Bond's Literary Style Bond's most writings show the influence of the social life of the hilly life of Himalaya's foot hills. He spent his childhood in that region. His literary style is different in the way that it tries to make its readers understood the landscape through carefully chosen words. While going through his text his awesome description of flora and fauna captivates the attraction of the readers. In the span of his writing career covering thirty five years, he wrote hundred short stories, essays, novels and more than thirty books for children. Three collections of short stories, The Night Train at Deoli, Time Stops at Shamli and Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra have been published through Penguin India. He has edited two anthologies too named The Penguin Book of Indian Ghost Stories and The Penguin Book of Indian Railway Stories. Bonds writing are greatly influenced by the hills, and the valley of Dehradun. Few Important Books by Ruskin Bond It has taken the better half of fifty years for Ruskin Bond, one of India's most prolific writers in English for adults and children, to receive the critical attention that he deserves. Quietly, Bond has been writing novels, poems, essays, and countless short stories for his mostly Indian fans since the 1950s, yet critics have tended to pay more attention to expatriate Indians rather than the indigenous, especially those known mostly for writing children's literature. Meena Khorana, in her critical biography of Bond, therefore has the daunting task of making up for neglect and lost time, and she does an impressive job of covering a vast career in a slim volume. Not only does she give the most complete and sophisticated look at Bond up to now, but her work also helps to define the post-independence Indian literary identity and its relation to British influences. The first five chapters of Khorana's book follow Ruskin Bond's life, with a particular focus on his childhood and adolescence, the periods most influential in his writing, in the mountains and cities of northern India. We see the young Ruskin migrate from his home in India, to Britain for a short, but crucial period, and back to the foothills of the Himalayas, where he has stayed, more or less, ever since. Along the way, he deals with his mixed British and Indian identity and perseveres in his tireless effort to survive as a writer. While Khorana is a careful biographer, there were a few moments when I was hoping for a bit more, particularly on Bond's failed proposal to a Vietnamese woman in Britain, and his going to trial in India on charges of obscenity, of all things. Still, the real value in the biographical section is in Khorana's gliding naturally into critical discussions of Bond's usually autobiographical work, including The Room on the Roof (1956), The Young Vagrants (1957), and many short stories and poems. Khorana distances Bond from those to whom he is often compared, such as Kipling, by aligning him with other post-independence writers like Godden and Macfarlane, who, as she claims, along with Bond, tend to deconstruct the colonial novel. Moving away from the biographical format, Chapters 6 and 7 are insightful critical essays focusing on Bond's vision of childhood and his use of natural imagery, with a focus on his writing for children. In the last chapter, she admirably defends Bond from his detractors, though at this point it hardly seems necessary. Awards Won by Bond’s Books |