Makarand Paranjape

Home > Makarand Paranjape > Biography full

Indian novelist

Makarand R. Paran*e (born 31 August 1960) is an Indian novelist, poet, and the Director at Indian Ins*ute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Shimla. Prior to this, Paran*e was a professor of English at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

1 Early life and Education
2 Career
- 2.1 IIAS
3 Works and reception
4 Personal life
5 Honours
6 References
7 External links
8 See also

Early life and Education

Makarand R. Paran*e was born in 1960 in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. He was educated at the Bishop Cotton Boys' School in Bangalore followed by a B.A. (Hons.) in English at St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi, in 1980. Thereafter, he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from where he received his M.A. in English Literature and, subsequently, a PhD, in 1985, on the topic Mysticism in Indian English Poetry.

Career

Makarand Paran*e had started his career in 1980 as a teaching *istant at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and returned to India in 1986 to join the University of Hyderabad, first as lecturer and then reader. In 1994, he joined the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Delhi as an *ociate professor, and between 1999–2018, he served as professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

He was also General Editor of a series of reprints for rare and out-of-print Indian English *les published by the Sahitya Akademi (New Delhi), the founding Trustee of Samvad India Foundation, a Delhi-based non-profit, public charitable trust, and was the founding editor of Evam: Forum on Indian Representations, an international bi-annual, multi-disciplinary journal on India. He was chairperson for the pan-commonwealth panel of judges in the Europe and South Asia region of the 2008 and 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and served as the Indian host judge in Delhi for the 2010 prize.

IIAS

Paran*e was appointed as Director of IIAS in August 2018. In August 2020, charges of irregularities filed against him by another office-bearer, leading to a spat with the Chairman and the Vice-Chairman at the ins*ution. Paran*e offered a rebuttal to his critics through an interview with The Wire in April 2021. However, it was later reported that he had violated the MoA (memorandum of *ociation) of the ins*ute as its Director and that it was not any clash with other specific individual heads at the ins*ution.

Works and reception

In his coffee-table book of poems published in January 2022 as Iden*y's Last Secret, Paran*e discussed how he "came out of a difficult relationship." In 2013, Makarand R. Paran*e published a novel called Body Offering. The novel is a tale of a middle-aged man's extra-marital affair with a woman 25 years younger than him. The Sunday Guardian dubbed the book as one "that walked in the long shadow cast" by Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabakov's 1955 novel Lolita.

Personal life

Paran*e was married to Sarina in 1987. He later married Devaki Singh in 2006, who is daughter of the former Congress minister Arun Singh. It was reported in the press that the wedding festivities were attended by Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi, and Robert Vadra. He is now married to Gayatri Iyer.

Honours

ICCR Chair in Indian Studies, National University of Singapore, August 2010 onwards.
October–December 2014: Inaugural DAAD-Eric Auerbach Visiting Chair in World Literatures at the University of Tübingen, Germany.

References

External links

The Official Makarand Paran*e Webpage
Makarand Paran*e Webpage at JNU