Meg7- Indian English Literature Block 1- Non-Fictional Prose
Meg7-
Indian English Literature
Block 1- Non-Fictional Prose
Indians first started learning English for the purpose of trade and commerce.
Dean Mahomed ( 1 759- 1 85 1) was born in 1759 into a family claiming traditions of service to the Mughal Empire.in 1784, Dean Mohamed went to Ireland with him. He settled down there, and married an Anglo-Irish girl.In 1794, with the help of public subscription, he published his book, The Travels of Dean Mahomet, Native of Patna in Bengal, Through Several Parts ofIndia, While in the Service of the Honorable The East India company. Dean Mahomet (to use the spelling he favoured) adopted the epistolary form; the book is in the form of thirty eight letters. The Travels of Dean Mnhomet is probably the only account by an Indian of life with the East India Company. The book ends with his arrival in Britain.
For long, Cavelley Vertkata Bsriah's "Account of the Jains' ' published in 1809 in a journal has been considered the first published work by an Indian in English.
(1772-1833)Raja ~mohan Roy's essay, "A Defence of Hindu Theism" (1817) is the first
original publication in expository prose in the history of Indian writing in English. He knew Arabic, persian, greek, Hindi, English, and Sanskrit.In 1828, he founded the Brdimo Samaj, a reformist Hindu mo\ement. He fought for women's rights, and Isad a movement against sati. . He was one of the founders of the Hindu College (which came into being in Calcutta in 18 17).
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1 838-94), the father of the Bengali novel, wrote several essays in English.
Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848-1909)
Surendranath Banerjea (1848-1925)
Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902)
namcd Narendranath Di-itta by his parents. At the age of eighteen, he became a disciple of the great mystic krishna Pararnahamsa, and took the name Vivthanda. After Sri Ramakrishna's death in 1885, he founded the Ramakrishna Mission. an order of monks devoted to social reform.
Rabindranath Tagore ( 1 86 1-1 94 1) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 19 13. He composed hundreds of songs and was also a painter of merit.
Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) Sri Aurobindo's essays can be divided into three broad categories: religion. soc~al issues and literary criticism. In !926 he had a great spiritual experience, the descent of a new consciousness. He retired into seclusion, but continued his literary work.
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
M.Hiriyanna, author ofArt Experience (1954)
Nationalist leaders like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Mahadev Govind Ranade were great orators. Perhaps the greatest orator of the period was V.S .Srinivasa Sastri (1 869-1 946), a leader of the Moderates. He was known as "the silver-tongued orator of the Empire"
Sarojini Naidu
Rajagopalachari (Rajaji)
Mahatma Gandhi
Jawaharlal Nehru
Post Independence:
After Independence, the political struggle no longer engaged the attention of writers; this facilitated the growth of lighter writing. Both before and after Independence. Indians wrote scholarly books in the field of history, economics, religion and philosophy
S .Radhakrishnan ( 188 8- 1975)
Khushwant Singh
K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar,
C.D.Nat-asirnhaiah
M.K.Naik
Meenakshi Mukherjee
Nirad C. Chaudhuri
Ved Mehta
Born in Lahore in 1934, he became blind at the age of four as a result of meningitis, and was educated at a special school for the blind at Bombay. When he was fifteen years old he went to America to study at the Arkansas School for the Blind. obtaining a B.A. degree from Oxford University and an M.A. from Haward.
Sheila Dhar Here's someone I'dLike You to Meet (1995) contains entertaining anecdotes of musician
R.K.Laxman, InPia's best cartoonist. has published his autobiography, The Tunnel of Time (1998).
Nayantara Sahgal's Prison and Chocolate Cake (1954
R.K Narayan
Ruskin bond
C.D.Narasimhaiah
Manohar Malgonkar
won the Sahitya Akademi Award (m 1976) 1s Sarvapalli Gopal's Jawaharlal Nehru
Rajmohan Gandhi (b. 1935).
Salman Rushdie
Allan Sealy
Vikram Seth
Amitav Ghosh
V.V.John
Jug Suraiya, the newspaper columnist, has published a collection of light essays.
