1 - Introduction

Summary

Vikram Seth has been termed a citizen of the world and a cultural traveller in more than one study, and academic critics have struggled in vain to place him in tidy categories. His work is housed in a variety of eclectic and traditional forms and the locations of his poetry and prose move across the world, making literary homes of distant lands and cultures. In the contemporary academic climate where increasingly rigid practices of literature and literary theory prevail, Seth's works retrieve an unfashionable pleasure in writing and reading. Seth resists all neat pigeonholes; his work, though it is form and rule bound, flagrantly flouts academic expectations and canons, and is aimed at the general reader. A piquant blend of conservatism and defiant individualism, and an unmatched force in the publishing market, Seth poses a puzzle to the academic critic. His work and the readership together seem to point towards perhaps a first truly internationalliterary phenomenon, and defeat, in a sense, existing critical terminology and academic categories.

The present study attempts to locate him neither as a diasporic nor as a postcolonial writer, though he fits into both categories by virtue of his wanderings across the globe and his temporal location. The study attempts, through close readings of almost all his major publications, to help precipitate significant aspects of his work that is loved by the academic as well as general reader across the world.

Life and Works

Vikram Seth was born in 1952 in Calcutta. His father, Premo Seth, worked for a long time with the Bata Shoe Company and is known in certain circles as Mr Shoe.