Analysis

Part 1

The first part of the novel is aptly named, for “Nanda Kaul at Carignano” is precisely what this is
about.

Nanda Kaul is an older woman: elegant, reserved, and not at all interested in engaging with
wider society. She enjoys her isolation and her ability to control her life in a way she once
could not. She “wanted no one and nothing else” (3) beside her house on the hill in the
mountainous region of Kasauli.

She possesses a “cold and piercing stare” (3) and a sharp, critical mind, though her good
breeding does not allow her to let the few others she comes into contact with fully bear the
brunt of her disapprobation.

She is a widow and a mother, but she does not seem inclined toward stereotypical motherly
affection.

She seems inordinately glad to be away from her children (now grown, some with children of their own)
and characterizes her former life as a “noose…round her neck” (19) and “an eddy, a whirlpool of which she
was the still, fixed eye in the centre” (24). She was “so glad when it was over” and felt she’d “discharged
all [her] duties” (30). Her former life of commotion, self-abnegation, and lack of autonomy was
left behind in the plains “like a great, heavy, difficult book that she had read through and was
not required to read again” (30)—except, unfortunately for Nanda Kaul, it seems she is going to have
to read that book again with her great-granddaughter’s imminent and unwanted arrival. It is hard not to
sympathize with her disinclination to lose all privacy, solitude, and control.

******

Desai is engaging in a dialogue with the patriarchal Indian society that relegated women to
the roles of wives, mothers, and other forms of caregivers (Ila Das as a social worker, for
example). The text presents Indian society, K.J. Phillips explains, “caught between two worlds and times:
between a tradition where women are expected only to nurture others, and a more westernized, modern
vision whereby women have a right to lives of their own.”

Nanda Kaul is not a feminist trailblazer, and the novel’s revelation that she was mostly forced to
come out to Carignano by her children complicates her professed desire for autonomy; even so, she is a
woman who is categorically unenthused, to say the least, at the idea of having her life be entirely devoted
to caring for others. She refuses to mourn her separation from her former life: “The care of others was a
habit Nanda Kaul had mislaid. It had been a religious calling she had believed in till she found it fake. It
had been a vocation that one day went dull and drought-struck as though its life-spring had dried up” (30).
Even though she is very different from the English maiden memsahibs who occupied Carignano before her
(see below), she does have one thing in common with them, as Geetha Ramanathan points out: “The
history of the house itself signifies women’s desire for separation from domesticity and for
control over the space of the house.”

The place that Nanda Kaul so ardently cherishes is Carignano, Desai’s finely-drawn picture of barren
beauty in the Himalayas. Nanda Kaul’s house is high above the plains, with a view of the mountains, pine
trees, a ragged gorge, and the valley. It is characterized by starkness and wildness, with only a slight nod
to domesticated flora and fauna in the garden (though the apricot trees and yellow roses were not planted
by Nanda Kaul but rather by former residents). Nanda Kaul loved “the sound of the cicadas and the pines,
the sight of this gorge plunging, blood-red, down to the silver plain” (19). This stands in sharp contrast to
her former life as the Vice-Chancellor’s wife, which was full of “too many servants…too many guests
coming and going…so many children…friends, all of different ages and sizes and families” (29-30). S.P.
Swain writes, “Symbolically, the seclusion and serenity of Carignano defines the stillness and
freedom Nanda has been able to achieve in her old age. Carignano is Nanda and Nanda is
Carignano.”
Despite Nanda Kaul’s unfettered affection for Carignano, its past is not particularly peaceful. The house is
a remnant of British colonialism, built by a Colonel for his wife and their children. All members of the family
eventually died, and death and violence stalked the rest of the inhabitants until Nanda Kaul came to it. In a
symbol of the violence of the British colonial presence, part of the roof breaks off in the wind and takes off
a coolie’s head. The wife of a pastor who takes the house next tries to kill her husband but dies herself.
The next few maiden English ladies who occupy it have their own legends attached to them, including one
who stabbed her cook in the neck thinking it would release a bone he was choking on, only to have him die
of the stabbing instead. Chelva Kanaganayakam identifies this past as exemplary of the Gothic, noting that
Carignano “has a colonial past, but its colonial legacy and attendant assumptions of cultural superiority
and hierarchy are questioned by the Gothic framework within which the past is couched…the Gothic thus
displaces both the mimetic and the hierarchal to problematize the colonial past.”

