Neelum Saran Gour is a well-known Indian English writer of fiction who represents a special category of fiction that arose in the early 1990s and depicted the world of North India's small towns and their vibrant cultural histories. She is the author of five novels, four collections of short stories and one work of literary non-fiction. She has edited a pictorial volume on the history and culture of the city of Allahabad, where she lives and works, and has also translated one of her early novels into Hindi. In recent years she has come to be recognized as one of the leading practitioners of Indian English fiction coming out of the North Indian heartland.
Early life and education
Born in Allahabad, Neelum Saran Gour is the child of a Bengali mother and a Hindiphone father and was exposed to an array of languages and cultural influences in her childhood. Educated in St. Mary's Convent Inter College, a school run by Roman Catholic nuns, she went on to study History, Philosophy and English Literature at the University of Allahabad in the early nineteen seventies. In the course of an outstanding career in University, where she topped consistently in every academic year, she won ten gold and silver medals for academic brilliance. Soon afterwards in 1977 she was appointed Lecturer in English in the Department of English at the Allahabad University. She has taught at the University since 1977 and now holds the position of Professor in her subject, English Literature. Her real identity is that of a prolific novelist, short story writer, folklorist, reviewer, critic and online columnist.
Career
Neelum Saran Gour's first writings were magazine stories published in popular Indian literary magazines of the nineteen eighties. One of these was spotted by the Managing Director of the newly opened Penguin India, David Davidar, and he solicited her for a volume of short stories. The famous debut collection Grey PigeonAnd Other Stories was released by Penguin India in 1993. It received rave reviews, winning Gour a Writers’ Fellowship in Britain from the '. Her next book, a novel, was titled Speaking of '62 and was published by Penguin in 1995. This was followed in 1997 by Winter Companions And Other Stories. In 2002 appeared Virtual Realities and in 2005 two novels were published, Sikandar Chowk Park by Penguin, and Messres Dickens, Doyle and Wodehouse Pvt.Ltd. by Halcyon Books. Both received highly positive reviews in many Indian magazines and journals, bringing Gour to the forefront of Indian fiction writing. Her work was covered by critical volumes of international stature like the Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-colonialLiteratures, edited by Eugene Benson and L.W. Conolly, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Women’s Writing, edited by Lorna Sage, Germaine Greer and Elaine Showalter, Companion to Indian Fiction In English, edited by Pier Paolo Piciucco, and Indian English Literature 1980 -2000 by M.K.Naik and Shyamala Narayan. Recent critical writings on her work are included in Emerging South Asian Writers, Edited by Feroza Jussawalla and Deborah Fillerup Weagel and in Contemporary Fiction: An Anthology of Female Writers, edited by Vandana Pathak, Urmila Dabir and Shubha Mishra. 2009 witnessed the release of the pictorial volume Allahabad Where The Rivers Meet, edited by Gour and published by Marg Publications. It was a runaway best-seller, earning Gour the position of Allahabad's representative literary voice to a large readership of the Indian diaspora. In 2010 Penguin –Yatra published a Hindi translation of Gour's early novel Speaking of 62, done by Gour herself and titled '62 Ki Baatein. 2011 saw the launch of Song Without End And Other Stories by Penguin. A work of non-fiction followed in 2015, the celebrated literary history of the Allahabad University, Three Rivers And A Tree – The Story Of Allahabad University, published by . This was followed, in the same year, by Allahabad Aria, also published by Rupa Publications and Invisible Ink, published in late 2015 by HarperCollins. Her latest novel is Requiem In Raga Janki, published in June 2018 by Penguin Viking. Apart from these exclusively authored works, her work has appeared in numerous fiction and non-fiction anthologies like: Desert in Bloom- Contemporary Indian Women’s Fiction In English, edited by Meenakshi Bharat,, Growing Up As A Woman Writer, edited by Jasbir Jain, The Fear Factor, Edited by Sharon Rundle and Meenakshi Bharat, Only Connect, edited by Sharon Rundle and Meenakshi Bharat ), Indian English And Vernacular India, edited by Makarand Paranjape and G.J.V.Prasad, The Creative Process- Seven Essays,and Learning Non-violence, edited by Gangeya Mukherji. Gour's critical writings include RajaRao’s Metaphysical Trilogy, as also her book reviews for TheIndian Review Of Books and for the Times Literary Supplement'. As a journalist she was a humour columnist for the Allahabad page of TheHindustan Times. She has conducted Creative Writing workshops for the Sahitya Akademi and the Central University of Rajasthan, researched and worked on a BBC T.V. Series Who Do You Think You Are? in which Rupert Penry-Jones searched for his family history, aired internationally on 16 August 2010. Her novel Sikandar Chowk Park was prescribed for study in the M.A. course of the Charles University Prague. Her story A Lane In Lucknow is prescribed for study in the M.A. course of the U.G.C.’s e- Pathshala project.
