| Seth has written a wide range of books "" collections of poems written by himself as well as translated from the Chinese, a travel book, a libretto, and three novels, one in verse, one based in India of the 1950s and the most recent one based in England with nothing even remotely Indian about it. The essays in this collection take up almost all his works except for the libretto. |
| "A Different Gaze: Vikram Seth's Journey through Mainland China" by Nandini Chandra attempts to put From Heaven Lake in the context of post-colonial travel writing by an Indian. |
| In an attempt to present a comparatist view, Chandra takes up Amitav Ghosh (Dancing in Cambodia, At large in Burma, 1998) and the pioneering traveller Rahul Sankritayan who had travelled to Tibet a number of times in the first half of the twentieth century in search of Buddhist books and manuscripts. |
| Chandra feels that Seth is not a "seasoned or intrepid traveller". On the other hand "he is typically Indian in his weakness for the comforts and conveniences of organised tours". One agrees with this but the statement that Seth is "lazy, laid-back and not very motivated by any overt ethnographic mission" needs to be modified. Why must a traveller have an ethnographic mission at all? |
| Isn't that typical of Western travellers who are forever looking for "exotic" tribes to boost their own superiority. On the whole it is a thought-provoking essay and one would like to add just one small observation on Seth's travel writing. It is realistic and presents the good points as well as shortcomings of a destination/town so that the potential traveller knows what to expect. |
| Prasad is a poet himself and takes up Seth's collection The Humble Administrator's Garden in his essay "The Solitary Wanderer "" The Seth of the Garden". A good pun! His appreciation of Seth's poetry is clear in the opening sentence of the essay. |
| "Vikram Seth is a poet's poet, someone who is so much in control of language, and who seems to be so in love with its rhythms that one just has to listen to the music of his verse and learn from his craft." |
| Individual poems are taken up and analysed very sensitively. Prasad concludes, "Seth ...is the poet of love and loneliness, of emotion and poise, of grace under stress, good manners, discipline, and meter, of tears under control...and dry-eyed banter." |
| The book has three more essays on Seth's poetry "" two on The Golden Gate and one on All You Who Sleep Tonight. Tabish Khair, also a poet, looks at The Golden Gate in the context of Indian English poetry in "No Golden Gate for Indian English Poetry?" |
| According to him, "Seth's success with The Golden Gate was based largely on avoiding the problems of formulating a prosodic identity in Indian poetry in English." Having said that, he adds that his purpose is not to run down the book "which had its own justification, and kind of brilliance". |
| Angelie Multani looks at the book as "A Metrosexual Love story" which is why its appeal extends to the young, transcending geographical boundaries. |
| In "Protocols of Poetry" K C Boral looks at All You Who Sleep Tonight and declares that "...his is an endeavour of concerned humanism that characterizes not only good poetry but great poetry". |
| A Suitable Boy is the Indian reader's favourite Seth novel because one can relate to it. It has been translated into Indian languages and received well by regional readers. There are four essays on it in the book, each looking at the novel from a different angle. |
| Neelam Srivastava looks at secularism in the novel, tracing it to Nehru's ideology and then considers it as a historical novel "that attempts to 'write back' to the Indian political situation of the 1990s". |
| Jon Mee looks at the disparity between the repetition/construct of history in the narrative and the modernity of the narrative voice. |
| The title of Priya Kumar's essay "History, Politics and Romance in Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy " gives one an idea of its content and some of the notions she highlights. |
| A comparative study of A Suitable Boy and Phanishwarnath Renu's Maila Ancal is interesting and this reviewer feels the need for an essay comparing the novel in its source language with the Hindi translation. |
| An Equal Music is absolutely different from what Seth has written so far. There is nothing Indian about it except for the name of the author. What this reviewer was struck by while reading the novel was Seth's great love for Western music. |
| Anjana Sharma's essay reads this along with the representation of Julia as the message that the domain of Western classical music is not for women. Meenakshi Bharat takes up the "seminal" role of nature in the novel. Mala Pandurang raises a number of questions about the novel and its "distance" from India. |
| One need not agree with everything that a critical work says; its main purpose is to be provocative, to make one think. Vikram Seth: An Anthology of Recent Criticism evokes response from all readers. It is not easy to edit a collection on such a writer who has produced such a variety of writings and is so much of a perfectionist. It goes to Prasad's credit that he has got the best out of his contributors, written a sensitive piece himself and topped it with a very readable introduction. |
| VIKRAM SETH: AN ANTHOLOGY OF RECENT CRITICISM |
| Edited by G J V Prasad Pencraft International Pages: 185, Price: Rs 400 |
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