I WRITE this article with an overwhelming sense of looming disaster – I feel myself headed towards an unavoidable collision with a huge rock that I know I cannot avoid even as I can recognize and predict its trajectory. A diasporan academic writing about writers from the diaspora for a journal from India knows that she may be in for a helluva ride once the article is on line for many to critique.

So why did I agree to set myself up for such a ride. I believe the answer may partly lie in my own desire to provide a much delayed answer to a question I was asked at a talk I gave in 1997 at Jadavpur University, Calcutta. The question went something like this: Why are you folks out there (in the US) so obsessed with diaspora, diaspora, diaspora? My initial answer was phrased as an abrasive, why not? After all these years and after reading and teaching many South Asian writers (mostly from the diaspora), I want to answer the question in a more sustained manner (though perhaps not any less abrasively). This self-analysis is of course highly self-conscious and partly self-serving since many diasporic academics suffer from what I only semi-facetiously term, the kala pani anxiety. But on the other hand, when taking into account Indian writing in English, the diaspora figures quite prominently.

So my agreeing to write is many pronged; I can assert my home-grown identity while claiming diasporic expertise. I can finally answer the question asked of me back in India while sitting at my computer looking out at a snow covered yard trying to capture a hint of a long remembered warmth. I can single out all the writers I like and don’t like and try to capture why diaspora writing evokes such strong emotions, often negative in so many Indians in India and abroad. In what follows I mostly talk about South Asian writing in North America which chiefly feature the novel. It would be an entirely different cricket game to engage with Indo-Caribbean or Indo-African writers (I have published on them elsewhere).

 

 

I want to say at the outset that I do not want to get into a battle over whether writers should be writing in English or in an Indian language; whether writing in English inevitably fails to capture the rhythms and cadences of something broadly yet essentially conceived of as an Indian life. Anyone who argues the latter has obviously never read Amit Chaudhuri. More on him later. More immediately and quite emphatically, I do not want to rehearse an argument over whether writing in English is better than or far superseded by writings in the many Indian vernaculars. For one, my vanity is much more circumscribed than Salman Rushdie’s, and second – I say this because it is an unavoidable truth – I am incapable of reading writings in any vernacular. My knowledge of written Hindi is the best, which is to say I read Prem Chand while going to high school in Kanpur, India. My knowledge of Bengali, my mother tongue is primarily oral. I learned to read only because like a true Bengali I learnt to sing Rabindra Sangeet while growing up in Bombay, Trivandrum and Kanpur.

 

 

My only true expertise in an Indian language is English – at Lady Brabourne College in Calcutta I was an English major and my language requirement was fulfilled by taking something absurdly called ‘alternative English’, and then I also took general English. There was nothing alternative or general about any of the English literature read in these classes; very much a repetition of the same canonical texts of British literature – from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf was my repertoire – and after a BA and MA in English I far surpassed a mere saturation point with the heavy hitters of a much endorsed British canon.

My entry into the field of post-colonial studies, in which diaspora writing from the subcontinent features quite significantly, happened towards the end of my PhD studies at the University of Washington in Seattle and like many other South Asian post-colonial critics working towards a degree in the late ’80s early ’90s in the US, I too was heavily influenced by colonial discourse analysis. My first book is pretty much part and parcel of the field of colonial discourse analysis with only a chapter devoted to two contemporary South Asian writers. But I was and continue to produce work on writers from the diaspora though it is in my teaching that I most frequently engage and confront South Asian writers from the diaspora.

I am not an expert on South Asia, my training is not as a comparatist – my interest lies in the literary (quite restricted to the anglophone world at large) broadly impacted by theoretical trends in the US academy – post-structuralism, postmarxism, cultural studies, new historicism, transnational feminism and, most recently, ethics. I say all of the above to not just position myself but to also highlight the particular slant of my position vis-a-vis the subject matter of diaspora writings.

