India Unbound was the first volume (2002), on artha, 'material well-being', which narrated the story of India's economic rise from Independence to the global information age. Published in many languages and filmed by BBC,[3] it was called "a quiet earthquake" by the Guardian.[4] The second, The Difficulty of Being Good, is on dharma or 'moral well-being', and is "rich with learned musings on the epic, Mahabharata and its moral dilemmas"[5] that speak to our day to day contemporary life. Kama: The Riddle of Desire is on the third goal of desire, and recounts a tale of "love and vulnerability, about self-doubt and betrayal, about wanting more of everything and being haunted by settling for less."[6]
Gurcharan Das graduated with honours from Harvard University in Philosophy. He had later attended Harvard Business School (AMP), where he is featured in three case studies. He was CEO of Procter & Gamble India and later managing director, Procter & Gamble Worldwide (Strategic Planning). At age 50, he took early retirement to become a full-time writer.
He is a regular columnist for The Times of India[7] and five Indian language newspapers in Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, and Gujarati.[8] He also contributes periodically to Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. Aside from the trilogy, his other literary works include a novel, A Fine Family, two book length essays, India Grows at Nights: A Liberal Case for a Strong State, The Elephant Paradigm, and an anthology, Three English Plays.[9]
Gurcharan Das was born in Lyallpur, British India (now Faisalabad, Pakistan) . His father was an engineer with the government of Punjab. The family lived in Lahore at the time of the partition of India in August 1947 when they had to flee for their lives. They arrived as refugees in Shimla, and this is where the young boy grew up. His father was a passionate mystic and meditated for many hours a day and the boy was raised in an atmosphere charged with Bhakti mysticism. His partially autobiographical novel, A Fine Family, sheds some light on his early life.[10]
In 1952, the family moved to Bhakra Nangal; in 1953, to Delhi, where he went to Modern School. In 1955, his father was transferred to Washington DC, to represent India in talks with Pakistan on the sharing of the waters of the rivers of the Punjab, mediated by the World Bank. He went to high school in Washington D.C. In 1959, he won a scholarship to Harvard University.[11] He graduated from Harvard in 1963 with honours in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He wrote his senior thesis under the political philosopher, John Rawls, who had a great influence on his life. Harvard later elected him to Phi Beta Kappa for "high attainments in liberal scholarship."
Corporate career
Instead of accepting a fellowship to do a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Oxford, Gurcharan Das returned home to India. Just before coming back, Das wrote in a letter to his mother that he "just could not imagine living the rest of my life at that stratosphere of abstract thought."[12] While waiting to decide what he wanted to do with his life, he got a job as a trainee in a company that made Vick Vaporub. He soon discovered that he liked the rough and tumble of the business life "and like the man who came to dinner, I stayed on."[13]
Gurcharan Das rose to become the managing director and Chairman of Richardson Hindustan Limited. Before that he spent two summers at Harvard Business School's Advanced Management Program, where he is featured in three case studies.[14] In 1985, his parent company, Richardson Vicks was acquired by Procter and Gamble and he became the first CEO of Procter & Gamble India and vice-president for Procter & Gamble Far East from 1985 and 1992. He then moved headquarters to become vice-president and managing director, Procter & Gamble Worldwide, responsible for global strategic planning.
At the end of 1994, after a 30-year career in six countries, he took early retirement to become a full-time writer. Before leaving he wrote, 'Local Memoirs of a Global Manager in Harvard Business Review.[15]
He has joined a Bangalore-based edtech company, BrightCHAMPS as an advisor on their Global Curriculum Advisory Board.[16][17]
Literary career and books
Gurcharan Das began his writing career as a "weekend writer". In his twenties, he wrote three plays, which were published together as an anthology, titled Three English Plays, by Oxford University Press in 2001 and later re-published as Three Plays by Penguin India in 2011.
