Vanitha Reddy Gallery exposed Photos

The Feminization of ‘Indian’ Culture: Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Divakaruni, and Bharati Mukherjee as Feminine and Feminist Ethnographers in South Asian Diasporic Fiction

Jhumpa Lahiri’s glamorous pose on the book jacket of her recent novel, The Namesake (2003), points to her national and global celebrity, which was secured after her 2000 Pulitzer Prize win for Interpreter of Maladies. Lahiri must be positioned within a recent tradition of popular fiction by South Asian women writers in the U.S. diaspora, such as Bharati Mukherjee and Chitra Divakaruni, whose literary celebrity is buttressed by a similar glamorous ‘ethnic’ appeal. As highly visual and visible bodies, these writers circulate within a visual economy of desire, in which feminized racial difference is increasingly served up for global consumption.

In reading Lahiri, Mukherjee and Divakaruni through the kaleidoscopic lens of circulation, this paper first discloses the ways in which “Indian culture” is interpellated through the hyper-visibility of the middle-class Indian woman’s body both in India and the U.S. I track the cultural production and consumption of these diasporic women as South Asian cultural artifacts in national and transnational popular media. In doing so, I argue more broadly that “Indian culture” has undergone a distinct feminization within late global capital, in which the Indian woman’s body becomes the primary locus of commodified cultural difference.

After examining various national and transnational cultural inscriptions upon the Indian woman’s body, I shift focus slightly to examine these writers’ interventions into the ‘feminization’ of ‘Indian culture’ from within the U.S. I argue that these women explore/exploit both the femininity and feminism of the Indian female subject in their fiction, non-fiction essays and interviews. At this point, I argue for the legitimacy of reading these women as feminine and feminist ethnographers of sorts, given their distinct location in the U.S. and their various ties the Indian ‘homeland.’ To what extent do these diasporic writers translate (or refuse to translate) “Indianness” as a set of gendered social relations? To what extent do their various acts (and non-acts) of cultural translation intervene in the global commodification of feminized racial difference, both in the U.S. and in India? In a slightly different, but related, inquiry into methodology: To what extent does the ethnographic register complicate assumptions about “cultural authenticity” that often underwrite both white liberal feminist celebrations of Other women as multicultural feminists of sorts, and postcolonial feminist disparagements of these writers as blatantly (neo)Orientalist and/or (multi)culturalist?