ਚਿਤਰਾ ਬੈਨਰਜੀ ਦਿਵਾਕਰੁਨੀਚਿਤਰਾ ਬੈਨਰਜੀ ਦਿਵਾਕਰੁਨੀ

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (born Chitralekha Banerjee, 1956) is an Indian-born American author and poet, the Betty and Gene McDavid Professor of Writing at the University of Houston, whose novels have carried Indian women's stories to readers in 29 languages. Her best known books are The Mistress of Spices (1997), Sister of My Heart (1999) and The Palace of Illusions (2008), a retelling of the Mahabharata from Draupadi's point of view that was a national bestseller in India for over a year. Her historical novel The Last Queen (2021), about Maharani Jind Kaur of Punjab, is the book of hers this Kosh holds, and it was written together with this entry so that author and novel could be linked from the start.

ਮੁੱਢਲਾ ਜੀਵਨ

Divakaruni was born in Calcutta in 1956 and took her BA from the University of Calcutta in 1976, the same year she left for the United States. She earned a master's degree at Wright State University and a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985, writing her doctoral dissertation on Christopher Marlowe. She put herself through graduate school with a string of jobs, working as a babysitter, a store clerk, a bread slicer in a bakery, a laboratory assistant and a dining hall attendant, and she taught English at Foothill College and Diablo Valley College in California before moving to Texas, where she now lives and teaches in Houston.

The novels

She began her writing career as a poet, publishing Black Candle and Leaving Yuba City, and her first book of stories, Arranged Marriage (1995), won an American Book Award in 1996, a PEN Josephine Miles Award and a Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. The novels followed in quick succession: The Mistress of Spices (1997), made into a film in 2005; Sister of My Heart (1999), made into a television series in Tamil; The Vine of Desire (2002); Queen of Dreams (2004); The Palace of Illusions (2008); One Amazing Thing (2010); Oleander Girl (2013); Before We Visit the Goddess (2016); The Forest of Enchantments (2019); The Last Queen (2021), her first historical novel; and Independence (2023), a Partition tale. She has also written a young adult fantasy series, The Brotherhood of the Conch, and her work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker and in the Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories and the Pushcart Prize anthology.

What does she write about?

Her work is largely set in India and the United States and often follows the lives of South Asian immigrants, and at its centre are women: wives, mothers, daughters and queens who find their own voice inside families, marriages and histories that were not written for them. She has said she sees her writing as an extension of her activism, and the activism is real. In 1991 she co-founded Maitri, a helpline in San Francisco for South Asian women dealing with domestic abuse, and she serves on its advisory board and on the advisory board of Daya, a similar service in Houston. She has also served on the board of Pratham Houston, which works to bring literacy to disadvantaged children in India. The same impulse runs through the fiction: the retelling of an epic from a woman's eyes, or the recovery of a queen history forgot, is activism of another kind.

Honours and later life

The honours began with Arranged Marriage: the American Book Award, the PEN Josephine Miles Literary Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, all in 1996, followed by Pushcart Prizes in 1997 and 2003 and a Distinguished Writer Award from the South Asian Literary Association in 2007. The Last Queen brought a new round: it won the 2022 International Association of Working Women Award for Best Fiction and was longlisted for the 2022 Dublin Literary Award. She lives in Houston with her husband, Murthy, and has two sons.

ਵਿਰਾਸਤ

Divakaruni's place is as a bridge between two worlds and two literatures. She writes in English about Indian lives, in America about India, and in India about America, and her books have been translated into 29 languages. For Punjabi readers her importance is particular: The Last Queen took the story of Rani Jindan, the last queen of the Sikh Empire, out of the footnotes and gave her a voice of her own, and it did so in the first person, so that the fall of an empire is felt as one woman's loss. Her full book in this Kosh is The Last Queen, created together with this entry.