At a gut level I am absolutely amazed at the proliferation of writers emerging from South Asia, primarily from Indians in India and abroad. There are enough writers that Washington DC has been able to organise three conferences with a writing workshop hosted by a writer for three years now. The success of the workshops attest to the probable appearance of still more novels and short stories by a new generation of South Asian Americans. For the inaugural conference, the organization primarily made up of very young, energetic South Asian professionals, invited David Davidar, CEO and Publisher of Penguin Books India to talk about the industry’s growing appetite for South Asian writing in English. Was it a surprise when he came up with his first novel in 2002 titled The House of Blue Mangoes? Of course not. It seems kind of fitting that the publisher of a house that has produced so many Indian writers from R.K. Narayan to Arundhati Roy should want to feel the urge to compose his version of the ‘great Indian novel’.

 

 

An even greater illustration of the success of South Asian writers in the West maybe clicked on at www. shashitharoor.com. How appropriate that an Under-Secretary General of Communications and Public Information of the UN would feature a website about his writerly achievements, featuring among various books and photographic self-images a novel steeped in Hindu mythology titled The Great Indian Novel. While his reviews claim him to be a satiric novelist greatly concerned with social ills, is it in bad taste for me to imagine a website with the url: www.greatindianwriter.com? If I was being truly honest, I would say this may be my own subconscious fantasy.

The conundrum faced by diasporan academics now is not where we are going to find a writer to read/teach but who are we going to teach/read/write about. The choices are varied and while most are written by Indians, Indians in the US or Indian Americans there are writers from Canada as well – novelists like Shyam Selvaduram of Funny Boy notoriety – a queer bildungsroman about a gay boy discovering his sexuality even as Sri Lanka is ripped apart by ethnic violence. A bildungsroman that ends not with marriage or the birth of a child but with the by now familiar trope of migration to the West.

 

 

I must include here a book that I just taught last summer by Indo-Canadian writer Anita Rau Badami, The Hero’s Walk, an evocative novel of inertia and failed mobility, migration and reverse migration. A beautifully narrated novel, poignant and humorous about a Vancouver born, orphaned inter-racial girl, traumatized into silence being raised by her grandparents in a small town in India. A novel that suggests the vast untapped material still available for depiction; a novel remarkable in its ability to make heroic the ordinariness of everyday life. It reminds us that not all novels have to be about the partition of India, or the problems of assimilation, or the trials between mother and daughter, or the oppressed lives of women who find a hard won freedom once they come to the West.

While all these subjects are crucial and continue to haunt and obsess us, I know, at least for now, I don’t want to read another novel by any ethnic minority that explores through the lens of gender a generational and cultural gap. While I find myself defending writings from the diaspora to Indians in India and have no truck with notions of authenticity and can’t tolerate essentialism when it comes to imaginative renditions of lives and characters, I do feel that certain topics have reached a soaking point producing cripplingly unimaginative work. At the same time as a diasporic Indian I feel I should not have to explain myself, or even worse shrilly defend my cautious admiration of works like Jasmine (see below) and Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia.

 

 

So in general I prefer having an increasing pool of writers and texts to choose from rather than the stalwarts, Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand and R.K Narayan; the familiar Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul; the staples Kamala Markandaya (Nectar in a Sieve – perhaps the only one in print), Anita Desai and perhaps Shashi Deshpande and Bapsi Sidhwa. I can now teach a course on just South Asian Writing in English moving chronologically and thematically from Raja Rao to Ameena Meer (Bombay Talkie), or Shauna Singh Baldwin (English Lessons and Other Stories; What the Body Remembers) or Anjana Appachanna (Incantations and Other Stories; Listening Now).

Even more incredible is the fact that I can teach (and write), if I choose to, only on South Asian women’s writing and include writers not just from North America but from Australia, the Caribbean and Africa.

However, this celebratory proliferation has produced works that sometimes have little merit. It’s a delicate balancing act because while one enjoys the current currency of South Asia, particularly India, in the US imagination, one balks at the continuing exoticization and commodification of both writers and other worlds. Colonial othering has been replaced or even displaced by neo-imperial forms of longing, lamentation, bewilderment, benevolence and malevolence towards the other. These feelings are fuelled and altered by increased globalization and panic at the visibility and ease with which the other appears to profit from its very otherness while participating in the practices of an everyday life in what should be for the other anything but ordinary.

