Anita Desai

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Anita Desai
Anita Mazumdar Born 24 June 1937 (age 74) Mussoorie, India

Occupation

Author/Professor

Nationality

Indian

Alma mater

University of Delhi

Period

1970spresent

Genres

Fiction

Children

Kiran Desai

Anita Mazumdar Desai (born 24 June 1937) is an Indian novelist and Emeritus John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1978 for her novel, Fire on the Mountain, by the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters.[1]

Contents

1 Background 2 Career 3 Film 4 Awards 5 Selected works 6 See also

7 References 8 External links 9 Papers

[edit] Background
Born as Anita Mazumdar to a German mother, Toni Nime, and a Bengali businessman, D. N. Mazumdar[2] in Mussoorie, India. She grew up speaking German at home and Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and English outside the house. She first learned to read and write in English at school and as a result it became her "literary language".[3] Despite German being her first language she did not visit Germany until later in life as an adult. She began to write in English at the age of seven, and published her first story at the age of nine.[4] She was a student at Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School in Delhi and received her B.A. in English literature in 1957 from the Miranda House of the University of Delhi. The following year she married Ashvin Desai, the director of a computer software company and author of the book: Between Eternities: Ideas on Life and The Cosmos. They have four children, including Booker Prize-winning novelist Kiran Desai. Her children were taken to Thul (near Alibagh) for weekends, where Desai set her novel The Village by the Sea.[2]

[edit] Career
Desai published her first novel, Cry The Peacock, in 1963. She considers Clear Light Of Day (1980) her most autobiographical work as it is set during her coming of age and also in the same neighborhood in which she grew up.[5] In 1984 she published In Custody - about an Urdu poet in his declining days - which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 1993 she became a creative writing teacher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[6] Her latest novel, The Zigzag Way (2004), is set in 20th-century Mexico. Desai has taught at Mount Holyoke College, Baruch College and Smith College. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and of Girton College, Cambridge University (to which she dedicated Baumgartner's Bombay).[7] In addition, she writes for the New York Review of Books.

[edit] Film
In 1993 Merchant Ivory Productions released In Custody, directed by Ismail Merchant, with a screenplay by Shahrukh Husain. It won the 1994 President of India Gold Medal for Best Picture and stars Shashi Kapoor, Shabana Azmi and Om Puri.

[edit] Awards

1978 - Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize- Fire on the Mountain

1978 - Sahitya Akademi Award (National Academy of Letters Award)- Fire on the Mountain 1980 - Shortlisted, Booker Prize for Fiction - Clear Light of Day 1983 - Guardian Children's Fiction Prize - The Village By The Sea 1984 - Shortlisted, Booker Prize for Fiction - In Custody 1993 - Neil Gunn Prize 1999 - Shortlisted, Booker Prize for Fiction: Fasting, Feasting 2000 - Alberto Moravia Prize for Literature (Italy) 2003 - Benson Medal of Royal Society of Literature [8]

[edit] Selected works

The Zigzag Way (2004) Diamond Dust and Other Stories (2000) Fasting, Feasting (1999) Journey to Ithaca (1995) Baumgartner's Bombay (1988) In Custody (1984) The Village By The Sea (1982) Clear Light of Day (1980) Games at Twilight (1978) Fire on the Mountain (1977) Cat on a Houseboat (1976) Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975) The Peacock Garden (1974) Bye-bye Blackbird (1971) Voices in the City (1965) Cry, The Peacock (1963) The Artist Of Disappearance India- A Travellers Literary Companion

Biography
Anita Desai was born in 1935 in Delhi to a German mother and a Bengali father. 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). 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

Anita Desai

A useful revision exercise might be to organise the following quotations into groups. You could then start producing a couple of P,E,E, sequences for each group: Games at Twilight quotations.doc If you find that difficult, I have already grouped the quotations for you here. You can then simply select a couple of quotations from each group, and produce a P.E.E. sequence for each one. Alternatively, you could try to produce a powerpoint presentation on this story, like the ones I have made, using the quotations in this attachment: Games at Twilight quotations (grouped).doc Summary: Games At Twilight was written by Anita Desai. The story is about a young boy named Ravi, who is misunderstood by his fellow comrads (his family) which makes him feel insignificant. The day starts off

boiling hot. the children desperate to go out " that they burst out like seeds from a crakling, over- ripe pod," they start their day off by playing games such as ' Hide and Seek,' but Raghu the older brother was the seeker. And Ravi was one of the hiders. Ravi hid in a shed, "it was dark, spooky in the shed," and Ravi stayed there for a very long time. He was not found, but after a while he realized to win the game, you have to touch the 'Den.' He came out of the shed fast and ran and shouted out, " Den, Den,Den." Everyone looked at him with amazement. The 'motherly' Mira said " Stop it, Stop it, Stop it, Ravi, Don't be a baby." Ravi made himself think that he won, but no one agreed or did not even bother looking for him. " he is silenced by a terrible sense of his insignificance." "Cause by the ignominy of being forgotten." Ravi was looking forward to winning but was heartbroken when the other children left him out. Games At Twilight highlights the effects of exclusion towards the people. Ravi is a pariah in the family beacuse the other children don't see him as being important. Setting: The story is set in India. In the house it is very stuffy and hot, when they go out to the veranda, it is very hot and humid. The shed that Ravi when to hide in was dark, creepy and scary. " the shed smelt of rats, ant hills, dust and spider webs." Characters:

Mira - sister, motherly figure. Raghu - aggressive, violent and animalistic. "charged after him with a blood curdling yell." Ravi - main character. suffers from ignominy. social pariah. youngest child. Mother - tries to be strict; not much control over the children; not very persistent.

Themes: Childhood Igonominy Being misunderstood Hierarchy Parents and children relationship Family Pariahs

Quotations:

"please ma,please we'll play in the vendra" "Their faces were red and bloated." "the business of the children's day which is- play. "Raghu was it. he started to protest, to cry." "Raghu's long, hefty, hairy footballer legs." "it was dark, spooky in the shed." " "he alone left unconquered." "ignominy of being forgotten." "Their lungs were stuffed with cotton wool and dust". "They faced the afternoon. It was too hot. Too bright".

"silenced by a terrible sense of insignificance". "flower pot...that at least was cut to his own size"-a flower pot is the only thing that Ravi gets for being the youngest and smallest child in the family "such a dark and depressing mortuary of defunct goods"-as much as Ravi wants to be noticed he only finds comfort in a shed full of forgotten furniture, forgotten just like himself

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