A Study of Anita Desai as a Female Explainer

Pages:28-29
Pallavi (Department of English, GJU S&T, Hisar, Haryana)

Desai was born as Anita Mazumadar in Musoorie, a northern India hill station near Dehra Dun on June 24 1937. Born to a Bengali business man father and a mother that was from Germany and was the Toni Nime. She grew up during World War II and was no stranger to discrimination which is reflected in her writing. She was multilingual and she speaks German at home, as well, as Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and English at school and in the streets. Growing up she says she was surrounded by western culture which probably had tweaked her writing to get more pop. She began to write English at the age of seven and her first book published at the age of nine. Such as her book, “Clear Light of Day” which is her most autobiographical book about her town. Her characters are often developed escapists ways to deal with their world outside comfortable living or everyday boring lives. Later in her life Anita left India. Anita never tried, or ever got her work published in India because no publisher in India would be interested in a fiction writer from India. She states “I can’t really write on it with the same intensity and familiarity that I once had”. She is glad she left later rather then sooner because she believes she has been drifting away from the culture ever since. At the age of 21 she married a business man named Ashvin Desai and they raised four children together. She believes she was noticed in England because of her western style of writing and their interest in India. She believes her feministic style of writing come from the changing times when she was growing up “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.” (Dsesai) Anita wrote most of the time in a formal way except when she wrote her children books like in Clear light of day “No one feels the atmosphere more keely-or catches the nuances, all the insulations in the air- or notes those details that escape elders because their senses have atrophied, or calcified. She once said” I can state definitely that I did not choose English in a deliberate and conscious act and I’d say perhaps it was a language that chose me and I started writing stories in English at the age of seven, and have been doing so for thirty years. “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” (Desai).