 

 

Heterotopia is what sells in a capitalist world and the success of novels creating unfamiliar worlds testifies to the reader’s capitulation to estrangement and the processes of defamiliarization. One could argue that this is true of most novels; that in fact the novel form excels at capturing the familiar and the strange and that the best novels are those that can retain our attention precisely because they are able to maintain the fine line between absolute alienation and repetitive familiarity. So what is different in a diasporic South Asian novel? The difference lies I would argue in the reader’s response to the constructed dialogism within the novel. In other words, if we were to put Iser (reader response) and Bakhtin (theory of the novel) in conversation over the form, function and mastery of the South Asian, diasporic, anglophone novel it would require a re-evaluation of some of their crucial ideological assumptions. But I need to leave that for another time and another place.

For now I want to go back to the question about the diaspora’s obsession with the diaspora. The apparent digression that follows is actually not a self indulgent foray into an evaluation of the social-psyche of an exilic population, it is rather a necessary aside since so many novels deal precisely with the very same anxieties and concerns. It’s a commonplace now that newer diasporas (I am talking here chiefly about South Asian migration to North America and I call it newer as opposed to other Asian migration – primarily Chinese, Japanese and Korean) are more concerned with trying to maintain umbilical ties with home/desh even as the manner in which these ties manifest themselves vary generationally. A post ’65 migrating generation imagines India very differently than say a post ’80s generation and a post 2000 generation. Class and gender play crucial roles in the fashioning of not just the diaspora but also the diaspora’s interaction with and investment in cultures that define an ethics of ethnicity.

 

 

To generalize, one could say without much qualification that an earlier generation felt greatly unmoored and anchored themselves by holding on to an ethos characterized as, say Indian, evoking tradition as a key that helped them expand and share a common idea of home with other similar minded folks even as it helped keep at bay the immanent threat of an invading foreign public sphere. The separation of public and private so crucial to colonialism and nationalism (see Partha Chatterjee’s work or any number of critics working in related fields including myself) resurfaces in the US, Canada, England, Australia as a way of marking difference.

We are here but not quite. We want to be home but not yet and so we continue to recreate home as a desire to resituate the discourses of us versus them. The us has a cultural superiority rooted in ideas of tradition and community that confirms some of the fundamental tenets of an orientalist discourse. It is an anxious withholding of modernity in the face of a material modernity so desired by the us. The rituals of custom are furiously and often desperately maintained so that the us does not get swallowed up by the them who are merely dedicated to an ever developing materialist modernity.

 

 

In contrast, newer generations growing up in a much more hybrid world, a postmodern, globalized, digital, consumer capitalist world has less trouble negotiating the us and them divide. And again class is a crucial marker of cosmopolitical ability – to be at home anywhere and everywhere. I call this cosmopolitics and not cosmopolitanism because the cosmo-political while sharing non-nationalist ideals with the cosmopolitan enjoys the idea of home and this enjoyment while not entirely independent of gender is far more androgynous than ever imagined by an earlier migrating population. (An interesting exploration of this more hybrid moment can be found in a memoir like text, Mira Kamdar’s Motiba’s Tatoos, a far less self-indulgent memoir than Meena Alexander’s Fault Lines).

Then there is the second generation of South Asian Americans – the unforgiving acronym of ABCD (American Born Confused Desis) only touches the tip of the cultural iceberg they are challenged to confront and negotiate. All this and more forms the content of many novels originating in the diaspora though the quintessential ABCD dilemma seems to me at least in the US, for now, more the domain of films.

Short stories seem best suited for the exploration of both first and second generation angst. I am thinking here of collections like Chitra Devakaruni’s Arranged Marriages and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Booker prize winning Interpreter of Maladies that represent various moments in the life of an immigrant generation in expressive, though not necessarily always impressive, vignettes. In a full length novel version we get such desperate evocations like Bharati Kirchner’s Sharmila’s Book, a novel of only slightly more merit than the kind of torpid colonial romances produced by the likes of M.K. Fisher (Kirchner should stick to writing recipes – they actually work). Bharati Mukherjee’s early novel Jasmine, despite all its problems, still remains one of my favourites because it attempts to, in part at least, rewrite the frontier novel from the perspective of a female immigrant traversing the vast spaces of an alien territory.

