Arranged Marriage
by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
New York: Doubleday, 1995
320 pages $21
Reviewed by C.J.S.Wallia
Chitra Divakaruni's book of short stories, Arranged Marriage, focuses
on family-arranged matches, a centuries-old tradition in India. These stories
about Indian immigrants to the U.S. show how the dislocations of immigration
are making this tradition problematic.
Arranged Marriage is a welcome addition to the rich multicultural
literature of the immigrant experience in the U.S: luminaries like Isaacs
Bashevis Singer and Bernard Malamud on the European-Jewish immigrants; Maxine
Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and Frank Chin on the Chinese-American experience;
Carlos Bulosan on the Filipino-American; and many others. People of Asian
and Pacific Island heritage now constitute about 3 percent of the U.S. population,
and in this group the third largest are the immigrants from the Indian subcontinent
totalling over a million.
Divakurani's stories and her earlier book of poems, Black Candle,
can perhaps best be understood in the context of the history of Indian immigration
to the U.S.
The earliest Indian immigrants came in the first decade of this century
and were mostly farmers from the Punjab province who settled in Sutter and
San Joaquin counties in northern California. These immigrants faced such
severe racial discrimination that many returned to India to fight for independence
from British imperialism, which, they felt, was the major reason they were
regarded as inferior in the U.S. Some of the immigrants applied for U.S.
citizenship and were naturalized by State courts. However, in 1923, by a
decision of the Supreme Court, all of these naturalized citizens were denaturalized
on the ground that, although they were Caucasians, they were not white.
Here are two examples of the kind of discrimination Indian immigrants and
visitors encountered during this period. Dalip Singh Saund completed his
Ph.D. degree in mathematics from U.C. Berkeley in 1927 and accepted a job
to teach in the Los Angles school district. However, before he could meet
his first class, the job offer was withdrawn by the school board because
they ruled that the students would be too upset to be taught by a brown-skinned
person. So much for the brown civilizaton that invented the numeral system
1,2,3, etc. ( misnamed as the "arabic" numerals by the Europeans
-- a fact acknowledged by Arab historians themselves), the decimal system,
and many of the founding concepts of geometry as well as algebra. Frustrated
from following his profession, Dalip Singh Saund turned to farming and,
decades later, became the first Asian-American to be elected to the U.S.
Congress. In 1929, the prodigious poet Rabindranath Tagore, who had won
the Nobel Prize in literature in 1913, was treated so humiliatingly by the
U.S. immigration authorities in Los Angeles -- they demanded proof from
the brown-skinned poet of being literate and having funds on hand to guarantee
that he would not become a public charge in the U.S. -- that he promptly
cancelled his lecture tour and returned to India. The tall, aristocratic,
seventy-year-old Tagore, with flowing white beard and long locks, commented:
"Jesus could not get into America because, first of all, he would not
have the necessary money, and secondly, he would be an Asiatic."
Indian immigration came to a complete halt in 1924 with the passage of the
Asian Exclusion Act. It resumed only in 1946, when the Luce-Celler bill
allowed a token immigration of one hundred people from the Indian subcontinent.
This bill was passed in recognition of the hypocrisy of the U.S. having
just fought Hitlerian racism in Europe while practicing racial discrimination
in its own immigration policies. It was not till the Immigration Act of
1965 that sizeable numbers of Indians were allowed into the U.S. The criterion
used by the U.S. consulates was outstanding professional qualifications.
Many of the new arrivals came with M.D.'s and Ph.D.'s degrees in the sciences
(Deepak Chopra is the best known of this group) so much so that the Indian
Americans, according to the 1990 U.S. census, have the highest per capita
income of any ethnic group. Later, these elite professionals sponsored their
relatives, some of whom lacked college education and now make up the lower
classes of Indian-American immigrants.
The stories in Arranged Marriage capture the experience of both classed
of Indian immigrants, the professionals as well as the lower class such
as auto-mechanics and 7-eleven store clerks.
Most of the stories are about characters from the author's native region
of Bengal and are told by female narrators in the first person singular
point-of-view, often in the present tense, imparting a voice of intimacy
and cinematic credibility.
