Write the introduction to Anita Desai.

Ans.

Anita Desai, born Anita Mazumdar (born 24 June, 1937) is an Indian novelist and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi. India’s National Academy of Letters, she won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea.

Early Life

Desai was born in 1937 in Mussoorie, India, to a German immigrant mother. Toni Nime and a Bengali businessman, D. N. Mazumdar. Her Bengali father first met her German mother while he was an engineering student in pre-war Belrin, and they got married during a period when it was still unusual for an Indian man to marry a European woman. Shortly after their marriage, they moved to New Delhi, where Desai was raised with her two elder sisters and brother.

She grew up speaking Hindi with her neighbours and only German at her home, she also spoke Bengali. Urdu and English. Out of her house, she first learned to read and write in English at school and as a result, English became her ‘literary language. She began to write in English at the age of seven and published her first story at the age of nine.

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 Eternitics ideas on life and The Cosmos.

Career

Desai published her first novel Cry the Peacock, in 1963. In 1957, she collaborated with P. Lal and founded the publishing firm writers workshop. She consider Clear Light of Day (1980) her most autobiographical work as it was set during her coming of age and also in the same neighbourhood in which she grew up.

In 1984, she published in custody-about an Urdu poet in his declining days which was shortilised for the Booker Prize. In 1993, she became a creative writing teacher at Massachusetts institute of technology.

The 1999 Booker Prize finalist novel fasting feasting increased her popularity. Her novel The Zigzag Way, set in 20th century Mexico, appeared in 2004 and her latest collection of short stories, The Artist of Disappearance, was published in 2011.

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 (to which she dedicated Baumgartner’s Bombay).