ਕਿਸ਼ਵਰ ਦੇਸਾਈਕਿਸ਼ਵਰ ਦੇਸਾਈ

ਮੁੱਢਲਾ ਜੀਵਨ

Kishwar Desai was born Kishwar Rosha on 1 December 1956 in Ambala, in Punjab, a town that today lies in Haryana. Her parents were Padam and Rajini Rosha. She grew up in Chandigarh, where her father was the head of the Punjab Police, and she graduated from Lady Shri Ram College in Delhi in 1977, with a degree in Economics.

After her first marriage she was known as Kishwar Ahluwalia, and she has a son, Gaurav, and a daughter, Malika, from that marriage. In July 2004 she married the economist Meghnad Desai, a member of the British House of Lords. They were together for twenty one years, until his death in July 2025.

Television career

Desai began her career as a print journalist and political reporter with the Indian Express, then moved into television and broadcast media, where she worked for more than twenty years. She worked as an anchor, television producer and head of a television channel, with TV Today, NDTV and Doordarshan among others, and she ran her own production house.

She anchored Doordarshan's morning show, Good Morning Today, and she set up and ran Tara Punjabi, a Punjabi television channel, as its chief executive. Her last full time job in television was as vice president of Zee Telefilms, running a channel. She has also written as a columnist, including for The Guardian.

ਵਿਟਨੈਸ ਦ ਨਾਈਟ

Her first novel, Witness the Night, was published in 2009, and it won the Costa First Novel Award in 2010. It has been translated into more than twenty five languages, and it was shortlisted for the Author's Club First Novel Award and longlisted for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize. In 2020, The Independent listed it among the twelve best Indian novels.

The novel opens with a young girl, barely alive, found in a sprawling house where thirteen people lie dead. The girl is charged with the murders, and Simran Singh, a middle aged social worker and crime investigator, is her only hope. The story deals with female foeticide, and the Costa judges praised how Desai transplanted a country house murder to modern India in a book unafraid to tackle serious themes.

Novels, biography and plays

Before her fiction, Desai wrote Darlingji: The True Love Story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt, published in 2007, a biography of two iconic Indian film stars based on interviews with the Dutt family and friends. It tells the larger story of the evolution of Hindi cinema, and of a society and a nation in the throes of change.

Witness the Night began the Simran Singh series. Origins of Love, published in 2012, looks closely at surrogacy and adoption, as Simran examines the case of an abandoned baby at an IVF clinic. The Sea of Innocence, published in 2013, deals with gang rape. The trilogy has since been optioned for a web series.

Desai has also written for the stage. Her play Manto!, based on the life of the Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto, won the TAG Omega Award for Best Play in 1999. Her play Devika Rani: Goddess of the Silver Screen was staged across India in 2019.

What is the Partition Museum?

Desai is the chairperson of the Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust, which set up the world's first Partition Museum at the Town Hall in Amritsar. The museum, which has won seven awards, tells the story of Partition through the memories and belongings of the people who lived through it. She has since set up a second Partition Museum, at the Dara Shukoh Library in Old Delhi. Both are people's museums, created entirely through donations.

She also helped to install the statue of Mahatma Gandhi outside Westminster in the United Kingdom, and in 2019 she received the Distinguished Alumni Award from her alma mater, Lady Shri Ram College, for her work in arts, literature and modern Indian history.

Jallianwala Bagh, 1919 and later books

Desai's first work of political non-fiction, Jallianwala Bagh, 1919: The Real Story, was published in 2018. Drawing on the reports of the Hunter Committee and the Indian National Congress, it pieces together what happened in Amritsar on 13 April 1919 and in the days around it. The book won critical acclaim and inspired exhibitions on the massacre in India, the United Kingdom and New Zealand at the centenary of the massacre.

Her next book, The Longest Kiss: The Life and Times of Devika Rani, was published in 2020. It tells the story of the Bombay Talkies founder and actress Devika Rani, and it won the Swarna Kamal for the best book on Indian cinema at the National Film Awards. It is being made into a feature film.