Small Remedies

Last updated

Small Remedies is a novel by Indian author Shashi Deshpande published in 2000.

Contents

Plot summary

Madhu, a writer, lost her son due to the incident of the 1992 Ayodhya Babri Masjid bombing. To recover, Madhu travels to a town to write about Savitribai, a woman that decided to leave her husband and move over to another city to pursue her passion of music and starts living with her Muslim lover and accompanist. While writing about Savitribai and living in Bhavanipur, she searches for the true meaning of her life and tries to come to terms with her grief over her son's death.

Reception

Mohit K. Ray, the author of The Atlantic Companion to Literature in English, said that the novel "reaffirms Shashi Deshpande as one of the leading fiction writers in India". [1] S.P. Sree, the author of Alien Among Us: Reflections Of Women Writers On Women, called Small Remedies "the best novel Shashi Deshpande has written since The Long Silence". [2] The novel was reviewed by the Indian journal Manushi [3] and has a page in the 2008 edition of the book 1001 Books To Read Before You Die. [4]

Related Research Articles

Buchi Emecheta Nigerian writer

Florence Onyebuchi "Buchi" Emecheta was a Nigerian-born novelist, based in the UK from 1962, who also wrote plays and an autobiography, as well as works for children. She was the author of more than 20 books, including Second Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979). Most of her early novels were published by Allison and Busby, where her editor was Margaret Busby.

Margaret Laurence Writer (1926−1987)

Jean Margaret Laurence was a Canadian novelist and short story writer, and is one of the major figures in Canadian literature. She was also a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada, a non-profit literary organization that seeks to encourage Canada's writing community.

Shashi Tharoor Indian politician, diplomat, author

Shashi Tharoor is an Indian former international diplomat, politician, writer and public intellectual who has been serving as Member of Parliament, Lok Sabha from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, since 2009. He was formerly Under-Secretary General of the United Nations and contested for the post of Secretary-General in 2006.

Madhu Kishwar

Madhu Purnima Kishwar is an Indian academic and a conservative commentator. She is currently employed as a chair Professor in the Indian Council of Social Science Research. Kishwar along with fellow-academic Ruth Vanita co-founded the journal Manushi.

Deshpande is a surname native to the Indian states of Maharashtra, Goa and Karnataka. The surname can be also found in some parts of Andhra Pradesh. Deshpande surname is found among the Deshastha Brahmins, Goud Saraswat Brahmins (GSB) and the Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhus (CKP).

Savitribai Phule 19th-century Indian social reformer

Savitribai Phule was an Indian social reformer, educationalist, and poet from Maharashtra. She is regarded as the first female teacher of India. Along with her husband, Jyotirao Phule, she played an important and vital role in improving women's rights in India. She is regarded as the mother of Indian feminism. Savitribai and her husband founded one of the first Indian girls' school in Pune, at Bhide wada in 1848. She worked to abolish the discrimination and unfair treatment of people based on caste and gender. She is regarded as an important figure of the social reform movement in Maharashtra.

Shashi Deshpande

Shashi Deshpande is an Indian novelist. She is a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award.

Serial (literature) Publishing format by which a single literary work is presented in contiguous installments

In literature, a serial is a printing or publishing format by which a single larger work, often a work of narrative fiction, is published in smaller, sequential installments. The installments are also known as numbers, parts or fascicles, and may be released either as separate publications or within sequential issues of a periodical publication, such as a magazine or newspaper.

Gauri Deshpande

Gauri Deshpande was a novelist, short story writer, and poet from Maharashtra, India. She wrote in Marathi and English.

<i>Eight Months on Ghazzah Street</i>

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988) is the third novel by English author Dame Hilary Mantel, who won the Man Booker Prize in 2009 and 2012. It tells the story of an Englishwoman, Frances Shore, who moves to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia to live with her husband, an engineer.

Joan Riley is a Jamaican-British author. Her 1985 debut novel The Unbelonging made her "the first Afro-Caribbean woman author to write about the experiences of Blacks in England".

Adya Rangacharya, known as R.V. Jagirdar till 1948, later popularly known by his pen name Sriranga, was an Indian Kannada writer, actor and scholar, and a member of the Adya Jahagirdar family. He was awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship in 1967 and the Sahitya Akademi Award for literature in 1971 for Kalidasa, a literary criticism in Kannada.

<i>Hound Music</i>

Hound Music by English author Rosalind Belben has been described by The Atlantic Companion to Literature as a 'fine historical novel. Published in 2001 by Chatto and Windus it is set at the beginning of the twentieth century in rural England and concerns fox-hunting.

Sunita Jain

Sunita Jain (1940–2017) was an Indian scholar, novelist, short-story writer and poet of English and Hindi literature. She was a former professor and the Head of the department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. She published over 60 books, in English and Hindi, besides translating many Jain writings into English. She is featured in the Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English and was a recipient of The Vreeland Award (1969) and the Marie Sandoz Prairie Schooner Fiction Award. The Government of India awarded her the fourth highest civilian honour of the Padma Shri in 2004. In 2015 she was awarded the Vyas Samman by the K.K. Birla foundation for outstanding literary work in Hindi. In 2015 she was awarded an honorary D.Litt. from the University of Burdhwan, West Bengal.

Anne Burke (fl.1780-1805) was an Irish novelist in the Gothic genre. She was one of the earliest women writers of Gothic fiction.

Nina Sibal Indian diplomat and writer

Nina Sibal was an Indian diplomat and writer, known for her prize-winning novel Yatra and other English-language fiction as well as for her work in the Indian Foreign Service.

<i>The Slave Girl</i> (novel) 1977 novel by Buchi Emecheta

The Slave Girl is a 1977 novel by Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta that was published in the UK by Allison and Busby and in the US by George Braziller. It won the Jock Campbell Award from the New Statesman in 1978. The novel was Emecheta's fourth book; it was dedicated to her editor Margaret Busby.

A Matter of Time is a 1996 novel by Shashi Deshpande. Unusually in Deshpande's fiction the focus is on the impact of the actions of a male character, Gopal, who leaves his family.

Sathupati Prasanna Sree is an Indian linguist.

Uma Vasudeva was an Indian writer and columnist. She was one of the early editors of India Today.

References

  1. K. Ray, Mohit (2007). The Atlantic Companion to Literature in English. Atlantic Publishers & Dist. p. 136. ISBN   978-8126908325 . Retrieved 1 May 2012.
  2. Sree, S.P. (2008). Alien Among Us: Reflections Of Women Writers On Women. Sarup & Sons. p. 86. ISBN   978-8176258432 . Retrieved 1 May 2012.
  3. C. Vimala, Rao (2003). "History as metafiction: Shashi Deshpande's Small Remedies. (Book Review)". Manushi. Archived from the original on 9 March 2016. Retrieved 1 May 2012.
  4. Bogen, Anna (2006). Peter Boxall (ed.). 1001 Books You must Read Before You Die . New York: Quintet Publishing Limited. p.  889. ISBN   978-0789313706.