THE ANALYTICAL STUDY OF CULTURAL VERTIGO ESTHER DAVID NOVELS

Literature in its many forms and facets plays an important part in Esther David’s novels. Many of her characters are keen readers, and allow themselves, consciously or unconsciously, to be influenced in their actions and attitudes by what they read. They are thus not representatives of the majority of ordinary Indians, who, according to Esther David herself, “aren't great readers, aren't great book buyers. They always turn to music or to the visual arts for pleasure and entertainment rather than read... It is still rather a strange act to buy a book and read it, an unusual thing to do”. In any case, she does not see her characters as representatives of large communities but rather as individuals with their own idiosyncratic ways of coping with life, as she frequently stresses in interviews. In their interest in literature in its widest sense and in the way in influences them, they resemble Esther David herself, who admits to the powerful impact her own reading has had on her writing. When asked why literature plays such an important part in her novels, she explained “literature's certainly one of the richest sources I know of, but my response to it is a private response. It isn't based on analysis... It's more a coming together of moods or minds. It's a sense of closeness with certain poets and writers”. Old Money people have almost always been mill owners, but after the 1984 mill workers' strike in Mumbai, most mills closed down there and in Ahmedabad. During this time, weaving factories and printing houses mushroomed in Gujarat, making a further dent in the textile industry of Ahmedabad.(1) One of the achievements of the modern critical mind is the willingness to problematize the seemingly empirical. Seeing, hearing, etc. are no longer acknowledged as the neutral modes of sensory perception that they were once thought to be in realistic / mimetic approaches to art and literature; they are, rather, primary modes of interpretation. After all, these modes of interpretation include, as the linguist Leonard Bloomfield put it, everything in the life of the interpreter. To see, even when we are not conscious of it, is thus to 'make sense of knowledge that includes the personal, the psychological, the social and several other interacting dimensions. And seeing as a writer does, specifically and self- consciously, in order to interpret the worlds s/he lives in to others, can only be an even more complex act. Keywords : Characters, Literature, Novels, Closeness, Explaine