Aurobindo Ghosh

Sri Aurobindo Ghosh ranks among the greatest personalities of modern India. He is a multi-faceted genius – a political revolutionary, social reformer, historian, educationist, philosopher, yogi and above all men of letters. He is a journalist, editor, literary critic, linguist, translator, essayist, short story writer, dramatist and more than all of these,a great poet.

K.R.Srinivasa lyengar says that ‘Aurobindo was not merely a writer who happened to write in English but really an English writer’. In fact, after spending his early days in England and then returning to Baroda he reorients his western studies with the studies of Sanskrit and modern Indian languages. By the process he gains contact with his Indian heritage through a program of rigorous scholarship. He gains a deep insight into Indian culture and civilization. This learning mound his poetry and philosophy.

Sri Aurobindo’s poetry is meant to bridge the present and the future, self – divided present life and Life Devine that is to be. Songs to Myrtilla and Urvasie are his earlier poems published respectively in 1895 and in 1896. the life Divine or the way to Yogic feats is an evaluation of thought through love which is traced even from his earlier poems. Thus he says:

“Love is divine

Love is the hoop of the Gods

Hearts to combine”

Love is not love if it acquiesces in evil; great and true love is a power and it can break open the doors of captivity, it can change gross to gold, it can defy death or it is not love.

The lovers in Urvasie fail for their limitation in ultimate realization. But Savitri in Savitri (published much later in 1954) alone who fuses the less and the greater realizations into an integral and total transformation of limited human life into the fullness and splendour of the Life Devine.

Even in A Tree, his earlier poem contains his quintessence of philosophy in which he sees us as present attainment, another thirsting for higher thing. In Life and Death he tells that Death is Life disguised; that what appears to be death is another kind of life. In Savitri too at the climatic moment in the epic, it is death itself, which reveals its true face as the Supreme Lord of Life and Delight.

Aurobindo’s philosophical and mystical glow is through an integral view of man, Nature and God. He believes in the evolution of life and that will change the face of the world. In Savitri, his master piece he succeeds to a great extent in expressing his mystic experiences and Yogic realizations. Aurobindo arrives at the conclusion that releases from bondage and changes with the Secret knowledge, the soul achieves a complete spiritual transformation. Savitri is cast for uniquely cosmic role of struggle and redemption, and is the incarnation of divine mother. Savitri is both the response and the resulting transformation.

Sri Aurobindo is a skillful craftsman in the use of blank verse and felicity in poetic expression. His grand, mantric and mystic style in this poetic works are ample testimony of his stupendous achievements.

Rohinton Mistry

Rohinton Mistry was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India in 1952. He graduated with a degree in Mathematics from the University of Bombay in 1974 and immigrated to Canada with his wife, the following year, settling in Toronto, where he worked as a bank clerk, studying English and Philosophy part-time at the University of Toronto and completing his second degree in 1982. Mistry wrote his first short story, `One Sunday`, in 1983, winning First Prize in the Canadian Hart House Literary Contest (an award he also won the following year for his short story `Auspicious Occasion`). It was followed in 1985 by the Annual Contributors` Award from the Canadian Fiction Magazine, and afterwards, with the aid of a Canada Council grant, he left his job to become a full-time writer.

His early stories were published in a number of Canadian magazines and his short-story collection, Tales from Firozsha Baag, was first published in Canada in 1987 (later published in the UK in 1992). He is the author of three novels: Such a Long Journey (1991), the story of a Bombay bank clerk who unwittingly becomes involved in a fraud committed by the government, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book), A Fine Balance (1996), set during the State of Emergency in India in the 1970s, and Family Matters (2002), which tells the story of an elderly Parsi widower living in Bombay with his step-children. Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance were both short-listed in previous years for the Booker Prize for Fiction, and Family Matters was short listed for the 2002 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Mistry`s fiction is rooted in the streets of Bombay, the city he left behind for Canada at the age of twenty-three. Tales from Firozsha Baag (1992), Mistry`s first collection of stories, marked the arrival of a prodigious talent. Also available (in a slightly different form) as Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag, the collection contains eleven interrelated short stories that brings together some of Mistry`s earliest and finest writing. The tales detail the day-to-day lives of the residents of a decrepit apartment block in Bombay: Firozsha Baag. Mistry`s affectionate, thumb nail sketches bring together the lives of miserly Rustomji, the deranged Jaakaylee and Pesi, who is able to look up girls` skirts with the aid of his torch.

Such a Long Journey (1991), Mistry`s first novel, won numerous literary awards when it was first published and has since been adapted for film. The novel is set in 1971 during the time of the Indian Pakistan war. Its protagonist is no conventional hero, however: Gustad Noble is a bank clerk and a family man, a vulnerable figure whose world is still haunted by the war with China in 1962. The fate of Gustad`s family is closely bound up with that of the subcontinent during a time of crisis and turmoil. The clerk`s daughter`s illness and his son`s refusal to go to college, are events that we are encouraged to read symptomatically in Such a Long Journey. When Gustad receives a parcel and a request to launder money for an old friend, the event`s ramifications are at once personal and political.

