South Asian Novelists in English: An A-to-Z Guide 0313318859, 9780313318856, 2002070045

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
MEENA ALEXANDER (1951– )
MULK RAJ ANAND (1905– )
ANJANA APPACHANA (1972– )
JEAN ARASANAYAGAM (1930– )
VIKRAM CHANDRA (1961– )
UPAMANYU CHATTERJEE (1959– )
AMIT CHAUDHURI (1962– )
NIRAD CHANDRA CHAUDHURI (1897–1999)
KAMALA DAS (1934– )
ANITA DESAI (1937– )
SHASHI DESHPANDE (1938– )
FARRUKH DHONDY (1944– )
CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI (1956– )
INDIRA GANESAN (1960– )
ZULFIKAR GHOSE (1935– )
AMITAV GHOSH (1956– )
YASMINE GOONERATNE (1935– )
JAMES GOONEWARDENE (1921–1997)
ROMESH GUNESEKERA (1954– )
SUNETRA GUPTA (1965– )
KAIZAD GUSTAD (1968– )
MOHSIN HAMID (1971– )
GITHA HARIHARAN (1957– )
RAJ KAMAL JHA (1966– )
FIRDAUS KANGA (1961– )
MANJU KAPUR (1949?– )
MUKUL KESAVAN (1957– )
ADIB KHAN (1949– )
CHANDANI LOKUGE (19??– )
MANOHAR MALGONKAR (1913– )
KAMALA MARKANDAYA (1935– )
GITA MEHTA (1943– )
VED MEHTA (1934– )
PANKAJ MISHRA (1969– )
ROHINTON MISTRY (1952– )
BHARATI MUKHERJEE (1940– )
KIRAN NAGARKAR (1942– )
SUNITI NAMJOSHI (1941– )
KIRIN NARAYAN (1959– )
R. K. NARAYAN (1906–2001)
MICHAEL ONDAATJE (1943– )
VICTOR RANGEL-RIBEIRO (1925– )
RAJA RAO (1910– )
ARUNDHATI ROY (1960– )
SALMAN RUSHDIE (1947– )
NAYANTARA SAHGAL (1927– )
I. ALLAN SEALY (1951– )
SHYAM SELVADURAI (1965– )
VIKRAM SETH (1952– )
BULBUL SHARMA (1952– )
BAPSI SIDHWA (1938– )
KHUSHWANT SINGH (1915– )
SARA SULERI (1953– )
MANIL SURI (1959– )
SHASHI THAROOR (1956– )
ARDASHIR VAKIL (1962– )
MOYEZ G.VASSANJI (1950– )
Selected Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
About the Editor and Contributors

Citation preview

South Asian Novelists in

English

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South Asian Novelists in

English An A-to-Z Guide

Edited by Jaina C. Sanga

Emmanuel S. Nelson, Advisory Editor

GREENWOOD PRESS WESTPORT, CONNECTICUT • LONDON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data South Asian novelists in english: an A-to-Z guide / edited by Jaina C. Sanga p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-313-31885-9 (alk. paper) 1. Authors, South Asian—Biography. 2. Indic fiction (English)—South Asian authors. 3. Indic fiction (English)—20th century—History and criticism. I. Sanga, Jaina C , 1961PR9496.2.S6S68 2003 820.9,954—dc21 2002070045 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2003 by Jaina C. Sanga All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002070045 ISBN: 0-313-31885-9 First published in 2003 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www. greenwood, com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 987654321

For my father, Max Chinai, whose ideas have influenced me more than he knows.

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Contents

Introduction by Jaina C. Sanga

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MEENA ALEXANDER (1951- ) by Lavina Dhingra Shankar MULK RAJ ANAND (1905- ) by Rochelle J. Almeida ANJANAAPPACHANA(1972- ) byLaraVKattekola JEAN ARASANAYAGAM (1930- ) by Chelva Kanaganayakam VIKRAM CHANDRA (1961- ) by Doug Payne UPAMANYUCHATTERJEE(1959- ) by Rochelle J. Almeida AMIT CHAUDHURI (1962- ) by Purvi Shah

