The Search for Ramji Lall

Then, sometime during junior high school, I came across Ramji Lall. More precisely, I came across his guidebooks, and they came as a relief. Difficult plots were explained in simple language. Poems had summaries, characters had descriptions, and themes were laid out clearly. Suddenly, some of those difficult texts began to make sense.

Back when I was a student in a remote school in Bhutan, English textbooks were not always easy to understand. English was a foreign language to us, and our comprehension was limited. A difficult poem remained difficult, while a complicated story sometimes became even more complicated after we had read it.

What surprised me was that Ramji Lall seemed to have a guide for everything. Poetry, short stories, dramas, novels and even some of the English texts we studied. If a literary work was prescribed in school, there was a good chance Ramji Lall had already written something about it. I sometimes wondered how one man managed to read so much, let alone write about all of it.

There was another way to identify a Ramji Lall book. You knew the moment someone placed one in your hands because it was usually falling apart. The books were printed on cheap paper, and many of the copies we handled did not survive student use well. Pages came loose from the spine, and students repaired them with cello-tapes. We taped the spine, the cover and individual pages, but the pages fell out anyway. A well-used guide might take you from page 47 straight to page 52. You either searched for the missing pages or borrowed another copy to find out what Ramji Lall had said in between.

His books were cheap and widely available. Some copies we encountered might even have been pirated editions bought from the border towns. Friends brought books back and we shared them among ourselves. I have a confession here. Despite benefiting from Ramji Lall for years, I do not remember buying a single copy. I borrowed them, read them, checked what Ramji Lall had to say and returned whatever remained of the book to its owner.

Ramji Lall followed me to college, where I studied English Literature. By then, my view of his books had changed. His explanations often seemed too simple and general. At that level, we were expected to read more widely, examine different interpretations and develop our own arguments. Yet I still checked Ramji Lall. His guides gave me a starting point. First understand the plot, characters and basic themes, then move on to deeper analysis.

Looking back now, I think I underestimated what he achieved. This was long before Google, YouTube and AI. For students learning English as a foreign language, especially those studying in remote schools with limited access to libraries and academic resources, a cheap guidebook served an important purpose. Ramji Lall took difficult literature and explained it in language we understood. His treatment might have been simple, but for a struggling student, simplicity was often what was needed.

A memory of those books recently made me search for Ramji Lall again, this time as an adult. I wanted to know whether my childhood impression that he had written about almost everything was an exaggeration. Apparently, it was not.

Online catalogues now list dozens of works under his name. Goodreads attributes 51 distinct works to him, while one Indian college library alone returns 64 catalogue records under Ramji Lall. His subjects ranged from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Austen, Dickens, Hardy, Hemingway, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and Samuel Beckett. His books were already appearing by the late 1960s. One college library records his Essays in Criticism from 1967, while another has his Alfred Tennyson from 1969 and Persuasion from 1970.

What surprised me even more was how many editions some of these books went through. A university catalogue records A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in its 29th edition and Lord of the Flies in its 17th edition. His Paradise Lost: Book I had reached its 45th and 46th editions by 2016. Suddenly, the battered copies circulating among us in Bhutan made more sense. We were part of a much larger population of students reading Ramji Lall.

Yet my adult search produced a strange result. I found his books everywhere, but I found almost nothing reliable about Ramji Lall himself. I could find titles, editions, publishers and library records stretching across decades, but little about the man behind them. As literature students, we learnt about the lives of the writers we studied. We knew where they were born, what influenced them and often far more about their personal lives than we needed to know. Yet here was a man whose books had accompanied us from school into college, and we knew almost nothing about him.

Perhaps this is why the memory interests me now. Ramji Lall occupied an unusual place in our school lives. He was never the writer we were supposed to be studying. He was the fellow standing beside the writer, explaining to us what on earth was going on, rather like an interpreter standing beside someone speaking a language we barely understood.

Somewhere in remote Bhutan, students learning English were reading his explanations, sharing his books and taping loose pages back together. I was one of those students, although I never bought a single Ramji Lall book myself. Decades later, I still remember his name, and I am now searching for the man behind it.

Perhaps I owe him the price of at least one guidebook, preferably one with all the pages still attached.