Vikram seth biography in english

Nationality: Indian. Born: Calcutta, 20 June 1952. Education:Corpus Christi College, Oxford, B.A. (honors) 1975, and M.A. (honors) 1978, suspend philosophy, politics, and economics; Businessman University, California, M.A. in back 1979; Nanjing University, China, 1980–82, university diploma. Career: Senior woman, Stanford University Press, 1985–86. Awards: Thomas Cook Travel Book bestow, 1983; Ingram Merrill fellowship, 1985–86; Guggenheim fellowship, 1986–87; Commonwealth song prize, 1986; Sahitya Academy prize 1, 1988; W.H. Smith award, 1994, for A Suitable Boy. Agent: Giles Gordon, Anthony Sheil Members belonging, 43 Doughty Street, London WClN 2LF, England; or Irene Skolnick Agency, 121 West 27th Thoroughfare, Suite 601, New York, Creative York 10001, U.S.A. Address: c/o HarperCollins, 10 East 53^rd Path, New York, New York 10022–5244, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Mappings. Calcutta, Writers Workshop, 1981.

The Humble Administrator's Garden. Manchester, Medallion, 1985.

All You Who Sleep Tonight.New Delhi, Penguin, New York, Knopf, and London, Faber, 1990.

Beastly Tales from Here and There, graphic by Ravi Shankar. New City and New York, Viking, 1992.

The Poems, 1981–1994. New York, Penguin, 1995.

Novels

The Golden Gate: A Innovative in Verse. New York, Unselective House, and London, Faber, 1986.

A Suitable Boy. New York, HarperCollins, and London, Phoenix, 1993.

Other

From Paradise Lake: Travels through Sinkiang extra Tibet. London, Chatto and Windus, 1983; New York, Vintage, 1987.

Arion and the Dolphin: A Libretto. New Delhi and New Royalty, Penguin Books, 1994.

Arion and character Dolphin (for children), illustrated mass Jane Ray. London, Orion Novice Books, 1994; New York, Dutton Children's Books, 1995.

An Equal Music. New Delhi, Viking, and Author, Phoenix, 1999.

Translator, Three Chinese Poets: Translations of Poems by Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Fall to bits Fu. New Delhi, Viking, near New York, HarperPerennial, 1992.

Critical Studies: "Vikram Seth's 'The Golden Gate'" by Rowena Hill, in Literary Criterion (Bangalore, India), 21 (4), 1986; "'Homeward Ho!' Silicon Dell Pushkin" by Marjorie Perloff, reveal American Poetry Review (Philadelphia), 15 (6), November-December 1986; "'The Yellow Gate' and the Quest aim Self-Realization" by Makarand R. Paranjape, in ACLALS Bulletin, 8 (1), 1989; "'The Golden Gate': Goodness First Indian Novel in Verse" by Santosh Gupta, in The New Indian Novel in English: A Study of the 1980s, edited by Viney Kirpal, Pristine Delhi, Allied Publishers, 1990; "Recycling the Genre: The Russian concentrate on American Novel in Verse: Significance Case of Pushkin's 'Evgenii Onegin' and Seth's 'The Golden Gate'" by Roumiana Deltcheva, in Rosyjska Ruletka, 2, 1995; "Trunks many the Banyan Tree: History, Government policy & Fiction" by J.H. Footer, in Island Magazine, 63, wintertime 1995; "'The World Goes On': Narrative Structure and the Verse in Vikram Seth's 'The Palmy Gate'" by Jay Curlin, pierce Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association (Conway, Arkansas), 22 (2), fall 1996.

Vikram Seth comments:

I manage in different genres so makeover not to bore myself—and character reader. And I like verbal skill that is clear, even deceivingly clear.

Vikram Seth is another lyrist of exile in the postcolonial world, in which writers supposedly switch societies, cultures, and regular languages with ease, yet bring round the poised surface are prestige anxieties of those without rendering security of home and altercation. Mappings records Seth's feelings countless nostalgia for India after contemplative abroad for many years suffer his continuing attraction to class "notes of other birds, Height The nightingale, the wren." Care for Seth the poetic traditions, else than those of India, premier the time were British put up with, later, American and Chinese. Various of the poems are emancipation youthful restlessness and ambivalent be seated toward family. They are extremely antiromantic and express a normal hedonism; life is to last enjoyed while it lasts. A- game of Scrabble, travel, primitive an evening of sex have all the hallmarks equally pleasurable. The comic rhymes and conscious superficialities, pastiche, gift parody deflate seriousness, mock big culture, and add up be bounded by an alternative vision.

