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Upamanyu Chatterjee (born in 1959) is an Indian Administrative Servant who currently serves as Joint Secretary to Government of India on the Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board. He is a 1983 batch I.A.S from Maharashtra Cadre. He is a published author and best known for his novel ‘English August’ also adapted into a film of the same title. His literary taste is so amazing and appreciating that he could write many realistic novels with his hard and busy duty of an administrative official. It’s another matter that Upamanyu Chatterjee is a novelist of a disillusioned age. He is by his education and heritage, a misfit in the modern world. He had a profound sense of his age. Being an administrative officer Upamanyu Chatterjee digs deep into the root of the Indian administrative system realistically He is pre-eminently concerned with urban life. Though the places in his novels are the tiny cities and villages, but he portrays the features of big cities realistically. His novels are of streets, houses and people and not of the woods, fields and flowers. We are much impressed by his characters and their gross selfishness and sensuality. The novels of Chatterjee are pervaded by symbolism such as dissmelled steak in passage ways, of stale beer, of cocktails and cigarettes, of dusty paper flowers, of females in shuttered. These things altogether show the inevitable gloom as well as the realistic, if not naturalistic picture of a metro city, Delhi, quite apart and away from the life of Madna, the life of insanity and boredom. In a way, he exposes the reality of his contemporary society and politics as well with his own vision that’s his realism and for this purpose,he employs symbolism to express the bitter things indirectly. My research paper has attempted to focus on his novelistic art of the above mentioned I.A.S.

Keywords

Novelistic; Art; I.A.S. Realism; Vision; Symbolism; Socio-Moral; Bureaucrats;Isolation; Irony; Embarrassing.

1. Rao,Vimala Rama, Rev. of English, August: An Indian Story. The Literary Criterion. Vol.27, No.4, 1992. pp.78-79.


2. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘The Last Burden’, Penguin Books, London, 1993, P.– 03


3. Kanga, Firdaus, ‘The Tribune’, Vol. II, No. III, 1993, P.–34.


4. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘The Last Burden’, Penguin Books, London, 1993, P.–303


5. Sharma, Anjana. "What others have to say about Upamanyu Chatterjee". Upamanyu Chatterjee at the complete review. Retrieved 26 June 2011.


6. Naik Dr. M. K, “A History of Indian English Literature”, Sahitya Academy, New Delhi, 1982.


7. Ravi,P.S., Modem Indian Fiction: History, Politics and Individual in the Novels of Rushdie, Ghose and Chatterjee. Delhi: Prestige Books, 2003.


8. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘English, August’, Faber and Faber, London, 1988, P.–01-10


9. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘The Last Burden’, Penguin Books, London, 1993, P.–05-12.


10. Chatterjee, Upamanyu,‘The Mammaries of the Welfare State’, Penguin Books,London, 2000, P. 12-15.


11. Naikar, Vasabraj, ‘Indian English Novel’, Sterling Publishers, New Delhi, 1997, Vol. IV, P.–65.


12. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘The Mammaries of the Welfare State’, Penguin Books, London, 2000, P.–33.


13. ‘The Hindu’, Delhi edition, 14th Dec.2006.


14. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘Weight Loss’, Penguin India, 2006, P.–07-22


15. Chatterjee, Upamanyu, ‘English, August’, Faber and Faber, London, 1988, P.– 02-13.


16. Glasgow Herald Review, Vol. III, No. VI, 1993, P.–34