Lover of Light Among Luminaries Dilip Kumar Roy

Author(s): Amruta Paresh Patel
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

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A LOVER OF LIGHT AMONG LUMINARIES: Dilip Kumar Roy of biography in India, after independence, the lives of freedom fighters were attempted. Hence, political biography flourished in India. Noteworthy biographies of Lokmanya Tilak are those by Ram Gopal (1956), D. V. Tamhanker (1956). S. L Karandikar (1957), Dhananjay Keer (1959) and N.G. Jog (1963). D.G. Tendulkar's Mahatma.Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 8 Vols., N. K. Basil's My Days with Gandhi (1953), J. B. Kripalani's Gandhi:His Life and Thought (1970) are important studies of Mahatma Gandhi. Biographies of Nehru. Subhas Chandra Bose. Lajpat Rai, Vallabhbhai Patel, Sri Aurobindo and many of lesser eminence are, too, numerous to be listed here. What is obvious in all this is that the Indian biographer has now begun "to evoke an individual caught in the travails of life arising from acute moral, political and social dilemmas."4
Nirad C. Chaudhuri's Scholar Extraordinary: The Life of the Rtn. Hon. F. Max Muller (1974) is considered to be one of the best examples of Indian biography in English. Krishna Kripalani's Rabindranath Tagore-.A Life (1962), and K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar's Sri Aurobindo:A Biography and History (1945) too are well-documented and reliable. What we have here is the expression of the Indian view and Indian attitude to life and to history and to great men of India. But one can not help feeling that we do not see objectively men as men and do not try to see their realistic portraits. Unwittingly perhaps we glorify and idealize what is small and ordinary as truly great and blind ourselves to obvious faults. I do not recollect having read an Indian biography by an Indian with an authentic psychoanalytical approach. One may feel that a detailed comparative study of Indian and Western approaches to biography is very necessary.
We discern salient features of biography as it is practised all over the world today :
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Biography can be called a branch of history when the author's aim is to record the outward events of the life of a person of eminence from his birth to death.
Biography assumes the form of hagiography when the biographer generally talks of the life of a pious or religious person with an attitude of reverence and refuses to see authentic and accurately produced picture of the life of that person. From the earliest medieval lives of the saints to the Modern portraits of the Victorian persons, biography was used as a source of moral instruction.
Biographies in the modern times are written from the view point of scientific objectivity. The biographer feels that he is quite capable of claiming that he is concerned with 'truth':not truth as a philosophical aesthetic concept, but truth in terms of demonstrable facts.