"A Fine Balance", critically Mistry`s most successful work to date, tells the story of four characters (Maneck, Dina, Ishvar and Omprakash) and the impact of Indira Gandhi`s state of emergency on them. One of the most successful aspects of this book is its carefully crafted prose. The morning express bloated with passengers slowed to a crawl, then lurched forward suddenly, as though to resume full speed. The train`s brief deception jolted its riders. The bulge of humans hanging out of the doorway distended perilously, like a soap bubble at its limit. This intricate opening paragraph, which is typical of the precise prose of "A Fine Balance" throughout, helps propel the novel forward through what is one of the most memorable portraits of post-Independence India ever written.

Family MattersMistry`s latest novel, "Family Matters" (2002), is based in Bombay once more. Where his first two novels were set in the 1970s and were essentially `historical` fictions however, Family Matters depicts contemporary Bombay and is set in the 1990s. At the centre of the book is an old man, a Parsi with Parkinson`s Disease. Nariman Vakeel is a retired academic whose illness places renewed strains on family relations (Nariman, an English professor, compares himself to King Lear at one point).

A widower with skeletons in his closet, Nariman`s memories of the past expose the reader to earlier moments in the city`s, and the nation`s history in a novel that moves across three generations of the same family. In Family Matters we have the familiar slippage between public and private worlds. Similarly the lives of the residents of `Chateau Felicity` (Nariman`s former residence) and `Pleasant villa` (where he is forced to move by his scheming step daughter) recall the world of Firozsha Baag. Where the earlier novels tended towards a decisive closure however, the epilogue of this novel seems much less ready to console.

Prizes and Awards

1983 Hart House Literary Contest (first prize) `One Sunday` (short story).

1984 Hart House Literary Contest (first prize) `Auspicious Occasion` (short story).

1985 Annual Contributors` Prize, Canadian Fiction Magazine.

1991 Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) Such a Long Journey.

1991 Governor General`s Literary Award for Fiction (Canada) Such a Long Journey.

1992 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) Such a Long Journey.

1992 Smith Books/Books in Canada First Novel Award Such a Long Journey.

1995 Giller Prize (Canada) A Fine Balance.

1996 Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) A Fine Balance.

1996 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) A Fine Balance.

1997 Irish Times International Fiction Prize (shortlist) A Fine Balance.

2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) (shortlist) Family Matters.

2002 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize (joint winner with Pascal Khoo Thwe) Family.

Matters 2002 Man Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) Family Matters.

2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (shortlist) Family Matters.

As Rushdie puts in, Rohinton Mistry is a "writer from elsewhere". Very much of Indian origin, Rohinton Mistry in his novels, is always enthused with the infinitesimal particulars of his native city Bombay. However being a Parsi origin, Rohinton Mistry is more concerned with the tribulations and the idiosyncrasies of Bombay Parsis. Mistry in his novels explores the relationships at the heart of this community, their cultural identity and the uniqueness of their community living.

Tales From Ferozsha Baag, Rohinton MistryMistry, being himself, belonging to the Parsi community, experiences the diasporic issues and as a writer he shed light over these issue. Rohinton Mistry is a writer who makes up a part of the Indian Diaspora. His short stories as well as in his novel, Mistry underscores both the heterogeneous nature of one community`s identity and its dynamism. Traumatism in its inevitability brings change to the characters` lives, which Mistry focuses in his fictions. What he affirms is the power and pliability of the individual and that of the community in a world without a shred of pity.

Sympathetic to the women, he always advocates for the independence of the women and in his novels are always noted a protest of the women against the conventional arranged marriage. The novels bare often marked with a color of feminism. His females are fortuitous and choose their own male counterpart. The books of Rohinton Mistry are highly acclaimed and are considered as the masterpiece of the postcolonial literature.

Tales from Ferozshah Baag: - The Tales from Faerozshah Baag is the story of the lifestyles of the inhabitants living in the apartment named Ferozshah Baag. Such A Long Journey: -Inviolable background of the Indo Pak War, forms the background of Such A Long Journey, in which Mistry has etched out the tales of common Bombayites.

A Fine Balance: - The uncertain future of the young individuals in the precarious circumstances of 1975, when the Government has declared the State of Emergency is ideally portrayed in "A Fine balance".

The story of `A Fine Balance` is set at the backdrop at the time of 1975 in India, in an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, and the country is on the edge of chaos. In these precarious circumstances, four strangers are forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. Their background is different and so do their habit. But ultimately they become dependant on each other and thus story proceeds.

