This book represents the first comparative analysis of a new generation of diasporic South Asian women novelists from a feminist perspective. It focuses primarily on Kiran Desai (b. 1971, India/UK/USA), Tahmima Anam (b. 1975, Bangladesh/USA/UK), Monica Ali (b. 1967, Bangladesh/UK), Kamila Shamsie (b. 1973, Pakistan/USA/UK) and Jhumpa Lahiri (b. 1967, USA/India/Italy). This new wave of diasporic anglophone South Asian feminist fiction writers came to the fore in the wake of the extraordinary critical and commercial success of Arundhati Royās debut novel The God of Small Things (1997). The novel shot to the top of best-seller lists across the world, and Roy became the first resident Indian and subcontinental woman to win the Booker Prize. The novel sold four million copies by the end of 1997, and it has been translated into over twenty-five languages. This study examines the selected authors in relation to established writers such as Roy (b. 1961, India) and in comparison to lesser-known diasporic women writers, including Sorayya Khan (b. 1967, Pakistan/Netherlands/USA), Uzma Aslam Khan (b. 1969, Pakistan/UK/USA), Roma Tearne (b. 1954, Sri Lanka/UK), Roshi Fernando (b. 1966, Sri Lanka/UK) and V.V. Ganeshananthan (b. 1980, Sri Lanka/USA).
Historical Background
Judith Brownās study Global South Asians: Introducing the Modern Diaspora (2006) shows how the absolute size, distribution and concentration of South Asians outside the subcontinent make their migratory experience of considerable interest and importance: āBy the last decades of the twentieth century over 9 million people of South Asian descent lived outside the subcontinent. South Asians have made a significant and distinctive contribution to the economies, societies and cultures of the places to which they have goneā¦and they have increasingly influenced the politics, economies and cultures of the places which they and their ancestors leftā.1 Jigna Desai foregrounds the increasing centrality of the South Asian diaspora and its transnational class to the postcolonial nation-state due to the deterritorialisation of the nation and other global processes.2
The different histories of South Asian migration to the USA3 and UK, and the contrasting positions of South Asian minorities therein, inform this discussion of diasporic South Asian women writers. South Asian migration is often conceptualised as part of the restructuring of global capitalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, as Rozina Visram, Michael Fisher and others have shown, South Asian presence in the UK dates as far back as the early seventeenth century, with notable early settlers such as Sake Dean Mahomed (1759ā1851),āthe shampooing surgeonā. During the nineteenth century, settler communities varied in cultural, religious and socio-economic terms.4 Thus the UKās multicultural heritage and South Asian migration have a much longer and more complex history than is usually acknowledged in the customary emphasis on post-war migration. It has been experienced and conceptualised diversely at different historical moments. Visram et al. uncovered the UK metropoleās function as a centre for forging global networks of anti-colonial struggle and other forms of diasporic networking. More recent research sees the UK as just one nodal point or contact zone in the global vision of history. [Kamila Shamsieās A God in Every Stone (2014a) refers to Great Britain as ājust a pin prickāsuch a small, small islandā.5] These studies pay increasing attention to diasporic South Asian networks outside the UK, in the rest of Europe, in North America and elsewhere in the Empire, as well as to the transnational nature of the political and literary processes that influence the production of a sense of South Asian identity in the UK and North America.6 They move away from a bicultural model of British/South Asian alliances to signal South Asian, African, Caribbean and other cross-cultural engagement and the lateral relations between South Asians and other colonised communities within the context of empire and decolonisation.