1 6 12 16 21 27 32

NIRAD CHANDRA CHAUDHURI (1897-1999) by Pallavi Rastogi KAMALA DAS (1934- ) by Manju Jaidka ANITA DESAI (1937- ) by Pradyumna S. Chauhan SHASHIDESHPANDE(1938- ) byJosnaRege FARRUKHDHONDY(1944- ) by Sangeeta Mediratta CHITRABANERJEEDIVAKARUNI(1956by Lavina Dhingra Shankar

38 43 47 54 61 ) 64

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INDIRA GANESAN (1960- ) by Sangeeta Mediratta ZULFIKARGHOSE(1935- ) by Waqas Ahmad Khwaj a AMITAV GHOSH (1956- ) by Bakirathi Mani YASMINEGOONERATNE(1935- ) by S. W. Perera JAMES GOONEWARDENE (1921-1997) by Nihal Fernando ROMESHGUNESEKERA(1954- ) by Gautam Kundu SUNETRA GUPTA (1965- ) by Vij ay Lakshmi (Chauhan) KAIZADGUSTAD(1968- ) byJignaDesai MOHSINHAMID(1971- ) by Waqas Ahmad Khwaj a GITHAHARIHARAN(1957- ) by Meenakshi Bharat RAJ KAMALJHA (1966- ) by Pallavi Rastogi FIRDAUSKANGA(1961- ) by John C. Hawley MANJUKAPUR(1949?- ) by Pallavi Rastogi MUKULKESAVAN(1957- ) by Padmaja N. Challakere ADIB KHAN (1949- ) by Rebecca Sultana CHANDANI LOKUGE (19??- ) by S.W. Perera MANOHAR MALGONKAR (1913- ) by Janet M. Powers KAMALAMARKANDAYA(1935- ) by Hena Ahmad GITAMEHTA(1943- ) by Pradyumna S. Chauhan VED MEHTA (1934- ) by Suj ata Iyengar PANKAJMISHRA(1969- ) by Rahul Gairola

69 72 78 83 88 93 100 103 107 111 115 118 122 125 128 132 136 141 149 153 158

cONTENE ROHINTONMISTRY(1952- ) by Tess E. Chakkalakal BHARATI MUKHERJEE (1940- ) by Kellie Holzer KIRAN NAGARKAR (1942- ) by Niti Sampat-Patel SUNITINAMJOSHI(1941- ) by Harveen Sachdeva Mann KIRINNARAYAN(1959- ) by Grant Farred R. K. NARAYAN (1906-2001) by John P. Langan MICHAEL ONDAATJE (1943- ) by Anthony R. Guneratne VICTOR RANGEL-RIBEIRO (1925by Gita Raj an RAJA RAO (1910- ) by Janet M. Powers ARUNDHATI ROY (1960- ) by Emmanuel S. Nelson SALMAN RUSHDIE (1947- ) by Michael Reder NAYANTARA SAHGAL (1927- ) by Jill Didur I. ALLAN SEALY (1951- ) by Manju Jaidka SHYAMSELVADURAI(1965- ) by Emmanuel S. Nelson VIKRAMSETH(1952- ) by Anthony R. Guneratne BULBULSHARMA(1952- ) by Natasha W Vashisht BAPSISIDHWA(1938- ) by Feroza Jussawalla KHUSHWANT SINGH (1915- ) by Doug Payne SARA SULERI (1953- ) by Ambreen Hai MANILSURI(1959- ) by Kellie Holzer SHASHITHAROOR(1956- ) by Gita Raj an

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169 177 181 186 193 201 207 212 218 223 235 243 247 251 257 260 265 272 277 281

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ARDASHIR VAKIL (1962- ) by John C. Hawley MOYEZG.VASSANJI(1950- ) by Marian Aguiar Selected Bibliography Index About the Editor and Contributors

