Upamanyu Chatterjee | |
---|---|
Born | 1959 Patna, Bihar, India |
Occupation | Author |
Alma mater | St. Xavier's School, Delhi, St. Stephen's College, Delhi |
Genre | Novel |
Upamanyu Chatterjee (born 1959) is an author and a retired Indian civil servant. His works include the novel English, August: An Indian story , The Last Burden , The Mammaries of the Welfare State and Weight Loss . In 2008, he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for his contribution to literature. [1]
Chatterjee was born in 1959 [2] in Patna, Bihar. [3] [1] He attended Delhi University, graduated from St. Stephens College, and became a 1983 batch Indian Administrative Service officer. [1] [3] He became a Writer in Residence at the University of Kent in 1990. He became a Director in the Ministry of Human Resource Development in India in 1998. [3]
Chatterjee has written and published short stories since the 1980s, including stories republished in the 2019 collection The Assassination of Indira Gandhi. [4] [5] [6]
His 1988 novel, English, August : An Indian story was adapted into the film English, August. [3] His novel The Last Burden was published in 1993. [5] A sequel to English, August, The Mammaries of the Welfare State was published in 2000. His fourth novel, Weight Loss , a dark comedy, was published in 2006. [5] His fifth novel Way To Go, a sequel to The Last Burden, was published in 2010 [5] and longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. [7] In 2014, he published Fairy Tales at Fifty. [8] [9] Indrapramit Das writes in a review for The Hindu Business Line , "Like a David Lynch film set in India, Upamanyu Chatterjee’s latest book is a monstrous fairytale that respects the darkness of the real world." [10] In 2018, his novella The Revenge of the Non-vegetarian was published. [11] [12] Pratik Kanjilal writes in a review for The Indian Express , "In a way, it is a back story to his first novel". [13] Uddalak Mukherjee writes in a review for The Telegraph , "Writers cannot be faulted for turning towards their most successful work for inspiration after dishing out a few ordinary books", and "The result [...] is a pacy, tautly-written narrative." [14]
In The Hindu , Anjana Sharma equates Upamanyu's vision of humanity with W.B. Yeats. She writes, "Eighty years apart, cultures, civilisations, even craft and temperament apart, Yeats and Chatterjee share an identical vision of a de-centered, de-natured world." [15] Mukul Dikshit opines that Chatterjee has, for the first time, focused on a "new class" of Westernised urban Indians who were hitherto ignored in the regional as well as the English fiction of India.[ citation needed ]
In 2009, he was awarded Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in recognition of his "exemplary contribution to contemporary literature" [16] In 2004, he was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Mammaries of the Welfare State. [17] The novel Way To Go was shortlisted for The Hindu Best Fiction Award in 2010.
Name | Publisher | ISBN | Publishing date | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|
English, August : An Indian story | Faber & Faber, Rupa & Co, NYRB Classics | Hardback: ISBN 0-571-15101-9 Paperback: ISBN 0-14-027811-7 Reprint: ISBN 1-59017-179-9 | First published June 1988. Reprint by NYRB Classics 2006 | Hailed as the definitive urban Indian coming-of-age novel |
The Last Burden | Faber & Faber | Hardback: ISBN 0-571-16825-6 | 16 August 1993 | |
The Mammaries of the Welfare State | Viking | ISBN 0-670-87934-7 | 2000 | Sequel to English August |
Weight Loss | Penguin Books India | Paperback: ISBN 0-670-05862-9 | 28 February 2006 | |
Way to Go | Penguin Books India | Hardback: ISBN 978-0-670-08352-7 | 15 February 2011 | Sequel to The Last Burden |
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Dev Benegal is an Indian filmmaker and screenwriter, most known for his debut film English, August (1994), which won the Best Feature Film in English at the 42nd National Film Awards.
English, August is a 1994 Indian English-language film and director Dev Benegal's first feature film. A humorous and irreverent study of bureaucracy and the Indian Generation X, English, August won several awards at international film festivals.
The Mammaries of the Welfare State is an English-language Indian novel, the sequel to Upamanyu Chatterjee's debut novel, English, August, also told from the perspective of the fictional character Agastya Sen. It won the Sahitya Akademi Award (English) in 2004. The novel tells the story of political bureaucracy in the fictional state of Madna when an epidemic breaks out. The title derives from a line of dialog in the novel, where a civil servant states "In my eight years of service, I haven't come across a single case in which everybody concerned didn't try to milk dry the boobs of the Welfare State".
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English, August: An Indian Story is a novel by Indian author Upamanyu Chatterjee written in English, first published in 1988. It was adapted into a film of the same name in 1994. The novel portrays the struggle of a civil servant who is posted in a rural area and is considered to be a very authentic portrayal of the state of Indian youth in the 1980s. Chatterjee, who became a civil servant in 1983, provides key insight into the disparity between rural and urban lived experiences witnessed in his generation. The character Agastya Sen can also be seen in the sequel of this novel The Mammaries of the Welfare State.
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