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 Custodyexplores 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…
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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 25 November 2024.]
