Gay-Neck; The Story of a Pigeon

Dhan Gopal Mukerji was perhaps the best-known Indian writer of the early 20th century who published in English. In the 1910s, he took part in the Bengali resistance, and at the age of twenty, he was forced to leave India. Soon after, he settled in New York. Cut off from his homeland, Mukerji began writing to cope with nostalgia — and to support himself and pay for his education. Most of his books are about India. He describes the lives of ordinary people in jungles or mountain villages with precision and honesty, without sentimentality. Unlike Kipling, whose animals often behave like humans, Mukerji writes about them as a curious observer, without romanticizing the relationship between humans and animals.

His most successful children’s book, Gay-Neck, The Story of a Pigeon, was written in 1928 and won the Newbery Medal that same year. The story, which Mukerji said was meant to show that birds and humans are kindred spirits, is largely autobiographical. It draws on his own childhood, when young Dhan spent nearly all his time at the family pigeon coop.