Githa Hariharan


Githa Hariharan is an Indian writer based in New Delhi. Her first novel, The Thousand Faces of Night, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the best first novel in 1993. Her other works include the short story collection ; the novels , , , and I Have Become the Tide and a collection of essays entitled Almost Home: Cities and Other Places.
Hariharan has written children's stories and co-edited a collection for children called Sorry, Best Friend!. She has also edited a collection of translated short fiction, A Southern Harvest, the essay collection From India to Palestine: Essays in Solidarity and co-edited Battling for India: A Citizen’s Reader.

Recent Work

Her recent novel , published in 2019 in India, includes three distinctive narratives that intertwine past and present in compelling ways to raise an urgent voice against the cruelties of caste, and the destructive forces that crush dissent. But they also celebrate the joy of resistance, the redemptive beauty of words, and the courage to be found in friendship and love. I Have Become the Tide is deeply political, but it never loses sight of humour, tenderness—or the human spirit.
Her recent edited book, was published in 2019 by Speaking Tiger in India. The reader is a necessary collection that brings us the voices and experiences of those who are battling for India through their private struggles and public activism: Alivelamma, a woman farmer. Huchangi, Rohith, Ravan—poet, scholar, activist; all dalit. Sukalo, Rajkishor, Leelabati—activist, poet, singer; adivasis. Eighteen-year-old Muddu Thirthahalli and ninety-one-year-old Nayantara, both writers; Amarjeet, Sonia and 2000 others gathered at a workers’ rally. Salima, Hafiz, Aslah, who refuse to be second-class citizens. Among them, and with them, are the voices of journalists, artists, teachers and students. Together, they speak to us of the many ways in which state and extra-state forces have been excluding more and more citizens from India. Together, they show us ways to re-make the nation envisioned by our Constitution—a nation whose people can, without exception, live as free and equal citizens.

Early life

Githa Hariharan was born in Coimbatore, India, and she grew up in Bombay and Manila. She was educated in these two cities and later in the United States. She got a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature and Psychology from Bombay University in 1974; and a Master of Arts in Communications from the Graduate School of Corporate and Political Communication, Fairfield University, Connecticut, 1977. She worked as a staff writer in WNET-Channel 13 in New York, and from 1979 to 1984, she worked as an editor in the Mumbai, Chennai and New Delhi offices of Orient Longman, where she was responsible for the social science, fiction and women's studies lists. From 1985 to 2005, she worked as a freelance professional editor for a range of academic institutions and foundations. She is, at present, a writer based in New Delhi.
In 1995, Hariharan challenged the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act as discriminatory against women. The case, Githa Hariharan and Another vs. Reserve Bank of India and Another, led to a Supreme Court judgment in 1999 on guardianship.

Career

Hariharan first worked in the Public Broadcasting System in New York and then with a publishing firm as an editor in India. She is currently, a full-time writer.
Hariharan's fiction has been translated into a number of languages including French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Greek, Urdu and Vietnamese; her essays and fiction have also been included in anthologies such as Salman Rushdie's Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947-1997. She wrote a monthly column for many years on different aspects of culture and their political and social underpinnings, in The Telegraph, Kolkata. She has been Visiting Professor or Writer-in-Residence in several universities, including Dartmouth College and George Washington University in the United States, the University of Canterbury at Kent in the UK, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and in India, Jamia Millia Islamia and Goa University.
Hariharan is also a founder member of the Indian Writers’ Forum, a public trust set up to promote Indian diversity and freedom of expression; and address, through discussion, debate and participation in public events and campaigns, current issues in the overlapping practice of culture, academics, art and politics.  The Forum runs two sites, the which focuses on cultural politics; and , an online journal that showcases diverse cultural, artistic and academic practice in India.
Gita Hariharan's novels A Thousand Faces of Night and The Ghost of Vasu Master are concerned with rewriting folk tales and children's stories. In The Ghost of Vasu Master a retired schoolteacher, Vasu Master, succeeds in winning over the problem child Mani by storytelling. The stories are reworking of the Panchtantra. Vasu comes to recognize 'the necessity of reconstruction' from the dismantled parts of various ideas, beliefs, models' that are his inheritance.
A Thousand Faces of Night deals with the positioning of Indian Women in relation to this orientalist idea of tradition. Hariharn herself returned to India after attending graduate school in the United States and this novel is an account of the foreign returned Devi's attempt to find aa way of living in contemporary India.

Author