Umashankar Joshi was a prominent Gujarati author. He was born in the small village of Bamana in the hill area of Shamalaji, north Gujarat, in 1911. He joined the nationalist movement in the 1930s, giving up his college education temporarily. After writing poems and short stories, in 1932 he tried his hand at one-act drama while in prison. Most of his plays collected under the title Sapna bhara i.e. `Bagful of Snakes` in 1936 come from this period. He graduated in 1936 and, after completing his MA in 1938, he started teaching. Umashankar Joshi rose to become Vice-Chancellor of Gujarat University in Ahmedabad and Visva-Bharati in Shantiniketan. He was also the Chairman of Sahitya Akademi.

Umashankar Joshi`s one-act plays reflect the reality of what he had seen during his childhood in rural north Gujarat, but always contain his unshaken faith in humanism. He was perhaps the first Gujarati writer to express disillusionment with India`s newly acquired independence in Haveli i.e. `Mansion` in 1959. He experimented with short verse drama, collected in Prachina or `Ancient` in 1944 and in Samagra kavita i.e. `Collected Poems` in 1981, using Sanskrit metres as well as free-flowing prosody. Umashankar Joshi lived his life till 1988.

This article is a stub. You can enrich by adding more information to it. Send your Write Up to content@indianetzone.com