Forms of Pros:
Prose is derived from the Latin word meaning "direct, straight forward". Prose can employ all the rhetoric techniques (like simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole, understatement, irony etc) that verse uses. Prose, too, can be rhythmic, though rhythm in prose is different from the music of poetry.
We shall devote our attention to the main non-fictional forms: the essay, biography and autobiography, and the travelogue.
"Essay" is derived from the French word meaning "attempt". An essay is a prose composition of moderate length devoted to some particular topic. 2 types:
Formal essays, written by scholars in any field (referred as articles)
The personal essay, written in a light style, seeks to entertain the reader(; it can be anecdotal, and generally reveals the personality of the author)
A biography is the story of the life of an individual. Unlike history, which concentrates on facts and figures, a biography tries to project the personality of the subject, helping the reader to share that person's hopes and fears.
In an autobiography, the author is his own biographer, so it tends to be more subjective
Another big difference between a biography and an autobiography is that an autobiography is more select~ve in the incidents it describes. A biography can cover the whole life of the subject from birth to death, and even discuss his reputation after his death. An autobiography is necessarily incomplete, but it has the great advantage of presenting events at first hand.
A travelogue is an account of the writer's travels. In this autobiographical account, the focus is on the places and people he has met in his travels, not on events in the author's own life, or his personality
Varieties of prose(Fiction and Non fiction both)
Descriptive (describe a person, a thing, or a place)
Narrative (describes events; a narrative deals with what happens over the course of time)
Expository prose( defines or explains a subject. Eg. on science, technology, philosophy, religion, political science, economics)
These are not exclusive categories -- a writer may use two or all three types in the same passage
Block 2- Vivekananda, Aurobindo and Ananda
All 3 shared a common Outlook - National idealism
It means, simply speaking, two things.
1 - an attitude of reverence for the nation that is India.
2 - at the same time construct a state that was modem, democratic, and equitable.
Swami Vivekananda: 1863-1902
Real name- Narendra Dutta was born and raised in an upper class Kayastha family in Calcutta.
Initially he was a positivist, that is someone who only believed in positive knowledge--that which could be verified by the senses and tested for its accuracy. He was not prepared to accept things on authority, faith, or superstition.
His life changed quite suddenly and dramatically after he met Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886). The latter was an astonishing spiritual phenomenon.
After his guni's death, Swami Vivekananda founded an order of monks to spread the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna and also to reawaken the sleeping conscience of India. To this end, he travelled all over India, and eventually left for the US in 1893. Returned to India in 1897.
Introduction to Addresses at the Parliament of Religions, 1893:
the largest inter-religious gathering
Swamiji had no money to go there so he begged and met a few kings who gave him tickets and money to visit the west.
Swamiji set sail on the 31" of May 1893 on a ship to Chicago.
six speeches during the Parliament.
From 11th to 26' September 1893, Swami ~ivekananda made six addresses at the Parliament of Religions.
Response to Welcome:
Swamiji stood before the Parliament not in his private capacity but as a representative of the spiritual genius of Indian civilization.
Called his order the most ancient as he connected himself to the ancient monks who existed even before buddhism.
Called Hinduism the mother of all religions in terms of Sanatan Dharma and not conventional Hindu religion.
thanked the organizers in the name of those millions of people of India.
emphasized the tolerance and inclusiveness of India.
quotes from the Bhagawat Geeta and from another unnamed source to strengthen his argument.
extremely clear statement against dogmatism, intolerance, and bigotry (Fanaticism)
uses the mode of the parable to illustrate his point about the futility of narrow-mindedness- Each frog believes that his well is the biggest.
Hinduism:
the longest and most detailed of all of Swamiji's talks.
He calls it a prehistoric religion, flourishes in all its pristine glory in the place of its origin and maturation
Stresses on Vedas and includes Buddhism and Jainism as a part of Hinduism.
he tries to describe the essence of Vedic thought in modern scientific terms
Hinduism stresses the immortality of the soul, or atman, and declares that 'I am not my body but the everlasting, indestructible spirit'.
