Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay was published in 1988 and stands as one of the few major novels of Indian literary fiction to place a European Jewish refugee at its center. The book follows Hugo Baumgartner, a German Jew who flees Nazi Germany and rebuilds a life in India, first finding modest success in business before descending into an impoverished old age spent largely in the company of a household of stray cats in Bombay. Desai’s novel is not a work of history or memoir but an imagined life, yet it draws on a real and largely forgotten chapter of the subcontinent’s story: the small number of Jewish refugees from Central Europe who found their way to India in the 1930s, fleeing a catastrophe that most of their neighbors back home did not survive.
A Refugee’s Displacement, Twice Over
What makes Baumgartner’s story distinct within Desai’s body of work, and within Indian Jewish literature more broadly, is its structure of double exile. Baumgartner arrives in India a foreigner among Indians, marked by his German origins and his Jewishness alike, and never fully absorbed into any of the country’s existing communities, whether the well-established Baghdadi Jewish merchant families of Calcutta and Bombay or the Bene Israel and Cochin Jews whose roots in India ran back centuries. He is, in effect, exiled twice: once from Germany by Nazism, and again, more quietly, from full belonging in his adopted country. India under British colonial rule treated German nationals, including Jewish refugees who had lost that nationality’s protection in every meaningful sense, as enemy aliens during the Second World War, a historical detail that shadows the novel’s account of Baumgartner’s disrupted and precarious residence.
This premise allows Desai to write about statelessness and displacement without the novel becoming a conventional Holocaust narrative. Baumgartner survives; his story is not one of the camps but of a life spent afterward, permanently unmoored, carrying the trauma of exile into decades of ordinary, diminished existence in a country that never becomes quite home. The novel’s late sections, depicting an aging, increasingly isolated Baumgartner surrounded by the cats he feeds and shelters, have often been read as a study in the long aftershock of displacement, the way a catastrophic rupture in one’s youth can continue to shape and constrict a life lived out, materially safe, decades later and thousands of miles away.
Anita Desai’s Own Inheritance
Desai’s interest in this territory is not incidental. She was born Anita Mazumdar in 1937 in Mussoorie, India, to a German immigrant mother, Toni Nime, and a Bengali businessman father, D. N. Mazumdar, who had met while he was an engineering student in pre-war Berlin. Desai grew up in New Delhi speaking German at home and Hindi with neighbors, later adding Bengali, Urdu, and English, and did not learn to read and write until she encountered English at school at the age of seven, the language that became, in her words, her literary language. That childhood, split between a German mother’s inherited culture and an Indian upbringing, gave Desai a personal vantage point on the kind of cultural in-betweenness she assigns to Baumgartner, even though her own family’s history was of course entirely different from that of a Jewish refugee fleeing Nazi persecution. The novel is dedicated to Girton College, Cambridge, where Desai holds an honorary fellowship.
Desai’s Place in Indian Fiction
By the time Baumgartner’s Bombay appeared, Desai was already one of the most acclaimed novelists writing in English from India, with a body of work that included Cry, the Peacock, Voices in the City (1963), and Fire on the Mountain, which won the Sahitya Akademi Award, India’s National Academy of Literature prize, in 1978. Her 1978 story collection Games at Twilight and her 1983 novel The Village by the Sea, winner of the Guardian Prize, had further established her reputation for precise, psychologically dense prose. Across her career she was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, cementing her standing as one of the leading literary voices of postcolonial Indian fiction. Baumgartner’s Bombay extended that reputation into new territory, applying her characteristic attention to interior isolation and displacement to a protagonist whose foreignness in India was total, rather than the more familiar generational or regional dislocations explored in her earlier novels.
Why Baumgartner Matters to Indian Jewish History
Most accounts of Jews in India focus, understandably, on the subcontinent’s three principal established communities: the Cochin Jews of Kerala, whose presence stretches back roughly two millennia; the Bene Israel of the Konkan coast and Bombay; and the Baghdadi Jewish merchant families who settled in Bombay and Calcutta from the eighteenth century onward. Central European refugees like Baumgartner represent a smaller, later, and less institutionally documented chapter, a scattering of individuals rather than an organized community, who arrived with little more than what they could carry and who mostly left again after the war, resettling in Israel, Britain, the United States, or elsewhere once the immediate emergency had passed. Few of these refugees left behind memoirs or organizational records comparable to those of the established communities, which makes Desai’s novel, imaginative rather than documentary though it is, one of the more sustained literary treatments of this thin but real thread in the history of Jews in India.
Read against that historical backdrop, Baumgartner’s Bombay functions as a kind of imaginative recovery project, giving interior depth and a fully realized inner life to a figure of a type that history otherwise records only in passing: the refugee who washed up in Bombay in the 1930s, stayed because there was nowhere better to go, and lived out a long, quiet, foreign life in a city that never stopped regarding him as an outsider. For readers interested in the fuller range of Jewish experience in India, beyond the better-documented Cochin, Bene Israel, and Baghdadi communities, Desai’s novel offers a rare and carefully imagined entry point.
The Language of Exile
One recurring detail in discussions of the novel is Baumgartner’s fractured, hybrid speech, a private language stitched together out of German, English, and Hindi that reflects his suspended position between cultures. He belongs fully to none of the languages he speaks, and Desai uses this linguistic fragmentation as a way of dramatizing a deeper condition: a life lived in translation, never quite at home in any single vocabulary or community. This mirrors, at a remove, Desai’s own multilingual childhood, though she has been careful in interviews to distinguish her own comfortable, privileged multilingualism from the involuntary linguistic and cultural homelessness she assigns to her protagonist. The distinction matters, because it keeps the novel from collapsing into simple autobiography and instead lets Baumgartner stand as an invented, fully separate consciousness shaped by a history Desai did not live but chose to imagine with evident care.
The cats that surround Baumgartner in his final years have drawn particular attention from critics and readers, functioning simultaneously as a literal detail of an impoverished old man’s household and as a symbol of the only unconditional companionship available to someone permanently exiled from full human belonging. That final image, an old European Jewish refugee, decades removed from the catastrophe that displaced him, living out his days in a Bombay flat surrounded by animals rather than the family or community he never fully regained, has become one of the most quietly devastating pictures in modern Indian fiction of what displacement costs a person over the course of an entire lifetime, long after the historical emergency that caused it has receded into the past.
For a reader coming to the book specifically interested in the history of Jews in India, Baumgartner’s Bombay is best approached not as a substitute for the documentary and scholarly record of the Cochin, Bene Israel, and Baghdadi communities, but as a complement to it: a literary account of the war-era refugees who passed through or settled briefly in Indian cities, whose numbers were small and whose traces in the historical record are thin, but whose experience Desai’s fiction insists on treating with the same seriousness given to India’s older and better-documented Jewish communities.