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APPENDICES
APPENDIX-A
The Preface of this work makes it clear that Dilip Kumar Roy's English works have received little critical notice. This, to the best of my knowledge, is the first full-length critical work on Dilip Kumar Roy as a biographer. I had to depend almost entirely on my own ability to comprehend Roy's art.
I thought I might get some critical help from the old inmates of Sri Aurobindo Ashram who had been also Roy's contemporaries, who knew him personally and frequently had exchange of views and arguments with him. I put some questions about Roy to them and tape-recorded their answers. But this could not yield much, because none of them had taken Roy seriously. They had to remember Roy with some effort and had to remember also one or the other work of his to comment on. The remarks they made are not, consequently, of much critical importance. However, I am reproducing below the conversations. The persons I talked to were K. D. Sethna, Nirodbaran and Jayantilal Parekh. AU of them, when I interviewed, were aged and infirm. Jayantilal Parekh died in 1999. Moreover, in very low tone they spoke. Hence, everything is not clearly audible in the tape. Whatever is clearly audible, is clearly stated here. The gaps are marked with 'inaudible' into bracket.
Answers of the above said persons are faithfully reproduced, but here and there the language of the questions is corrected without affecting the substance of the questions.
(1) Conversation with K. D. Sethna
(K. D. Sethna was bom on 25th November, 1904. He was educated at St. Xavier's School and College in Bombay. Following an inner urge, he left his studies of M. A. and joined Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry. At present he lives there. He has been editing Mother India', a Review of Culture, since 1949. He is interested in literature, philosophy, spirituality, science as well as Indian history. Some of his important works are: The Problem of Aryan Origins: From an Indian Point of View, Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, The Obscure and the Mysterious:A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry, The Secret Splendour: Collected Poems of K. D. Sethna (Amal Kiran).
KD. Sethna was a friend of Dilip Roy at Sri Aurobindo Ashram. About their common interests, Sethna notes
"We had several things in common. There was the intense love of literature, especially poetry. There was also the itch for writing, the urge in particular to write poems of a new beauty
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