Born in Bombay in the year of 1952 Rohinton Mistry graduated with a degree in Mathematics from the University of Bombay in 1974. He migrated to Canada with his wife the following year, settling in Toronto, where he worked as a bank clerk, studying English and Philosophy part-time at the University of Toronto and completing his second degree in 1982. Mistry wrote his first short story, `One Sunday`, in 1983. Because of which he won the First Prize in the Canadian Hart House Literary Contest. It was followed in 1985 by the Annual Contributors` Award from the Canadian Fiction Magazine, and afterwards, with the aid of a Canada Council grant, he left his job to become a full-time writer. His early stories were published in a number of Canadian magazines, and his short-story collection was first published in Canada in 1987. In one of his semi autobiographical novel he depicted the story of a Bombay bank clerk who unwittingly becomes involved in a fraud committed by the government, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Another novel set during the State of Emergency in India in the 1970s. He always takes contemporary topics as his subject matter as for example in one of his stories he tells the story of an elderly Parsi widower living in Bombay with his step-children which was short listed for the 2002 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Synopsis:

A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry This book of Rohinton Mistry is a masterpiece. Enlaced with beautiful writing the book brings new understanding about India`s struggles with poverty and caste systems. The cultures and traditions are displayed through this story using four main characters and involving many background characters to make this book so realistic. Rohinton Mistry meshes the lives of four people of diverse backgrounds into a bond that lasts a lifetime. Dina Dalal, widowed and determined to make it as an independent woman in a world where women have little value, becomes the unwilling glue that supports 3 other lives. Maneck Kohlah is a student, sent by his parents from his mountain village to attend school in the city. Ishvar Darji and his nephew Omprakash are tailors escaping the terror in their village by moving to the city to look for work. This unlikely group of people becomes dependent on each other out of necessity, their lives entangling to create the basis of the story as well. This book is sometimes crude while sometimes cruel. The story mainly deals with the story of India during the 70s and the changes it was going through as well as the corrupt government. Here`s a book to make an American feel the privileges our country gives us, or any truly free country.

Being published by the Vintage publishing house A Fine Balance is written by Rohinton Mistry, which is a tale of four persons from different background living in a same place.

The collection of short story `Tales From Ferozsha Baag` by Rohinton Mistry aptly satisfies the title as this contained the stories of the lifestyle of the residents living in the apartment named Ferozsha Baag.

Born in Mumbai in 1952, Rohinton Mistry graduated with a degree in Mathematics from the University of Bombay in 1974. But next year he emigrated to Canada with his wife and settled in Toronto, where he worked as a bank clerk, studying English and Philosophy part-time at the University of Toronto and completing his second degree in 1982. He was very serious in his studies and also worked very to achieve his goal in life. Mistry started his writing career with a short story, `One Sunday`, in 1983. In 1986 he left his job and contributed all his time to flourish his career in writing. He won many awards as well as many writing contests. Rohinton Mistry His early stories were published in a number of Canadian magazines, and his short-story collection, Tales from Firozsha Baag, was first published in Canada in 1987.

His novels brought him national and international recognition. Mistry`s fiction spreads a precise writing style and a sensitivity to the humour and horror of life to communicate deep compassion for human beings. His writing concerns people who try to find own self while dealing with painful family dynamics and difficult social and political constraints. His work also addresses immigration, especially immigration to Canada, and the difficulty immigrants face in a society that recognizes their cultural differences and yet cannot embrace those differences as being part of itself. He is an excellent writer with unique writing style.

Synopsis:

`Tales From Firozsha Baag` is a collection of 11 short stories about the residents of Firozsha Baag. This is a creation of india born canadian writer Rohinton Mistry. Firozsha Baag is a Parsi-dominated apartment complex in Mumbai. All the stories deal with the same location, and thus the title of the story truly signifies it. Tales from Firozsha Baag, though a lesser-known work by Rohinton Mistry, still captures with vivacity, the rich and complex patterns of life of lower middle class families inhabiting an apartment in Bombay. Mistry`s Characterisation in this story is fabulous as he sketches Jaakaylee, an ayah and the Baag`s ghost seer.

The simplicity of her feelings is brought out through a compelling illustration of her day to day activities. The way she gets teased by kids of the baag for seeing a bhoot. The way her confession stops her periodic troubles with the bhoot. The novel portrays the feelings of an adolescent who gets addicted to stamp collection and gets carried away. It also portrays how events hurt in many ways. At the end when Jahangir left the boxful of precious stamps, which he gets from Dr. Mody, touch the reader`s heart.

Rohinton Mistry `Tales From Firozsha Baag` was Rohinton Mistry`s first book, it was published by McClelland and Stewart in 1987.

