Karen Klink asked Alka Joshi:

Can you truly understand what it is like for a woman growing up in India when you left at such an early age? One Indian reviewer said you wrote for white women, not for what it was like for true Indian women. "I found the narrator, Lakshmi Shastri, a henna artist who reads Dickens and Jane Austen, rather unbelievable. Her explanations on what Indians do and don’t do seem written for that white woman audience."

Alka Joshi Great question! In THE HENNA ARTIST, I imagined an alternate life for my mother, who was 18 in 1955 when her marriage to my father was arranged. I borrowed much of Lakshmi's character from my mother, who read Life and Look magazines and the English classics in school.

Keep in mind that when the British vacated India in 1947, they had been ruling the country for 200 years. During that time, they reformed the Indian school system, eliminating religious teachings and making English mandatory. Christian missionaries were enlisted in this endeavor and many school children, like my brothers and me, went to "convent" schools where we were taught by nuns. (We were all born in the 1950s. Before leaving for the US in 1967, we were enrolled at St. Sophia School, where we were instructed in English all day with the exception of an hour of Hindi grammar.)

In the late 1930s, Lakshmi's father would have been teaching at a private high school in a big city until the British penalized him for taking part in the Quit India movement. His punishment was to be relegated to a backwater village and teach children who were more often than not working in the fields with their parents. During British rule, many Indians like him were imprisoned, punished, and starved for their role in fighting for India's independence. But he brought all his books with him and taught his girls to read and write English from an early age. They also read Indian authors like R.K. Narayan and Tagore.

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