Since then, more of her work-a memoir of her time with her late cat Suki, a revisiting of Aesop’s legacy in Foxy Aesop-has appeared in India, as have some of her writings for children. There’s no room for just outrage in her writing, though Namjoshi is nothing if not a profoundly political writer. In 2013, Zubaan published The Fabulous Feminist: A Suniti Namjoshi Reader, which gave readers a taste of her spiky genius, wicked sense of humour and refusal to play by the book. It’s a pity that they aren’t as widely read, enjoyed and celebrated as they deserve to be.Īlso read: How Dante’s Vita Nova inspired an art exhibition Over the last four decades, her books for adults and children have continuously pushed the boundaries of the real and the imagined. They inhabit a morally dubious, if exciting, universe, where conventional beliefs about life and art, gender and sexuality, right and wrong, turn topsy-turvy.īorn in 1941, UK-based Namjoshi embraces these contradictions in her writing with an elan that’s hard to rival. The best fabulists are masters of the art of fibbing. But it could equally mean a liar, a compulsive teller of tales. The word, deriving from the Latin fabula (“story”), refers to a storyteller. Few contemporary writers own the epithet of a “fabulist” with as much sass as 81-year-old Suniti Namjoshi.
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