Hinduism also stresses the law of Karma, of endless cause and effect.
he declares, "Verification is the perfect proof of a theory,"
Hindu dharma is not about believing in certain dogmas 01. rituals but in realizing oneself and one's inner perfection. Self-realization. Swvamiji explains, does not consist in a loss of individuality, but the gaining of universal individuality.
The average idol worshipping Hindu is neither a sinner nor an evil person. He or she is perfectly harmless and well-intentioned.
n but move higher and higher; if this is true, the higher need not condemn the lower. The beauty of Hinduism is that it does not believe that we travel from error to truth. but from truth to truth, from the lower truth to the higher truth. In that sense. the absolute and the relative are not contradictory and opposed, but the absolute can only be realized through the relative.
According to Swamiji. it is the only faith which does not say that the Hindu alone will be saved.
Vivekananda ends his speech with an appeal to all the assembled people to move to a new era of inter-religious harmony and tolerance.
Religion Not the Crying Need of India
Swami Vivekananda says that bread, not religion is the crying need of India.
He exhorts Christian missionaries not to try to convert the poor. "It is an insult to a starving man to teach him metaphysics."
He also stresses that according to Indian traditions knowledge is free. that is it cannot be bought and sold.
Rice Christian
Buddhism, the Fulfillment of Hinduism
Swamiji is undoubtedly right in claiming that the Buddha did not ever claim to start a new religion or faith. Also that Hindus do not regard Buddhism as a rival or antagonist faith, but a part of the Sanatana traditions. That is why most Hindus accept Buddha as an incarnation.
But Buddhism, as it developed, did deny the notion of God, son~ething that most people in India could not live without.
Address at the Final Session
fervent plea for religious harmony.
That is why Swarniji pities those who believe that only their own religion should survive while all others should be destroyed He pleads for help, assimilation, harmony, and peace, as against fighting, destruction. and dissension among the various religions of the world.
Sri Aurobindo:(1872-1950)
Sri Aurobindo's life may be conveniently divided into four periods based on major location of residence: namely,
1 - England,
born on August 15, 1872 into a Westernized upper-middle class Bengali Ananda fanlily, the son of Krishnadhan and Swarnalata Ghose.
at the age of seven he was taken to England to be educated. (learned Greek, French, English and Latin)
obtained an appointment with the Maharaja of Baroda and set sail to return to India in January 1893.
2 - Baroda,
This period lasted for 13 years upto 1906. phase of preparation and growth for his later work.
Returned to India with no knowledge of any Indian language.
Studied Sanskrit and Bengali
Started participating in Yoga and Politics
1901 -married to Mrinalini Bose
During this year he also cspcricnced his first definite spiritual realizations, which are reflected in some of his poems and reminiscences.
3 - Calcutta,
In 1906 Sri Aurobindo left Parocla to join the newly formed National College in Calcutta
he attacked British imperialism vehemently. In 1907 he was prosecuted for sedition, but acquitted.
1908 - he was arrested and detained on suspicion of revolutionary activities
During these twelve months, he underwent hrthcr spiritual experiences. which prompted him to decide to withdraw from politics, at least temporarily.
He was defended by the famous lawyer and politician Chittaranjan Das free of charge.
4 - Pondicherry.
In 1910 he retired to French Chandranagore, and on hearing that a third prosecution was to be launched against him. set sail for Pondicherry in South India.
given up political activity, he was never again to return to British India or to politics; he continued living in Pondicherry, uptil his death in 1950
During this period, he began the publication of Arya, a periodical in which the original versions of most of his famous works such as The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, The Secret of the Veda, etc., appeared. He also wrote poetry, criticism, drama, and translated extensively From Sanskrit and other Indian languages
In 1920, Mirra Richard settled down in Pondicherry. She came to be known as the Mother afterwards.
Aurobindo died on December 5, 1950.
1s India Civilized?