All the stories in the novel `Tales From Firozsha Baag` is written in a excellent manner. It`s different stories shows the language of love from different angle. E.g. father-son, lover-lovee, and other emotional tales of human life. This has a light subject matter which tries to give a little amount of piece to the reader`s mind in these of work pressure and tension.

Such a Long Journey unfolds the tale of the common Bombayites. Gustad , his life, his daily hard work and indeed the inviolable background of the Indo Pak war forms the base of the story.

Rohinton Mistery was born on 3rd July 1952. He is considered to be one of the famous authors who have gone out of India and writing in English. Rohinton Mistry is of Indian origin, he belongs to the Parsi Zoroastrian religious minority. The Parsis are small, yet united, religious community in India, devoted to Zoroastrianism, whose ancestors fled Islamic persecution in Iran during the eighth century. At his young age he worked in a bank for some days. After completing his degree in English and philosophy he attended University of Toronto where he won two Hart House literary prizes and Canadian Fiction magazine`s annual contributor`s prize for 1985. His first novel `Such a long journey` was published in 1991. This creation of Mistry won many awards e.g. Governor general`s award, commonwealth writer`s prize for best book, W. H. Smith books in Canada first novel award. The novel has also been translated in German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Japanese. This story of the author has also made into a film sharing the same name as the novel `Such a long Journey`.

Synopsis:
Rohinton Mistry uses `ordinary` men and women as his protagonists and fills his novels with the sights, sounds, smells, and color of India. Depicting his characters as neither saints nor sinners, he involves the reader in their lives as they try to survive the complexities of their culture. The backdrop of `Such a Long Journey` is set in Bombay and the time is 1971. The central character of the novel is very hard-working bank clerk named Gustad Noble. He is a devoted family man. He works hard to maintain his family properly. She has Dilnavaz, his wife and three children in his family. But there comes some problems in his life when his eldest son Sohrab refuses to attend the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology to which he has gained admittance. His youngest daughter Roshan falls ill. Other conflicts within the novel involve Gustad`s ongoing interactions with his eccentric neighbours and his relationship with his close friend and co-worker, Dinshawji. A letter that Gustad receives one day from an old friend, Major Bilmoria, slowly draws him into a government deception involving threats, secrecy and large amounts of money. Throughout the novel, the wall outside Gustad`s apartment building symbolizes the larger world of Bombay and parallels some aspects of Gustad`s own life. At the outset, it is used as a latrine, breeding illness in the neighborhood. Gustad tries something to come out of this problem. He persuades a sidewalk artist to paint it, and consequently he depicts scenes from all the religions of India. In this way the wall becomes a holy place. Eventually the government decides to widen the road and tear it down.

Being published by Mc clelland and stewart, Random house Inc., Alfred a Knopf, Faber and Faber, `Such A Long Journey` has been made into a movie named Such a long journey which was released in the year of 1998.

`Such A Long Journey` by Rohinton Mistery is a marvelous collection illustrating day to day life in a unique way. It is a beautifully constructed and emotionally involving story of a small family trying to live meaningful lives against almost overwhelming odds. The characters are finely drawn, and the plot reflects the traumas of an ordinary man and his wife caught up in events and crises not of their own making. This novel unable the author to take the experience of writing and become well versed in career.

Inn Yard, Playhouses & Theaters

Inn Yard Theater
1576-94: The Bull Inn
76-94: The Bell Savage
76-94: The Cross Keys
76-94: The Bell
76-94: The White Hart
76-94: The George

Playhouses
1573-Middle Temple Inn
76-St. Paul’s Cathedral
76-Gray’s Inn
76-Whitehall Theatre
76-Blackfriars
96-Blackfriars

Theater
1576-The Theater: The first recognised theater in England
77-Curtain
87-Rose
95-Swan
99-Globe
1600-Fortune
00-Boar’s Head
04-Red Bull
08-Whitefriars
13-Hope
16-Cockpit

Rushdie & Grimus

Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay on 19 June 1947. He went to school in Bombay and at Rugby in England, and read History at King`s College, Cambridge, where he joined the Cambridge Footlights theatre company. After graduating, he lived with his family who had moved to Pakistan in 1964, and worked briefly in television before returning to England, beginning work as a copywriter for an advertising agency. His first novel, Grimus, was published in 1975.

His second novel, the acclaimed Midnight`s Children, was published in 1981. It won the Booker Prize for Fiction, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction), an Arts Council Writers` Award and the English-Speaking Union Award, and in 1993 was judged to have been the `Booker of Bookers`, the best novel to have won the Booker Prize for Fiction in the award`s 25-year history. The novel narrates key events in the history of India through the story of pickle-factory worker Saleem Sinai, one of 1001 children born as India won independence from Britain in 1947.

