Writing about food leads to writing about the complex histories of our relationships to eating, and to food itself. If that food is curry, we enter the metaphysical realm of discussing what’s real. Not reality itself, but being real. Novels, memoirs, and food writing that touch on authentic experiences of elsewhere, delivered via fork or paratha, enter into a conversation about experience, alienation, authenticity, and belonging: this ‘mystical microcosmic’ element of South Asian writing plays an important role for both non–South Asian readers and nostalgic brown readers. Eat, pray, love: curry is good for you, especially when it seems real.
Readers of 2003’s Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipes, by Shoba Narayan, can cook along to the author’s memories and stories, extending from her first childhood meals in South India to her departure for college and life in America. The dishes lend solidity to the experiences—by cooking along to this book, readers are meant to enter Narayan’s journey through the senses. The author recounts the day when her bid for freedom from the family home was cemented: she cooked a feast so convincing that her parents just had to grant her permission to leave. In America, one of her ongoing struggles is persuading her arranged-marriage husband, Ram, that fusion cuisine is an acceptable alternative to the South Indian recipes he’s used to.
Monsoon Diary is one of countless books that deal in South Asian food and culture, and extend dinner-table conversation into the discussion of life’s greater questions. Narayan examines the particular cards she’s been dealt while teaching the reader to prepare a bowl of steaming sambar to accompany her ruminations on fate and belonging. Monsoon Diary is an account of childhood, emigration, and diasporic life, and provides consistent links between cooking in the home and keeping a connection to the homeland. Preparing a meal becomes an act of recollection. Even if nostalgia may alter the familial memories that are conjured, the descriptions of food are precise: Narayan’s largely unsentimental prose can be strikingly evocative, such as when she describes ghee as ‘the vegetarian’s caviar.’
Remembering a country in writing—or recreating a country and past that may never have existed—is a form of definition, particularly when the recollection is aimed at an audience. To readers, nations and culture perceived through tales of food and caring family become realms of nostalgia or otherness, defined more by how they are recollected than by their physical existence.
The home, the domestic space, is a crucial part of any immigrant story: it’s the place where safety, guilt, and disconnection often meet, and where language is in its greatest state of fusion flux, as Western tongues meld with whatever is spoken in the kitchen. Making a home through food is the constant in Narayan’s journey through a past that resulted in a happy emigrated existence in America. A Western audience can read, taste, and visit someone else’s past, without having to swap the dice-roll of a love marriage for the dice-roll of an arranged marriage.
Monsoon Diary belongs to that genre I, at first, jokingly, then more thoughtfully, have been calling currybooks. These books, part of the influx of great, good, and bad diasporic literature that came after the early eighties, follow a set of invisible and flexible genre rules. As with all genre fiction, the good ones are good and the bad ones are bad. And if you’re a brown writer, it will be presumed to be your default genre, and you’d best recognise that.
In a 1982 essay, Salman Rushdie described several attempts at defining the ‘Indo-Anglian’ writer, and indeed the idea of Indianness itself, that he encountered at a conference about Indian writing in the English language. The definitions on offer ranged from a knowledge of Sanskrit to membership in mainstream Indian culture, disregarding the minority cultures of Buddhists, Sikhs, or Muslims. Rushdie, himself a member of that latter group, recollects the point precisely: ‘if Muslims were “Mughals,” then they were foreign invaders, and Indian Muslim culture was both imperialist and inauthentic. At the time we made light of the jibe, but it stayed with me, pricking at me like a thorn.’
The concept of the ‘Indian writer’ (especially Indian writers abroad such as Rushdie) has since expanded into the idea of the ‘South Asian writer,’ the author of ‘immigrant fiction’: the category has broadened, and the critical need to define brown writers in English by their exact place of physical and linguistic origin has lessened. Contrarily, the critical and popular discussion around what’s between the pages of one of their books is perhaps more narrowly definition-focused than ever: as the tropes and genre conventions around books by South Asian authors have accumulated over the decades since Rushdie’s essay, the expectations for what brown writers are supposed to do in their work have narrowed.
Hints and swipes aside, what differentiates the kind of work my younger, even more irritating, self began calling currybooks from the greater body of diasporic novels? For one, currybooks typically detail a wrenching sense of being in two worlds at once, torn between the traditions of the East and the liberating, if often unrewarding, freedoms of the West—as with, for example, V. V. Ganeshananthan’s 2008 Love Marriage, in which the Sri Lankan–American protagonist traces her ancestry and its impact on her present at the deathbed of her Tamil Tiger uncle. There’s typically also a generational divide, a bridge littered with pakoras and Reese’s Pieces that cannot be crossed except with soulful looks and tangential arguments. Most often we’re looking at a displaced South Asian character in the UK, North America, or Western Europe, searching for place, belonging, and an outer and inner shape to her identity. This protagonist has perhaps been displaced before birth, by her parents.
