ABSTRACT
Very few modern Indian writers have received as much international attention and acclaim as Anita Desai. Her eight novels and various short stories have expanded the dimensions of the Indian literary scene by giving voice to a range of characters previously relegated to the margins of Indian fiction: women, children, adolescents, and the elderly. Except perhaps for the Hindi writer Premchand, whose work emerged from the turmoil of the nationalist movement, and the energy created by the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi in the 1920s and 1930s, most modern Indian fiction has been dominated by writers who usually emphasize the dilemmas of adult males that mirror those of emergent India. This is true of major figures writing in English—Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, and Salman Rushdie, to name a few—and also of many authors writing in the vernaculars.