This essay by Sri Aurobindo was originally serialized in the quarterly Ayr from December 1918 to February 1919. It was published in book form, along with other essays of related interest, under the title Fo~lndations ofIndian Culture in 1953 by the Sri Aurobindo library, New York
The series of articles of which this is one was inspired by an attack on Indian civilization by a British critic, William Archer. William Archer and his attack are forgotten today, but Sri Aurobindo's response has become a classic.
Sri Aurobindo clearly avows that happiness is indeed the goal of human life.
In Sri Aurobindo's scheme of things, a human being possesses at least three levels of being:
the physical,
the mental,
the spiritual
And, what is more important, without a natural harmony between these three levels, we can never be really happy.
any country.or society which caters only to the body or to the body and the mind, but leaves out the spirit cannot achieve true happiness.
The notion of progress in India is primarily spiritual. It is this that makes India special and distinct
Sri Aurobindo says that there are countries and cultures which aft: led by a difference. even opposite conception of spirituality of human life.
He says that the West has lost the harmony between the inner and the outer lives and thus what they have achieved cannot be considered to be true progress.
Three stages of the interaction between nations. These are:
conflict and competition(Current status)
concert,
Sacrifice
a perennial conflict for supremacy between Europe and Asia. In this conflict, either Asia will become Europeanized or Europe Asiaticised.
Sri Aurobindo aa~nits that "Spirituality is not monopoly of India
For Sri Aurobindo, ultimately, it does not matter if we are defeated or if we triumph. What is important is to uphold the life that we believe in.
Sri Aurobindo does not intend us to become second-rate imitations of the West He wants us to become world-leaders. But we can do so only if we spiritualize our lives now, without postpoing it to some future date.
Sri Aurobindo explains what he means bq aggressive spirituality: "India must defend herself by reshaping her cultural forms to express more powerfully, intimately and perfectly her ancient ideal. Her aggression must lead the waves of light thus liberated in triumphant self-expanding rounds all over the world which it once possessed or at least enlightened in far-off ages
ANANDA KENTISH COOMARASWAMY (1877-1947)
an extraordinary geologist, art scholar, collector, curator, and philosopher
an English mother, Elizabeth Clay Beeby and Sri Lankan Tamil father, Sir Mutthu Coomaraswarny, was born in Colombo. His father was a leading member of the native society in Sri Lanka, the first Asian to qualify for the bar, a linguist, and great scholar himself
Within a year of Ananda's birth, his mother set sail for England, probably finding life in Sri Lanka too difficult. Sir Muthu died on his voyage to join his family, with the result that Ananda was raised by his mother in England.
He went to Wycliffe School, possibly the only English public school that encouraged vegetarian diet.
Appointed as the Director of the newly established Department of Mineralogy of Ceylon
discovered a new mined, "Thorianite," which he refused to name after himself as was the fashion, but made extensive studies in the art, history, crafts, philosophy, and philology of the island of India.
Coomaraswamy was only twenty-six when he "discovered Sinhalese art, but it changed his life forever. He gave up what was a lucrative career as a geologist and turned instead to his true vocation, to articulate the spirit of astern arts to the world.
He became not just a reformist but a nationalist, fighting on behalf of his father's country, Ceylon, against hls mother's, imperialist Britain.
He found weavers, metal workers, and skilled craftsmen all over the Indian subcontinent, carrying on age-old traditions. produce was much greater both aesthetically and practically than modem, machine made goods.He began to see that such art and craft as ancient and medieval India produced was possible largely because of varnashrama.
started his own publishing house
Essays in National Idealism (19 1 1) is of great importance. It contains fifteen essays on themes as diverse as "Indian Nationality," "Gramophones and Why Not?" "The Influence of Modem Europe on Indian Art," "Memory and Education," and "The Christian Missions in India."
declared that "nations are made by artists and poets, not by traders and politicians."
"national idealism" was Coomaraswamy's term. He meant an alternative conception of a nation that prevailed in Europe. A nation was built not merely on the basis of racial, religious, or linguistic unity as was the case in most of Europe. If this were the case, India could never be a nation. A nation could be built on a geographical and cultural India such as India had throughout the ages. Coomaraswamy believed that a strong nation could be built not by developments in science and technology or by other modern devices.
