Sunday, April 15, 2001		Article

HE is born and brought up in India. He loves India, especially the Himalayas. Under that fair skin of his, he is as much an Indian as any of his brown-skinned compatriots. And he is a writer to boot. Meet Bond...Ruskin Bond. Oh, that Ruskin Bond who writes for children? The topic generally ends on this dismissive note. A readership that is enamoured with ‘adult’, ‘intellectual’ and ‘abstract’ literature would not touch anything ‘juvenile’. So ‘the serious-minded’ reader merely turns over the page of the publication in which Ruskin Bond’s writings appear. In an age where even kids are finding it increasingly difficult to retain their child-like traits, how has Ruskin been able to preserved his impish simplicity? When one chanced upon a website dedicated to him by school kids, Pushkin, Sangita and Arvind, one realised the sort of following this fair-skinned Indian has. Yes, he hates to be described as a foreigner. In one of his narratives, he describes how the first thing a hotel receptionist asks him for is his passport. This forces him to retort, "Do I have to carry the passport to travel in my own country?" However, what really gives one the chance to get acquainted with Ruskin’s writings is a visit to the bookstore.

There one espies his various fiction, non-fiction and children’s books like, Panther’s Moon & Other Stories, Delhi is Not Far: the Best of Ruskin Bond, and Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra etc. His love for the mountains, especially Dehra, comes out poignantly in all his accounts. Here is a person who pined for the Himalayas when he was in London, who declined a lucrative offer in a prestigious magazine in Hong Kong just because he couldn’t imagine a life away from his beloved hills — creating doubts regarding his mental health in the minds of his friends. His love for his country — India is not his adopted country but is his motherland as much as it is for any of us — becomes apparent in every word he writes and every phrase he composes.

In At Home in India, Ruskin asserts, "But it’s more than the land that holds me. For India is more than a land. India is an atmosphere. Over thousands of years, the races and religions of the world have mingled here and produced that unique, indefinable phenomenon, the Indian: so terrifying in a crowd, so beautiful in himself... And oddly enough, I’m one too. I know that I’m as Indian as the postman or the paanwala or favourite MP..." His essays like, Mathura’s Hallowed Haunts , Beautiful Mandakini etc. give one an idea of the writer’s unstinted love for his place of birth.

Some call him India’s Wordsworth. This proves to be partially apt when one reads his narratives, wherein Mother Nature comes alive in all her splendour. He gives equal attention to the beauty of the plebian marigolds, as he does to the nose-in-the air orchids. His another un-English trait is the singular lack of passion for roses. But his writings are much more than odes to India’s flora and fauna.

The rhapsody of natural sounds transports you to the enchanted world where birds sing, rivers flow in a musical cadence, trees sway rhythmically in the gentle breeze... Can evil ever survive in such a paradise? Yet evil does make its appearance, albeit for fleeting moments when the trusting big cat is killed by the shikaris. In a land where Ruskin roams unarmed, his anguish at the sight of armed bloodthirsty fellow men can only be imagined.

Yet, he loves fellow men in his own way. This comes out poignantly in his very first story, Untouchable, that he wrote as a sixteen year old. The Bent Double Beggar is another tale that would bemuse both the child and the adult alike. The characterisation of Dukhi, the gardener, is one more of his masterstrokes, as is of the princess in, The Room of Many Colours. In fact, the lucidity of his narration brings all his characters alive on the rustling pages.

To compare him with Kipling, RK Narayan or other masters of yore, is both unfair and unnecessary. Perhaps, it won’t be wrong to say that his genre is unique. "My prose is deceptively simple," claims Ruskin Bond. And how right he is! Add to this the uncomplicated plots and simple story lines and you have the essence of the writer.

And his poems like, Lovers Observed, Lone Fox Dancing etc are rich in imagery and full of music. Frankly, if one feels forlorn or depressed one can use a Ruskin Bond as anti-depressant. One has spent several amusing and engrossing moments in the company of these books. They have proved to be great companions. Thank you, Mr, Bond.

Self-deprecating humour is one of his strengths. In Life at My Own Pace,he tells us of an incident ‘’just a year or two before independence". He was an eleven-year-old then. In his own words: "...two passing cyclists, young men, swept past and struck me over the head. I was stunned but not hurt. They rode away with cries of triumph — I suppose it was a rare achievement to have successfully assaulted someone whom they associated with the ruling race..." However, he was not exactly enamoured with the ‘ruling race’. This comes out repeatedly in his tales — be that the Untouchable, The Funeral, A Job Well Done etc. In the last one the humble Dukhi pushes the overbearing British Major Sahib into a well and seals it with bricks and cement. Macabre, yes, but with a decided tilt in favour of the underdog. One finds similar humour in his poem, A Frog Screams.

His unselfish love for India has gone largely unnoticed. Today, when we revel in the success of a Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy or Salman Rushdie in the West and howl in protest when an Indian is ignored in the prize-distribution stakes, especially the Booker, do we pause and reflect on our own attitude — the official one that is? Why has there been no major award for Ruskin when he has done so much for children’s literature in India, and the kids love his writings? How many other writers have been promoting the cause of our inherent diversity without any selfish motive as Ruskin has been doing ever since he first started writing about half a century ago? Perhaps he is being ignored because of his Anglo-Saxon ancestry? Or is it the chronic malady, the cussedness of our rulers, who are waiting to put him on a pedestal posthumously, that prevents them from acknowledging the man’s genious when he is still alive? Like all talent in India, recognition comes when it is no more relevant.