SOURCE: Smith, Katharine Capshaw. “Narrating History: The Reality of the Internment Camps in Anita Desai's Baumgartner's Bombay.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 28, no. 2 (April 1997): 141-57.

In the following essay, Smith contrasts the experiences of the imprisoned protagonist of Baumgartner's Bombay with the similar autobiographical account of Heinrich Harrar in Seven Years in Tibet, demonstrating not only the historical veracity of Desai's representation but also its effects on the development of Baumgartner's conflicted character.

Baumgartner's Bombay is a text deeply concerned with intrusion of history into an individual's interior life. Desai weaves Hugo Baumgartner's experience of Kristallnacht and pre-Holocaust Germany with descriptions of India's partition riots in order to create a realistic—and historical—image of “[t]he clash between the inner and the outer [worlds]” of Baumgartner's sensibility (Desai, Interview 166). Much critical study of the novel focuses on discovering the foundations for its events and perspective...