288 292 297 301 305

Introduction

Jaina C. Sanga Undoubtedly, South Asian novelists writing in English have arrived on the international literary scene on a grand scale. The publication of Salman Rushdie's Booker Prize-winning novel MidnightJS Children in 1981 followed by the unprecedented popularity of his subsequent work; the many best-sellers written by Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Chandra, and others; Bharati Mukherjee's National Book Critics' Circle Award in 1988; the cinematic adaptations of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India; Arundhati Roy's Booker Prize in 1997; and the selection of Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance by acclaimed talk-show hostess Oprah Winfrey are just a few of the notable highlights in recent years that have contributed to drawing the world's attention to South Asian literature written in English. This reference includes, for the most part, novelists who were born in South Asia— specifically, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Although there are several novelists who have written and continue to write about situations and issues relevant to South Asia—G. V Desani, Pico Iyer, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Hanif Kureishi, V S. Naipaul, for example—the entries in this volume are focused on novelists who claim the countries in South Asia as their birthplace. While acutely aware of the problems and limitations of setting such boundaries, I have used this criteria as an organizational strategy and as a means to foreground the literary contributions of the representative nations. So why has international literary interest focused on South Asian writing? What is it about this writing that continues to draw so much attention? Most obviously, the language in which these novels are written—English—is a paramount factor. The beginnings of South Asian literature in English may be traced back to the early days of English education in India. The tradition of English studies in colonial India has been brilliantly documented by Gauri Viswanathan, a protege of Edward Said, in her book titled Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989). Viswanathan traces the origins of English studies in the colony from the passing of the Charter Act of 1813 when the East India Company took on the responsibility for native education, to 1857 when the British Crown took over the company and formally patterned the Indian university system after the curriculum at London University. The development of an English curriculum in upper-class Indian schools was the direct result of moral and political issues that were outlined in Thomas Macaulay's famous 1835 Minute of Indian Education, as well as by William Bentinck's English Education Act, which made the study of English mandatory in India. Although there was a great deal of dissension among

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Indian scholars who felt that the indigenous languages would suffer because of the widespread proliferation of English, there were many Indian reformers—Ram Mohan Roy, for instance—who favored and encouraged the study of the English language in India. One of the most direct outcomes of British colonialism is the growth of a post-Independence generation of writers in the Indian subcontinent that speak and write primarily in English. This tends to be an elite strata of society, concentrated most often in the urban centers that house prestigious schools and universities. Although most of them know at least one or two other Indian languages, for many, English is a first language, sometimes the only language in which they can claim a degree offluency.Furthermore, quite a few of the South Asian novelists have been educated in England, Australia, and the United States, while some have even immigrated to these countries. Because of the privileged backgrounds that most of these novelists come from, they exude a definite sense of confidence in the ease and elegance with which they are able to use the English language. Another reason why South Asian novels in English have garnered so much acclaim is that this literature represents a writing of great power and relevance. These novelists insist on their own perspectives, providing largely alternative views of the South Asian sentiment to those that fueled the imagination through the nostalgic, idealized imagery found in the novels of Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, Paul Scott, and others. Moreover, South Asian novels do indeed provide something different: They show us a vibrant, exotic, chaotic world where people seem more robust and spirited than in most other contemporary fiction; where exuberance and compromise infuse daily life; where religion and politics matter profoundly; where the follies and foibles of humanity are showcased with precise satire; and where ancient traditions are brought face to face with the conventions of modern living. It should be noted at the outset, however, that although it is the novels written in English that have attained immense popularity around the world, there is in fact a long and sophisticated tradition of novel writing in the numerous indigenous languages in South Asia. South Asian literature—unlike Latin American, Russian, French, German, British, or American literature—is not language specific. There are numerous South Asian writers who have produced brilliant works in languages other than English: Sadat Hasan Manto (Urdu), Premchand (Hindi), O. V Vijayan (Malayalam), Bibhuti Bhusan Banerjee (Bengali), Nirmal Verma, Manoj Das, Ashok Mitran, and U. R. Anantha Murthy (Kannada) are just a few from quite a lengthy list. These writers of the vernacular languages continue to have a crucial impact on the evolution of South Asian literature as they, too, like their counterparts writing in English, provide unique articulations of local and national spaces. Although their work is virtually unknown in the rest of the world owing to, among other reasons, the lack of adequate translations in English, in recent years there have been certain systematic attempts to describe and popularize the breadth and scope of the various regional literatures. For instance, Amit Chaudhuri's The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature (2001) anthologizes the amazing polyphony of literary practices; the volume includes English translations from Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, and so on and shows how modern Indian writing is actually made up of multiple traditions; Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha's Women Writing in India (2 volumes: 1991 and 1993) is an excellent collection showcasing women's writing in a host of languages; and Nalini Natarajan's Handbook of Twentieth-Century Literatures of India (1996), is a compilation of historical and critical essays on fifteen different vernacular literatures. By focusing this reference on South Asian novelists in English, the agenda is not to sideline or discredit the work of novelists writing in the indigenous languages. This volume focuses on novelists in English because English is a language that occupies a dom-