As South Asian literature (a term just as nonspecific but functionally useful as Indian food) grew throughout the seventies and eighties to become an increasingly mainstream cultural force in the West, a generic calcification began to appear around certain elements. This thread of diasporic literature became a subgenre unto itself, and it’s now a sure thing that you’ll find a disconnected-family/ roots-rediscovery page-turner with exotic red silks, black braided hair, and perhaps a mango on the cover among the stacked books at Costco, or on a chain-bookstore table under an ‘Eastern Journeys’ placard. These books bear titles like The Golden Son (by Shilpi Somaya Gowda), The Orphan Keeper (by Camron Wright, who is white, but the book is ‘based on a true story’ of kidnapping and orphan-selling in India, and therefore fits comfortably into this authenticity-rich subgenre), The Hindi-Bindi Club (Monica Pradhan), and The Mistress of Spices (Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni). There is strong, sincere prose in many of these books, while others are solid entertainments. Regardless of literary quality, they typically hit enough nostalgia, authenticity, and exoticism points to score decently on Goodreads.
When these books are really bad, nuance is out the door, as mothers and fathers screech rules and edgy white girlfriends and boyfriends offer drugs. Some of this reflects the lived experience of many South Asians, of course, but the poles of the pure-if-backward East in opposition to the corrupt-but-free West in these stories is drawn so strictly that the books become fairy tales by default. Books that escape the codifications of the genre often interrogate it—Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (later made into a television show scored by David Bowie and starring a pre-Lost Naveen Andrews) called bullshit on East and West equally. The protagonist is a sixties hippie teen whose father sets himself up as a junior maharishi in London’s suburbs, with unholy goals of sexual and financial enrichment. It’s possible for vendors of South Asian spiritual groundedness to make the move west, whether by plane ticket or by book—and it’s also possible for South Asian emigrants to the West, and for their children, to long for the truths of the past and a pure homeland.
White writers have certainly pursued the authenticity of the imagined ancestral past that is the birthright of every second- or third-generation member of the South Asian diaspora. Getting back to the real, right thing is, after all, a key part of Elizabeth Gilbert’s overwhelmingly successful spiritual self-help/travel memoir, 2006’s Eat, Pray, Love, a cousin to a certain subgenre of books in the widening field of South Asian literature. Gilbert’s travel experience in the book reflects a particularly modern privilege: allocating circumscribed experiences to particular cultures and geographies, designating each place with a desire or goal. In Gilbert’s predetermination of how her year of self-discovery was going to unfold, India was the pray-place, after her feasting in Italy. The pounds she gained in experience of gelato, cheese, pasta, and bread on what her friend Susan calls the ‘No Carb Left Behind’ tour are to be abandoned, along with the spiritual clutter of her past, in her guru’s ashram. One of her ashram pals, ‘Richard from Texas,’ describes the place where Gilbert starts her Indian sojourn as ‘a beautiful place of worship, surrounded by grace. Take this time, every minute of it. Let things work themselves out here in India.’
At that line, the quietude of Gilbert’s time in India, and its consequent artificiality, becomes striking: in exposing herself to spiritual truth, the overmastering fact of India’s population, its crammed density—‘the crowd,’ as Salman Rushdie put it in a 1987 essay, ‘The Riddle of Midnight,’ on the separation of India and Pakistan—is nowhere to be seen. She’s in perpetual peace, with other seekers. From most accounts I’ve read, extending from the Raj to the present day, peace and quiet in India is an expensive commodity. In the country that Gilbert has allocated the role of finding her inner truth, she’s strictly averse to any outer experience. Her resistance to getting out of her Indo-spiritual mode by engaging with the country emerges as a reluctance to taste it:
A few times a week, Richard and I wander into town and share one small bottle of Thumbs-Up—a radical experience after the purity of vegetarian ashram food—always being careful not to actually touch the bottle with our lips. Richard’s rule about traveling in India is a sound one: ‘Don’t touch anything but yourself.’
This may not be explicitly racist, but it is hilariously cautious—a hundred pages ago, Gilbert was dining on the intestines of a newborn lamb, but in India she’ll decide that her needs are best served by staying in the ashram for the full term of her spiritual education. Like Amit Chaudhuri, averse to the street food of Calcutta because it wouldn’t dovetail with his idea of a necessary experience of the city, Gilbert has a clear idea of what she’s there for. She didn’t come to India to eat. Where Italy was a place for gustatory hedonism, India is a place of spiritual honesty and reconstruction, and damned if she’s going to allow it to be anything else. Her time in the country, after her days of self-confrontation and looking for the yogic God in herself, ends with a flight out of ‘India at four in the morning, which is typical of how India works.’ Maybe it is typical—I haven’t been, myself. And it’s likely that Gilbert has been back and experienced a fuller version of the country since. But can she make the call of what’s typical of the country or not after having spent a few weeks meditating in a series of quiet rooms?
Jhumpa Lahiri’s experience of Italy, a country she moved to in order to deepen a long-standing relationship with its language, speaks to another aspect of the inescapable realities of travel. In Other Words (2015), Lahiri’s written-in-Italian account of a mature writer coming to grips with a different language, can’t help but become a travelogue, as her Italian can only make the final leap toward fluency by her moving from America to Rome—a trip back to someone else’s old country, in pursuit of a language she wanted to make her own.
