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The World of Vikram Seth
How Indian is Wirram Seth? How cosmopolitan is he? Where are his roots? The politics of the private sphere rather than the public domain are Seth's abiding concern, indicating his nostalgia for nineteenth-century British and Russian novels.
The most outstanding and immediately striking feature of Vikram Seth's writing is its cultural hybridity. Seth's work is set in different continents and cultures and spans India, China, the U.S., and England, reflecting his cross-cultural affinities. He grew up in India and was a student later at Oxford, Stanford, and Nanjing University in China. On the surface, there appears to be little continuity of content or style in Seth's work since he changes genres and contexts frequently. Yet what emerges in his work is an old-fashioned interest in family and relationships in the private and domestic spheres. He seems to grieve the loss of stable, sustained, personal relationships in a contemporary international world impacted by consumerism in the West and modernization and the breakdown of patriarchal society in India. The trope of music surfaces frequently in his writing, emphasizing the unifying influence of the artistic sphere that speaks across cultures and provides an escape from cultural conflicts. This paper looks at the body of Seth's nonfictional writings briefly and then examines his three novels-The Golden Gate (1986), A Suitable Boy (1993), and An Equal Music (1999)-as examples of his range of cultural representation.
Seth has written four collections of poems: Mappings (1981), Tlie Humble Administrator's Garden (1985), All You Who Sleep Tonight (1990), and a collection of fables in verse. Beastly Tales (1991). In addition he has translated the works of three Chinese poets-Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu-into English (1992). He has written a libretto, Arion and the Dolphin (1994), in which a shipwrecked and forsaken Arion is befriended by a dolphin who is betrayed and killed by men, a classic, tragic tale very different from Seth's usual bantering, ironic tone. He has also written a travelogue describing his hitchhiking trip from Tibet to Nepal, From Heaven's Lake (1993), and an engaging account of the lives of his Indian dentist uncle, Shanti, and his German wife, Henny (Two Lives, 2005).
In Two Lives, Shanti and Henny attempt to acculturate in...