Silent Life
Chaman Nahal
From the small town of Sialkot in pre-Partition Punjab, through the bustling streets of Delhi, to the scholarly environs of Cambridge and the bistros of Turin, Chaman Nahal walks us gently through his life. A life rich in literary scholarship and discipline, but equally in humour and a cynical eye capable of looking as critically at himself as at the follies and foibles of other human beings. If his 'rules' for subjects as varied as writing a full-length book while coping with a full time job, fighting depression or even addiction to drink, bring a smile to one's lips, his achievements as writer, teacher and litterateur, often in the face of great odds, can only induce respect. Nahal's delightfully candid accounts of his encounters with Nirad Chaudhuri, the great Sir Vidia, Manohar Malgonkar and others; his diatribes against the tardiness and indiscipline that marks so much of 21st century India; and his frank appraisal of the trials and tribulations he has faced as an Indian writer in English, both at home and abroad, make this a memoir significant in today's literary context, as well as an absorbing cameo of an earlier time and place.
Chaman Nahal was formerly Professor and Head of the English Department at the University of Delhi, and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, UK. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1977 for his novel Azadi. The same year he received the Federation of Indian Publishers Award, also for Azadi. He again received the Federation of Indian Publishers Award in 1979 for his novel The English Queens. He was awarded the Medal of Honour by Turin University, Italy, when he was a Visiting Professor there in 1988. He received the Distinguished Service Award of the East West Center, Honolulu, while holding the Dai Ho Chun Chair at Hawaii University in 1998-99. He is the author of 22 books, including 9 novels, amongst them: My True Faces (1973); Azadi (1975); Into Another Dawn (1977); The English Queens (1979); The Crown and the Loincloth (1981); Sunrise in Fiji (1988); The Salt of Life (1990); The Triumph of the Tricolour (1993); and The Boy and the Mountain (1997).
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