 

 

The novel, unlike most, attempts a formal innovation still very much in the vanguard when it comes to South Asian anglophone writing. While it reaffirms everything unoriginal about the myth of American individualism and mobility, it does so by producing a chronotope that is quite brilliant in its execution. I would argue that the same is true in Holder of the World, another novel, which, while it leaves me incredulous vis-a-vis its exoticization, I feel compelled to praise for its polemical re-narrativization of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. While it may imagine the Raj in familiar language, it absolutely defamiliarizes a whole range of British and Puritan images and ideas.

In terms again of execution, in the trope of time travel via a computer grid rather than a Wellsian time machine, in its rewriting of a premier American novel, and in its tongue-in-cheek metafictional commentary (‘Who can blame Nathaniel Hawthorne for shying away from the real story of the brave Salem mother and her illegitimate daughter’, 284) it far surpasses the banal, failed serio-comic novel by Hari Kunzu titled The Impressionist. Perhaps my biases are obvious but I remain a literary reader and so find solace in aesthetics when troubled by unpalatable politics and/or ethics. And so I remain a fan of Rushdie with Ground Beneath My Feet being my favourite. I could write volumes on just this one novel but since so much has been written on Rushdie I will bypass him to talk briefly about other novels.

 

 

I could also include here a evaluation of The God of Small Things, not a novel by a diasporic writer, but a novel that was just such a pleasurable and moving read. Despite straining at times at a forced erudition the novel opened up a new vista in terms of form and language. The thirty or so opening pages of the novel tells you most everything that is going to unfurl and the great success of the novel lies in its ability to hold the reader’s attention despite its beginning that encapsulates the middle and the end. The novel ends on the hopeful note of tomorrow for characters who we know are dead but as the description of the kathakali dance expresses, the novel gathers its stature not from the story but from the telling of the tale, a common tale, a known tale, a tale that one can enter and leave at any point. A remarkable feat for a novice writer and perhaps a one hit wonder. But I know I’ll buy the next book Roy writes, if she writes fiction and not political essays.

I keep wanting to wrap up and mention some other writers in broad strokes but I keep having to pause and talk about one more favourite writer. So this is my final, though not unrelated digression. I want to return to Amit Chaudhuri as an example of another writer, very different from Rushdie and Roy who in many ways bucks the trend of common diasporic themes, perhaps because he is not truly a man of the diaspora – more a peripatetic writer with a stable address in Calcutta (?). A modernist to the core, his novellas and novel are ruminations on subjective states evoked by the most banal of moments such as the daily evening sweeping of the floor in dusty Calcutta by a woman called Chaya; or vivid, sensual, ineffable yet expressive descriptions of the eating of boal fish with one’s hands or the soggy towels hanging from a clothes line in mid-afternoon on Vidyasagar Road. His three novellas gathered together under the cover of Freedom Song are refreshing, calming, deeply evocative meanderings that inspire me to believe in the Kantian aesthetics of the beautiful.

 

 

Rather than being borne away in a rush of events, Chaudhuri’s craftsmanship makes a virtue of belatedness including in his narrative, a metafictional commentary about his own art: ‘...why did these houses seem to suggest that an infinitely interesting story might be written around them? And yet the story would never be a satisfying one, because the writer, like Sandeep, would be too caught up jotting down irrelevances and digressions that make up lives, and the life of a city, rather than a good story – till the reader would shout "Come to the point!" – and there would be no point, except the girl memorising the rules of grammar, the old man in the easy-chair fanning himself, and the house with the small empty porch that was crowded, paradoxically, with many memories and possibilities. The "real" story, with its beginning, middle, and conclusion, would never be told, because it did not exist’ (Freedom Song, 54).

