Songs of the Road where nature flutter its wings- Ruskin Bond and Bibhuti Bhusan Bandopadhay

Ruskin Bond in short : Ruskin Bond is a nature lover. All love Ruskin Bond because he narrates what he sees with a small tint of humour - the mountains, the nature, the people - who live their hard struggling life yet are simple and nice in their own way. Ruskin Bond despite call for a city life with dash and pomp, prefer to lead a silent writers' life at remote Landour Hills and still prefer to use the Typewriters to type his manuscripts....That's commitment to protecting nature and simple way of living a life that gets so beautifully reflected in his writings  - these are called happy books for all ages. His writing is the celebration of life with joy despite all the pains, that the author so beautifully put aside. If you read "The Room On The Roof", you definitely feel getting back something in life, that you in your city life miss.   

Ruskin Bond

Two years back I visited this site of pilgrimage with my family. But luck was not on our side and  he was not in the  home. But we spoke to one of his adopted family members and my son had posed for a photo with his adopted grand-daughter. Here is his Address for Bond lovers.

Ruskin Bond
Ivy Cottage
Landour Cantt
P.O. Mussoorie, Uttarakhand
PIN – 248179

Ruskin Bond, born 19 May 1934 in Kasauli Distt Solan, is an Indian author of British descent.

In 1992, he received the Sahitya Akademi award for his short story collection, Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra, given by the Sahitya Academy, India's National Academy of Literature. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999 for contributions to children's literature. He now lives with his adopted family in Landour near Mussoorie.

Bond was born in a military hospital in Kasauli, brother to Ellen and William, the children of Edith Clerke and Aubrey Bond. Ruskin’s father was with the Royal Air Force. When Bond was four years old, his mother was separated from his father and married a Punjabi-Hindu, Mr. Hari, who himself had been married once. Bond spent his early childhood in Jamnagar and Shimla. At the age of ten Ruskin went to live at his grandmother's house in Dehradun after his father's sudden death in 1944 from malaria. Ruskin was raised by his mother, who remarried an Indian businessman. He completed his schooling at Bishop Cotton School in Shimla, from where he graduated in 1952. Ruskin’s love for books and writing came early to him since his father had surrounded him with books and encouraged him to write little descriptions of nature and he took his son on hikes in the hills.

After his high school education he spent four years in England. In London he started writing his first novel, The Room on the Roof, the semi-autobiographical story of the orphaned Anglo-Indian boy Rusty. It won the 1957 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, awarded to a British Commonwealth writer under 30. Bond used the advance money from the book to pay the sea passage to Bombay. He worked for some years as a journalist inDelhi and Dehradun. Since 1963 he has lived as a freelance writer in Mussoorie, a town in the Himalayan foothills.[1] He wrote Vagrants in the Valley, as a sequel to The Room on the Roof. These two novels were published in one volume by Penguin India in 1993. The following year a collection of his non-fiction writings, The Best Of Ruskin Bond was published by Penguin India. His interest in the paranormal led him to write popular titles such as Ghost Stories from the Raj, A Season of Ghosts, A Face in the Dark and other Hauntings.

The Indian Council for Child Education recognized his pioneering role in the growth of children's literature in India, and awarded him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1992 for Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra. He won the Padma Shri in 1999.

Ruskin commented "The India I Love, does not make the headlines, but I find it wherever I go - in field or forest, town or village, mountain or desert - and in the hearts and minds of people who have given me love and affection for the better part of my lifetime."

Media-shy, he currently lives in Landour, Mussoorie’s Ivy Cottage, which has been his home since 1964

Most of Bond's writings show the influence from the social life in the hill stations at the foothills of the Himalayas, where he spent his childhood. His first novel, The Room On the Roof, was written when he was 17 and published when he was 21. It was partly based on his experiences at Dehra, in his small rented room on the roof, and his friends. Since then he has written over three hundred short stories, essays and novels, includingVagrants in The Valley, The Blue Umbrella, Funny Side Up, A Flight of Pigeons) and more than 30 books for children. He has also published two volumes of autobiography. Scenes from a Writer's Life describes his formative years growing up in Anglo-India; The Lamp is Lit is a collection of essays and episodes from his journal.

Bond said that while his autobiographical work, Rain in the Mountains, was about his years spent in Mussoorie, Scenes from a Writer's Lifedescribed his first 21 years. Scenes from a Writer's Life focuses on Bond's trip to England, his struggle to find a publisher for his first book The Room on the Roof and his yearning to come back to India, particularly to Doon. "It also tells a lot about my parents," said Bond. "The book ends with the publication of my first novel and my decision to make writing my livelihood," Bond said, adding, "basically it describes how I became a writer".

His novel, The Flight of Pigeons, has been adapted into the Merchant Ivory film Junoon. The Room on the Roof has been adapted in to a BBC-produced TV series. Several stories have been incorporated in the school curriculum in India, including "The Night Train at Deoli", "Time Stops at Shamli", and Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in India for Our Trees Still grows in Dehra in 1992. He has also been given the Padma Shri, one of the most prestigious civil awards in India. In 2007, the Bollywood director Vishal Bharadwajmade a film based on his popular novel for children, The Blue Umbrella. The movie won the National Award for Best Children's film.