Part 2
Raka is not what Nanda Kaul expects: instead of being a needy child who requires entertainment,
emotional support, and indulgence of whims, she is absolutely fine being on her own; indeed, she
fundamentally desires to be on her own, scrambling into the ravine, climbing hills, observing animals, and
remaining ensconced within her interior world. Because Desai only gives us rare looks into Raka’s past and
psyche, we do not know too much about Raka as a character; Francine E. Krishna sums it up by noting that
“We do not know what she thinks; we only know what she does,” and Chelva Kanaganayakam
calls her a “figure of ambivalence and fluidity that is acknowledged in the narrative itself.”
Nevertheless, we know she has a monstrous home life with a drunken, abusive father and a weak mother,
and we know that she has never really felt like she fit in anywhere. Ruth K. Rosenwasser suggests that she
is reclusive because of “her reaction to patriarchal values that insist on her mother’s remaining with her
husband even though she is mistreated”; though she is a child and dependent on her elders, “she seeks
refuge from their authority in the deserted areas of the mountainside. The uncivilized
landscape of the mountain mirrors the damaged emotional landscape of her childhood.”

Ashley Batts gives more context for the situation of Raka’s mother, Tara, and why it might be
detrimental for Raka to observe (even if she can’t fully comprehend it yet): “Literary scholars
Premila Paul and R. Padmanabhan Nair write that ‘Life for a woman is a series of obligations and
commitments. Tara gets ill-treated by her husband, but the woman has to yield always.
Woman often becomes woman’s enemy. Asha attributed Tara’s domestic misfortune to her inability
to understand men and also her inability to be a successful diplomat’s wife,’ which only reiterates the
treatment women such as Tara sometimes receive from other women, but also what expectations Indian
society puts on women in abusive situations.”

All of the characters and much of the imagery of Fire on the Mountain are identified with the
natural world.
In terms of Raka, her great-grandmother thinks she resembles an insect, not the moon that her name
would suggest. She acts like an animal when she first arrives at Carignano—“she walked about as the
newly caged, the newly tamed wild ones do” (40-41). She appears and disappears like an animal, silent
and mysterious. She wants to pursue “her own secret life amongst the rocks and pines of Kasauli” (48)
and balks at any mention of playmates, school, or society in general. Her senses are important to her, with
Desai writing that she “sniffed the air,” “licked her dry lips,” and “shaded her eyes to look up” (49). And it
is not just the beautiful, serene scenes that beckon and intrigue Raka: she also loves the clotted gorge, the
violent dust storms and ominous forest fires, and the exhilaration of being “higher than the eagles” (61)
on Monkey Point.

Krishna explains that the images of the story “are generally not static, but are metamorphosized
by what happens to the characters. In fact, much of the action is revealed in the transformation of
these images as they reflect the changes within the characters .” Nanda Kaul will come to see Raka as
more like a twig than an insect after she experiences the trauma of the party at the club.
The langurs are charming, silly creatures before the party but screaming, threatening bandits afterward.
The cuckoos that were domestic birds for Nanda Kaul at the beginning of the novel are later “the
demented birds that raved and beckoned Raka on to a land where there was no sound, only silence, no
light, only shade, and skeletons kept in beds of ash on which the footprints of jackals flowered in gray”
(90).
Raka’s experience at the Club is one of pure Rabelaisian horror. The costumed figures are surreal
manifestations of death, violence, and sex, and the way Desai lays out the scene makes it unrelentingly
terrifying. Geetha Ramanathan notes that even though Raka is the one observing, she has no control. She
becomes observed by the omniscient narration, who “deliberately maintains control and allows us no
opportunity to rationalize the scene by invoking the subjectivity or point of view of the child.” The
overwhelming sensation is one of loss of agency and control, and what Raka sees indelibly
reminds her of her abusive father, impotent mother, and her own inability to control the
situation in any possible way.

