Biography

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning author and poet. Her work is widely known, as she has been published in over 50 magazines, and her writing has been included in over 30 anthologies.

She was born in India and lived there until 1976, until she was nineteen, at which point  she left Calcutta and came to the United States. She continued her education in the field of English by receiving a Master's degree from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. To earn money for her education, she held many odd jobs, including babysitting, selling merchandise in an Indian boutique, slicing bread in a bakery, and washing instruments in a science lab. At Berkeley, she lived in the International House and worked in the dining hall, slicing Jell-O and removing dishes from the dishwasher. She briefly lived in Chicago and Ohio before she settled in Sunnydale, California in 1979. She currently lives in Sunnydale with her husband and two children while teaching creative writing at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, CA. Since 1991, she has been the president of MAITRI, a helpline for South Asian women that particularly helps victims of domestic violence and other abusive situations. The one word she says would describe her is "enthusiastic" and she states that she is motivated to be excellent in her field and to create literary art of lasting value (qtd in "Profiles"). She says that she sees herself as "a listener, a facilitator, a connector to people," and, "to me, the art of dissolving boundaries is what living is all about" ("Dissolving" 2).

Major Themes

Much of Divakaruni's work is partially autobiographical. Not only are most of her stories set in the Bay Area of California, but she also deals with the immigrant experience, which is an important theme in today's world, where the immigrant's voice is rarely heard. Her book Arranged Marriage is a collection of short stories, all about women from India caught between two worlds. In The Mistress of Spices, the character Tilo provides spices, not only for cooking, but also for the homesickness and alienation that the Indian immigrants in her shop experience (Softky 1997). She writes to unite people, and she does this by destroying myths and stereotypes. As she breaks down these barriers, she dissolves boundaries between people of different backgrounds, communities, ages, and even different worlds. Much of Divakaruni's writing centers around the lives of immigrant women. She says, "Women in particular respond to my work because Iím writing about them, women in love, in difficulties, women in relationships. I want people to relate to my characters, to feel their joy and pain, because it will be harder to [be] prejudiced when they meet them in real life" (qtd. in Softky). Divakaruni's interest in women began after she left India, at which point she reevaluated the treatment of women there. At Berkeley, she volunteered at a women's center and became interested in helping battered women. She then started MAITRI with a group of friends, which eventually led her to write Arranged Marriage, a work that includes stories about the abuse and courage of immigrant women.

Arranged Marriage and her novel, The Mistress of Spices, are both highly acclaimed works by Divakaruni. In Arranged Marriage, Divakaruni beautifully tells stories about immigrant brides who are "both liberated and trapped by cultural changes" and who are struggling to carve out an identity of their own (Holt 1).  In one story, "Doors," the character Preeti, after moving to the United States, has come to love the western idea of privacy. She faces a dilemma when her husband's cousin wants to come live with them. She expresses her discontent with the situation, which shows her newfound decisiveness and her fight against her husband's view of a traditional Indian wife. In another story, "Clothes," the husband of the narrator, Sumita, dies and she is faced with the decision of staying in America or going back to India to live with her in-laws. Sumita calls widows who are serving their in-laws in India "doves with cutoff wings." Divakaruni deals with a variety of issues in the book, including racism, interracial relationships, economic disparity, abortion, and divorce. She says that the stories are inspired by her imagination and the experiences of others (Mehta 4).

The Mistress of Spices is unique in that it is written with a blend of prose and poetry. The book has a very mystical quality to it, and, as Divakaruni puts it, "I wrote in a spirit of play, collapsing the divisions between the realistic world of twentieth century America and the timeless one of myth and magic in my attempt to create a modern fable" ("Dissolving" 2). The novel follows Tilo, a magical figure who runs a grocery store and uses spices to help the customers overcome difficulties. In the process, she develops dilemmas of her own when she falls in love with a non-Indian. This creates great conflicts, as she has to choose whether to serve her people or to follow the path leading to her own happiness. Tilo has to decide which parts of her heritage she will keep and which parts she will chose to abandon. The novel is currently being made into a movie.

Divakaruni's novel, Sister of My Heart is about the lives of two women and how they are changed by marriage, as one woman comes to California, and the other stays behind in India.  The Vine of Desire (2002) continues the story of the two friends.  The Unknown Errors of Our Lives is a collection of stories "about family, culture, and the seduction of memory" (book jacket).

