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 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)
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