At age 23, he wrote his first play, Larins Sahib, which won the Sultan Padamsee Prize in 1968.[18] It was produced by the Theatre Group in Bombay in 1969, published by Oxford University Press in the UK in 1970, and later presented at the Edinburgh Festival in 1991.[19] A historical play about the British in India, it is set during the confused period after the death of Ranjit Singh in the Punjab with a focus on an unusual Englishman in India named Henry Lawrence.
His second play, Mira—a "rite of Krishna for five actor-dancers" – explores what it means for a human being to become a saint through the story of Mirabai, the sixteen-century Rajput princess-poet. It premiered at the La Mama Theatre in 1970 to much critical acclaim. Clive Barnes of the New York Times wrote, "Remarkable in the way it combines Indian legend with the sophistication of Western total theater…Mira has the quality of a dream ritual."[20] It was produced in Bombay by Alaque Padmsee and was called "a major artistic achievement of immense merit and supreme significance to the re-blossoming of theatre in India" [21]
He wrote a third play also in his twenties. 9 Jakhoo Hill is set in the autumn of 1962 in Shimla. "During the autumn of discontent of a once-wealthy family [9 Jakhoo Hill] broods over better days…on the hold that mothers have over their sons…a family coming down in the world…remnants of the Raj, disillusionment with politics. Sixties? The script is here and now."[22] It has been performed in major Indian cities.
In the midst of a corporate career in his thirties, Gurcharan Das also wrote a novel, A Fine Family, which follows the stories of several generations of a Punjabi family, beginning with the Partition. It was published by Penguin in 1990. The Hindu called it "a worthy addition to the body of fiction that deals with the anguish and bitter memories of one of the most sorrowful disasters in recorded history,"[23] and India Today said, "The canvas is broad and the scope enormous. But Das' success lies in making people ordinary without making them dull…A Fine Family shines because of its simplicity."[24]
Gurcharan Das turned to non-fiction when he became a full-time writer in 1995 and began to write a regular column in the Times of India. He travelled for four months in 1995 and out these travels emerged a 20-page cover essay, 'A Million Reformers' about how the reforms were changing India.[25] From this essay grew his first major non-fiction work, India Unbound, the story of the economic and social transformation of India from Independence to the global information age.[26] Amartya Sen called it, "a wonderful book…a great mixture of memoir, economic analysis, social investigation, political scrutiny and managerial outlook thrown into an understanding of India."[27] The New York Times wrote, "Something tremendous is happening in India, and Das, with his keen eye and often elegant prose, has his finger firmly on the pulse of the transformation."[28] The book has been published in many languages and filmed by BBC,[29]
India Unbound was followed in 2002 by a book of essays, The Elephant Paradigm: India wrestles with change. It recounted the "story of an ancient civilization's reawakening to the spirit and potential of its youth", arguing that "India may not roar like the Asian tigers, it will advance like a wise elephant, moving steadily but surely."[30] A decade later, Gurcharan Das returned to the theme of India's rise, confessing wryly that 'India grows at night when the government sleeps'. In India Grows at Night: A liberal case for a strong state, he argued that India's is a story of private success and public failure and it is rising despite the state. In this book, which was rated as one of the best books of 2013 by London's Financial Times, he offers significant governance reforms so that 'India can grow during the day.' [31]
Prosperity had, indeed, begun to spread in India, as India Unbound predicted, but so had corruption and Gurcharan Das turned to the ancient epic, Mahabharata, to understand role of dharma or 'doing the right thing' in our lives in The Difficulty of Being Good: On the subtle art of dharma.[32] "It is one of the best things I have read about the contribution of great literature to ethical thought," said Martha Nussbaum.
Having written about artha and dharma, Gurcharan Das turned to the third aim of life in Kama: The Riddle of Desire, and discovered that if dharma is 'our duty to others', kama is a 'duty to ourselves'.[33] The dilemma often is whether to betray the other or oneself. This fictional memoir narrates a philosophical journey "creating a sense of enchantment, using memory as a device to summon the many forms of desire that play upon the mind [thus] entering an imagined world of beauty."[34]
Gurcharan Das is also general editor of a fifteen-volume series, The Story of Indian Business (Penguin), which "mines great ideas in business and economics that have shaped commerce in the bazaars and high seas of the Indian Ocean. Leading scholars examine historical texts, inscriptions and records and interpret them in a lively, sharp authoritative manner. Beginning with the ancient Arthashastra: The Science of Wealth, it narrates tales of trade over two thousand years, including the story of The East India Company: The World's Most Powerful Corporation, and The Marwaris."[35]
Reviews
Reviews related to the non-fiction and fiction books of Gurcharan Das.