Based on Bond's historical novella A Flight of Pigeons (about an episode during the Indian Rebellion of 1857), the Hindi film Junoon was produced in 1978 by Shashi Kapoor (directed by Shyam Benegal). Ruskin Bond made his maiden foray on the big screen with a cameo in Vishal Bhardwaj's film 7 Khoon Maaf, based on his short story Susanna's Seven Husbands. Bond appears as a Bishop in the movie with Priyanka Chopra, who kills "each of her seven husbands".[2] Bond had earlier collaborated with him in the The Blue Umbrella which was also based on his story.

Collections

Tiger in the house

Garland of Memories

The boy who broke the bank

Funny Side Up

Night Train at Deoli

Rain in the Mountains-Notes from the Himalayas

Our trees still grow in Dehra

A season of ghosts

Tigers Forever

A Town Called Dehra

The Night Train at Daoli

A Face in the Dark and Other Hauntings

Potpurri

The Adventures Of Toto

The Lost Ruby

The Death Of Trees

Novels

Room On The Roof

Scenes from a Writer's Life

Susanna's Seven Husbands

A Flight of Pigeons

Landour Days - A writers Journal

The Sensualist by Ruskin Bond

The Road To The Bazaar

The Panther's Moon

Once Upon A Monsoon Time

The India I love

The Kashmiri Storyteller

The Blue Umbrella

The Tiger In The Tunnel

Bibhutibhushan in Short : Commonality of both Bond and Bibhutibhusan begins and end at being passionate nature lover and yearning to see the old order of nature . That apart, beautiful portrayal of simple people of the roads with sympathy to their life and struggle in life of survival. But as a humanist writer, Bibhutibhushan went a few files ahead with his passion for stark portrayal of  rural lives - its struggle. And in the forests - portrayal of a few immortal characters and the life in forest.  

Bibhutibhushan would be remembered for all time for his Apu Trilogy( First Part - Pather Panchali - The song of the village road; Second Part - Aparajito - the Undefeated - the struggle of an orphaned village boy to go to city for higher study leaving aside the village odd job and a painful conflict of a lonely widowed mother's desire to have her son near her while the son's desire to study and enchanting city lifestyle; Part III- Apur Sansar - that boy lost his mother (dying alone in village without care), got settled down in an industrialised capital city of India and his relentless hunt for job, got married in a strange circumstances, lost his wife while giving birth to a boy, and Apu become vagabond while his new born child grow in his in-law's home like an orphan);

And Aranyak ( About Forest)  . A novel that would take you months to complete and for me it took ten years to complete - many times you will read some chapters and keep it aside. That because, getting into the right mental frame is a must to finish Aranyak and once you finish you know that you should have read it much earlier for the realisation of life. The novel Aranyak is a very very slow paced novel  - it is like the forest and its various characters that wave at you and say, Forest has no time, no time, no time ....it is timelessness that would engulf the readers and the journey of settlement of people near forests and spread of farmland and evolving of new village societies and its evolving culture, its struggle);   

And Chader Pahar( Set in Africa - a fiction adventure )  - in my son's list of all time best adventure stories for teenagers.

All the above were written in Bengali but later translated into many languages .

Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay

 (Bengali: বিভূতিভূষণ বন্দ্যোপাধ্যায়) (listen:  Bibhutibhushon Bôndopaddhae (help·info)) (12 September 1894 - 1 November 1950) was an Indian Bengali author, and one of the leading writers of modern Bengali literature. His best known work is the autobiographical novel, Pather Panchali (The Song of the Road), adapted (along with Aparajito, the sequel) into the memorable Apu Trilogy films, directed by Satyajit Ray.



The Bandyopadhyay family originally came from Panitar village near Basirhat, North 24 Parganas district of modern-day Paschimbanga (West Bengal). Bibhutibhushan’s great-grandfather, who was a kaviraj or Ayurvedic physician, came to settle at Barakpur village near Bongaon, North 24 Parganas.

Bibhutibhushan was born at his maternal uncle’s house at Muratipur village near Kanchrapara-Halishahar, North 24 Parganas. His father Mahananda Bandyopadhyay was a Sanskrit scholar and a story-teller (Kathak) by profession. Mahananda and his wife Mrinalini had five children, of whom Bibhutibhushan was the eldest.
His home was near Gopalnagar police station in Bongaon, North Twenty Four Parganas (location 23'41+88'46). He studied at Bongaon High School, one of the oldest institutions in British India. Incidentally, he also taught at this school in the beginning of his working life. His novels Pather Panchali, Adarsha Hindu Hotel, Ichhamati, Bipiner Sansar and a few others were all set in Bongaon. Ichhamati reflects on the life of rural society on the banks of river Ichhamati in undivided southern Bengal. The story of indigo planters and plantation life, rural communities and the divers castes and their societal roles in early last century of Bengal have been captured in vivid detail. Relationships have been sensitively portrayed in their subtlest nuances. Soul-stirring descriptions of nature to the smallest details and the unselfconscious but poetic portrayal of the flora and fauna on the banks of Ichhamati are the added features of this magnificent creation. There are a lot of dialogues which bring up deep spiritual thought, advaita vedanta in particular. Peppered with a few characters who show the hypocrisy of the Brahminical order which dictated the social and religious life of rural Bengal under a deeply stratified caste system, the novel is an invaluable and otherwise inadequately documented time capsule.
Bandyopadhyay's early days were spent in abject poverty. Nevertheless, he fought his way to complete his undergraduate degree in History, at the Surendranath College, Kolkata; although he could not afford to enrol for the postgraduate course at the University of Calcutta. The economic burden of his family rested squarely on his shoulders.

