Githa Hariharan’s the Thousand Faces of Night

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Githa Hariharan’s The Thousand Faces of Night Githa Hariharan was born in 1954 in Coimbatore, India, and she grew up in Bombay and Manila. She was educated in these two cities and later in the United States, where she also worked as a staff writer on public television. She is one of the rare Indian-born, India-resident writers, not diasporic, who writes exclusively in English. She regards herself as a politically-oriented writer and as a feminist. She was noted by the public for winning the right to have the children named after her (instead of carrying the father’s name, which is common in India) and the Supreme Court agreed that the mother was also a “natural guardian” of the child. Apart from her first novel, The Thousand Faces of Night, published in 1992, she has constantly maintained the balance between fiction and non-fiction by authoring numerous newspaper articles, but also producing three more novels and two volumes of short stories. Her debut novel received the 1993 Commonwealth Prize for the best first novel from the Eurasian region and has been translated into French, Spanish and Dutch. Through her works, she attempts to tear apart the veil of sophistication and social equality by presenting the status of women even in the present age. She tries to portray the custom-ridden Indian society, especially in the southern part of India. She focuses on women’s lives and family matters with great confidence, but she articulates these themes with the help of Indian mythology. Githa presents the Indian myths taken from Ramayana and Mahabharata and relates them to the women characters of her novels. It is important to note that in the Indian traditional family system these myths have unique importance as they are verbally and orally transmitted from one generation to another in order to establish the rules by which people conduct their lives. Indian mythology
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