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inant place in South Asia today. It is very much the language of cultural and commercial communication in this part of the world. Within the past twenty-five years or so, English has gradually become more prevalent within a larger cross section of society. Moreover, with the presence of more than thirty official languages, the presence of English, has, to a great extent, succeeded in drawing together a mass of people that would otherwise remain segregated along linguistic boundaries. The authority of English as a literary medium in South Asia today (mainly, albeit not exclusively in its standard form) is unmistakable. Also unmistakable is the enduring quality of writing in English despite its presence in a huge, multilingual area of the Asian continent. Admittedly, as Amit Chaudhuri points out, English is not an Indian language in the same way that Hindi or Telegu or Marathi are considered Indian languages ("Modernity and the Vernacular" Times Literary Supplement, 1997). Nor is English a Pakistani or Bangladeshi language in the same way that we may think of Urdu as a Pakistani language and Bengali as a Bangladeshi language. While the position of English in South Asia may be slightly ambiguous, its authority and permanence are certain. Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, or Sri Lankan literature in English is thus not essentially separate from South Asian literature—it is, in fact, a modern part of it. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's Rajmohan s Wife, which appeared in 1864, is generally regarded as the first Indian English novel. A particularly didactic tale, it focuses, like much of the early Indian English fiction on social reform. The story concerns the sufferings of a Hindu middle-class woman who is consistently oppressed by her husband. During the late 1800s there were several emerging novelists in India whose novels centered around the issues of poverty, the position of women, the changing status of the aristocracy, and the plight of the landless peasantry. It was not until the 1930s, however, that the Indian novel in English really took ground. The gradual process of the demotion of imperial power found its literary and cultural expression in some of the early novels of this time. This was in the wake of a tremendous nationalist fervor that gained significant momentum in the Civil Disobedience Movement pioneered by Mohandas Gandhi. Three major Indian novelists, regarded as the "gurus" of the Indian English novel—Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, and Raja Rao—began their careers as novelists during this time. Some of the themes that developed in the novels of this period—the complexities of the freedom struggle, issues of communalism, Hindu-Muslim dynamics, economic exploitation, the social status of untouchables, and the clash between orthodox views and emerging ideas of new social formations—to a large extent still resonate in South Asian fiction today. Moreover, the three "great" novelists are notable for the contribution they made to literary aesthetics, particularly their innovative treatment of the novelistic genre. Anand, for instance, experiments, like James Joyce, with the technique of compressing a single day's events into a meaningful narrative; Narayan, best known for his stories of the imaginary locale Malgudi, is concerned with representing astute details, his characters grounded in local rather than heroic discoveries, their eccentricities insistent on surfacing as small ironies of the human predicament; and Rao, champion of the philosophical novel, sets up an engaging contrast between Western and Eastern worldviews in his autobiographical account of the modern Indian intellectual. Furthermore, both Anand and Rao are notable for the way in which they introduce Indian words and idioms into their fiction, a practice that has now gone to new heights in the novels of Salman Rushdie. One of the problems, however, encountered by much of South Asian writing in English has been rendering experience in a language in which it does not occur. It has been imperative for these novelists to use the English language in a way that is necessarily reinventive, not merely imitative of its colonial engagements.

