Vikram Seth is one of those modern Indian poets who have moved poetry into new dimensions. Born in Calcutta in 1952 to highly placed parents, Seth had his education in Doon School and later in U.K., Nanjin University, China and Stanford University U.S.A. Though his first language is Hindi and translates from Hindi and Urdu, he believes that English is his strongest base. He is said to speak in ‘a mellifluous tenor with a British accent but when he lived in California he put off using the American spelling for a long time.
To quote his own words, “I was inside the language but not inside the orthography”. Apart from the fact that he is a polymath, a man of great learning in various fields “he is able to function with sensitivity and skill in four vastly different cultures — Indian, English Chinese and American”. Also “he is more interested in the world outside of himself than he is in himself”. Another interesting fact about Seth is that he chose to study economics and not literature, for he felt as R.K. Narayan felt at the time of choosing a career, that he would lose his interest in literature if he studied it.
Vikram Seth’s first publication was Mappings (1982) which records his dual feelings of nostalgia for India after studying abroad for many years. “Many of the poems in this first volume are of youthful restlessness or concern rebellion and ambivalent feelings towards family, especially his father, with whom he appears to have strong disagreements” (Bruce King). His second work published when he was a student at Stanford, The Humble Administrator’s Garden (1985) won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Asia.
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This was followed by the publication of his The Golden Gate, “the great California novel” (1986). Much earlier, he had published a travel book about hitch hiking through Western China, called From Heaven Lake. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship and returned to India in 1986.
Seth’s The Golden Gate was hailed as “a splendid achievement”, as “a thoroughly Californian novel, peopled by unmistakably Californian characters” and “a splendid tour de force of the transcendence of the mere tour de force”. The tributes were well-deserved indeed.” In fact it took great courage and daring on his part to venture this great attempt at novel writing in verse in spite of the discouragement he received from many of his friends except Timothy Steele, a poet and teacher at the University of California.
Like his friend and mentor, Victoria Steele (husband of Timothy Steele) Seth favoured the traditional stanzaic and metrical forms and they believed that modern poetry’ had floundered because it was no longer accessible to the common reader. It had become too arcane from everyday experience. Seth has frankly stated that he does not enjoy most modern poetry. Similarly, his views about prose fiction are anti-modern anti-experimentative.
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His Golden Gate written in fourteen-line metred stanzas presents the story of how a friend of John places a personal ad in a newspaper on John’s behalf and how a succession of romantic relationships follows which include a homosexual one. Of the five main characters, two are ‘yuppies’ (young urban professionals). Part of the pleasure yielded by the book extends from the way in which it treats contemporary subjects poetically.