Archives: literature

By Srinidhi Murthy 

Born on July 11, 1956, in Calcutta, Amitav Ghosh has lived and travelled extensively across India, Bangladesh, Iran, and Srilanka. He completed his education in an all-boys boarding school in Dehradun. Prominent author Vikram Seth and historian Ramchandra Guha were his contemporaries at the school. In his student days, Ghosh regularly contributed to the fiction and poetry genre for The Doon School Weekly. He also founded a magazine called ‘History Times’ along with Ramchandra Guha. He received his degrees from St. Stephen College in Delhi and Delhi School of Economics before pursuing his PhD in Social Anthropology at the esteemed Oxford University under the supervision of anthropologist Peter Lienhardt. Ghosh also taught at several universities such as the University of Delhi, The American University in Cairo, Columbia University in New York City, and Queens College of the City University of New York to name a few. In 2004, Ghosh decided to pursue writing as a full-time career and split his time between India and the United States. 

Amitav Ghosh started his career at Indian Express during this period as a reporter and editor. Ghosh published his first book named ‘The Circle of Reason’ in 1986 and continued to write more books. Amitav Ghosh includes the themes of climate change, travel, history, political struggle, and communal violence in his novels and his narrative tends to be transnational in sweep and well-researched. His works have been translated into more than thirty languages. Amitav Ghosh also published his non-fiction works in the form of anthologies of essays such as ‘Imam and the Indian’, ‘Dancing in Cambodia’ and ‘At large in Burma’. Amitav Ghosh has written nine fiction novels and six non-fiction works.

It is also interesting to note that Ghosh’s writings, mostly, revolve around his birthplace, Calcutta. In his first novel. ‘The Circle of Reason’, he narrates the misadventures of a young master weaver from Bengal who is falsely accused of terrorism and his journey through the Persian Gulf to North Africa. In his novel ‘The Shadow Lines’, the author traces the lives of an English and a Bengali family whose lives intertwine in tragic and comical ways. The writer also worked on the genre of thriller in his novel ‘Calcutta Chromosomes’ that narrates the story of people who are brought together by a mysterious series of events.

Ghosh has served as a jury in the Locarno and Venice Film festivals and has been facilitated with an Honorary Doctorate by Maastricht University and the University of Puget Sound. ‘The Shadow Lines’ gave him the two prestigious Indian Awards –  Sahitya Academy and Ananda Puraskar in the same year. He was also awarded the Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best science fiction novel. His novels ‘Sea of Poppies’ and ‘River of Smoke’ were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He was also honoured with the Padma Shri by the Indian government for his contribution to literature. Amitav Ghosh is the first English language writer to receive the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honour. He was also named as one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade by Foreign Policy Magazine in 2019.

By Srinidhi Murthy 

Bharati Mukherjee was an Indian-American writer, born on July 27th, 1944 in present-day Kolkata. She authored several novels, short stories, and essays in fiction as well as in the genre of nonfiction. Her notable fiction works include Jasmine, Desirable Daughters, The Holder of the World, Leave it to Me, and The Tree Bride.

Born during the era of British India, Bharati Mukherjee belonged to a wealthy Bengali family. She travelled to Europe with her parents after the independence of India and lived in London and Switzerland for a short period of time. During this time, her father was able to pursue his research. She returned to Calcutta with her parents in the early 1950s. Bharati, along with her sisters, was taught English from the age of three and they attended Loreto Convent School in Calcutta. She later earned her Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Calcutta followed by her master’s degree in Ancient Indian Studies from the University of Baroda in 1961. She travelled to the United States to obtain her MFA from the University of Iowa and pursued her PhD in 1969. Bharati Mukherjee married Canadian-American author Clark Blaise when they were students at the University of Iowa. During their stay in Canada, Mukherjee published an essay in a Canadian magazine named Saturday Night.

