About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Ruskin Bond

Encyclopedia : R : RU : RUS : Ruskin Bond

Ruskin Bond is an Indian author of British descent who was born in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, in 1934, and grew up in Jamnagar (Gujarat), Mussoorie, Dehradun, and Shimla. He lives in Landour, a picturesque Himalayan hill station contiguous with Mussoorie in the northern Indian state of Uttaranchal.

Contents

Biography

Ruskin Bond is an icon among both Anglo-Indian writers and children's authors. His father passed away in 1944 during World War II, when Ruskin was 10, and he was raised by his mother as well as a beloved uncle 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 1953. 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 passing.

At the time Ruskin 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 over 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 the deep well of 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,He is a generous man, quite careless with money.Ruskin Bond was born in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, in 1934, and grew up in Jamnagar (Gujrat), Dehradun, and Shimla. In course of a writing career spanning forty years, he has written over a hundred short stories, essays, novels, and more than thirty books of children. Three collections of short stories,

List of works

Novels/Novellas

Short stories

Essays and Vignettes

Travel Writings

Songs and Love Poems

External Links

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: