Reviews
Ruskin Bond. The India I Love.
New Delhi: Rupa, Pages 144, Price Rs.295 (hb),
ISBN 0-67-091170-4.
If you are expecting a glossy, fast-paced, technically sophisticated, Bondlike cinematic art translated for the page, you will not find it in our Bond’s The India I Love. Instead, in Ruskin Bond’s new collection of prose and poetry, the tone is languorous, the world he describes is largely set in the hills. It is full of local characters he periodically meets, the pleasures of afternoon naps and walks in the hills, and his love for the natural world of mountains, rivers, and the seasons.
His writing is private, inward, unhurried, universal, and simplistic. It never pretends to be otherwise — and this is Ruskin Bond’s strength — that of unpretentiousness. And he corroborates this in his preface, “The India that I love does not make the headlines.”
The book contains nineteen pieces, and almost always his prose is more convincing than his poetry. If his publishers had judiciously insisted this book to be one of meditations, reflections and musings of Bond, its spine would have held together more tenaciously.
While his non-fiction is charming, full of love, and almost patrician — his poetry is essentially prose lines broken up and arranged in column format. In as much as anything that is written in a modern-day colour-supplement-oriented weekend newspaper, his free verse without any formal architecture could pass off as poetry. But short of giving a bad name to modern poetry, it disappoints a serious lover of verse, more so when it is penned by one of India’s “well-known writers … and raconteur par excellence”.
However, his gentle diary-like prose that is full of “philosophical acceptance of hardships, love and affection” is vintage Ruskin Bond. And that he has the love and zeal for life and things that are clean-hearted and pure at his age inspite of what the market demands is noble and honourable.
Page(s) 385
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