Namita Gokhale (born 1956) is an Indian 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.
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. She studied English literature Jesus and Mary College at Delhi University, and at age 18 married Rajiv Gokhale and had two daughters while she was a student. She refused to attend a course about the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, and was dismissed from university by age 26. By age forty, she had survived cancer and her husband had died.
Career
While a student, at age 17, 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. After Super closed, she began writing the story that became her debut novel.
In addition to her writing career, Gokhale hosted a hundred episodes of Kitaabnama: Books and Beyond, a multilingual book-show she conceptualized for Doordarshan. According to Raksha Kumar, writing for The Hindu in 2013, "Kitaabnama tries to showcase the multilingual diversity of Indian literature by inviting laureates from different languages to talk about their work. It reminds one of the times when book stores were not overwhelmed by technical writing and self-help books; when literature and quality writing were not considered a waste of time; when the pleasure of reading was experienced by many."
Gokhale is also a founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival, along with William Dalrymple and Sanjoy K Roy. She was also an advisor to the 'Mountain Echoes' literary festival in Bhutan. She conceptualised the 'International Festival of Indian Literature-Neemrana' 2002, and 'The Africa Asia Literary Conference', 2006. Gokhale also advises The Himalayan Echo Kumaon Festival for Arts and Literature or the Abbotsford Literary Weekend.
From 2010 through 2012, she traveled and conducted administrative work as a committee member of Indian Literature Abroad (ILA), an initiative by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, for a project intended to translate contemporary literature from Indian languages into the eight UNESCO languages, but after funding was not provided by the government, she shifted her efforts to work with Jaipur Bookmark, the publishing imprint of the Jaipur Literature Festival.
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.
Influences
In a 2017 interview with R Krithika of The Hindu, Gokhale described the influences on her writing as "very insidious things. Books and ideas can trigger responses that take a long time to come to fruition." She named The Tale of Genji as a major influence, and listed "Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Muriel Spark, Kalidasa." In 1998, Nalini Ganguly writes for India Today, "All of her work seems to be stuck with her personality as a Kumaoni Brahmin girl," and quotes Gokhale, "My way of looking at the world remains trapped in that primary identity; once you start loving the hills they hold on to you." In 2010, Nita Sathyendran writes for The Hindu, "The author is also "deeply fascinated" by Indian mythology, with a lot of her books inspired by its tales and characters. It has also led her to writing books such as The Book of Shiva (on Shaivaite philosophy) and an illustrated version of the Mahabharata for children."