http://www.bagchiblog.blogspot.com
Around
the time my eldest brother was losing the battle for his life happier tidings
came from distant Pokhra in Nepal. Here my nephew, Amitabh Bagchi (son of my
late second brother, Ajoy Bagchi) was awarded the DSC South Asian Literary
Award, 2019 for his fourth novel “Half the Night is Gone”.
His
first novel “Above Average” was about life of students in an IIT. It got what
are generally called rave reviews. Even well-known story-teller-cum-anthropologist
Amitav Ghosh wrote a very complimentary comment about the book. Since then
Amitabh has written three more books, the last of which fetched him the South
Asia Literary Award, 2019.
Incidentally,
Amitabh is an alumnus of IIT Delhi. He did his Ph. D from Johns Hopkins and
later did his Post-doctoral work in the University of California, Irvine. He
currently teaches at the IIT Delhi. He is married to Ratika Kapoor who is also
a novelist and was long-listed by Booker for her first novel “Overwinter”.
The
Jury citation for “Half the Night is Gone” is very complimentary. It says, “This
novel, written in English, feels like a book written in an Indian language and
has the authenticity and interiority of a work in translation without being a
translation. All sub-continental novelists since Raja Rao have striven to
express in a language that is not one’s own sensibility and this novel invokes
the sensibility of not one but three Indian languages, Hindi, Sanskrit and
Urdu. It weaves together three parallel stories interrogating the relationships
between men and women, fathers and sons, masters and servants and the nation
and the individual. It is epic in scope, profound in its exploration of class
and gender, and elegantly assured in the way it infuses English with Indian wit
and wisdom to achieve an unprecedented co-mingling of different literatures and
cultures”.
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