Abstract
Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The relative absence of South Asian American male writers, especially in comparison with British Asian literature, may be explained by the fact that Asian American literary traditions have generally proved more favourable to women than men. In the absence of a significant literary father figure in the manner of, for example, Salman Rushdie or Hanif Kureishi for younger British Asian male authors (and of course female writers too), South Asian lines of literary descent in the US have generally been female, following the success of Bharati Mukherjee. South Asian American men – including Dhan Gopal Mukerji, Dalip Singh Saund, Krishnalal Shridharani, Ved Mehta, A K Ramanujan, Agha Shahid Ali, Indran Amirthanayagam, G S Sharat Chandra and Abraham Verghese – have principally gravitated towards life writing, short fiction and poetry rather than the novel. These genres’ lower commercial profile may perhaps explain the lesser prominence of such authors. On the other hand, South Asian American cinema has traditionally been dominated by men, in particular the director M Night Shyamalan and the actors Kal Penn and Aasif Mandvi. 2. For Sameer Parekh, a male writer, the patterns are patrilineal but essentially the same, since his novel, Stealing the Ambassador (2002), explores the difficult interconnections between fathers, sons, grandfathers and national belonging. 3. Similar ideas are explored in British Asian cultural production, where fathers have suffered untimely deaths in texts as diverse as Farrukh Dhondy's short story, ‘East End at Your Feet’ (1976); Suhayl Saadi's stories, ‘Ninety-Nine Kiss-o-grams’ and ‘The Dancers’ (2001); and Sarfraz Manzoor's memoir, Greetings from Bury Park (2007 Lalwani, Nikita. 2007. Gifted, London: Penguin. [Google Scholar]), which is powered by the personal impact of Manzoor's father's unexpected death. In David Attwood's 1992 film, Wild West (written by Harwant Bains), the British Pakistani protagonist's father has already died when the film begins. 4. Ironically, neither Raj nor Nina is American-born; rather they belong to the so-called ‘1.5 generation’, born in one country before settling in another at a young age. 5. Occasionally the figure of the deceased mother haunts South Asian American literature: for instance, in Kamani's short story, ‘Just Between Indians’ (1995 Kamani , Ginu . ‘Lucky Dip’ . Junglee Girl . San Francisco , CA : Aunt Lute Books , 1995 . 15 – 43 . [Google Scholar]), and Lahiri's ‘Hema and Kaushik’ short story cycle from Unaccustomed Earth (2008); in each case, it is sons who have lost their mothers, those deaths both premature and tragic. See also Bob Roe (dir.), Dancing in Twilight (2004; written by Rishi Vij) which is premised on parental death, using Sameer's mother's death as its starting point and concluding with the presumed suicide of his father, Madhav. 6. Bapuji's attitude contrasts with Indian parents who encouraged their children to emigrate to the US in the 1960s and 1970s; see Kalita Kalita, S Mitra. 2003. Suburban Sahibs: Three Immigrant Families and Their Passage from India to America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP. [Google Scholar] 36.
Highlights
The prominence of maternal themes within this literature can be traced to the high number of South Asian American women writers.1 Women’s writing is, after all, often matrilineal in its need for female role models and its urge to empower the older generation, especially in traditionally colonial and patriarchal contexts
Music (1997), Sandhya’s mother, Sosa, is portrayed as critical and implacable and Sandhya emigrates from India to the United States in part to escape this bad relationship, as do the main characters of other novels: Gita in Kirin Narayan’s Love, Stars, and All That (1994), and Priya in Amulya Malladi’s The Mango Season (2003)
When Alexander recalls a visit from her own mother to New York in her memoir, Fault Lines (1993), she considers that the fact ...I had married a man of my choice, come with him to another country, given birth, and found myself a university job, all in short order, none of that counted
Summary
That parent-child relationships should play a significant role within South Asian American literature is perhaps no surprise, since this is crucial material for any writer. The particular maternal mystery underpinning the novel – explored through Maya’s return to the ancestral homeland one summer at the age of fifteen – is connected to the reasons behind Kamala’s earlier decision to leave her daughter behind Their relationship has never recovered from Maya’s powerful sense of abandonment by her mother and seems to have broken down irreparably, its dysfunctionality apparently well beyond the classic problems of adolescents and their parents. South Asian matriarchs are sometimes presented as loving figures – for instance, Mira in Beena Kamlani’s short story, ‘Brandy Cake’ (1999), and Leela in Kavita Daswani’s novel, For Matrimonial Purposes (2003) – yet even where they are depicted more favourably, they embody ancestral ways, and not necessarily in a positive sense Their defence of certain traditional customs, such as arranged marriage and a woman’s duty to stay at home, allows writers to question such mores.
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