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A Study Guide for Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day
A Study Guide for Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day
A Study Guide for Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day
Ebook46 pages38 minutes

A Study Guide for Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Anita Desai's "Clear Light of Day," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 14, 2015
ISBN9781535820882
A Study Guide for Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day

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A Study Guide for Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day - Gale

13

Clear Light of Day

Anita Desai

1980

Introduction

Anita Desai is one of the best-known postcolonial writers of India and one of the founders of the Indian literary renaissance referred to as Indian English Literature, or Indo-Anglian literature, written in English by natives of India. Indo-Anglian fiction actually predates Indian Independence, which started in 1947, but women novelists like Desai came to the fore during the decades afterwards as women's roles were changing and the country was modernizing. Her early novels like Cry, the Peacock (1963) helped illuminate the psychological struggles of women to become individuals. Desai gradually broadened her focus to include the inner portraits of whole families who have grown up in India's modern cities, detailing their difficult adjustments to postcolonial life. Her fiction has been hailed as a turning point in Indian literature for delving into psychological territory. Some of her themes include alienation, the search for identity, the fragmentation of tradition in city life, and self-understanding. Her novel In Custody (1984) was made into a Merchant Ivory film, and her 1983 children's book The Village by the Sea became a TV series. Desai has been shortlisted for the coveted Booker prize in fiction three times.

Clear Light of Day (1980) is the last of her early novels exploring the inner reality of the characters, without much reference to external action. Historical issues like Indian independence and Partition are only felt in the background of the thoughts of the Das children, who come of age along with the country. The four siblings are shown to have different memories of growing up in Old Delhi. Their impressions are compared during a family reunion in middle age as they try to patch up old wounds.

Author Biography

Anita Mazumdar was born in Mussoorie, near Delhi, India, on June 24, 1937, to a German mother, Toni Nime, and a Bengali businessman father, D. N. Mazumdar. Although she grew up speaking German with her family of three other siblings, she spoke Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, and English as well. At school she studied and wrote creatively in English from the age of seven and published in children's magazines. She attended Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School in Delhi and Miranda House at Delhi University, where she graduated with a bachelor's degree in English literature in 1957. In 1958, she married Ashvin Desai, a businessman. They had four children, including Kiran Desai, who is also a novelist.

In later life, Desai separated from her husband and traveled, teaching in England at Girton and Smith College and in America at Mount Holyoke College, Baruch College, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and of Girton College and writes for the New York Review of Books. Since 1993, she has taught creative writing

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