This study has attempted a comprehensive survey of Vikram Seth's oeuvre in an endeavour to trace the trajectory of the author's growth as a writer and discuss the major themes and ideas that form the basis of his work. A few conclusions on Seth's location in Indian Writing in English and the general features of his writing can be offered as a way of allowing this examination to culminate.

In the climate of literary practice where the emphasis seems to be predominantly on imagining the nation through the retrieval of histories under erasure and foregrounding, in the attempt, a self-reflexive awareness of the act of narration, Seth marks a departure in several ways. He is perhaps the only Indian writer today to experiment with so many genres of literature: poetry in metre and rhyme that eschew current practices of Indian poets who largely use free verse, a travelogue, a verse novel in sonnets, a classically realistic novel, a modernist novel and a biographic memoir. Though several Indian writers and novelists locate the themes of their work in other geographical areas in addition to India, the shaping consciousness of their work is often Indian, which then leads to liminal and hybrid representations that have now become the concerns of the academic world. Seth's changing locales – India, China, America and Europe – do not exhibit these preoccupations. Moreover, Seth's realism does not question modes of representation, and his novel A Suitable Boy asserts unquestioningly ideas of development and progress of the nation towards a desired secular and modern vision.

The world and its affairs interest Seth and this is discernible in all his works, whether verse or prose.

In 1983 Seth published From Heaven Lake, an account of his unorthodox travels in China using unconventional modes of travel. The book offers an intriguing exploration of places and people in China and Tibet. In his brief introduction to the first edition of the book, Seth tells us that the journey was undertaken when he lived in China as a student at Nanjing University from 1980 to 1982. In the summer of 1981 he returned home to Delhi via Tibet and Nepal. The land route, which he followed on his hitchhiking journey in trucks, originated in the oases of northwest China and went on to the Himalayas crossing four Chinese provinces: Xinjiang (Sinkiang) and Gansu in the northwestern desert, the basin and plateau of Qinghai, and finally Tibet. The travelogue, he says, is based on the journal that he kept and the photographs which he took on the journey. The book received high praise when it came out in Britain and it received the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, Britain's prestigious award for travel writing, for the year 1983. No American publisher however was willing to take it on, and it was published much later by Random House in the wake of the success of The Golden Gate, in the year 1986.

From Heaven Lake is a leisurely account of Seth's travels and has some truly poetic descriptions of the natural landscapes of China and warm evocations of ordinary Chinese men and women with whom he struck up friendship.

While each of Vikram Seth's books is a one-off creation so to speak, The Golden Gate (1986) is uniquely so. Its rise to fame and the subsequent reputation rests largely on the fact that it is written entirely in sonnets. The novel is made up of a sequence of nearly six hundred sonnets in iambic tetrameter over thirteen chapters, with the Acknowledgements, Dedication and a charming Contents list, all in perfect octosyllabic sonnets. A few aspects of the novel's genesis and reception need to be discussed before moving on to an analysis of the work.

Literary Antecedents

The Golden Gate was inspired, as is common knowledge, by Charles Johnston's English translation of the Russian masterpiece Eugene Onegin written in the early 19th century by Pushkin. Pushkin was influenced by Byron and Goethe, and 18th century satirical verse. He attempted to create in this verse novel of eight books a sonnet form that could carry, in the spoken Russian idiom, an ironic comment on contemporary Russian aristocratic society. Eugene Onegin, a feckless fop, is the hero of Pushkin's novel that narrates with pungent and caustic wit the vicissitudes of his career in life and love, satirizing at the same time the aristocratic Russian milieu of the period. Seth was so entranced with two different translations of the novel (that he had picked up, incidentally, intending to study the differences between the translations, wondering if the voice of the poet would sound similar in both) that he found himself devouring stanza after stanza, transported into the world of the novel (Leslie 1986: 5).

Vikram Seth has been termed a citizen of the world and a cultural traveller in more than one study, and academic critics have struggled in vain to place him in tidy categories. His work is housed in a variety of eclectic and traditional forms and the locations of his poetry and prose move across the world, making literary homes of distant lands and cultures. In the contemporary academic climate where increasingly rigid practices of literature and literary theory prevail, Seth's works retrieve an unfashionable pleasure in writing and reading. Seth resists all neat pigeonholes; his work, though it is form and rule bound, flagrantly flouts academic expectations and canons, and is aimed at the general reader. A piquant blend of conservatism and defiant individualism, and an unmatched force in the publishing market, Seth poses a puzzle to the academic critic. His work and the readership together seem to point towards perhaps a first truly internationalliterary phenomenon, and defeat, in a sense, existing critical terminology and academic categories.