Rushdie`s third novel, Shame (1983), which many critics saw as an allegory of the political situation in Pakistan, won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. The publication in 1988 of his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, lead to accusations of blasphemy against Islam and demonstrations by Islamist groups in India and Pakistan. The orthodox Iranian leadership issued a fatwa against Rushdie on 14 February 1989 - effectively a sentence of death - and he was forced into hiding under the protection of the British government and police. The book itself centres on the adventures of two Indian actors, Gibreel and Saladin, who fall to earth in Britain when their Air India jet explodes. It won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1988.

Salman RushdieSalman Rushdie continued to write and publish books, including a children`s book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), a warning about the dangers of story-telling that won the Writers` Guild Award (Best Children`s Book), and which he adapted for the stage (with Tim Supple and David Tushingham. It was first staged at the Royal National Theatre, London.) There followed a book of essays entitled Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (1991); East, West (1994), a book of short stories; and a novel, The Moor`s Last Sigh (1995), the history of the wealthy Zogoiby family told through the story of Moraes Zogoiby, a young man from Bombay descended from Sultan Muhammad XI, the last Muslim ruler of Andalucía.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet, published in 1999, re-works the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in the context of modern popular music. His most recent novel, Fury, set in New York at the beginning of the third millennium, was published in 2001. He is also the author of a travel narrative, The Jaguar Smile (1987), an account of a visit to Nicaragua in 1986.

Salman Rushdie is the Honorary Professor in the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was made Distinguished Fellow in Literature at the University of East Anglia in 1995. He was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1993 and the Aristeion Literary Prize in 1996, and has received eight honorary doctorates. He was elected to the Board of American PEN in 2002.

The subjects in his new book, Step Across This Line: Collected Non-fiction 1992-2002 (2002), range from popular culture and football to twentieth-century literature and politics. Salman Rushdie is also co-author (with Tim Supple and Simon Reade) of the stage adaptation of Midnight`s Children, premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2002. His other novel "Shalimar The Clown" (2005), is the story of Max Ophuls, his killer and daughter, and a fourth character who links them all. It was shortlisted for the 2005 Whitbread Novel Award.

An ideal futuristic fantasy "Grimus" is the heart-rending saga of a fictitious character "Flapping Eagle" whose quest is to find out his sister "Bird Dog" with whom he is separated since childhood.

Salman Rushdie, original name is Ahmed Salman Rushdie, born in Bombay on 19th of June 1947. He spent his childhood going to school in Bombay and at Rugby in England. He used to read History at King`s College, Cambridge, where he joined the Cambridge Footlights theatre company. After graduating, he lived with his family who had moved to Pakistan in 1964. He worked there in television before returning to England. In England he began working as a copywriter for an advertising agency. His first novel was Grimus, which was published in 1975.

Plot Summary

Published in 1975, Grimus was Salman Rushdie`s first published novel. To a large extent it has been disparaged by academic criticism and though Peter Kemp`s comment is particularly vitriolic it does give an idea of the novel`s initial reception; `Grimus` is one of the notable creations of Salman Rushdie. This is not any exceptional work of Rushdi but also a notable science fiction. This eccentric story deals with immortality, created worlds, surreal things, other dimensions both inner and outer, and also outcasts, which make the story different from the others The story follows Flapping Eagle, a young Indian who receives the gift of immortality after drinking a magic fluid. Flapping Eagle , an Axona Indian who has a lighter complexion than the rest of his people. His mother died just after some seconds he was born and as a result he was outcasted. He is not easily accepted, by the society. His sister "Bird Dog " protected him and presented him with the elixir of eternal life and after that she disappears mysteriously from the land of the Axona. Flapping Eagle is then exiled from his people, and wanders the world for centuries. Flapping Eagle wanders the earth for 777 years 7 months and 7 days, searching for his immortal sister, Bird Dog. Flapping Eagle explores identities till he falls through the hole in the Mediterranean Sea. He arrives in a parallel dimension at the mystical Calf Island. Here he finds people blessed with immortality yet bored with the sameness of life. However they are reluctant to give up their immortality and exist in a static community under a subtle and sinister authority. Flapping Eagle is tired with the mundane reality of immortality hence wants to get rid of the Grimus effect.

Published by the Random House Trade, this is indeed a noteworthy work of Rushdie.

Rushdie`s maturity gains diction in this futuristic fiction. The topics like hybridity, immigration, exile, imperialism and nationhood are subtly touched in this novel. As ideally said by the critics ""tentative steps towards an examination of post-coloniality" Salman Rushdie`s Grimus is undoubtedly a great work.

