Born in Kasauli, British India (in the present-day state of Himachal Pradesh, India), in 1934, Ruskin Bond is arguably India’s best known and most-loved children’s author. The son of Aubrey Alexander Bond, who was British, and Edith Clarke, who was Anglo-Indian, Bond experienced the twilight years of British rule in India, Partition, India’s Independence in 1947, and the decades that followed. Consequently, many of Bond’s early works express the tension of being caught at a crossroads and in liminal spaces of belonging neither here nor there, as an Anglo-Indian man who chose to remain in India after the British departed.
The feeling of being an outsider is especially pronounced in Bond’s earliest published writing. “Even if I have papers, I don’t belong. I’m a half-caste, I know it, and that is as good as not...
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Citation: Roy, Ritwika. "Ruskin Bond". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 February 2026 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=479, accessed 09 June 2026.]
