Balachandra Rajan

"This novel of modern India centers around national and personal conflicts in its story of V. S. Krishnan, a Brahmin, who, returned after ten years of schooling in England, finds that his country's strife over partition and the English evacuation is reflected in his own struggle to find a meaning and a definition of his life. His career arranged, his marriage predetermined, he escapes disgrace in a civil demonstration and settles into his government service post. Although Kamala is the perfect Hindu wife, personifying non-violence in which resignation can be translated into resistance, when Cynthia Bainbridge turns up their friendship, begun in England, becomes a passionate affair but it is ended when Krishna realizes that his religion is no longer open to him. Joining Kamala in riot-torn Shantihpur, he is confronted by the vicious hatred of the Moulems and the threat of cholera and is the witness of Kamala's murder when she attempts to protect a Moslem girl. After the traditional rites of her burial, he returns to Delhi and Government Service knowing that Kamala's final profession of faith has effected a change in him even if it has gone for nothing in larger terms. The parallel struggles of individual and state for freedom, the symbols, fundamentals, rituals and practices of different Indian groups, are overlaid with heavy textured prose that is exhaustive in its exploration of contemporary Indian thinking."--Kirkus.

A Novel

The Dark Dancer

The Prison and the Pinnacle: Papers to Commemorate the Tercentenary of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes 1671-1971

Elizabeth Sauer

Scholarly criticism of John Milton's writings has in recent decades been distinguished by a methodological prudence that separates it from other forms of literary scholarship. One critic, however, stands apart from his colleagues and has consistently offered a corrective to this prudence: Balachandra Rajan. In Milton and the Climates of Reading, Elizabeth Sauer undertakes the daunting work of bringing together a selection of Rajan's essays on Milton, some hitherto unpublished, in order to chart trends and changes in Milton scholarship over the last sixty years and to consider future directions in this vital field of inquiry. This collection, which is framed by Sauer's insightful introduction and an eloquent afterword by Joseph Wittreich, demonstrates Rajan's critical range and his ability to adapt to 'new' ideas, always reformulating them in his own characteristic and individual manner. Milton and the Climates of Reading offers timely statements about the ways in which Milton's writings not only addressed their own time, but also speak profoundly and powerfully to ours.

Essays

Milton and the Climates of Reading

Too Long in the West

This chief aim of this title, first published in 1965, is to present a comprehensive picture of Yeats’s achievement and some of the means for an evaluation of that achievement. To this end both the poems and plays have been examined and some of Yeats’s critical ideas have been briefly discussed. Professor Rajan’s study provides a compact introduction to Yeats’s work, and will be of interest to the general reader as well as to students of literature.

Balachandra Rajan

Books

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