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 grew up speaking German at home and Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and English at school and in the city streets. She has said that she grew up surrounded by Western literature and music, not realizing until she was older that this was an anomaly in her world where she also learned the Eastern culture and customs. She married a businessman at twenty-one and raised several children before becoming known for her writing. Her first book, Cry,the Peacock was published in England in 1963, and her better known novels include In Custody (1984) and Baumgartner's Bombay (1988). She once wrote: "I see India through my mother's eyes, as an outsider, but my feelings for India are my father's, of someone born here" (Griffiths).
Anita Desai was born June 24, 1937 in India to a German mother and an Indian father. Although she now resides in South Hadley, Massachusetts, teaching writing at Mount Holyoke College, she is a member of the Advisory Board for English in New Delhi. Desai writes in English, saying, "I first learned English when I went to school. It was the first language that I learned to read and write, so it became my literary language. Languages tend to proliferate around one in India, and one tends to pick up and use whatever is at hand. It makes one realize each language has its own distinct genius." Her family spoke German at home and Hindi to their friends.
Desai's work is part of a new style of writing to come out of India which is not nearly as conservative as Indian writing has been in the past. One concern that is part of her work, especially the novel Baumgartner's Bombay, is that about foreignness and dividedness. Desai grew up during World War II and could see the anxiety her German mother was experiencing about the situation and her family in Germany. After the war when she realized the Germany she had known was devasted, her mother never returned there, nor had any desire to return. Anita herself did not visit until she was an adult.
She never considered trying to first publish in India because there was no publisher in India who would be interested in fiction by an Indian writer (Jussawalla) and it was first in England that her work became noticed. U.S. readers were slower to discover her, due, she believes to England's natural interest in India and the U.S.'s lack of comprehension regarding the foreignness of her subject.
But Desai only writes in English. This, she has repeatedly said,was a natural and unconscious choice for her: "I can state definitely that I did not choose English in a deliberate and conscious act and I'd say perhaps it was the language that chose me and I started writing stories in English at the age of seven, and have been doing so for thirty years now without stopping to think why "(Desai).
She is considered the writer who introduced the psychological novel in the tradition of Virginia Woolf to India. Included in this, is her pioneer status of writing of feminist issues. While many people today would not classify her work as feminist, she believes this is due to changing times: "The feminist movement in India is very new and a younger generation of readers in India tends to be rather impatient of my books and to think of them as books about completely helpless women, hopeless women. They find it somewhat unreal that the women don't fight back, but they don't seem to realize how very new this movement is" (Jussawalla).
Also, she says, her writing is realistic: "Women think I am doing a disservice to the feminist movement by writing about women who have no control over their lives. But I was trying, as every writer tries to do, even in fiction, to get at the truth, write the truth. It would have been really fanciful if I had made [for example, in Clear Light of Day] Bim and Tara modern-day feminists "(in Griffiths).
Desai considers Clear Light of Day, her most autobiographical book, because she was writing about her neighborhood in Delhi, although the characters are not based on her brothers and sisters. What she was exploring in this novel, she has said, was the importance of childhood and memories as the source of a life. She had wanted to start the book at the end and move backwards, into the characters' childhood and further, into the childhood of their parents etc., but in the end: "When I had gone as far back as their infancy the book just ground to a halt; it lost its momentum. It told me that this was done, that I couldn't carry it further. But I still have a sense of disappointment about that book, because the intention had been different" (Jussawalla). The character of Raja is identified with her in the sense that he is so immersed in all different types of literature and culture, and is so concerned with protecting the multicultural heritage of India. His worries about the Muslim neighbor family is not just about them particularly, but rather worry about the loss of all that the Muslim culture and literature contributes to India.
While Desai has taught for years at Mount Holyoke and MIT, and spends most of the year outside of India, she does not consider herself part of the Indian Diaspora. Although she does not fit in the Indian box anymore (Griffiths) as she said, she considers herself lucky for having not left India until late in her life, because she feels that she has been drifting away from it ever since: "I can't really write of it with the same intensity and familiarity that I once had." Yet she cannot feel at home in any other place or society (Griffiths).
Selected works:
* The Peacock, 1963
* Voices in the City, 1965
* Bye-Bye, Blackbird, 1971
* The Peacock Garden, 1974
* Where Shall We Go This Summer?, 1975
* Cat on a Houseboat, 1976
* Fire on the Mountain, 1977
* Games at Twilight and Other Stories, 1978
* Clear Light of Day, 1980
* Village by the Sea, 1982
* In Custody, 1984 - film 1993, dir. by Ismail Merchant, starring Shashi Kapoor, Shabana Azmi, Om Puri, screenplay by Anita Desai
* Baumgartner's Bombay, 1988
* Journey to Ithaca, 1996
* Fasting, Feasting, 1999
* Diamond Dust, 2000
* The Zigzag Way: A Novel, 2004
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