Amritlal Nagar

Who is Amritlal Nagar?

Amritlal Nagar was one of the prominent Hindi writers of the twentieth century.

He started off as an author and journalist, but moved on to be an active writer in the Indian film industry for 7 years. He worked as a drama producer in All India Radio between December 1953 and May 1956. At this point he realized that a regular job would always be a hindrance to his literary life, so he devoted himself to freelance writing.

Often cited as the true literary heir of Premchand, Amritlal Nagar created his own independent and unique identity as a littérateur and is counted as one of the most important and multi-faceted creative writers of Indian literature. In the words of famous critic, Dr. Ram Bilas Sharma,"Undoubtedly, Amritlal Nagar will be remembered as an important novelist. For me, he is a very major sculptor of fiction. He has revealed the power of both standard [manak] Hindi, as well as the non-standard [ghair-manak] Hindi of the ordinary".

Amritlal Nagar's real genius lay in the art of developing a range of characters in his stories and novels. Commenting on his distinctive ability to operationalize a story at many levels in complex and multi-dimensional ways, another prominent writer and critic of Hindi, Shreelal Shukla notes, "Rather than imposing his own personality on his character, Nagar ji dissolves himself in the character and in the process, he absorbs at the experiential level, all of those complexities that even the simplest characters nurture in the forms of anxieties and knotted puzzles. This work can only be done by a major creative writer".