Author: Suguna Iyer
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 185
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0141007664
Description
A masterly evocation of life in southern India and of the conflict between tradition and modernity, this is an unusual novel that brings alive a world rarely explored in Indian fiction. A novel about love, passion, and the pursuit of knowledge.
In 1921, while on his way to England, N. S. Ramachandran stumbled upon a riddle that was to drive him for the rest of his life: why was the sea blue, even when there was no sunlight and no blue sky for it to reflect? The Young scientist returned to India, eager to start work on the problem of optical phenomena. With his assistants Subramaniam and Seshadri, he embarked on a voyage of discovery that was a culminate in the NSR effect, which would bring him worldwide fame, and the Nobel Prize for physics.
A fascinating insight into the heady years of research leading up to the discovery that changed the face of Indian science, 'The Evening Gone' is also the story of the men and women who got left behind in the race for knowledge and power. So there is Meenakshi, who yearns to learn Sanskrit, but is condemned to spend her life as a shaven-headed widow in her brother's orthodox Tamil Brahmin household; Tripuram, whose intense love for music must always take a backseat to her husband's ambitions; and Subramaniam, whose contribution to NSR's work remains forever a point of contention.
A masterly evocation of life in southern India and of the conflict between tradition and modernity, this is an unusual first novel that brings alive a world rarely explored in Indian fiction.
REVIEW :
'The Evening Gone' evokes - with acuteness, compassion and beauty -- the many strands of ancestral experience which lie behind a contemporary India family. These strands are political, cultural, intellectual and social, so the book does nothing less, in effect, than describe the birth of a modern India identity.'
— Shama Futehally, author of Tara Lane