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To this effect, Rao's words, which have now become classic, are indicative of a fecund sensibility essential for understanding the unique hybrid nature of Indo-Anglian literature. Rao, in his author's foreword to the Kanthapura writes: "We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us. Our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect which will some day prove to be as distinctive and colourful as the Irish or the American." Anand, Narayan, and Rao are acclaimed novelists in their own right, and certainly their work has had a profound impact on the current generation of novelists. However, in tracing the rise of the South Asian novel in English, it is the seminal influence of one book—Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children published in 1981—that has succeeded in triggering a tremendous boom in South Asian writing. The novel is the story of Saleem Sinai—the narrator—born at the precise moment of India's independence: at midnight on August 15, 1947. Telepathically linked to one thousand other "midnight's children" who are also born at the hour of independence, Saleem's life is inextricably linked to that of the nation. Thus, metaphorically, Saleem equals India, and the novel is a brilliant rendition of the trials and triumphs of modern India told through the narrator's fractured perceptions. Rushdie's innovative narrative strategies and his evocation of Indian places and themes has offered the upcoming generation of novelists new ways to effectively tackle reality. Most important, though, it is Rushdie's use of language that has inspired novelists to write in a brave new way. His importing of Indian words, phrases, and intonations into the text has, to a large extent, succeeded in writing through the anxiety manifested in the contesting authorities of language and culture. Rustom Barucha has put it succinctly: "It is almost as if the Queen's English has been 'chutnified,' fried in sizzling ghee, and dipped in curry" ("Rushdie's Whale," Reading Rushdie, M. D. Fletcher, ed.). The new generation of South Asian novelists—Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Amit Chaudhuri, Githa Hariharan, I. Allan Sealy, Kiran Nagarkar, Mukul Kesavan, Meena Alexander, Pankaj Mishra, Gita Mehta, and numerous others—have had to be overtly concerned with and develop responses to the competing trajectories of colonialism, nationalism, modernity, and globalization. Hence, their fiction provides, among other things, new ways to imagine the nation. Issues of diaspora and national identity figure prominently in some of their novels. The focus of some of their work is also the subject of communal violence, unleashed in most part by the garrulous events of independence and partition. The lives of women and their inclusion in the sociopolitical construction of contemporary South Asia as well as a productive attention to subaltern representation is engagingly featured in their fiction. Literary critics and publishing houses in South Asia and in the West have played a key role in the rise of the South Asian novel in English. The popularity of certain Indian writers has depended on the promotion by Western literary figures: Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable, for instance, was turned down by several publishers until it was endorsed by E. M. Forster; Wishart Books finally agreed to publish the novel provided Forster wrote the introduction. Also Graham Greene's favorable review of R. K. Narayan's first novel, Swami and Friends, helped garner international acclaim for the young Indian novelist. In recent years even, it is a well-known fact that publishers, especially in the West, have become acutely aware of the revenues that certain South Asian novelists have been able to fetch them. Bidding wars between publishers and the hefty sums extended to novelists by way of advance money is further evidence of the importance and authority of the South Asian novel in English. In the early part of the twentieth century, the book business in South Asia lacked enterprising publishers, and there were few competent booksellers. The production of

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books was hampered by numerous errors and misprints, and the poor quality of paper used further impeded the professional appearance of books. (For more information on the early book production business in South Asia, please refer to M. K. Naik's A History of Indian English Literature.) The book trade in South Asia has become more organized in the past few decades. It is no longer a Pickwickian process; rather, publishers there are now printing books of exceptional quality, and the book business has become a thriving enterprise. Moreover, some publishers have ventured into lucrative partnerships with their foreign-based counterparts: Penguin India, for instance, is the result of a collaboration in 1986 between Penguin Books and the Ananda Bazar Patrika; HarperCollins (India) is the result of a joint venture in 1991 between HarperCollins and Rupa Publishing House. All this is not to downplay the inherent merit and originality of South Asian novels, but rather to suggest that their popularity is and has been dependent on a number of interrelated factors that are both directly and indirectly sustained by the political and historical legacies of the colonial and postcolonial moments as well as by the workings of global market processes. This reference is designed to be used by both beginning and advanced scholars as well as the general reader of fiction. The purpose of this volume is to provide a systematic way to approach the study of South Asian novelists writing in English. Each entry begins with a section on the novelist's biography. This is followed by a discussion of the major works and themes of the novelist. The next section provides an overview of the critical reception that the novelist has received. Each entry concludes with a detailed bibliography listing both primary and secondary works. In many cases, the writers of the entries happened to be personally acquainted with the novelists they were writing about. In such instances, in an effort to provide a more "real" account of the novelists and their works, I have encouraged the inclusion, wherever relevant, of personal correspondences and anecdotes. The increasing popularity of South Asian writers has engendered a remarkable body of literary criticism. The Selected Bibliography at the end of this volume lists some pertinent collections of essays as well as certain individual articles that focus on the South Asian novel in English. Also included in this bibliography is a list of anthologies that showcase South Asian fiction and a list of relevant periodicals. A volume such as this can be considered a celebration as well as a judgment. In as much as the purpose is not to establish a definitive canon, I realize the extent to which reference works can be implicated in the problematics of canon formation. It must be remembered, however, that South Asian literature in English is, at this time, a protean phenomenon. It is constantly evolving—new novelists are emerging, it seems, almost every month, and while we can discern certain common thematic traits and identify and follow the course of several prominent novelists already, it is impossible to chart out a definitive canon as such. It is more productive, I suggest, to think of this body of literature in terms of a "continuum"—a fluid process that constantly accommodates imaginative profusion. Lack of space and time has prevented including many notable novelists, such as Himani Bannerjee, Kamila Shamsie, Stephen Alter, Ruskin Bond, and numerous others. I hope this volume, despite its omissions, still provides the reader with a sense of the amazing trajectory of the South Asian novel tradition. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the contributors of this volume. Many of them completed their entries amidst the pressures of teaching, meeting other writing deadlines, coping with illnesses, or dealing with technical fiascos. Their enthusiasm, promptness, and sometimes tardiness made my role as editor a truly fascinating experience. My thanks to Dr. George Butler, senior editor at Greenwood Press, for his

