1890s to World War II—the Pioneers

During the period that the British ruled the Indian subcontinent, many sailors, soldiers, and traders found their way to the United States. As Vivek Bald has written in Bengali Harlem, many of these people came as sojourners and eventually settled in various cities and established businesses. Many intermarried with the local black community and lived amongst communities of color in places like Harlem, New Orleans, and Baltimore. In the West Coast, people came first to British Columbia in Canada, and as immigration laws tightened and labor markets dried up there, they moved South across the border and down the West Coast of the United States. Although a majority of these migrants were Sikh and Muslim, they were often referred to as “Hindoos.” Their numbers were not large, and they experienced racist backlash in towns like Bellingham, Washington, because of their willingness to work for lower wages. ⁶ Some of these immigrants formed the Ghadar (Revolution) Party in 1913 in Astoria, Oregon, and eventually established themselves in California. ⁷ Most of them were agriculturalists, and some were students who came to the major public universities on the West Coast and intermingled with the agricultural immigrants. Several of these immigrants married Mexican women because of the anti-miscegenation laws in place and a Punjabi-Mexican community formed in California. ⁸ These early immigrants sought to simultaneously fight racist immigration laws in the US and Canada that were exclusionary and also to resist British imperialism at home. They produced newspapers, radical tracts, and revolutionary poetry that focused on these twin goals. Important themes in the writing of this period include cultural alienation, racism and its impact on everyday life, and the depiction of India as a mystical space that offers spiritual renewal and refuge.

One of the earliest South Asian writers of this period was Dhan Gopal Mukerji, who was best known for his works of children’s literature including Gay Neck, the Story of a Pigeon, which won a Newberry award in 1928. Mukerji also published an autobiography, Caste and Outcast, in which he describes his life both in India and in the United States. The second part of the autobiography describes in great detail how isolated Mukerji felt in the US, where he had arrived and had enrolled as a student at the University of California. He had no money and had to work to support himself. His upper caste upbringing in India had not provided him with the kind of skills (cooking, housekeeping, cleaning) necessary for the menial jobs he found near the university campus. He writes of his connections with other minorities, such as Jewish Americans and African Americans, who helped him along the way. Although there were several other Indian students in California, Mukerji avoided their company because he found their radical politics problematic. He connected with students and thinkers from different political and religious persuasions to debate philosophy and religion. Much of his energies were focused on Indian (Hindu) spirituality and explaining India’s mysticism to the curious American. The autobiography speaks to Mukerji’s exploration of his spiritual identity as a Hindu in America. He draws on an orientalist tradition of imagining India as a spiritual space in his writing and seeks to promulgate the glories of Indian civilization to an American audience, including children. His narrative also speaks to his profound alienation from both American culture and the fledgling Indian American community, and Mukerji’s alienation eventually led to his suicide in 1936. ⁹

Another person who writes about life in this early period of South Asian immigration is Kartar Dhillon (1915–2008). Dhillon was the daughter of Bakshish Singh Dhillon and Ratan Kaur, who had come to the West Coast in 1897 and 1910 respectively. Dhillon’s autobiographical fragments published in the latter half of the twentieth century outline the rigors of the pioneers’ lives. In “The Parrot’s Beak” (www.saada.org/tides/article/20121004-1114), Dhillon recounts her mother’s last days when she was dying in a hospital from a tumor. We learn that Ratan Kaur had been widowed young and had eight children. She had been harsh in her treatment of her daughters, particularly Kartar, and had managed to raise them through the family’s sharecropping on West Coast farms. Dhillon speaks of the difficulties that she faced after her mother’s death in caring for her younger siblings. Dhillon married another Punjabi revolutionary and also had children when still in her teens. Although the men in the Ghadar Party were fighting for social and political change, their treatment of their women reflected Punjabi patriarchal values. Dhillon recognizes that her mother’s harshness came from her isolation in the United States. Since women were very few in number, her mother mostly lived amongst men, bereft of the support of women in her extended family, which would have been possible had she lived in India. Her female companionship came from her daughters as they grew older. Dhillon’s recollection of her mother’s life in the early days of South Asian immigration remains the only female-centered account of immigrant lives at this time. In her other work—such as the narrative for the film Turbans made by her granddaughter Erika Surat Andersen and an autobiographical fragment she wrote about her return to Astoria, Oregon, and still another piece in which she memorializes her brother, Bud Dhillon—Kartar Dhillon captures both the hardships of minority life as Sikhs and describes in great detail the resistance work undertaken by the early Punjabi migrants. ¹⁰

