Correspondent Priyanka Tanwar interacted with celebrated writer Jerry Pinto at the Kerala Literature Festival 2025 about mental health, the influence of Bombay in his writings, vintage Bollywood posters, translations and his journey from journalism to writing.
Edited excerpts:
Indian Printer & Publisher (IPP) – How was your experience at the Kerala Literature Festival?
Jerry Pinto – I enjoyed myself in Kerala, as always. It’s nice to come to a place with cleaner air, good food and close to the sea. I had lots of interesting interactions, and conversations with old friends and made some new friends.
IPP – Your first novel Em and the Big Hoom puts the spotlight on mental health and dysfunctional families. What inspired you to write about mental health, especially bipolar disorder? What challenges did you face?
Jerry Pinto – I don’t think there is any such thing as a dysfunctional family because I don’t believe there is such a thing as a functional family. Everybody is inventing it as they go along. We have this imagination that once a man and a woman get married, they have children, they settle down, and everything goes along in a smooth and predictable path. This, I think, arises from the fact that what we know of families is what other people show us as a family. Every family is dysfunctional in a certain way, almost all families are functional in a certain way. I define a functional family as one in which everybody dies of natural causes in the end and nobody has killed each other. Children, if there are any, come out of the family unscathed and unscarred.
As far as mental scarring or psychological scarring goes, it is almost inevitable with interactions that involve vulnerability. In the family, we are deeply vulnerable because we love each other. Because we love each other and know how to hurt each other, we can hurt each other badly and support each other well. Both these things come as a package.
In Em and the Big Hoom, I wanted to show that the family as an integrated, well-adjusted home is a myth. There are only people who are trying to make human relationships work and the setting is important. So, when mental disease afflicts one or more members of the family – that challenge becomes even greater, even deeper and then love becomes a challenge to maintain. I think it was to talk about maintaining the challenge of loving one another in circumstances such as these which made me write Em and the Big Hoom. I don’t think it’s a secret now that my mother was afflicted with bipolar disorder and our family lived with it. I suppose that’s one of the reasons I chose to write the novel.
IPP – There is very little awareness and sensitivity towards mental issues in India. How much do you think the scenario has changed since Em and the Big Hoom was published?
Jerry Pinto – I think it has changed a great deal and not a great deal at the same time. There’s a lot more conversation but this conversation is largely limited to English. There’s a lot more awareness and a lot more conversation and I am afraid this is largely restricted to cities. There are many more professional helpers available but professional help for psychiatric problems is expensive, time-consuming and limited to a very small number of urban people.
The stigma has not gone away. We need to work with that because this stigma attached to mental health must be cleared for more people to come out and talk about mental health problems. If there is a stigma, they feel they may be attacked, segregated, and humiliated or they may lose their jobs. Their children may not get married or they may get ostracized. These are real psychological costs a person who is mentally ill and their family has to bear. These costs have to be reduced before we can claim we have made progress as a nation in the way we treat mental health.
IPP – Has social media been able to help create awareness about mental health issues?
Jerry Pinto – Social media has helped a lot. However, it is also linked with creating new mental health problems among young people who find themselves bullied, find themselves ignored on social media, or find that the medium is not giving them as much response as they would like.
Nothing comes free. Social media has helped create awareness about problems and causes. For instance, it has helped with crowdsourcing small projects else some budding artists and directors would not have been able to make documentaries or do other things that they wanted to do. But it also has created problems. We need to find a way to deal with social media with intelligence, care, and sensitivity.
IPP – Bombay forms a big part of your work. What prompted you to visualize stories in the city? In what way has Bombay shaped you as a writer?
Jerry Pinto – I think Bombay is a story – I think Bombay is a collection of stories. Every city, I believe, is a collection of stories because it is a collection of energies. People come to Bombay to rewrite their stories. The city is a machine, I have always said, for the destruction of identity and the manufacturing of identity.
In the village, you may be known as Babu, the son of Kumar and the grandson of Badrinath, and you live in that house in such and such quarter. Everyone knows everything about you. Once you come to the city as Babu, have a trade and become a good mason, for example, you are known as Babu the mason. If you are reliable and don’t drink, arrive on time, work well, don’t take undue holidays, and do uninterrupted work, then you are known as a reliable mason. The reliable mason tag erases all your history. Your new identity is helping you construct an economic future. Cities are all about the making of stories, the writing of new stories, and the unwriting of old ones. How can that not affect someone who is a writer who wants to write those stories, who wants to capture a tiny fraction of the stories into which we are always coming into contact throughout the year?
IPP – You have edited a collection of essays on the Hindi film industry. In what ways does Bollywood speak to you?
Jerry Pinto – I think when I was growing up in 1970s and 1980s, Bollywood was the only form of popular culture available to us. Television was not so important, it was black and white, available from 6 to 10, and expensive. Since it was government-run, most of the programs were high-minded and not entertaining.
