Picture by Sanat Kr Sinha

Dacia Maraini came to talk at the Book Fair as a member of the delegation of Italian writers and artists. I had certainly not heard of her and viewed the task of engaging her in conversation with ignorant bewilderment.

As I started to find out what she has written, the full force of her distinction started to unfold. Here was someone whose first novel, Holiday, published in 1993, when she was 27, carried a foreword by Alberto Moravia. She has won all the literary awards of Italy, receiving the Premio Campiello for The Silent Duchess, 1990, an international bestseller, and the Premio Strega, perhaps the most prestigious, for Buio (Darkness) in 1994. She was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2011 and it is not perhaps surprising that in that emphatically English-speaking club, she did not win it.

A startlingly brilliant, sensitive, provocative writer, Maraini (picture right) has written 60 works: novels, short stories, poetry, plays, essays, travel writings, children’s books, is now branching out into detective fiction, and is a journalist too — as editor of Nuovi Argomenti, she kept alive the dialogue between different generations of writers.

When I met Maraini at a small gathering organised by the Italian consulate, I found a strikingly attractive woman, dressed with the legendary elegance and flair with which Italians present themselves to the world. To my delight, she did wear the blue eye shadow that I had been told about, changing the colour to aquamarine the next day.

Over dinner, she spoke about her visits to India and Africa, of how travelling was like acquiring knowledge, of its downside being the necessary precautions against local diseases like malaria. I noticed that she ate very little and when I asked her why, she said that she, on her part, noticed that people ate far too much here!

What impels Dacia Maraini to write? Her unusual upbringing and familial experiences, coupled with her undeniable talent for writing and her obsessive need to do so. Born in 1936 when fascism and Nazism held Europe in thrall, her father, Fosco Maraini, an anthropologist and Tibetologist, told her, ‘Remember, races don’t exist, cultures exist’. Her mother, Alliata di Salaparito, a Sicilian princess, was an artist; her feudal background ignited a rebellious spirit in Dacia, and she was to write about that world in her novel Bagheria (1993).

The family moved to Japan when she was six as her father was undertaking research on the Ainu, a centuries-old discriminated community. Once Japan signed a treaty with Italy, all Italians were asked to sign their consent to Mussolini’s fascist republic. Her parents refused, resulting in the family’s incarceration in a concentration camp, similar to Buchenwald, for three years. The experience was to lead her to support social justice everywhere. When she was asked whether she was a feminist, because her writing does focus on women’s struggles, she said simply that she was wary of “isms”, that it was more a case of “delle parte, delle donne” — on the side of the women. An example is Memoirs of a Female Thief (1993) that she wrote with Teresa, a small-time thief in a prison, sharing the royalties with her. It was made into a film with the same name in 1974, directed by Carlo di Palma, with Monica Vitti in the leading role.

Dacia Maraini has always been part of the avant-garde, collaborating closely with Alberto Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini, founding Teatro del Porcespino (Porcupine) with them, a friendship that led to travelling together in Africa, Dacia doing the driving. She visited India sometimes with Moravia — The Seduction of the Elsewhere (2010), are essays on travel. Dacia also founded an all-women group, Teatro del Maddalena. Among her major plays is Dreams of Clytemnestra, an interesting revisiting of the Oresteia from a woman’s point of view.

This remarkable writer ironically places herself amidst the neglected stream of women writers who keep slipping out of the public gaze as they do not appear in the curriculum or archives. The injustice of this denial was indeed perceived by her Calcutta audience.