SOURCE: "History and Letters: Anita Desai's Baumgartner's Bombay," in World Literature Written in English, Vol. 30, No. 1, Spring, 1990, pp. 37-46.

In the essay below, Newman examines "the relation between discourse and history" in Baumgartner's Bombay.

Anita Desai has always sidestepped any recognition of language as a social fact, disavowing political intent and describing her work in "universalist" terms. In interview she maintained that she had avoided many of the ideological problems created by the use of English, by not writing "social document" novels.

By writing novels that have been catalogued by critics as psychological, and that are purely subjective, I have been left free to employ, simply, the language of the interior. [Ramesh K. Srivastava, in Perspectives on Anita Desai, 1984]

In Baumgartner's Bombay, however, Desai departs from her previous practice, in order to interrogate the relation of discourse to history, the language of the interior to that of the...