But for the most part, the ‘real story’ does exist for most writers inhabiting the diaspora and most novels coming out of a South Asian/diaspora re-animate realism in a myriad of ways. One can get the somewhat straightforward mirroring of a Victorian novel in the likes of A Suitable Boy (Vikram Seth), a novel that can do justice to a Lukacsian confirmation of realism as that which – ‘represents reality as it is – namely, as a totality.’ Or on the other hand one can get the equally unwieldy though, for me, the peculiarly productive and chaotic beauty of A Glass Palace (Amitava Ghosh) that takes the Lukacsian idea of ‘reification’ and turns it on its head as it were by aestheticizing it via the modes deemed more representative of modernism and expressionism.

Ghosh among others could very well be termed ‘critical realists’ in the vein of Lukacs’ heroes like Scott, Balzac and Mann. But Ghosh’s critical realism actually points to the impossibility of reflecting the totality of social relationships in colonial, imperial and neo-imperial worlds captured in the sweeping yet fragmented colonial map that precedes the table of contents and the panoramic views frequently clipped by concentrated descriptions of peoples and places forming a montage of sense impressions and fragmentary subjective states often deemed alien to realism.

 

 

So while the kind of postmodern experimentation of a Rushdie remains unrepresentative of South Asian writing in general and realism seems increasingly the form of choice, in some of the best novels it is a realism sundered from an uncomplicated mimesis. Realism achieves the kind of social totality in these novels that cannot be explicated by the logics of a horizontal axis confounded by its intersection with a vertical one. To me formal realism in South Asian writing is best captured by the description of maps of the world provided by the unnamed narrator of another one of Ghosh’s novels Shadow Lines. Using a compass, the narrator draws three circles with different cities at the centre and circumference. What he realizes is what we in the diaspora coming out of another culture and inhabiting a different one often feel – a vertiginous disassociation best captured in the following lines from the novel. While these lines address a specific moment of recognition for the narrator vis-a-vis his cousin and family, I am using it here symptomatically:

‘When I turned back to my first circle I was struck with wonder that there had really been a time, not so long ago, when people, sensible people, of good intention, had thought that all maps were the same, that there was a special enchantment in lines... They had drawn their borders, believing in their pattern, in the enchantment of lines... What had they felt, I wondered, when they discovered that they had created not a separation, but a yet-undiscovered irony...: the simple fact that there had never been a moment ...when places were more closely bound to each other than after they had drawn their lines... a moment when each city [substitute place, my words] was the inverted image of the other; locked into an irreversible symmetry by the line that was to set us free – our looking glass border’ (233).

 

 

So much of South Asian diasporic writing inhabits this looking glass border, a looking glass that very rarely reflects what we hope to see – it is not just a fractured mirror, a refracting mirror or an opaque one. More often the mirror shatters into shards forcing us to piece them together for some semblance of a composed subjectivity but very often composure is exactly what is denied or when attained it often seems temporary, belated and fraught. I do not mourn this loss of composure since I find the virtue overrated. I thrive on the mobility gained by being able to traverse the inside/outside opposition in both antipodean spaces. I am more at home here than I can be there, but I was more at home there than when I first got here. I am lucky to have had a home then and now.

 

 

Some may be at home nowhere – a young girl growing up in rural Bangladesh, married off to an older man in London to inhabit a small, cramped council apartment on Brick Lane serving time as wife, mother and garment worker. Her only voyage out is through letters that arrive intermittently from her sister left behind who ironically travels greater distances literally and metaphorically and ultimately disappears from the pages of the novel, Brick Lane, in which she appears in/as scripted ungrammatical English that translates an informal, colloquial, vernacular grammar. As the one sister refuses to participate in the longing for home that paralyzes her husband, refusing to return ‘home’ with her husband, it is the husband’s voice that emerges from the great divide (a different modality of the us and them binary) in the final pages of the novel usurping the epistolary presence of the sister whose disappearance from the pages of the novel marks a more dangerous invisibility in Dhaka.

The narrator of Brick Lane depicts worlds (in England and Bangladesh) absolutely unfamiliar to me but the triumph of the novel, and indeed all great books, is that by the time I reach the last page of the novel I can simultaneously mourn the loss of another unaccounted for woman who breathed life into the pages of her sister’s book and marvel at the enormous capacity for life in the figure of Nazneen, the sister in Brick Lane, as she finally ties on her boots and gets ready to skate on ice in a sari in London.