Despite her advanced level of proficiency in the language, Lahiri’s white husband was taken by Italians to be the real native speaker in the family: ‘But your husband must be Italian. He speaks perfectly, without any accent,’ a saleswoman tells Lahiri, ignoring her husband’s clearly Spanish accent and Lahiri’s higher level of fluency. The saleswoman can’t hear Lahiri’s better grasp of the language, simply because she doesn’t look like her Italian should be better than her white husband’s. While Elizabeth Gilbert’s Americanness is often called to her attention in Italy, in relation to her body, her manner, and her clunky use of language, the sense of rejection is never as profound as the one Lahiri takes from her experience of her language being deemed inferior to her husband’s. Gilbert wanted to visit Italy to eat, to nourish herself in this place-away. Lahiri wants to absorb the country, to inhabit its language and ultimately the place itself. She’s confronted with the fact that racism prevents this from occurring once she leaves the domain of pure language and enters the life of the country: on the Italian pages she writes and reads, she can belong, she can have an authentic experience and be accepted by the language as her mastery of it increases. But in the streets, she’s still a brown woman among white Italians. Gilbert’s whiteness allows her to shape Italy to fit the preconceived experience she needs to extract; Lahiri can’t. To get the Indian experience she needs, Gilbert also has to shut out the country outside and stay in her ashram the whole time—even privilege and whiteness aren’t enough to corral the actual life of India on the other side of the meditation gates.
Nothing beats actual travel for a real education, they say (‘they’ quite often being bartenders or servers or students who spend off-seasons fucking hot Australians or Swedes in hostels and reporting back on markets and forest temples seen along the way). But entering the subjectivity of a novel or a travel memoir is a crucial supplement to a worldly education. Elizabeth Gilbert’s India is one I’ll never see, because I can as little imagine myself spending weeks in an ashram as I can envision going to astronaut camp or being good at sports. As a minor character says in the film Total Recall: ‘What is it that is exactly the same about every single vacation you have ever taken?…You! You’re the same. No matter where you go, there you are.’
There’s a subtle difference between travel and tourism—one deeply bound up with authenticity. Elizabeth Gilbert largely accepts her role as a tourist, as she’s shaping each place she visits to the brand of experience she wants to emerge with. Jhumpa Lahiri’s sojourn in Rome (where she still lives, writing in Italian) is a purposeful inhabitation of another culture, a visit that’s meant to turn into a stay, and maybe one day into a kind of homecoming. Belonging and authenticity aren’t quite the same thing, and Lahiri, on account of race, cannot ever completely belong to this other place.
Great travel writing allows you to travel as someone else. And certain brands of writing about food or culture allow you to remember yourself as someone else. Part of the appeal of authentic-Indian cookbooks like Monsoon Diary and diasporic narratives like Sabrina Dhawan’s script for the Mira Nair film Monsoon Wedding, in which members of a dispersed Punjabi family return to Delhi for a wedding and end up confronting past traumas, is the chance to enter someone else’s remembering. We want to trace a journey backward, to its completion in the past. The more often a tale of returning to the real in past and homeland is told, however, the greater the chance is that its recurring elements start to ring false. It doesn’t help when the publisher’s marketing moves, such as inserting Monsoon into the title of a memoir-cookbook released a couple of years after Nair’s hit movie, transparently commercialise South Asian recollections and nostalgia.
This idea of travelling as someone else drew me to another Italian journey, a fictional one by a contemporary of Rushdie’s. In his novel The Comfort of Strangers, Ian McEwan talks about the moment of entering the authentic, as his husband-and-wife protagonists enter a space they realise they’d been dreaming of throughout their trip to Venice. Robert, the man who befriends the couple and eventually lures them into an experience so unpleasantly real it involves passing through sex into death, tempts them with the promise of a ‘very good place’ for food. The place where they end up offers only booze, but even if their stomachs stay empty it nonetheless gives them something they truly crave. It’s the real deal, a place where people like them—outsiders—aren’t supposed to be.
Then, despite the absence of food, and helped on by the wine, they began to experience the pleasure, unique to tourists, of making a discovery, finding something real. They relaxed, they settled into the noise and smoke; they in turn asked the serious, intent questions of tourists gratified to be talking at last to an authentic citizen.
This is precisely the same experience-request that books by brown people are often asked to fulfill, and not only for the audience—often, the author also seems to want that experience of becoming an authentic citizen. A trip to the subcontinent is supposed to be more than a holiday, and a book about people of South Asian descent is supposed to be more than a novel. An audience may demand that it fulfill the function of literary tourism, offering not just a glimpse of another place and time, but an experience of authenticity. And for the diasporic writer? He or she gains the experience of that pleasure, unique to tourists, of making a discovery, finding something real. The disconnected experience of being a person in the West, let alone a person of colour in the West, doesn’t lend itself to a sense of comfort or peace: fitting your own story to a narrative where answers are to be found in a familial, national past can be extremely soothing.
