Vilas Sarang

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Vilas Sarang (born 1942) is one of the most significant modernist Indian writer, critic and translator to emerge in the post-independence period.

[edit] Overview

One of the most significant modernist Marathi writer, Vilas Sarang has written remarkable short stories, poems, a novel and also brilliant pieces of criticism in his first language Marathi as well as in English. His Marathi short story collections are 'Soledad' (1975) and 'Atank' (1999) and translations of his stories in English are collected in 'A Fair Tree of the Void' (1990) and more recently `The Women in the Cages' (2006). A selection of his short stories also appeared in French translation in 1988. His English novel 'The Dinosaur Ship'(2005) and his Marathi novel is `Enkichya Rajyat'. His Marathi collection of poems is published under the title Kavita 1969-1984 and his collection of English poems is published as 'A Kind of Silence'(1978). He has also written significant criticism in Marathi 'Sisyphus ani Bolakka' and 'Aksharanchya Shrama Kela'(2000).He has also published The Stylistics of Literary Translation ( 1988 ) and edited the anthology Indian English Poetry Since 1950 ( 1989. He has also edited reputed literary journals like the Bombay Review and The Post Post Review.

He holds a Ph. D. in English from Bombay University and another in comparative literature from Indiana University. He taught at the University of Basra in Iraq during the 1970s, became Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at Bombay University in the eighties, and he has also taught at Kuwait University. He lives in Mumbai

The quest for primitive source of human existence is an important feature of his writings. His short stories are often surreal and have often been compared to Kafka. For instance, in one of his stories collected in The Women in Cages, the narrator finds himself transformed into a gigantic phallus. In another more well known story, a person named Chako is marooned on an island where women have either upper half of their bodies or the lower half. Sarang is awovedly anti-representational modernist in his aesthetics and provides a refreshing alternative to over-hyped `diaspora' and `exiled' non-resident Indian English writers like Salman Rushdie, VS Naipaul and Kiran Desai.