Namita Gokhale

Namita Gokhale (born 1956) is an Indian fiction writer, editor, festival director, and publisher. Her debut novel, Paro: Dreams of Passion was released in 1984, and she has since written fiction and nonfiction, and edited nonfiction collections. She conceptualized and hosted the Doordarshan show Kitaabnama: Books and Beyond and is a founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival. She won the 2021 Sahitya Akademi Award for her novel 'Things to leave behind'.

Early life and education Gokhale was born in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, in 1956. She was raised in Nainital by her aunts and her grandmother Shakuntala Pande. married Rajiv Gokhale and had two daughters while she was a student. Gokhale began editing and managing the 1970s-era film magazine Super, and continued publishing the magazine for seven years, until it closed in the early 1980s.

Gokhale is also a founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival, along with William Dalrymple and Sanjoy K Roy.

She is also the co-founder-director of Yatra Books, established in 2005 with Neeta Gupta, a multilingual publishing company specialising in creative writing and translations in English, Hindi and Indian regional languages. According to the Press Trust of India in 2020, it "has remained a cult classic." It was later re-issued as the double edition Double Bill: Priya and Paro in 2018, with the 2011 sequel Priya: In Incredible Indyaa, described by Paro Anand, writing for Outlook in 2011, as a "racy read" and by Somak Ghoshal, writing for Mint in 2014, as "not as well received" as Paro. In a 2011 review for The Hindu, Sravasti Datta writes Priya "intrigues but doesn't shock. Why? Because sexual frankness is everywhere, be it in books or films."

In 1994, Gokhale published Gods Graves and Grandmother, described by Subhash K Jha of India Today as "remarkable on two counts. First, its structure of a modern fable held aloft by the gauziest of irony. And second, its searching scan of life in the downwardly mobile class of the Indian metropolises migrants who, by emotional and pecuniary manipulation, get rich quick, breaching the bastion of the bourgeois class as a casual enterprise." It was later adapted into a musical play.

In 1998, Gokhale published the nonfiction Mountain Echoes: Reminiscences of Kumaoni Women, a book of oral biography, that explores the Kumaoni way of life through the lives of four women: her aunt Shivani, the Hindi novelist, which was one of several of her works described by Nita Sathyendran, writing for The Hindu in 2010, that "narrate tales of strong women."

Gokhale edited the 2014 book Travelling In, Travelling Out, described by Danielle Pagani in The Hindu as an essay collection that "take the reader from Asia to America and Europe, discovering situations and different ways to travel. Every author shares his or her personal experience and the stories are very different from each other — from unusual encounters with Maoist guerrillas in the jungle to Western cities and difficulties encountered there by immigrants," and "Although rich in detail, some of the stories are short, leaving the readers wanting more."

Her novel Things to Leave Behind was published in November 2016. Shahnaz Siganporia writes for Vogue India, "Veteran publisher, prolific author, founder-director of the Jaipur Literary Festival and advisor to Mountain Echoes in Bhutan—Namita Gokhale's latest novel is considered her most ambitious yet." Rakhshanda Jalil writes for Scroll.in, "Things To Leave Behind is the third in her trilogy of books on the Himalayas, coming after The Book of Shadows and A Himalayan Love Story. As in the previous books, once again she demonstrates her strength in painting the most vivid pictures of the hills and dales in and around Naineetal and Almora. Her eye for the small details coupled with her near-photographic memory for the sights and sounds she imbibed as a child and the stories she heard from her grandmother and grand-aunts help in creating a virtual tableau before the reader's inward eye." In a review by Ravi Shankar Etteth of The New Indian Express, Gokhale is described as writing with "chutzpah, imagination and leaps of faith taken in the ordinary pursuit of the extraordinary." Shreya Roy Chowdhury writes for The Times of India that the novel is the "third in a series set in the Kumaon hills between 1840 and 1912," and that the "experiences of Gokhale's own family, especially its women members, have informed her stories." In a review for Kitaab, Dr. Pallavi Narayan writes, "the author seems to be pointing to the patriarchal functioning of much of society—documenting the histories of men while conveniently absenting the women, or portraying them as shadow figures. But what the novel is primarily about is the tussle of women with their dependence on men, and how this frames a woman's identity within that of the man "taking care" of her at the moment." Annie Zaidi writes in a review for Mint, "The novel moves at a brisk trot, with the result that the drama inherent in the lives of these characters is rather underplayed. [...] Gokhale's light touch also masks her more serious musings upon the painful clamp of caste and religion, the lack of education and independent property, and how these negative forces narrowed lives in ways that could break a woman's spirit, or declaw a spirited one."

Her first YA fiction book Lost in Time was published in 2017, and described by R Krithika of The Hindu as "a lovely tale of time travel, friendship, loss and love."

Gokhale edited the 2017 anthology of prose and poetry The Himalayan Arc: Journeys East of South-east, featuring work by 28 authors from the region Gokhale described as "the bend of the Himalayas, the East of South-east, including Nepal, Bhutan, north-east India, and Myanmar." In a review published in The News Lens, Omair Ahmad writes, "These histories have largely been forgotten in favor of the lines drawn on the map by the British Empire and its successors, but they have re-emerged, and have to be understood, if we are to understand the complex political geography of the region." Aishwarya Sahasrabudhe writes for Firstpost, "we are taken in five days through the lives of some interesting characters who are in one capacity or another part of what is often referred to as the Kumbh Mela of Literature, the Jaipur Literature Festival."

Works Fiction Paro: Dreams of Passion, 1984 Gods, Graves, and Grandmother, 1994 A Himalayan Love Story, 1996 The Book of Shadows, 1999 Shakuntala: The Play of Memory, 2005 Priya: In Incredible Indyaa, 2011 The Habit of Love, 2012 Things to Leave Behind, 2016 Lost in Time: Ghatotkacha and the Game of Illusions, 2017 Betrayed by Hope : A Play on the Life of Michael Madhusudan Dutt (co-authored with Malashri Lal), 2020 The Blind Matriarch, published in 2021

Non-fiction Mountain Echoes – Reminiscences of Kumaoni Women, 1994 The Book of Shiva, 2000 The Puffin Mahabharata, 2009 In Search of Sita(co-edited with Malashri Lal), 2009 Travelling In, Travelling Out (edited), 2014 Himalaya: Adventures, Meditations, Life(co-edited with Ruskin Bond), 2016 The Himalayan Arc: Journeys East of South-east (edited), 2018 Finding Radha: The Quest for Love, 2018

Honors and awards 2017 Centenary National Award for Literature from the Asam Sahitya Sabha 2018 International Dublin Literary Award long list (Things to Leave Behind) 2021 7th Yamin Hazarika Woman of Substance Award 2021 Sahitya Akademi Award for Things to Leave Behind