He married Gouri Devi, who died during childbirth a year after their marriage. The tragic theme of her death and his loneliness is a recurrent motif in his early writings.

At 46, Bandyopadhyay married Rama Chattopadhyay. Their only son, Taradas, was born in 1947.
Bandopadhyay, before becoming a writer, took up various jobs to make ends meet. He taught at a school, became a secretary, and managed an estate. Finally, in 1921, he published his first short story, "Upekshita," in Probashi, which one of the leading literary magazines of Bengal. However, it was not until 1928, when his first novel, Pather Panchali (also known in English as Song of the Little Road), was published, that Bibhutibhushan received critical attention. With Pather Panchali, Bibhutibhushan quickly became a prominent name in Bengali literature.

Bandopadhyay had a stout constitution and walked miles in the woods every day. He usually took his notebook with him and enjoyed writing while surrounded by the wilderness.
Pather Panchali is considered to be Bibhutibhushan's masterpiece. It has been included in the CBSE syllabus for students choosing to study Bengali. He has 16 novels and over two hundred short stories to his credit.
Humayun Azad opined that the novel is superior to its cinematic rendition. This is not necessarily a commonly held view in the West, as the Apu Trilogy is considered to be among the finest films in the history of cinema, and the unavailability of a complete translation of Pather Panchali into English makes it an issue hard for the English-speaking audience to resolve: the available translation (by T. W. Clark and Tarapada Mukherji) is a truncated version of the novel. However, in the Bengali-speaking world, the stature of the novel is not seriously in doubt. Martin Seymour-Smith, in his Guide to Modern World Literature (1973), calls Bandopadhyay (he uses the form Banerji) "perhaps the best of all modern Indian novelists" and says "probably nothing in twentieth-century Indian literature, in prose or poetry, comes to the level of Pather Panchali".[2]

Apart from the translation of the truncated text by T. W. Clark and Tarapada Mukherji, Amit Chaudhuri has translated a few excerpts for inclusion in the anthologyThe Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. In his introduction to these excerpts, Chaudhuri writes: "Unique for its tenderness and poetry ... Pather Panchalirejects both nineteenth-century realism and social realism (the social milieu described in it would have logically lent itself to the latter) for an enquiry into perception and memory." [3]

The complete text of Aparajito, the sequel to Pather Panchali, has been translated into English by Gopa Majumdar. Bibhutibhushan's works are mostly concerned with the lives of people from rural Bengal. His writings come alive with vibrant and normal characters from the countryside.

Bandopadhyay died on 1 November 1950, of a heart attack while staying at Ghatshila

Aranyak - About Forest

Complete list of novels:


Pather Panchali (Bengali: পথের পাঁচালি) (Song of the Road)
Aparajito (Bengali: অপরাজিত) (Unvanquished; sequel to Pather Panchali)
Aranyak (Bengali: আরণ্যক) (In the Forest)
Adarsha Hindu Hotel (Bengali: আদর্শ হিন্দু হোটেল)
Ichhamati(Rabindra Purashkar 1950-51) (Bengali: ইছামতি)
Dristi Pradeep (Bengali: দৃষ্টি প্রদীপ)
Chander Pahar (Bengali: চাঁদের পাহাড়)
Heera Manik Jale (Bengali: হীরা মানিক জ্বলে)
Debjan (Bengali: দেবযান)
Bipiner Sangsar
Anubartan
Ashani Sanket
Kedar Raja
Dampati
Sundarbane Sat Batsar-Not completed by him
Dui Bari
Kajol--Sequel of Aparajito -Completed By His Son Taradas
Maroner Danka Baje
Mismider Kabach
Kosi Pranganeyer Chitthi
Aam Aatir Venpu (Bengali: আম আঁটির ভেঁপু)

Partial short story collections

MeghaMallar

Mauriphool

Jatrabadol

"Jonmo o mrittu"

"Kinnardal"

"Benigir fulbari"

"Nabagata"

"Talnabami"

Films based on his works

Pather Panchali (1955)

Aparajito (1956)

Apur Sansar (1959)

Baksa Badal(1970)

Nishipadma(1970)

Amar Prem (1971) [5]

Nimantran(1971)

Ashani Sanket (1973)

Fuleswari(1974)

Alo (2003)

Source: weikipedia and my own