Academic articles on Gurcharan Das
Bhargava, Rajul. Ed. Indian Writing in English: The Last Decade. Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2002.
Das, Bijay Kumar. Postmodern Indian English Literature. 2003. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2010.
Critical Essays on Post-Colonial Literature. 1997. Rev. 2nd ed. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2007.
Dass, Veena Noble and R.K.Dhawan. Fiction of the Nineties. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1994.
Iyengar, Srinivasa K.R. Indian Writing in English. 1962. Rev. ed. 18th Rpt. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers. 2009.
Kirpal, Viney. Ed. The Postmodern Indian English Novel: Interrogating the 1980s and 1990s. Bombay: Allied Publishers Ltd., 1996.
Ed. The New Indian Novel in English: A Study of The 1980s. New Delhi: Allied Publishers Limited, 1990.
Kulkarni, Vibhati Vasantrao, Gurcharan Das: A Writer of Globalized Indian Culture Indian Streams Research Journal, Volume 3, Issue 2, March 2013, ISSN2230-7850
Kumar, T. Vijay, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Harish Trivedi and C. Vijaysree. Ed. Focus India: Postcolonial Narratives of the Nation. New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2007.
Mukherjee, Meenakshi. Realism And Reality: The Novel and Society in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1993.
The Twice Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in English. New
Naik, M.K. 20th Century Indian English Fiction. New Delhi. Pencraft International, 2004
A History of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1980.
Naik, M.K. and Shyamala A. Narayan. Indian English Literature 1980 to 2000: A Critical Survey. Delhi: Pencraft International, 2001.
Nanavati, U.M. and Prafulla C.Kar. Ed. Rethinking Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2000.
Roy, Pinaki, 'Against Eurocentrism: A Postcolonial Re-reading of Gurcharan Das's Larins Sahib', in Unmasking Power: Subjectivity and Resistance in Indian Drama in English (eds. J. Sarkar and A. Bhattacharya), Guwahati: Papyrus, 2014, ISBN978-93-81287-40-8, pp. 101–21.
Rukhaiyar, U.S. and Amar Nath Prasad. Ed. Studies in Indian English Fiction and Poetry. New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2003.
Shetty, Amrita. "Tuned to a Fine Pitch". Rev. of A Fine Family, by Gurcharan Das. Indian Review Of Books 9.9. (16 June 2000 - 15 July 2000): 30–31.
V.K. Shrotriya, 'Review of Gurcharan Das, India Grows at Night', The NEHU Journal, Vol XI, No. 2, July 2013
Shukla, Sheobhusan and Anu Shukla. Ed. Studies in Contemporary Literature: Indian English Novel in the 90s. New Delhi: Sarup and Sons, 2002.
Valiyamattam, Rositta Joseph. "The Family and The Nation: Critiquing Gurcharan Das' A Fine Family" (The Quest -A Peer-Reviewed International Literary Journal, Silver Jubilee Issue, Vol.25.No.2., Dec 2011, pp.94–102). ISSN0971-2321
"The Non-fiction of Gurcharan Das: Narrating the Nation in Post-colonial Times" (Indian English Prose and Poetry: New Perspectives – Proceedings of UGC Sponsored National Seminar, 6th and 7th Dec.2012, Dept. Of English, Midnapore College, West Bengal, Publ. by Amritalok Sahitya Parishad, Mar.2013, pp.138–149). ISBN81-89635-69-X .
