Written Traces

  About the Novelist Anita Desai was an Indian English novelist and a professor of humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Born in Mussoorie in 1937 as Anita Mazumder to a German immigrant mother and a Bengali businessman father. Desai completed her higher secondary in the Queen Mary’s higher secondary school. Later she received her B.A. in English from Miranda House of the University of Delhi. She has been thrice shortlisted for the Booker Prize and also the recipient of the prestigious Sahity Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel “Fire on the Mountain”. She won the British Guardian Prize for “The Village By the Sea”. She is also on the advisory board of the Lalit Kala Akademi. She is married to Ashvin Desai and the mother of the Booker Prize winning novelist Kiran Desai. Influenced by Emily Bronte, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and so on. She read Wuthering Heights at the age of 9. Important works  The Zigzag Way The Artist of Disappearance Ba...

  Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004) The literature of early Indian English novel is identified especially with the trinity of Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao.  They all began writing in the thirties of the 20th century. Out of which Mulk Raj Anand is the object of our consideration. He was born in 1905 in Peshawar, now in Pakistan to a Kshatriyas family.  His father was Lal Chand , a Silversmith turned sepoy who had left his hereditary occupation to attend school. Later he learnt English, took a British military examination and served in cantonments as a head clerk.  He was highly ambitious of his son, both in education and economic status. From his father, Anand inherited the artisan's industry and minute attention to detail. Also the revolutionary temperament. Anand's mother was a religious lady with a knack for storytelling.  Anand attended Khalsa College, Amritsar after completing his matriculation.  Later, graduated from Punjab University with honou...

  Henry Louis Vivian Derozio: The Harp of India & My Country! In Thy Day of Glory Past Both are Sonnets and nationalist poem. Harp is a musical instrument, the enterprise of the entire Indian civilization is being compared, if symbolically, with the Harp. It is about the sorry condition of the Harp. The Harp and it’s melodies music, which was once played by the past musicians, in this case of the countrymen of the past, is now remains in silence. The poet ends it with a question that if the notes of the past i.e the lost glory of the past i.e the debilitating decline of the culture India can be revived ?  If so , then he very much would like to be one of those who have the honour in the revival of the glory.  He uses the idea of past glory only to stress the present decay. Both poems has forward looking, inspirational aspect. Brave attempt to face the future with hope Themes:- Decline glory of the country Possible revival The poet’s own role in it Tory Dutt : The Lo...

About the Author Arun Joshi (1939-1993) • One of the major Indian English writer of the contemporary time. • Educated in both India and U.S.A • Primarily an existentialist writer and his writing was in line with Albert Camus and Franz Kafka. • Existentialism : a twentieth century literary movement which challenged the established order of the universe as a moral absolute system. Instead, it pointed out,  ‘’The aimless existence of man who is indifferent to everything and alien to everybody, a delirious effect brought upon to the life of man due to the forces of industrialisation and urbanization.’’ • Arun Joshi’s writings are the Indian variety of existentialism which examines the human psyche trapped in the matrix of decaying values. • The distinctive feature of his writing is the duality of selves i.e. the native consciousness and the acquired consciousness. • Joshi’s fiction encounters the cultural conflicts of tradition and transition and the juxtaposition of materialistic, r...

 ABOUT THE NOVELIST  Salman Rushdie, born on 19th June 1947, is an Indian born British-American novelist and essayist. He was born into a Kashmiri-Muslim family to Anit Ahmed Rushdie and Negin Bhatt. He was born and educated in Bombay in St. Cathedral until he was fourteen. Soon after that age he left the city of Bombay for England to study at Rugby School. And it was during this time when he tasted the bitter experience of racism with comments such as “Wogs go home” from one of the boys at Rugby. So hurt by the experience that Rushdie never wanted to return to England. However, persuaded by his parents he joined King’s College in Cambridge and returned to England to study for his graduation. After graduation, he worked as a stage actor and also as a copywriter in an advertising firm.  It was also the time when he was giving some serious thoughts of becoming a writer.  As a writer, Rushdie’s work reflects a combination of magical realism with historical fiction...

 THE BACKGROUND OF THE NOVEL   To understand the text of the novel Kanthapura it is important to have the knowledge about its background, the inspiration that the author took to write the novel.  The novel “Kanthapura” is a social document, written in 1929 and published in 1938,  about a village in turmoil due to the sources from which it has shaped it’s form. That source is the social and political upheaval of a dependent India. Whatever was happening on the political scene of India in the 1930s finds its due reflection in the novel.  GANDHI’S THOUGHT AND ITS IMPACT The novel is set in the 1930s in an archetypical South Indian village named “Kanthapura” and is inspired by Gandhi’s ideology of “Ahimsa” and  “Satyagraha”. Gandhi doesn't feature in the novel as a character but the presence of Gandhi can be felt in every part of the novel and his philosophy of life and political struggle is reflected by the thought and action of many characters in the novel , ...

 ABOUT NEHRU Nehru (1889-1964) was born into a rich Kashmiri Brahmin family and had a very good education, first at home through governesses and then at Harrow, Cambridge and the Inner Temple. After his education he got involved in India’s freedom fight and played a leading role in that matter by first becoming the President of the Indian National Congress and later becoming the first Prime Minister of free India from August 1947 till his death on 27 May 1964. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY Nehru wrote his Autobiography during the time of his imprisonment in Dehra Gaol. It took him a period of less than 9 months, from June 1934 to 14 February 1935, to write a work which has the massive manuscript of 976 pages. He began writing his Autobiography in Dehra Gaol and completed in the District Gaol, Almora. The original title for Nehru’s Autobiography was “In and Out of Prison” with a subtitle “An Autobiographical Narrative with mushings on recent events in India.” But later, in 1936, it was publishe...

 AN INTRODUCTION The word prose is derived from the Latin expression “Prosa oratio” which means straightforward or direct speech. The French poet Paul Valery compared prose with walking while verse with dancing.  Any kind of literary genre can be written in the form of prose thus it is not restricted to a particular genre. For instance , it is considered that epics are mainly written in verse but the qualities of epics can also be found in Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" which is written in prose. FORMS OF PROSE In so far as the forms of prose are concerned, these are of two kinds viz. • Fictional forms, under which falls the category of the short story and the novel. • Non-fictional forms, under which falls the category of essay, biography, autobiography and travelogue. Following are a brief explanation of non-fictional forms of prose. i. Essay The word is derived from French which means attempt. It has a moderate length and a particular topic. Essays are further cla...