Goja

Imprint. Suniti Namjoshi recaptures the impact of growing up in India and moving to the West. This powerful meditation, part autobiography, part elegy, deconstructs the glamour given to wealth and power, and celebrates the quest for love. Author will be a guest at the Sydney Writer's Festival 2000.

I had thought once that I felt most at home in a plane in mid-air, but that isn’t true. I belong to India and to the West. Both belong to me and both reject me. I have to make sense of what has been and what there is.Suniti Namjoshi traverses the cultures of the East and of the West. She muses on the patterns of her life, and of the impact of colonisation, both the resistances and the acceptances of it. Growing up a princess in the ruling house of Maharashtra, the two most important relationships in her life were with her grandmother, the Ranisaheb, and with Goja, the servant woman who slept beside her bed.When she was ten her test pilot father was killed in an air accident and Suniti was sent away to boarding school. After working in the Indian Civil Service for some years, she decided that she wanted to be a poet and she moved to the West. In the US and Canada she became just another brown-skinned immigrant without the privileges of her childhood.