Introduction

The research paper focuses on some very significant key issues of Vikram Seth’s life and works. His first poem is mappings in 1980. The novel A Suitable Boy was adapted into a BBC TV miniseries drama in 2020. An Equal Music presents the troubled love-life of a violinist. Seth’s poems are Mappings (1980), The Humble Administrator’s Garden (1985), All You Who Sleep Tonight (1990), Three Chinese Poets (1992) and Beastly Tales from Here and There (1992). Beastly Tales from Here and There is a children book which consists of 10 stories. The poem has a story about animals.

He is a versatile writer. He uses a variety of genres in his poems. He is a very well-known for his readable style, pleasurable use of irony, language, and technical mastery. He set a place for himself in the Indian writing in English as a poet and novelist. He has been awarded several awards like Padma Shri, Pravasi Bharattiya Samman, Sahitya Academy Award, WH Smith Literary Award and Crossword Book Award.

Seth uses in his poems traditional form. He is thematically a post-modernist. The irony and humor is a theme of the isolation or loneliness of late twentieth century life, the very difficult of forming relationships, the failure of love as a bond. His intercourse with contemporary culture and idiom further exhibits his time and place. His writing technique reveals a postmodern self-consciousness transparently.

Vikram Seth is a very great writer in Endian English writing. He is a versatile writer. He is known for his apparent and readable style, pleasurable use of language, and technical mastery. He secured notable place in Indian writing in the English language. Seth’s poetry is analyzed in terms of several distinctive factors such as his multicultural identity. His poetry contains material influenced by his residence and familiarity with the literature of Eastern and Western countries and cultures. Seth’s poems are cosmopolitan: they regain diverse states and cultures of being. Further, he is influenced by the Indian literature as well as the world literature in translation from Greece and Russia. It seemed in cultural diversity which is reflected in the variety of his themes. In Seth’s poetry, another distinctive factor is his technical supremacy of traditional forms of rhyme and meters, unusual in a poet of the modern age. Seth followed his own tastes and inclinations in his own poetry. Verse in form is what he reads and recalls.

Mappings was written when he was a student in California, London. It was his first volume of poetry. Having no luck with publishers, Seth developed his own stapled volume which he hawked around the bookshops of San Francisco Bay in 1980 in Mappings. It was not until his trip home to Delhi, during the break from his research in China, that he meets Professor P. Lal of the Calcutta Writers Workshop who published the first volume in 1981. After that Seth finds out the reason why he could not find the publisher for mappings because he was standing outside the orbit of the critical theories, and he did not realize that writing in meter and rhyme would make him sort of literary untouchable.

The volume comprises the intimate subject matter of lost love, sexuality, love and relationships within the family, and also the poems about nature. He touched on public issues throughout the poems such as the injustice of poverty. The poem, Dubious which starts with the stanza:

Some men like Jack

And some like Jill;

I’m glad I like

Them both; but still (Accessed from wikipedia).

These lines have led people to make assumptions about Seth’s sexuality lost love and love. It is a question that touched upon in interviews and once Seth denied to answer. On one occasion, he affirms:

My attitude about the question of my own sexuality as that if people don’t like my books then they shouldn’t be interested, and if they like my books then it’s a pretty poor recompense for the enjoyment I’ve given them to try to remove the privacy from my life (Accessed from wikipedia).

Mappings introduce to Seth, the Polygot, with poems translated from Urdu, Hindi, German and Chinese. The verse is in rhyming sonnets, couplets, triplets and octets.

Seth dedicated the anthology to my family, pictured within as in Mappings. Homeless in the Neem section delineated passionate feelings of having left home and the alienation that comes with continuously being on the move. The poem is a noble satire on upper middle- class life in post independent India of the 1980’s. The references of autobiographical are evident. He is able to encapsulate comments on contemporary academic corruption, practices, personal ideology, politics, as also a changing system. In which the grandmother describes her feelings of loneliness and neglect.

The poem has the features such as humanism underpinning a cosmopolitan approach to the world and its experiences, feelings of exile tempered by the required to be free, a keen observation for nature and the acceptance of determination that life inflicts and of course the polish of these feelings in nobly crafted verse. The three spaces that California, China and India were represented in his earlier volumes. In short Seth introduces Nazi Europe and the bombed Hiroshima, enhancing the spatial and temporal approach of the poetry collection.

Beastly Tales poem is a collection of ten tales in Seth’s characteristic cosmopolitan fashion. The first two come from India and the next two from the foreign country, China, two more from Ukraine and Greece each and the last two from the poet himself. Written with his own style and wit, the collection has endeared itself to the readership, finding itself on school curriculum given as very pleasurable gift to children and adults.

These poems are fables set in contemporary times and reflects lightly on affair share of the world’s concerns such as the media savvy stardom, the consumer culture and it is a debatable subject in an academic discussion, to take apart with heavy hands and a thing of much care freeness. Seth enlarges the original fables to accommodate darker tones. His light- hearted jobs in the world around him belong to the social satire which the polished comic rhyme of the poems, only considers, as it does the Punning title of the collection: Beastly Tales quite obscure. These tales talk about human affairs disguised in the garb of animals. The pun on the word ‘beastly’ that means both ‘of beasts', and nasty and horrible, connects to the most supreme amongst beasts is the human being. The tales are evidence of the law of the jungle-the good guy does not win in such a manner.

Three Chinese Poets published in 1992, is a collection of translation by Seth of the poetry of a Li Bai, Wang Wei and Du Fu, three distinguished literary figures of China. As they lived during the reign of the emperor Ming Huang of the Tang Dynasty, in the 8th century A. D., the choice is largely on the political responses of these poets to their common times in terms of appreciation of music, perception of nature, bonds of loyalty and friendship.

Seth explains in his introduction that how works in translation have always had as deep an influence on his own work as poems he has read in the original. “In some cases”, he further clears, “The translations have so moved me that I have tried to learn the original language of the work” (The Collected Poems, 13). Seth showed his interest in China to the translations of Wang Wei. Seth was motivated highly to study the language. He was eventually able to read Wang Wei in the original. Yin Chuang, Seth’s Chinese language professor at Stanford, declared Seth as a fantastic student.

The present research paper focused on various major themes of Vikram Seth. The paper dealt with modern them, love and lost love, nature, isolation, political issues, social issues, corruption and academic corruption. In this paper, many themes and issues have been discussed which are very important in the field of research.

References

1. Seth Vikram. D esert Island Discs, 2012.
2. B BC Radio 4. Retrieved Print, 2014.
3. Dharwadkar Vinay. Ed. The Collected Poems of A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995. Print.
4. Accessed from Wikipedia dated 17/02/2021