Articles and Interviews

To author Meera Nair, New York City is very much like urban India. Both are defined by their dissonant sights, sounds and smells, and are filled with "all these people from amazingly different regions, living together in a glorious mishmash," she says over a cup of tea at a café near her home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. And even though the music that blasts from neighborhood apartments is not typically Indian, other similarities make it easy for her to spend her days writing about village life in her native land.

After working in advertising in Bangalore, India, Nair, 40, moved to the U.S. to study creative writing in 1997. But her career didn't take off until 2003, when her debut collection of short stories, Video, was awarded the Asian American Literary Award. "Maybe my writing gives a greater understanding of India," Nair says, noting how in the not-too-distant past, many Americans thought of India only as the land of the Taj Mahal and doe-eyed women. "[It] replaces certain preconceptions with a startling, more complex idea of the country and its people."

Nair is now working on her first novel (due in early 2005), which is set in her home state of Kerala in 1957, and which follows a landowning family as the world's first democratically elected communist government takes office.

Even though she writes about India, Nair loves New York and says she thrives here because of its community of writers—especially South Asian writers. Here, she can consider herself a citizen of the world while still embracing her Indianness. However, she acknowledges that categories like "South Asian" can be limiting. "I don't believe in that kind of labeling," Nair says. "It's bad for America if you just want to label writers as Latin Americans, South Asians or Serbo-Croatians. This is a wonderful democracy, and we add to the democracy of writing."