Cite this Essay
MLA:
Iyer, Nalini. “Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.” Indian Writing In English Online, 08 May 2023, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/chitra-banerjee-divakaruni-nalini-iyer/ .
Chicago:
Iyer, Nalini. “Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.” Indian Writing In English Online. May 08, 2023. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/chitra-banerjee-divakaruni-nalini-iyer/ .
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is a prolific and a popular South Asian American writer. Her works combine storytelling and social justice with a focus on immigrant rights, gender, citizenship, and belonging. In a blog post on her author website, Divakaruni writes: “Sometimes I’m asked if I would have become a writer if I hadn’t moved to the United States. I don’t know the answer to that question. I do know, though, that I couldn’t have written the same kinds of stories, hybrids born out of the melding of the Indian and American cultures”(https://www.chitradivakaruni.com/blog/2013/7/7/america). Divakaruni who is a poet, novelist, activist, and academic was born in Kolkata on July 29, 1956. After receiving a B.A. from the University of Calcutta, she moved to Wright State University in the United States for an M.A. She completed her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1985. She has taught at several American colleges and universities and is currently the McDavid Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Houston in Texas. As an activist, she is the founder of Maitri, an organization in San Francisco that supports women who are victims of domestic violence. She also serves on the board of Daya, a Houston based organization that does similar work. Her literary works have won several awards including the American Book Award (1996), the PEN Josephine Miles award (1996), and she has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize (1997).
Divakaruni’s work is shaped by her experiences as an immigrant woman, and many of her works focus on how women navigate the trials and tribulations of the immigrant experience. She also depicts strong women characters who overcome adversity and establish life pathways for themselves. In recent years, she has turned to reworking Indian mythology and history from the perspective of women and thus her The Palace of Illusions (2008) retells the Mahabharata from Draupadi’s perspective, and the The Forest of Enchantment (2019) presents the Ramayana from Sita’s viewpoint. Her most recent novel, The Last Queen (2021), tells the story of Jindan, the youngest wife of Maharajah Ranjit Singh and her struggle against the British Empire while serving as a regent who protected her young son’s rights.
The Immigrant Experience:
Like many middle-class and upper-caste Indians who emigrated to the United States, Chitra Divakaruni also arrived there as a graduate student. In 1965, the United States passed the Immigration and Nationality Act which provided opportunities for educated Indians to study and work in the United States. While such changes in the law benefited many in the technical and scientific fields, there were people who also pursued studies in the Humanities like Divakaruni. Her first publication was a poetry collection Black Candle (1991) that garnered praise for its South Asian metaphors and images. For example, in “The Garba” set during the Navaratri, “Light glances/off the smooth wood floor of the gym/festooned with mango leaves/flown in from Florida” (43), the poet simultaneously invokes the nostalgia and displacement of the diasporic subject. Some of the poems were inspired by the art and film of others. For example, “The Rat Trap” was inspired by Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s film Elipathayam and “Two Women outside a Circus, Pushkar” was influenced by one of Raghubir Singh’s photographs. Her second collection Leaving Yuba City (1997) is notable for its final sequence of poems in which Divakaruni tells the stories of the early Sikh immigrants to the Imperial Valley in California. Her poignant poems speak to the loneliness of the immigrant men who were either single or had left their wives behind. She writes of the bewilderment of the women who arrive years later to find their husbands changed, of young men whose interracial marriages to Mexican women transformed their everyday lives, and of the daughters of the early immigrants who struggled to escape strict homes. These poems frame lyrical narratives in the context of the lesser-known history of South Asians in the Pacific Coast.
Divakaruni’s first work of fiction was Arranged Marriage (1995), a collection of eleven women-centric stories that focused on urgent topics such as domestic violence, the isolation of immigrants, and the stigma of divorce. Divakaruni’s stories in this collection are notable for raising awareness about violence within immigrant families that are exacerbated by the challenges of migration. In the 1990s her fiction addressed topics that were relatively underexplored in South Asian American writing. Divakaruni’s first important novel The Mistress of Spices (1997) marks her shift from the realist mode of her debut short stories to a melding of realism and fable. Her protagonist Tilo has magical healing powers and arrives in a spice store in San Francisco, where her customers share their stories of struggle and she offers them spices that give them solace. She falls in love with a Native American man, Raven, and in committing to him breaks the code for spice mistresses. Her choice between conformity to the mistress’s code and autonomy mirrors the struggles of her clients. The narrative is thus a celebration of Tilo’s autonomy. Scholars like Inderpal Grewal have critiqued the novel’s dismissal of the violence of the spice trade and its embrace of an American vision of multicultural solidarity by “producing ethnic identity through exotic difference” (Grewal 76). However, as I have argued elsewhere, the spice store setting shows Divakaruni’s understanding of that violent history and traces its continuity in current times as an exotic grocery store in the Bay area where, ironically, the customers unaware of the history of the spice trade are nevertheless experiencing racism, alienation, and prejudice that trace their roots to that colonial trade (Singh et al., 7).
