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Lady in America The encounters of Bhartiya womanhood and Uncle Sam. By Chitra Banerjee, Divakaruni EMERGING VOICES As the second generation of the post-1965 Indian immigrants come of age in America, we are beginning to see a wealth of literature as well as critical essays in which they chronicle and analyse their experiences. Readers might recall anthologies of prose and poetry such as Living in America, edited by Roshni Rustomji Kerns, and Contours of the Heart (which won an American Book Award), edited by Rajini Srikanth and Sunaina Maira. Then there are the more scholastic, research-oriented post-colonial texts such as An Immigrant Success Story: East Indians in America by Arthur and Usha Helweg and Cultural Variables in Asian Indian Families by Uma Segal. Emerging Voices, edited by Sangeeta Gupta, falls somewhere between the two categories. It contains academic articles and carefully documented case studies in addition to impassioned autobiographical accounts by women who have lived through repressive or abusive situations. Emerging Voices is an openly feminist collection divided into three sections: Self, Family and Community. The book is an insightful and significant achievement by Gupta, who is a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has managed to bring together writers who are not afraid to address taboo issues such as domestic violence and pre-marital sex among Indian American teenagers as well as the more common issues -- of marital roles, arranged marriage and south Asian women in the workplace. In "The Habit of Ex-Nomination", Ananya Bhattacharya, activist and founder of Sakhi, openly castigates the Indian American community for its bourgeois values, its insistence on being a model minority and its subsequent denial of a space in which gays, lesbians and battered women can exist with dignity. In "The Paradoxes of the Kama Sutra and the Veil: Asian Indian Women and Marital Sexuality", Mantosh Singh Devji depicts with brave frankness the stories of five women -- including Devji herself -- and their experiences in the bedroom. She draws a connection between these mostly unhappy experiences and the strictures of the patriarchal society within which these women were raised. Here is one of her conclusions: "Indian men are notoriously poor lovers. They do not teach, cajole, woo, arouse or practice seduction. Instead ... they conquer or basically use sex for personal release." Fighting words, maybe. But Devji -- like the other writers in the collection -- has the evidence to back them up. The most moving pieces in the book are the first-person accounts by women who have fought their way through traumatic situations. Here is an excerpt from Sabah Aafreen's "In Search of Self", powerful in its staccato simplicity: "Parents will look the other way if they catch their sons with an American girl. But they keep an eye on their daughter as soon as she reaches puberty. She is taught to fear Allah and obey her parents. Her marriage is arranged with a cousin back in Hyderabad before she graduates from high school ... "In high school my grades were good and my teachers were encouraging me to apply to different universities, most of them far from Chicago. My father found a Boston University application lying around. He tore it up and threw it away." Pooja K. writes of herself after her divorce, "Where do you fit in ... you are no longer the 'wife of a doctor'. "What is your identity now in Indian society, where a woman is defined by the man in her life? ... Do you even have an identity?" Emerging Voices is a thought-provoking collection to which
readers in India and America -- both academics and laypersons -- will relate. Editor Gupta
hopes that the book will further open the dialogue within the diverse south Asian
communities of the world. I believe it will do so with great success.
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