The autobiographical narratives of this period are significant in the development of South Asian American writing because they capture the everyday experiences of the pioneering South Asians. These immigrants found their way in a culture that was significantly different from their own. They also experienced ambivalence in terms of citizenship and belonging in both the United States and in India under imperial control. The British considered them as inferior and subject peoples, and the Americans saw them as aliens whose only purpose was to work under harsh conditions. In these narratives, the authors assert their humanity and turn their gaze onto American life and offer critical insights. Although they dream of democracy for India, they are aware of the problematic place of minorities in American democracy.

1965–2000—the Immigration Boom and the Emergence of South Asian American Writing:

The passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (also known as the Hart-Cellar Act) transformed the demographics of the United States. By shifting away from nation-based quotas to skills-based immigration, the United States opened the doors for educated immigrants from Asia, including South Asia. ¹¹ Immigration reform of the 1980s, which emphasized family reunification, added to the numbers of South Asian immigrants to the US, although not all of them were highly educated. Many South Asians came to the United States after 1965 as students, notably in the scientific fields. The majority of these immigrants were male, and they often stayed on in the United States for jobs.¹² However, several South Asians also came to the United States for graduate education in the humanities, including writers such as Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Divakaruni, Meena Alexander, Agha Shahid Ali, and Tahira Naqvi. Although these new immigrants were fluent in English and college-educated, they experienced racism, cultural isolation, and a deep longing for the homes they had left behind. Jhumpa Lahiri, whose parents immigrated to New England via the UK, writes about these immigrants of the professional classes in her short stories in The Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth and also in her novels. In The Namesake, she traces how a Bengali student, Ashoke, arrives in the US for graduate education, marries Ashima on one of his trips home, and establishes a life in New England. In tracing Ashoke and Ashima’s life over a couple of decades, the novel explores how immigrants who are professionals move up the economic ladder (home ownership, college education for the kids) and also build an ethnic community through informal gatherings and celebrations of milestones to capture a sense of home. The first generation yearns for the family and country left behind and seeks to recreate that culture in New England. Their children, however, are adrift. They share neither their parents’ nostalgia for home nor do they feel completely at home in American culture. The novel examines how Gogol, the son of Ashoke and Ashima, understands his identity as a Bengali/Indian/American. He changes his name and uses an Americanized short version of his new name, Nikhil, and tries to assimilate in mainstream American culture through the women he dates. When his father dies suddenly, Gogol retreats into his parents’ culture and marries the daughter of Bengali immigrants who shares his sense of alienation and hybridity. However, that shared sense of displacement is not enough for the marriage to succeed, and Gogol continues his search for home.

In her autobiography, Fault Lines, the poet Meena Alexander also writes about cultural identity and race. In one segment, she narrates how her biracial children map their identity fairly young. Whether it is her young son drawing an imaginary map of the world that shows where both sets of his grandparents live or her daughter, Svati Mariam, drawing a picture of her grandmother with a bone through her hair, thus confusing Indian American with American Indian because her school could not keep the cultural identities separate, these writers grappled with cultural, national, and racial identities in their writings.

