Shivani (Gaura Pant)

Shivani was the pen name of Gaura Pant, one of the most read Hindi novelists of the twentieth century. Her stories, steeped in the households, temples and hill roads of Kumaon, gave its women their richest portrait in fiction.

She was born in 1923 in Rajkot, where her father was tutoring princes, into a scholarly Kumaoni Brahmin family of Almora, and the hills were always home. Educated at Tagore's Santiniketan, she began publishing as Shivani and quickly found a vast readership in the Hindi magazines of the 1950s and 60s.

Her novels and stories, Krishnakali, Bhairavi, Kariye Chhima and dozens more, are set among Kumaoni families and pilgrim towns, told with wit, music and an unsparing eye on what tradition costs women. Few writers have fixed a region's inner life in the popular imagination so completely.

She was awarded the Padma Shri in 1982 and wrote to the end of her life in Lucknow, dying in 2003. Her daughters carried the literary line on, and in Kumaon her name is spoken as the hills' own novelist.