Chaman Nahal


Chaman Nahal commonly known as C Nahal, also known as Chaman Nahal Azadi, was an Indian born writer of English literature. He was widely considered as one of the best exponents of Indian writing in English and is known for his work, Azadi, which is set on India's Independence and her partition. He is also known for his depiction of Mahatma Gandhi as a complex character with human failings.

Life and career

Chaman Nahal was born in Sialkot, in pre-Independence India, a province in the present day Pakistan, in 1927. After having his school education locally, he did his master's in English at University of Delhi in 1948. He continued his education as a British Council Scholar at University of Nottingham and obtained a PhD in English in 1961.
During his education, he worked as a lecturer (1949–1962. In 1962, he joined Rajasthan University, Jaipur as reader in English. The next year, he moved to New Delhi as professor of English at the University of New Delhi.
He was a Fulbright fellow at Princeton University, New Jersey and served as a visiting professor at various universities in the United States, Malaysia, Japan, Singapore, Canada and North Korea. He was also a fellow at Cambridge College in 1991 and worked as columnist for the Indian Express, writing a column, Talking about Books from 1966 to 1973. He died on November 29, 2013 in New Delhi, India.

List of works

Novels
WorkPublisherYear
My True FacesOrient1973
Into Another DawnSterling1977
The English QueensVision1979
Sunrise in FijiAllied1988
Azadi Arnold-Heinemann & Boston
Houghton Mifflin		1975
The Crown and the LoinclothVikas1981
The Salt of LifeAllied1990
The Triumph of the TricolourAllied1993
The Gandhi QuartetAllied1993

Short story collection
WorkPublisherYear
The Weird Dance and Other StoriesArya1965

Uncollected short stories
WorkPublisherYear
"Tons"The Statesman1977
"The Light on the Lake"Illustrated Weekly of India1984
"The Take Over"Debonair1984

Others
WorkPublisherYear
Moby Dick, adaptation of the novel by Herman MelvilleEurasia1965
A Conversation with J. KrishnamurtiArya1965
D.H. Lawrence: An Eastern ViewSouth Brunswick, NJ, A.S. Barnes1971
The Narrative Pattern in Ernest Hemingway's FictionVikas New Delhi & Rutherford, New Jersey
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press		1971
Drugs and the Other Self: An Anthology of Spiritual TransformationsHarper1971
The New Literatures in EnglishAllied1985
The Bhagavad GitaPitamber1987
Jawaharlal Nehru as a Man of LettersAllied1990

Bibliography
In The New Literatures in English, 1985
Critical Studies on Chaman Nahal
WorkAuthor/editorPublisherYear
Commonwealth Literature in the CurriculumK.L. GoodwinUniversity of Queensland Press1980
Introduction to The Crown and the LoinclothA KomorovRaduga1984
Three Contemporary Novelists:
Khushwant Singh, Chaman Nahal, and Salman Rushdie		R.K. DhawanClassical1985

Memoir
Children's novels
WorkPublisherYear
Akela and the Blue MonsterAruvik & Allied2007
Akela and the Asian TsunamiAruvik & Allied2009
Akela and the UFOsAruvik & Allied2009

Literary review

Chaman Nahal's writings are known to talk about India without any touch of exoticism. Azadi, his novel on the partition of India, is widely considered to be the best of the Indian-English novels written about the traumatic partition which accompanied Indian Independence in 1947. An autobiographical book, Silent Life, was originally written in English and later translated into 12 languages, including Russian, Hungarian and Sinhalese.

Awards and honours