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guidance and patience. Many thanks to Emmanuel S. Nelson, series advisor, for his support and encouragement and, most of all, for his friendship. I am grateful also to all the publication staff at Greenwood who work behind the scenes to make such a book possible. Finally, a special thanks to my lovely daughter Monica, for her computer wizardry and for her unfailing and meticulous help in formatting this volume.

Meena Alexander (1951- ) Lavina Dhingra Shankar BIOGRAPHY Born a Syrian Christian on February 17, 1951, in the Hindu pilgrimage city of Allahabad in North India, Meena Alexander was baptized Mary Elizabeth Alexander after her two grandmothers Mariamma and Eli. In her memoir, she cherishes her deep-rooted spiritual and emotional attachment to her grandparents' ancestral home in Tiruvella and her parents home in Kozencheri, Kerala. At age five, she moved to Khartoum, Sudan, in North Africa, where her father's job with the Indian government had taken the family. Each year Meena lived for six months on each continent—Africa and Asia—until she moved to England at age eighteen to attend Nottingham University, where she completed her doctoral dissertation on the British Romantic poets. Having felt a sense of intense dislocation and alienation in England, she returned to India at age twenty-two, and lived in Delhi and Hyderabad for part of her twenties, teaching at the University of Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Central Institute of Hyderabad, and the University of Hyderabad. In 1979, Alexander married a Jewish American historian, David Lelyveld, whom she met in India. She moved to New York as a pregnant bride, spent a year teaching in Minnesota, and eventually settled in New York. Before Alexander moved to the United States, she had published several volumes of poetry and had completed a draft of her first novel, Nampally Road, which she published many years later. Alexander speaks six languages—Malayalam, English, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, and French—and her first poems were published in Arabic. She was awarded a distinguished professorship by the City University of New York in 1999, and teaches in the writing program at Columbia University. She lives in New York with her husband and two children: a son, Adam Kuruvilla, and a daughter, Svati Mariam. MAJOR WORKS AND THEMES In an interview with Zainab Ali and Dharini Rasiah, Meena Alexander articulates her artistic goals explicitly in a way that applies to both her novels: "What I try to do is give voice to these very simple human experiences of longing and love and loss—all the stuff that makes us what we are—but within this complicated, unstable world, shifting within diasporic and migrant spaces, where identities are contested, where they cannot be taken for granted. Because that's the world I know" (88). This statement reveals

