Amrit Rai (3 September 1921 – 14 August 1996) was an Indian writer, poet and biographer in both the

Hindi Modern Standard Hindi (, ), commonly referred to as Hindi, is the Standard language, standardised variety of the Hindustani language written in the Devanagari script. It is an official language of India, official language of the Government ...

and

Urdu Urdu (; , , ) is an Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the Languages of Pakistan, national language and ''lingua franca'' of Pakistan. In India, it is an Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of Indi ...

styles of the

Hindustani language Hindustani is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in North India and Pakistan as the lingua franca of the region. It is also spoken by the Deccani people, Deccani-speaking community in the Deccan plateau. Hindustani is a pluricentric language w ...

. He is the son of Munshi Premchand, a pioneer of modern

Urdu literature Urdu literature (, ) comprises the literary works, written in the Urdu language. While it tends to be dominated by poetry, especially the verse forms of the ''ghazal'' () and '' nazm'' (), it has expanded into other styles of writing, includin ...

and of

Hindi literature Hindi literature () includes literature in the various Central Indo-Aryan languages, also known as Hindi, some of which have different writing systems. Earliest forms of Hindi literature are attested in poetry of Apabhraṃśa such as Awad ...

. A prolific writer, Rai made his literary debut with novel ''Beej'' in 1952 and went on to write an acclaimed biography of his father, Premchand, ''Kalam ka Sipahi'' (1970), which later won him the

Sahitya Akademi award The Sahitya Akademi Award is a literary honour in India, which the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, annually confers on writers of the most outstanding books of literary merit published in any of the 22 languages of the ...

for 1971.

Career

Rai co-edited ''Chitthi Patri'' (1962), a two-volume book on the letters of Premchand along with his biographer, Madan Gopal. In 1982, he donated a collection of his father's 236 letters to the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) at Teen Murti House,

Delhi Delhi, officially the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi, is a city and a union territory of India containing New Delhi, the capital of India. Straddling the Yamuna river, but spread chiefly to the west, or beyond its Bank (geography ...

. His ''A House Divided'' is an influential account of how the shared Hindi/Hindavī linguistic tradition became differentiated into Modern Standard Hindi and Urdu.

Death

Rai died in

Allahabad Prayagraj (, ; ISO 15919, ISO: ), formerly and colloquially known as Allahabad, is a metropolis in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.The other five cities were: Agra, Kanpur, Kanpur (Cawnpore), Lucknow, Meerut, and Varanasi, Varanasi (Benar ...

, in August 1996 at the age of 75. He had suffered a paralytic stroke earlier in March.

Bibliography

* Rai, Amrit. ''Premchand: A Life''. Harish Trivedi, translator. New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1982. * Rai, Amrit. ''A House Divided: The Origin and Development of Hindi/Hindavi''. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984.

References

1921 births 1996 deaths Writers from Prayagraj Indian male novelists Hindi-language writers Recipients of the Sahitya Akademi Award in Hindi 20th-century Indian novelists 20th-century Indian biographers Jawaharlal Nehru Fellows Novelists from Uttar Pradesh Indian male biographers {{india-writer-stub