Saros Cowasjee

Saros Cowasjee (born 1931), novelist, short story writer, commentator, critic, anthologist and screenwriter, was born in Hyderabad, the capital of what since 1948 has been the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and was previously the state of Hyderabad.^[1] With degrees from universities in Agra and Leeds, the latter where he obtained a PhD, he was an editor for two years with the Times of India Press in Bombay (now renamed Mumbai) and migrated to Canada in 1963, joining the faculty of the University of Saskatchewan, Regina Campus (since 1974 the University of Regina). He is Parsi (previously spelled Parsee), the Persian word for Persian, though lately in Iran "Farsi," principally because the vast majority are Muslim and Arabic does not contain the "p" sound.^[2]

Cowasjee is the writer and editor of over twenty books, including

• Goodbye to Elsa (1974);
• Mulk Raj Anand: Coolie : an assessment (1976);
• Nude therapy (1978);
• So Many Freedoms: Major Fiction of Mulk-Raj Anand (1978);
• The last of the maharajas: A screen play based on Mulk Raj Anand's Private life of an Indian Prince (1980);
• Modern Indian Fiction (1981);
• Suffer little children (1982);
• Stories from the Raj (1983);
• Women Writers of the Raj (1990);
• Studies in Indian and Anglo-Indian Fiction (1995);
• The Assistant Professor (2000).

He has said “…I am a Canadian citizen, though my I sell much better in the U.K. and India than I do in Canada…. Perhaps my work lacks Canadian content and sensibility. Also, to be noticed in Canada one has to be an aggressive salesman, as aggressive as a Jehovah’s Witness, and as prepared to take insults and get the door shut in one’s face.”^[3] Now retired, he resides in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Notes