The present study attempts to locate him neither as a diasporic nor as a postcolonial writer, though he fits into both categories by virtue of his wanderings across the globe and his temporal location. The study attempts, through close readings of almost all his major publications, to help precipitate significant aspects of his work that is loved by the academic as well as general reader across the world.

Life and Works

Vikram Seth was born in 1952 in Calcutta. His father, Premo Seth, worked for a long time with the Bata Shoe Company and is known in certain circles as Mr Shoe.

An Equal Music (1999) came out to a reading public that was eagerly awaiting Seth's new novel. It was published six years after A Suitable Boy and its reception was naturally shaped by the enormous popularity and hype surrounding the earlier work, which was described in publishing and literary circles as an international bestseller. A second factor that pushed expectations to dizzying heights was Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet getting published around the same time. In about a month's time both authors had media coverage that most well-established writers enjoy in a lifetime. The Seth-Rushdie controversy originated in a media reported spat between the two soon after the publication of A Suitable Boy, which Seth immediately denied in a letter to the Times (Clark 1999). The hype about their new novels was in a way fuelled by expectant publishers, literary editors, music journalists and even general reporters eager for a story. There were elements enough for speculation and curiosity in the fact that two high-profile Indian-born novelists were both publishing novels about music in the same year.

However, though both novels share common themes – music and love – and play out the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice (the parable of love lost and almost restored by the power of music), An Equal Music and The Ground Beneath Her Feet are marked more by their very striking dissimilarities. Rushdie's book is about rock music and is typically exuberant and wildly expansive. As if to escape easy categorization, Seth sets his novel in Europe with an all-white English cast and the high classical tradition of European music as his theme.

In defiance of the international publishing warning of ‘brand disintegration’, which dictates that authors stick to a single sort of book, Vikram Seth has gone from one genre to another, nonchalantly making dust of publishing wisdom and creating his own marketing precedents. Seth secured an estimated 1.4 million pounds (highest so far for a non-fiction book) from his British publishers for Two Lives, a biography of his great uncle and aunt. News items reported that with this advance Seth was catapulted, at least in financial terms, into the ranks of contemporary literature's very elite (Evening Standard 2003). With increasing regularity in the past few years, Seth is described as “the greatest living writer” in newspapers and review journals. The journey that this study has attempted to map is also a graph of Seth's development as a writer, and his phenomenal success in the publishing market.

Reception

While the hype surrounding the release of Two Lives speaks as much about Seth's literary significance as it does of the continuously increasing and overwhelming incursions of the market into every nano-aspect of contemporary life, it also opens up features of Seth's work that we have seen earlier. Whether poetry or fiction, his work is frequently labelled as ‘international’ and ‘popular’, which its sales-worthiness seems to prove true. For Seth's Indian publishers a book by him after seven years was reason enough to celebrate. Seth's Two Lives was the biggest book of the year 2005, and the publishers praising Seth for his unmatched “range and versatility” said, “he is truly international” (quoted in Mandira Nayar 2005).

Women prisoners live in a zone of theoretical anarchy. Patriarchal societies have consistently treated women's crime and women prisoners with neglect and ruthlessness. Research on women's crime and imprisonment has therefore, kept pace with such biases of popular patriarchal imageries.

Framing a methodological position for the study involves the following:

1. a. Selecting methodological tools for research

2. b. Identifying issues and assumptions for the study

3. c. Positioning oneself as a researcher vis-à-vis the subject.

During the research vis-à-vis the prison, women prisoners, and their stories involved traversing a long and layered distance. This process was also achieved as a recoil to the assumptions of mainstream criminology. To put it more dramatically, the research was conceived as an attempt at breaching the many walls of popular bias, academic neglect, and theoretical distortion. The researcher's entry into the prison constituted a breach of walls of bias and letting go of inhibitions. It also required a strong understanding of female sensitivities. In the process of understanding the stories of women prisoners and converting them into objective data for research conclusions, these sensitivities proved to be helpful in preserving the subjectivity of each story.

Research Design

This is a case study that utilises multiple sources of data. The study addresses questions of the nature of ‘how?’ and ‘why?’ The focus of this study is on the lives of women in Indian prisons. The Chanchalguda State Prison for Women was the site chosen for this research, mainly for two reasons:

1. a. There are two State Prisons for women in the state of Andhra Pradesh and the Chanchlaguda Prison is one of them.