Coomaraswamy's ~ndiim interlude, which lasted from 1907 to 1916, was perhaps the most productive and iering of this life.
He left India as he could not get the freedom to set up a museum in India. Instead, the Boston museum of fine arts lured him away. A rich philanthropist and patron of arts, Denman Ross, not only brought Coctmaraswamy's collection but had him appointed as the Keeper of Indian and Muhammadan Art at the Boston Museum.
The Dance of Shiva
This essay became the title piece of a collection of fourteen published under that title in 19 18.
is, to explain the significance of the image of Nataraja, or the dancing Shiva. But in doing so, Coomarasw~y also helps us understand a whole philosophy and way of life, taking us into the very depths of an ancient tradition.
Coomaraswamy starts by explaining one of the names and aspects of ShivaNataraja, or the master of the dance or the king of actors. Of course, Shiva is himself both the dancer and the audience.
Coomaraswamy mentions three dances of Shiva-
the evening dance at Kailasa
the Tandava,
the Nadanta dance at Chidambaram(main focus)
the image shows the five activities of Shiva:
creation, (Brahma)
preservation, (Vishnu)
destruction, (Rudra)
veiling, (Mahesh)
release. (Sadashiva)
Kali, not Shiva, is the dancer. Which is the embodiment of the dynamic aspect of Shiva, of his energy. The two fbm are related, even complementing one another. In the end, the author talks of a contempow poem, explaining with comments in brackets after selected lines, how it conforms to Hindu ideas.
Towards the end of the essay, Cwmaraswamy, quoting texts, identifies the image with the panchakshari mantra, the five-syllable chant, namah shivaya. By adding "Om,'' which represents the Shakti, we have a complete mantra, what is traditionally known as the mahamrityunjaya or the great victory over death mantra.
Block 3- Gandhi(1869-1948) - Hind Swaraj
Gandhi:
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in Porbandar on 2 October 1869 and died in Delhi on 30 January 1948.
Called the father of the nation and given the appellation, "Mahatma," or great soul.
autobiography, The Story ofMy Experiments with Truth.
well-known statements, "My life is my message."
To Gandhi, Truth is sat, the first component of the trinity Satchitananda, which is the Vedic definition of the Ultimate Reality. Truth is simply that which is; Truth is what exists, what is real.
The autobiography is full of richly subjective detailing and narration.
After his early schooling in Rajkot and marriage to Kasturba ip 1883, Gandhi left for England in 1888 to study law
After qualifying for the Bar in 189 1, he came back to India but found no satisfactory work.
He therefore set sail to South Africa in 1893 to take up his practice as a lawyer.
the turning point was his being thrown out of the first class compartment of a train at Pietermaritzburg in 1893, even though he possessed a valid ticket
His struggle culminated in the Great March of 19 13 from Charlestown to Volksrust.
This forced the South African government to accede to his demands in the Gandhi-Smuts pact of 1914.
During the South African years, Gandhi experimented with all the major ingredients of his praxis:
community living in the Tolstoy
Phoenix settlements,
experiments with diet and natural cure,
the invention of satyagraha, the adoption of Truth and nonviolence,
the vow of brahmacharya or chastity,
the giving up of personal property.
The South Africa years were thus, literally, the years of the making of the Mahatma, years of self-formation. He discovered his personal and political philosophy and hardly deviated from it for the rest of his life.
During this period Hind Swaraj came to be Written.
Came back from South Africa in 1915, already a Mahatma
HIND SWARAJ:
It was originally written in Gujarati and published in Indian Opinion, a journal that Gandhi used to edit in South Africa. The ms. was written in 1909.
The ms. was later translated into English for the benefit of Gandhi's English friends. Its English translation was published in book form in 1910.This is the only book of his which he himself translated.
It was published as a booklet in Gujarati. but immediately banned by the government of the Bombay Presidency.
What is the message of Hind Swaraj?
As Gandhi himself says, "It teaches the gospel of love in place of that of hate. It replaces violence with self-sacrifice. It pits soul force against brute force."
He met Savarkar in England, who was convinced that only armed people can win the battle against the british and to respond to his views, Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj.
