Mukul Kesavan

Mukul Kesavan (born 9 April 1957) is an Indian historian, novelist and political and social essayist. He was schooled at St. Xaviers' School in Delhi and then went on to study history at St. Stephen's College, and at the University of Delhi. He later attended Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge on an Inlaks scholarship, where he received an MLitt degree.

His first book, a novel titled Looking Through Glass (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1994) received international critical acclaim. In 2001 he wrote a political tract titled Secular Common Sense which was published by Penguin India. He teaches social history at Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi.

Kesavan writes frequently about the game of cricket. His book on cricket, Men in White, was published by Penguin India in 2007. He also wrote a blog by the same name on ESPNcricinfo.

Kesavan is also the author of The Ugliness of the Indian Male and Other Propositions, published by Black Kite in 2008. The book is a collection of essays on a wide variety of themes ranging from Indian films to Indian men to travel writing to political commentary. His latest book, titled Homeless on Google Earth (2013), published by Permanent Black, is a collection of several previous columns and opinion essays alongside some previously unpublished essays.

Kesavan is the co-editor of Civil Lines, a widely respected journal of Indian writing in English. In 2014, The New Republic included his Homeless on Google Earth in its list of the year's best books, describing Kesavan as " novelist and essayist, a historian and poet, a social commentator and public intellectual, commands an enviable following in the Anglophone world beyond America and Britain".

His columns have appeared in The Telegraph, ESPNcricinfo, Outlook Magazine, Mint and several other periodicals and journals.

His mother, Dr. Chandrakanta Narain, was Punjabi, born in Lahore and brought up in Delhi. His father B. S. Kesavan, a writer, was also the highly regarded curator of the National Library in Calcutta.

He lives in New Delhi with his wife, the UNDP lawyer Arundhati Das and their two children.

References

"Employers Resume" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 15 September 2014. Retrieved 2 April 2020.
Gerein, James (1997). Riggan, William; Clark, David Draper; et al. (eds.). "World Literature in Review: Asia & the Pacific". World Literature Today. 71 (1). University of Oklahoma: 222. doi:10.2307/40152780. JSTOR 40152780.
- Ugra, Sharda (28 May 2007). "Men In White - Life lived via cricket". India Today. Archived from the original on 3 April 2022.
- Parthasarathy, Vijay (31 July 2007). "Armchair view of Test cricket". The Hindu. Archived from the original on 3 April 2022.
- Rajadhyaksha, Niranjan (21 April 2007). "Fifty overs... and counting". Hindustan Times. Archived from the original on 3 April 2022.
Choudhury, Chandrahas (14 December 2007). "The male beauty myth". Mint. Archived from the original on 15 October 2024.
- Rose, Jaya Bhattacharji (19 May 2016). "Lucid yet forceful". The Hindu. Archived from the original on 26 September 2024.
- Sinha, Arunava (15 February 2014). "Essay Does It". The Indian Express. Archived from the original on 26 September 2024.
- Mukherjee, Uddalak (20 June 2014). "Soap, Rhinoceros and Orwell". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on 2 October 2024.
- Desai, Santosh (5 February 2022). "On Guru Dutt's Passion". Outlook. Archived from the original on 2 October 2024.
"Best global non-fiction 2014". The New Republic. Archived from the original on 17 May 2017. Retrieved 2 April 2020.
"Mukul Kesavan. outlookindia.com". Archived from the original on 13 October 2007. Retrieved 21 August 2007.
Kesavan, Mukul (28 March 2016). "A different slogan". The Telegraph. India. Archived from the original on 2 March 2019. Retrieved 1 March 2019.