College of Houston artistic writing professor Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni at work.
Her plan was to turn out to be an English professor. However life had different concepts.
Whereas Dr. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is, certainly, an English professor who teaches on the College of Houston’s acclaimed artistic writing program, she can be a best-selling creator, with greater than 20 works of poetry and fiction to her credit score. Her books have been translated into 29 languages. Younger Indian ladies comply with her on social media, the place they deal with her like a rock star.
“I hear from numerous my readers in India they usually say issues like, ‘Studying about these ladies [in your books] actually modified how I take a look at the world and made me conscious of so many issues that I’m able to doing, and even when society doesn’t encourage me, I’m going to go forward and do it,’” she says. “That simply makes me so glad and grateful, and it actually isn’t something I imagined or might even conceive of once I was writing the books.”
Divakaruni grew up in India, the place her father had what she calls “a kind of transferring jobs.” Her household moved from metropolis to metropolis for his work, residing in Kolkata, Mumbai, and Delhi. She additionally went to high school for some time in Darjeeling, situated within the Himalayas. She got here to the USA in 1979 at age 19, following the completion of her bachelor’s diploma on the College of Calcutta.
“I got here first to Dayton, the place my older brother was,” Divakaruni says. “In order that there may very well be some supervision, which my mother and father mentioned was vital.”
She would go on to earn her grasp’s diploma from Ohio’s Wright State College and her PhD from the College of California, Berkeley. Whereas Divakaruni mentioned that her childhood in India supplied some degree of range, it was nothing like what she encountered at Berkeley.
“I met so many various sorts of Individuals that it simply expanded my data. , Ohio was fantastic, however in Berkeley I used to be uncovered to cultures from all around the US and all around the world. There was numerous intermingling of cultures and concepts,” she says. “And I believe that actually influenced me when it comes to changing into increasingly keen on depicting the immigrant life.”
One of many driving forces behind capturing her ideas on paper was witnessing the challenges dealing with ladies within the Bay Space’s South Asian inhabitants. She’d began volunteering at a neighborhood ladies’s middle that catered to victims of home or intimate companion abuse.
“I seen that our ladies didn’t really feel snug coming to a mainstream shelter,” she says. “Lots of them didn’t converse English. Their meals habits had been totally different; their worship habits had been totally different. They didn’t really feel snug coming to a mainstream shelter the place they’d simply really feel very misplaced. With a gaggle of like-minded ladies, I cofounded a company known as Maitri, the primary group of that sort on the West Coast for South Asian survivors of violence.”
Dr. Divakaruni can be an advocate for victims of home and intimate companion violence.
Turning into an middleman for these ladies, serving to them discover sources and shelter, usually simply speaking with them to assist them not really feel alone led Divakaruni to begin increasing her writing profession. She wrote brief items and scenes, then poetry. A few of her poems had been picked up for publication in magazines and collections, corresponding to The New Yorker, Calyx, Indiana Evaluation, Threepenny Evaluation, and Chicago Evaluation.
Divakaruni additionally started taking a writing class within the Bay Space, the place the instructor informed her that he preferred her work. He felt she was writing from a singular perspective and launched her to his agent. The agent took her manuscript of brief tales to New York, which was subsequently revealed as Organized Marriage, a set exploring ideas of womanhood, the immigration expertise, and the mixing of Indian and American tradition.
It went on to turn out to be a bestseller, additionally successful an American Guide Award, a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and a Bay Space Guide Reviewers Award in 1996.
“All of that was fantastic,” says Divakaruni. “However successful the American Guide Award actually type of pushed my fame ahead and likewise made me really feel that that is one thing I wished to do, so I began writing extra—and extra significantly.”
She was instructing at Foothill Faculty within the Bay Space when Organized Marriage was revealed, and shortly after, in 1998, her husband was supplied a job with Shell. The couple moved to Houston, and Divakaruni known as the College of Houston’s Artistic Writing Program asking for a place.
“It was very serendipitous, as a result of Philip Levine, the fantastic poet, was instructing at the moment, and he had identified my work. When he heard that I used to be in search of a job, he advisable me to the artistic writing program,” she says.
She’s been instructing there ever since. Divakaruni additionally by no means stopped writing. Her work spans poetry, modern ladies’s fiction, younger grownup, and historic fiction. Her 1997 novel The Mistress of Spices was made right into a film in 2005. The screenplay was written by Gurinder Kaur Chadha, who additionally wrote and directed Bend It Like Beckham. She re-examined Indian myths and centered them on a feminine perspective in her novels The Palace of Illusions and The Forest of Enchantments, and captured the sweeping historical past and results of partition and India’s independence in Independence. That novel, too, gained a 2024 American Guide Award.
“It’s all the time been a ardour of mine to present ladies their very own voice,” she says. “And with Independence, it’s a novel of in all probability a very powerful nationwide story in India. Hindus and Muslims, wealthy and poor, educated and illiterate, everybody got here collectively for this. I wished to indicate that as a result of I believe we’re residing proper now in such a divided world the place, on this nation in addition to India, teams are turning in opposition to one another.”
Constructing group and serving to others totally use their abilities is one thing Divakaruni stresses in her lessons. She’s pleased with UH’s artistic writing program and loves that it’s obtained a lot assist from town and native literary organizations like Inprint.
“I like my college students,” she says. “I communicate with them over many years. I’ve college students who ship me marriage ceremony invites and child photos and inform me once they’ve revealed a e book. And I definitely be taught from my college students, as a result of they’re studying issues which can be totally different from what I’m studying. I believe that creates a really good environment.”
When Divakaruni isn’t instructing or writing, she’s spending time together with her sons; one lives in Houston and the opposite in Austin. Each had been raised right here. She’s additionally continued to work with entities that help others, together with the Houston Meals Financial institution and Akshaya Patra, a company in India that feeds schoolchildren. After which there may be the Jaipur Literary Competition, one of many largest of its form on the earth. Through the years, it’s expanded into different cities across the globe. Divakaruni is a part of why the Bayou Metropolis hosts JLF Houston each September, bringing collectively writers and thinkers for a day of occasions at Asia Society Texas.
She retains transferring ahead as a author, too, and is at the moment working within the speculative fiction style, loosely outlined as tales that happen past our identified world. Divakaruni loved and was influenced by novels corresponding to Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, which revisits historical past by an imaginative lens, and Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver, which takes a narrative set in an historic magical world and weaves in themes just like the roles of girls and minorities, and the violence visited upon each. Studying them fueled her need to write down a novel taking over related challenges.
“I’m very keen on inserting it in an Indian context,” Divakaruni says. “And as with all of my books, there will probably be a powerful and sophisticated girl—truly, at the very least two of them—at its middle.”