Many of these writers also explore gender issues. In particular, Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Divakaruni, and Jhumpa Lahiri among others write about the difficulties women experience with emigration. As with Kartar Dhillon who preceded them, they are acutely aware of the struggles of women who are simultaneously navigating homeland values about family and marriage while also managing life in a new land with its own regime of gendered racialization. An early anthology of South Asian American writing Our Feet Walk the Sky, edited by a South Asian Women’s Collective, articulates the complex and heterogeneous experiences of South Asian immigrant women. In this book, women share poems, narratives, essays, and critical analyses from a breathtaking variety of South Asian backgrounds. Their works signal different linguistic, religious, and class backgrounds. Some are first-generation immigrants and others are children and grandchildren of immigrants. Some had come directly from South Asia, and others had traversed the globe as part of earlier South Asian migrations to the Caribbean or Fiji. These women do not speak as one voice, and their powerful stories explode on the page. They challenge patriarchal authority, defy heteronormativity, and express sorrow, loss, nostalgia, anger, joy, and love. The book is divided into eight sections including “Lighting the Fire Beneath Our Homes;” “Surrounded By the Walls of Our Community;” “The Labourers of this War; “The Fear that Comes from their Eyes;” “She will not be Shamed”; “Fissures of the Past;” “The Strength that Mends her Soul;” and “My Feet Found Home.” The titles and sequence of these sections tell the stories of women’s struggle against family, community, and nation and also speaks to their resilience and courage. There are also critical essays by scholars like Samita Das Dasgupta and Inderpal Grewal that reflect the pioneering work done in articulating South Asian American studies as a field which had been marginalized in both postcolonial studies and Asian American studies.

A more recent anthology, Good Girls Marry Doctors, focuses on daughterhood and critically examines familial and cultural expectations of marriage and motherhood and the price of challenging cultural values. The authors of these essays come from different religious and national backgrounds in South Asia. Triveni Gandhi explores her religious practices through family taboos on meat and alcohol and how she arrives at a personal religious philosophy after reflecting on her own experiences of Indian culture outside her family’s particular practices. Sayantani DasGupta’s “Good Girls Become Doctors” explodes the idea that Indian families force their children into medicine as a profession. The daughter of a South Asian feminist and academic, DasGupta writes about growing up in a household where community-based activism for gender equality was part of the fabric of family life. When as a college student DasGupta is considering her own professional path, she understands that her father urges her to become a doctor not because he is a patriarch but because he wants his daughter to never be dependent on another for her livelihood. Ruksana Badruddoja’s “The Fantasy of a Normative Motherhood” is a powerful essay on the author’s growing realization that the ideals of Bangladeshi American expectations of marriage and motherhood shackled her to a world that furthered capitalistic and heteronormative expectations. She writes candidly of her discovery during a challenging pregnancy that she never felt the biological clock tick nor really wanted to be a mother. Motherhood isn’t quite what she wants, and yet she continues her commitment to raise her now- teenaged daughter. In the “Politics of Being Political,” Piyali Bhattacharya, the editor of this anthology, shares her experiences of navigating parental expectations—familiarity with Indian culture, fluency in the mother tongue, good grades—until she discovered feminism in college. While her parents supported her desire to be a writer, her career as a journalist who wrote on Black Lives Matter and the Indian presence in Kashmir caused conflict with her parents. Yet, when she receives the contract to publish this book, her parents respect her desire to speak her truth.

South Asians Americans also began writing about sexual identities and the challenges gay men and women experienced within traditional family structures as well as because of their racial identities within US gay culture. The anthology A Lotus of Another Colour: An Unfolding of the South Asian Gay and Lesbian Experience was a pioneering one. The novels of Sri Lankan Canadian writer Shyam Selvadurai; Indo-Trinidadian Canadian writer Shani Mootoo; transnational writer Sandip Roy; South Asian American writers Ginu Kamani and Minal Hajratwala; and the more recent narratives by Rakesh Satyal, S. J. Sindhu, and Rahul Mehta are among the many works that speak to the heterogeneity of the South Asian gay and lesbian experiences. In recent years, the poetry and performance of Alok Vaid-Menon and a children’s book, The Boy and the Bindi, by Vivek Shraya focus on narratives of gender nonconformity. For these writers, the heteropatriarchal family is the site of psychic and physical violence, and these works question what constitutes assimilation and belonging if the family is the structure that facilitates that process.

The latter half of the twentieth century saw the emergence and establishment of South Asian American writing as a distinct genre in ethnic American literature. These literary works traced questions of national identity, cultural alienation, gender and sexuality, but they tended to be overwhelmingly produced by the professional class with many writers having advanced degrees or working in academia. Although this body of literature was referred to as South Asian American, it was also Indo-centric, and Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, or Nepali voices were peripheral.

