Exploring Indian Literature

Kids always love good stories. My mom tried to encourage reading since I was very young. I loved making up stories before I could start writing and as a child told my stories to other kids in the playground and my classmates loved to hear them and would always ask for one. I got into Nancy Drew, Enid Blyton and several others. During middle school, I enjoyed Jane Eyre and Little Women. As a young child, the imaginative worlds of the stories I read provided an escape from family problems. I had a dysfunctional family. It was the only place where I could be a kid. Then when I stepped into adolescence, it was a way to express thoughts, feelings, emotions and means for self-discovery and figuring out the world.

Only during my undergraduate studies, I started taking an interest in Indian literature and mostly Indian-American voices in literature like Jhumpa Lahiri. When I was in secondary school, we didn't have Indian-American stories in our required readings. I was not at all interested in them anyway. I was interested in World Literature and enjoyed Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart in a World Literature class I took during my junior year of high school. As a teenager, I was interested in world culture and different perspectives, except Indian culture and literature.

Keep in mind that I was a teenager and more concerned about fitting-in. Appreciating my heritage and background was not at all a priority. I could care less. I remember my parents dragging me into Indian functions and I was reluctant to go. I did not want to be constantly reminded that I am "different" from my classmates. I went to a mostly white school and I was often the only brown girl there. Most of high school and college, I always felt stuck in-between two worlds. This is common among any immigrant or first-generation American. But when you are younger you tend to think no one else can possibly understand your predictament and you're the only one going through this.

Now, as a 26-year-old woman, my perspectives have refined and matured. I enjoy my dual-identity of being both Indian and American and not fully fitting-in in either cultures. That's what makes me unique and why be like everyone else?

I haven't read much of Indian literature while growing up, apart from Panchatantra stories in my school textbooks and those Tinkle Digest comics for kids. Anyone remember them? This isn't Indian literature but India is portrayed there from an outsider's point of view: Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days and E.M. Forster's Passage to India.

I am now curious about my own heritage. To be honest, I cannot imagine moving back to India. I love visiting. But reverse culture is worse than culture shock itself. Reading Indian literature is a window to my own homeland. I read Indian-American fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharathi Mukherjee, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. I got through Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth and now enjoying Interpreter of Maladies.Their novels are about Indians living abroad and something I can relate to. I like realism. I also read Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul.

After reading all these good books, I am also inspired to pen my own thoughts down and write my own novel. This is something I dreamed about since I was ten-years-old. I have my own unique (writing) voice, imagination and a story to tell. As I write, I feel challenged by the question, "what is my identity?" Having a dual-identity and being in-between two worlds has its own uniqueness, flavor and scent but has its complexities too.

I want to read some South Asian Cultural Studies books. A friend recommended that I readPavan K. Varma's Being Indian.I'm going to check it out.

While I am venturing into South Asian Cultural Studies, I'm also thinking about my own writing. At the moment, I'm trying to pen down a novel. This idea has been on my mind during the last year of my college. Now that I graduated from college, I do not have an excuse for being busy. And so I am working on it. It makes me think how I would portray my characters and situations. The protagonist of my story is an Indian-American woman. I'm exploring the idea of dual-identity and the idea of being a foreigner to self and others around. This should be interesting. I cannot wait to see how the plot and characters turn out when I am done.