The Life and Works of Ruskin Bond

(Hardback)

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Ruskin Bond is known internationally as one of India's most prolific writers in English for children, young adults, and adults. This literary biography analyzes the impact of personal, social, geographical, political, and literary influences on Bond's worldview, aesthetic principles and writings. Connecting the development of Bond's writing career over the past 50 years to the evolution of the publishing industry in India, Khorana details the author's pioneering work in the field of children's and young adult literature, and his contribution to diasporic and postcolonial/post-independence literatures. She concludes that it is Bond's versatile, original, and elegant writing in a variety of genres that continue to endear him to readers around the world. According to the author, despite Bond's British background, he does not write about India from a Eurocentric perspective. Having lived the majority of his life in India, he knows the country as an insider, writing with an authenticity and emotional engagement about the land and the people of the Himalayas and small-town India. Khorana analyzes his novels and short stores, and highlights his juxtaposition of his protagonists' individual dramas against larger social, moral and metaphysical issues. In addition, she reveals how the autobiographical and regional elements in Bond's work provide insight into universal themes such as the tension between past and present, city life versus rural values, the dignity of ordinary folk, preservation of the environment, and living in harmony with nature.

Reviews

[a]n impressive job of covering a vast career in a slim volume. Not only does she give the most complete and sophisticated look at Bond up to now, but her work also helps to define the post-independence Indian literary identity and its relation to British influences....Khorana's work has opened the door to further serious biographical and critical work on a figure who is only just now beginning to be recognized for the significant plcae he has always held in the pantheon of contemporary Indian writers.-Children's Literature Association Quarterly
"an impressive job of covering a vast career in a slim volume. Not only does she give the most complete and sophisticated look at Bond up to now, but her work also helps to define the post-independence Indian literary identity and its relation to British influences....Khorana's work has opened the door to further serious biographical and critical work on a figure who is only just now beginning to be recognized for the significant plcae he has always held in the pantheon of contemporary Indian writers."-Children's Literature Association Quarterly
"[a]n impressive job of covering a vast career in a slim volume. Not only does she give the most complete and sophisticated look at Bond up to now, but her work also helps to define the post-independence Indian literary identity and its relation to British influences....Khorana's work has opened the door to further serious biographical and critical work on a figure who is only just now beginning to be recognized for the significant plcae he has always held in the pantheon of contemporary Indian writers."-Children's Literature Association Quarterly

Author Bio

Meena G. Khorana is Professor of English at Morgan State University.