Clear Light of Day --A Novel

Clear Light of Day --A Novel

Summary:NirmalJain
Anita Desai’s contribution to Indian-English Fiction.

The special quality of Desai’s literary voice is its ability to weave together several strands of feeling into a complex, affecting symphony. As Rushdie observes in his introduction to In Custody: “When you first encounter it the prose seems to whisper, to speak so softly as to risk going unheard, but as you bend your ear to listen you hear many unexpected notes of wicked comedy, of sharp, even biting perceptions about her fellow men and women, and of a clear-sighted unsentimental about human nature that is anything but frail. The voice takes hold of the reader, gently, irresistibly, and its strength and clarity soon comes to seem like small miracles.”

“Anita Desai is godmother to the current generation of prodigal Indian writers in English. She began writing at a time when Indian writers did not get big advances, weren’t reviewed regularly in all the big papers, didn’t win Bookers or Pulitzers. She championed Salman Rushdie from the beginning. She taught us, among other things, how to use spoken Indian English without lapsing it into parody. Farrokh’s soliloquy about hippies, at the beginning of the book, is a classic study of an Irani restaurant owner – I know that man, I know that language.”
Desai’s tremendous contribution to Indian fiction in English was recently recognised by the Sahitya Akademi fellowship conferred on her in New Delhi this year. Although she is the seventy-fifth Fellow in the entire history of the Sahitya Akademi, she is only the third Indian writer in English, after Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. Narayan, to be so honored
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Speaking on the occasion, Desai described the struggle of those early days of writing in the language: “It is true that in my early days as a writer of English I and my colleagues were constantly having to apologies for using it rather than Hindi or Tamil or Bengali or Marathi. We were the leftovers of the colonial age, unfortunately educated in what everyone could see was not a native tongue and surely ours was the last generation that would employ it. Yet we were enjoying the challenges of making the language our own, bending and twisting and manipulating it to express our own way."

Desai is part of a new literary tradition of Indian writing in English which dates back only to the '30s or '40s. She explains that this is because "at one time all literature was recited rather than read and that remains the tradition in India. It is still rather a strange act to buy a book and read it, an unusual thing to do". Her new style of writing is also different from that of many Indian writers, as it is much less conservative than Indian literature has been in the past.

Throughout her novels, children's books, and short stories, Desai focuses on personal struggles and problems of contemporary life that her Indian characters must cope with. She maintains that her primary goal is to discover "the truth that is nine-tenths of the iceberg that lies submerged beneath the one-tenth visible portion we call Reality" . She portrays the cultural and social changes that India has undergone as she focuses on the incredible power of family and society and the relationships between family members, paying close attention to the trials of women suppressed by Indian society.

Desai is praised for her broad understanding on intellectual issues, and for her ability to portray her country so vividly with the way the eastern and western cultures have blended there. She has received numerous awards, including the 1978 National Academy of Letters Award for Fire on the Mountain. The story is of a remote, isolated woman and her equally withdrawn great-granddaughter as they are forced together in hills surrounded by violence and fire. In 1983 she was awarded the Guardian Prize for Children's Fiction for The Village by the Sea, an adventurous fairy tale about a young boy living in a small fishing village in India and the Literary Lion Award in 1993, and has also been named Helen Cam Visiting fellow, Ashby fellow, and honorary fellow of the University of Cambridge.

Clear Light of Day --A Novel Originally published in Shvoong: http://www.shvoong.com/humanities/linguistics/2412510-clear-light-day-novel/