Soon she settled in the United States and accepted a position to teach postcolonial and world literature at the University of California. She also taught at McGill University, Skidmore College, Queens College, and the City University of New York during her lifetime. She started writing her novels based on the lives of Indian immigrants in a foreign country. This was inspired by her own experience in Canada and the United States. Her first novel was named ‘The Tiger’s Daughter’, which was published in 1972. Bharati narrates the story of a sheltered Indian woman in the novel who finds herself shocked by her immersion in American culture. Four years later, she published her second novel titled ‘Wife’, in which she narrates the dilemma and thoughts of an Indian woman who was torn between the demands of Indian culture and the culture she witnessed in New York.

Bharati Mukherjee wrote various short stories such as ‘The Middleman’ and other stories that centred on immigrants from developing countries in the United States. The theme continued as a subject for her next two novels ‘Jasmine’ and ‘The Holder of the World.’ Jasmine was published in 1989 and was selected as Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review and considered as one of her famous and notable works. 

Bharati Mukherjee with her husband, Clarke Blaise wrote an account of their fourteen-day stay in India named ‘Days and Nights in Calcutta’, published in 1977. She also wrote about the assessment of leadership trends in India titled Political Culture and Leadership in India. Bharati Mukherjee died on January 28th, 2017 at the age of 76.

By Nitya Menon 

“Wherever you go, becomes a part of you somehow”

– Anita Desai

Anita Desai, who started writing at the age of nine, emerged to be one of India’s most respected novelists. Her achievements include being shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times and receiving the Sahitya Academy Award in 1978 for her book, Fire on the Mountain. She has indeed not only left her mark in the genre of fiction but also nurtured her daughter Kiran Desai in doing so. 

Born in 1937 in Mussoorie, India, Anita Desai grew up speaking German, Hindi and English. She was a student of Queen Mary’s Higher Secondary School in Delhi and later went on to receive a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Delhi. As a child, she always seemed to notice how her family was different from other families in the community in terms of culture and caste. Her mother, who was German, adapted and practised every Indian culture and tradition, yet she always felt like an outsider.

Anita Desai’s childhood days serve as a major theme in her novels. Her writing style is often poetic and descriptive, revolving around fiction and fantasy and the use of symbols and flashbacks. Many of her novels explore the state of middle-class women and the tensions that exist in these families. Anita Desai always believed in quoting the truth as it is,

“I aim to tell the truth about any subject, not a romance or fantasy, not avoid the truth”.

The characters in her novels are quite beautifully written and expressed and a special emphasis is given to female protagonists. The themes of her books are often associated with her own personal life experiences. 

• The suppression of Indian women was the subject of her first novel Cry, the peacock, which is a poetic novel revolving around an incompatible marriage with the focus on the heroine’s psyche. This book immediately established Desai as an icon in Indian Literature.  

• Her second novel Voices in the city is about her experiences in the city of Calcutta where she portrays Calcutta as an oppressive city.

•  In Bye -Bye, Blackbird, the major themes are rejection and acceptance, nostalgia, and alienation. 

• Fire on the Mountain, for which she received an award, is praised for its poetic symbolism and sounds. 

Her other novels include Clear light of the day, Where shall we go this summer, Fasting, feasting and In custody. 

Anita Desai believed the art of writing can only emerge with good reading, she often starts her morning by reading, sometimes books on poetry that strikes the right note for her to begin her writing. She always says her first love was fiction and the motivation to start writing came from her family and the books she frequently read and loved, especially Thomas Hardy and D.H Lawrence who were big influences. She also took a great interest in Japanese and Russian literature such as Dostoyevsky that opened her sense of imagination and the discovery of a new part of literature. 

Her work is well-appreciated, and the major awards received were the Padma Bhushan in 2014, Sahitya Academy Fellowship in 2007, and shortlist for the Booker Prize in 1980, 1984 and 1999. She has also received the Royal Society of literature Winifred Holtby Prize in 1978. She is a professor of Humanities in the Massachusetts Institute of technology and once taught at Cambridge, Oxford. 

As an accomplished author, her message to young budding writers is that one would have to face several difficulties in the journey. It is important to be very persistent and stubborn to achieve what one dreams of. She suggests that writers first begin with short pieces and send them to magazines and newspapers, and once you are confident and it gives you a great sense of joy and delight you can go ahead and write novels and once you start you would never want to stop.