Chaman Nahal
# Chaman Nahal

Chaman Nahal commonly known as C Nahal, also known as Chaman Nahal Azadi, was an Indian born writer of English literature. He was widely considered one of the best exponents of Indian writing in English and is known for his work, Azadi, which is set on India's Independence and her partition. He is also known for his depiction of Mahatma Gandhi as a complex character with human failings.

## Life and career

Chaman Nahal was born in Sialkot, in pre-Independence India, a province in the present day Pakistan, in 1927. After having his school education locally, he did his master's in English at University of Delhi in 1948. He continued his education as a British Council Scholar at University of Nottingham (1959–61) and obtained a PhD in English in 1961. During his education, he worked as a lecturer (1949–1962). In 1962, he joined Rajasthan University, Jaipur as reader in English. The next year, he moved to New Delhi as professor of English at the University of New Delhi. He was a Fulbright fellow at Princeton University, New Jersey and served as a visiting professor at various universities in the United States, Malaysia, Japan, Singapore, Canada and North Korea. He was also a fellow at Cambridge College in 1991 and worked as columnist for the Indian Express, writing a column talking about books from 1966 to 1973. He died on 29 November 2013 in New Delhi, India.

## List of works

Novels

| Work | Publisher | Year |
| - | - | - |
| My True Faces | Orient | 1973 |
| Into Another Dawn | Sterling | 1977 |
| The English Queens | Vision | 1979 |
| Sunrise in Fiji | Allied | 1988 |
| Azadi (Freedom) | Arnold-Heinemann & Boston Houghton Mifflin | 1975 |
| The Crown and the Loincloth | Vikas | 1981 |
| The Salt of Life | Allied | 1990 |
| The Triumph of the Tricolour | Allied | 1993 |
| The Gandhi Quartet | Allied | 1993 |

Short story collection

| Work | Publisher | Year |
| - | - | - |
| The Weird Dance and Other Stories | Arya | 1965 |

Uncollected short stories

| Work | Publisher | Year |
| - | - | - |
| "Tons" | The Statesman | 1977 |
| "The Light on the Lake" | Illustrated Weekly of India | 1984 |
| "The Take Over" | Debonair | 1984 |

Others

| Work | Publisher | Year |
| - | - | - |
| Moby Dick (for children), adaptation of the novel by Herman Melville | Eurasia | 1965 |
| A Conversation with J. Krishnamurti | Arya | 1965 |
| D.H. Lawrence: An Eastern View | South Brunswick, NJ, A.S. Barnes | 1971 |
| The Narrative Pattern in Ernest Hemingway's Fiction | Vikas New Delhi & Rutherford, New Jersey Fairleigh Dickinson University Press | 1971 |
| Drugs and the Other Self: An Anthology of Spiritual Transformations | Harper | 1971 |
| The New Literatures in English | Allied | 1985 |
| The Bhagavad Gita | Pitamber | 1987 |
| Jawaharlal Nehru as a Man of Letters | Allied | 1990 |

Bibliography

In The New Literatures in English, 1985

Critical Studies on Chaman Nahal

| Work | Author/editor | Publisher | Year |
| - | - | - | - |
| Commonwealth Literature in the Curriculum | K.L. Goodwin | University of Queensland Press | 1980 |
| Introduction to The Crown and the Loincloth | A Komorov | Raduga | 1984 |
| Three Contemporary Novelists: Khushwant Singh, Chaman Nahal, and Salman Rushdie | R.K. Dhawan | Classical | 1985 |

Memoir

| Work | Publisher | Year |
| - | - | - |
| Silent Life | Roli Books | 2005 |

Children's novels

| Work | Publisher | Year |
| - | - | - |
| Akela and the Blue Monster | Aruvik & Allied | 2007 |
| Akela and the Asian Tsunami | Aruvik & Allied | 2009 |
| Akela and the UFOs | Aruvik & Allied | 2009 |

## Literary review

Chaman Nahal's writings are known to talk about India without any touch of exoticism. Azadi, his novel on the partition of India, is widely considered to be the best of the Indian-English novels written about the traumatic partition which accompanied Indian Independence in 1947 (Quoted from '’Train to Pakistan – Azadi : Vice-versa Journey'’ by Dr. Mangalkumar R. Patil). An autobiographical book, Silent Life, was originally written in English and later translated into 12 languages, including Russian, Hungarian and Sinhalese.

## Awards and honours

| Award | Year |
| - | - |
| Sahitya Akademi Award | 1977 |
| Federation of Indian Publishers award | 1977 |
| Federation of Indian Publishers award | 1979 |
