Gopal Baratham

Dr. Gopal Baratham (September 9, 1935 – April 23, 2002) was a Singaporean author and neurosurgeon. He was known for his frank style and his ability to write about topics that were often considered controversial in the rigid city-state.

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Career

Born to a physician and a nurse, Baratham decided to follow his parents and entered the medical profession. However, his youth is marked by the experience of the Japanese occupation. In 1954 he registered at the Medical College of the University of Malaya, Singapore, and after studying at the Royal London Hospital in 1965, he entered the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Edinburgh in 1969. He finished his studies by 1972, when he was already 36 years old, to become a surgeon at the Thomson Road General Hospital in Singapore.

In the 1960s, Baratham had already started writing, which he never stopped despite his medical career. His first novel, Fuel in Vacant Lots, was however never finished. In 1974 he was able to get his first short story, "Island", published in Commentary, the publication of the National University of Singapore Society. In 1991, Dr. Baratham published his most successful novel, A Candle or the Sun, which he had started working on in 1983. The novel was published in London and not in Singapore due to its controversial nature. The novel was loosely based on the case of the so-called Marxist plotters, a group of Catholic activists who the Singapore government had declared to be Communists and subsequently arrested. The same year he also published an erotic love-story called Sayang set in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. He won the S.E.A. Write Award and was elected the president of the ASEAN Association of Neurosurgeons.

In 1994, Dr. Baratham wrote an account of the events surrounding the American Michael Fay, called The Caning of Michael Fay.

Works

Short story collections

• Figments of Experience (Times Books International, 1981)
• People Make You Cry (1988)
• Memories that Glow in the Dark (1995)
• The City of Forgetting (2001)

Novels

• A Candle or The Sun (Serpent's Tail, 1991)
• Sayang (Times Books International, 1991)
• Moonrise, Sunset (Serpent's Tail, 1996)

Non-Fiction

• The Caning of Michael Fay (KRP Publications, 1994)

Secondary Texts

• Of memory and desire: The stories of Gopal Baratham by Kah Choon Ban (Times Books International, 2000)