Anita Desai, In Custody

Catherine Pesso-Miquel (Université Lyon II)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 10.3.1.03: Indian Writing and Culture: Post-colonial, 1947-present.
Vol. editors: Claire Gallien (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3), Pavan Kumar Malreddy (J W Goethe University of Frankfurt), Delphine Munos (Université de Liège)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1984

Places

India (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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 …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

3176 words

Citation: Pesso-Miquel, Catherine. "In Custody". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 October 2012 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4517, accessed 25 November 2024.]

Save this article