Goja
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. In beautifully crafted prose, Suniti Namjoshi converses in her head with Goja and grandmother Goldie. They talk about the East and the West, about class privilege and poverty, about language and literacy, and about all the contradictions which Suniti’s life has brought into their relationship. Suniti Namjoshi has a marvellously rich story to tell and she tells it with poetic charm and a light touch. She delves deeply into the paradoxes of her life, and has much to share with others. She is articulate and a fine conversationalist. Suniti Namjoshi is a fabulist, poet, novelist, and now, autobiographer.
2000 | ISBN 9781875559978 | Paperback | 200 x 132 mm | 157 pp
Reviews
'Goja is a beautifully written, sensitive work by an extremely intelligent author. This one should be on everyone's shopping list.'
–Caroline Lumley
'… a gorgeous book that is both humorous and brutally honest.’
–Phoebe Everett, Melbourne Star Observer
‘… a thoughtful – and often brilliant – account about values and stances, about the process of revisiting and understanding events that shape one’s life, and about people whose actions seems justified and inevitable, even when they oppress and hurt.’
–Chelva Kanaganayakam, The Toronto Review
‘Suniti Namjoshi is a polemical storyteller who is not afraid to spell out her message. She writes about the gulf between rich and poor, the gulf between her life as the grandchild of an Indian aristocrat and that of her beloved servant, Goja, who cared for Namjoshi as a child.’
–Fiona Capp, The Age