Raka unconsciously connects the suffering of her mother (and perhaps, by extension, herself)
with the suffering of wild creatures.
She mourns that the hoopoe will not be able to feed its babies if she and Nanda Kaul are sitting outside,
prevents Ram Lal from throwing a stone at the mother langur,
and evinces discontent about the part of Nanda Kaul’s story where the cats were eating fish.
She is shocked (but, admittedly, intrigued) by Ram Lal’s stories of the poor dogs at the Pasteur Institute.
Gurpreet Kaur explains that “Raka is shown to be upset at the distress of the animals around her
or at the violence meted out to them. Through these incidences of animal abuse, Desai connects
the issue of intertwined oppressions of animals and women, demonstrating that it is
instructive to consider incidents of male-induced violence no matter where it is directed.”
Thus, the violent, grotesque behavior of the men at the party is connected not just to Raka’s
father but also to the violence carried out against both animals and women in general.
Desai makes it even more clear that Raka’s upbringing was profoundly deleterious for the child, and that
Nanda Kaul does not really understand this. Elaine Yee Lin Ho writes, “the shocking violence in Raka’s
transformation of the scene [at the Club] points to that hidden trauma which belies her
apparent self-completion,” and that “memory is a madhouse and it can act to disfigure the
present reality, and incorporate it—as it does in the ballroom scene—into past madness.”
Raka’s independence and self-assurance “[are] an illusion of freedom…her wildness is the sign
of a disordered self, the havoc wrought upon her in the madhouse of memory.”

As for Nanda Kaul, she is more and more interested in and somewhat emotionally dependent
on her great-granddaughter, but she does not know how to fully understand or reach the
child. She begins telling her elaborate, fanciful stories of her childhood and family that at first seem
realistic and are certainly compelling, but which Raka comes to recognize are false: “if only [Nanda Kaul]
had glanced down and met Raka’s eyes then, she would have been halted by something doubting in them,
a lack of trust in that clouded look” (99). Nanda Kaul’s lies foreshadow the lies we learn she’s been
telling herself ever since she was the Vice-Chancellor’s wife, a betrayal not just of Raka but of
herself: Ho notes that “she…connives in putting herself back into a past where family obligation overrode
all demands of truth to the self and others, and enforced upon her a life of having to put up with her
husband’s infidelity and her marriage as a lie.”

In this section, there is a decent amount of foreshadowing, albeit obliquely, to Raka’s action at the
end of the novel. Her face is more “flushed” and her eyes “darkened, as if with a secret she would not
divulge” (72). She stares more and more at the factory, and she is entranced by the forest fire.
The langurs that were once clowning and charming are now “bawdy, raucous, and marauding” (78) like
the Club revelers.
Raka shows no emotion at the news of her mother, as if the news makes sense given what she
is coming to understand about men, women, and society in general. She is drawn more and more
to the “ravaged, destroyed and barren spaces in Kasauli,” all of the “seared remains of the safe, cosy,
civilized world in which Raka had no part and to which she owed no attachment” (91). Though the end of
the novel is far from “obvious” at this point, Raka’s behavior is suggestive of something
ominous.
Part 3

In this section, we meet Ila Das, whose voice was memorably heard at the beginning of the novel. She
comes across as extremely annoying at first, her appearance and behavior palpably disturbing to Nanda
Kaul and Raka even though the former has known her for decades . Ila Das is unmarried, has a club foot, is
“small, shrunken” (118), wears shoddy clothing, and has a singular voice that is described as, among other
things, “shrill” (110), a “cackle…[a] scream…It was the motif of her life, unmistakably. Such a voice no
human being ought to have had” (111). While not immune to others’ disapprobation, she seems to have
had a pleasant enough childhood, especially due to her parents’ wealth under the British Empire. Though
that wealth does not exist anymore, as readers will find out in the next chapters, she has retained a
degree of autonomy and morality that she and Nanda Kaul ascribe to good breeding.

When Ila Das joins Nanda Kaul and Raka for tea, she is full of exclamations, emotional tears,
and recitation of memories. Though Nanda Kaul gives her nothing to run with, she plows ahead with
her remembrances of when she was at the university as a lecturer in Home Science, the Vice-Chancellor’s
house and Nanda Kaul’s presiding over it, teachers and students, summer recreation, music and
badminton, etc.

Unfortunately for Nanda Kaul, many of the remembrances Ila Das indulges in are painful and problematic
for her. Ila Das realizes this when she mentions Miss David and the Vice-Chancellor, who were having a
lifelong affair without any regard for Nanda Kaul. Elaine Yee Lin Ho explains, “the unbridgeable distance
between this ‘anti-social’ voice and what it speaks of sharpens the pathos of Ila. Her account, re-
membered in nostalgia, of the past life of Nanda’s household as a rich social tapestry, full of human
warmth and the pleasures and satisfaction of food company and conversation, is crucial to Ila’s self-worth
—that she too has once experienced life in its plenitude. Nada, behind apparent composure, is increasingly
perturbed not only by Ila’s fantasy of herself and Nanda’s family history, but more fundamentally by the
dissociation between memory and truth which enables Ila’s account and which bonds Ila to her in feelings
of admiration and loyalty.”

