My Writings

Herman Melville is a great American writer. He was born and brought up in New York. Unlike Emerson and Thoreau, he had little higher education. He soon became a sailor and sailed to Liverpool. His novel Redburn describes this. He did a whaling trip and lived with the Typee cannibals in the Marquises. This is seen in Typee (1846), Omoo (1847) and Mardi (1849). White-Jacket (1850) is also about sea life. Melville lived near Nathaniel Hawthorne and dedicated his masterpiece Moby Dick (1851) to him, which is, by some considered as one of the two best American novels of the 19th century, the other being Mark Twain’s Huck Finn. Melville’s last two novels Pierre (1852) and The Confidence-Man (1857) were failures, while Billy Budd (1924), published after his death, is his another great classic. Melville also wrote a book of short stories The Piazza Tales and many volumes of poetry, of which Clarel is a novel in verse about Melville’s vision of life. It is said to be a great American document about Euro-American culture.

The present critical monograph on Conrad is like an Indian writers revisiting of Conrad. The book has four chapters. Chapter I is about Conrad’s life and works. Chapter II deals with a critical analysis of Conrad’s entire corps of novels. Chapter II analyses Conrad’s short stories; and chapter IV is about Conrad’s world-view.

Franz Kafka the Austrian writer was a pioneer modernist writer. He is called the ‘poster boy of modernism.’ Kafka wrote three novels America, The Trial and The Castle, and stories like The Metamorphosis (actually a novella), “In the Penal Colony” and others.
            Kafka also maintained elaborate letter correspondence with Max Brod, his friend and writer (who  edited Kafka’s works posthumously), his lovers Felice Bauer, Milena Jenseneska and Dora Diamant. Kafka’s letters to each of them, his diaries, and even aphorisms are published today. Kafka’s fiction is available in all the major languages and numerous studies on Kafka have been fruitful. He is considered one of the best modernist writers today.

D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) is a fine yet controversial English novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. Lawrence comes from a coal mining community of the Midlands, UK. Then he became a great yet controversial writer. Lawrence often drew his themes from his own life and relationships. His major novels include Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). He has written many more novels and a great number of short stories. Lawrence was a great poet, playwright, travel writer, essayist, critic and painter. Aldous Huxley has edited his letters.

Trends and Techniques in Modern English Literature is a collection of articles on art, literature, religion, society and life. These nearly two dozen articles deal with English language, stylistics, the art of translation, travel literature, Greek mythology and drama, feminism, absurd theatre, existentialism, playwriting, poetry and fiction, the Bible, and cultural studies. The volume is very useful for the students and teachers of any literature, and more so for Indians.

The present book analyses Hemingway’s entire corps of work—journalism, short stories, novels, non-fiction, travelogue, play, film and his reputation abroad.  First of all, Hemingway was a good journalist. He was fine short story writer and his books include In Our Time, Men Without Women and Winner Take Nothing. As a novelist Hemingway is truly great and his finest novels are The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea.

The Epics of the World has eleven essays, each foucssing on an important epic of the world beginning with The Epic of Gilgamesh, 3000 BC upto the Kalevala composed in 1835. The two Hindu epics—the Ramayana and the Mahabharata – are great grand narratives in themselves. They are the backbone of Indian civilization. Again the two great Greek epics – the Iliad and the Odyssey – are the backbone of Greek civilization. They still form the ways of life in Europe. Virgil’s Aeneid is no less a formative book for the Romans. Beowulf, likewise, is ‘the breath and finer spirit’ of the North European races. Camoes’s Lusiads speaks of the Portugueeses.Milton’s Paradise Lost is similarly a great epic, speaking about man’s sense of protest, and speaking about mankind. The Kalevala speaks about the cultural heritage of Scandinavia. Still there are hundreds of minor epics, or epic poems, just like Spenser’s Faerie Queene or the German Nibelungenlied. In Arnold’s sense, the epic provide us ‘sweetness and light.’

Everything about Charles Dickens is an Indian companion to Dickens’s life and works. The book is a comprehensive and critical research in Dickens’s life and times, his journalism, enormous body of novels, Christmas stories, theatricals, travel accounts, public readings and his social reform activities and circle of men. This is a fine reference work for all sorts of Dickens readers.

This book on Rudyard Kipling is an adventure. This is an intellectual adventure on one of the most controversial writers in the history of English literature. One must know that Kipling is both loved and hated for his finest writings and political ideas about Britain. Mr. Kipling, as an Anglo-Indian writer stayed in India for many years and he had his boyhood here. After his education at Southsea and Westward Ho! he joined the Civil and Military Gazatte at Lahore and then he worked for the Pioneer in Allahabad. He traveled in other parts of the country like Kolkata and Rajaputana and studied India as no other Anglo-Indian writer could do. His writings are better than Forster’s and Paul Scott’s. Kipling began to write of India and the East in the best possible way at that time. Later he settled down for some years in the USA and then he settled down in Suxssex, England. He visited many countries like Japan, Srilanka, South Africa and Brazil. He was a globe-trotter. As critics like T. S. Eliot and Edmund Wilson think he has depicted India in the best possible manner. His poetry and short stories depict India like nobody else could do. His poetry is really wonderful. It is melodious, folksy and, even at times vulgar. One must read his poetry in the Barrack Room Ballads. Chapter –V deals with his poetry.

Faulkner as a great writer has written such great works as The Sound and the Fury (1929), Absalom, Absalom (1936), Sanctuary (1931) and Intruder in the Dust (1948). Most of these books are still studied with interest colleges and universities. Faulkner has depicted the American South, and the region Yoknapatawpha is symbolic of that life.

The present book “Rabindranath Tagore: Life and Works” has seven chapters. The first chapter is a simple story about how Tagore lived. The next six chapters speak of what Tagore did. Chapter-Two is about Tagore’s Gitanjali, a remarkable literary event in world poetry. Chapter-Three is about Tagore’s other books of poetry. As a prominent Bengali, and in a way, a pioneer English poet, Tagore wrote poetry as if it was his first love. Chapter-Four “Rabindranath Tagore’s Plays” is noteworthy. The chapter covers his major plays in English. What more Tagore was a fine experimentalist, realist and theatre personality. Chapter-Five “Rabindranath Tagore’s Fiction” covers a critical interpretation of many of his novels that are available in English. Chapter-Six is about Tagore’s non-fictional prose works like Nationalism, his Hibbert Lectures and The Religion of Man. The last chapter is about his ‘Other Aspects’: Theatre, Dance, Music and Painting. There is a list of books for further reading. I believe that this book is a comphrehensive and critical account of Tagore’s entire corpus of writing and it will help both the teachers and students of Indian English literature for a better understanding of Tagore.

The present monograph on Sri Aurobindo is a study of the life and works of Sri Aurobindo, one of the brilliant English writers India (even the world) has ever seen. He is as good a writer as Rabindranath Tagore. He reminds us the English mystic poet William Blake, sometimes. Sri Aurobindo was an outstanding academician, administrator, revolutionary patriot, writer and finally a spiritualist. This is a great combination of a genius, indeed. The present book has three chapters about his life and works. All those who are interested in Sri Aurobindo must read it.