________________
184
A LOVER OF LIGHT AMONG LUMINARIES : Dilip Kumar Roy
fair sex he would have grown into a desiccated specimen of manhood, strong may be (after a fashion, but certainly not into a many-mooded personality – exhibiting at will, a poet, a
musician or a composer."
He also indicates certain gestures of characters so that they can be identified immediately by the readers as their peculiar habits. Asit, for instance, has the habit of speaking in staccato. Sir Eric's speech, during their travelling in train, remains halting because of the severe pain of his stomach. The characters also comment on one another to make them clear to the reader.
Thus Roy uses both dramatic and narrative techniques to realize his fictional beings in his novels. Almost all the characters of Upward Spiral are dynamic. Rene Weliek and Austin Warren, in their Theory of Literature, note:
"In the nineteenth-century English and American fiction, one finds brunettes, male and female (Heathcliffe. Mr Rochester, Becky Sharp; Maggie Tulliver; Zenobia, Miriam; Ugeia) and blondes (female instances- Amelia Sedley; Lucy Dean; Hilda, Priscilla, and Phoebe (Hawthorne); Lady Rowena [Poe]. 'The blonde is the home-maker, unexciting but steady and sweet. The brunette-passionate, violent, mysterious, alluring; and untrustworthy-gathers up the characteristics of the Oriental, the Jewish, the Spanish, and the Italian as seen from the point
of view of the Anglo-Saxon.' "7
We in the Indian context, do not have brunettes and blondes in the physical appearance, but in this special sense suggested by Wellek and Warren, we have both brunettes' and 'blondes' in the present novel. Tapan, Amar, Lisna and Prabal can be called brunettes. Mala, Raka and Suniti can be considered blondes. Dilip Roy's women characters are attractive.
Asit, the narrator of Upward Spiral is Dilip Roy himself. From his autobiography, Pilgrims of the Stars one can learn that like Asit he, too, had lost his mother at the age of six. Asit is a musician, the author, too, was a prominent musician of his times. Pramila is Asit's former pupil of music. Roy also had such rich and aristocratic music students like Premila (e.g. Uma Bose).
Asit stays in the Yoga-Ashram of his gurudev Swayamananda at Dumel. The author stayed at the Ashram of his gurudev Sri Aurobindo in Pondicheny. Raka who has left her husband and son, is Asit's spiritual colleague at the Ashram. Indira Devi was Roy's spiritual colleague at Sri Aurobindo Ashram. She also had left her home, husband and children, like Raka, for the sake of the realization of Krishna.
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
