"women and intelligent men"

Rohit Khare (rohit@bordeaux.ics.uci.edu)
Thu, 09 Apr 1998 17:01:17 -0700


Chitra Divakaruni was interviewed in a recent Atlantic in conjunction with a
new short story ("Mrs. Dutta wirtes a letter" -- people might find it a little
literal, but I recommend this tale of a widowed grandmother moving to her
son's in the States -- and trying to decide what happiness is in the
intersticies of culture).

Chitra quoth:
> But I have always thought in terms of gender rather than race, if I
> have thought about it at all. And since my writing is so much about women,
> I would ultimately say I write for women and intelligent men.

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/factfict/ff9804.htm
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98apr/dutta.htm

Now, I've plugged her work on FoRK before:
http://xent.ics.uci.edu/FoRK-archive/august97/0231.html

But I don't think we added her to the booklist:

Arranged Marriage : Stories - Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni; Paperback
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0385483503/forkrecommendedrA

The Mistress of Spices - Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni; Paperback
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0385482388/forkrecommendedrA

Check it out. My cousins highly recommend her, too.

Rohit

=====
[Things I'd like to join -- but would probably be hooted out of --RK]

Is there a community of Indian writers within this literary "movement"?

Yes, very much so. There are communities on all levels. In San Francisco's
Bay Area, for example, we have an Indian writer's group that meets quite
regularly. And I have been fortunate enough to meet and form friendships with
a number of Indian writers now living in the United States; we let one another
know what is happening and show one another our writing from time to time.
This sense of community is very important to me.

=====

PS. Finding the Chitra FoRK url was exceedingly difficult. AltaVista is
missing about 3,000 posts, so I'm getting worried about setting up a reliable
search fallback. Hotbot hit the spot, but still had the old xent.w3.org URL.

PPS. When I searched for "xent" on excite, the top ten related terms were, in
order: khare, rohit, fixations, kohn, mentions, barrera, woodpeckers, crook,
thau, and abelson. Methinks their database is a wee bit out of date, unless
they REALLY have a thing for peckers.

P3S. Thanks to Greg Bolcer for the link.