Vilas Sarang

Who is Vilas Sarang?

Vilas Sarang is one of the most significant modernist Indian writers, critics and translators to emerge in the post-independence period.

Vilas Sarang was born in 1942 in Karwar, a coastal town in Karnataka. His father, of the non-Brahmin Bhandari caste, hailed from Malwan and was a magistrate. His mother came from Ratnagiri and reared six sons of whom Vilas Sarang is the youngest.

He studied in Marathi, the regional language, until high school, then attended Elphinstone College, Bombay, and obtained a doctorate in English Literature from Bombay University. From 1971 to 1974, Sarang studied in Bloomington, Indiana, from where he obtained a second doctorate in Comparative Literature under the direction of Professor Breon Mitchell.

He spent five years in Iraq, where he taught English at the University of Basrah. Sarang was head of the English Department at the Bombay University from 1988 to 1991, during which years he also edited The Bombay Literary Review. From 1991 to 2002, he taught at Kuwait University.

Having returned to India in 1979, he married Reba Dasgupta, of Bengali origin, in 1982, with whom he has two children.