A Study Guide for Gita Mehta's "A River Sutra"
()
About this ebook
Read more from Gale
A study guide for Frank Herbert's "Dune" Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Study Guide for Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for William Shakespeare's Macbeth Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Haruki Murakami's "Kafka on the Shore" Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Study Guide for James Clavell's "Shogun" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Louis Sachar's "Holes" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide for S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for George Orwell's Animal Farm Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Study Guide for Octavia Butler's "Parable of the Sower" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBusiness Plans Handbook: Bakery Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Lois Lowry's The Giver Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide for Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Psychologists and Their Theories for Students: ALBERT BANDURA Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBusiness Plans Handbook: Furniture Businesses Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Study Guide for George Orwell's 1984 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Study Guide for James Joyce's "James Joyce's Ulysses" Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Study Guide for Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide for Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Psychologists and Their Theories for Students: JEAN PIAGET Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for John Rawls's "A Theory of Justice" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide (New Edition) for William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide for Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Shirley Jackson's The Lottery Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Octavia E. Butler's Kindred Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to A Study Guide for Gita Mehta's "A River Sutra"
Related ebooks
The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narratives Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An Order Outside Time: A Jungian View of the Higher Self from Egypt to Christ Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Four Marys : A Quartet of Contemporary Folk Tales: A Quartet of Contemporary Folk Tales Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTrickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wallet of Kai Lung Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Study of Imagination - Essays on Fairy Tales, Folk-Lore and Mythology Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Magic of the Middle Ages Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFaust Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTragic Sense Of Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSheila Watson: Essays on Her Works Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMagic and Religion Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPercy Bysshe Shelley Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHypatia – Or, New Foes With an Old Face Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5"Wild Duck" Summarized and Analyzed Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSupernatural Horror in Literature Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Hindu Bard: The Poetry of Dorothy Bonarjee Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGentlemen and Amazons: The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, 1861–1900 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Companion to Arthurian Literature Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Mourner's Song: War and Remembrance from the Iliad to Vietnam Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHumble Theory: Folklore's Grasp on Social Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDruids v1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTales of the Narts: Ancient Myths and Legends of the Ossetians Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMama Amazonica Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume IX: Early Art: Uncollected Articles and Reviews Written Between 1886 and 1900 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSumerian Liturgies Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Companion to Gender Prehistory Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Citadel of Fear: A Lost World Mystery Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Celtiberian’s Tale Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Teaching Methods & Materials For You
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Financial Feminist: Overcome the Patriarchy's Bullsh*t to Master Your Money and Build a Life You Love Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Lost Tools of Learning Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Speed Reading: Learn to Read a 200+ Page Book in 1 Hour: Mind Hack, #1 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dumbing Us Down - 25th Anniversary Edition: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 5 Love Languages of Children: The Secret to Loving Children Effectively Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equality Matters--And How to Get It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Verbal Judo, Second Edition: The Gentle Art of Persuasion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The 5 Love Languages of Teenagers: The Secret to Loving Teens Effectively Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Principles: Life and Work Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jack Reacher Reading Order: The Complete Lee Child’s Reading List Of Jack Reacher Series Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Closing of the American Mind Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Personal Finance for Beginners - A Simple Guide to Take Control of Your Financial Situation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix (10th Anniversary, Revised Edition) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Inside American Education Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Diagnose and Fix Everything Electronic, Second Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Take Smart Notes. One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Raising Human Beings: Creating a Collaborative Partnership with Your Child Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Study Guide for S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHow to Think Like a Lawyer--and Why: A Common-Sense Guide to Everyday Dilemmas Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Anxious Generation - Workbook Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Reviews for A Study Guide for Gita Mehta's "A River Sutra"
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
A Study Guide for Gita Mehta's "A River Sutra" - Gale
1
A River Sutra
Gita Mehta
1993
Introduction
In A River Sutra, Gita Mehta took a new direction in her writing. In her previous works, Karma Cola (1979) and Raj (1989), Mehta had focused on the interactions between India and the Western world. In A River Sutra, Mehta changes focus and explores the diversity of cultures within India. To accomplish this, Mehta presents seemingly unconnected stories in her novel, stories about Hindu and Jain ascetics, courtesans and minstrels, diamond merchants and tea executives, Muslim clerics and music teachers, tribal folk beliefs and the anthropologists who study them. What binds these stories together are two things: the Narmada River and a sutra.
Sutra,
as Mehta explains in the glossary to her novel, means literally, a thread or string.
In the case of her novel, the sutra
is the theme of love that runs through all the stories, threading them loosely together. The Narmada River stands for another type of sutra.
This river, known as the holiest in India, threads together the diverse people who live on its shores or who come to worship at its waters. The term sutra
also refers to an Indian literary form, so in the novel, each story is in itself a sutra
that presents a message. Every time the nameless narrator tries to tease out the meaning of one sutra,
he encounters another pilgrim or lost soul with another story to tell.
Critics have responded positively to A River Sutra. They remark on both the simplicity of the storytelling style—a style as old as India—and the complexity of the themes the novel explores. As the reviewer from the Washington Post Book World noted, the stories leave the reader with the sense that things are richer and more meaningful than they seem, that life is both clear and mysterious, that the beauty and the horror of this world is both irreducible and inexplicable.
Critics further praise how Mehta introduces Western readers to a world they have not fathomed. A River Sutra, however, suggests that the sutra,
or the theme of love, running through the stories can connect all people together.
Author Biography
Gita Mehta was born in New Delhi, India in 1943 to parents who were very involved in the movement for Indian independence. In 1943, India was still a British colony. Three weeks after Mehta was born her father was jailed for supporting the nationalist cause. At the age of three, Mehta was left to be raised in a convent in Kashmir so that her mother could better aid her jailed husband. After India gained its independence, Mehta’s father went into