White and Indian? Intermarriage and Narrative Authority in South Asian American Fiction

Abstract

How does intermarriage affect a storyteller? In this essay, I seek to examine literary narratives of South Asian family formation that take late twentieth-century intermarriages—particularly between Indian men and white American women—as their central governing trope. This phenomenon raises two linked questions: first, how do South Asian families recruit or reject individuals within constructs of South Asian identity; and second, to what extent do individuals not of South Asian descent gain the authority to imagine and re-imagine the contours of their multiracial family? I here examine the work of the white American writer Robbie Clipper Sethi, whose novel-in-stories, The Bride Wore Red (1996), tells the unfolding saga of a multiracial South Asian family in the United States and India. These narratives of white women socialised into ambivalent places within larger South Asian families, I argue, figure larger anxieties about imaginative representation across the mobile borders of what is considered one's culture. The family structure emerges as a contradictory space that empowers this border-crossing representational authority by simultaneously calling this authority into question.