Is there a problem with these expectations existing in the genre? Only that they constrain and limit the potential methods of expression for brown writers. No page can be entirely blank when you have a general idea of the shape of what you’re supposed to write. For a diasporic writer, the hidden demand to play both tour guide and tourist could lead to a fulfilling negotiation of identity, family, and place—and it could also seal off other paths of exploration, other stories the writer may feel more driven to tell, to an audience that he or she may suspect doesn’t exist. A tacit request from readers to create an authentic experience can, ironically, result in the opposite: false stories, or stories with false elements burying truthful details and experience, built on conventions created by other writers and the categorisations of the publishing industry.
Daniyal Mueenudin, author of the excellent 2009 short story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, offers a case study in how the sense of discovering authenticity and the comfort of a homeland can function for readers and writers. The stories are multifaceted and complex, but Mueenudin’s introductory essay to the Reading Group Guide at the end of the book drives directly to the authenticity-appeal of his work:
Half Pakistani and half American, I have spent equal amounts of time in each country, and so, knowing both cultures well and belonging to both, I equally belong to neither, look at both with an outsider’s eyes. These stories are written from the place in between, written to help both me and my reader bridge the gap.
Of the eight stories contained In Other Rooms, seven are set in Pakistan and one in Paris. The ‘gap,’ apparently, is to be bridged in one direction: toward Pakistan, and away from the West. Handily, this journey parallels the biographical fragment Mueenudin provides us with in his essay.
Mueenudin grew up on a Pakistani farm that parallels the parcels of terrain that connect the upper-, middle-, and working-class characters in his stories. He gained insight into the lives of the servants and villagers around his father’s property, who paid little attention to him because he was a child: ‘I learned the rhythms and details of their lives in a way I never could as a grown-up…These people, their gestures, and intonations as I observed them in my childhood, appear throughout the stories in In Other Rooms, Other Wonders.’ After college at Dartmouth in America, Mueenudin returned to take control of the family farm as his father was dying—with the administration of his land stabilised, Mueenudin returned to the US, got a Yale law degree, and then a job.
Sitting in my office on the forty-second floor of a black skyscraper in Manhattan, looking out over the East river, I gradually developed confidence in the stories I had lived through during those years on the farm. I realised that I was in a unique position to write these stories for a Western audience—stories about the farm and the old feudal ways, the dissolving feudal order and the new way coming, the sleek businessmen from the cities. I resigned from the law firm, returned to Pakistan, and began writing the stories that make up this book.
Mueenudin’s short account of his life is, necessarily, missing details. But it’s telling that after being specific about two of his degrees—his undergraduate work at Dartmouth and the law degree at Yale—he skips over his MFA at the University of Arizona, where he began to write the Pakistan-set stories that eventually captured the attention of top NYC agent Bill Clegg. These details are also part of the truth, and parallel the bios of most modern literary writers in the West. Still, for a reading group taking on stories set in a distant land, revelatory of insider truths about many levels of a culture that Mueenudin is in a ‘unique position to write…for a Western audience,’ workshop and agent talk isn’t salient. In fact, it interferes with the reader’s conception of a leap from childhood experience in Pakistan to a not-quite-fulfilling adulthood in the West, then back to studied reflection in Pakistan. What Mueenudin puts across in his short essay is his link to the realness of the Pakistan he grew up in, where he had access to villagers that would be impossible to regain as an adult. He wants to authenticate the stories, by showing readers how he was tapped into a life that was earthy, more about his knowledge of the ‘fertiliser, diesel engines, and the qualities of soil’ of running his father’s farm than the airy irreality of life on the forty-second floor in Manhattan.
To be clear, Mueenudin’s pursuit of truths in the past and his half-homeland of Pakistan don’t mean he emerges with fanciful or half-baked stories. His hyper-awareness of the unjust but seemingly unchangeable nature of class relations, familial obligations, and the complex inequalities of relationships between the sexes everywhere from Pakistan to Paris make his work much more than a series of souvenir keepsakes of the lives of the unimaginably poor in Pakistan. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Mueenudin’s deep ties to Pakistan, to dismiss his writing about the country of his childhood as a commercial decision. The stories are enriched by a lack of nostalgic sentimentality about life, rich and poor, in Pakistan, and a tangible discontent and longing for escape that affects characters rich and poor. One of the characters in ‘Our Lady of Paris,’ encountering his son’s white American girlfriend, admits that he wouldn’t have minded being born in America: ‘The one thing I’ve missed, I sometimes feel, is the sensation of being absolutely free, to do exactly what I like, to go where I like, to act as I like. I suspect only an American ever feels that. You aren’t weighed down by your families, and you aren’t weighed down by history.’ Mueenudin’s connection to his family, his personal history, and its relation to the changing face of Pakistan and to the West point to another reaction to the ‘absolute’ freedom his character describes. When presented with this freedom, thanks to financial possibility and a top-class law degree, Mueenudin’s ties to land and family still have a powerful appeal—one that also attracts readers, both from the West and the brown diaspora, who can’t boast his family bonds and lived experiences of a homeland. Books like his don’t only give us access to a far-off place by depicting life there with precision: for readers seeking an experience of a different home, closer to the earth than a skyscraper office, writers like Mueenudin provide transport. And there’s something about the divided subcontinent that has long made it a place that readers, travellers, and eaters look to for truth.
