Vijaydan Detha Biography
Vijaydan Detha was a noted writer from Rajasthan, who won several awards and recognitions including Padma Shri award. He is also a recipient of the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award. He was also a contender for the Nobel prize in 2011. He owns the credit of publishing more than 800 short stories and many of his stories have been translated to English and other languages. Apart from that, a few of them have been adopted onscreen as feature films. Mani Kaul’s Duvida, Amol Palekar's "Paheli" and Amol Palekar's "Paheli" are among those creative works, apart from several theatre plays. He is also known for his outstanding contributions in documenting Rajasthani folk-lore, arts and music and has worked with late Komal Kothari to renovate Rajasthani culture this way. They together started Rupayan Sansthan with this aim.
Detha was born in Borunda of Rajasthan in the year 1926 into a family of poets. Both his father and grandfather, Sabaldan Detha and Jugtidan Detha respectively were poets. His father and two brothers died when he was only 4. He later stayed with his elder brother who worked in a civil court. His school education was completed at Bihar and Barmer, and later from Durbar School, Jodhpur. He was inspired a lot by the works of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay and was a critic of Tagore’s works, though he started admiring him later.
He joined college in 1944 and by that time, he started writing. He wrote all his works in his mother tongue Rajasthani, which his son Kailash Kabeer translated to Hindi. His Bataan ri Phulwari (“garden of tales”), is a 14-volume collection of stories based on the folklore and spoken dialects of Rajasthan. Apart from writing stories, he has also edited a few books for Sahitya Akademi including Rajasthani-Hindi Kahawat Kosh and Complete work of Ganeshi Lal Vyas. He has also penned short stories for children.
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Updated: December 11, 2015