Ruskin Bond
About the Author
Ruskin Bond was born on 19 May 1934 in Kasauli, a hill resort in the western Himalaya popular with the colonial officials of former British India. He lives in Mussoorie in the Indian state of Uttarakhand.
As his parents' marriage was disharmonious and later ended in divorce, Bond grew up partly with his father in Gujarat and Delhi, partly with his mother and grandparents in Dehradun. He spent most of his school years in boarding schools he did not love.
Bond belongs to the Anglo-Indian minority. On his father's side he is of British, on his mother's side of Anglo-Indian descent. After India became independent in 1947, almost all the British left the country, including a large part of Bond's relatives. After finishing school he spent two years with relatives on the British Channel Islands and two further years in London. There he wrote his first – autobiographically influenced – novel The Room on the Roof, whose first-person narrator, the youthful Rusty, lives in an attic room in Dehradun. After Bond had found a publisher for it and received an advance payment, he used the money to buy a ship's passage to India, where he felt more at home than in England. Several years of journalistic work in Delhi and Dehradun followed. Since 1963 he has lived as a freelance writer in Mussoorie.
Works
Bond's oeuvre comprises short stories and longer tales, novels, essays, travel writing, memoirs and books for young readers. He is very well known and popular in India. His short story collections Time Stops at Shamli (1989) and The Night Train at Deoli (1988) have been reprinted several times. In them Bond draws realistic pictures of different milieus. His protagonists have to work hard, often fighting for sheer survival. A conciliatory element comes into play through humour and subtle irony.
In several works Bond traces the nuanced relationships between Indians and Europeans. The short novel A Flight of Pigeons (1973) is set at the time of the "Sepoy Mutiny" (1857/58), a rebellion of Indian soldiers in the service of the East India Company, which today is regarded as the first Indian struggle for independence. Here Bond tells of the precarious fate of an Anglo-Indian family in the turmoil of that time. In Strange Men, Strange Places (1992) he portrays European adventurers and military men who had entered the service of Indian maharajas in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Bond's books reveal his deep attachment to nature. Early on he denounced environmental sins such as the defacement of the Himalayan mountain world by quarries and deforestation. His travel sketches All Roads lead to Ganga (1992), Rain in the Mountains. Notes from the Himalayas (1993) and Tales of the Open Road (2006) can be read as a homage to his beloved mountains.
In A Face in the Dark and other Hauntings. Collected Stories of the Supernatural (2004) Bond takes up the tradition of the ghost story.
In 2012 the novel Maharani appeared, in 2015 A Book of Simple Living: Brief Notes from the Hills (essays and reflections) and the stories Small Towns, Big Stories, and in 2020 The Call of the Mountains. Tales, Reminiscences, Encounters & Anecdotes.
In 2017 Bond published his autobiography under the title Lone Fox Dancing.
Published in German
- Die Straße zum Basar (The Room on the Roof), Albert Langen Georg Müller, Munich 1958
- Damals zur Zeit des Monsuns, with pen drawings by Ingrid Hegemann. Georg Bitter Verlag, Recklinghausen 1985
- Ein Schwarm Tauben (A Flight of Pigeons), Draupadi Verlag, Heidelberg 2010
- Geschichten aus dem Herzen Indiens (a selection of his short stories), Kitab Verlag, Klagenfurt 2013
Film Adaptations
In 1978 Bond's historical novel A Flight of Pigeons was made into the Hindi film Junoon (roughly: "madness/obsession") under the direction of Shyam Benegal, which became a modern classic of Indian cinema.
In 2005 Vishal Bharadwaj filmed Bond's youth novel The Blue Umbrella (1980).
In 2011 Bond expanded his short story Susanna's Seven Husbands, at Vishal Bharadwaj's request, into a longer novella, which was filmed by Vishal Bharadwaj under the title 7 Khoon Maaf ("Seven Murders Forgiven") – a story carried by black humour about a woman who kills her husbands one after the other.
Detailed Bibliography
Reviews
- Review of "Ein Schwarm Tauben" (rezension.org, in German)
- Thomas Völkner: "Geschichten aus dem Herzen Indiens" on Hamburg local radio (PDF, in German)
Reading Excerpts
The author portrait PDF below additionally contains the excerpt "Gefangen!" from Ein Schwarm Tauben (A Flight of Pigeons) in German translation.
Reinhold Schein
📄 Download this author portrait as PDF (in German, with further bibliography and review links)