A Study Of Exile And Alienation In Anita Desai’s Novels

Anita Mazumdar Desai (born 24 June 1937) is an Indian novelist and the Emeritus John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times; she received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain from the Sahitya Akademi India’s National Academy of Letters; she won the BritishGuardian Prize for The Village by the Sea. Anita Desai is one of the most powerful Indian novelists in present time. Her novels try to tackle the main problem of the modern writer-the problem of rendering complete human personality. Modern man is doomed to suffer the corrosive impact of isolation exile and alienation. Anita Desai has delineated in her novels the problems and plight of isolated and alienated individuals caught in the crisis of changes in the society. She excels particularly in highlighting the miserable position of highly sensitive and emotional women tortured by humiliating sense of neglection loneliness and desperation. The existential problem of the alienated and isolated self finally emerges to be central themes of her novel. The present study is an attempt to observe themes of exile and alienation in the novels of Anita Desai.