Hind Swaraj is written as a dialogue between an Editor and a Reader. The Editor is none other than Gandhi himself, while the Reader is a prototype of the kind of angry, young man that Gandhi met in London and wished to change.
Book is in dialogic mode - "can be put into the hands of a child."
Gandhi was the master of the direct and plain style; in many ways, he was a minimalist
20 little chapters in the whole book.
A SUMMARY OF THE MAIN POINTS IN EACH CHAPTER
ChapterI: The Congress and Its Officials
2: The Partition of Bengal
3: Discontent and Unrest
4: What is Swaraj
5:The Conditions of England
6:Civilization
7:Why Was Hdia Lost?
8:The Condition of India
9:The Condition of india (Continued): Railways
10:The Condition of india (Continued)
11:The Condition of India (Continued): Lawyers
12:The Condition of India (Continued): Doctors
13:What is True Civilization'?
14:How Can India Become Free?
15:Italy and India
16:Brute Force
17:Passive Resistance
18:Education
19:Machinery
20:Conclusion
Block 3- Jawahar Lal Nehru (1889-1964)
Born to rich Kashmiri parents,
after his return fronl England he plunged intcr the nationalistic struggle,
went to jail a number of times,
became President of the Indian National Congress,
headed the Interim Government.
He was Prime Minister of free India from August 1947 till his death on 27 May 1964.
Three main books of News which we owe to his prison days are:
An Autobiography (1 936)
Glimpses of World history (1939)
The Discovery of india (1946)
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
All serious writing during his prison terms.
His Autobiography was written entirely in jail in a period of less than 9 months from June 1934 to February 1935 or 14February 1935.
The book is dedicated to his wife Kamala who had died a few weeks before its publication.
Nehru explains the genesis of the book at two places -
once in chapter LXIV dealing wit11 'Dehra Gaol Again'
in the preface to the first edition of the book.
His primary purpose he says, was two-fold.
It was to give himself a definite task that would fill in the long solitude of jail life
Would divert his mind from worry and depression.
His account is clearly and self-confessedly "egotistical" and selective. "
Take the story of his years upto February 1935 when he was 45.
The opening quotation from Abraham Cowley refers to the dilemma of an autobiographer
The closing epigraph from Talmud talks of the essential incompleteness of human labour.
Nehru had thought of calling it In and Out of Prison.
CHAPTERWISE ANALYSIS:
Chapter 1: DescentfromKashmir
Chapter IV: Harrow and Cambridge
Chapter VII: The Coming of Gandhiji: Satyagraha and Amritsar
Chapter XXX In Naini Bison
Chapter L IV: The Record of British Rule
Chapter LXVIII: Epilogue (595-97)
Nehru says that he is a queer mixture of the East and West. "out of place everywhere, at home nowhere."
UNIT 5 NIRAD C. CHAUDHURI (1897-1998)
Work-
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian,
Thy Hand, Great Anarch,
Defence of India or Nationalization of Indian Army", a seventy-three page essay, was published in 1935 by the All India Congress Committee, Allahabad.
Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse. (The three "horsemen" are individualism, nationalism and democracy.
The Continent of Circe : An Essay on the Peoples of india(1966) provoked fierce controversy. He proposed the thesis that Hindus are actually a race alien to India and are arrivals from Europe.
e the Intellectual in India (1967)
To Live or Not to Live (1970)
East is East and West is West, edited by his son, was published in 1996,
His biography of Clive, Robert Clive ofIda
Extraordinary The Life of professor the Rt. Hon Friedrich Max Muller (1974)
To Live or Not to Live
Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1897-1 998) was born on November 23 into a middle class family in Kishoreganj, a small town in Mymensingh District of East Bengal. He was educated in Bengal, and took his B.A. (Hons.) degree from the University of Calcutta in 1918.
learnt European languages li'~e French. German and Latin. Lack of a master's degree ruled out the chances of teaching in a college, and he found it difficult to get suitable employment. For some time hc tried freelance journalism. From 1937 to 194 1 he worked as a secretary to Saratchandra Bose He worked for All India Radio from 1941 to 1952.
He was extremely fortunate in marriage. They had three sons. and his wife Amiya supported his eccentric ways in their six decades of married life. Hc was always extravagant in his love for art objects, and acquired them even if they were beyond his means. He recounts how his wife had to settle the account selling off the gold coins she had received as a mamags present when he bought some expensive Cashmere shawls on credit. Their financial situation did not improve even after moving to Delhi, because of Chaudhuri's penchant for buying rare wines ,and books from money which could be better spent on routine household expenses.
In 1955 he went abroad for the first time in his life. The British Council arranged for him to visit England, where he spent five weeks at the invitation of the B.B.C. to prepare some talks for its Overseas Service. The newspaper articles he wrote about his visit grew into his second book, A Passage to England, a very readable travelogue. Passage to England received good reviews from the English press.
In 1970 he moved to England, and started work on a biography of Max Miller and never came back.He was badly disappointed when hc found that contemporary English society was very different from the picture he had built up from his reading of literature.
Chaudhuri was intellectually active till the very end, and very proud of this fact.
His biography of Max Muller won the Sahitya Akademi Award
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN UNKNOWN INDIAN
"In spite of its title, the book was not truly an autobiography. It was a picture of the society in which I was born and grew up."
liberal sprinkling of words from European languages. There are many situations where only the French or Latin quotation would do. But Chaudhuri seems to use foreign phrases even if English equivalents exist
He assumes that his reader should be as erudite as he is, and never provides a translation. There is a tendency in Chaudhuri's prose for the main point to get lost in a haze of verbiage.
The dedication has been widely denounced, and Chaudhuri has been condemned as unpatriotic.It never strikes him that many Indians did not want to be British, they preferred independence to citizenship
Chaudhuri is always very conscious of the fact that his knowledge of English and Nirad C. Chaudhuri England is secondhand, yet he persists in describing things only in English metaphors.
Chaudhuri's tone is quite detached - there is no sense of closeness to his native village.
Chaudhuri's diction seems to be based on bureaucratic jargon, with endless reservations and qualifications. There is no poetic licence whatsoever.
He is at his best when he gives us concrete particulars, as in his description of the rainy season. He is capable of using short, simple, balanced sentences.
Chaudhuri's style is usually prolix -- he does not believe in using the minimum number of words. He uses many connecting phrases to link different paragraphs
Unknown Indian is in four books.
Book I, "Early Environment" (pp. 1-1 30) is devoted to the background, describing Kishoreganj, his ancestral village, and his mother's village, and Bengali society at the end of the nineteenth century.
Book II, "First Twelve Years", describes his birth and early life, while
Book 111, "Education". covers the years he spent at high school and college in Calcutta
Book IV, "Into the World" is an essay on life in Bengal in the nineteen-twenties, rather than an account of Chaudhuri's life after he left college. it reveals more about Chaudhuri's mindset than about the topic discussed, because Chaudhuri chooses only the facts which support his argument, neglecting large chunks of history.
The concluding chapter, "An Essay on the Course of Indian History" is fill of easy generalizations; he believes that "Civilizations in the successive historical cycles in India are foreign importations" (p.489).
Each of the four books has a prefatory note.
THY HAND, GREAT ANARCH
Chaudhuri started writing Thy Hand Great Anarch in 1979, when he was eighty-one years old, and took six years to complete it.
The same self satisfied stance of wisdom, the complete lack of modesty, can be found in the second book.
Thy Hand! Great Anarch is almost a thousand pages long, and covers the years from 192 1 to 1952. It hsrs ten chapters, with a long epilogue. It combines autobiography with history, politics and social commentary.
Chaudhuri has always been inimical to the technological society, and it is not I surprisingly ht he condemns Americans for their technological advancement.