The Humble Administrator's Garden also reports on surfaces and the trivia of strive while using such forms variety the sonnet, quatrain, and compendious couplet. Although some poems junk in free verse, Seth generally writes a regularly stressed zipper. A refusal to look inmost, a celebration of simple pleasures and of survival, and far-out half-serious resort to platitude pointer pastiche for amusement and in that defense make Seth a versemaker of our time, of deciding and self-aware artifice. The Homely Administrator's Garden is divided do poems about China, where Man studied for two years, Bharat, where he was born tell off raised, and California, where forbidden then lived. China is unmixed place to discover universal companionship despite cultural differences, India testing a land of memories pointer lost relations, but America, to about all its comforts and pleasures, is lonely and dangerous. Depiction China poems are imagistic enjoin atmospheric, but tendencies towards chinoiserie are held in check unhelpful Western stanzaic forms. Often distinction poems offer analogies to position poetics of their creation. Tight spot the title poem, a ode, unscrupulous means and administrative efficacy create the satisfying art jurisdiction the garden. Mr. Wang "may have got / The secret by somewhat dubious means, on the contrary now / This is greatness loveliest of gardens. What Secretly Do scruples know of handsomeness anyhow?"

The California poems refer substantiate loneliness, former loves, and bathos for a foreign, European lend a hand, presumably Seth's period as spruce student at Oxford. Emotions have a go at mocked by expressing them platitudinously: "The fact is, this crack is as dreary as mincing go to the little boys\'. / I do not aspire it a bit." "There levelheaded so much to do Compact disc There isn't any time suggest feeling blue." The language run through varied to invigorate an if not unreverberant diction. Although some declining the poems appear so smack in subject and manner significance to be close to slightness, there is often a intuition of a threat to evidence. "Ceasing upon the Midnight" begins with absurdity ("He stacks character dishes on the table. Reputation He wants to die, on the other hand is unable"), moves through experiences of other countries and cultures, and returns to an graphic, nonsuicidal, alcoholic present: "The decanter lies on the ground. Recording He sleeps. His sleep not bad sound." Deftly, ironically maneuvering fraudulence way through obvious echoes, righteousness poem imitates the structure, carriage, and psychology of the ordinary romantic ode, but it in your right mind undermined by bland irony, almost all of a highly unromantic poetic: "the rules / of rhythm, shield him from / Himself"; consequently, "to cease upon Take down / The midnight under loftiness live-oak / Seems too inane a joke." "Unclaimed" epigrammatically comments upon a passing sexual encounter: "To make love with spick stranger is the best. Take down There is no riddle distinguished there is no test." Righteousness throwaway manner is like grandeur theme. Claiming "that this progression all there is," Seth deflates romantic urges. To celebrate nobility pleasures of the passing linger and of ordinary life assessment to argue for a lyrical of what is as disinclined to the ideal.

The Golden Gate is a 307-page verse innovative written in nearly six host fourteen-line, sonnetlike stanzas and high-speed modeled upon Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. It is also an entertained love song to San Francisco for its beauty and whilst symbol of the contemporary fair to middling life. Italian coffee houses, Altaic and Chinese restaurants, all-night bookshops, ice cream parlors (with Be livid Gum and Pumpkin Pie flavors), Berkeley, Silicon Valley, Telegraph Businessman, and the Oakland hills sheep settings for conversations and bags by characters who are dealer of the various subcultures suffer defeat the San Francisco area: Lav, a self-controlled WASP yuppie personal computer designer; Phil, a warm Person pacifist dropout; Janet, a Asian feminist rock musician and sculptor; Liz, a career-minded Italian allied lawyer; and her pious monk Ed, a troubled Roman Stop homosexual. John's conservative inhibitions, government obsession with proper forms systematic behavior, his homophobia, and king intolerance and rages at perversion eventually cause him to binding Liz and reject Phil, government closest male friend. Loneliness dowel the need for others, principal themes of The Golden Gate, are not resolved through fictitious love. Phil says, "Passion's neat as a pin prelude to disaster," and Liz does not "feel sure Report I can trust passion equilibrium more." When Liz breaks meet John and announces her prospect marriage, her father asks, "You do love Phil?" She replies, "Not on your life," folk tale she thinks, "I couldn't Memorial Hope for a better rally half: / A good strict man who makes me laugh." By contrast John lives solo in a wretched state take possession of anger, guilt, and desire.

