Arvind Krishna Mehrotra was born in 1947 in Lahore, Pakistan, and studied English literature, ancient history and economics at the University of Allahabad. Fascinated with the library of his uncle, an English professor with whom he lived, he fulfilled his dream of publishing his first poems and seeing his own
Arundhati Roy was born in Shillong in northern India in 1959 and she and her brother were raised by their mother in Kerala in southern India. At the age of sixteen she moved to Delhi where she studied architecture and worked in cinema first as an actress and then as
born in 1949, is an Indian ethnologist. He grew up in Bombay and emigrated to the USA to study, where he received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1976. He has taught at Yale, the New School, and at universities in Europe, Latin America, and India. One of
Anita Desai (originally Anita Mazumdar) was born to a German mother and an Indian father in Mussoorie, India, in 1937. When she was a child, German was spoken at home and Hindi outside of the family. However, the language she learned to read and write in was English, which is also
Writer-painter Amruta Patil is India’s first female graphic novelist. The blending of the timeless and the contemporary – replete with innumerable micro-subversions – is central to her textual and visual style. Patil, who thinks of herself primarily as a writer, incorporates a freewheeling mix of acrylics, collage, charcoal and watercolor
The Indian writer and musician Amit Chaudhuri was born in 1962 in Kolkata and grew up in Mumbai. He studied English language and literature at University College London and wrote his doctorate on D. H. Lawrence in Oxford. For a number of years, he spent his time between India and
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956 and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied history and social anthropology in Delhi and Oxford. While a student he worked as a journalist for the »Indian Express«, which was one of the few Indian newspapers to oppose the
Altaf Tyrewala was born in the Indian city of Mumbai in 1977. From 1995 to 1999, he studied business economics at Baruch College in New York and earned a meager living doing part-time jobs. For him, this city became synonymous with »hunger, coldness, and backbreaking work« and he harbored an
Alka Saraogi was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, in 1960. Eight years after her marriage, and after having two children, she went to university to do a Master’s and a Ph.D. in Hindi literature – an unusual step in her conservative community. She published newspaper articles about health and