In "Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs," the narrator, Jayanti, comes
to Chicago to stay with her aunt before beginning her graduate studies at
an American university. When she last saw her aunt, Jayanti was only eight-
years-old. The occasion was the aunt's arranged marriage in Calcutta with
an Indian emigrant who, the matchmaker had assured her family, was the owner
of an automobile empire in America. On arrival, Jayanti discovers that the
man runs only a small auto-repair garage and the couple live in a dingy
apartment in an undesirable part of the city. The aunt welcomes her warmly.
Jayanti finds that her aunt stays home the whole time. At Jayanti's insistence
they both go out for a stroll in the neighborhood, which the aunt had long
been forbidden to do by her husband. They are accosted by a gang of four
white pre-teenage boys, shouting "nigger" and throwing slush at
them. Badly shaken the two women find their way home.
"Now the others take up the word, chanting it in high singsong voices
that have not broken yet, nigger, nigger, until I want to scream, or weep.
Or laugh, because can't they see that I'm not black at all but an Indian
girl of good family? When our chauffeur Gurbans Singh drives me down the
Calcutta streets in our silver-colored Fiat, people stop to whisper, Isn't
that Jayanti Ganguli, daughter of the Bhavanipur Gangulis."
This is reminiscent of the recently published story of Salman Rushdie "Chekov
and Zulu" in which the protagonist's wife resents the code name Zulu
for "it sounds like a blackie" illustrating the distance Indian
immigrants typically like to put between themselves and Africans. She points
out that the name from Star Trek is Sulu. It is also reminiscent of novelist
Bharati Mukherjee's statement in a published interview: "I am less
shocked, less outraged and shaken to my core, by a purse snatching in New
York City in which I lost all of my dowry gold--everything I'd been given
by my mother in marriage--than I was by a simple question asked of me in
the summer of 1978 by three high-school boys on the Rosedale subway station
platform in Toronto. Their question was, 'Why don't you go back to Africa?'
"
Immigration to the U.S., the faraway dislocation, made this particular arranged
marriage possible, without the customary verifications, between the working-class
impostor and Jayanti's upper-class aunt. Immigration also brought the couple
into an extremely hostile social environment. Although the social environment
that the Indian immigrants from the upper social classes to the U.S. come
to is not overtly noxious, it exacts a poignant psychic cost--by challenging
their traditional self-concept as integral parts of an extended Indian family
and by pushing them instead into the American mold of autonomous, and all-too-often
alienating, individualism.
This psychological struggle is the focus of several stories.
In "Meeting Mrinal," Mahesh, the narrator's husband, is struggling
to leave her for his red-haired ex-secretary, Jessica, after a 20-year marriage
(which initially had been, of course, an arranged marriage), a 17-year-old
son, and a plush home in Silicon Valley:
"I asked him again which outfit he wanted me to wear.
'I don't care,' he replied in a voice that didn't sound like his. 'I can't
take this anymore, Asha.'
All his life, he told me then he'd been doing what other people wanted,
being a dutiful son, then a responsible husband and father. Now he'd finally
found someone who made him feel alive, happy. He wanted the chance to really
live his life before it was too late.
...'Haven't you been happy with us, ever?' I'd asked my voice even.
'I thought I had,' Mahesh had said. 'I hadn't known what real happiness
was then.'"
In "Affair," two temperamentally ill-matched Indo-American couples,
whose marriages had been arranged on the basis of their horoscopes having
matched "perfectly," divorce after many years of affluent living
in Silicon Valley. For two months before they split, Meena, a buoyant socialite,
married to Srikant, a nerd (who gives his computer an adoring feminine name
Lalita), has been having an an affair with a middle-aged Euro-American man
in her office. Says the narrator, Abha, about Meena:
"Perhaps it was because, in spite of her worldliness, Meena understood
our Indian friends far less than I did.
The men, for example, even the ones clustered around her, laughing at her
jokes, they too would have things to say about her in the privacy of the
men's room, things followed by winks and lewd, derisive laughter. For in
spite of their Bill Blass suits and alligator-skin shoes and the sleek Benzes
that waited obediently for them in the parking lots, they still belonged
to the villages of their fathers. Villages where a woman caught in adultery
was made to ride around the market square on a donkey, her head shaved,
her clothes stripped off her, while crowds jeered and pelted her with garbage."
This engrossing 10,000-word story fully displays Divakaruni's narrative
skills and psychological insights and is one of the better stories in Arranged
Marriage .