Chitra Divakaruni is also the editor of Multitudes, an anthology she uses in her own classroom. She states about the book, "I didn't want to sacrifice quality, and [the stories] focus on problem solving, not just how terrible things are" (qtd. in Softky). The anthology includes stories about communication styles across cultures, expectations of friendships, the Los Angeles riots, and prejudice against gay people. The book contains works by a variety of authors, and some are even by her own students.

Before she began her career in fiction-writing, Divakaruni was an acclaimed poet. She writes poems encompassing a wide variety of themes, and she once again directs much focus to the immigrant experience and to South Asian women. She shows the experiences and struggles involved in women trying to find their own identities. Divakaruni's latest collection, Leaving Yuba City, is unique because it includes series of poems based on and inspired by various art forms, including paintings by Francesco Clemente, photographs by Raghubir Singh, and specific Indian films, such as Salaam Bombay.  With these poems, Divakaruni once again shows how boundaries can be destroyed, as she illustrates how different art forms are not independent entities, but how they can, in fact, influence each other. The following is a poem from Black Candle, which contains poems about women from the India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

The Arranged Marriage

 The night is airless-still, as
 before a storm. Behind the wedding drums,
 cries of jackals from the burning grounds.
 The canopy gleams, color
 of long life, many children.
 Color of bride-blood. At the entrance
 the women have painted a sign
 of Laxmi, goddess of wealth, have put up
 a blackened pot to ward off
 the witch who lives beyond
 the Sheora forest and eats
 young flesh.
        Guests from three villages
 jostle, making marriage jokes. A long
 conch blast for the groom's party,
 men in dhotis white as ice. Someone runs to them
 with water of rose, silvered betal leaves,
 piled garlands from which rise
 the acrid smell of marigolds.
 The priests confer, arrange wood and incense
 for the wedding fire. The chants begin.
 Through smoke, the stars
 are red pinpricks, the women's voices
 almost a wailing. Uncles and brothers
 carry in the bride, her face hidden
 under an edge of scarlet silk, her trembling
 under the wedding jewels.
                                       The groom's father
 produces his scales and in clenched silence
 the dowry gold is weighed. But he smiles
 and all is well again. Now it is godhuli,
 the time of the auspicious seeing.
 Time for you, bride of sixteen,
 mother, to raise the tear-stained face
 that I will learn so well,
 to look for the first time into
 your husband's opaque eyes (14-15).

Major Works

POETRY
Dark Like the River (1987)
The Reason for Nasturtiums (1990)
Black Candle (1991)
Leaving Yuba City (1997)

NOVELS
The Mistress of Spices (1997)
Sister of My Heart (1999)

OTHER
Multitude (Editor) (1993) A cross-cultural anthology
Arranged Marriage  (1995) A collection of short stories

Awards and Honors

PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Prize for Fiction
Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for Fiction
Before Columbus Foundationís American Book Award
Gerbode Foundation Award
Two Santa Clara Arts Council Awards
Barbara Deming Fellowship
Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize
Pushcart Prize
Two PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Awards
Orange Prize for Fiction

Selected Bibliography

Albert, Janice. "How now, my metal of India?" English Journal Sept 1997: 99-100.

Divakaruni, Chitra. Black Candle. Corvallis, Oregon: CALYX Books, 1991.

---."Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni." San Francisco Chronicle 24 Dec 1995:  A10.

---. "Dissolving Boundaries." (1997): 3 pag. Online. Internet. Available: http://headlines.entertainmentmarket.com/boldtype.divakaruni.article$597

Holt, Patricia. "Women feel tug of two cultures." San Francisco Chronicle 1 Aug 1995:  E5.

Mehta, Julie. "Arranging One's Life." (1996): 6 pag. Online. Internet. Available:
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/10.03.96/books-9640.html

"Profiles: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni." 2 pg. Online. Internet. Available: http://www.helloindia.com/profiles/profile.shtml

Softky, Elizabeth. "Cross-cultural understanding spiced with the Indian Diaspora." Black Issues in Higher Education 18 Sept 1997: 26+.

Related Sites

A page with links related to Chitra Divakaruni
http://www.mx.org/divakaruni/

A transcript of an online chat with Chitra Divakaruni
http://www.io.com/~leena/chitra.txt

MAITRI homepage
http://www.maitri.org/

Chitra Divakaruni: "My Work with MAITRI"
http://headlines.entertainmentmarket.com/boldtype/divakaruni.article$600

Author: Nilu N. Patel, Spring 1998 (npate07@emory.edu)
 

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