Reviews and Essays

A few weeks ago, I walked into a Barnes and Noble store in downtown Brooklyn. A Bollywood soundtrack was playing softly over the storewide stereo system. While listening to the music and browsing through the store’s magazine section, I noticed that Jhumpa Lahiri had published a new short story in the New Yorker. (June 16 & 23, 2003). She had broken a literary silence two years long.

As ever, Lahiri’s new short story ‘Gogol’ is both sophisticated and simple. ‘Gogol’ starts with an anxious Ashoke Ganguli awaiting the birth of his first child at a hospital in Massachusetts. Lahiri’s terse narrative paints a vivid picture of his bland personality. Ashoke’s only eccentricity is his passion for Russian literature, which he inherited from his grandfather as a young boy.

Lahiri’s narrative then travels back in time and space to recount a defining event in Ashoke’s life. Ashoke is a college student and is traveling across Bengal by train to visit his grandparents. While other passengers in his compartment sleep, he stays awake and reads a collection of short stories by Nikolai Gogol. While Ashoke is immersed in his reading, there is a calamitous accident. The train is derailed, and many passengers die.

The authorities begin searching the wreckage for survivors and Ashoke’s motionless body is indistinguishable from the bodies of the dead lying near him. Just when the search party is about to give up, one of them notices Ashoke’s copy of Gogol’s short stories moving in his hands as he feebly tries to signal for help. Years later, Ashoke names his son Gogol after the Russian author who ‘saved’ his life.

Gogol Ganguli, the son of first generation immigrants to New England, begins to resent his first name as he enters adolescence. The peculiar name makes him to feel insecure and unhappy. ‘He hates that his name is both absurd and obscure, that it has nothing to do with who he is, that it is either Indian nor American but, of all things, Russian.’ Gogol believes that his name is irrelevant to his individuality. He is mistaken. Gogol hasn’t yet learnt the story of his father’s fateful train journey from which his name derives.

At the end of the story, Ashoke reveals the tale of his train accident to Gogol. This marks a turning point in Gogol’s ability to reconcile his problematic name and identity. Only after connecting with his family’s personal history – a family that is both Indian and Bengali – is Gogol not burdened by his name and able to make peace with his individuality.

Gogol Ganguli’s story echoes a predominant theme of English-language fiction by South Asians writers: individuals evolve through time and space, and cannot abandon their past. Gogol’s past is tangled up in the collective aspects of his identity: Indian, Bengali and North American culture – the macro-context of his life.

But what is more essential to Gogol is a personally relevant and specific past – the micro-context of his life. This is defined by his family, a train crash in Bengal, the Beatles’ White Album, suburban Boston, Nikolai Gogol, and an infinite number of events, people, places and ideas. For Gogol to understand his identity and be happy, he must learn to accept his unique micro-context.

‘Gogol’ is, therefore, a universal story about the child of an immigrant family coming of age in America. The story of Gogol Ganguli’s life cautions readers against relying too heavily on collective notions of identity. But while Lahiri’s narrative emphasizes the unique circumstances of Gogol’s life, it is unwilling to relinquish its place within Indian and Bengali contexts.

‘In India parents take their time…. Besides, there are always pet names to tide one over: a practice of Bengali nomenclature grants, to every single person, two names. In Bengali the word for “pet name” is daknam, meaning literally the name by which one is called, by friends, family, and other intimates, at home and in other private, unguarded moments…’

Lahiri devotes eleven consecutive sentences to this particular explanation of Bengali nomenclature. While a certain amount of such contextual information is necessary for readers to understand and enjoy a short story in today’s globalizing world, excessive contextual information isn’t vital to a reader’s interpretation and enjoyment of a narrative. In asserting her story as Indian and Bengali, Lahiri sacrifices the quality and universality of her storytelling. There are other consequences as well.

On a textual level, such a sharp and prolonged digression causes readers to become disengaged from the story about the Ganguli family. On a societal level, if South Asian writers tie their narratives too tightly to Indian culture, they may be in danger of exoticizing themselves or labeling themselves as the other. The other is, at least subconsciously, often that which is lesser or inferior. By clinging to a collective South Asian context, we may be building a wall around our narratives that could eventually place them in a metaphoric ethnic ghetto.

So why does Lahiri sacrifice the rhythm and quality of her writing for the sake of reinforcing her story’s Indianness and Bengaliness? The answer lies in the Barnes and Noble store from where I bought a copy of The New Yorker, in which the Bollywood soundtrack was playing softly. In this particular branch, of the 15 books on the new fiction rack, at least 4 were written by South Asians. Desi culture is trendy and this trend is not restricted to the literary world.

The racks of Kmart, Walmart, and Macy’s are lined with clothing that, ten years ago, could only be acquired in a dusty by-lane of Janpath in Delhi. Jay Z recorded a song with England’s leading Panjabi MC, and black Latino, and white New Yorkers are grooving their heads to the sounds of digitized Bhangra.

Mainstream North American audiences are craving information about the quirks and complexities of subcontinental culture. And what better way to deliver this information to them, than through fiction? Information provided through fiction is both digestible and dramatic.

It is true that fiction could reveal interesting contextual information about cultures and places. And characters and stories are depend upon their contexts. But fiction should not tell the story of a context. A story should not sacrifice its characters and plot to attach itself to a notion of collective identity.

The bubble of South Asian popularity will inevitably deflate. And as a writer of South Asian descent, I must ask several questions. How can my stories survive in the imaginations of the consuming, cosmopolitan world, beyond the market trend? How can my voice be representative of all of my parts, but not be confined by any of them? And finally, how can I embrace notions of collective identity that are rooted in South Asia, without reinforcing borders that have divided people, languages and a subcontinent?

We must write without sacrificing our storytelling to feed a current fad. When the boom of South Asian literature ends, readers will buy our stories for their quality – not for their ethnicity. We should seek to be good writers who are South Asian, not good South Asian writers.

Hirsh Sawhney works as a writer and educator in New York and London.