Vikram seth biography summary rubric

BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS

© 2019 by M. Keith Booker

The Indian postcolonial novel occupies a very different position in relation to British culture than does the African postcolonial novel. For one thing, the colonial relationship between Britain and India was far longer and more complex than the relationship between Britain and Africa. For another thing, India had a rich tradition of written literature even before the arrival of British colonizers. Postcolonial Indian literature draws upon that tradition, giving it dimensions that are unavailable to most postcolonial African writers.[1] India itself is also far different from Africa, consisting as it does of a single large country with a population roughly equivalent to that of the entire African continent. But India is also a very diverse country, both culturally and linguistically. As a result, Indian literature written after India attained independence in 1947 tends to be less dominated by the colonial experience and less concerned with establishing a dialog with British literature than is postcolonial African literature. In addition, most postcolonial Indian literature is not written in the English language, though there is a significant body of Anglophone Indian literature. Despite all these differences, many of the critical and theoretical issues discussed in the previous chapter with regard to African literature (including the questions about language), and the reader of this chapter is encouraged to review that one before moving forward with this one.

India had a long and rich history of intercultural encounters even before the initial arrival of the British there. The long British encounter with India dates back to the beginning of the seventeenth century and was solidified by the establishment of permanent coastal trading outposts in India by the British East India Company[2] around the beginning of the eighteenth century, just as the Mughal Empire[3] that had ruled much of India in the sixteent

It is that time of the year when brown leaves carpet morning walks, making us ponder on the fragility of life. Longer nights mean more time with one’s self and dark hours of contemplation in the undisturbed company of memory. Autumn is upon us and we sit surrounded by its moods. Vikram Seth’s poetry collection ‘Summer Requiem’ is not just a seasonally suitable book to read but one which makes the reader find herself somewhere within its folds of poetic musing, watching the orange dusk. Because ‘sombre thoughts become this hour, Hour of red copper, rust, dark iron’ (from ‘Summer Requiem’). 

The overarching idea in Vikram Seth’s poetry is that of transience – of seasons, of love in relationships and of life itself. We see the poet, at home or in the world, looking around at shifting scenes and poring within with thoughts of change, and even death. Observation and contemplation unite to create vivid visuals which add profundity even to the usual. And the poet? A man whose streams of thought, whether flowing backwards in time or surging ahead, seem poignantly lonely in a crowd. However, the low notes of remembrance of things gone by are in peaceful symphony with those positive ones reflective of acceptance of this very impermanence around; a flux which impresses itself upon the poet’s mind as he bids adieu to summer. 

Love…

Outside the great world’s gifts and harms

There must be somewhere I can go

To rest within a lover’s arms,

At ease with the impending snow. 

(From ‘Late Light’)

In the poem ‘Summer Requiem’, the poet knows that ‘I must forsake attachment.’ We wonder why. We see the world around him gradually turning leaden from rust, bringing ‘everything to a close’. It’s a closure to the day or to the season. And it seems the poet too has reached a finale in his life. He’

It was 1989, and I was a graduate student at Oxford. I had made little progress with my doctoral dissertation, and I had written a novel that had almost, but not quite, found a publisher. One of the routes that had taken me in my first fiction toward Calcutta was Irish literature—its provincialism and cosmopolitanism, its eccentricity and refinement—so I was pleased when I heard that Seamus Heaney was the likeliest candidate to win the elections for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry. Paul Muldoon’s anthology, The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, had reintroduced me to Heaney: to the magical early poems, about the transformative odd-jobs men of a prehistoric economy—“diviners” and “thatchers”—and the features of that economy, wells and anvils; and to the Dantesque political cosmology (Heaney’s overt response to the “troubles”) of Station Island.

A diversion was caused by the nomination of the Rastafarian performance and dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah. It was a strategically absurd nomination, made in the tradition that periodically produces a fringe contender in the Loony Party to clear the air. On the other hand, I’d noticed that Heaney had begun subtly to remake himself as a postcolonial poet since Wintering Out and particularly North. By “postcolonial” I mean a particular way of using allegory to tackle questions of power, Empire, violence, and empowerment: allegories that, in Heaney’s case, had him scrutinizing, since 1971, Iron Age John Does buried for centuries in the peat, Tollund men who had once been the victims of state violence; in his later poetry it also involved the glamor his words imparted to bottomless bogs and to Celtic orality. There was a hint of magic realism to North’s politics and poetics. In retrospect, I realize this reinvention on Heaney’s part was making me uneasy.

Heaney won over Zephaniah and other competitors for the post by a very wide margin. The poet’s lectures were thronged by students, and Heaney’s performances

Long fictional narrative story

For other uses, see Novel (disambiguation).

A novel is an extended work of narrativefiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The word derives from the Italian: novella for "new", "news", or "short story (of something new)", itself from the Latin: novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning "new". According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, Medieval Chivalric romance, and the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, in the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel. Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne,Herman Melville,Ann Radcliffe, and John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance". Such "romances" should not be confused with the genre fictionromance novel, which focuses on romantic love. M. H. Abrams and Walter Scott have argued that a novel is a fiction narrative that displays a realistic depiction of the state of a society, while the romance encompasses any fictitious narrative that emphasizes marvellous or uncommon incidents. Works of fiction that include marvellous or uncommon incidents are also commonly called novels, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.

The spread of printed books in China led to the appearance of the vernacular classic Chinese novels during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), and Qing dynasty (1616–1911). An early example from Europe was Hayy ibn Yaqdhan by the Sufi writer Ibn Tufayl in Muslim Spain. Later developments occurre