Two Short Novels: Lament on the Death of a Master of Arts & Death of a Hero
About this ebook
Saros Cowasjee's laudatory proposal to bring forth a commemorative volume of Mulk Raj Anand's two short novels, Lament on the Death of a Master of Arts and Death of a Hero, on his birthday will undoubtedly help readers to get acquainted with another challenging side of the celebrated author of Untouchable and Coolie.
While Lament on the Death of a Master of Arts, takes us back to the British colonial India of the modernist era of the thirties, Death of a Hero brings us face to face with the historical realities of the beginnings of free India.
Lament is a poetic dirge on the philosophies of pain, loss and grief, but Death as an epitaph is Anand's poetic aside on liberty and the function of the poet as reformer and legislator.
About the author
MULK RAJ ANAND (1905-2004) was born in Peshawar (now in Pakistan), and educated at the Universities of Punjab and London. He began his career by writing for T. S. Eliot’s Criterion and went on to win international fame with his heart-warming portraits of the Indian landscape and its people. With a sensitiveness which is uniquely tender and an imaginative fervour which is contagious, his stories and novels explore little known and not-so-familiar corners of the Indian soul and show the technical virtuosity of a master story-teller.
Author of more than a dozen novels, short stories, and critical writings, Mulk Raj Anand was honoured with Sahitya Akademi Award, the most prestigious and coveted Indian award for literary writing, in 1972. He held the Tagore Chair at the Punjab University and has edited Marg, a reputed quarterly devoted to the arts.
