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Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard is a novel by Kiran Desai published in 1998. It is her first book and won the top prize for the Betty Trask Awards in 1998. [1] It is set in the Indian village of Shahkot (state of Punjab) and follows the exploits of a young man, Sampath Chawla, trying to avoid the responsibilities of adult life.
- Kiran Desai
- 1998
A comprehensive guide to Kiran Desai's satirical novel about a man who turns into a guava in India. Find plot summary, analysis, themes, quotes, characters, symbols, and more.
One morning, as Shahkot’s government officials and military arrive to forcibly remove the monkeys from the orchard (and the Shahkot area), they discover that Sampath has somehow transformed into a large guava.
Jan 1, 2001 · April 21, 2012. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard is the first novel by Kiran Desai. In the town of Shahkot, in the shadow of the Himalayan foothills, lives Sampath Chawla, a bored, dreamy Post Office clerk distinguishing himself with lacklustre career ambitions.
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- Introduction
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Media Adaptations
- Characters
- Themes
- Topics For Further Study
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
Kiran Desai's debut novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), made the author an instant success at the age of twenty-seven. She is the voice of a younger generation of Indian writers who write in English, many of whom live in self-exile. Indeed, many expatriate Indian novelists have gained international attention, including Salman Rushdie, Ar...
Kiran Desai was born on September 3, 1971, in New Delhi, India, the youngest of the four children of Anita and Ashvin Desai. Her mother, Anita Desai, whose own mother was German and whose father was Indian, is one of the most respected and famous Indian writers today. Ashvin Desai is a Delhi businessman. Kiran's parents are now separated, due to th...
Chapter 1
In the Himalayan foothills, in the small north Indian town of Shahkot, during a very hot summer, many proposals are made to induce the monsoon. By September the situation is so bad that famine relief camps have to be set up. This is the year Sampath Chawla is born. His mother, Kulfi, is only twenty-one and just married to Mr. Chawla. She gets bigger and hungrier as the drought gets worse, but none of the relief planes coming with supplies reach them. Kulfi is so hungry, she obsesses about foo...
Chapter 2
Twenty years have passed. Sampath has grown into a thin and oversensitive young man, unable to sleep with the noisy breathing of his family around him, all sharing the one ceiling fan: father, mother, grandmother Ammaji, and sister Pinky. He rushes to the roof of the house where it is just as hot. He sings and walks back and forth all night, wishing he had somewhere else to go; he feels suffocated in his life. When morning comes and the town begins to wake up, he sees his father come out with...
Chapter 3
Mr. Chawla is a man of habit and performs morning exercise. He is forty and head clerk at the Reserve Bank of Shahkot. He shouts orders to his family as he readies for the day. Ammaji and Pinky try to keep up with his demands. Mr. Chawla reads bits from the newspaper. Kulfi is uninvolved with what is going on and sits by the window thinking of food. She has grown more and more peculiar, and the grandmother has to do all the work. Pinky is disgusted by the political scandals her father reads a...
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchardwas adapted as an unabridged audiobook read by Madhav Sharma and produced by Isis Audio Books on six tapes (1999).
Ammaji
Ammaji is Mr. Chawla's mother and Sampath's grandmother. She takes over the duties of her son's wife, since Kulfi seems to be incompetent. She does not mind this, for she does not lose her place of power in the house. Ammaji fusses over Kulfi when she is pregnant, trying to get her to take herbs, or to sing to the baby and watch the planetary configurations. She represents the older traditional habits and lore of India, while her son is the modern trained colonial servant. She defends Sampath...
Atheist Spy
The spy is a schoolteacher who hates his job in Shahkot and hopes to win fame as an undercover agent. Sampath Chawla is his first assignment from the Branch to Uncover Fraudulent Holy Men (BUFHM). The spy hangs around listening to Sampath's answers to questions, writing them down in his book and trying to make sense of them. He grew up in poverty and thinks he will one day win fame in the papers as an intellectual on TV. He interprets everything as a fraud because he begins in that frame of m...
Dr. Banerjee
Dr. Banerjee is the doctor from the bazaar clinic who tries to get Sampath down from the tree. He writes an article about monkey bites causing rabies, forcing the CMO to counter with an article saying that rabies is not a problem, so he will not have a crisis on his hands.
