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Namita Gokhale

About the Author

Namita Gokhale Namita Gokhale, 2021 Photo: Jaidev Pant

Namita Gokhale (née Pant) is an Indian author and publisher. She was born on 26 January 1956 in Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh). She became particularly well known as founder and director of the renowned Jaipur Literature Festival, which she launched together with the celebrated Scottish writer and historian William Dalrymple in 2006.

As a child she spent most of her time in New Delhi and her hometown Nainital at the foot of the Himalaya. She studied English literature at Jesus and Mary College, Delhi University. To date she has written a total of twenty works of fiction and non-fiction in English. She also founded Yatra Books, a publishing house specialising in translations.

Work (Selection)

Together with her late husband Rajiv Gokhale, whom she married at 18, she published the film magazine Super in the late 1970s. After the magazine ceased publication in the early 1980s, she began writing her first novel. Her debut novel, Paro: Dreams of Passion (1984), is already a classic and has been reprinted many times since its first publication. Paro is a satirical social novel that tells the story of two women, Paro and Priya. Owing to their different positions in society, the two women are to be understood as opposites, yet they have something in common: a strong sense of independence and a tendency towards a certain irreverence. Through a twist of fate, their lives become intertwined. This satire received much acclaim and caused a stir through its frank depiction of sexuality.

Her second novel, Gods, Graves and Grandmother (1994, in German Großmutters Tempel, 2006), appeared after a ten-year pause. Gudiya, the novel's protagonist, lives with her grandmother in a suburb of Delhi. Her grandmother (Ammi) tells her that she belongs to a family of courtesans (kothewalis) who used to live in a mansion (haveli) in a small town and were very wealthy. However, the once-prosperous Gudiya family fell into great poverty. Gudiya's grandmother and mother subsequently flee with Gudiya to a suburb of Delhi and settle at a lonely street corner. The grandmother becomes a famous bhajan singer, which leads to the emergence of a Hindu temple complex there. The development of temple life depicted in the novel illuminates various aspects of modern Indian history, including rapid urbanisation, the great migration from India's poor regions into big cities such as Delhi and Mumbai, and the coexistence of many religions. The South Asia scholar Nadja-Christina Schneider wrote of this novel in a review: "'Großmutters Tempel' is recommended both for 'newcomers' and for all those who want to keep their enthusiasm for contemporary Indian literature alive well beyond the recent Frankfurt Book Fair."

In her other books, Namita Gokhale deals predominantly with stories and travel accounts from the Himalaya as well as themes from Indian mythology. Worth mentioning here is her book Mountain Echoes: Reminiscences of Kumaoni Women (1998). It illustrates the way of life of the inhabitants of the Kumaon region on the southern slopes of the Himalaya in the state of Uttarakhand, from the perspective of four highly gifted and individualistic women: Shivani, Tara Pande, Jeeya and Shakuntala Pande. They are relatives of the author. Their memories describe a social environment that no longer exists, one that lost its footing through modernisation, urbanisation, democratisation, growing education and emancipation. The historical novel Things To Leave Behind (2016) also deals with this theme, describing the development of Kumaon under British rule between 1842 and 1912.

Namita Gokhale, who herself grew up in Kumaon, said of her works about the Himalaya in an interview (Guftagoo, Rajya Sabha TV, 2020): "I have written a great deal about the Himalaya, because my heart still beats for the Himalayan mountains."

The anthology In Search of Sita: Revisiting Mythology (2009, in German Auf der Suche nach Sita. Neue Blicke in die indische Mythologie, 2013) was compiled by Gokhale together with Malashri Lal. It is a collection of essays, poems, interviews and various other creative interpretations of Sita. All the contributions in the book illuminate different phases of her life. These include the phase as an abducted woman, as the lonely wife of the god Rama, and as a single mother. Her inner strength and determination accompany her through all these phases. The book traces Sita's journey and helps to understand her inner world and her relevance for Indian society today.

One of Namita Gokhale's most recent works is the play Betrayed by Hope: A Play on the Life of Michael Madhusudan Dutt (2020), which she again wrote together with Malashri Lal. The play presents the letters that the famous Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt wrote to friends and patrons. It portrays the life of the poet, who plunges from one life crisis into another while his imagination and poetic creativity soar. It is also the story of a man who, though at home in the Western education system, ultimately turns back to his mother tongue. In the play, Dutt's letters are read aloud by an actor who plays him at his various stages of life, with interventions by the play's presenter, Rubina Rahman. Dutt's letters reflect his tragic life, constantly driven by hope on the one hand, yet also poisoned by hardship and despair on the other.

Jaipur Literature Festival

The Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF for short) has been held annually in January in Jaipur (Rajasthan) since 2006. Namita Gokhale and the Scottish writer and historian William Dalrymple are the festival directors. It is the largest literature festival in Asia. Every year the festival brings together a diverse mix of significant writers, thinkers, humanists, politicians, business leaders, athletes and entertainers from around the world on a single stage. The aim is to offer festival participants a platform for free expression, on which they can enter into deep, engaged dialogue with one another.

Of the festival, Gokhale said: "In India, the Jaipur Literature Festival has developed over the years into a cultural catalyst and a colourful celebration of books, ideas and music." Speakers at the festival to date have included the Nobel laureates J.M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk and Muhammad Yunus, the Man Booker Prize winners Ben Okri, Margaret Atwood and Paul Beatty, the Sahitya Akademi Award winners Girish Karnad, Gulzar, Javed Akhtar, M.T. Vasudevan Nair, as well as Mahasweta Devi and U.R. Ananthamurthy, and bestselling authors such as Amish Tripathi, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Vikram Seth.

As a forum reaching beyond literature, the festival has also hosted Amartya Sen, Amitabh Bachchan, former Indian president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the 14th Dalai Lama, Oprah Winfrey, Stephen Fry, Thomas Piketty and former Afghan president Hamid Karzai.

Yatra Books

From 2005 to 2021, the publishing house Yatra Books, founded by Namita Gokhale, Neeta Gupta and Shuchita Mital, was in operation. Yatra ("journey") stands for cross-cultural literary journeys, at the core of which are translations. Yatra was thus a publishing house specialising in literary translations, committed to high-quality translations into English, Hindi and other Indian regional languages.

The publishing house has released more than 500 titles in English, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Telugu, Bengali and Urdu, and has collaborated with many international institutions.

Awards

Namita Gokhale has received numerous literary prizes for her works. The most significant of these is the Sahitya Akademi Award 2021 for her 2016 novel Things to Leave Behind.

Isha Pandit

Published in German

  • Großmutters Tempel, novel, translated from English by Annemarie Hafner, 304 pp., Lotos Verlag Roland Beer 2006
  • Auf der Suche nach Sita. Neue Blicke in die indische Mythologie, edited by Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal, translated from English by Reinhold Schein, 210 pp., Draupadi Verlag 2013

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