Research Catalog

Title

Breaking out : an Indian woman's American journey / Padma Desai.

Author

Desai, Padma.

Publication

Cambridge, Mass. : The MIT Press, [2012]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xvii, 250 pages : illustrations; 21 cm

Summary

The author grew up in the 1930s in the provincial world of Surat, India, where she had a sheltered and strict upbringing in a traditional Gujarati Anavil Brahmin family. Her academic brilliance won her a scholarship to Bombay University, where the first heady taste of freedom in the big city led to tragic consequences, seduction by a fellow student whom she was then compelled to marry. In a failed attempt to end this disastrous first marriage, she converted to Christianity. A scholarship to America in 1955 launched her on her long journey to liberation from the burdens and constraints of her life in India. With a growing self-awareness and transformation at many levels, she made a new life for herself, met and married the celebrated economist Jagdish Bhagwati, became a mother, and rose to academic eminence at Harvard and Columbia. How did she navigate the tumultuous road to assimilation in American society and culture? And what did she retain of her Indian upbringing in the process? This brave and moving memoir, written with a novelist's skill at evoking personalities, places, and atmosphere, and a scholar's insights into culture and society, community, and family, tells a compelling and thought-provoking human story. -- From publisher's website.

Subject

• Desai, Padma
• Women economists > United States > Biography
• Women economists > India > Biography
• East Asian Americans > Biography
• East Asians > United States > Biography

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 243-250).

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Father -- Mother -- Kaki -- Childhood and adolescence -- The seduction -- Harvard, 1955-1959: four years of magical awakening -- Down and out in Delhi, 1959-1968 -- The conversion to Christianity -- Jagdish -- Anuradha -- Breaking out -- My family.

ISBN

• 9780262019972 (hardcover : alk. paper)
• 0262019973 (hardcover : alk. paper)

LCCN

^^2013009440

OCLC

• 973615803
• SCSB-10935259

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library