An interview with a writer that’s primarily about the writer’s process of writing gives us an invaluable insight into the writer’s mind. Pseudo Mag, being a literary magazine, and aspiring to become a more serious one in its own right, interviewed the renowned Marathi writer “Rajendra Banhatti” (who also kindly gave us one of his translated short stories for the first issue).

Rajendra Banhatti is a person who likes to keep to his own study and desk. We are immensely grateful to him for letting us interview him, letting us into his study, and talking to us in English for the interview.

We asked him everything we could right from his first story to handling criticism, and what makes good literature.

When asked if he had ever faced the writer’s block he said, “Only prolific writers face the writer’s block. I have never faced it. Writers who for any given reason are under pressure of immediately producing the next piece of writing tend to go through a writer’s block. I only ever wrote when I felt like it.”

He talked about “sincerity in writing” in relation to the actual writing process as well as the after-process of writing viz. the work actually being read by another person. When a writer writes does he think about the reader? Does he think about how his work would be received by his audience? Banhatti answers that if the writer does so, the writing would end up being either highly pretentious, or somehow, because of the ingenuity of it which immediately leaks through, would not be taken to be the best piece of literature.

A writer is never only a writer. She is also a reader. Writing what suits her best as a reader is the way.

by Kimaya Kulkarni

Video shot by Tanvi Salunkhe