Anita Desai Biography and List of Works

Indian novelist and short story writer. Several of Desai's novels explore with Chekhovian sensibility tensions inside family, unable ness to share feelings, disillusionment, and the alienation of middle-class women torn between the needs of self and the demands by the tumultuously changing Indian society. In her later novels Desai has grappled with such themes as German anti-Semitism, the demise of traditions, and Western stereotypical views of India.

"Even though his cigarette stank - it was a local one, wrapped in a tendu leaf, fierce enough to make his head swim - he could smell the distinctive Indian odour - of dung, both of cattle and men, of smoke from the village hearts, of cattle food and cattle urine, of dust, of pungent food cooking, of old ragged clothes washed without soap and put out to dry, the aroma of poverty."
(from Baumgartner's Bombay, 1988)

Anita Desai was born in Mussoorie, a hill station north of Delhi, as the daughter of a D.N. Mazumdar, a Bengali businessman, and the former Toni Nime, of German origin. She began to write in English at the age of seven, publishing her first story at the age of nine. Desai was educated in Delhi at Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School and Miranda House, Delhi University, where she received in 1957 a B.A. in English literature. In the following year she married Ashvin Desai, a businessman; they had four children.

As a novelist Desai made her debut in 1963 with The Peacock. She had started to write short stories regularly before her marriage. The Peacock was published in Britain by Peter Owen, a publisher specializing in literature of the British Commonwealth and continental Europe. In was followed by Voices of the City (1965), a story about three siblings and their different ways of life in Calcutta. Amla sees the city as a monster, Nirode sacrifices everything for her career, and Monisha cannot bear her stifling existence in then household of a wealthy old Calcutta family. Fire on the Mountain (1977), set in Kasuli, a hill station, focused on three women and their oppressed life. In Clear Light of Day (1980) Desai weaved the history of Delhi with a Hindu family. The central character is Bim, an independent and heroic woman, whose self-realization is not in conflict with her caring for others. Bim's memories of the family past dominate her sterile existence, she feels betrayed by her sister Tara, and replays her memories in the decaying family mansion in Old Delhi.

"'No one, said Bim, slowly and precisely, 'comprehends better than children do. No one feels the atmosphere more keenly - or catches the nuances, all the insinuations in the air - or notes those details that escape elders because their senses have atrophied, or calcified.'"
(from Clear Light of Day, 1980)

The author's characters in many novels are members of the anglicanized Indian bourgeoisie, whose dissatisfactions has little to do with the problems of the underclass. Desai present different and mostly neurotic ways of escape from the dull everyday life or violent world outside social walls. In Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975) Sita, pregnant with her fifth child, takes refuge from her marriage on the magical island homestead of her deceased father. Nanda Kaul in Fire on the Mountain (197) withdraws into a private world of self-willed isolation.

In the mid-1980s Desai started to look more closely the life of the unprivileged. In Custody (1984) is Desai's ironic story about literary traditions and academic illusions. The central characters are Nur, an Urhi poet, who has fallen on hard times, and Deven, a professor of Hindi, who realizes that the beloved poet is not the magical genius he has imagined. The author's own German half of the parental heritage is in the background of Baumgartner's Bombay (1988) - her first language was German. In the story a retired Jewish businessman has escaped in his youth the Holocaust and stayed on his old age. His reclusive existence is shattered by a drug-crazed German hippie, and the hidden Nazi hatred surfaces. In both of these books Desai has ventured into the material squalor and poverty of India, in the middle of the mud and filth, dust and debris.

In Journey to Ithaca (1995) Desai examines the nature of pilgrimage to India through three characters - Mateo and Sophie, young Europeans, and Mother, a charismatic and mysterious woman, whose story is an earlier version of their own. Desai's perspective on India is more European than in his earlier works. However, it is one-sided to argue that Desai lacks compassion for the Indian people, or has not adapted Indian oral storytelling forms into her work. Desai goes beyond public or social themes and national literary traditions. Her focus is on the female psyche and on the interior lives of individuals, through which she portrays the reality in contemporary India. Desai has commented on her work: "My novels are no reflection of Indian society, politics or character. They are my private attempt to seize upon the raw material of life."

Desai has been a member of the Advisory Board for English of the National Academy of Letters in Delhi and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has taught at Girton College and Smith College in England, and at Mount Holyoke College in the United States. In 1993 she became a creative writing teacher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Desai is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London. She received the Guardian Award for Children's Fiction for the novel The Village by the Sea (1982), and the 1978 National Academy of Letters Award for Fire on the Mountain (1977).

For further reading: Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 1); Novels of Anita Desai by Sandhyarani Dash (1997); Five Indian Novelists; B. Rajan, Raja Rao, R.K. Narayan, Arun Joshi, Anita Desai by V.V.N. Rajendra Prasad (1997); Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel: Genre and Ideology in R.K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, and Salman Rushdie by Fawzia Afzal-Khan (1993); Anita Desai's Fiction by M. Solanki (1993); Symbolism in Anita Desai's Novels by K. Sharma (1992); Virginia Woolf and Anita Desai by A. Kanwar (1989); Voice and Vision of Anita Desai by S. Jena (1989); The Novels of Anita Desai by U. Bande (1988); Stairs to the Attic by J. Jain (1987); Perspectives on Anita Desai by R.K. Sarivastava (1984); Anita Desai the Novelist by M. Prasad (1981); Anita Desai by R.S. Sharma (1981); The Novels of Mrs. Anita Desai by B. Ramachandra Rao (1977)

Books by Anita Desai