Analysis of Anita Desai as a writer

Anita Desai is born on June 24th 1937. She is an Indian novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and children's writer. She is best known for her studies of Indian life. Anita Desai focuses on the personal struggles of Anglicized, middle-class women in contemporary India as they attempt to overcome the societal limitations imposed by a tradition-bound patriarchal culture. As a contemporary Indian female author, Desai has been identified with a new literary tradition of Indian writing in English, which is stylistically different and less conservative than colonial Indian literature and concerns such issues as hybridity, shifting identity, and “imaginary homelands,” a phrase coined by Indian novelist Salman Rushdie. Most of Anita Desai's works engage the complexities of modern Indian culture from a feminine perspective while highlighting the female Indian predicament of maintaining self-identity as an individual woman. Since the mid-1980s, Desai has shown a definite shift in her narrative voice, favoring dialogue over interior monologue and focusing on underprivileged characters rather than her usually bourgeois protagonists. Although Desai has not been widely read in her native country—mainly at Indian universities—Western audiences have warmly received her fiction largely due to its unique insights on the often neglected aspects of Indian culture. Many reviewers have praised her intellectual rigor and vivid portrayals of India, particularly her insistence on the multicultural dimension of contemporary Indian society. The passage above is basically a summary of the analysis of Anita Desai from http://www.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-criticism/desai-anita.

I personally feel that Anita Desai’s writing is very brilliant and she knows a lot about India. She is able to describe settings so well like in Village by the Sea that I could picture out what is happening just by reading the book. She is able to bring out the “bad” or poorer side of India in most of her stories too. I admire her writing skills a lot and aspire to be like her!