Ruskin Bond
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Ruskin Bond (born 19 May 1934, Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh) is an Indian author of British descent. After growing up in Jamnagar (Gujarat), Mussoorie, Dehradun, and Shimla, he now lives in Landour, a picturesque Himalayan hill station contiguous with Mussoorie in the northern Indian state of Uttaranchal.
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[edit] Biography
Bond is an icon among both Anglo-Indian writers and children's authors. He was born in the dying days of the British Raj and had, by his own account, a somewhat lonely childhood, marked by his parents' divorce and his mother's remarriage. His father had died in 1944 during World War II, when Ruskin was 10, and he was raised by his mother, step-father (an Indian businessman) and other relatives. For a while, he attended Hampton Court School, which is still in existence on Mussoorie's Mall Road, once the town's major promenade and now its summertime tourist trap. He completed his schooling at Bishop Cotton School in Shimla, from where he graduated in 1952. Given his childhood in various hill stations, most of his writings revolve around the foothills of the Himalayas, especially the greater Doon Valley, including Landour, Mussoorie, Dehradun and points nearby in southwestern Uttaranchal.
As a young man, he spent four years in the Channel Islands and London, having moved there with his family, as was common for many Anglo-Indian and domiciled British families to have done in the years after 1947. Bond, to the surprise of his family, returned to India alone in 1956 (his siblings and mother remained in Britain), and he has never left the country since. He has lived in Mussoorie/Landour since 1962. A lifelong bachelor, he moved to Landour by himself, but over the decades an extended foster family has grown around him. Among blood relatives, Bond has a sister, who lived in England but now too may have returned to India (to Delhi). His brother is a 'serial-emigrant', having first left India for England, then England for Canada. He also has two half-brothers from his mother's remarriage after his father's death.
At the time Bond moved there, Mussoorie and Landour were losing population given the decline of the boarding schools of the area and the gradual departure of the once-dominant expatriate classes, primarily British and American missionaries. Bond initially moved to Landour for the "peace and quiet" (see note on "solitude" below). Things are rather different now in Mussoorie, which is often described as "Delhi's Chandni Chowk on a Hillside", though Landour Cantonment where Bond lives is much calmer. Earlier Bond lived in Mussoorie proper, in Maplewood Cottage just below Wynberg-Allen School, until 1976.
As a writer, he is as productive as ever in his early seventies, and gets many of his ideas by reminiscing while gazing out of the windows of his apartment towards the Lower Western Himalaya, the Pauri Hills and the Doon Valley from his perch atop Mullingar Hill in Landour Cantonment. He can always reach into his rich life experience, especially his childhood and early adulthood, for yet another story line or another evocative character.
Over the course of a writing career spanning forty years, he has written over a hundred short stories, essays, novels, and more than thirty books for children.
The Room On The Roof was his first novel, written when he was seventeen and it received the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial prize in 1957. Vagrants In The Valley was also written in his teens and picked up from where The Room On The Roof left off. These two novellas were published in one volume by Penguin India in 1993 as was a much-acclaimed collection of his non-fiction writing, Rain In The Mountains, Delhi Is Not Far : The Best Of Ruskin Bond was published by Penguin India the following year.
Ruskin Bond received the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in India for 1992, for Our Trees Still Grow In Dehra. Of his autobiography, Scenes from a Writer's Life, published in 1997, V.S. Naipaul said: "I have read nothing like that from India or anywhere else. It's very simple. Everything is underplayed, and the truths of the book come rather slowly at you. He is writing about solitude, tremendous solitude. He himself doesn't say it. He leaves it all to you to pick up. I haven't read another book about solitude from India. In a way, from this great Subcontinent so full of people, to write a book about solitude is quite an achievement."
Bond was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999.
His interest in the paranormal led him to write popular titles like 'Ghost Stories from the Raj', 'A Season of Ghosts', 'A Face in the dark and other hauntings' and more...5 novels, 73 short stories, 10 essays, 6 travel writings, 10 songs and poems.
[edit] List of works
[edit] Novels/Novellas
- The room on the roof
- Vagrants in the valley
- Delhi is not far
- A flight of pigeons
- The Sensualist
[edit] Short stories
- The woman on platform no. 8
- Cricket for the Crocodile
- The Blue Umbrella
- Ghost Trouble
- Angry River
- dust on the Mountain
- A guardian angel
- The photograph
- Death of a familiar
- The coral tree
- The kite maker
- The Window
- The monkeys
- The Girl on the Train
- Chachi's funeral
- The prospect of flowers
- The man who was Kipling
- A case for Inspector Lal
- The eyes are not here
- The story of Madhu
- The thief
- A job well done
- The boy who broke the bank
- The cherry tree
- His neighbour's wife
- My father's trees in Dehra
- Panther's moon
- The garlands on his brow
- The tunnel
- Sita and the river
- Love is a sad song
- When you can't climb trees anymore
- A love of long ago
- The funeral
- The night train at Deoli
- Time stops at shamli
- Our trees still grow in Dehra
[edit] Essays and Vignettes
- Life at my own pace
- The old gramaphone
- A little world of mud
- Adventures of a book lover
- Upon an old wall dreaming
- Landour days
[edit] Travel Writings
- Ganga descends
- Beautiful Mandakini
- The magic of Tungnath
- On the road to Badrinath
- Flowers on the Ganga
- Roads to Mussoorie
[edit] Songs and Love Poems
- Lost Love lyric for Binya Devi
- It isn't time thats passing
- Kites
- Cherry tree
- Lovers observed
- Lone fox dancing
- Secondhand shop in a hillstation
- A frog screams
- A song for lost friends
- Raindrop
