Suvir Kaul
Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 2000), 121-136

This essay introduces readers to the writing of Anjana Appachana, a contemporary Indian woman author. Working within a feminist context made available by the growth of urban, middle-class feminism in India since the 1970s, Appachana is one of a group of recent writers who, in contrast to writers like Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, and Arundhati Roy, give voice to a quieter strain in contemporary Indian writing in English, one whose compressed energy derives not from its sweep or its claim to represent entire worlds-in-the-making but from its insistence on enacting in a realist idiom the lives and experiences of middle-class families, particularly those of the women who live within and are defined by the expectations of these families. At the same time, a single story like “Incantations” (1991) simultaneously traces multiple and overlapping stories, becoming thick with event and meditation. “Incantations” is, further, a story whose multilingualism allows an overlap and jostle of languages from which emerge conflicted models of desire and of aberrant or idealized subjectivity.