Akash Kapur in the New York Times:
My first memory of being Indian in America was being called an “injun.” This was around 1980. I was visiting my grandparents in rural Minnesota. The boy who called me an “injun” punched me in the stomach; later, his friends would call me a “communist.”
Those were particularly crude reactions but they were characteristic of the distance that separated India and America for much of my life. I grew up between both countries, the son of an Indian father and an American mother, but my two homes always felt very far apart. For much of my childhood and early adulthood, India and America were literally — but also culturally, socially, politically and experientially — on opposite sides of the planet.
When I moved to America in the early 1990s, India was little more than a cipher in the American imagination. Many of my new friends were uninterested in and uninformed about the country that I desperately missed. India was defined by the broadest, and usually most unflattering, of brush strokes — stereotypes about poverty and corruption, images of crowds, maybe a vague sense of what Indians in America used to call the “three C’s”: caste, cows and curry. More:
In the National, Ed Lake reviews “In the Kitchen” by Monica Ali (Doubleday)
In retrospect, nobody came out of l’affaire Brick Lane very well. Monica Ali’s first novel was published in 2003 to simultaneous fanfare and denunciation. The author was already a star; Granta had named her one of Britain’s best young novelists on the strength of her unpublished manuscript. And the book, when it came, seemed to do what was asked of it: its portrait of life among Bangladeshi immigrants in East London was celebrated by a largely white critical fraternity as a dispatch from Britain’s alienated and increasingly radical Islamic contingent. The Scotsman wrote that it opened “a new and potentially rich seam in mainstream British fiction”. The Evening Standard praised its insights into a “fresh, rich and hidden world”. In short, it dished dirt, and in doing so assisted the commentariat in their grand inquiries. Ali’s vision of a small world beset by oppression, hypocrisy and militant posturing was taken to be authentic, which is to say, just bad enough to be true. And that, of course, is what many of the real Brick Lane’s Bangladeshis objected to.
The novel’s heroine, Nazneen, is an illiterate Sylhetti farm girl who finds herself married off as a teenager to Chanu, a council worker twice her age, who lives in the navel of the London borough of Tower Hamlets. Through Nazneen’s eyes we are shown a world of dank state housing, busybody neighbours and desperate boredom. Chanu is a failure though he doesn’t know it, blinded as he is by pride at his numerous certificates, his degree in English literature, and his Open University non-insights into colonial history. In one of Ali’s better – because bitter – jokes, she has Chanu announce grandly, with the clear intention to impress, that: “To be an immigrant is to live out a tragedy.” Despite cultivating aloofness from the old-country gaucheries of a faceless horde of “ignorant types”, he can’t get ahead at the office. He’s that recurring figure in the literature of the Indian diaspora, the would-be bourgeois, cousin to VS Naipaul’s Mr Biswas. The only way for him is down. More:
Meena Thiruvengadam in the Wall Street Journal:
The word was “milieu.” Balu Natarajan spelled it — and transformed it.
In 1985, Dr. Natarajan, now a sports doctor, correctly spelled the word to become the first Indian American to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Before you ask for a definition, it means, “the physical or social setting in which something occurs or develops.”
Since his victory, Indians have become as ubiquitous at the annual bee as dictionaries. They have won eight times, and the 2002 documentary “Spellbound” chronicled one Indian family’s dreams of victory. But back then, Dr. Natarajan recalls, “it was big deal that a son of immigrants was winning the spelling bee.”
A quarter-century later, it’s become pretty normal. More:
[Updated on March 31]
In The Hindu, Mukund Padmanabhan speaks to Jhumpa Lahiri ahead of the launch of her new book of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth (Random House, Rs 450, pp 333)
The recent literature of emigration and exile is forged by perspectives that emerge from at least two cultures, identities and, in some cases, languages. The themes in migrant literature, however, vary, depending not only on the country of origin but also on the pattern of the migration itself. The attention of first generation migrant literature is often directed at the act of migration, the passage to another land, the reception in the emigration country, issues of rootlessness and racism, nostalgia and longing. While some of these issues do crop up in second generation migrant writing, it does so often in a much more morally complex way. Affiliations are more ambivalent, there is a recognition that global uprootedness is…well…a global phenomenon, and the focus, in an odd way, is not on the country of origin or arrival, but in a community that does not fully belong to either.
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And in Hindustan Times, Indrajit Hazra reviews the book
One way of looking at nostalgia is to see it as a yearning for an old habit. In that sense, Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest book, a collection of short stories that has the quietness and the cleanliness of a modern breakfast, is not about diasporic dilemmas, but about coming to terms with new habits and reconciling with broken ones.
Unlike in her novel, The Namesake, or in her debut collection, The Interpreter of Maladies, the stories in Unaccustomed Earth do not as much deal with the differences of uprooting oneself from one’s culture and setting tentative roots in a new one, as they do about that other space-time difference: the generation gap. What Lahiri does, in the manner of an irony-less Evelyn Waugh, is to use the (anticipated, perceived or real) effects of translocation of an older generation as fodder for embarrassment-cum-concern for their children.
Continue reading ‘Roots, migration and exile’
Times of India
Swapan Dasgupta relates Indian aggression at the Sydney cricket ground to the rise in nationalism
There were two powerful images of India that came through from Sydney Cricket Ground last week. The first was a visibly irate Harbhajan Singh in a verbal altercation with Andrew Symonds. The second was a very composed but undeniably haughty Anil Kumble throwing a variant of Bill Woodfull’s legendary remark on Bodyline back at the Australians: “There are two teams out there; only one is playing cricket.”
Cricket, once a metaphor for life, has increasingly become associated with the national character. In the heydays of socialism and the shortage economy, it is unlikely an Indian player would have reacted to Australian sledging the way Harbhajan did. It is more inconceivable that the captain would have had the temerity to call the rival team a bunch of cheats – which is what Kumble did with all the imperiousness at his disposal.
Continue reading ‘India arrives’
