Anita Desai, Baumgartner's Bombay

Download PDF Add to Bookshelf Report an Error

Elaine Yee Lin Ho describes Anita Desai’s tenth novel

Baumgartner’s Bombay

(1988) as “Desai’s retrospective on the century” (52). In her most historically and geographically ambitious text – the first to be written outside her native India – Desai engages with the Nazi occupation of Europe, the repercussions of the Second World War, Indian Independence, and the violence of Partition. These cataclysmic events are introduced to the text via the experiences of the title character, Hugo Baumgartner, signalling a central theme of the novel: the relationship between the individual and the grand narratives of history. Baumgartner is a German Jew who escaped Nazi persecution for India, but was subsequently incarcerated by the British colonial elite, one of many such foreign…

1605 words

Citation: Bird, Emma . "Baumgartner's Bombay". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 August 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6407, accessed 19 March 2024.]

6407 Baumgartner's Bombay 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.

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here

Leave Feedback

The Literary Encyclopedia is a living community of scholars. We welcome comments which will help us improve.