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A LOVER OF LIGHT AMONG LUMINARIES : Dilip Kumar Roy Roy's letter to her is published in Appendix I. The character of Ananda Giri, as Roy himself has revealed during the last phase of his life in his book, The Flute Calls Still is drawn from the personality of Swami Ramdas. Roy was personally connected with all the remaining characters of the novel. He has simply changed their names to hide their identity.
The writer has mingled facts with a little element of fiction to convert them into a delightful material for a novel. With the parallel study of his autobiography, Pilgrims of the Stars and even other biographical works one can find that the element of fiction is almost negligible. The veil is very transparent. For instance, in the story of Ananda Giri, he has taken liberty with time. On the one hand, he talks of the events of partition which took place in 1947, while on the other hand he talks of his own crises about the search for his guru which actually took place in 1928. He claims that this Anand Giri is Swami Ramdas. But one can find from Pilgrims of the Stars that the saint who told Dilip Roy about his predestined guru was not Swami Ramdas, but Baroda Kanta Babu. Such changes, however, do not matter when the reader approaches it as a work of art and loses himself or herself in the free flow of the narration. Roy does not try portraits in the novel, but miraculous events. Therefore, narration becomes more important than portraits. The element of fiction appears in the imaginative treatment of events actually witnessed by the author. Roy has used the traditional third person narrative technique. It has enabled the author to remain present everywhere with his characters while he, as Asit, retrospectively, relates the stories of miracles to Barbara. The “Appendices' given at the end of the novel add to the veracity of the miraculous events described in the form of novel.
The structure of the novel becomes extraordinarily delightful when one notices Roy's command of the English language. His prose is very poetic. His style, as usual, is poetic and metaphorical The flow of the narrative remains lucid throughout the novel. Various Hindi devotional songs and Sanskrit dictums included in the original form as well as in English translation, exhibit the author's talent as a musician, as a scholar of various languages and as a translator as well. It seems that the author has also tried to keep his Western readers in his mind. Here, as in all other works, the author has given letters written by himself to others and also by others to himself.
The book, both in Bengali and English, was on the one hand criticized for its theme of miracles and on the other, appreciated. As Dilip Roy reports in the “Preface”, his Bengali “...book saw four editions in two years and was ranked as one of the best-sellers in the book-market”23
A few literary critics took a serious note of it in their articles. Indian P.E.N. (February 1959), wrote
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