The Hindu : From Raja Rammohun Roy to Arundhati Roy

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Nov 07, 2002

National

National

From Raja Rammohun Roy to Arundhati Roy

New Delhi Nov. 6. R.K. Narayan, one of India's most famous writers, launched his literary career with a printer's devil in his own name.

The cover of his first book `Swami and Friends'(1935) bore the name `R J Narayan'.

The mistake, which was fortunately not repeated, is today part of the lore of Indian literature.

Though it is not known if a copy of the book with the mistaken cover is available in India, people can now see a photograph of the cover, which is kept in the India Office Library in London.

The photograph now appears in a new book `An Illustrated History of Indian Literature', published by Permanent Black.

Among the other photographs are the Macaulay English Minute introducing English education in India and Macaulay's picture. The book is a 200-year journey beginning from the time Indians first started writing in English to the present day, a period which its publisher Rukun Advani describes as ``from Raja Rammohun Roy to Arundhati Roy''.

Appearing with Rudyard Kipling, Nobel Prize winners Rabindranath Tagore and V.S. Naipaul, Nirad C Chaudhuri, Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth are Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.

``Though the purpose of the writings of Gandhi and Nehru was not literary, they became classics because of their political contents,'' says Mr. Advani.

Edited by Allahabad University English teacher Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, the book contains 24 articles on different topics by such contributors as Amit Chaudhury who writes on Tagore and Pankaj Mishra whose article is on R.K. Narayan. — UNI

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