Divakaruni’s depiction of the immigrant experience takes a significant turn after 9/11 when she begins documenting the struggles of South Asian immigrants in the United States in the new racialized regime with intensified Islamophobia. In an essay she published in the LA Times, Divakaruni writes about how 9/11 led to her displaying an American flag in her home because she cherished American values of liberty, equality, and justice and notes also that immigrants like her are always viewed with a suspicious lens (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-oct-21-op-59757-story.html). In Queen of Dreams (2004), she once again works with magical realism as she had done in The Mistress of Spices. Rakhi, her protagonist, the child of Indian immigrants, is distanced from her mother who had the ability to interpret and experience the dreams of others. In exploring her mother’s dream journals after her death, Rakhi learns much about her family history. When 9/11 shatters Americans’ sense of security and invulnerability, Islamophobia dramatically increased in the United States. There were many violent attacks on South Asian immigrants, including Sikhs, who were misidentified as the Taliban. This rise in violence shattered many immigrants’ ‘American Dream.’ Rakhi’s child who has inherited her grandmother’s ability to interpret and experience dreams struggles with her nightmares about burning buildings. Rakhi and her friend Belle witness violence against their Sikh friend who is mistaken for a Muslim. Their café and restaurant, like Tilo’s spice store, become a space for community and solidarity for immigrants of color.
In Oleander Girl (2013), Divakaruni once again explores the impact of 9/11 on Indian immigrants when her protagonist, Korobi, visits from Calcutta to search for her father whom she had believed dead. Using her family’s wealth and business connections, Korobi embarks on a search for her father. Her quest takes her from New York to California. Korobi, who has been raised in a wealthy Calcutta family, and is about to marry into a wealthier one, has a limited understanding of race and racism. She has experienced prejudice in India for her dark skin, and in her travels in the United States, she learns of the hardships and racism that Indians have experienced in post 9/11 America. She witnesses domestic violence and marital breakdown due to racism in the lives of the Mitras, the couple who host her in New York. The Mitras manage an art gallery for the Boses, Korobi’s prospective in-laws, and the attacks on their business threatens their economic stability and also that of the Bose family. She undertakes a road trip to meet her father and is surprised to learn that he is Black. Her assumption as a child was that her American father was white, and her discovery that she is half-Black leads to a recalibration of her identity and her experiences with colorism. In meeting her father, she learns about her parents’ romance but little about her father’s experience of race as a Black man. She understands that the rejection of her father by her grandparents and the subsequent secrets about her birth reflect an intertwining of anti-Black racism with both caste and colorism in India. The novel undermines the popular idea of Indian Americans as upwardly mobile and wealthy professionals. Through the story of the Mitras and of Vic, a working-class Indian American man, Divakaruni challenges the model minority myth. However, when Korobi returns to India to marry Rajat Bose, she seems to set aside her African-American heritage and fully embrace her Indian identity. Thus, while Divakaruni draws a connection between the experiences of racism in the US and the anti-Black views in India, the novel’s ending emphasizes Korobi’s re-assimilation into her wealth and privilege.
