Vikram Seth
Vikram Seth is an Indian novelist, poet, and biographer working across multiple forms and languages, born in Kolkata on 20 June 1952.
His education took him across several continents and institutions. In India he attended St. Michael's High School and St. Xavier's High School in Patna, as well as Welham Boys' School. He then studied at Tonbridge School in England, before going on to Corpus Christi College and Stanford University. This broad schooling appears to have supported a writing life conducted in an equally broad range of languages: Seth has worked in English, Hindi, Urdu, Standard Chinese, German, and Welsh.
Seth's output spans an unusually wide set of forms. As a novelist, he is credited with notable works including A Suitable Boy, An Equal Music, and The Golden Gate. Beyond fiction, he has worked as a poet, biographer, children's writer, screenwriter, librettist, and editor. That range of activity has been recognised with a substantial list of honours. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in English and the Padma Shri in literature and education, both significant distinctions within India. Internationally, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, and the Commander of the Order of the British Empire. He also received the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, which is awarded to members of the Indian diaspora for contributions to their field. He holds a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature.
What connects Seth's work across its many forms is the consistent reach across genres and languages rather than a settled identity in any single one. He has produced novels, verse, libretti, and biography, and has written in languages from Urdu to Welsh, making the breadth of his practice a defining characteristic of his career.
Quotes by Vikram Seth
Vikram Seth's insights on:
I simply seem to drift. But I sort of allow the drift, because it has a kind of check – it forces me to work harder at what I’m interested in.
It was a warm evening, and there was less silk and more fine cotton than at Savita’s wedding. But the jewellery glittered just as gloriously. Meenakshi’s little pear-earrings, Veena’s navratan and Malati’s emeralds glinted across the garden, whispering to each other the stories of their owners.
Whenever she opened a scientific book and saw whole paragraphs of incomprehensible words and symbols, she felt a sense of wonder at the great territories of learning that lay beyond her – the sum of so many noble and purposive attempts to make objective sense of the world.
All over India, all over the world, as the sun or the shadow of darkness moves from east to west, the call to prayer moves with it, and people kneel down in a wave to pray to God. Five waves each day – one for each namaaz – ripple across the globe from longitude to longitude. The component elements change direction, like iron filings near a magnet – towards the house of God in Mecca.
May we not be as foolish as we are almost bound to be. If we cannot eschew hatred, at least let us eschew group hatred. May we see that we could have been born as each other. May we, in short, believe in humane logic and perhaps, in due course, love.
I am certainly not allergic to causes – particularly on subjects such as religious intolerance.
Strange to be a man and never grow big with child. To feel a part of you opening, and a part of you leaving, and howling as if it were not a part of you.
I certainly think its very important that writers as citizens – not necessarily as writers, but just as ordinary citizens – should talk about things that matter to them.