Clear Light of the Day – Anita Desai.pptx

Clear Light of the Day

1. Clear Light of the Day – Anita Desai Semester – II

2. Anita Desai was born in 1935 in Mossoorie , India to a German mother and a Bengali businessman

3. Biography She grew up speaking German at home and Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and English at school and in the city streets.  Although German is her first language she did not visit Germany until later in life as an adult.  She first learned to read and write in English at school and as a result English became her "literary language".  She began to write in English at the age of seven and published her first story at the age of nine.

4.  She was a student at Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School in Delhi  received her B.A. in English literature in 1957 from the University of Delhi.  In 1958, she married Ashvin Desai, the director of a computer software company and author of the book: Between Eternities: Ideas on Life and The Cosmos.  They have four children, including Booker Prize-winning novelist Kiran Desai.

5.  Her first book, Cry,the Peacock was published in England in 1963, and her better known novels include In Custody (1984) and Baumgartner's Bombay (1988). She once wrote: "I see India through my mother's eyes, as an outsider, but my feelings for India are my father's, of someone born here" (Griffiths).

6.  She only writes in English.  Desai is considered the writer who introduced the psychological novel in the tradition of Virginia Woolf to India.  Included in this, is her pioneer status of writing of feminist issues.  she says, her writing is realistic  Her fiction has covered themes such as women’s oppression and quest for a fulfilling identity, family relationship and contrasts, the crumbling of traditions, and anti-Semitism.

7.  Desai considers Clear Light of Day, her most autobiographical book, because she was writing about her neighborhood in Delhi, although the characters are not based on her brothers and sisters.  She had wanted to start the book at the end and move backwards She once wrote: "I see India through my mother's eyes, as an outsider, but my feelings for India are my father's, of someone born here" (Griffiths).

8. Clear Light of Day is a novel published in 1980 by Indian novelist and three-time Booker Prize finalist Anita Desai. Set primarily in Old Delhi, the story describes the tensions in a post-partition Indian family, starting with the characters as adults and moving back into their lives throughout the course of the novel. While the primary theme is the importance of family, other predominant themes include the importance of forgiveness, the power of childhood, and the status of women, particularly their role as mothers and caretakers, in modern day India.

9. Theme - Time Anita Desai has described Clear light of Day as a ‘four dimensional piece”; inspired by T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1978), the novel shows how time can be both a destroyer and a preserver, and it also shows “what the bondage of time does to people”. Anita Desai comments herself that Time is the main theme of the novel: “ I have tried to construct a four-dimensional world, the fourth dimension being Time. I wanted Time to have as palpable an existence as the spatial world perceived by the five senses. I wanted Time to be an element, like light or darkness, pervasive and perceived by the characters as a part of their everyday consciousness.”

10. Our Universe as we know it has four dimensions:  the three dimensions of space (up and down, left and right, back and forth), and one dimension of time that keeps us all ticking along .

11. Anita Desai further says that she has aimed to prove that although Time appears to damage, destroy and extinguish, one finds instead that nothing is lost, nothing comes to an end, but the spiral of life leads as much upwards as downwards and is in perpetual circular motion, both the past and the future existing always in time present .

12. Time & Memory In this novel there is a close association between Time and Memory. The passage of time and its influence on man is recollected mainly through memory. This gets established at the very outset of the novel, in the novelist’s use of two epigraphs: one by Emily Dickinson and the other by T.S. Eliot. While the first epigraph suggests the traits of memory, the second is suggestive of how with the passage of time things don’t really change; only the pattern does.

13. Structure of the novel This novel is the study the four children of the Das family, their problems, their behaviour, their attitudes, their reactions and their relationships. The four sections of the novel, suggesting 'the four dimensions' of time record the transitions that take place in their family. In Clear Light of Day there is an attempt to see the events in time from the perspective of childhood and age. The household is a microcosm of an absurd world, which has little to offer by way of love, hope or inspiration in the apparently absurd and dull grey world. The novel is split into four sections covering the Das family from the children’s perspective in this order: adulthood, adolescence and early adulthood, childhood, and a final return to an adult perspective in the final chapter.

14. Part One The story centres on the Das family, who have grown apart with adulthood. It starts with Tara, whose husband Bakul is India’s ambassador to the USA, greeting her sister Bimla ( Bim ), who lives in the family's Old Delhi home, teaching history and taking care of their autistic brother Baba. Their conversation eventually comes to Raja, their brother who lives in Hyderabad. Bim , not wanting to go to the wedding of Raja’s daughter, shows Tara an old letter from when Raja became her landlord, in which he unintentionally insulted her after the death of his father-in-law, the previous landlord. The section closes with the two sisters visiting the neighbours, the Misras .