Even if the subcontinent was never one’s home to begin with, it can serve—and has served—as a spiritual home in conversation, books, films, and pilgrimage-like trips. Since the example of the Beatles, a major influx of Western tourists have come to India in search of spiritual reality: the authentic home for the soul that Elizabeth Gilbert sought, a place where truth can be found in spiritual slogans, riddles, in long, cross-legged communions with silence and humidity. Gita Mehta observed both these visitors and the industry of fake fakirs who arose to embrace their curiosity and take their money in her 1979 book Karma Cola. As the vivid success of Eat, Pray, Love and Chip Wilson’s Lululemon empire have proven, the guru era is far from over. It’s alive both in the form of useful spiritual relationships and in darker incarnations. There are fraudulent ashrams and cultish inveiglers all over the subcontinent and in the islands where we scattered: everyone has a cousin or six who gives 38 per cent of their income to a Leader who, in exchange, relieves them of their connections to family and friends. In the West, too, gurus proliferate, in small local temples, Sai Baba megastructures, and the Bikram Yoga training camp.
Mehta’s book goes beyond simply calling shit on hippies and drawing scolding portraits of false gurus, and many of her observations can be easily drawn over to reflect on the writing and reading of diasporic South Asian lit. Karma Cola is history-as-reportage, a sardonic chronicle of minor vengeance for colonialism and yet another rippling development in the relationship between India and the West, the series of colonisers who just wouldn’t go away and who the country can now actually extract value from, a welcome variation on the one-way cash flow of the former empirical relationship. India could sell its wisdom, packaged for consumption by America and Europe’s young and directionless—or old and directionless, for that matter. A welcome influx of cash in exchange for knowledge or simply the ability to clear one’s mind of clutter drifted into post-partition India from Europe and the Americas, and, inevitably, leaked back out—the residual path-to-wisdom promises of the Maharishi giving an often-unwanted sheen of higher truth to the work of writers and cooks who wanted to do good work.
For Westerners, the sixties and seventies represented a key moment in the creation of what Rushdie has called an ‘India of the mind.’ This India contained simpler, purer ways and answers to the most difficult problems through the miracle of relinquishing worldly wealth to a country willing to accept that wealth. This country-sized temple had been building up in white minds for parts of the past two centuries—George Harrison’s sitar lessons just accelerated construction. Mehta writes:
Earlier in the century the Brahmins of Western intellectual thought had paved the way. Aldous Huxley had struggled with Vedanta and dared to expand his mind. William Butler Yeats…found ‘in that East something ancestral in ourselves, something we must bring into the light.’ These were the thoughts of the highest caste, the scholar, deliberating on language, meaning and despair.
Now it was the turn of the populists, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, to become pacemakers for a faltering Western heart, and they achieved a more striking success.
Next in this path of inheritance, decades on from Beatlemania, is the displaced diasporic subject: the brown writer, or the protagonist in that writer’s novel, who is embedded in the West but also has a ‘faltering heart’ in need of revival by the ancestral tonic of a voyage east. Think of Mueenudin’s closing paragraph, where he depicts himself adrift in his Manhattan skyscraper, stuck in a job where he knows he simply doesn’t belong, before setting off to tell stories of the Pakistan that he knows. Even diasporic writers who aren’t writing narratives of nostalgia and healing homecoming must contend with the spectre of creating an India-of-the-mind, both for themselves and for a Western readership.
In ‘Imaginary Homelands,’ his essential 1982 essay on the plurality of identities possessed by any Indian diasporic writer, Rushdie discusses coming to the dilemma of realism early in the composition of his 1981 novel Midnight’s Children, and building faulty memories and altered perceptions into his characters to compensate:
But if we do look back, we must do so with the knowledge—which gives rise to profound uncertainties—that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.
For the past two decades or so, many of the novels dealing with the South Asian diaspora have depicted a solid subcontinent and a wavering West: the mirage is in the writer’s and character’s present, while the truth lies somewhere in the past, somewhere ‘back home.’ Chanu, the homecoming-obsessed husband in Monica Ali’s 2003 bestselling Booker-shortlisted novel Brick Lane, is a prime example of a character who believes his unsatisfying life can only be repaired by reversing his emigration. His lack of a worthy job and appreciation from his superiors in London, his struggles with money and intellectual fulfilment—Chanu believes they’ll all be repaired by a return to Bangladesh, while his wife is profoundly sceptical. Ali has the realist sense not to allow Chanu to be proved right, but dozens of novelists influenced by Ali’s foundational diasporic novel have accepted the lure of locating resolution and truth in the past. Chanu’s return is a disappointment: he goes back to the land of his past, but can’t step into an idealised memory, or a younger version of himself. When his wife asks him if the return has granted him what he wanted, he replies, ‘The English have a saying: You can’t step into the same river twice. Do you know it? Do you know what it means?’ Chanu’s saying goes further back than the English. It’s Greek, Heraclitus, a take on the essential hollowness of nostalgia and the danger of basing decisions around it that’s over two thousand years old, and still difficult for readers, writers, and Chanu to actively believe.
