Upendranath Ashk:

Language: EnglishPages: 242About The BookThis is how the Hindi Literary world perceives Upendranath Ashk. In this powerful biography Daisy Rockwell presents the many faces of the writer and his tumultuous life and times unfolding in the process the period the literary history of Hindi and the Hindi-Urdu divide. She also traces the development of Modern Standard Hindi Participants in its evolution and Ashk's role in it. About The Author Daisy Rockwell is the Vice Chair at the Center for South Asia Studies at the University of California Berkeley. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1998. She writes on South Asian literature and films. Introduction In January 1996 Upendranath Ashk the well known and controversial Hindi author passed away at the age of eighty six. Ashk left behind him a phenomenally large oeuvre comprising over a hundred volumes of fiction poetry memoir criticism and translation. The career of-this prolific writer had begun in the early thirties and spanned a momentous sixty year period which not only saw tremendous social and political change in India but profoundly important cultural and artistic change as well. Ashk's work distinguished itself not just for its abundance but for its originality and difference from the work of his contemporaries and the Hindi tradition in which he had chosen to write.To Ashk the work which took precedence over all his other writing and which he considered to be his greatest contribution to literature was the seven volume novel Girti Divaren (Falling Walls 1947-96)1 which he nearly but not quite completed in his lifetime. The entire novel spans five years in the life of its semi-autobiograph