Perhaps of all the main characters, Ila Das best exemplifies a feminist worldview. She is
unmarried, childless, and works for a living. She challenges men when they are wrong, telling
Nanda Kaul, “it’s so much harder to teach a man anything” (129) in terms of changing outmoded
behaviors, and that the priest “sets the young men in the village against me” (129) but that she is not
going to stop advocating for the cessation of child marriage and for the assumption of new forms of
medical treatment. Ruth K Rosenwasser writes that “by challenging male authority, Ila Das espouses
the feminist cause through her conscious need to empower women…As a heroine and a
feminist, Ila Das combines energy, determination, and courage to protest male dominance
which relegates women to positions of subservience and submission.” However, as we will
discuss in the final analysis, Ila Das is not allowed to fully inhabit this space and is instead
punished for her behavior.

First, we learn that Nanda Kaul did not exactly come to Carignano fully of her own volition:
after her husband’s death, her children more or less made her withdraw here. We also learn of her
husband’s affair with Miss David, her lack of love for and interest in her children, and the various lies she
told Raka to soothe herself and interest the child. It is clear, especially because of how Nanda Kaul came to
love Raka and want to insinuate herself into the child’s life, that she was not entirely desirous of solitude
when she came to Carignano. All the same, it would be wrong to conclude that Nanda Kaul did not desire it
to a degree and that she has since found it refreshing, natural, and worthy of holding onto.

Ila Das’s fate is certainly more tragic than Nanda’s, however. Though her job as a social worker
would seem to promise autonomy and independence, she continually confronts prejudice, hostility, and
violence. She uses her voice, which is invoked over and over again, to
call attention to the problematic modalities of life in the village, such as the eschewing of medical
treatment and, most significantly, patriarchal power and violence. Though Desai sympathizes with Ila
Das’s goals, she does not allow her to pursue them safely, suggesting that Indian society was not
comfortable with Ila Das’s speech—both in its content and in the mere audacity of its being used at all.
Ashley Batts notes that Preet Singh rapes and kills Ila Das because he needs to “prove his point
that men rule women,” and that Ila Das “is powerless in the face of the father, like so many
other mothers and mother figures. Ila’s long turbulent life comes to an end there, her lying
face down in the dirt, exposed and defiled.”

As for Raka, the clues that Desai has subtly embedded in the text regarding the child’s cracking come to
fruition with the understated but terrifying line of, “Look, Nani, I have set the forest on fire. Look,
Nani—look—the forest is on fire” (145). There are numerous interpretations as to why Raka does this.
Gurpreet Kaur suggests, “While the fire is evidently her revenge against the adult world, Raka
also symbolically destroys the local space which was the scene of the violence, failure, and
death of females before her.” Ruth K. Rossenwasser alludes to Raka’s trauma of memory and
inability to know herself, suggesting, “Raka, the crazy one, marginalized, so that her protest is
unheard and unseen, cannot find a signifying self and can only protest through violence by
setting fire to the mountain.” Geena Ramanathan connects Ila Das’s voice and its eventual
silencing, along with Nanda Kaul’s alternating strangled speech and muteness, to Raka
actually vocalizing what she has done: “Although Kaul and Das are silenced, Raka sets the
forest on fire. Her voice is a whisper when she tells her Nani what she has done. Raka burns the master’s
world in the name of the mother.” Francine E. Krishna focuses on the symbolism of fire, writing that
“Raka’s final act to set fire to the mountain…is not merely an act of violence, but also an act of
purification as if she might burn away the lies and deceit of Nanda’s portrayal of her childhood
as well as the violence of her own.” Dr. B. Brahmananda Chary agrees, saying the fire is “it is a
means of escape for her. By the act of setting fire to the forest, she saves her ideal self from
being totally destroyed.”

Finally, Alka Saxena focuses on what Raka’s act might mean specifically in regard to Nanda Kaul: “The
setting of the forest-fire by Raka symbolizes the burning of a life of pretention and escape.
The fire brings Nanda Kaul face to face with the realities of the world.”
Anita Desai herself said in an interview, “I don’t think anybody’s exile from society can solve any
problem. I think basically the problem in how to exist in society and yet maintain one’s
individuality rather than suffering from a lack of society and lack of belonging, that is why
exile has never been my theme.”