Vikram Seth Two Lives: A Literature of Global Protogonism

Pages:258-261
Satyavati and Prem Parkash Khatri (Research Scholar, Singhania University Jhunjhunu Rajasthan, Research Supervisor, Singhania University Jhunjhunu Rajasthan)

Vikram Seth’s Two Lives, published in 2005,1 is a work centred on questions of expatriate diasporic identity, not easy either to define generically or to place spatially and culturally within the globalising literary economy of the early twenty-first century. It is a non-fiction narrative, set mostly in Germany and England, which chronicles the lives of two of Seth’s own relatives across the second two-thirds of the twentieth century. There is nothing naïve or simplistic about this work: rather, it raises complex issues concerning the relationship between text and history, while also exploring questions of identity and belonging in terms that ultimately point beyond the very category of postcolonial writing into which Seth’s volume apparently falls.