About the Book
'Bin Udgam Ke Srota' has been enthusiastically received by the Hindi world. The famous Hindi novelist Jainendra Kumar wrote: "The very first few pages had hit my heart with sweet pangs. By the time I reached the end, I was amazed and overtaken by the sincerity of emotions and the power of expression. This novel had appears to me nothing short of a miracle., the reader cannot miss the sensations coming from his deepest soul that he misses in the humdrum of life. I got all this from 'Bin Udgam Ke Srota'. If this novel has the grandeur of elevated thoughts, it has, in equal measures, the sweetness of genuine emotions. Nowadays, I find novels only full of thoughts and lacking in emotions. I'm told that it is inevitable in this age of science. However, if literature is of any use, it has to compensate for the abstraction that the thinkers gift. In any case, literature should not be heavy and devoid of sweetness and the juices of life. I found sweetness and light both integrated and balanced in this work of Nirmal. The fact that he is very young and his literature is full of the spirit of life fills me with great hope. What has touched me the most is the impregnation of speed, movement and joy in this novel. Like some cataract breaking loose from the very root of life, flowing gracefully with verve and enthusiasm, it has the power to suddenly turn into a light shower from heaven. Nirmal embraces all the bitter as well as sweet experiences of life without the slightest hesitation - indeed, Nirmal is a rare boon...... I believe Nirmal Kumar will have a unique place in Hindi literature and his contribution will carve a niche for itself." This novel is about love. The title itself suggests love, for the words in the title translated into English mean certain brooks whose origin is untraceable. The hero of the novel, Ravi Kant, is an adolescent, who loves two girls, both madly. One of them is Mini, his elder sister and the other, Savani, who is an adolescent, like him. What strikes the reader is a truth of human nature, that, in spite of being loves of equal intensity, love for the two differs right from the roots, like a rose and a jasmine, sprouting close in the same soil. The beauty of each comes out spontaneously, since there is no weight of morality on any of these two loves. There is no trace of any effort on part of the author to keep them separate and distinct from each other. They grow uninhibitedly, but nature flowers each differently, as if the difference is a part of nature, not a gift of moral education. Nowhere does the hero curb or intellectually restrain his spontaneous feeling of oneness with his sister. These are not ordinary feelings. These are fiery feelings, emblazing with passion, the feelings of a man who cannot imagine himself separated from her, yet the burning passion seems instinctively informed from within. His love for her knows no limit and yet knows its direction. Nirmal Kumar seems to have dug up the very roots of these two loves. He has revealed the truth of both, and it is heartening to see that love is not subject to ethics. If anything, its roots are deeper and its stem is higher than ethics. If analysis is permissible of lyrical characters, Mini and Savani show that woman's nature is fragile, not fickle, and her character is, comparatively, stronger than man's. 'Bin Udgam Ke Srota' is a classic that deserves to be placed among the best novels in all literature. When Hindi will become free of the sectarian warlords of literature, this novel is sure to get its place in world literature.
About the Author: Nirmal Kumar is one-man bridge between the east and the west. His writings aim at projecting that the Indian and the Western literature, philosophy, psychology and culture project the same truth in different ways. Where they differ, the differences are because they are two halves of human knowledge that have to integrate to express the truth; and that truth, too, would be only a fraction of the knowable Truth, not to mention the unknowable. He blends the Indian and Western heritage in such a way that it looks to be the development of a single mind, not two opposite currents (the twain that would meet never - Rudyard Kipling). His writings are proof that if the two currents have never met historically, they have met in his mind, and this could not have happened had they not met somewhere in God. Times of India has written, "Nirmal Kumar has emerged as one of the greatest modern thinkers. Another popular daily Hindustan Times wries, "Nirmal Kumar draws rare psychological insights from Indian epics. They may baffle many modern psychologists who swear by Freud." The Deccan Herald daily writes, "Nirmal Kumar's argument indicates the originality of his thinking. He has the courage to think for himself" The great novelist Jainendra Kumar, wrote, "His art is like a cataract, innocent, joyous and ever-new. Nirmal is a rare boon to literature." Regarding his poetic genius, Bachchan writes "His poetry has profound depth and power. It emanates from the sincerity with which he has looked upon nature and life." He believes that the Indian culture is Indian by accident; in truth, it is the culture of all humanity, since it is born of the innocence and the untutored emotions of every infant heart. He calls these two channels as God's direct communication to man, without the intervention of any priest or prophet. His mind is dissimilar to the minds of the modern clairvoyants and prophets of doom. He does not resist the maddening waves of modern life. It lets them hit and shatter it. It neutralizes all those quakes against each other and creates out of them every time new models of a better and stronger humanity before which the diabolic surrenders. He proves that inside the core of honest and innocent humanism lies hidden the omnipotent and the omniscient God. Man has no need of collaborating with the devil for success, since the omnipotent and the omniscient are only the other faces of his fragile looking innocence and spontaneous love.
