User talk:Prashbhaw

Prashant Bhawalkar is the author of the semi-fantastic novel "Chambers of the Sea." Born in India in 1973, he went on to study in Australia and moved to Canada where he began work on his magnum opus while travelling through the Quebecois countryside. The stunning natural beauty awakened every dormant pagan instinct that his sensibilities contained, he admitted later to a friend, the eminent Proustian scholar Yevgeny Medvedev.

Medvedev was responsible for introducing Bhawalkar to the novel that planted the germ of Chambers of the Sea. The novel by a maverick Soviet author Mikhail Bulgakov, entitled The Master and Margarita centres around the arrival of the devil in 20th century Soviet Russia. The novel subverts reality in a manner that profoundly impressed Bhawalkar. Coming from a Hindu brahmin family, he was only too well-acquainted with the myths of classical India. He took one of these, from the long narrative poem Meghdoot by the poet Kalidasa, and used it to construct the plot of the novel. Meghdoot revolves around the exile of a Yaksha, a mythical creature from Alakapuri the kingdom ruled by Kubera the God of wealth. In the poem, the Yaksha laments his separation from his beloved and asks a passing raincloud to carry his message of love to her. Bhawalkar's novel follows the same plot. In this case, the Yaksha has been banished to British India in the 1930s and asks a British orientalist scholar to carry his message of love, thereby setting him on a journey that takes place not in the material realm but in the realm of the consciousness, of the imagination, of dreams.

The novel has several quaint characters like the poet Ovid and a German writer Siegfried Abendroth through whom Bhawalkar eloquently expounds his aesthetic theory. The novel, through its vigour, colour, and profundity, is destined to be one of the great novels of the twenty first century, a true indication of the troubled genius of its creator.