9/11 and after:

The attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11 had profound consequences for South Asian Americans. South Asians experienced increased state surveillance, harassment at airports, violent attacks, and Islamophobia, which exacerbated their marginalization and precarity but also sharpened religious differences between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs in the United States. Sikhs were often targets of violence because they were mistaken for Muslims, and Hindus sought to distance themselves from Muslims in an attempt to identify as the “good” South Asian immigrants.¹³ Post-9/11 writing by South Asian immigrant authors has highlighted the complexities of identity. Among literary works that focus on South Asian racialization post-9/11 are Salman Rushdie’s novel Shalimar the Clown, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West, Chitra Divakaruni’s Queen of Dreams and Oleander Girl, and Ayad Akhtar’s plays Disgraced and The Who and the What.

In his Pulitzer prize-winning play, Disgraced, Akhtar examines what it means to be Muslim in post-9/11 America. His protagonist, Amir Kapoor, is a prominent Pakistani American lawyer married to a liberal white woman artist. His nephew enjoins him to defend an Imam accused of terrorist activities and being tried under the Patriot Act. Amir is concerned that his involvement would jeopardize his place in his law firm where the partners are Jewish. As the play progresses, the audience learns that the growing prejudices against Muslim Americans fuel Amir’s insecurities and impact his marriage as well as his professional relationships with colleagues in the law firm. In an explosive dinner party scene where Amir; his wife Emily; his African American colleague Jory; and her husband Isaac, an art dealer, discuss identity, race, and culture, Amir learns that Jory has been made partner over him and that his wife had an affair with Isaac. Amir falls apart and argues with Jory about their relative place in the law firm’s racialized hierarchy. When Jory and Isaac leave the party, Amir confronts his wife about her fidelity, gets further enraged, and beats her. In this controversial and violent encounter, the play foregrounds gendered and racialized tensions within post-9/11 America. The characters’ debate about anti-Black racism, anti-Semitism, Islamic values, and gender identities highlight how 9/11 has introduced new racial categories into American political and cultural life and that while different minority groups (white woman, black woman, Jewish man, Muslim man) fight about who is more oppressed, white supremacist structures remain intact.

If Akhtar explores the profound vulnerabilities of a Muslim male immigrant, a model minority from some perspectives, in post-9/11 America, then Chitra Divakaruni’s focus in her novel Queen of Dreams is on the day itself and how it bred violence. In that novel, Rakhi, the protagonist, has established a tea house in an upscale Bay Area neighborhood with her best friend, Belle, who is Sikh, and with assistance from her father. The tea house is a gathering place for people of different immigrant backgrounds where, along with tea and snacks, the customers celebrate different cultures. When the planes crash into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, a rash of violence occurs across the country as a backlash against those who look like the attackers. Belle’s boyfriend, Jespal, is attacked in one such occurrence, and the white attackers do not care about his ethnic identity; they just want revenge against foreigners or those that they see as brown-skinned aliens.

These post-9/11 works depict the social, cultural, psychic, physical, and economic impact of racism and Islamophobia on South Asian Americans. These works counter the depiction in mainstream media and popular culture (thrillers, spy fiction, and police procedurals, for example) where brown-skinned men of West Asian or South Asian descent are stereotyped as terrorist threats and where West Asian and South Asian women are often depicted as victims of their patriarchal cultures who need to be rescued by white liberal Americans.

South Asian immigrant writing in the United States now has a substantial presence within Asian American literatures and is also recognized as distinct from postcolonial South Asian writing. However, the coalescing of an identity that centers common regional culture and common experiences within the racialized regime of American immigration law also tends to homogenize and erase distinctions within this group. Not only is this writing overwhelmingly representative of professional and middle-class immigrant experiences, it also becomes marketed as an exotic body of literature. There are also erasures of subaltern identities within this writing (caste identities, sexualities, religions, refugee, and undocumented experiences); any such overview, like this essay, must, ultimately, recognize this tension between the homogeneity and diversity within this literary canon.

Notes

Works Cited