Reworking Myth and History:
In recent years, Divakaruni has shifted the focus of her fiction to Indian myth and history. As a feminist writer, she seeks to recover lost or marginalized women’s voices through fictionally reimagining well-known narratives from women’s perspective. Her The Palace of Illusions (2008) rewrites the Hindu epic, The Mahabharata, from the perspective of Paanchali (Draupadi). She presents Paanchali’s story of birth, her marriage to five brothers, her deep involvement in her husbands’ quest for their lost kingdom, and her relationship with Lord Krishna. In The Forest of Enchantments (2019), Divakaruni retells The Ramayana from Sita’s perspective. Framed as a feminist retelling, the novel not only makes Sita the protagonist, it also highlights and reworks perspectives on other female characters including Surpanakha (Ravana’s sister), Mandodari (Ravana’s wife), and Sunaina (Janaka’s wife). Divakaruni’s retelling of the Hindu epic participates in the long tradition of retellings, what Paula Richman has called “many Ramayanas,”(9) through which the epic is kept alive. Divakaruni portrays Sita as a warrior princess who is skilled in archery and also as a healer and an eco-feminist. Drawing not just from Valmiki’s Ramayana but also from Krittibas, Kamban, Adbhuta Ramayana, and Jaina traditions, Divakaruni remains focused on not just the greatness of Rama but the role of the women in his life. Kaikeyi is portrayed with compassion and Lakshmana’s wife Sumitra as one devastated by his decision to exile himself with his brother. In her retelling, Divakaruni also suggests the possibility that Sita is the child of Mandodari and Ravana who is abandoned by her parents because her birth foretells the doom of her father and thus hints at an incestuous relationship between Ravana and Sita. Divakaruni imagines the everyday life of Sita as Queen when she returns to Ayodhya and needs to resurrect a household that has been neglected for many years. She also explores palace intrigues in great detail and adds in the human dimension to a narrative that is often read as divine.
In The Last Queen (2022), Divakaruni returns once more to a Queen whose story, like Sita’s, has been overshadowed by that of her warrior husband. Jindan, the youngest wife of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, is the center of this narrative and Divakaruni writes of the King’s courtship of the young daughter of one of his employees, a keeper of horses. The teenage Jindan falls in love with a much older king and the marriage occurs by proxy when the girl marries Ranjit Singh’s sword because he is absent, being at a war. The courtship of Ranjit Singh and Jindan is portrayed as in any contemporary romance novel, and as with The Forest of Enchantments, much narrative energy focuses on palace intrigues—power plays amongst queens and concubines, poisonings, household factions and so on. Once Ranjit Singh dies, Jindan finds herself and her baby son in danger. But with clever political maneuverings she becomes the regent when her child, Dalip, is installed as Ranjit Singh’s heir. When the Sikh Empire falls to the British, Dalip is sent to England as the ward of Queen Victoria and his mother is imprisoned. She tricks her way out of prison and makes a harrowing journey to Nepal where she is at first welcomed and offered refuge, and later despised for her politics. The narrative traces her reunification with her anglicized adult son, and her eventual death. The novel is both a critique of how women’s roles in politics are overlooked by historians and an examination of the British destruction of the mighty Sikh Empire. Although The Forest of Enchantments rewrites an epic and The Last Queen draws on a historical figure, the narratives depict the women protagonists similarly—beautiful, clever, able to manipulate palace intrigues, and sexually empowered. Such similarities in character development render these women almost anachronistically contemporary and framed by second-wave American feminism as developed by critics such as Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Elaine Showalter, among others. Second-wave feminists focused on recovering the works of overlooked women writers (Showalter) and in understanding Victorian women writers and their female characters (Gilbert and Gubar). Thus, Divakaruni’s feminist depictions run the risk of what Chandra Mohanty identified in “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonialist Discourse”—the production of a monolithic “third world woman” (51, Indian woman in Divakaruni’s case), and producing feminist knowledge about India using Western strategies and analytic categories. This alignment with second-wave feminism makes Divakaruni popular with North American readers.[1] By foregrounding women of color in her fiction and for telling stories of their struggles against a stereotypical Indian patriarchy, Divakaruni’s writing aligns with the North American publishing market’s drive for diversity in their lists.