CRITICAL OPINION
C.D.Narasimhaiah who has the poorest opinion of Chaudhuri's autobiography. Hc finds absolutely nothing praiseworthy in it.He has compared Nehru's aut~hiography with Chaudhuri's, and believes that they demonstrate "two kinds of Indim writing: one pulsating with human warmth. the other abstract, ponderous and dully academic; one mmt for Indians, another for an English-speaking world abroad. According to him, "Chaudhuri's writing betrays an immaturity that one would not normally associate with a person of his age" He points out that none of the people described are memorable, "They are not individualized, or they have nothing of interest to other human beings"
The most common charge against Chaudhuri is that he is partisan; he has already made up his mind which side he is on, and does not present alternative view points
Sudesh Mishra has written in detail about this interesting aspect of Chaudhuri's writing, that there are two Chaudhuris, "Historical Witness and Pseudo-Historian".
weak as a historian. He tries to bend facts to suit his theory, and has no qualms about leaving out any facts that do not fit his theory
UNIT 6 VIKRAM SETH AND AMITAV GHOSH
Vikram Seth (b. 1952) was born in Calcutta, and educated in Dehra Dun. He got admission in St Stephen's College, Delhi, in Mathematics (Honours) course, but did not join. He won a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Oxford University, and graduated in 1975 with honours in philosophy, politics and economics. He went to Stanford University, U.S.A. in 1977. He obtained his Master's degree in economics, and started work on a doctoral dissertation.He spent two years in China doing research.
Work: , Mappings(1982), From Heaven Lake(1983), The Humble Administrator's Garden (1985) won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Asia, The Golden Gate(1986) - It won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Sahitya Akademi Award, and the American "Book of the Month Club" New Voices Award. All You Who Sleep Tonight (1990),Beastly Tales from Here and There ( 1991), Three Chinese Poets (1992), A Suitable Boy (1 993), An Equal Music
From Heaven Lake is based on his experience when he travelled to India overland, through Sinkiang, Tibet and Nepal.
FROM HEAVEN LAKE
Vikram Seth lived in China as a student at Nanjing University from 1980 to 1982. In the summer of 198 1 he returned home to Delhi via Tibet and Nepal. From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet is based on the journal he kept and the photographs he.took while he was on the road.
The short book is divided into nineteen chapters, dealing with different stages of his journey, starthg with "Turfhn" (Chapter 1) and "Heaven Lake" (Chapter 2) and ending with "Kathmandu; Delhi" (Chapter 19)
The book contains about twenty black and white photographs, of the various scenes
The second edition of the book, published in 1990, contains a foreword giving Seth's reaction to the Tiananmen Square-the massacre of June 4, 1989, when the Chinese Army opened fire on hundreds of students who were demonstrating peacefully.
Seth uses short sentences, and common words.This does not mean that Seth's vocabulary is limited; if the context demands it, he uses difficult words in order to write concisely.
Seth occasionally introduces short poems to break the monotony of the prose
Amitav Ghosh:
He was born in Calcutta in 1956, and spent his childhood in Calcutta, Dhaka and Colombo. He graduated from St. Stephen's College. Delhi, and went to England at the age of twenty-two to study social anthropology. After obtaining a D. Phil. from Oxford University, he taught at the prestigious Delhi School of Economics. In 1987 he started teaching social anthropology and comparative literature at various universities in U.S.A. At present, I he is based in New York, with his American wife; they have two children.
Work:The Circle of Reason (1986), The Shadow Lines (1988) won the Sahitya Akademi award,bl an Antique hnd ( 1992), the fifth(2000), The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), Palace of Glass(2000).
DANCING IN CAMBODIA, AT LARGE IN BURMA
Dancing it1 Cambodia, at Large in Burma (1998) is based on three articles which had appeared in Granta (1993), The Observer Magazine (1994) and The New Yorker (1996). The first chapter, "Dancing in Cambodia" is based on his visit to Cambodia ~in 1993
People. past and present, come to life vividly.Ghosh is completely self-effacing, he hardly appears in the book.
Ghosh never tells us how impressed he was, how awesome he found the temple, how it was a unique experience etc. He lets the monument speak for itself, through his descriptions and the effect it has on the Cambodians. A unique characteristic of Ghosh's travelogue is that he never talks about himself -- the focus is always on the place, its history and people.
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