Fiction by Indian Diaspora Authors: Background information when reading Seeking Fortune Elsewhere

Fiction by Indian Diaspora Authors

This article relates to Seeking Fortune Elsewhere

Sindya Bhanoo, author of the story collection Seeking Fortune Elsewhere, writes about South Indian immigrant and diaspora communities and the connections people in them maintain (or lose) with family in India. Bhanoo, who lives in Texas, was born to immigrant parents in the United States. The Indian diaspora is the largest in the world and encompasses a wide range of cultures, languages and experiences. Below are a few additional works of fiction by Indian diaspora authors that cover all kinds of subjects and that have been reviewed and recommended on BookBrowse.

Girls Burn Brighter (2018) — Shobha Rao emigrated from India to the United States at age seven. She published the short story collection An Unrestored Woman in 2016 and her debut novel Girls Burn Brighter in 2018. The novel tells the story of two girls, Poornima and Savitha, from the village of Indravalli. After striking up a friendship, the girls are separated, and they endure forced marriage, human trafficking and abuse. But this brief friendship keeps a furnace burning inside each that represents the possibilities of a better, happier and more independent future. The novel addresses the oppressive misogyny of Indian culture, but Poornima and Savitha face similar treatment in the U.S., where they flee for ostensible safety.

Family Life (2014) — Akhil Sharma came to the U.S. at age eight with his family, and his real-life experiences during childhood and young adulthood form the basis of his novel Family Life. The narrator, a child named Ajay, is excited about moving to a new country, but his world is torn asunder by a terrible accident that leaves his older brother with a traumatic brain injury. Ajay contends with survivor's guilt, but finds meaning and comfort in books. Sharma relays the nuances of the immigrant experience, specifically that of living in an ethnic enclave in America, as his novel's setting is a community of Indian immigrants in New Jersey.

Whereabouts (2021) — Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London and raised in Rhode Island by Indian immigrant parents. Since her debut story collection Interpreter of Maladies won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, she has continued to rack up numerous prizes and honors, and her evolving approach to literary craft is exciting to follow. Her latest novel, Whereabouts, was written in Italian, a language that Lahiri learned relatively recently. The book is sparse and simply formatted but riveting, organized in a series of vignettes that follow an unnamed narrator through various aspects of her life. Lahiri has talked about the significance of her relationship with language, and how Bengali, English and Italian have all informed her writing.

Burnt Sugar (2020) — Avni Doshi was born to Indian immigrant parents in New Jersey, and has since lived in New York, where she studied at Barnard; London, where she got her master's at University College London; India; and Dubai, where she is currently based. Her debut novel, titled Girl in White Cotton when released in India (2019) and Burnt Sugar in the U.K. and U.S. (2020), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The novel is set in Pune, India and centered around the difficult relationship between a daughter and her emotionally withholding mother, who is suffering from memory loss.

The Lives of Others (2014) — Neel Mukherjee was born and raised in West Bengal and attended University College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He lives and works in London as a novelist and critic. The Lives of Others, published in 2014 and shortlisted for the Booker, is set in Kolkata, and narrates a multigenerational family's fall from grace in the 1960s and early '70s, interweaving the story of political instability in India at the time with the characters' troubles. In an interview with Grazia, Mukherjee explains the significance of the people and place he chose to write about, contrasting them with "Westernized" depictions of Indians: "I wanted to write my 'Bengali novel,' peopled with characters who live, work, die in this country. The 'immigrant novel' continues to flower, like a mad, magical tree, and shows no sign of loss of fecundity, but that does not mean that it is the only species around."

Article by Elisabeth Cook

Filed under Reading Lists

This "beyond the book article" relates to Seeking Fortune Elsewhere. It originally ran in April 2022 and has been updated for the May 2023 paperback edition. Go to magazine.