Clear Light of Day Study Guide

The daughter of a German mother and Bengali father, Anita Desai grew up between five languages and literary traditions—German, Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, and English—in the same Delhi neighborhood where Clear Light of Day is set. She started writing at a young age and lived through the 1947 Partition riots that play a central role in the novel. After completing an English Literature degree at the University of Delhi, she married a Bengali businessman and moved to Kolkata, where she began seriously writing novels and helped found a publishing company named Writers Workshop. While she has published more than a dozen novels in the years since, she first gained international recognition for her 1977 Fire on the Mountain and then for Clear Light of Day. In fact, she was a finalist for the Booker Prize three times—for this novel, In Custody (1984), and Fasting, Feasting (1999)—and her daughter, novelist Kiran Desai, would go on to win it in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss. Anita Desai has won several other major literary awards, including India’s two most important: the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship. In addition to several cities in India, Desai has also lived and taught in England, Mexico, and the United States, where she is currently an Emerita Professor at MIT.

Clear Light of Day takes place largely in the shadow of Indian independence, and especially the Partition that accompanied it. Responding to longstanding demands from Muslims for an independent state, the British split India into two countries, India and Pakistan. While India’s elites celebrated the independence movement’s victory and the nation’s birth as a secular, democratic republic, the masses faced horrific violence. This was the case particularly in Punjab and Bengal (which were split between India and Pakistan) but also in cities like Delhi, where tens of thousands of people died in violent riots. In the Partition’s immediate aftermath, some 300,000 Muslim migrants left Delhi and roughly 500,000 non-Muslims came from Pakistan, and the city’s population doubled overall between 1941 and 1951. Still, Delhi’s history is inextricably connected to both cultures, as its rulers were long Urdu-speaking Muslims and its masses Hindi-speaking Hindus. While not central to the Das family’s conflicts, the Partition serves as a metaphor for their separation (as Tara and Raja move away permanently just after it) and its violence is constantly present in Part II of the novel. For instance, Hyder Ali Sahib, the Das family’s wealthy Muslim landlord, leaves with his family for Hyderabad—which briefly remains an independent princely state ruled by a Muslim Nizam. Bim notes the city’s growing refugee camps while on the bus with Dr. Biswas, then learns about Mahatma Gandhi’s murder at the hands of a radical Hindu assassin on another date with him. Above all, Raja’s love for Urdu poetry enables him to cross between Hindu and Muslim social spheres in a way that is increasingly taboo in his day and age, but which also represents Desai’s hopes for a future in which India can again find the religious harmony she observed in her childhood.

While Anita Desai’s novels have touched on a wide range of themes and historical, geographical, and cultural settings, they have largely approached questions of gender, history, diaspora, and cultural identity in India through rich profiles of Indian women’s inner lives and family relationships. Her first major novel is arguably Fire on the Mountain (1977), which follows an elderly widow who lives alone in the mountains and receives a surprise visit from her great-granddaughter. Desai’s second Booker Prize-nominated novel (after this one) is In Custody (1984), which explores Hindu-Muslim relations and Delhi history through the story of a down-and-out Hindi teacher’s fraught relationship with an elderly Urdu poet. Her young adult novel The Village by the Sea (1982) describes a struggling village family’s relationship with elderly vacationers from the city, Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988) describes a German Jewish Holocaust refugee who moves to India, and Fasting, Feasting (1999) focuses on an Indian family whose son goes to an American university. Anita Desai’s daughter Kiran Desai, also a novelist, has published Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998) and the Booker Prize-winning The Inheritance of Loss (2006), and her friend and neighbor Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is best known for Heat and Dust (1975). Some of the English poems that Desai’s characters read in Clear Light of Day include Lord Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib” (1815), T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922), and D.H. Lawrence’s “The Ship of Death” (1932). They also read the Urdu-language works of poets like Mirza Ghalib, Daagh Dehlvi, and especially Pakistan’s national poet Muhammad Iqbal.