"A Nation Needs A Moral Core: Interview with Gurcharan Das" (The Quest - An International Literary Journal, Vol.27.No.1, June 2013, pp.10–17). ISSN0971-2321
Valiyamattam, Rositta Joseph. "Confrontations with Neo-Colonialism in Indian English Novels of the 90s: Gurcharan Das, Rohinton Mistry and Arundhati Roy" in the anthology Postcolonial Approaches to Literature: Text, Context, Theory edited by Subashish Bhattacharjee, Saikat Guha and Mandika Sinha, North Bengal University, AuthorsPress, New Delhi, 2015, pp.228 – 243. ISBN978-93-5207-118-0.
Personal and National Destinies in Independent India: A Study of Selected Indian English novels. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK, 2019
Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri is a British-American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays in English and, more recently, in Italian.
Mulk Raj Anand was an Indian writer in English, recognised for his depiction of the lives of the poorer castes in traditional Indian society. One of the pioneers of Indo-Anglian fiction, he, together with R. K. Narayan, Ahmad Ali and Raja Rao, was one of the first India-based writers in English to gain an International readership. Anand is admired for his novels and short stories, which have acquired the status of classics of modern Indian English literature; they are noted for their perceptive insight into the lives of the oppressed and for their analysis of impoverishment, exploitation and misfortune. He became known for his protest novel Untouchable (1935), followed by other works on the Indian poor such as Coolie (1936) and Two Leaves and a Bud (1937). He is also noted for being among the first writers to incorporate Punjabi and Hindustani idioms into English, and was a recipient of the civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan.
Ruskin Bond is an Indian author. His first novel, The Room on the Roof, was published in 1956, and it received the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1957. Bond has authored more than 500 short stories, essays, and novels which includes 69 books for children. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1992 for Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999 and Padma Bhushan in 2014. He lives with his adopted family in Landour, Mussoorie, in the Indian state of Uttarakhand.
Anita Desai, born Anita Mazumdar, is an Indian novelist and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters. She won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea (1983). Her other works include The Peacock, Voices in the City, Fire on the Mountain and an anthology of short stories, Games at Twilight. She is on the advisory board of the Lalit Kala Akademi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, London.
Shobha De is an Indian novelist and columnist. She is best known for her depiction of socialites and sex in her works of fiction, for which she has been referred to as the "Jackie Collins of India."
Amitava Kumar is an Indian writer and journalist who is Professor of English, holding the Helen D. Lockwood Chair at Vassar College.
Ottupulackal Velukkuty Vijayan, commonly known as O. V. Vijayan, was an Indian author and cartoonist, who was an important figure in modern Malayalam language literature. Best known for his first novel Khasakkinte Itihasam (1969), Vijayan was the author of six novels, nine short-story collections, and nine collections of essays, memoirs and reflections.
David Davidar is an Indian novelist and publisher. He is the author of three published novels, The House of Blue Mangoes (2002), The Solitude of Emperors (2007), and Ithaca (2011). In parallel to his writing career, Davidar has been a publisher for over a quarter-century. He is the co-founder of Aleph Book Company, a literary publishing firm based in New Delhi.
Ashok Kumar Banker is an author and screenwriter. His writing spans crime thrillers, essays, literary criticism, fiction and Indian mythology. The author of several well-received novels including a trilogy billed as "India's first crime novels in English", he became widely known for his retellings of Indian mythological epics, starting with the internationally acclaimed and best-selling eight-volume Ramayana Series. His books have sold over 2 million copies and have been published in 16 languages in 58 countries. His Epic India Library is an attempt at retelling all the myths, legends and itihasa of the Indian sub-continent in one story cycle comprising over 70 volumes.
Purushartha literally means "object(ive) of men". It is a key concept in Hinduism, and refers to the four proper goals or aims of a human life. The four puruṣārthas are Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha.
Raj Kamal Jha is an Indian newspaper editor and novelist writing in English. He currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of The Indian Express. He has written six novels that have been translated into more than 12 languages. His journalism and fiction have won national and international awards, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize; Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize; Tata Literature Live! Book of The Year; the International Press Institute India Award for Excellence in Journalism; and the Mumbai Press Club Journalist of the Year award. In September 2021, Jha was awarded Editor of The Year by the India Chapter of the International Advertising Association Annual Leadership Awards.