Despite Chanu’s inability to find a sense of home in the homeland, Brick Lane remains striking in its juxtaposition of authenticity-fetishising techniques and blunt contradictions of fanciful conceptions of the subcontinent. The book opens in Bangladesh, 1967, with a flit through homey squalor:
An hour and forty-five minutes before Nazneen’s life began—began as it would proceed for quite some time, that is to say uncertainly—her mother Rupban felt an iron fist squeeze her belly. Rupban squatted on a low three-legged stool outside the kitchen hut. She was plucking a chicken because Hamid’s cousins had arrived from Jessore and there would be a feast. ‘Cheepy-cheepy, you are old and stringy,’ she said, calling the bird by name as she always did, ‘but I would like to eat you, indigestion or no indigestion. And tomorrow I will have only boiled rice, no parathas.’
A couple of lines later, the narrator refers to Rupban’s pregnancy this way: ‘For seven months she had been ripening, like a mango on a tree.’ I’d venture to say that if the writer of these words were white and English, they’d be taken as exoticising, ham-handed (that self-dialogue, the ‘cheepy-cheepy’), the food references sticking out as markers of a situation as recognisably foreign as red soil on Mars.
The designations of poverty, of the exotic, of a cheerful comfort with one’s lot, of hospitality and familial closeness over the feast table: it’s all there, prefacing the as-yet-unborn protagonist’s uprooting to London. Ali herself was born in Bangladesh, which isn’t an incidental fact; it lends credence to her grasp of life there. But it’s incredible how imagined-from-the-outside the scene seems, if only for how often it has been emulated at varying degrees of qualities by writers after (and before) her.
These currybook elements survive Nazneen’s arranged-marriage-facilitated emigration to London: she begins to receive letters from her sister, Hasina, which are presented to the reader in broken English, lacking articles and prepositions. This despite the fact that neither sister knows English at this point in the novel, which means the letters the reader is seeing are translated through Nazneen and Ali—if Nazneen’s Bengali dialogues with her husband and friends emerge in plain English, why does this written version of Bengali emerge with such lack of fluency? ‘They still playing chess but some of piece are lost there not so many fight now.’ These aren’t the errors of a native speaker who is bad at writing—they’re the errors of a woman writing outside her native language. Nazneen’s letters from her sister are doubly translated, first rendered into English from Bengali, and then into broken English, to emphasise the separation between life for women in Bangladesh and the life Nazneen is leading in England. Added to the abject conditions that Hasina endures in her increasingly difficult life, her lack of fluency becomes code for her distance from the relative freedom that Nazneen enjoys in the West, a life she ultimately can’t bring herself to abandon when Chanu makes the decision to move the family back.
Hasina’s broken-English-Bengali has the same reality as the statues that Nazneen and her husband see in the windows of the Pakistani restaurants near their home:
Days of the Raj restaurant had a new statue in the window: Ganesh seated against a rising sun, his trunk curling playfully on his breast. The Lancer already displayed RadhaKrishna; Popadum went with Saraswati; and Sweet Lassi covered all the options with a black-tongued, evil-eyed Kali and a torpid soapstone Buddha. ‘Hindus?’ said Nazneen when the trend first started. ‘Here?’
Chanu patted his stomach. ‘Not Hindus. Marketing. Biggest god of all.’ The white people liked to see the gods. ‘For authenticity,’ said Chanu.
Ali’s novel adds a supplement to Chanu’s observation: brown readers and writers want to see authenticity, too, especially if it’s packaged with a message that the freedoms of the West can be had alongside a long-distance experience of the subcontinent. Ignoring Chanu and Heraclitus, as well as Ali’s precise and subtle delineation of the expectations placed on brown writers, the genre that Ali’s book flirts with continued to thrive.
In Amulya Malladi’s 2003 novel The Mango Season, which kicks off every new section with a recipe, tech worker Priya Rao leaves her fiancé, Nick, at the airport to travel back to India after seven years in the US. Upon her return, she finds talk of an arranged marriage, yes, but also a vibrant, sensory overload that defines India in the peppier examples of currybooks. ‘Everything that had seemed natural just seven years ago seemed unnatural and chaotic compared to what I had been living with in the United States.’ Priya retains an American stiffness, and an attentiveness to carefully washing her fruit, as she wards off her mother’s attempts to inveigle her into an arranged marriage. Her memories of India, a place she now finds almost surreal, become more authentic, more real, as she reacclimatises:
‘Yes,’ I said, and dropped my eyes to my plate where my fingers danced with the rice and the creamy bottle gourd pappu. How easy it was to eat with my fingers again. I had forgotten the joys of mixing rice and pappu with my fingers. Food just tasted better when eaten with such intimacy.
Throughout her family conflicts and arguments over women’s freedom, the sensory largeness of India—the heat, dirt, colours, tastes, and scents of Hyderabad—provides its own unchallengeable argument. ‘India was not just a country you visited,’ Priya says, in a phone call with her American boyfriend’s mother, ‘it was a country that sank into your blood and stole a part of you.’ Priya goes on describe the smells, tastes, and noise of the country, as well as her hatred of the ‘bigotry, the treatment of women,’ concluding that it is still her country. Despite this balance of hatred and reluctant acceptance, India provides Priya with a sense of belonging, as well as truths and answers born in the honesty of the conflicts that arose from her homecoming.
