Manoj das biography books online

Novelist, short story writer, educator, editor, literary journalist, exponent of Indian culture and spirituality, Manoj Das would be remembered, most of all, as a narrator and story teller par excellence who belonged to and reclaimed the traditions of Panchatantra, the Jataka Tales and Katha Sarita Sagar for contemporary needs.

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I have now read the stories of Manoj Das with very great pleasure.

Another critic noted memorably:’ Das’s forte is his conversation style married to a knack of reworking the classic ghost story. For his creative writings, he chose essentially the form of the Novel and Short Stories in English and Odia.

Wide Appeal:

Manoj Das came from a remote hamlet of coastal Odisha; And yet, at the time of his demise, he was mourned widely by the world of literature and culture, politics and public services.

(Honoris Causa). Some of his best-known works in English are the following: A Tiger at Twilight, The Submerged Valley, The Bridge in the Moonlit Night, Cyclones, Mystery of the Missing Cap and Myths, Legends, Concepts and Literary Antiquities of India. 

Chasing the Rainbow: Growing Up in an Indian Village, Oxford, 2004, a collection of memoirs, records the author’s childhood experiences in his remote village where the child protagonist ‘could run across a green meadow studded with palm trees, dreaming of catching the end of a huge rainbow spanning the sky’.

To be in love was risky enough. But the next morning one of us would confide to another and we would all know by evening that he had caught a glimpse of the girl, standing on the broken terrace gazing at the moon or looking down at the river shedding tears which fell like drops of gold.

‘It was nothing new, yet we were thrilled every time and would gather on the river-bank again the next evening.

‘Any of us village boys would have done anything to help her in some way.

He saw no contradictions in creative self-expressions in English and his mother tongue Odia, anchored to the rich repertoire of India’s Bhasha traditions.  He integrated the secular and spiritual traditions, the world of fantasy and realism through the magic prism of stories, legends and novels.
Here is India's foremost bilingual writer whose use of the two languages he writes in is uniquely original.

Most recently, in 2020, his biography of the Master, based on years of research, entitled Sri Aurobindo: The Life and Times of the Mahayogi was published by the Sri Aurobindo International Center of Education Pondicherry. He is the former Vice Chancellor of the Central University of Odisha. The Sahitya Akademi conferred on him its highest honor, the Fellowship for life time.

Lasting Legacy:

‘In our own times’, wrote K.

R. Srinivasa Iyengar, the doyen of the  Indian Writing in English, masters like  Premchand, Masti, Mulk Raj Anand  and  Vaikkom  Mohammed  Basheer  have  made their mark as exemplars  of this art. And to be in love with a ghost was surely dangerous. This, according to Manoj Das, formed the bedrock of Indian culture, diverse and pluralistic  with a   set of core  values  that unified us all.

Early Beginnings:

Born on 27.02.1934  at the Sankhari village on the eastern sea board of Odisha, to Madhusudan Das and Kadambini Devi, Manoj Das grew up in Nature’s bounty [and devastations too like floods, famines and cyclones] that  often  act as the settings of his creative  and critical work.

After early learning at nearby Jamalpur and Balasore, he had higher education in English Literature and Law at Cuttack. When the fitful breeze made waves of the tall yellow grass around it, the house looked like a phantom castle floating on an unreal sea.
Worthy is a relative term. The Odisha Sahitya Akademi also bestowed on him its highest honor, the Atibadi Jagannath Das Samman.

Such was the reach of his writings commemorated by novelist icons like Graham Greene, R. K. Narayan and Ruskin Bond and critics like K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar.