Vikram Seth

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A writer is designated on the basis of the socio-geographical community and culture to which he belongs and whose tradition, life and language he utilizes in his writings. The Indian English novelists of the 1980s are totally assimilated with the western culture and they establish an independent cultural and literary identity exposed to the experience of life in India and abroad- their writings are of an auto- biographical historical nature, primarily revelations of events and episodes, the experience of the place and its ambience.
The 1980s witnessed efficient emergence of new Indian fiction in English heralding a new era of change in its tone and tenor, with an impressive array of young novelists from the corridors of St. Stephen’s college, New Delhi – Amitabh Ghosh, Allan Sealy, Shashi Tharoor and Vikram Seth. Both quantitatively and qualitatively, by the virtue of his education, Vikram Seth qualifies as a member of the post- independence generation of economically privileged upper middle class Indians – his schooling at Dehradun Public School, his graduation at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, his doctoral studies at Stanford University. He is a famous polymath who has lived in three continents- Asia, Europe and Australia and written in a variety of genres- poetry, fiction, non-fiction, travelogue and libretto. He has studied several languages including Welsh, German, French, Mandarin, English, Urdu, Hindi and the Devanagari language.
In 1986, Vikram Seth wrote The Golden Gate, his first novel, a satirical romance describing the stories of young professionals in San Fransisco throughout their quests and questions to find and deal with love in their lives as well as each other’s lives. In 1993, Seth was propelled into the publi...

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...verse culture with the basic concept of love. His writings reveal the complex heterogeneity and multi locational contexts with trans-national mobility.

Works Cited

Seth, Vikram. The Golden Gate. New York: Random House Inc. 1986.
…. A Suitable Boy. New Delhi: Viking, Penguin India Ltd, 1993.
…. An Equal Music. New Delhi: Viking, Penguin India Ltd, 1999
…. Two Lives. New Delhi: Viking, Penguin India Ltd, 2005.
Gupta, Roopali. Vikram Seth’s Art: An Appraisal. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2005.
Kapur, Akash. ‘The Seth Variations’. Atlantic Unbound Online Edition. June 23, 1999.
Mee, John. ‘After Midnight: The novel in the 1980s and 1990s’. An Illustrated History of Indian
Literature in English. Ed. A.K. Mehrotra. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003.
Punekar, Rohini Mokakshi. Vikram Seth: An Introduction. New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2008.

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