So, we went to the cinema to see Bollywood movies and experience our dreams. We all went together and dreamed together. For instance, we watched Amar Akbar Anthony, made by Manmohan Desai in 1977. What you saw was playing out of the nation’s state. Those three brothers who were separated, according to me, were Pakistan, Bangladesh and India. The reunion was the reunion of these three brothers. We no longer make those films. We no longer make bichre hue bhai (‘brothers separated at birth’) because I think we have realized the three brothers will remain apart. Amar was a Hindu, Akbar a Muslim, and Anthony a Christian, and the three of them living, cooperating, and working together told the story of the secular India dreamt of in those days.
Bollywood had many roles for us to play. Helen was called the vamp or the original item girl, which was a very stupid way of talking about her. Her world was one of the moral poles of the Bollywood universe. So I wrote Helen: The Life and Times of a Bollywood H-Bomb, which won me the National Film Award in Best Book on Cinema in 2006. It was important to say how all these aspects and elements of Bollywood contributed to the building of the nation and a secular identity for India.
IPP – Your book Bollywood Posters (co-authored with Sheena Sippy) cast a light on the significance of posters not only as a medium of signage but also as a collector’s item. Would you like to talk about the evolution of printing technologies for making posters from hand-painted ones to lithography and now digital means?
Jerry Pinto – I think film posters have an interesting backstory. MF Husain started as a painter of posters. He tells the story in Ila Pal’s biography of him (Husain: Portrait of an Artist) of how he would get up at noon and work on the posters from 12 to 4 in the morning before the first trams started to move. He had to unroll the huge posters, paint over them and roll them back up before the trams moved. When Picasso was told MF Husain did this, he said, ‘what better education for a painter than to do film posters?’.
These are the important stories about film posters we need to remember. There was a bunch of talented, intelligent and sensitive people who did the film posters. They went out of business when lithography or screen printing came in. These men went on to do other jobs. I remember I went to one of the places where these film posters were painted. There was a guard at the door and I told him I wanted to talk to the guys who used to paint the posters. He said there were none now because the posters are now done through screen printing. He said he was one of them. ‘I used to paint film posters but now I am a security guard,’ he said. I asked him why and he said that is how he made a living. ‘Painting posters was how I made a living once, this is how I make a living now.’ So, those men went on and did other things. For them, this was a job and they did it well. Some did it brilliantly, some did it masterfully and others did it as a job. I don’t want to romanticize the old film posters but I do believe a lot of the posters that people buy now are probably fakes.
When I was working with Mehlli Gobhai, I found some beautiful posters he had made for Air India. When I unrolled them, they fell apart because they were made like 70 years ago. Because posters were made from very thin paper, they were made to last for a couple of weeks, and not more than that. Very few posters you see right now are probably real.
IPP – Some of your works such as Em and the Big Hoom and The Education of Yuri have an autobiographical aspect. At times, do you feel exposed writing about your past experiences?
Jerry Pinto – I think everybody thinks of their past to write what they are writing. Let me give you an example. I wrote a book about Leela Naidu, a famous and beautiful woman (Leela: A Patchwork Life, co-authored with Leela Naidu) who was once counted as five of the most beautiful women in the world by Vogue. She became an actor, and a radio producer, made documentary films, and did voiceovers. Towards the end of her life, she was seen in Arundhati Roy’s Electric Moon and Shyam Benegal’s Trikal – performances that you still remember.
When I was writing Leela Naidu, I realized that to do it as a biography, I would have to travel to France, Geneva, Conoor and other places. I didn’t have the budget because I was not paid to write the book and when I did write the book, I was paid very late. I could not afford to say ‘she’ because when you say ‘she’ as Jerry Pinto, the journalist, you say Leela Naidu did this and did that and people can say please show me the proof. But if Leela Naidu is saying ‘I did this’, then she is saying it, and all I am doing is being her amanuensis. She would have said you are not supposed to write like that, you are the writer of the book, but I wrote it as an eye. When I started writing it, I had to pretend to be a 65-year-old woman looking back on a highly privileged past. Her father was one of the great scientists of India, who started chemotherapy for cancer in India after having worked with Marie Curie in France. Her mother was Swiss, and there was this whole history that I did not know. When the book came out, Sunil Sethi, one of Leela’s good friends, said you can hear Leela’s voice in the book and I thought ‘Great! I did it!’.
Now, what part of my autobiography and memoir did I use when I was writing the Leela Naidu book? All I was using was the desire to be desired. I think every man holds that inside his heart. When Helen’s songs played, the old uncles would get up and start dancing. It doesn’t mean that they are gay or something, it just means that they want to participate in the leela of being desired – that is what I think I was doing, I was pretending to be Leela because for a moment I wanted to be that person who walked into a room and everyone stopped just to have a look at them. That is what one does – we always use some parts of ourselves in our writing, which part of it is the demand of the book at that point. The autobiographical element will be slightly more visible in some books and slightly less visible in others.
