About Vikram Seth's "Two Lives"

Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Didactics - English - Literature, Works, language: English, abstract: migration, and double migration, a diasporic writer is challenged and ruptured by the multiplicity of ambivalent affiliations of language, class, race, gender and sexuality. The writer often tends to deal with these affiliations as a mode of postcolonial grand narrative¹ exposing the theoretical clichés of marginalization and resistance. But a writer of a much greater sensibility transcends these issues and moves towards a global narrative of reconciliation and resolution. A master of every genre ─ whether it is poetry, novels, libretto, travelogue or children book ─ Vikram Seth's Two Lives² exhibits refreshing change in the postcolonial narrative technique. A masterful fusion of biography, memory, autobiography, documentary, history, fiction and essay like excursions, it resists theory biased theme of cultural resistance and gravitates towards a narrative of global resolution. Deeply entrenched in the history of Second World War it is a powerful reminder of the horrors and trauma of the War. Two Lives does not do quite what is expected of a postcolonial narrative or of an English novel in the tradition of Jane Austen (as Seth's magnum opus A Suitable Boy3 is considered).A cosmopolitan4 story, narrated by a truly cosmopolitan writer, It resists any branding of an Indian writing in English.