Kamala Das: Life

Kamala Das, also known as Kamala Suraiya, the sophisticated Indian poetess was born on March 31, 1934. She is a distinguished Indian writer who composes in English as well as Malayalam, her native language. Kamala Das is looked at as one of the exceptional Indian poets writing in English, even though her reputation and esteem in Kerala is based primarily on her short stories and autobiography. Much of Kamala Das`s writing in Malayalam is published in the pen name `Madhavikkutty`. Kamala Das was born in Malabar in the maritime state of Kerala. She was born to V. M. Nair, an ex- managing editor of the widely-distributed Malayalam daily Mathrubhumi and Nalappatt Balamani Amma, a renowned Malayali poetess. A notable feature included in Kamala Das`s character analysis is that she is perhaps the first Hindu woman ever to blatantly and candidly talk about sexual desires of Indian women, making her an iconoclast of her generation.

Born into a conservative Hindu Nair (Nallappattu) household possessing royal ancestry, Kamala Das had embraced Islam in 1999 at the age of 65 and assumed the name Kamala Suraiya. Just like the subjects of her stories, conversion in religious faith too had provoked much heat and storm in the social and literary circuits. Kamala Das also took active participation in politics in India and had launched a national political party, called the Lok Seva Party. The foremost aim of the party is to focus wholly on humanitarian work, as well as provide refuge to orphaned mothers and promote secularism. In 1984, Das had contested the general elections to enter parliament, but lost.

Kamala Das`s journey from being an elegiac child to turn into a respected Indian poetess is pretty long one. Her love of poetry began since early childhood under the influence of her great uncle, Nalapat Narayan Menon, a well-known writer. Das had spent most of her early days in Calcutta, where her father was employed. Das reminiscences watching her great uncle "work from morning till night" and thinking that he led "a blissful life". Kamala Das was also profoundly impressed by the poetry of her mother, Nalapat Balamani Amma and the sanctified writings preserved by the matriarchal community of Nayars. She received private education until the age of 15, when she was married to K. Madhava Das. She was barely 16 when her first son was born, to which she states that she "was mature enough to be a mother only when my third child was born". It is also known from the poetess`s autobiography that Das`s husband used to often assay a fatherly role for both Das and her sons. Due to the huge age difference between Kamala and her husband, Madhava Das often encouraged his wife to stay associated with people of her own age. Kamala Das corroborates this information and says that he was always "very understanding". When Kamala Das wished that she should begin writing, her husband supported her decision to expand the family`s earnings. Since Das belonged to the group of the `fair sex`, she could not utilise the `morning-till-night` agenda enjoyed by her great uncle. Hence, she had to wait until nightfall after her family had gone off to sleep, after which she would write until morning. There was the availability of only the kitchen table, where she would cut vegetables and after all the plates and things were washed up, Das would sit there and start typing. This scrupulous schedule weighed upon heavily upon the poetess`s health, but she viewed her illness from the optimistic side. Her illness gave her more time at home and hence, more time to write. Such was Kamala Das`s dedication, only after which did she attain the elevated Indian poetess status. As her career escaladed towards the high, her husband always remained her greatest supporter. Though he was sick for three years before he passed away, his presence brought Das remarkable joy and comfort. She avowed that there "shall not be another person so proud of me and my achievements".

Kamala Das`s achievements do broaden well beyond her verses of poetry. According to Kamala Das, "I wanted to fill my life with as many experiences as I can manage to garner because I do not believe that one can get born again". True to her word, Das has made herself successfully involved in painting, fiction and even politics. Though she had failed to win a place in Parliament in 1984, yet, she had witnessed much more success as a syndicated columnist. She has moved farther from poetry because she claimed that "poetry does not sell in this country (India),". However, opportunely, her forthright columns did and still do. Kamala Das`s columns were based upon everything from women`s issues and child care to politics.

Kamala Das`s mysterious honesty is wholly extended to her exploration of womanhood and love. According to her, womanhood calls for a specific set of collective experiences. Again, Kamala Das`s attention towards eroticism is magnificently coupled with her exploration of women`s needs. According to her, love should be determined by a fanatical kind of unconditional honesty. An encumbered love seems to be no love at all; only a total raptness in love can do justice such varied experiences. Much like the makers of ancient Tantric art, Das made no effort to conceal the sensuality of the human form; her work appears to commemorate its cheerful potential, while acknowledging its co-occurring perils.

Kamala Das`s poems when focussed upon love treat it within more panoptic ranges of themes, more realised settings and with deeper feeling, bringing to it an intensity of emotion and speech. The rich, full complexity if life is wholly grasped in Das`s writings. Her themes travel beyond stereotyped yearnings and complaints. Even her feelings of lonesomeness and distress are part of a larger-than-life personality, obsessive in its consciousness of its self, yet, weaving a drama of selfhood.

Significantly, many of her poems in English are about the warmth of her childhood and the family home in Kerala. Similar to other South Indian writers, this Indian poetess was also fond of writing about memories of childhood, family relations, and the family`s great house. In Kamala Das`s poetry there lies an idealised time of childhood in My Grandmother`s House, when she felt the sanctuary of love within familiar surroundings innocent of sexual fears and frustrations. Despite the fickle alterations of mood, attitude and self-respect in her poetry, there is an inner nucleus of identity to which Das refers: her name and aristocratic blood, her mother`s family, life in the South and her youth in contrast to her marriage.

