Upamanyu Chatterjee
| Upamanyu Chatterjee উপমন্যু চট্টোপাধ্যায় | |
|---|---|
 Upamanyu Chatterjee at a reading in New Delhi | |
| Born |
1959 Patna, Bihar, India |
| Occupation | author |
| Nationality | Indian |
| Ethnicity | Bengali Hindu |
| Alma mater | St. Stephen's College, Delhi |
| Genres | Novel |
Upamanyu Chatterjee (Bengali: উপমন্যু চট্টোপাধ্যায়) (born 1959) is an Indian civil servant who currently serves as Joint Secretary to Government of India in the Ministry of Defence. He is a 1983 batch Indian Administrative Service officer from Maharashtra Cadre.[1]
He is a published author and best known for his novel English, August, also adapted into an acclaimed film of the same title.
Major works
Chatterjee has written a handful of short stories of which "The Assassination of Indira Gandhi" and "Watching Them" are particularly noteworthy. His best-selling novel, English, August : An Indian story (subsequently made into a major film), was published in 1988 and has since been reprinted several times. A review in Punch described the book as "Beautifully written … English, August is a marvelously intelligent and entertaining novel, and especially for anyone curious about modern India". The novel follows Agastya Sen - a young westernized Indian civil servant whose imagination is dominated by women, literature and soft drugs. This vivid account of "real India" by the young officer posted to the small provincial town of Madna is "a funny, wryly observed account of Agastya Sen's year in the sticks", as described by a reviewer in The Observer.[1]
His second novel, The Last Burden, appeared in 1993. This novel recreates life in an Indian family at the end of the twentieth century. The Mammaries of the Welfare State was published at the end of 2000 as a sequel to English, August. His fourth novel, Weight Loss, a dark comedy, was published in 2006.[1] His most recent work is Way to Go, published in 2010. It is a sequel to The Last Burden.
Anjana Sharma equates Upamanyu’s vision of humanity with W.B. Yeats. She writes, "Eighty years apart, cultures, civilisations, even craft and temperament apart, Yeats and Chatterjee share an identical vision of a de-centered, de-natured world." Dr. Mukul Dikshit opines that Chatterjee has, for the first time, focussed on a "new class" of Westernised Urban Indians that was hitherto ignored in the Regional as well as the English Fiction of India. He declares that Chatterjee's imagination is as fertile as Kafka’s; his tragic sense is as keen as Camus’s; his understanding of the absurd-comic (farce) in life is at par with Milan Kundera and Saul Bellow.[2]
Awards
In 2009, he was awarded Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in recognition of his "exemplary contribution to contemporary literature"[3] Earlier in 2004, he was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Mammaries of the Welfare State.[4] The novel Way To Go was shortlisted for the The Hindu Best Fiction Award in 2010.
Bibliography
| Name | Publisher | ISBN | Publishing date | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English, August : An Indian story | Faber & Faber,
Rupa & Co, NYRB Classics |
Hardback: ISBN 0-571-15101-9
Paperback: ISBN 0-14-027811-7 Reprint: ISBN 1-59017-179-9 |
First published June 1988.
Reprint by NYRB Classics 2006 |
Hailed as the definitive urban Indian coming-of-age novel |
| The Last Burden | Faber & Faber | Paperback: ISBN 0-571-17155-9 | November 17, 1994 | |
| The Mammaries of the Welfare State | Viking | ISBN 0-670-87934-7 | 2000 | Sequel to English August |
| Weight Loss | Penguin Books India | Paperback: ISBN 0-670-05862-9 | February 28, 2006 | |
| Way to Go | Penguin Books India | Hardback: ISBN 978-0-670-08352-7 | February 15, 2011 | Sequel to The Last Burden |
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Library of Congress New Delhi Office. "Upamanyu Chatterjee, 1959-". The South Asian Literary Recordings Project. US Library of Congress.
- ↑ Sharma, Anjana. "What others have to say about Upamanyu Chatterjee". Upamanyu Chatterjee at the complete review. Retrieved 26 June 2011.
- ↑ "Upamanyu Chatterjee Gets French Award Officier Des Arts Et Des Lettres". Retrieved 26 June 2011.
- ↑ UNI (22 Dec 2004). "Sahitya Akademi award winners". The Hindu. Retrieved 26 June 2011.
External links
- http://www.loc.gov/acq/ovop/delhi/salrp/upamanyuchatterjee.html
- Upamanyu Chatterjee details on completereview.com
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