Mastery of Manohar Malgonkar as a Novelist

Manohar Malgonkar, one of the leading Indian novelists in English, has been a prolific writer. Primarily hailed as a Maratha historian, he turned to fiction writing with a purpose-the purpose of pure entertainment. Yet his roots are in history and his fictional world traces the tensions of Indian political history. He wrote five English novels: Distant Drum (1960) Combat of Shadows (1962), The Princes (1963), A Bend in the Ganges (1964), and The Devil's Wind (1972). His works of history are Kanhoji Angrey (1959), Puars of Dewas Senior (1962), and Chhatrapatis of Kolhapur (1971). He wrote essays that were characterized by a stately prose style. He also wrote scripts for movies, short stories and many news paper articles. The present book makes an in-depth study of the theme, the plot, the characterization, the point of view, the technique and the language used in his five major novels.