Cultural Aspects of Gandhian Perception in Bhabani Bhattacharya’s Shadow from Ladakh

This paper focuses on the Cultural Aspects of Gandhian Perception in Bhabani Bhattacharya‟s “Shadow from Ladakh.” Bhattacharya's novel was published in the year 1966 and it is conflicting with two thoughts described by Gandhigram and Steeltown. He got Sahitya Academy Award, the coveted Indian award for his Shadow from Ladakh in 1967. In every part of the novel, the writer endeavors to bring about the combination of large-scale and small-scale industrialization, the East and the West encounter, Gandhian asceticism and Tagore aestheticism, the traditional and the modern values, village and town, Indian and Chinese, and the old generation and the new generation. In the novel opening, the towns of the two poles are hopeless in meeting each other. Gandhigram explains a model of the country India as envisaged by the father of the nation. The village people have collected Satyajit to guide the conditions of traditional village and to regulate its life so that it may become an example and a source of inspiration to the rest of the country. Educated in Cambridge, he has seen responsibility as a teacher at Shantiniketan, and at one level, he shows the impression of Tagore‟s educational views and philosophy of life. Characteristically, it is Shantiniketan that he first meets his future wife, Suruchi, a woman of great dynamism, adorned with excellence and the gift of song. The novel is not opposite the approaching experience of Chinese aggression in 1962. The shadow of the armed opposition with the unexpected opponent at Ladakh was cast everywhere. His experiences in the West and their integration with the Indian Ethos culminated in his novel being much-celebrated.