Colonialism and patriarchy have silenced the voice of women in the penal history of India. This historiographical silence may be attributed to multiple causes:

1. a. Female criminality never struck public imagination as a dangerous phenomenon.

2. b. Female crimes formed a negligible portion of the overall crime rate, thereby resulting in a scholarly neglect.

3. c. Colonialism bore an administrative diffidence towards gender issues.

This place of women inmates in history, or rather the lack of one, cannot be understood in vacuum. It must be located within the context of ancient, medieval, and colonial judicial system in India and various penal reforms that have had only a ritualistic acknowledgement towards women offenders. These reforms are a self-perpetuating exercise with few results. Women simply become another insignificant category in reform literature. The discussion in the following pages addresses:

1. a. The history of penology in India. This discussion addresses the judicial systems that existed in ancient and medieval India. This discussion is relevant since it not only provides the context for the historical understanding of crime and punishment in India but also the way women fit in this discourse.

2. b. The colonial foundations of the Indian penitentiary. The history of the contemporary penal regime in India begins with the colonial foundations of the criminal justice system. The imperatives and conditions which formed the basis for the evolution of the criminal judicial system were strongly colonial. It is interesting to notice that what seemed to be simple colonial imperatives could adapt traditional intransigence as well as the modernist progressive pretense as regards gender and other inequities.

3. c. Penal Reforms. One after the other these reforms have reproduced the earlier findings.

The study of female crime and an understanding of the stories residing in a women's prison hold multiple meanings for feminist theory. The marginalised domain of female criminality also involves powerful anecdotes on the biases of mainstream criminology. This chapter leverages an understanding of the changing context of Indian society and feminist sensitivities in laying out the stories of women prisoners in India. In bringing out the divergences, dilemmas and ironies of women offenders lives in India, the study re-looks at the categoric and causal fixations of mainstream criminology.

The endeavour of understanding the range of factors and conditions that occasion crime requires a holistic understanding of the act of offence and its relation to cultural or social practices. The stories of women prisoners told in the course of interviews have been used to generate data and deployed as narratives of the journey of women from everyday contexts of confinement to their present context of a designated prison. The ironies of this journey resist getting immured into any categories or being hauled into fmalistic theories.

This chapter begins with the first challenge in studying marginalised populations. In this case it is about women in prison. This is the challenge of representation. Representing women in prison and ‘speaking for them’ continues to be a challenge in feminist research.

An abiding interest in ethnographic research on women's crimes and punishments in India took me to one of the most opaque institutions in the world – a women's prison. I often try to remember what aroused my interest in the lives of women who violate legal regulations. Was it the ‘Phoolan story’, that my mother used to tell me when I was a kid? Was it an intellectual curiosity to understand why and how women in a deeply entrenched patriarchal society like India violate laws? Or was it simply a personal desire to celebrate female agency? I still do not know. It probably did begin with my childhood stories of Phoolan – the ‘female Robin Hood’ of India.

The narrative of Phoolan Devi is among the many narratives of female offenders who have captivated postcolonial India. It is the story of a young girl's abuse in her family, her revenge, the way she eludes law and order, surrenders to the government, emerges as a public figure, and finally gets assassinated.

The story of Phoolan Devi, India's most famous female offender has spawned legends, literary productions, research studies and theories, an output that qualifies as a genre of thought and imagination in modern India. The Phoolan Devi story is a potent pool of symbols and meanings that captures and signifies the anxieties, aspirations, paradoxes, dilemmas and dynamics of a changing India.

Phoolan Devi first stepped on to the national stage in 1983 when she ‘surrendered’ during a public function in Bhopal, before the Chief Minister of the Indian State of Madhya Pradesh and other VIPs.

Issues of women's crime and imprisonment constitute a contested terrain in Indian academic research. Shankardass (2000) rightly argues that studies and theories in these areas are beset by the twin difficulties posed by the male-centric bias of mainstream criminology and the limitations of its Eurocentric origins.

