Lover of Light Among Luminaries Dilip Kumar Roy

SR No.: 001542
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Amruta Paresh Patel
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad
Publication Year: 2002
Total Pages: 258
Language: English
Classification: Book_English, Literature, & Biography
File Size: 16 MB

Page 16

THE LIFE-HISTORIES AND THEIR RELEVANCE onwards, a steady development in the art of biography is discernible. At the end of the 18th Century appeared Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets (1778) and Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). With the Romantics inner life, the psychological portrait of the personality concerned, becomes more important. This was hence on an addition to plain historical account After Freud psychoanalytical approach has become more popular, and the biographers seek to relate external action to some internal emotional compulsion.
Thus, one can see that, in the initial stage, the biographers portrayed the character by outward details, then they struggled to get rid of the ethical intention so that they could give truthful potrayal of their subject and ultimately there came about the insistence upon the accuracy of facts.
In the East, biographical literature is not so cultivated as it is in the West. In China, biography was considered a by-product of historical writing produced in the tradition of the Historical Records' of Ssu-ma Ch'ein and Pan ku.
"In India it has been the enduring concern for spiritual values and for contemplation or mystical modes of existence that have exerted the deepest influence on literature from the first millennium BC to the present, and this has not provided a
milieu suitable to biographical composition."3
However, there are in ancient Sanskrit literature, the instances of biographical writing. The tenth book of Srimad Bhagavat is two biographies in one:Krishna and his brother Baldeva. Ashvaghosha's Buddhacharitam is clearly a biography. Lalit vistar, too, is a biography of Buddha. Other instances are Bana's Harshacharitam and Madhavacharya's Shankar Digvijay. Biographical material is discernible in the histories and chronicles of the Muslim period, too. But it was all unsystematic and largely eulogistic. We Indians have not been good at history writing, and so we had been poor in the art of biography, too. The real art starts flowering only under the impact of English education and European culture. Here three clear stages could be seen.
In the initial stage of the development of biography in India, its subject was almost a model to be emulated. The religious leaders were depicted with a sense of reverence. The notable biographical works of the time are:Manmath Nath Dutt's Prophets of Ind (1894) and Kshetrapal Chakravarthy's Life of Sri Chaitanya (1897). Then, in the first half of the twentieth century, historiography became an important form of biography. R. P. Paranjapye's Life of G.K. Gokhale (1915), H.P. Mody's Sir Pherozshah Mehta (1921), P. C. Ray's Life and Times of C R Das (1927), R.P. Masani's Dadabhai Naoroji : The Grand Old Man of India (1939) and Life of Swami Vivekananda by his Eastern and Western disciples are important examples of this phase. During the third stage of the development