Background
Som Ranchan was born in Lahore, British India. His father was an employee of the Accountant General’s Office at Lahore which was shifted to Shimla (Himachal Pradesh) following India-Pakistan partition in 1947. He had to migrate to India along with his mother, father, three brothers and a sister. This displacement ruined the family fortunes; the siblings had misgivings about career and education which made them anxious and restless. One of the brothers, Vijay Ranchan, qualified Civil Services and retired as an Additional Chief Secretary, Gujarat. Som Ranchan absented from college and worked in Delhi picking up some odd jobs like insurance, marketing and reporting for an English magazine Delhi Mirror (although a very short lived magazine). He himself describes the year 1951-1954 as the “Struggle Period” of his life. During the struggling years, Ranchan completed his MA (Eng) as a private candidate. If one has to know more about Ranchan one needs to read and understand his works better, as he proclaims: “All my poetry is autobiographical”(Journal of Indian Writing in English,1980) The author however, feels that the above quote doesn't truly represent him as it is decontexualized. The critical consensus is that Ranchan's poetry is many-layered, it is personal, experiential of life and times and truly archetypal. The consensus further is that he is an epic poet and specially an inventor of dialogue epics on secular and spiritual Wisdom Figures
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