To begin with, the discussion examines theoretical accounts of women's crimes. Explanations for women's crimes have revolved primarily around biological determinism and socio-economic contexts. Most research in India has followed these traditions. Feminist perspectives in the West have broadened the scope by introducing a critical component that addresses race, gender, sexuality, and class. Post colonial theory in India has critiqued the modernist and imperial project. Feminism in India has had its formative inspiration in this larger critical venture and also its theoretical agenda has been strongly influenced by issues of caste, class, and gender; their changing forms and roles in modernising India. However, it is a struggle to find any literature that deals with critical understanding of women who offend and about the treatment they receive by the society and in prisons.

Secondly, the study delves into extant researches on the lives of women in prison. Studying women's crimes tells us one side of the story, but what about the other side? This is the story of the reactions of the society to women's offences. It is in this context that the prison emerges as a central institution.

While laying out the accounts of women prisoners and casting them through the available theoretical and conceptual frameworks, this study endeavours to preserve the sense of subversion inherent in mainstream theory along with the militant notes of the women's stories. It has been possible to counteract the subversion by invoking a whole range of ideological sensitivities and by throwing some light on the possibilities of understanding these stories in the context of culture, the Indian family structure, economic marginalisation, abuse, resistance, and sexuality. The dependence on feminist perspective has ensured that multiple possibilities of understanding could be sustained in a single critical framework.

Historical Relevance

Historical analysis enables insight into societal perceptions of what is considered crime by women and how society prescribes penalties against them. Most literature on women's crimes and women's prisons in India is characterised by ahistoricity (Sanyal, 1975; Ahuja 1989; Sharma 1989; Singh 1980; Bajpai and Bajpai 2000). It would be a partially futile exercise if the research fails to acknowledge the importance of history.

India is an age-old civilisation and its history does not begin with colonialism. Through an examination of historical trends, this study shows that the issue of morality is critical when it comes to defining women's crime. In both Ancient and Medieval India, women's transgressions revolved around adultery and prostitution. Kautilya's Arthasastra (Shamasastry, 1956), played an important role in defining crimes by women. Women's crimes for Kautilya were in the nature of ‘transgression, vagrancy, elopement, and sojournments’.

Punishment regimes in a women's prison often operate in close relation with visible and invisible forms of social control. Daily lives of women inmates in any prison must be understood in conjunction with control, since control is the most defining moment in a prison. Prisons are part of a larger societal network, and replicate the societal ideologies of defining control over women. Carlen (1983) in her classic Women's Imprisonment: A Study in Social Control, focuses on the ‘prison moment’ and Howe (1994) rightly argues that Carlen places the analysis of female imprisonment firmly and irrevocably in the broader context of the social control of women.

In her introduction, Carlen writes that her book is not primarily about Cornton Vale or about women prisoners. She contends that it is a book about wider meanings of the moments of prison – meanings which cannot be retained within one particular institution. Though Carlen focuses on Cornton Vale, her intellectual speculations may be applied to wider contexts as well. This study is an attempt to make sense of these wider moments of control in the Chanchalguda prison.

The term ‘control’ is probably one of the most widely used catchwords in criminological and penological literature. In this context, it is used to refer to a gender-specific control that is exercised over women prisoners. The term ‘control’ does not simply refer to an authority from above. It could mean multiple interactions which confine women prisoners to the conventional and patriarchal structures. This can happen through both visible (overt rules and regulations) and invisible (interaction with prison authorities) mechanisms. The visible forms are easier to comprehend. Informal controls are more difficult to analyse.

Retention of key professionals has become a major challenge for organisations. They spend a tremendous amount of time, effort and cost in evolving retention strategies. To manage the attrition rate, organisations are offering attractive benefits such as Employees Stock Option Policies (ESOPs) to the employees. As cost of interviewing, recruiting, relocating, training and compensating employees rise, the Human Resource managers are impelled to do a better planning job. The costs associated with recruiting and orienting new professional and managerial employees are often astounding when the rates of attrition during the first two years are taken into account.

The value of an experienced employee may exceed the total costs incurred. The replacement cost raises the question that if all the employees were to leave tomorrow, what would it cost to replace them at their present level of competence. This may be 3–5 times the annual total payroll of a company. But this is an average estimate and actual replacement costs depends on specific capabilities desired for each position and the availability of talent.

Appreciate employees for good work

Studies show that people are more comfortable to stay in jobs where they feel appreciated rather than where they might be paid more. It must be remembered that good pay and perks can always be matched by your competitors – it is only the great work places that will make significant difference to the quality of the organisation. The seniors genuinely share the joys and sorrows of their subordinates. Employees should be involved in decision-making process and suggestion schemes so that they feel like a part of the organisation.