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Alexander's preoccupation with expressing, through her writing, the psychological trauma of her own physical and geographic dislocations and her ongoing attempts at defining her identity (Shankar, 287). Alexander writes autobiographical fiction, utilizing incidents from her own life as well as her personal questions that recur in several of her works. Her fiction reveals her obsession with searching for answers on how to make sense of her fragmented life, which has led to her experience of a fractured identity, and which she discusses most explicitly in her memoir Fault Lines (1993) and The Shock ojArrival (1996). The same themes, fears, and preoccupations are echoed in her novels; memories, dreams, and nightmares are often conflated so that neither the characters nor the readers are sure which situations are real and evoked from memory and which are the result of a fevered imagination. In Manhattan Music (1997), the protagonist Sandhya Maria Rosenblum, a Syrian Christian wife and mother who has immigrated to the United States from Hyderabad three years earlier—after marrying Stephen, a Jewish American man—is haunted by her past which she cannot forget (71, 77-78). She is drowning in memories of her life in India and her ancestral history: "memory swelling like black water threatened to drown her" (4). Through the novel's action, we witness Sandhya's discontentment with her marriage, her adulterous affair with an Egyptian immigrant—Rashid—and her overall diasporic confusion and dislocation, leading ultimately to her attempted suicide and her recovery with the help of her friend and alter-ego, Draupadi Dinkins, the IndoTrinidadian American performance artist who is named after the mythic heroine from the Mahabharata, and Sandhya's social activist cousin Sakhi. The novel is set against the backdrop of political events of the 1980s and early 1990s, which are mentioned in passing—including the anti-Sikh communal riots after Indira Gandhi's assassination in 1984, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Persian Gulf War, the Hindu-Muslim riots in Hyderabad, and Rajiv Gandhi's assassination—and which are often the subject of the socially and politically conscious characters' intellectualized thoughts or discussions. Violence permeates the text, such as in the opening scene in Hyderabad where Sandhya encounters a dead body while out on a walk, the references to the death of her activist-lover Gautam tortured in prison (20-21), dowry-related burning deaths of Sandhya's friends in India (33), the threat of international terrorism by Rashid's friends and other Muslim immigrants in Manhattan protesting against the Gulf War, accounts of racial violence faced by Draupadi Dinkins and her family in upstate New York, the stones and racial slurs hurled at Sandhya and her cousin Sakhi by skinheads in New Jersey, and, eventually, Sandhya's attempted suicide by hanging on a rope. The novel is divided into chapters titled "Sitting," "Stirring," "Going," "Stoning," "Turning," and "Staying" to give a sense of Woolfian "Time Passing" (To the Lighthouse) and the ebb and flow of memories and emotions. The narration is multivocal, and Draupadi Dinkins is the only one who narrates her story in the first person. Each section is narrated by a third-person narrator and focuses on the thoughts of one of the major characters, often providing interior monologues and insights into the minds of Draupadi, Sandhya, and her cousins, Jay and Sakhi. Alexander's first novel, Nampally Road (1991) is partly autobiographical and is based partly on historical fact. It is narrated by Mira Kannadical, an English instructor at a local college in Hyderabad, who has recently returned to India after studying in England. The protagonist has to overcome her naive idealism and recognize her country for what it is: political corruption, turbulence, and civil unrest. She simultaneously learns to deal with her inner psychological turmoil and her sense of having "suffered

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from dislocation" (29) in the Midlands on having returned "home" both to/from a place she feels alienated with. Mira struggles to reconcile her two worlds—the intellectual realm of daffodils and Romantic poets that she lectures about in the postcolonial Indian English classroom "mouthing unreal words" (47), her poetry writing which "seem the mere fruits of bourgeois privacy" (29), and the world of political activism and struggles for social justice in which her lover Ramu and her widowed physician friend and mentor Durgabai (Little Mother) are involved, where the physical survival of the socially and economically oppressed classes is at stake. Mira becomes concerned about the orange sellers on her street who are punished for organizing peaceful protests against taxes. The gang rape of a working-class Muslim woman, Rameeza Be, by drunken policemen shocks the community, which in turn burns the police station in revenge and liberates Rameeza from police custody. The gritty reality of senseless political violence forces Mira to confront her intellectual idealism and self-absorption. In a chapter aptly titled "Wordsworth in Hyderabad," she ponders the question she poses to her students: "Why study Wordsworth in our new India?" (54). Soon Mira finds herself as Rameeza's advocate, trying to salvage a literally voiceless woman's story and to join the rioting crowds fighting for social justice, thus moving out of her ivory tower existence and literally onto the streets, learning eventually to overcome social barriers: All around me I saw men, women, children, society matrons, soldiers, sailors, peasants, princes of state, poor sweepers of latrines, children who lived off the droppings they found in the street. There was no distinction of class, creed, or caste, as we shoved in a mass of arms and legs, mouths and bellies, out of the immense metal gates of the Public Gardens. (106) Like the British Romantic poets whose work she has earlier studied critically, Meena Alexander is obsessed with place and memory like William Wordsworth, and exhibits Percy Shelley's curious blend of political activism and self-indulgent display of individual torment. Alexander acknowledges honestly that despite her writing in several genres she explores the same issues: "All my life as a writer I've been touching the complexities, sometimes evading them. It has to do with a postcolonial geography, a geography of displacement. You can look at it in terms of my experience as a child, as a woman growing up, or as someone who is living in a racialized world in the United States. There are many ways of looking at it, but there are certain issues that keep coming up" (Ali and Rasiah 72). CRITICAL RECEPTION Alexander's novels have received mostly positive reviews, though they have been reviewed less frequently than her poetry and her memoirs Fault Lines and The Shock of Arrival. Nampally Road was named the Editor's Choice in the Village Voice. Critics often point to the connections between her fiction and poetry and comment on the lyricism and evocative qualities of Alexander's writing in Nampally Road: "Her lyrical narrative has the eloquent economy that marks her best poetry" (Francia 74). She is praised for giving "an unsentimental, multifaceted portrait" of late-1970s India "thankfully remote from that of the British Raj" (Francia 74). In a review of Manhattan Music, Susheela Rao commends Alexander's use of epigraphs and quotations from a wide range of writers, including William Shakespeare, Kalidasa, Franz Kafka, and Akka Mahadevi (twelfth-century Kannada writer), and her knowledge of Hindu epic stories. But she also points out Alexander's occasional errors

