Text Within Text: The Shaping of Sunetra Gupta’s Memories of Rain

Instead of venturing into the more expected readings of Sunetra Gupta’s debut novel Memories of Rain (1992) – which won her prestigious national literary award in India, the Sahitya Akademi Award for 1996 – as embodying the author’s intricate writing style or diasporic angst or desire of conveying her ideas and thought about Calcutta to a Western audience, this paper seeks to raise the issue of intertextuality in the novel. It shows how this novel is immersed in conversation with the expanse of literature produced in different periods and diverse cultural settings. Gupta’s extremely literary– even canonical– sensibility is revealed in the centrality and profusion of allusions and references that range from Euripides to Tagore. The paper argues that for a more nuanced understanding of Memories of Rain it is important to be aware of the influence and interplay of diverse texts providing the novel its context and meaning as well as shaping its narrative and characters.