15. Part Two In part two of the novel, the setting switches to partition-era India, when the characters are adolescents in the house. Raja is severely ill with tuberculosis and is left to Bim’s ministrations. Aunt Mira ("Mira- masi "), their supposed caretaker after the death of the children’s often absent parents, dies of alcoholism. Earlier, Raja's fascination with Urdu attracts the attention of the family's Muslim landlord, Hyder Ali, whom Raja idolizes. After recovering from TB, Raja follows Hyder Ali to Hyderabad. Tara escapes from the situation through marriage to Bakul , leaving Bim to provide for Baba alone, in the midst of the partition and the death of Gandhi.

16. Part Three In part three Bim , Raja and Tara are depicted awaiting the birth of their brother Baba in pre-partition India. Aunt Mira, widowed by her husband and mistreated by her in-laws, is brought in to help with Baba, who is autistic, and to raise the children. Raja is fascinated with poetry. He shares a close bond with Bim , the head girl at school, although they often exclude Tara. Tara wants to be a mother, although this fact brings ridicule from Raja and Bim , who want to be heroes.

17. Part Four The final section returns to modern India and shows Tara confronting Bim over Raja's daughter's wedding and Bim's broken relationship with Raja. This climaxes when Bim explodes at Baba. After her anger fades, she decides that family love is irreplaceable and can cover all wrongs. After Tara leaves, she goes to her neighbours the Misras for a concert, where she is touched by the unbreakable relationship they seem to have. She tells Tara to come back from the wedding with Raja and forgives him.

18. Symbols – Rose Walk Rose Walk Upon Tara's visit back home, the rose walk is where she first greets her sister, and it is where she initially begins to see the decay that has set in around the house that seems otherwise unchanged. Rose Walk is described multiple times throughout the book, seeming to symbolize the passage of time. The first time it is described is when Tara first arrives at the house to visit. She is surprised at how unchanged she finds everything, but upon closer inspection of the rose walk, she finds that the roses are not as plentiful as they once were, and that the ones that remain are growing weak. Rose Walk The rose walk is described again at the start of Part 3, and the scene where Tara walks with her mother, who is walking under her doctor's orders, and Tara finds a snail on the ground and becomes excited with it.

19. Rose walk cont …. This scene is repeated when Tara returns as an adult. She walks with Bim , instead, and remembers walking along the path with her mother as a child. Now, as an adult, she spies something shiny on the ground once more and again finds a snail. She bends down to examine and play with it, just as she did as a child. As a child, when her mother becomes so ill as to be taken to the hospital, it is the memory of walking along the rose walk with her mother that haunts her and the reason for Tara's asking to be taken to the hospital to visit her mother, a woman she had never been very close with. The rose walk contributes to this theme by portraying the passage of time between the two parts of the book in which it is described.

20. Old vs New Many things portray the sameness of the house and its members, and one of the main ones is Baba. Baba's presence, although quiet, is constant throughout the book Baba and Sameness His personality remains the same and so do his habits. His fixation with listening to loud records on his gramophone and playing with his pebbles on the veranda remains the same from his childhood to Tara's visit as an adult The music on his gramophone never changes and neither does the sound of his pebbles hitting the veranda. The house itself remains the same, as do the family's neighbors , the Misras , who play small but important roles in the development of the novel. Essentially, each of the children seems to have remained relatively the same through childhood to adulthood

21. Old vs New cont … New Delhi is also contrasted with Old Delhi, and Old Delhi is characterized similarly to the house, never changing. While New Delhi is the place where people go and things are always happening, nothing in Old Delhi ever changes, no one ever comes or goes, and everything stays the same. The city always remains in the distance, separated from Old Delhi, where the family resides. There seems to be an invisible line separating the old from the new.

22. The Well The well is located in the family's garden and serves as a symbol for darkness and death for the children from childhood through adulthood. When the siblings were children, their family purchased a cow that was a source of great pride and attention. The well became a source of fear for the children. They never dared go near the well, and dared each other to throw things into it. The fear they felt toward the well stayed with them even into adulthood. They never dared go near it, and, even as adults, the reluctance remained.

23. The well cont … When they were children, the well was regarded as a dark and scary place, a place that symbolized death and other unpleasant, horrible things. The extent to which it stayed in their memories became evident when Aunt Mira passed away. Bim , who had nursed her from the start of her sickness, was deeply affected by the death of her aunt. After she passed away, Bim had recurring dreams and visions of her aunts, and many of those dreams centered around the well.

24. Baba's Gramophone and Pebbles They are both recurring themes of the novel, and seem to serve as a reminder of Baba's presence. His presence itself is silent, but these sounds are associated with him. The music on his gramophonenever changes and neither does the sound of his pebbles hitting the veranda. The house itself remains the same, as do the family's neighbors , the Misras , who play small but important roles in the development of the novel. Essentially, each of the children seems to have remained relatively the same through childhood to adulthood