Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (b.1956) is an India-born American author of fiction, poetry, children’s stories, and nonfiction essays. Her works are celebrated for her synthesis of Bengali myths, Hindu folklore, and modern themes in a magic realist tradition. They contemplate the realities of living as an immigrant in America.
Born in Calcutta, Divakaruni earned her bachelor’s degree in English from Calcutta’s Presidency College. She immigrated to the United States and earned her master’s degree from Wright State University and a PhD in English from the University of California at Berkeley.
Divakaruni’s first books of poetry, Dark Like the River (1987) and The Reason for Nasturtiums (1990,) focused on the immigrant experience and South Asian women’s family life, exile, alienation, exoticism, ethnicity, domesticity, love, and romance.
Divakaruni continued her subject matters in her first volume of short stories, Arranged Marriage (1995,) and her first novel, The Mistress of Spices (1997.) Her other best-selling novels include Sister of My Heart (1999,) Vine of Desire (2002,) and Queen of Dreams (2004.) Her short story collection The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (2001) explores her characters’ conflicts between the beliefs and traditions of their Indian heritage and those of their—and their children’s—homeland in the United States.
A social activist on top, Divakaruni launched two organizations to help women of South Asian heritage who are victims of abusive relationships. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Houston.
The Mistress of Spices was made into an English movie by filmmakers Gurinder Chadha and Paul Mayeda Berges, as well as a Tamiḻ television serial by Suhasini Mani Ratnam.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
That’s how it is sometimes when we plunge into the depths of our lives. No one can accompany us, not even those who would give up their hearts for our happiness.
—Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
I am buoyant and expansive and uncontainable—but I always was so, only I never knew it.
—Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Above us our palace waits, the only one I’ve ever needed. Its walls are space, its floor is sky, its center everywhere. We rise; the shapes cluster around us in welcome, dissolving and forming again like fireflies in a summer evening.
—Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Love comes like lightning, and disappears the same way. If you are lucky, it strikes you right. If not, you’ll spend your life yearning for a man you can’t have.
—Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
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