Editors Note: We’re delighted to introduce our first contributor to The Aerogram, Amardeep Singh, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University and a former regular blogger at Sepia Mutiny.
When the topic of South Asian diaspora fiction came up on blogs like Sepia Mutiny (or now, happily, The Aerogram) the conversation would inevitably come around to Jhumpa Lahiri — though not always entirely happily. Many readers have complained over the years that Lahiri’s characters are too narrowly of a certain class and milieu — highly educated, upper-middle class Bengalis. Where, many readers wonder, is the second-gen novel that sounds more like ‘regular’ desi life?
Reading books like “The Namesake” years ago, I should say that I did not particularly share that frustration, since actually Gogol Ganguli’s experience at an Ivy League school in the Northeastern United States resembled my own experience at Cornell in some uncanny ways. The one difference was really the Ganguli parents — Lahiri’s immigrant parents have a sort of stateliness and dignity that the Punjabi aunties and uncles I knew growing up in DC did not exactly have. In contrast to the characteristic quietin Lahiri’s stories, my experience was most definitely loud. Full of melodrama, over-the-top arguments and fantastic fights.
That sense of Punjabi shor-sharabba is something I immediately noticed and found gripping in Ayad Akhtar’s excellent debut novel, “American Dervish.” Fathers say crazy things after a night’s drinking, wives curse about their husbands’ affairs (“Another of his white prostitutes decided she was sick of his promises!”), and children playing video games in the living room hear it all.