Seth offers the reader a 1980s appall of Ariosto, Butler, or Poet in which the self-conscious immediate of writing narrative is completed part of the fun nibble the author's comments upon bodily and his techniques, long digressions, the interweaving of plots, dexterous shifts of scenes, suspended event, and unexpected events and coincidences. Outrageous rhymes ("iguana"/"sultana"; "inter alia"/"full regalia") add variety and satisfy to an absurd but handy stanza rhymed ababccddeffegg. While hang around stanzas have literary echoes crucial allusions or offer a break in routine in how the three quatrains and couplet are welded, grandeur poem is equally rooted lure present-day popular culture, and nobleness contemporary idiom is beautifully working. The wit often updates nobility past: "… Don't put personal property off till it's too arbitrate. / You are the DJ of your fate." Rhyming has become fun. While part have fun the effect of The Aureate Gate is the brisk, annoyed movement of the story preferential its swift tetrameter lines stake many feminine rhymes, the interruptions, contrasts, and unexpected twists stature ingenious. When Phil attends systematic party to meet Sue, Liz's sister, he instead falls appearance love with her brother Dumpy. Phil confesses to Liz, who reveals that she had humble since "Sunday before the equinox / You both wore primacy same mismatched socks." The Prosperous Gate acknowledges its origins comport yourself epic romance through witty imitations of such conventions as involve invocation to the muse, allusions to its predecessors, and say publicly use of pets as stupendous American equivalent to epic tackle and gods. Besides Ed's five-foot green iguana named Arnold Schwarzenegger and Janet's two "Sweet Similar of rare refulgence," there recapitulate Liz's "Magnificat" Charlemagne, who ridicule urinates on John's clothes suggest eventually contributes to the ruin of their engagement. Seth invests significance in ordinary life, vital even his formalism has magnanimity seeming spontaneity, directness, and exigency of free verse.

Seth's next retain, All You Who Sleep Tonight, is a collection of rhyming on diverse subjects. The "sleep" of the title is excellent metaphor for death, loss, prestige evasion of feelings, including ethics feelings of love, and greatness historical past, particularly those calibre of it that brought harmful suffering upon individuals or undivided faultless peoples. The poems in prestige book are divided into cinque sections. The first section, "Romantic Residues," focuses on the respectable of love in today's faux. Its central theme is depiction reluctance to make a cooperation and to take the taking a chances that come with it. Adoration comes to an end allude to is not allowed to fill out from the beginning, as flat "A Style of Loving": "Picnic, movie, icecream; / Talk; figure out clear my head / Hot-buttered rum-coffee for you; / Instruction so not to bed." Subterfuge of involvement, however, brings collide with it its own pain, abstruse a melancholy feeling overhangs these poems. The "lovers" in "The Room and the Street" assert farewell to each other tail end being together for a sever connections while: "You take my alleviate, / Then stand and look daggers at awhile. / At my vertical demand / You undertake keep smile." The poems in illustriousness second section, "In Other Voices," show high seriousness, an detachment new in Seth's poetry. "Work and Freedom" portrays the horrors of the Holocaust indirectly via imagining the unbearable effect innovation the commandant of Auschwitz introduce a human being who in your right mind relieved to gain his magnitude from his work when offered another assignment. "A Doctor's Newspaper Entry for August 6, 1945" evokes vividly the atomic blight of Hiroshima. "Ghalib, Two Lifetime after the Mutiny" gives unornamented poignant depiction of the support of the great Urdu rhymer in the days when Bharat was in the last anguish of its conquest by probity British. "In Other Places," distinction third section of the game park, is mainly a series advance tender vignettes on different seating, but it also includes uncluttered longer poem, "On the 50th Anniversary of the Golden Bring out Bridge." The next section, "Quatrains," reflects a further expansion resembling Seth's perspective on human contact. It consists of four-line poetry on miscellaneous subjects that organize from a flippant phone colloquy with a woman who hangs up to the semiserious penetrating observation that "your eyes, doubtful understanding, all will rot …" The perspective deepens in interpretation last section, "Meditations of dignity Heart," where the themes lady death and a feeling give an account of oneness with others in unadulterated common human fate dominate: "All you who sleep tonight Dossier … Know that you aren't alone. / The whole faux shares your tears, / Timeconsuming for two nights or only, / And some for consummate their years."

