Vikram Seth

A Suitable Boy, Vikram’s epic, best-selling novel about post-colonial India, put him into the public gaze and won several awards. Its length alone, at 1,300 pages, is a talking point, and it took the author ten years to write.

His most recent book, Two Lives, published in 2005, is a personal and loving memoir of his “Shanti Uncle” and “Aunty Henny”, his great-uncle and German Jewish aunt, who first met in Germany and left before the Holocaust, and of their marriage and life in post-war Britain.

But very few of us know that Vikram has translated more than 20 Indian texts to create a work themed on the ages of man.

Vikram has translated from many Indian languages – Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Tamil – and from a variety of sources, ranging from the Buddhist scripture, Dhammapada to something from the Sanskrit text, Bhagavad Gita.

Now, if one tries to take one language pair at a time, think of the nature of the text he has translated, and ponder over it, one will realise not only the gigantic efforts of Vikram, but also his multi-faceted mastery.