Divakaruni’s most recent novel is Independence (India, 2022; United States, 2023) in which she tells the story of three sisters—Deepa, Priya, and Jamini—and their quest for autonomy set against the backdrop of Indian independence and Partition. Using brief epigraphs to sections of the book, she gestures toward the larger political issues such as the Radcliffe line or Gandhi’s satyagraha movement. She also examines the Partition’s impact on the lives of the three sisters and their mother. The family loses the father in the violence following Direct Action Day in 1946 in Calcutta and experiences growing poverty in their small rural community. As they strive to make ends meet, they are helped by an avuncular local wealthy man, and each sister forges her own path. Deepa elopes with a Muslim doctor and moves to Dhaka; Jamini struggles with her disability and her unrequited love for Amit, her sister Priya’s fiancé; and Priya is forced to choose between her aspirations to study medicine in Philadelphia and her impending marriage to Amit. Sisterly relationships, women’s struggle for autonomy, the challenges of living in a patriarchal society are the themes that are echoed from Divakaruni’s prior fiction. The sections outlining Priya’s life as a medical student in the 1940s in America is reminiscent of Divakaruni’s ongoing interest in pre-1965 Indian immigrant history demonstrated by her Yuba city poems. As a historical novel, Independence is noteworthy for its focus on the Bengal partition and the political challenges in East Pakistan that eventually led to the formation of Bangladesh.
The first anthology of criticism, Critical Perspectives on Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: Feminism and Diaspora, was published in 2022. It contains 12 critical interviews on a range of Divakaruni’s work and 3 reprinted interviews as well as a substantive introduction by the editors. In the scholarly works published on Divakaruni, certain novels predominate, and these include The Mistress of Spices, Queen of Dreams, and The Palace of Illusions. Much of the scholarship examines themes of diaspora, displacement, feminism, and women’s empowerment. Divakaruni herself maintains an author website www.chitradivakaruni.com that is a useful resource for her readers.
Chitra Divakaruni is an important voice in South Asian diasporic fiction. She explores a range of forms and techniques in her writing- from poetry and essays to realist short fiction, magic realism, and historical fiction. As a feminist writer, she has (along with Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri) foregrounded the experiences of Indian middle-class women with immigration, alienation, family struggles, and racism. Her focus on women overcoming hardships and finding autonomy offers a hopeful approach to the challenges of diasporic living. Divakaruni has contributed significantly to the mainstreaming of South Asian American voices in the realm of ethnic literature in the United States.
Primary Texts
Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee. Black Candle. Calyx Books, 1991.
—. Arranged Marriage. Anchor, 1995.
—. Leaving Yuba City. Deckle Edge, 1997.
—. The Mistress of Spices. Anchor, 1997.
—. Queen of Dreams. Doubleday, 2004.
—. The Palace of Illusions. Anchor, 2009.
—. Oleander Girl. Simon and Schuster, 2013.
—. The Forest of Enchantments. Harper Collins, 2019.
—. The Last Queen. Harper Collins, 2021.
—. Independence. William Morrow, 2023.Selected Bibliography on Divakaruni
Buley-Meissner, Mary Louise. “Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: A Bibliographic Review of Resources for Teachers.” Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies, vol. 1, no.7, 2010, pp. 142-153.
Erney, Hans-Georg. “Draupadi Returns with a Vengeance.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 55, no.4, 2019, pp. 486-497.
Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diaspora, Neoliberalisms. Duke UP, 2005.
Iyer, Nalini. “Embattled Canons: The Place of Diasporic Writing in Indian English Literatures.” Other Tongues: Rethinking the Language Debates in India, edited by Nalini Iyer and Bonnie Sue Zare, Rodopi/Brill, 2009, pp. 3-21.
Rasiah, Dharini. “Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.” Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers, edited by King-Kok Cheung, U of Hawaii P, 2000, pp.140-153.
Shankar, Lavina Dhingra. “Not too Spicy: Exotic Mistresses of Cultural Translation in the Fiction of Chitra Divakaruni and Jhumpa Lahiri.” Other Tongues: Rethinking the Language Debates in India, edited by Nalini Iyer and Bonnie Sue Zare, Rodopi/Brill, 2009, pp. 23-52.
Singh, Amritjit, Robin E. Field, Samina Najmi, editors. Critical Perspectives on Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: Feminism and Diaspora. Lexington Books, 2022.
Works Cited
Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Imagination. Yale UP, 1980.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Boundary 2 , vol.12, no. 3, 1984, pp. 333-358. Richman, Paula. Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia. U of California P, 1991.
Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. Viking, 1990.
[1] Actual data on point-of-sale numbers for books is only accessible to publishers. Mistress of Spices was reviewed in the New York Times and was on their bestseller list. Her latest, Independence, received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist. Her One Amazing Thing made it to citywide reading programs in nine American cities and was on all “campus-reads” programs on twenty-three college campuses.