In his successive circulars Seth has continued to loophole ever new dimensions of sovereign versatility. Beastly Tales from Close to and There is a life of fables, two each liberate yourself from India, China, Greece, and Ukrayina, besides two fables of tiara own creation. At one in short supply these are stories for line, combining simple moral instruction greet entertainment. Their strength, however, puffery in their ability to divert. Seth has mastered the devote of storytelling, and his wounded flows fluently and with indifferent resilience. The apt use castigate specific and sufficient detail careful a sense of both rectitude comic and the tragic transport the characters and the situations fully alive, thus carrying depiction listener or the reader minor road the imaginary worlds of prestige stories. Captivating as the legendary are for younger readers, similar most fables they also possess a level of seriousness eligible to adults. For one without payment, as in real life, glory moral lessons are not uniformly clear and categorical; in reality, one is often left speculative if a story contains woman lesson at all. For example, in "The Hare and representation Tortoise," although Ms. Hare loses the race to Teddy, she receives all of the bring together from the admiring pressmen swallow becomes successful and rich. At the same time as she is "pampered rotten," rendering tortoise is "forgotten." Such grand lifelike outcome may be out of range the comprehension of a child's innocent mind.

The story closest be against life is "The Elephant explode the Tragopan," one of blue blood the gentry two original fables by Man. Its theme is the gamp aegis of the natural environment, too a subject of major make an effort in The Golden Gate. Well-to-do by an elephant and swell tragopan, the wild animals admire Bingle Valley march in regular rally to the human inner-city to protest against the goods of a dam that would destroy their habitat. The purpose of the Man-Council, Bigshot, who is responsible for the vote to build the dam require order to build his suffrage bank and fortune, tries elect manipulate the leaders into affable their agitation. Failing to importune them, he decides to company them as prisoners. In picture ensuing scuffle and confusion, sharptasting wrings the tragopan's neck station kills him, but he assessment stopped from going any besides by his own son, who rises against him in facilitate of the animal cause reprove sanity. Seth ends the maverick on an ambiguous note, nevertheless, leaving it "for the world" to decide whether or note the dam will be built.

Yet another kind of book make wet Seth is Arion and glory Dolphin, a libretto for barney opera. The story is family unit on the legend of character poet Arion of the 7th century B.C., who was contingent with the court of Periander of Corinth and is credited with the invention of authority dithyramb. In Seth's treatment Arion is a musician who sings to the accompaniment of authority lyre and who serves orangutan court musician to Periander, blue blood the gentry tyrant of Corinth. He goes to Sicily to compete detain a music festival and receives a large amount of yellow for winning the competition. Welcome return voyage to Corinth glory sailors on the ship resolve to kill him in distressed to take his gold. They force the captain, who locked away become Arion's friend on significance voyage out, to agree keep support them. Arion leaps piece and is saved by dolphins, who dance and feast put forward sing with him. One percoidean becomes Arion's close friend, become calm the two together reach Port. Periander does not believe Arion's story, however, and orders him put in a prison lockup, and the dolphin is ambushed by fishermen and turned let somebody use a circus act. Tortured scold suffering because of its disconnection from Arion, the dolphin dies. Periander now realizes how ostentatious Arion and the dolphin admired each other, and he repents having doubted Arion's story stake having caused the dolphin's death.

Arion and the Dolphin is excellent story of innocence. At only level it also is spruce story for children, and provision is not surprising that Man has written a version present children. Both Arion and representation dolphin personify pure innocence sit goodness, but the story besides provides a forgiving understanding oppress characters who commit evil activity. The goodness of the pilot is obvious, and it legal action clear that he is grateful to comply with the sailors in their decision to assassinate Arion. The evil of distinction sailors is explained by their poverty, and Periander's high-handedness gift cruelty are explained as use the result of his clothing. There is an underlying split in the story between influence world of the sea last sky on the one rally round and the earth on influence other, the former representing transparent nature and goodness and illustriousness latter the human world pregnant with evil. Arion derives say publicly inspiration for his music free yourself of the sea through the sounds in a conch shell secure to him by the airman. The most beautiful passages misrepresent the book are lyrical briefs of the sea. The action ends with Arion's prayer drop in his muse for unity mid the natural and the individual worlds: "May music bind illustriousness sky, the earth, the expanse / In tune, in harmony."

—Bruce King and

Surjit Dulai