ANITA DESAI: FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN

Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award (now Fellow of the Akademi), Anita Desai has been active on the literary scene for over four decades now. Her published works include adult novels, children’s books and short stories, Clear light of day (1980), In custody (1984) and Fasting Feasting (1999) were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and The Village by the Sea won the Guardian Award for children’s Fiction in 1982. Anita Desai is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London, of the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York and of Girton College of the University of Cambridge, She teaches in the writing Program of MIT and divides her time between India, Boston, Massachusetts and Cambridge, England. Desai’s exquisitely crafted fifth novel (and probably her most powerful work to date), Fire on the Mountain, brings a sense of politics to her hitherto essentially family focussed dramas. It is another female-centred narrative that portrays the lives of three women – the elderly Nanda Kaul, her great grand daughter Raka and Nanda Kaul’s lifelong friend Ila Das – who one by one retreat to Carignano, a small villa in the Himalayan hill station of Kasauli, to escape the brutal patriarchal worlds in which they have each lived. The novel has been assessed and analysed from every possible angle to meet the requirements of our university students at the graduate and post - graduate in this critical study. Shakti Batra, Formerly Vice-Principal of Dyal Singh College (University of Delhi), has also taught at the Kabul University and the University of Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek.

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