The outbreak of the Second World War had an impact on South Asian patterns of migration to the UK. From the late 1930s, scores of South Asians migrated to the Midlands and northern England to work in the factories manufacturing wartime products. Unprecedented waves of South Asian migrants arrived in the UK as a direct result of the aftermath of colonialism. In the wake of Indian independence in 1947 and Sri Lankaās independence in 1948, the Nationality Act (1948) gave citizens of the former colonies rights of residence in the UK. Perceived links to the āmother countryā made the UK, with its open-door policy fuelled by its need for labour, a natural choice for migrants. This was the case not just for the 492 āWest Indianā arrivals on the Empire Windrush but also many South Asians fleeing the turmoil of the partition of India in 1947. Riots in London, Liverpool and Birmingham against the newly arrived ācolouredā immigrants followed. This period marked the establishment of black and Asian populations and an important shift in British identity. During the late 1950s and early 1960s large numbers of economic migrants arrived from India and Pakistan, settling in the northern industrial cities of Manchester and Leeds as well as London. The regional loyalties they invite are crucial in the formation of British Asian identities. Kenyan and Ugandan Asians expelled from Kenya in 1969 and Uganda in 1971 fuelled the widespread use of the term Asian as a collective category for all subcontinentals in the UK. Bangladeshi communities followed, leaving floods and civil war, in the early 1970s. Smaller numbers of Sri Lankans arrived in the UK in the context of Sri Lankaās Marxist insurrection and its brutal suppression in 1971. The waves of immigration to the UK resulted in two new laws restricting Asian and black migration in 1962 and 1968. The Immigration Act of 1971 removed the automatic right of dependents to join their families. Received ideas on race, citizenship and nationality were dismantled and documented anew by the next wave of Caribbean, African and South Asian writers to arrive in the UK; some of these were supported by the development of liberal-university interest in Commonwealth Literature. This mass post-war migration initiated the reconstruction of the term expatriate or migrant writer into minority writer. The occasional migrant writer does not constitute a category. Minority literature is a matter of mass. It becomes a phenomenon when substantial numbers of writers constitute a literary scene. Post-war migration radically changed the context for the appreciation and consumption of minority culture in the UK. British Asian writer Hanif Kureishi identifies the paradoxical nature of the UK in the 1980s: the cultural interest in marginalised and excluded groups āwas one plus of the politically repressive eightiesā.7 This refers to the flowering of British Asian women writers8 supported by the Greater London Council and newly established feminist publishing houses Virago and the Womenās Press, alongside the creation of Channel 4 in 1982, with its remit to support diverse cultural representation within the context of race riots and the flurry of immigration acts in this period. The riots and the immigration acts politicised anti-racist movements and radicalised Asian communities. Distinct religious and ethnic identities (Sikh, Bengali) emerged from the previously homogenised āAsianā community. This is partly a result of the racialisation of UK Muslim identities after the Rushdie affair (1989), which were then subjected to further intense scrutiny post 9/11, as explored in Monica Aliās novel Brick Lane (2003), discussed in Chaps. 2 and 4.
South Asian migration to the UK differs from South Asian migration to the USA primarily in terms of the class profile of the different sections of the diaspora. The 1924 US National Origins Act, originally designed to prohibit the entry of South and South-east Asian immigrants, meant that the Sikh farmers who settled in Yuba City, California, in the 1920s and 1930s could not bring their families with them or go back to get married. South Asian American Chitra Banerjee Divakaruniās poems in the collection Leaving Yuba City: New and Selected Poems (1997) explore this. The 1965 US Immigration and Nationality Act abolished this practice of quotas based on nationality. Instead it favoured skilled middle-class professionals, such as the academics and doctors that people Jhumpa Lahiriās stories. After the 1965 Act, professional South Asian (as well as Caribbean and South American) immigration to North America increased while the UK enforced more restrictive entry requirements. The UK was no longer the more obvious destination for migrating South Asians, as Lahiri shows in her story of the migrant Bengali doctor in the UK poised to move to the USA, āThe Third and Final Continentā. The writer Bharati Mukherjee (b. 1940), who settled in Canada (before moving to North America in 1980) in the late 1960s, exemplifies this trend. South Asian women writers followed in the late 1970s. Meena Alexander (b. 1951, India/USA) explores her move to New York in Manhattan Music (1997); Chitra Divakaruni (b. 1956, India/USA) and Kirin Narayan (b. 1959, India/USA) examine their migration to California.9 Their writing was produced in the context of the enormous popularity of black womenās writing in North America that encouraged both North American and UK publishers to provide a platform for South Asian women writers. These older writersā stories of fema...