| Shobha De | |
| Birth Name: | Shobha Rajadhyaksha |
| Birth Date: | 7 January 1948 |
| Birth Place: | Satara District, Province of Bombay, Dominion of India (present-day Maharashtra, India) |
| Spouse: | Dilip De |
| Children: | 4 |
Shobha De (née Rajadhyaksha, formerly Kilachand; born 7 January 1948) is an Indian novelist and columnist. She is best known for her depiction of socialites and sex in her works of fiction,[1] for which she has been referred to as the "Jackie Collins of India."[2]
Shobhaa De was born on 7 January 1948[3] in Mumbai into a Marathi Brahmin family, even though she just portrays being Hindu.[4] Her father was a district court judge, and her mother was a home-maker. The youngest of four siblings, she has two sisters and a brother.[5]
Shobha grew up in Mumbai, where she attended Queen Mary School. She graduated from Saint Xavier's College.[6]
At age 17, she began her career as a model, which lasted for five years.[7] At age 20, she began her career as a journalist, writing "agony aunt" advice columns and features for society magazines. She founded the magazine Stardust at age 23, which included Bollywood interviews, gossip, and photographs.[3]
In the 1980s, she contributed to the Sunday magazine section of The Times of India. She has since been a regular columnist for several newspapers.[3] She has also written several popular soaps on television.
Ankita Shukla wrote for The Times of India, in 2016, that "unignorable has been Shobhaa De's unabashed description of the womenfolk in her novels. De's women range from traditional, subjugated and marginalized to the extremely modern and liberated women. De's novels take a leaf the urban life and represent realistically an intimate side of urban woman's life, also revealing her plight in the present day society."[8] In 1992, Mark Fineman of the Los Angeles Times described her as "India's hottest-selling English-language novelist," and how her second novel, Starry Nights (1991), had "a drawing of a nude woman on the front cover," and according to De, "they said it was the first time they’d broken through the ‘F’ barrier, the first time they’d run the F-word without asterisks." Urmee Khan writes for The Guardian in 2007, "Her books are steeped in a lifetime's observation of Bollywood," and "They describe a side of the country that western audiences rarely encounter, her central themes being power, greed, lust and sex."
In 2010, De and Penguin Books created the publishing imprint Shobhaa De Books.[9]
De has also participated in several literary festivals, including the Bangalore Literature Festival,[7] having been part of it since its first edition.[10]
Shobha has married twice and has often said that she is the mother of six children, which includes two stepchildren.
Directly after graduation, Shobha married Sudhir Vrajlal Kilachand, of the Kilachand Marwadi business family. They quickly became the parents of two children, a son, Aditya Kilachand, and a daughter, Avantika. The marriage ended in divorce.
Shobha then married Dilip De, a businessman in the shipping industry, and a Bengali. This was Dilip's second marriage also, and he has two children by his previous marriage. Shobha and Dilip De became the parents of a further two daughters, Arundhati and Anandita.[11] [12]