By Dr Satish C Aikant
India’s best loved author Ruskin Bond turns 89 today. For close to seven decades he has charmed his readers, young and old, with his scintillating writing, and considering his unflagging creativity he has many more years of writing ahead of him. His appetite for story telling remains as strong as when at seventeen he wrote his début novel The Room on the Roof published in 1956. Since then, he has authored over 120 books of short stories, novels, poetry, essays, anthologies and books for children, the latest offering being The Golden Years (2023). During his long career in writing, he has received numerous awards and honours, including the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1992, the Padma Shri in 1999 and the Padma Bhushan in 2014. In 2005, HNB Garhwal University conferred an honorary doctorate on the great writer.
If there is one central metaphor that defines Ruskin’s work it is that of a lone fox, from his much-quoted poem Lone Fox Dancing, also the title of his autobiography published in 2017. The poem deserves retelling:
As I walked home last night
I saw a lone fox dancing
In the bright moonlight.
I stood and watched,
Then took the low road, knowing
The night was his by right.
Sometimes, when words ring true,
I’m like a lone fox dancing
In the morning dew.
The narrator makes way for the lone fox conceding that ‘the night was his by right’. This is so characteristic of the author’s own attitude to life – never be an imposing presence, nor ever transgress your human limits, and, as far as possible, make way for others by way of accommodation.
The Room on the Roof is a coming-of-age novel that explores the typically adolescent concerns of identity formation, alienation, and rebellion against authority. It won him the prestigious John Llewellyn Rhys Prize awarded to the most memorable work published by a young Commonwealth writer. The following year, the award went to the future Nobel Laureate, VS Naipaul.
Ruskin was named by his father after the great Victorian writer John Ruskin, the celebrated author of Unto This Last (Gandhi’s favourite text). Born in 1934 in Kasauli, Ruskin Bond grew up in Jamnagar, Shimla, New Delhi and Dehradun. Apart from four years that he spent in the Channel Islands in the UK, he has spent all his life in India. Since 1970, Mussoorie has been his home. The twin cities of Mussoorie and Dehradun have been central to much of his writings and have shaped his creative imagination. In Scenes from a Writer’s life: A Memoir (1997) Ruskin confesses, ‘Even though I had grown up with a love for the English language and its literature, even though my forefathers were British, Britain was not really my place. I did not belong to the bright lights of Piccadilly and Leicester Square, or, for that matter, to the apple orchards of Kent or the strawberry fields of Berkshire. I belonged, very firmly, to peepal trees and mango groves; to sleepy little towns all over India; to laughing brown faces; and the intimacy of human contact.’
While on the one hand we have a novelist like Rudyard Kipling, an apologist for empire, we have a writer like Ruskin Bond who does not allow an Anglo-centric worldview to prejudice his writings. By portraying Indian life and native people in a stereotypical way, Kipling reproduces imperial ideological assumptions while one can sense his ambivalence about India; his inability to emphatically align with India. Ruskin Bond does not harbour such ambivalence. Unlike Salman Rushdie, India is not an ‘Imaginary Homeland’ for him but a concrete location in time and space, and a lived reality. That does not however mean that he had to forsake his ‘Englishness’ of which too he is proud. Indeed, the British left us a mixed legacy. We have often looked upon the English as unwanted intruders into our land who exploited India and kept distance from Indians, living in their own havens of ‘Whites Only’ clubs, hill stations, the Civil Lines and the cantonments. There were of course those who despised almost everything about India, not just its heat and dust. But let us not forget that there was a good number of Britishers who had genuine fondness, even admiration, for Indians. While most of the Britishers left for ‘home’ after India’s independence, there are many who stayed on to make India their home.
Ruskin is not confined to writing only about the great moments of history or mighty personages. He prefers to write about people and places he has known and the lives of those whose paths he has crossed. Very often the setting and locale of his stories is a small town or rural hinterland. Indeed, all of Ruskin’s writings, fiction as well as non-fiction, suggest an intimate bond between man and nature. What Bradley said of Wordsworth can well be quoted for Ruskin: ‘It was not Wordsworth’s function to sing of war, or love, or tragic passions, or the actions of the supernatural beings. His peculiar function was to open out the soul of little and familiar things, alike in nature and human life.’ The ‘little and familiar things’ move Ruskin, too. He himself has shunned metropolitan life despite several lucrative offers for editorial jobs coming his way, choosing to settle down in a small town. ‘There is more to life than interest rates, dividends, market forces, and infinite technology’ is his telling comment.
Living in the hills has certainly made a difference to Ruskin’s writing in a subtle way. Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra (1991) is full of the sights and sounds of India and of the author’s passionate affinity for the life around. The stories, beautifully crafted, speak directly to the reader. One gets the picture of Himalayan landscape with its variegated moods, its seasons, its flora and fauna; and the pastoral vignettes are all very evocative. And then there are the sounds: gentle rain on the tin roof, a crow shaking the raindrops from his feathers and cawing rather disconsolately; babblers and bulbuls bustling in and out of bushes and long grass in search of worms and insects; the sweet, ascending trill of the Himalayan whistling-thrush and the crickets chirping.
Ruskin’s writing style is marked by a simplicity that does not make the readers toil and sweat. One instantly feels at ease with his writing. It is characterised by warmth and self-deprecating sense of humour. The distinctive mark of Ruskin’s characters is their disarming innocence and honesty. They have the ability to find happiness and contentment in everyday events and get fulfilment in the company of nature. About his readership he says, ‘My readership has always been here, and now I can write exclusively for the Indian reader, without having to make the compromises that are often necessary in order to get published in the UK or USA. So away with sensationalism, away with the exotic East, away with maharajas, beggars, spies and shikaris, away with romantic Englishwomen and their far pavilions. No longer do we have to write for the ‘foreign reader.’‘I give to the world that which is in my heart,’ wrote the composer Franz Schubert. Ruskin believes that he has tried to do the same.
One cannot, however, fail to perceive the irony that while Ruskin’s stories focus on the lives and experiences of ordinary people who are often from underprivileged backgrounds the stories are being consumed primarily by readers who are not themselves from those backgrounds and lack empathy and understanding for the underprivileged. Outside Cambridge Book Depot in Mussoorie one sees, on Ruskin’s birthday, long queues of avid readers and admirers from English speaking elite backgrounds waiting to have a glimpse of their beloved author, to take his autograph and have a photograph with him. But you won’t find among them a Binya, Rakesh, Sita, Bisnu, Somi or Kishen, the key protagonists of Ruskin’s stories. Coming from vernacular India they are neither fluent in English nor do they flaunt urban sophistication, the sort who constitute the writer’s actual readership.
(The writer is former Professor and Head of the Department of English, HNB Garhwal University)