There lies a dualism in Kamala Das`s writings in English, in which soul is contrasted to body. She seemed to imagine overwhelming this dualism only through death; Das`s poems are filled with yearnings for death, especially to drown in the sea, water being connected in her mind with an all-encompassing universal calmness, formlessness in contrast to the conscious mind and body of the anxious individual. The dualism results from the fall from childhood innocence into the adult realm of sexuality, marriage and life amongst strangers. Rather than a poet of free love, Kamala Das elucidates the disenchantment of sexuality.

The uniqueness of Kamala Das`s English poetry is not the story of sex outside marriage, but the volatility of her feelings, the way they rapidly shift and assume new postures, fresh attitudes of defence, attack, explanation or celebration. Kamala Das`s poems are placed neither in the act of sex nor in feelings of love; they are instead entangled with the self and it`s wide-ranging, often conflicting emotions. They often range from the yearning for security and intimacy to the assertion of the ego, self-dramatisation and feelings of humiliation and depression. Writing is a means of etching a place in the world; the use of the personal voice and self-revelation are means of self-assertion. Das had opened domains in which previously outlawed or ignored emotions could be elucidated in ways which reflected the true voice of feeling; she showed how an Indian poetess could establish a space for herself in the public world. Kamala Das brought a sense of locality to her poems.

Surpassing every sphere in Indian English literature, Kamala Das`s most remarkable achievement is her own sense of writing in Indian English. Often her vocabulary, idioms, choice of verbs and some syntactical constructions are part of what has been termed the `Indianisation of English`. This is indeed a feat of accomplishment for Das. It has served as an important phase in the development of a national literature.

Kamala Das is also popularly known as Madhavikutty in her mother-tongue, Malayalam. She is counted as one of the principal short story writers in Malayalam. In any given listing, Das numbers amongst the top five writers, even after bearing in mind personal choices and socio-cultural background of her readers. Kamala Das`s writing technique is indeed economical and the utilisation of language is pretty precise. Her vastly applauded stories in Malayalam include Pakshiyude Manam, Neypayasam, Thanuppu, and Chandana Marangal. Das also wrote a few novels, among which Neermathalam Pootha Kalam excels every other, which was received positively by the readers as well as the critics. It reanimates the nostalgia of an old ancestral home with it adjoining snake shrine. It is often stated that even Kamala Das`s casual talks falls in the genre of short stories. Such is the Indian poetess` creative genius that even after buckling under several unwanted controversies, she remains a widely admired figure.

Chaman Nahal

Chaman Nahal's distinction lies in writing about India without any touch of exoticism; he scrupulously avoids the stereotyped "East" of maharajahs, tigers and snakecharmers. The actual town of Delhi (in My True Faces and The English Queens) and the typical Punjabi town of Sialkot are presented vividly, and we get a good idea of middle-class life in India. Azadi is the best of the Indian-English novels written about the traumatic partition which accompanied Indian Independence in 1947. The Crown and the Loincloth and The Salt of Life portray Mahatma Gandhi as a complex character with human failings. The English Queens breaks new ground by using the comic mode to treat a problem which has concerned all Indians—the tendency of the educated elite in India to ape the West.

Nahal's first novel, My True Faces, adequately portrays the agony of a sensitive young man when he finds his wife and baby son missing. But the crisis seems to be too minor to warrant the heavy philosophical treatment, with the hero realizing at the end of the novel that all earthly manifestations are but faces of Krishna, and they are all his "true faces." The involved language betrays the fact that it is the work of a scholarly professor of English.

Azadi ("Freedom"), which won the award of the Sahitya Akademi (India's national academy of letters), employs an entirely different style. It is a straightforward account of a rich Hindu grain merchant and his family. The novel begins in mid-1947 with the people of Sialkot (now in Pakistan) hearing the announcement regarding partition, but they refuse to believe that they now have to move. Nahal shows how Kanshi Ram the Hindu, Barkat Ali the Mohammedan, and Teja Singh the Sikh share the same Punjabi culture and language, and consider Sialkot their homeland. Meticulous attention to details and a firsthand knowledge of the life of the characters enable Nahal to make the plight of the refugees real to the reader. The novel ends with a sadly depleted family trying to begin life anew in Delhi. Azadi has none of the sensationalism of other novels about India's partition, such as Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan or Manohar Malgonkar's A Bend in the Ganges. Nahal shows the cruelty as well as the humanity of both sides. The novel also shows the maturing of Arun, Kanshi Ram's only son, but the account of his love, first for Nur, the Muslim girl left behind in Pakistan, and then for Chandni, a low-caste girl who is abducted on the way to India, is not as gripping as the rest of the novel.