IPP – You have experimented with different forms of writing – poetry, translations, fiction, children’s fiction, and journalistic writing. How do you transition from one form to the other? Which form do you enjoy the most?
Jerry Pinto – At the age of 40, I retired from active journalism. I made up my mind I would write only when I wanted to write and what I wanted to write. And now, my overwhelming spirit is one of jigyasa (curiosity) – the desire to know, experiment, and see if I can do this but also do this.
In the beginning, I wanted to write poetry. I wrote poetry most of the time but I wrote very little poetry. Stories were spilling out of me and that’s why I began to write fiction. Some stories abbreviated themselves, which meant they became short stories and then I won the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for fiction from Yale University for Em and the Big Hoom. That gave me some freedom, some time to myself. I thought I had enjoyed reading in Hindi and Marathi, so can I try translation? Because I had some free time and some economic liberty, I began to translate and enjoyed it.
So, it is about discovering what form I want to experiment. Sometimes the words would come and play with me and I would play with the words too – sometimes they say I want to be a poem, sometimes they say I want to be a short story, sometimes they say I want to be a piece of journalistic writing and then I let them be that.
When you are editing, you are much more severe with the words. When you are writing, you are having fun, the words are having fun, they are spilling out, they are coming to you, they are coming in different ways and it’s just joy. Editing is a deadly serious process for me. Editing is where I think writers become writers. Everybody writes, but writers edit themselves.
IPP – Marathi translations are gaining prominence in India’s translation scene. What are your thoughts on these language translations?
Jerry Pinto – I believe that we need more translations. A translator is like a bridge between two islands. In a city like Bombay, you will have many islands of languages – you will have English, but you will also have Hindi when you are speaking to the taxi driver, or Marathi when you are speaking to a neighbor or Gujarati with another neighbor. You quickly go and come back from these different islands. You use these languages to get your work done. But when you begin to read poetry, you are making a pilgrimage to that language. You are waiting there, you are acquiring wisdom, coming back with something different. Your soul is different, your heart is changed, your mind is transformed. So, translation is the act of building a bridge over which people will cross to another language island. I can only be the bridge, people must cross themselves. I feel that very few people cross. I feel most readers read in only one language and stay in that language. It’s like eating the same dish every day. Why not try something new on the buffet, some new, different taste?
IPP – How do you ensure the quality of the translated work? How do you keep the author’s style and terminology consistent?
Jerry Pinto – I think one way is trying to be faithful to the original. Many people talk about transcreations, that the translator by taking a poem from one language and translating it to another has turned into a new poem. It is no longer the old poem. I believe some of that is true. But it is not my practice to use that. I believe one must be faithful to the spirit, to the zehen of the original. But once I have taken it across the river of translation, some changes will occur. We must respect the language into which we are translating – the rhythm and music in that language, the notion of a poem in that language, and then we work from one to the other.
IPP – You have been writing poetry since a young age. How have you evolved as a poet over time?
Jerry Pinto – I wish I could say that for myself and I would love to know that. I think that is a question that poets rely on critics to answer. I hope I have grown in wisdom and grace, in my ability to use and handle the language has improved. I cannot be sure that it’s a steady upward curve that all economists love that keeps rising happily. That’s not how poetry happens – some poems would be like ‘Wow! I wrote that!’ while others would be like ‘Oh my God! I wrote that?’ but you still work on it.
IPP – Would you like to talk about Indian writing in English today?
Jerry Pinto – I think it’s a growing field. I feel it is different, varied, and vast. I have been a judge for the JCB Prize for Literature and KLF Book Awards this year. Reading the different novels that came out this year was a wonderful experience and showed me how many different ways English is being used in this country, how English has become a proper Indian language, how it is rooted in our soil, drawing nourishment and sustenance from India’s language traditions and becoming a very different and more beautiful fruit.
IPP – Five books you would recommend to our readers?
Jerry Pinto – I would say These My Words: The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry edited by Eunice De Souza and Melanie Silgardo – it’s a lovely collection of poems, The Penguin Book of Indian Poets edited by Jeet Thayil, Land, Guns, Caste Woman: The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary by Gita Ramaswamy – amazing book, beautifully and very intelligently written, Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life by Upamanyu Chatterjee – magnificent novel, and Chronicle of an Hour and a Half by Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari – one of the best debut novels I have read this year.
IPP – Any book recommendations on mental health?
Jerry Pinto – On mental health, I would say read My World Without Jehan: Surviving a Brother’s Suicide by Liana Mistry, Homeless: Growing Up Lesbian and Dyslexic in India by K Vaishali, which won the 2024 Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar for English and Sonali Gupta’s and Shaheen Bhatt’s books on depression. Please go to your bookshop and tell the owner you should have an Indian mental health section because so many books on mental health are coming out of India. Pick up a book and read it at random and see if it works for you!
