Anita Desai : An Indian Novelist

Authors have a way of creating their characters to have individual virtues, but still making them relatable to the audience. They can recognize the common conflicts within the readers and incorporate them into their main characters in a unique way. The main characters from The House On Mango Street and The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part Time Indian have common internal and external conflicts throughout the story that are relatable to the expected audience. Their physical differences are factors that cause individual problems, but also help to contribute to the connection between the characters and readers.

Throughout the story, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, Junior goes through many ups and downs. This story is about how Junior, an indian from the Spokane reservation, decides to go to Rearden, the school for non-indians because of how run-down his school is and has trouble fitting in. Some of the ways Junior dealt with those downs include his uncanny sense of humor, his love for his friends, and the want to fit in and prove he’s just as good as everyone else at his new school.

Born in 1940 and raised in Calcutta, India, Bharati Mukherjee immigrated to the United States in 1961 and earned an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. in literature. Mukherjee is the author of several novels, including Tiger's Daughter (1972) and Jasmine (1989), and short story collections, such as The Middleman and Other Stories (1988). She teaches literature and fiction writing at the University of California, Berkeley.

Sherman Alexie is a Native American man who is well known for his novels and short stories based on his experiences as a member of many different Native American tribes. In his short story “Indian Education”, Alexie details the struggles with bullying and discrimination one Native American boy went through during his time in school. Although “Indian Education” is written differently from other short stories it still conveys a solid theme and has a well written plot. Alexie’s style is also a benefit to the reader as they make their way through grade school with the main character, Victor.

Arora, Namit. “What Do We Deserve?” Emerging Contemporary Readings for Writers. 2nd Ed. Ed. Barclay Barrios. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins. 2013 87-91. Print

Paige Raibmon’s book “Authentic Indians” take a closer look at the concept of authenticity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Focusing on the culturally diverse Aboriginal people of the Northwest Coast, Raibmon examines how both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people constructed and used the idea of the authentic Indian to achieve their goals. Drawing examples from three ‘episodes’ or stories about Aboriginal people of the Northwest Coast, Raibmon argues that authenticity is not a set marker that we can use to measure the distance between what an Aboriginal culture looks like today and what “real” Aboriginal culture looks like. Instead, Raibmon says that authenticity is an important and changing set of ideas that were used

The best gift you can give anyone is hope, because without it, you don’t have a future to look forward to. The book “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie is about a teenage boy go looking for hope in a new environment. He left everything he know to pursue the unknown because he is looking for hope. The biggest step Junior have to take is transferring to Reardan, because this is where he can find hope. In the process Junior lost his best friend;he gains hope, and he is making new friends.

The books The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (written by Sherman Alexie) and The House on Mango Street (written by Sandra Cisneros) follow young adolescents as they come of age throughout the novel. In the former, Alexie writes about Junior’s struggle to come to terms with both his place in his Native-American heritage and his new found home in an all-white school. The later contains the story of a young Hispanic girl striving to defy the gender roles set in place by her family and society. The role of society in both of these books, plays a key role in how their respective main characters view themselves and their names. In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and The House on Mango Street the characters struggle with an identity crisis relating to their names, and the stereotypes that are associated with them.

The novel, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian," by Sherman Alexie, is a tale about a hopeful 14-year-old boy named Arnold Spirit, also known as Junior, and the challenges that he faces being a poverty-stricken Spokane Native American Indian in a "white" man's world. Throughout the novel, Junior endures numerous obstacles and hardships; despite all of his adversities, he was determined to make a better life for himself and decided to go to a predominately white school away from his Indian reservation, where he had lived all of his life. Unfortunately, Junior did experience several problems relating to his cultural identity, some he faced while he was at his new school, others were on his Indian reservation, even though these obstacles temporally held him back he was able to overcome them.

The parents of Nilanjana Sudheshna Lahiri, a Bengali couple who immigrated to the United Kingdom from India, welcomed her into the world on July 11, 1967, in London. While Lahiri was attending university her nickname, ‘Jhumpa’, became commonly used by her professors, and she decided to keep this name for future publications. Jhumpa Lahiri first attended Barnard College in New York, where she focussed on English literature. Additionally, Lahiri joined Boston University, where she earned an astonishing three literary master’s degrees, and a doctorate in Renaissance studies. It was in 1999 that Jhumpa Lahiri published her debut, Interpreter of Maladies, which won her many prizes

Mukherjee uses contrasting diction to emphasize the difference of experiences the sisters had on immigration and the sacrifices they had along the way when faced with the American culture. For example, Mukherjee’s use of “maintain” and “self-invention” are contradictory to each other, but in the context “maintain” refers to her sister Mira and “self-invention” is directed to Mukherjee herself. In Mira’s case, she is very attached to her Indian culture and stresses about not letting the American culture take that away from her. The author’s purpose was to highlight the tenacious mentality Mira has on her culture. In contrast, Mukherjee's use of “self-invention” regards to her loosening her strict hold of Indian culture; the exact opposite

Rebecca Stead is fame as an American writer of fiction for children and teens. The achievement of her novels is not doubtful. She was born on January 16, 1968 and raised in New York City. Vassar College was the institution where she acquired her bachelor’s degree in 1989. Moreover, she has started to write since she was a child but she altered her career to become a lawyer. However, Stead started to become of writing subsequent to the birth of her two children. Her inspiration of writing children’s novel was from her son and her collections of story stories on her laptop. One day, her 4-year-old son by chance pushed her laptop out off the dining-room table and destroyed her piece of writing. Stead was very angry with her son and she went to the bookstore to find books which can inspire her to write. From that moment, her motivation and loving in writing began to boost up, and her debut novel was First Light which won The New York Best Times. Due to her great spirit in writing, she won The American Newbery Medal in 2010, Winner of the Boston Globe –Horn Book Award for Fiction, IRA Children’s Book Award for Young Adult Fiction, A Parents’ Choice Gold Award Winner and A National Parenting Publications Gold Award for her second novel, When You Reach Me, followed by achieving Guardian Prize in 2013 as the first winner for her third novel, Liar & Spy.

The novel Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee is an incredible story about the transformation and life experiences of a Panjabi girl from India. The life of Jyoti is told from her point of view when she is twenty-four years old, and pregnant with the baby of Bud Ripplemeyer, a crippled banker who is more than twice Jyoti’s age. During the span of two months in Iowa, Jyoti narrates her biographical experiences in Punjab and in America as she strives to become independent. Jasmine illustrates that when one’s relationships go through changes, it will impact one’s identity.

Bharati Mukherjee is one of the accomplished diasporic writers. Her writing focuses mainly on women’s suppression, struggle to overcome the problems and attempt to attain identification. Bharati Mukherjee also depicts the cultural conflicts between the East and the West. When a person enters into a new culture from the old one, the conflict arises between the two cultures in the alien land. This paper explores how the female character, Jasmine is portrayed as protagonist in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine. Bharati Mukherjee portrays Indian woman as protagonist in all her novels and the character takes brave decision to emigrate which is the first major step of heroism. The character is portrayed with the capable of facing adventures and creates own happiness and identity, unyielding by conventionality. In Jasmine (1989),

The name of my case study is Rekha Desai. She is a fifty-two year old indian female. She is hardworking, outgoing, and mother of two. Rekha is very health concise and sticks to primarily a plant base diet. She has been a vegetarian for thirty-seven years. Rekha follows this lifestyle with her four sisters. Shortly after turning twenty, Rekha had a arrange marriage to a financially stable indian gentleman named, Uday and they have to two kids, Gopal and Bella.