Indian English literature (IEL), also referred to as Indian Writing in English (IWE), is the body of work by writers in India who write in the English language but whose native or co-native language could be one of the numerous languages of India. Its early history began with the works of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio and Michael Madhusudan Dutt followed by Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo. R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao contributed to the growth and popularity of Indian English fiction in the 1930s. It is also associated, in some cases, with the works of members of the Indian diaspora who subsequently compose works in English.
Upamanyu Chatterjee 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.
Manoj Das was an Indian author who wrote in Odia and English. In 2000, Manoj Das was awarded the Saraswati Samman. He was awarded Padma Shri in 2001, the fourth-highest Civilian Award in India, and Padma Bhusan in 2020, the third-highest Civilian Award in India for his contribution to the field of Literature & Education.
Shiv K. Kumar was an Indian English-language poet, playwright, novelist, and short story writer. His grandfather late Tulsi Das Kumar was a school teacher and his father Bishan Das Kumar, was a retired headmaster. The letter 'K' stands for Krishna, i.e. Shiv Krishna Kumar.
Kshemendra was an 11th-century Sanskrit polymath-poet, satirist, philosopher, historian, dramatist, translator and art-critic from Kashmir in India.
Pavan K. Varma is an Indian diplomat, politician, and author who served as an ambassador to Bhutan and Cyprus.
Adya Rangacharya, known as R.V. Jagirdar till 1948, later popularly known by his pen name Sriranga, was an Indian Kannada writer, actor and scholar, and a member of the Adya Jahagirdar family. He was awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship in 1967 and the Sahitya Akademi Award for literature in 1971 for Kalidasa, a literary criticism in Kannada.
Neelum Saran Gour is an Indian English writer of fiction that depicts North India's small towns and their cultural histories. She is the author of five novels, four collections of short stories and one work of literary non-fiction. She has edited a pictorial volume on the history and culture of the city of Allahabad, where she lives and works, and has also translated one of her early novels into Hindi.
The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma is a book written by Indian author Gurcharan Das and published by Penguin Random House. The book is centrally focused on why to be good in our day to day, private, and public life and the essence of Dharma, a key concept in Indian philosophy for righteousness, with reference to Indian epic Mahabharata.
↑ The three volumes have been published in English by Penguin Random House: India Unbound in 2000, The Difficulty of Being Good in 2008, and Kama: The Riddle of Desire in 2018. India Unbound was also published in the US by Knopf and in the UK by Profile Books in 2002. The Difficulty of Being Good was published in the US by Oxford University Press. The books have also been translated into many languages.
↑ BBC Television: India Business Report: The Road Ahead, 9 March 2003, 11 am and 10 pm
↑ The five Indian language newspapers are Dainik Bhaskar (Hindi), Eenadu (Telugu), Lokmat (Marathi), Hindu (Tamil), Divya Bhaskar (Gujarati).
↑ All of the books of Gurcharan Das are currently in print, published by Penguin Random House India. The years of publication are: A Fine Family (1990), India Grows at Nights: A Liberal Case for a Strong State (2012), The Elephant Paradigm (2004), and an anthology, Three English Plays (2011).
↑ A Fine Family, Penguin Books India: Delhi, 1990.
↑ The Washington Post, 'Boy on Visit from India Stays to Excel at School, 3 June 1959.
↑ Letter of Gurcharan Das to his mother dated August 1963.
↑ .1) Harvard Business School, 0-385-176, 1984, 'Richardson Hindustan Limited', by Professor Francis J. Aguilar; Harvard Business School, N 9-388-083, 1988, Gurcharan Das: A Career Under Management Assessment.
↑ 'The cover essay appeared in Business World in its 27 December 1995 – 7 January 1996 issue.
↑ First published in English by Penguin Random House in 2000, India Unbound was also published in the US by Knopf and in the UK by Profile Books in 2002. The book has been translated into many languages.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