In a post-novel appendix in which she discusses the book with the engineering-school classmate whose name she borrowed for her main character, Malladi talks about how using India as a setting for her protagonist’s epiphany allowed her to use reality, to avoiding having to ‘make up stuff’: ‘For me writing The Mango Season was like taking a trip to India. I’d forgotten how good chaat tastes, or how good ganna juice tastes and when I was writing about it I could all but smell that sugarcane juice.’ Malladi’s recreated India, then, isn’t an India of the mind, to her: it’s a recreation of the place, the novel itself a comfortable return to the country she left. Her descriptions of food do ring true, and I want to taste that sugarcane juice, too. The very casualness of Priya’s quick passing over of caste and class issues in phrases such as her aside about how the ‘maidservant Rajni was not a Brahmin and so she was not allowed inside the kitchen’ serve as a jarring reminder that India is, indeed, a different place. The abrupt and frequently hammy dialogue, however, along with Priya’s sweeping pronouncements about the country’s narrow-mindedness, do give readers, or at least this reader, pause. Is this India that Priya returns to, and that Malladi re-inhabits on her novelist’s ‘trip to India,’ being viewed with heightened clarity after years away, or with a new collection of Westernised views? Despite Priya’s respect for the ‘essence’ of India, for its changeless place as her country, she discovers that the country
was not home anymore. Home was in San Francisco with Nick. Home was Whole Foods grocery store and fast food at KFC. Home was Pier 1 and Wal-Mart. Home was 7-Eleven and Starbucks. Home was familiar, Hyderabad was a stranger; India was as alien, exasperating, and sometimes exotic to me as it would be to a foreigner.
Yet even a negative nostalgia, the state in which Priya has arrested India as the repository of the family, prejudices, arranged marriages, and provincial values that she was desperate to escape as a teenager, provides the answer she needs: the place she is from, her country, is a fixed part of her past, unchanging and behind her. The truth she takes with her is that her present and future can happen only in the West.
Malladi’s titular mangoes have a symbolic weight equal to my beloved curry, especially to the marketing departments of publishers. Pakistani-American novelist Soniah Kamal ran into a mango dilemma that she describes in her 2016 essay ‘When My Authentic Is Your Exotic,’ wondering whether including the fruit in her book would become a statement:
If I put the mango in, was I a sell-out? If I took it out, was I being true to the season? What fruit could I substitute? A jamun? But what is the English name for jamun? Should an English name even matter, a jamun being a jamun, like a corn dog is a corn dog. Would I yet have to italicise jamun? Who is the audience for my novel, anyway? Everyone? But what does everyone mean? Should I stick to an apple or a banana? Or would that be too generic?
Finally deciding she ‘can neither deny reality for fear of the disdainful Eastern eye any more than I can write in fear of needing to fulfill the expectations of the orientalist Western gaze,’ Kamal allowed her characters to eat the goddamn mangoes, which made perfect sense in the scene she was writing, set at the peak of Pakistani summer. Reading this essay, I knew that the mangobooks Kamal dreaded seeing her novel shelved amongst were my currybooks—books that signal their falseness by underlining their authenticity, and placing that authenticity in a homeland lost to time and distance. The blended, diasporic person, existing away, is torn from one place, yes, and exists in another place, yes: but to assume that the before-place, the India or the Mauritius or the Trinidad, possesses a heightened reality and truth, what Kamal calls ‘the authentic exotic’? That’s not something I can accept in what I read, write, or remember. It’s also a type of narrative that does injustice to the true complexity, hilarity, danger, and weirdness of life as a brown person living anywhere in the world, either far away from their supposed home or right where their ancestors have dwelt for centuries.
Kamal passes over another audience, neither the ‘disdainful Eastern eye’ nor the ‘orientalist Western gaze’ that she never wants to write for. It’s the diasporic reader, a first- or second- or third-generation-away-from-the-homeland person who also longs for a version of what Malladi serves in The Mango Season. Western isn’t actually synonymous with ‘white’—we live here, too. The diasporic sense of nostalgia, of belonging, of home, isn’t simply shaped within brown households. The West leaks over the threshold, creating an overlap in what diasporic and other Western readers want from books by brown writers: and in that overlap is authenticity, and a sense that there is solidity, reality, and truth in that place and past that was left behind.
While the growth of the South Asian genre hasn’t injured the capacity of diasporic and subcontinental writers to produce original, unique works, genre rules and parameters emerged as the commercial viability of immigrant fiction became clear, and editors and publishing boards began to seek variations on a certain type of brown story. There’s profit to be made in a relatable, seemingly authentic presentation of race and culture, even if there’s a placeless tinge of Westernisation, subtle and ignorable under a formulaic blend as precisely calibrated as a Marks & Spencer chicken tikka masala. (I haven’t had one of these since M&S closed their Canadian stores in the nineties, when I would occasionally nuke one of them for a treat—if my preteen palate can be trusted, they were at least as rich as the real thing, even if something was missing in the flavour, and certainly from the soft fibres of the defrosted, industrial chicken). But what’s lost in this pursuit of the authentic is, perhaps, the reality of what lies in that placeless tinge: differentiated immigrant existences, ways of being and tasting that aren’t about pursuing the lost, truthful flavours of generations past.
