Samrat Upadhyay

In the late 80s, a prominent American newspaper ran a front page article on India, reporting how "weird" Indian cities can be (if I remember correctly, the focus was on New Delhi), where stray cows vie for equal space with deformed beggars. Consequently, angry letters were sent to the newspaper, complaining that the article made it appear as if the whole of India was "weird," full of irrationalities and fantastic happenings that would appeal to a Westerner's notion of what is "exotic" and reinforce the idea of Third World countries as chaotic, unpredictable and, well, uncivilized.

Reading Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's collection of stories, Arranged Marriage, arouses similar feelings, as if one were watching a made-for-TV movie about India in an American network and knowing that although the movie contains some truth, it deals only with the surface truth, that somehow the picture has been "arranged" to make heavy generalizations about India (or about the Hindu culture) so that it feeds the exoticized fantasies of Westerners ("What can you say about a country where brides are burned routinely for not bringing enough dowry?" is not an uncommon question from some Americans).

While we can understand the American reporter's hasty caricatures on a short assignment to India, Indian writers themselves have not been exempt from exoticizing their country to cater to the fast palates of Americans. Bharati Mukherjee, now acclaimed as a major American writer, in her novel Jasmine makes an uneducated village girl from Punjab "make it" to--and in--the United States and create for herself various sophisticated, educated personas so that she can assimilate into the American melting pot. The problem with Jasmine's journey, as some Indian women critics have pointed out, is that in an attempt to portray her immigrant heroine, Mukherjee plays up the picture of Indian women held back by her gender and by "backward" culture and economy of the Third World. Not to mention that Mukherjee also depicts India, specifically civil strife-torn Punjab, as filled with irrational, fighting women, cackling astrologers and marauding men so that Jasmine can be made into a prime candidate for emigration.

This selective representation also happens in Divakaruni's portrayal of Indian women, who find themselves suffocating under the burdens and constraints of traditional arranged marriage, whose husbands are invariably insensitive, controlling louts (even the educated ones) determined to put their wives in their "proper" places. What's wrong with this picture? It reduces the complexities of Indian marriage and of men-women relationships into a neat package (ready for consumption of the Western public), where the binary oppositions are clear and discernible. It also suggests, sometimes subtly and sometimes emphatically, that the only way for South Asian women to get out of this predicament is to adopt the rules of "unconventional" marriage/love relationships of America, thereby attaining a "freedom" that is the other name of Western "development". Thus liberation is directly linked to a traditional woman shedding her backward Indian sari and sporting a blouse and a skirt, as the widowed character envisions herself doing in the story "Clothes." This emphasis on discarding one's roots and assimilating into the mainstream American society has been the backbone of Bharati Mukherjee's fiction, and now we see the same equation (Western values = Emancipation) in Divakaruni's work.

Arranged Marriage, then, for Divakaruni becomes a metaphor for convention and its rigidity, preventing Indian women from freedom which the stories' characters suggest can only be found minus the men who, as one character puts it, "have destroyed our mothers." The women protagonists in Divakaruni's stories come in all sorts and colors (very vivid colors, one might add, for "exotic" Indian words are sprinkled generously throughout the text, adding to the mystery and orientalization for the American reader). "Clothes" describes the journey of an Indian bride who finds herself widowed after coming to California. "Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs" charts the disappointment of an Indian woman who comes for college to the U.S. and finds that her blue collar aunt and uncle have failed to realize the American dream. In "The Word Love," a Ph.D. student in California gets shunned by her mother for living with an American man, and so on. The problem is not that Divakaruni hasn't assembled--or "arranged," to borrow her term--a fair cross section of Indian women. The problem is that the narrative voice that tells the story, whether as a character or as third person omniscient, fails to explore these women's complex psychologies in their journeys from convention to modernity and in their displacement from a "Third World" to a "First World". The resulting effect is that the reader is left with gross generalizations, stereotyped characters and annoying clichés.

A typical example of this weak execution is "Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs," a story about a young college woman with blue collar relatives in Chicago. Jayanti, upon being met by Bikram-uncle and Aunt at the airport, is struck by how "ugly" Bikram-uncle is: "Bikram-uncle is a short, stocky man dressed in greasy mechanic's overalls that surprise me. He has a belligerent mustache and very dark skin and a scar that runs up the side of his neck." A villain from a Hindi film? No, just a "low-class" man--to use Jayanti's words--who suffers racism at the hands of whites who think he's taking their jobs away from them. The politics of racism in America eludes our college-educated Jayanti, who even after Bikram-uncle mentions how the Americans hate "kala admi," has this profound thought to offer us: "What has made him detest this country so much?" We want to yell: Well, he just told you, didn't he? Later, after she and Aunt experience direct racism while out on a walk and Bikram-uncle hits Aunt for going out without his permission, Jayanti wishes that she were back in Calcutta. The story ends with Jayanti's hands being covered by snow, "no longer brown but white,white, white," implying... what? That the pain of racism can be hidden by assimilation into the white culture?

What's wrong with this picture?

(Upadhyay is a poet and a novelist)