Anita Desai, In Custody

Catherine Pesso-Miquel (Université Lyon II)
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Anita Desai is one of the most acclaimed contemporary Indian novelists writing in English. She won a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978, and the 1983 Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. In 2007 she herself became one of the twenty-one members of the select Sahitya Akademi. Although she never won the Booker Prize, three of her novels were shortlisted at different times, among which

In Custody

(published in 1984, twenty-one years after her first novel).

In Custody

explores the relationship between a (fictitious) Urdu language poet and his admirer, a lecturer in Hindi. It can thus be described as a paradoxical work since it pays homage to Urdu poetry within the medium of English prose. The novel was turned into a Merchant Ivory film directed by Ismail Merchant (1993) for which Desai co-wrote the…

3362 words

Citation: Pesso-Miquel, Catherine. "In Custody". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 October 2012 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4517, accessed 19 March 2024.]

4517 In Custody 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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