The Henna Artist Study Guide

Alka Joshi was born in Jodhpur, a small city in Rajasthan, a state in the northwest of India. At age nine, she emigrated to the United States with her family; once they arrived in the U.S., Joshi’s mother, Sudha Latika Joshi, encouraged her daughter to embrace America’s less rigid gender expectations and forge a career of her own. After studying at Stanford, Joshi had a successful decades-long career in marketing and copywriting. At 51, Joshi’s husband (himself a writer) convinced her to enroll in an MFA program for fiction. For the next 10 years, Joshi worked on The Henna Artist, which skyrocketed to the top of nearly every bestseller list upon its release. Since publishing that debut novel, Joshi has added two more books—The Secret Keeper of Jaipur and The Perfumer of Paris—to what she calls her “Jaipur trilogy.” The trilogy is inspired by and dedicated to Joshi’s mother, who did not experience the “freedom of choice” that she so wanted for Joshi.

The shaping historical event in The Henna Artist is the Indian independence movement. After centuries of indirect and eventually direct British rule (the “British Raj”), Mohandas Gandhi started the Non-Cooperation protest movement in 1920; the movement picked up steam in the following decades and reached a zenith during the chaos of World War II. India was officially granted its independence on August 14, 1947, just eight years before Joshi’s novel begins. During Independence, the country went through a painful Partition, in which the Muslim population was concentrated into a newly formed country known as Pakistan. For Muslims who stayed in India, religious tensions lingered, though Jawaharlal Nehru, the nation’s first prime minister, did his best to de-emphasize Hindu hierarches in government. India’s independence also catalyzed a period of fast modernization for the country, which it is still undergoing today. 

A broad variety of literary influences helped shape The Henna Artist. The characters themselves draw from both British and Indian literary tradition, reading Victorian romances like Jane Eyre alongside religious Hindu epics like the Bhagavad Gita. This same synthesis is evident in Joshi’s own inspirations. She cites a variety of prominent Indian authors like Amitav Ghosh and V. S. Naipaul, but she is also interested in post-colonial literature as a whole; female authors like Jamaica Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat seem to be particular inspirations. Lastly, the use of cliff-hangers, plot twists, and unexpected romances links The Henna Artist to other popular works of contemporary fiction, like Big Little Lies or Little Fires Everywhere.