Is there something wrong with finding comfort and truth in tropes, whether as a South Asian writer or reader? Kamal and most other brown writers, including me, dread the idea of ‘serving’ a white audience, which is what tropes most clearly signal to people trying to publish in a market dominated by white editors and readers. In her essay ‘Why Am I Brown? South Asian Fiction and Pandering to Western Audiences,’ Jabeen Akhtar describes the defining elements of pandering ‘South Asian novels published in the West from 2000 forwards,’ an era she sees as having been ‘ushered forth by [Jhumpa Lahiri’s 1999] Pulitzer Prize–winning Interpreter of Maladies and all the copycats that followed.’ Tagging her list onto the end of writer Jeet Thayil’s exhaustion with the ‘mangoes, spices and monsoons’ that define these books, Akhtar adds ‘saris, bangles, oppressive husbands/fathers, arranged marriages, grains of rice, jasmine, virgins, and a tacky, overproduced Bollywood dance of rejection and obsession with Western Culture.’ Akhtar is also the author of ‘The 17 Elements of a (Bad) South Asian Novel,’ which I’m pretty sure is the essay that made Sandip Roy realise that his 2015 novel, Don’t Let Him Know, was slightly trope-ridden.
‘There was a recent article that had come out,’ Roy explained in a radio interview with NPR, ‘which talked about all the familiar tropes of South Asian fiction in America, and they had mentioned in there—mangoes, arranged marriage, a wise grandmother. And I went through the list and I was like, oh, my god, I have all of them in my book…But I’d like to think that I have them for a reason. I have them because they came naturally to me, and it was lovely.’ Here’s how the tropes that Roy is referring to shake out in one part of Don’t Let Him Know, where a character tells his mother that he intends to follow through on his dream of becoming a chef:
‘But you never even stepped into the kitchen when you were a boy in Calcutta,’ she said. ‘What do you even know of cooking?’
‘I’d love to cook, Ma, if only you’d let me step into the kitchen,’ he said sharply. ‘Ever since you came you’ve just taken it over. I’ve learned to cook in America and I really enjoy it.’
‘You do?’ She stared at him as if here was a stranger. Chefs were perfectly coiffed celebrities like Madhur Jaffrey in beautiful silk saris, not Amit. She couldn’t imagine him on television with an apron around him talking about sautéing chicken breasts and marinating kebabs.
‘It’s like meditation,’ he said. ‘It calms me.’ Then he paused and said, ‘And maybe you can teach me how. I could watch you and maybe we’ll even recreate your recipes, write a cookbook together—“Bengali Meals for an American Kitchen.” Wouldn’t that be fun, just you and me?’
Romola smiled and shook her head gently at herself. She had been afraid she had lost Amit to America. Who could have thought that accursed letter from so long ago would bring him back to her? They used to call him her little tail when he was a toddler because he’d follow her everywhere. Today he was looking at her with those same eyes again as if she knew the answers and could wrap him in the love of her sari.
The stories that come before us are inescapable. When Sandip Roy talks about how tropes came ‘naturally’ to him, it’s not just that the tropes reflect real circumstances of his background and life: it’s that the books and stories that came before him have embedded genre rules that can only be evaded by a determined writer.
But as Kamal points out, mangoes really do grow on the subcontinent. So do the spices, even if they were imported some centuries ago. Perhaps there’s a native truth to genre conventions that catch on so solidly—Sandip Roy may say so, in defending the tropes in his novel that reflect his own experience. Just as the heroic beats of action cinema and the trials-to-consolations rhythms of romantic comedies resonate with audiences and creators, immigrant novels that cleave to embedded beats of authenticity still speak of a genuine sense of displacement that, while it isn’t always based in lived experience or doesn’t always hearken to a past and other place that actually exists, appeals to a vast range of writers, readers, and watchers. They—we—are in need of confirmation that the alienation we feel is at least shared, that it resonates for another, and that there is perhaps an answer to it in an embrace with the realness of another place and culture, the one that was truly always our own.
Immigrant narratives allow readers to live in someone else’s past while sharing their sense of the fragility of that particular history: that the sense of alienation has roots in reality is as important to the reader and the writer as the idea of a distant land and a time that holds answers. For the brown-skinned writer, some versions of nostalgic existence are more appealing than others. ‘The ideal fusion fantasy,’ observes Githa Hariharan in Almost Home, ‘is a global address that allows you to hold on to the safe familiarity of provincialism.’
In both the writing and the living, the deeper into detail you go—as is true for any place, people, or culture—the more a narrative of collective mass culture becomes a story of particularity, of regional and familial specificities, often defined against the stories outside of themselves. The diasporic bond is a shared, invented history, based on real events and a real place, but shared only as a tissue of agreements, disagreements, and ideas imposed from the outside. Cultural and family history is a fruit that expands as it is peeled, until it is too large to be gripped in the hands or the mind.