Anita Desai

Author

• Born: June 24, 1937
• Place of Birth: Mussoorie, India

Anita Desai is among the first wave of Indian writers to emerge after independence who continued to write in English. She is a chronicler of the traditional and conservative Indian middle class and their children. She writes particularly of the conflicted lives of women, who balance traditional roles against modern ones.

Early Life

Anita Desai was born Anita Mazumdar in British India to Dhiren Mazumdar, an Indian businessman, and his German wife, Antoinette Nim. Although she was born in the Indian hill station of Mussoorie, Desai was brought up in Old Delhi with her brother and two sisters. Although both of her parents were fiercely anti-British, she was nevertheless sent to Queen Mary’s Higher Secondary School, an institution run by British Catholic nuns with a mostly Hindu or Muslim student body.

After Indian independence in 1947, the Muslim students disappeared, Mazumdar’s first experience of the partition of the country into India and Pakistan. She could speak German, English, and Hindi, though some of her school education was in Urdu, the cultural language of the former Mughal emperors. Urdu is traditionally associated with Islam, though in many ways it is similar to Hindi. With independence, Hindi became India’s official language, along with English. Mazumdar made the conscious choice to continue to use English when she began her writing career.

In fact, Mazumdar began writing stories when she was only seven years old. She was the writer in the family and a voracious reader. She was allowed to continue her education after graduating high school and attended Miranda House, a women’s college attached to Delhi University. She majored in English literature, winning the university’s Pershad Memorial Prize for English. While still a student, Mazumdar had her first short story published in a New Delhi magazine in 1957.

After graduation, Mazumdar went to Calcutta (now Kolkata) to work at the German Cultural Institute. There, she met and married Ashuin Desai, a businessman, in 1958. The couple had four children. The young family moved frequently, living in Mumbai, Kalimpong, Chandigarh, and Delhi, before finally moving to Pune. Anita Desai wrote a number of short stories at this time, some of which were published in India or in London.

Life’s Work

Desai’s first fiction of substance was a novel, Cry, the Peacock, which was published in 1963. Influenced by British novelist Virginia Woolf’s interior monologue, the story traces the heroine killing her husband and then herself after four years of marriage. It depicted the emerging modern, urban India and brought to English-language Indian fiction a new symbolic and imagistic technique and style. Desai’s interest lay in the husband-wife relationship rather than political and social identity, the concern of previous Indian English fiction.

A series of novels then slowly followed, gradually bringing Desai recognition as a major Indian writer of English. Voices in the City, about social transition in India, appeared in 1965. Six years later, her third book, Bye Bye Blackbird, the story of an Indian expatriate living in England, made its debut. Desai’s 1977 novel Fire on the Mountain won the Winifred Holtby Prize of the Royal Society of Literature in 1978, demonstrating that her reputation had been established in England as well. The same year, she won the Indian National Academy of Letters Award and, in the next year, the Sahitya Akademi Award, another Indian prize.

Desai’s first collection of short stories, Games at Twilight, was also published in 1978 and well reviewed in England. One of its stories, “The Accompanist,” became the basis for her novel In Custody (1984), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and later adapted for film. In 1979, she published a book for children, The Peacock Garden, followed by another novel, Clear Light of Day, in 1980. All of these works continued to feature Indian middle-class domestic scenes, often looking back to the period before and during Independence. There were also strong autobiographical elements in many of the plots and characters.

With her children grown, Desai moved abroad to take up various academic positions offered to her. From 1986 to 1987, she was the Helen Cam Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Girton College in England. This position was followed by stays at Smith College in Massachusetts, Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts, and Barnard College in New York. Desai then traveled back to Cambridge before becoming a Rockefeller Foundation scholar at the Bellagio Center in Italy and a visiting professor at Cairo University in Egypt. During this period, Desai completed some of her best work. Her novel Baumgartner’s Bombay came out in 1988, showing a broadening of theme as Desai wrote about a Jewish refugee settling in India during World War II.

Desai put down anchor in 1993 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she remained the John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities for a number of years. In 1997, Desai deposited her body of manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

The late 1990s and early 2000s were a fruitful period for Desai. Her novel Journey to Ithaca, which reflects some of her American experience, was published in 1995. The critically acclaimed Fasting, Feasting, a novel about culture shock, came out in 1999, followed by a collection of short stories, Diamond Dust: Stories, in 2000. Three years later, in 2003, Desai received the Benson Medal from London’s Royal Society of Literature. The following year, she released a novel about an American in the Yucatan, entitled The Zig Zag Way (2004). A collection of three of her novellas, The Artist of Disappearance, came out in 2011. In 2014, Desai was awarded the Padma Bhushan, the third-highest civilian award in India, for literature and education. She published Rosarita, a novel about a young woman who struggles to escape her past, in 2024.

Desai is professor emeritus at MIT. She lives and continues to write in upstate New York. She has four adult children, one of whom, Kiran Desai, is also an award-winning novelist.

Significance

Desai adapted the classic British novel of middle-class life and manners to an Indian setting. Her lucid style conveys the many nuances of personal relationships shaped by Indian traditional culture and religion as it engaged with Western influence over the previous two centuries. Desai’s work thus traces one strand of Indian modernity. While using India and her own autobiography as material and substance for analysis, her vision is humanistic: the reader can relate readily to the dilemmas and conflicts of her entrapped women and their efforts to find identity and significance in a life whose borders and limits are all too obvious.

Bibliography

Afzal-Khan, Fawzia. Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel: Genre Ideology in R. K. Naryan, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, and Salman Rushdie. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1993. Print.

Ahmad, Hena. Postnational Feminisms: Postcolonial Identities and Cosmopolitanism in the Works of Kamala Markandaya, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Anita Desai. Oxford: Lang, 2009. Print.

Bande, Usha. The Novels of Anita Desai: A Study in Character and Conflict. New Delhi: Prestige, 1988. Print.

Barnes, Joshua. "'You Turn Yourself into an Outsider': An Interview with Anita Desai." Sampsonia Way. Sampsonia Way, 14 Jan. 2014. Web. 22 Dec. 2014.

Brockes, Emma. "Anita Desai: ‘After I Left India, I Had to Train Myself to Express My Opinions.’" Guardian, 29 June 2024, www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jun/29/anita-desai-after-i-left-india-i-had-to-train-myself-to-express-my-opinions. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Datta, Sudipta. "The India of Anita Desai’s Dreams, and a New Book, ‘Rosarita’, Set in Mexico." The Hindu, 13 July 2024, www.thehindu.com/books/anita-desai-new-book-rosarita-novella-mexico-booker-prize-nominated-author-new-india/article68378543.ece. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Desai, Kiran. "In Conversation: Kiran Desai Meets Anita Desai." Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 11 Nov. 2011. Web. 22 Dec. 2014.

Fernández Carbajal, Albert. Compromise and Resistance in Postcolonial Writing: E. M. Forster's Legacy. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014. Print.

Sengupta, Jayiya. Refractions of Desire: Feminist Perspectives in the Novels of Toni Morrison, Michèle Roberts, and Anita Desai. Delhi: Atlantic, 2006. Print.