A Study Guide for Kiran Desai's "Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Kiran Desai's "Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535825146

Book preview

09

Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard

Kiran Desai

1998

Introduction

Kiran Desai's debut novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), made the author an instant success at the age of twenty-seven. She is the voice of a younger generation of Indian writers who write in English, many of whom live in self-exile. Indeed, many expatriate Indian novelists have gained international attention, including Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and Anita Desai (Kiran Desai's mother).

India is home to many religious groups, including Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims. It also has a history of political strife among those groups, exacerbated by the interference of British colonialism and modern globalization. Desai, like other Indian writers in English, combines these elements of India's traditions and history with a secular emphasis on storytelling. Her work explores the toll that these cultural divides have taken on India's population.

Desai's work is known for its rich and colorful language, and detailed presentations of setting and character. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard presents a fictitious small town called Shahkot in North India. The town has a mixed culture of traditional Indian social norms and of modern life, wherein the runaway Sampath Chawla, who just wants to be left alone, is forced into being a holy man in spite of himself.

Given its popularity, the novel was still in print as of 2008; it was reissued as an Anchor paperback in 1999.

Author Biography

Kiran Desai was born on September 3, 1971, in New Delhi, India, the youngest of the four children of Anita and Ashvin Desai. Her mother, Anita Desai, whose own mother was German and whose father was Indian, is one of the most respected and famous Indian writers today. Ashvin Desai is a Delhi businessman. Kiran's parents are now separated, due to the nature of Anita's career and travel. Kiran's early life was spent in Delhi, and sometimes in a family house in Kalimpong in the Himalayas, the scene of much of her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss.

Kiran was educated at a convent in Kalimpong, and at the age of fifteen, accompanied her mother to England when her mother got a temporary teaching position there. When Anita Desai moved to the United States to teach and write, Kiran went with her, for she has remained closest to her mother, as a friend and fellow writer. In America, Kiran went to high school in Massachusetts and then to Bennington College in Vermont. At first she planned on studying science, but because of her natural talent for writing and her mother's encouragement, she soon switched majors. After graduating from college, she enrolled in writing programs at Hollins University in Virginia and then Columbia University, where she got an M.F.A. in writing. She began Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard while at Hollins and completed it as part of her M.F.A. work at Columbia. The novel was published in 1998, when she was twenty-seven. The book was well received by critics, and the book received the Betty Trask Award from the British Society of Authors.

After this success, Desai secluded herself for eight years to write her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss (2006). While the first novel introduces social problems, it does so in a light comic or satiric mode and does not linger on them. The second novel takes up the more tragic theme of the loss of tradition, and the difficulties faced by immigrants who try to make a new life. For this novel, Desai won the Booker Prize for fiction. At the age of thirty-five, she was the youngest woman ever to win it.

In addition, The Inheritance of Loss was selected as a Publishers Weekly