Nahal's next novel, Into Another Dawn, is basically an East-West love story, set chiefly in the U.S.A. Nahal's fourth novel, Sunrise in Fiji, is a psychological study of Harivansh, a successful architect in his forties, who finds his personal life empty and meaningless. He goes to Fiji to bid for a building contract, and uses the break from routine to do some much needed soul-searching.

The English Queens is unique in Indian-English fiction; it is a very funny but hard-hitting satire against the elitism of the English-speaking groups in India, such as the officers of the defense forces, the nouveau riche, the highly placed civil servants, or Indians having foreign wives. Nahal unfolds a fantastic plot hatched by Lord Mountbatten, the last British Viceroy of India, to ensure India's subjugation to Britain. On the eve of handing over political power he prepares a charter for the "safe transfer of linguistic power" by which he gives the English language to India. To "preserve, propagate and spread" English in India he appoints six women in New Delhi to "The Order of the Queens." Rekha, the daughter of one of these queens, horrifies them by wanting to marry a young man from a working-class slum; worse still, he wears Indian clothes and is an expert in Indian classical music. The novel takes a further fantastic turn when the bridegroom reveals himself as an avatar of Vishnu, who has come to destroy this pernicious second-hand English culture. He flies back to heaven with the charter, but it drops out of his hand accidentally, and comes back to continue its destructive work; perhaps even God cannot help India! Of course, Nahal is not against the English language as such; his satire is against the kind of Indian who thinks that it is shameful to know anything about his own culture. One wonders whether non-Indian readers would enjoy the book as much as Indians do, because much of the humor rests on topical allusions.

"The Gandhi Quartet" covers three decades of Indian history, from 1915 to 1947. Azadi, which describes the last phase of the struggle for independence, was the first to be published. The Crown and the Loincloth is the first of three novels with Mahatma Gandhi as central character. Nahal presents Gandhi directly as well as in terms of the effect he has on the family of Thakur Shanti Nath, a landowner in a Punjabi village. This novel is set in the period from 1915 to 1922, and deals with many historical events such as Gandhi's return to India in 1915 and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Sunil, the landlord's son, and Sunil's wife Kusum are followers of Mahatma Gandhi. Sunil dies in 1922 while saving the Prince of Wales from an attack by terrorists, and Kusum joins Gandhi's ashram at Sabarmati with their young son Vikram. The second novel, The Salt of Life, centers on Gandhi's salt satyagraha of 1930. The heroine, Kusum, leaves the ashram when she gets married to Raja Vishal Chand, the ruler of a small princely state in the Himalayas. Her son Vikram stays on with Gandhi and participates in the Dandi march. When Vishal Chand dies, Kusum comes back to the ashram. The Triumph of the Tricolour, the third volume, deals with the Quit India movement of 1942. The narrative style of the later novels is quite complex, integrating Indian modes of storytelling with Western techniques like the stream-of-consciousness novel. But they lack the power of Azadi, which remains Nahal's best novel.

PUBLICATIONS

Novels

• My True Faces. New Delhi, Orient, 1973.
• Into Another Dawn. New Delhi, Sterling, 1977.
• The English Queens. New Delhi, Vision, 1979.
• Sunrise in Fiji. New Delhi, Allied, 1988.
• Azadi (Freedom). New Delhi, Arnold-Heinemann, and Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1975; London, Deutsch, 1977.
• The Crown and the Loincloth. New Delhi, Vikas, 1981.
• The Salt of Life. New Delhi, Allied, 1990.
• The Triumph of the Tricolour. New Delhi, Allied, 1993.
• The Ghandi Quartet. New Delhi, Allied, 1993.

Short Stories

• The Weird Dance and Other Stories. New Delhi, Arya, 1965.
• Uncollected Short Stories
• "Tons," in The Statesman (New Delhi), 12 June 1977.
• "The Light on the Lake," in Illustrated Weekly of India (Bombay), 22 July 1984.
• "The Take Over," in Debonair (Bombay), August 1985.

Other

• Moby Dick (for children), adaptation of the novel by Melville. NewDelhi, Eurasia, 1965.
• A Conversation with J. Krishnamurti. New Delhi, Arya, 1965.
• D.H. Lawrence: An Eastern View. South Brunswick, New Jersey, A.S. Barnes, and London, Yoseloff, 1971.
• The Narrative Pattern in Ernest Hemingway's Fiction. New Delhi, Vikas, and Rutherford, New Jersey, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1971.
• The New Literatures in English. New Delhi, Allied, 1985.
• Jawaharlal Nehru as a Man of Letters. New Delhi, Allied, 1990.
• Editor, Drugs and the Other Self: An Anthology of Spiritual Transformations. New York, Harper, 1971.