Freedom from the Mundane
The primary motivation of the main character, Sampath, is to be free of the forced and false manners of life. He hates his job in the post office and goofs off, unable to make himself focus on things he doesn't like. When he loses his job for his indecent and high spirited antics at his boss's daughter's wedding, his father angrily says he will have to find him another job. Mr. Chawla is an ambitious civil servant and has no idea what ails his son or why his son is such a failure. Sampath fee...
Research the influence of English colonization in India. In terms of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, give a class presentation in which you discuss examples of the English legacy that can be found...Research the role of women and marriage customs in ancient India. Write a paper showing how ancient ideas about women are still evident in modern India and how those roles are changing. Discuss thi...Have different class members report on the various religions of India: Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity. Discuss the conflicts in Indian life due to religious differences, as well as the...Write a paper on the Independence Movement in India under Mahatma Gandhi. Are any of Gandhi's values of peaceful civil disobedienceinnocently reflected in Sampath's behavior? Give examples from the...Folk Literature
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard has some characteristics of folklore, part of the long tradition of oral literature that was passed from generation to generation before stories were written down. Folklore includes folk tales, fairy tales, fables, proverbs and legends. A fable is a short narrative, often with animal characters, or of a fantastic nature, that teaches morals or ethics. Examples are Aesop's fables, which contains familiar tales such as the Tortoise and the Hare (the race is not a...
Satire and Folly Literature
Satire is a kind of literature using absurdity, fantasy, and nonsense to criticize society. The fool is a character who, through lack of virtue or balance, reveals the vices of society. In European tradition, the novel The Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brandt (1494) presents society as a collection of fools, each with a different vice. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726) and Candide by Voltaire (1759) are works in the same vein. Desai, familiar with both eastern and western literature, u...
The Religious Quest
Indian literature is full of characters who leave home, like the Buddha, in search of enlightenment. In this tradition, Sampath's running away to the forest is a familiar motif, for the Indian pilgrim would renounce the world and seek a teacher or retreat. In the great Indian epic, The Ramayana, the prince Rama is banished to the forest to live as an ascetic for a certain number of years. In the forest, Rama and his wife meet many holy men who impart wisdom and blessings. When a demon abducts...
Ancient India
India contains remnants of the oldest civilizations on earth; an example is, the Indus Valley Civilization dating to approximately 3,000 b.c.e. in Northern India and Pakistan, in the valley of the Indus River. It was a sophisticated urban trading culture (Harappa and Mahenjo-daro were notable cities), with developed agriculture, arts, and science. This was followed by the Vedic period when the major Hindu religious texts, the Vedas, were composed in Vedic Sanskrit during the second and first...
British Rule
The British East India Company was given permission by a Mughal emperor in 1617 to trade in India. In protecting its trading interests, Britain used more and more military force, until it took over large areas of India and its administration, with the cooperation of local rulers. The British used the policy of Divide and Rule, thus playing off the local enmities of individual Indian states against each other, to gain a foothold. In 1857, after the rebellious Indian Mutiny, the English Crown t...
India's Independence
From the 1920s, leaders such as Mohandas Gandhi sought to rouse the Indian people from their colonial stupor. Gandhi taught the people to boycott English products and to make their own cloth and salt. He used the principle of nonviolence to protest the presence of the British and gained a following of millions. He was miraculously able to unify all the religious factions of India, particularly the Hindus and Muslims, who were rivals. Independence was granted in 1947, with the partition of the...
There was a good deal of advance publicity for Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard because of Kiran Desai's literary connections. Part of the novel was pre-published in the New Yorker and in Salman Rushdie's anthology of Indian writing in English, Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947-1997(1997). Rushdie's pronouncement in the introduction to tha...
Sep 23, 2024 · Dive deep into Kiran Desai's Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard with extended analysis, commentary, and discussion
Feb 19, 2021 · Then Sampath climbs up a guava tree in search of a life of peaceful contemplation - and becomes unexpectedly famous as a hermit. News of the guru in the tree soon spreads. Sampath's family begins to make more money than they'd ever dreamed of.
