Clear Light of Day

Anita Desai (b. 1937) is a respected writer of postcolonial Indian Literature in English. She published her first novel Cry, the Peacock in 1963, and since then has authored numerous novels for adults and children as well as collections of short stories. She was nominated for the Booker Prize three times, although it was her daughter, the writer Kiran Desai, who won the Booker Prize for her second novel The Inheritance of Loss (2006). Many of Anita Desai’s novels focus on the struggles of women or other marginalized characters, and many take place in India. Born to a German mother and a Bengali father, Desai was raised in India and grew up speaking Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, German, and English—the language in which she writes. Because India was still under British colonial rule at the time of Desai’s childhood, it was compulsory for schoolchildren to study English throughout the country.

Clear Light of Day belongs to a category of Indian postcolonial literature called Partition Literature, exploring the effects of the separation of the Indian continent into the nations of India and Pakistan (see below). Other famous works in this category include Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956), Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (originally published as Ice Candy Man, 1988), and perhaps most famously Salman Rushdie’s Booker Prize winning Midnight’s Children (1981).