Anita Desai: Clear Light of Day (A Critical Study)

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About the Book Anita Desai Clear Light of Day A Critical Study by Shakti Batra Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award (now Fellow of the Akademi) and twice nominated for the Booker Prize, Anita Desai (b. 1937) has been active on the literary scene for over four decades now. Most of her principal works focus on women as the chief protagonists in their restricted male-dominated surroundings. Set in India's Old Delhi, CLEAR LIGHT OF DAY is Anita Desai's tender, warm, and compassionate novel about family scars, the ability to forgive and forget, and the trials and tribulations of familial love. At the novel's heart are the moving relationships between the members of the Das family, who have grown apart from each other. Bimla is a dissatisfied but ambitious teacher at a women's college who lives in her childhood home, where she cares for her mentally challenged brother, Baba. Tara is her younger, unambitious, estranged sister, married and with children of her own. Raja is their popular, brilliant, and successful brother. When Tara returns for a visit with Bimla and Baba, old memories and tensions resurface and blend into a domestic drama that is intensely beautiful and leads to profound self-understanding.

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 levels in this critical study

Shakti Batra, formerly Vice-Principal of Dyal Singh College (University of Delhi), has taught at the Kabul University and the International University of Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek as well as students from the Tibetan Public Service Commission, Dharamsala, and Kiyushu University, Japan.

Preface Anita Desai (b. 1937) is in the forefront of the second generation of Indian novelists in English. Her sixth novel, Clear Light of Day describes the emotional tanglements of the Das family against the Partition and Independence of India. Employing the narrative strategy of the stream-of-consciousness technique, the consummate artist that Desai is, she delves deep into the minds of the two Das sisters-Bim and Tara-to tell the tale of the family living in a dilapidated house in Old Delhi. Like Calcutta in her Voices in the City, Time, the destroyer and the preserver, adds a fourth dimension in Clear Light of Day, depicting the emotional turmoils of the protagonists.

The present critical study takes up this haunting work of art and explores its various facets that have become the hallmarks of Anita Desai's fiction. Clear Light of Day has been assessed and analysed from every possible angle-textual, political, delineation of characters and the inner landscape of their minds. It is hoped that it will meet all the requirements of our students from the point of view of university examinations at the graduate and postgraduate levels.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages