Fire on the Mountain Study Guide

Anita Desai was born in the Himalayan foothills, in the town of Mussoorie, India, in 1937. Her father, D. N. Mazumdar, was a businessman originally from the Bengal region, while her mother had immigrated to India from Germany. When they married in the 1930s, it was uncommon for Indian men to marry European women. Desai and her three siblings grew up in New Delhi. They spoke German at home, English at school, and Hindi with their neighbors. Desai attended the University of Delhi, where she earned a degree in English literature in 1957. In 1958, she married Ashvin Desai, with whom she had four children. Desai loved writing from an early age. Her first short story was published when she was nine years old, but she didn’t find widespread acclaim until the publication of Cry the Peacock in 1963. Her subsequent body of work includes novels, short story collections, and children’s books. Her work has won prestigious prizes including the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, and she is a member of the British Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Starting in the late 1980s, Desai held a series of academic posts in the United States, teaching creative writing at Mount Holyoke College, Baruch College, Smith College, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Nanda Kaul and Ila Das grow up in the waning years of the British rule in India. Although the British had been involved in colonial projects in India from the 17th century, it wasn’t until 1858 that the British Crown under Queen Victoria assumed direct control over India from the East India Company. The British had always faced uprisings and revolts in India, but events in the early decades of the 20th century led to a vote by Parliament in 1945 to decolonize India. Reasons for the decision included global sympathy and appreciation for India as a founding member of the United Nations; the high-profile protests of Mahatma Ghandi, his followers, and others; and the toll World War II took on Britain. In formally dissolving the British Raj, Britain divided its former holdings between the majority-Hindu India and the majority-Muslim Pakistan, thanks in part to ongoing agitation by Muslim separatists. The division, called the Indian Partition, led to massive upheaval, violence, and death in the affected areas, which were primarily in the northern part of the country. Kashmir, where Nanda Kaul grew up, was claimed by both India and Pakistan, leading to outright war in 1947–1948 and tensions which have simmered—and occasionally broken out into renewed violence—in the decades since.

Fire on the Mountain centers on the experience of Nanda Kaul, who has retired in her widowhood to an isolated cottage high atop a mountain. The physical isolation of her home, Desai’s literary choices—including shifting between the perspectives of Nanda Kaul, Raka, and Ila Das, and the novel’s thematic exploration of both the importance of friendships and familial relationships and the ways in which responsibilities can entrap and diminish women recall Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). Anita Desai’s daughter, Kiran Desai, riffs on the familial setup of Fire on the Mountain in her 2005 book The Inheritance of Loss, which sees an elderly widower and his faithful cook playing host to the widower’s granddaughter. Like Fire on the Mountain, The Inheritance of Loss explores themes of loss and family, but it places a heavier emphasis on the enduring effects of the British colonial project on the Indian subcontinent. In this vein, Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, published in 2018, explores themes of family, love, loss, and change as it follows its 80-year-old protagonist and her daughter on a trip to Pakistan, to places the mother left behind as a teenager during Indian Partition. All these books share Fire on the Mountain’s attention to language and lean heavily on imagery, puns, and a skillful manipulation of language to convey characters’ emotional lives.