Vilas Sarang - Overview of Sarang's Work

Overview of Sarang's Work

One of the most significant modernist Marathi writer, Vilas Sarang has written remarkable short stories, poems, a novel and also brilliant pieces of criticism in his first language Marathi as well as in English. His Marathi short story collections are 'Soledad' (1975) and 'Atank' (1999) and translations of his stories in English are collected in 'A Fair Tree of the Void' (1990) and more recently `The Women in the Cages' (2006). A selection of his short stories also appeared in French translation in 1988. His English novel 'The Dinosaur Ship'(2005) and his Marathi novel is `Enkichya Rajyat'. His Marathi collection of poems is published under the title Kavita 1969-1984 and his collection of English poems is published as 'A Kind of Silence'(1978). He has also written significant criticism in Marathi 'Sisyphus ani Bolakka' and 'Aksharanchya Shrama Kela'(2000).He has also published The Stylistics of Literary Translation ( 1988 ) and edited the anthology Indian English Poetry Since 1950 ( 1989. He has also edited reputed literary journals like the Bombay Review and The Post Post Review.

The quest for primitive source of human existence is an important feature of his writings. His short stories are often surreal and have often been compared to Kafka. For instance, in one of his stories collected in The Women in Cages, the narrator finds himself transformed into a gigantic phallus. In another more well known story, a person named Chako is marooned on an island where women have either upper half of their bodies or the lower half. Sarang is awovedly anti-representational modernist in his aesthetics and provides a refreshing alternative to over-hyped `diaspora' and `exiled' non-resident Indian English writers like Salman Rushdie, VS Naipaul and Kiran Desai.

Sarang sees himself as “a bilingual writer”. Indeed, as a post-colonial Indian, he has a complex relationship with language. Having published stories and articles in both Marathi and English, he acknowledges that he has a “divided psyche” - while his unconscious is “rooted in Marathi”, leaving him with a sense of greater freedom and inventiveness in Marathi, he nevertheless feels that the “definitive text ” of his creations lies invariably in their English versions, since English enables him to bring his works “before the world” (“Confessions of a Marathi Writer”, p. 309).

Various literary influences can be perceived in the writings of Sarang. The “Marathi Navakatha” (New Story) writers of the 1950s and 1960s led Sarang to use the short-story form. The modernisation of Marathi poetry by B.S.Mardhekar in the 1940s and further poetical innovation by unconventional Marathi poets like Dilip Chitre and Arun Kolatkar in the post-Independence era enabled Sarang to explore new avenues in his own poetical creations. Western European writers like Kafka, Camus, Sartre and Beckett also offered Sarang “a liberating route to self-realization” as a writer, beyond the narrow, conformist paths that Marathi literature has taken since the 1980s, tending to a closed absorption in nativism and a fundamentalist Indian-versus-Western dichotomy. Sarang, on the contrary, is interested in experimenting with his own creativity by transcending the parameters of Indianness and Westernisation (“Confessions of a Marathi Writer”, p. 310-311).

His Marathi book 'सर्जनशोध आणि लिहिता लेखक' (Pursuit of Creation and Author Engaged in Writing) received an award of Government of Maharashtra in year 2008.