India Ink LITERATURE OF THE SUBCONTINENT COMES TO AMERICA by Anantha Sudhakar image courtesy of Anchor Books Two summers ago I interned at the Asian-American Writers' Workshop in New York City, in a cramped basement office off of St. Mark's Place. On days when there was little work to be done, I would wander around the Workshop's bookstore, which consisted of only Asian-American works. It was here that I came across a copy of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's book "Arranged Marriage", the first novel I had ever read which explored my own cultural experience. As I read more and more Indian-American literature, I began to notice how important a role sexuality played in many of its stories and novels. I became fascinated with trying to understand my heritage through literature, and to understand the issues which that literature centered. When I returned to U.Va. that year, I decided to write an honors thesis in order to explore further the issues of sexuality which first struck me. What follows below is a brief introduction and example of the kind of results I have come across during my research this past semester. In their novels and short stories, authors such as Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Bharati Mukherjee, and Ginu Kamani address the complexity of sexuality for women who embrace two cultures -- that of India and of the United States. Often in these works, sexual expression is aligned with American freedom while Indian culture is associated with domesticity and chastity. In fact, many female characters rebel against Indian ways, desiring instead the liberated sexual expression of the typical American woman. In Divakaruni's story "Silver Pavements," such an Indian girl named Jayanti comes to America, full of the highest expectations. She leaves the luxury of her high-class Indian life for the U.S., barely able to breathe from excitement when she boards the plane, which "smells different from the air I've known all my life in Calcutta, moist and weighted with the smell of mango blossoms and bus fumes and human sweat." The dry air of America, transported across continents in an airplane, leaves a metallic aftertaste on Jayanti's lips. She says, "I lick at them, wanting to capture that taste, make it part of me forever." This idea of consuming the taste of America resonates several lines later with Jayanti's reaction to Almond Rocas. She treats the candy that arrives with her dinner like a treasure, running her fingers across its surface, and slipping it into her purse. But then she remembers: "I am going to the land of Almond Rocas," and promptly eats it, saying, "the American chocolate melts in my mouth, just as sweet as I thought it would be." Here, Jayanti makes a decided move from wishfulness and restraint to one of immediate gratification. The candy is not just any chocolate, but "American chocolate," thus presenting America as rich and infinitely sweet, a place where Jayanti can indulge herself sexually as much as she can in eating. She lingers over the chocolate, running her fingers along it, allowing it to melt in her mouth. Thus, in a simple, subtle way, Jayanti's lengthening of her experience with the chocolate, which is bound up in ideas of pleasure, is her first sexually pleasurable act. But Jayanti's hope of arriving in a land of Almond Rocas is met only with the smell of "stale curry" which permeates the apartment of the relatives with whom she stays. Reminders of India are disappointing, as is the Indian dinner her aunt prepares. Jayanti laments, "As I watch Aunt ladle more dal onto the plate, I have a strange sense of disorientation, and for a moment I wonder whether I've left Calcutta at all." For Jayanti, this ladling of Indian culture is clearly bound up in the tradition of gender roles in India: "when [Uncle] wants more [food] he points silently, and Aunt hurries to serve him." Aunt Pratima's servile role translates to Jayanti's suggested understanding of her aunt's place in a sexual relationship, with her aunt as the provider, and her uncle as the silent consumer. Jayanti counters this relationship with her own romantic dream of falling in love with an American professor who will tell her "of the trips we will go on around the world, the books we will co-author when I am his wife." Jayanti's Almond Roca dream and her aunt's stale curry reality are set at definite odds here. Her aunt serves food in silence to a silent husband, while Jayanti is mobile, free, and vocal with her imagined mate. "No arranged marriage like Aunt's for me!" she proclaims. Yet despite her open imagination about romance, Jayanti is haltingly reticent about her sexuality. Continuing her daydream she says, After dinner he takes me to his apartment overlooking the lake, where, fairy lights twinkle and shiver on the water. He pulls me down, respectfully but ardently, on the couch. His lips are hot against my throat, his ... But here my imagination, conditioned by a lifetime of maternal censorship, shuts itself down. This "maternal censorship" seems to refer not just to concepts of female virtue but also to a motherland. Even in her imagining of a changed, Americanized future, Jayanti cannot lay claim to an Americanized sexuality because it is cut short by (what she sees to be) repressive Indian values. The fears instilled by this maternal censorship express themselves in the very description of the way her professor lover pulls her down on the couch, "respectfully but ardently." Her insistence on respect even in her daydream points to an awareness and fear of the risks of sexual behavior -- the forced rape by this man who, due to his very Americanness, is a stranger. Thus Jayanti expresses a hesitancy to embrace sexual passion as freely as she savored the Almond Rocas. The phrase "respectfully but ardently" seems to speak out of a fear of sexual danger coupled with the desire for passionate pleasure. Yet Jayanti is still pulled by the prospect of her imagined redheaded lover. After standing out on her aunt and uncle's balcony, Jayanti returns inside, noting that "the apartment with its faded cushions and its crookedly hung pictures seems newly oppressive". When she asks her aunt if they can go for a walk outside, Aunt Pratima replies, "'You uncle does not like me to go out. He is telling me it is dangerous.'" Here it is clear that Aunt Pratima has never been outside in America. It is only through her husband that she has learned that America is dangerous, rather than through personal experience. Aunt even comments later that, "'In the village before marriage I was always walking everywhere'" suggesting that true freedom is only to be found at home, in India. Thus the American liberation that Jayanti dreamed of is met only with a forced female immobility. Aunt Pratima's hesitancy is somewhat validated as her and Jayanti's eventual foray into the cold Chicago night is met with a group of taunting young boys hurling insults and snowballs at them. This open attack, a chasing of these immigrant women back to their designated space, operates as a resignation in the story. "How little I've understood," Jayanti says. No longer illusioned by daydreams, Jayanti sees that Americans are not just red-haired professors and blue-eyed flight attendants, but also her uncle, her aunt, and the cruel boys they meet on the street. Even the title of the story, "Silver Pavements," resonates with this idea. The words refer to a song Jayanti used to sing as a girl: "Will I marry a prince from a far-off magic land / Where the pavements are silver and the roofs all gold?" Jayanti answers this question with the realization that America is not a magic land, the land of Almond Rocas with their crinkly pink wrappers, but rather a land in which to struggle like any other, a land in which one must assure respectability even in daydreams in the face of sexual danger. Although by the end of this story, Jayanti still seems to be searching for a means to fully express her sexuality, many other female Indian-American characters find their sexual expression coded in Indian terms, thus rendering both the Western and the Eastern necessary to an understanding of the self. It is this complexity which I go on to address in the rest of my thesis, this simultaneous struggle for self-definition against Indian culture coupled with the presence of self-definition through Indian culture. The underlying purpose of this struggle, and of the works addressed in my thesis, emerges as an attempt to break free from both of these polarities, as Jayanti does, and give shape to the immigrant experience by complicating the dichotomy of India/repression and America/freedom.

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