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such as the stated meaning of the name "Sandhya" (456), and asks a pertinent question about the novel's intended audience. Fellow Asian American women writers Chitra Divakaruni's and Jessica Hagedorn's reviews, cited on the novel's back cover, are very positive. Hagedorn describes it as "An insightful look at the multi-culti, trendy New York downtown art scene of the troubled '90s." Divakaruni applauds it as "At once violent, erotic, and somber, Manhattan Music is infused with the power of myth and poetry and the inner life, the electric intersection of characters who illuminate for the reader both the Old World and the New." BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Meena Alexander Novels Nampally Road. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991. Manhattan Music. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1997. Poetry The Bird's Bright Ring. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1976. I Root My Name. Calcutta: United Writers, 1977. In the Middle Earth. New Delhi: Enact, 1977. Without Place. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1977. Stone Roots. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1980. House of a Thousand Doors. Washington, DC: Three Continents, 1988. The Storm, a Poem in Five Parts. New York: Red Dust, 1989. Night-Scene, the Garden. New York: Red Dust, 1991. River and Bridge. Toronto: TSAR, 1996. Memoirs Fault Lines. New York: Feminist Press, 1993. The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience. Boston: South End Press, 1996. Nonfiction Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley. London: Macmillan, 1989. Studies of Meena Alexander Abraham, Ayisha. "On Writing and Contemporary Issues: Interview with Meena Alexander." Toronto South Asian Review (Winter 1993). Ali, Zainab, and Dharini Rasiah. "Interview with Meena Alexander." Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers. Ed. King-Kok Cheung. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000. 69-91. Bahri, Deepika, and Mary Vasudeva. "Observing Ourselves among Others: Interview with Meena Alexander." Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality. Eds. Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. 35-53. Chanda, Geetanjali, Elaine Ho, and Kavita Mathai. "Women in 'India': Four Recent Novels." Wasafiri: Journal of Caribbean, African, Asian, and Associated Literatures and Films 26 (Autumn 1997): 58-62. Dave, Shilpa. "The Doors to Home and History: Post-Colonial Identities in Meena Alexander and BhamtiMukherjee." Amerasia Journal 19.3 (1993): 103-11.

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Dayal, Samir. "Min(d)ing the Gap: South Asian Americans and Diaspora." A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America. Eds. Lavina D. Shankar and Rajini Srikanth. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. 235-65. Divakaruni, Chitra. "Living in a Pregnant Time: Meena Alexander Discusses Feminism, Literature, Decolonization." India Currents (May 1991): 19, 58. Duncan, Erika. "A Portrait of Meena Alexander." World Literature Today 73.1 (Winter 1999): 23-28. Francia, Luis H. Review of Nampally Road. Village Voice (March 26, 1991): 74. Gairola, Rahul Krishna. "Western Experiences: Education and 'Third World Women' in the Fiction of Tsitsi Dangarembga and Meena Alexander." Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.2 (Winter 2000). February 6, 2001