February 22, 2022

A.K.RAMANUJAN

A.K.RAMANUJAN

1929-1993

A.K. Ramanujan is one of India’s finest English language poets. He is best known for his pioneering translations of ancient Tamil poetry into modern English. At the time of his death he was professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago and was recognised as the world’s most profound scholar of South Indian languages and culture. His interests included anthropology and folklore. These influenced his work as a craftsman of English. This poem represents the complex distillation of a lifetime of unusual thought and feeling.

KAMALA DAS

KAMALA DAS

1934-2009

One of the greatest literary figures in Malayalam, Kamala Das was born in the year 1934 in Punnayurkulum, in South Malabar, Kerala. Her work, in poetry and in prose, has given her a permanent place in modern Malayalam literature as well as in Indian writing in English. She is best known for her feminist writings and focus on womanhood. She has been the recipient of such famous awards as the Poetry Award for the Asian PEN Anthology, the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for the best collection of short stories in Malayalam, and the Chaman Lal Award for fearless journalism.

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

1861-1941

Rabindranath Tagore was a poet, novelist, shortstory writer and dramatist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Tagore’s interest in drama was fostered while he was a boy, for his family enjoyed writing and staging plays. The music in his plays is instrumental in bringing out the delicate display of emotion around an idea. The central interest in his plays is the unfolding of character; of the opening up of the soul to enlightenment of some sort.


GIRISH KARNAD

GIRISH KARNAD

1938-2019

Girish Karnad is a contemporary writer, playwright, actor and movie director. He is a recipient of the Padma Shri (1974), Padma Bhushan (1992) and the Jnanpith Award (1998). He writes in both Kannada and English. His plays generally use history and mythology to focus on contemporary issues. He is also active in the world of Indian cinema. This play, too, can be looked at from multiple levels—the focus on values, both personal and academic, and the issue of bilingualism in today’s world.

G.B. SHAW

G.B. SHAW

1856-1950

George Bernard Shaw was a dramatist and critic. His work as a London newspaper critic of music and drama resulted in The Quintessence of Ibsenism. His famous plays include Arms and the Man, Candida and Man and Superman. His works present a fearless intellectual criticism, sugar-coated by a pretended lightness of tone. He rebelled against muddled thinking, and sought to puncture hollow pretensions.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

VIRGINIA WOOLF

1882-1941

Virginia Woolf was a novelist and essayist. She grew up in a literary atmosphere and was educated in her father’s extensive library. The famous group of intellectuals which came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group originated in gatherings of Cambridge University graduates and their friends in Virginia’s home. Along with her husband, Virginia started the Hogarth Press which became a successful publishing house. In her novels, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, she experimented with new techniques, particularly new ways of capturing the flow of time. She believed that much imaginative literature is false to life because it relates episodes in a straight line, whereas our experiences actually flow together like a stream. This essay records fleeting impressions and delicate shades of mental experience.

INGMAR BERGMAN

INGMAR BERGMAN

1918-2007

Ingmar Bergman is a well known Swedish director of films noted for their starkness, their subtle use of black and white and ‘shades’ of those extremes, the ambiguity of their content, and a certain brooding presence that seems to pervade them all. The list of Bergman films is long; his best known include The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1958), The Virgin Spring (1960), The Silence (1963), Persona (1967), The Passion of Anna (1970), and Cries and Whispers (1973)—this last film in colour, though emphasising red in all its shadings. In the following selection, the Introduction to Four Screen-plays by Ingmar Bergman (1960), Bergman discusses how he views the art of film-making.