In the last section of the last chapter of his book on Nirmal Verma, the author Vineet Gill writes, “We have been reading someone for years, and then one day we suddenly come face to face with that writer. What do we experience then? Undue familiarity? Or surprise at how different the ‘writer’ is from the ‘person’ we have before us?”
I have been reading Arvind Krishna Mehrotra for some years now. Like all students of Indian English literature, I first encountered his name on the cover of A Concise History of Indian Literature in English (not The Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English since it was more expensive and was usually avoided by students and, it seems, even the libraries.)
That is when I had first seen his photograph on the back cover of the book – a flowing white beard and a face exuding an air of vitality and wisdom. Over the years, I kept seeing that name and sometimes that face on other covers – The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets, Partial Recall, The Songs of Kabir, Translating the Indian Past.
A reluctant writerStanding outside Mehrotra’s house in Dehradun, Gill’s words were ringing in the back of my mind. I expected something to happen...
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