Masculinites in Recent Stories by South Asian American Women 99

Evolving Masculinities in
Recent Stories by South Asian
American Women
Bonnie Zare
University of Wyoming, Laramie, USA

Abstract
South Asian American women’s stories are primarily written from
one female character’s point of view; few stories by these writers have
explored Indian men’s confl icts as they work through internalized
colonialist, consumerist and patriarchal norms. Two recent exceptions
are Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Meera Nair’s
Video and Other Stories (2002). These authors depict middle-class male
householders struggling amidst the invasion of Western and hypercapitalist
assumptions. Lahiri and Nair lead readers to admire men who question
traditional precepts and thus make a new contribution to South Asian
American feminist literature.

Keywords
Masculinity, Lahiri, Nair, consumerism, feminism, collectivist society

Readers have often been struck by how frequently the Indian male seems
the incarnation of selfishness when depicted by South Asian diasporic
female writers such as Meera Syal, Chitra Divakaruni and Deepa Mehta.1
Narratives such as Bapsi Sidhwa’s An American Brat, Amulya Malladi’s
The Mango Season and Chitra Divakaruni’s “A Perfect Life” portray
immigrant females attaining strength and autonomy specifically through
experiencing intimacy with non-Indian American men.2 By contrast, we
often see a forward-thinking woman struggling with a rigid Indian male
partner. Short-story collections by South Asian American women primarily
contain tales narrated in a first-person female character’s voice or from a

Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications http://jcl.sagepub.com

(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
Vol 42(3): 99–111. DOI: 10.1177/0021989407081671
100 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

third-person viewpoint, conveying the inner thoughts of a single female

character. These female characters are often shown crafting a place of
greater autonomy for themselves.
Because of these authors’ feminist perspectives, we might now expect
to find portraits of Indian men who are also engaged in modifying their
roles. After all, over the past decade, feminist scholars such as Jackson
Katz, Michael Kimmel and Lynn Segal have been calling upon men to
recognize patriarchal limitations and to break away from strict notions of
their gender role.3 There is now much more general awareness of the way
societies constrain men by demanding that they be ultra-rational, stoical
and in control at all times.4 However, in most South Asian women’s stories,
male characters are not generally acknowledged as struggling with the
roles that have been imposed upon them by society. Apart from Tahira
Naqvi, in stories such as “Attar of Roses” and “A Man of Integrity” (1997),5
few South Asian American women have explored Indian men’s internal
conflicts as they work through internalized colonialist, consumerist and
patriarchal norms.
Two recent exceptions are Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies
(1999) and Meera Nair’s Video and Other Stories (2002). These collections
stand out for their inclusion of multiple tales narrated from a male point
of view and for their depiction of male ambivalence. Nair’s “Video” and
“Vishnukumar’s Valentine’s Day” and Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies”
and “This Blessed House” particularly highlight the costs to men of
striving to appear competent at all times. These stories move away from
representations of men as stereotypical villains, creating empathy for
their internal conflicts as they cope with rigid masculinist assumptions.6
Nair and Lahiri excel at portraying the inevitable vicissitudes that occur
on the path to smoothing out uneven power relationships.
In the past five years, scholarship about South Asian masculinity has
begun to expand.7 Following Independence, two aspects of South Asian
masculinity received particular attention: 1) the “colonial hangover”, that
is the Asian subject under the British yoke perceived as and perceiving
himself as unmanly”;8 and 2) a psychoanalytic complex, often employed
to explain male sexual behavior in relation to anxiety over semen loss.9
While explorations of these topics have some value, C. Osella, F. Osella and
R. Chopra’s collection South Asian Masculinities (2004) and S. Srivastava’s
Sexual Sites, Seminal Attitudes (2004) have provided a model for a move
towards fresh territory. Many of the essays or chapters within these volumes
carry out their introductions’ plea that researchers investigate various
forms of masculinity and how they interact with one another. Osella et al’s
Introduction emphasizes that men more often find themselves feeling
vulnerable in the current environment of rapid modernization and in
the search for a non-communal national identity. They think it fair to
Masculinites in Recent Stories by South Asian American Women 101

generalize that South Asian men, like men of many cultures, are “especially
fragile persons who nonetheless insist upon especially powerful personae”
(p. 14; their italics). One way men demonstrate these powerful personae
is to limit women’s power, especially the power of those who are legally
and economically bound to them as spouses.
The setting of these stories has profound consequences for the con-
struction of masculinity. Unlike American culture, which tends to glorify
men who take risks and act independently – even if selfishly – Indian
society, being a collectivist one, prioritizes community cooperation and
the needs of the extended family above all else. In collectivist societies,
while men as a whole are granted more autonomy and decision-making
power than women, individualistic male behaviour that significantly
harms members of the family, especially an elder (male or female), even
if indirectly, usually results in its perpetrator being judged negatively.10
If he does not respond to familial pressure to restrain himself, his access
to family resources (money, land, personal connections) may be cut off
or substantially limited. His position in the family structure is a man’s
second skin.
While Nair’s “Video” and “Vishnukumar’s Valentine’s Day” and Lahiri’s
“Interpreter of Maladies” are set in India and Lahiri’s “This Blessed House”
in the US, a number of similarities characterize the male figure in all four
stories: all are married, all are urban middle-class professionals and all
have breadwinning responsibilities that occupy most of their daily energy.
With the exception of “Interpreter of Maladies”, each story portrays a
male who is threatened by his wife’s greater spontaneity and flexibility.
This flexibility resists neat categorization and therefore challenges the
entitlement he has been raised to think he deserves. Nair and Lahiri
poignantly depict householders who are robbed of joy and self-discovery
because they are obsessed with demonstrating the masculinist values of
looking competent and minimizing friction.
Nair’s collection brings out the theme of how men put up unnecessary
fences between themselves and others.11 Both “Video” and “Vishnukumar’s
Valentine’s Day” explore how a man’s expectations of wifely obedience
lead him to construct barriers, preventing him from being receptive to
his partner’s needs. Both stories also show how the presence of a new
set of consumer demands etches anxiety on to men’s bodies. Following
India’s being opened to world markets, under Prime Minister Narasimha
Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, and the consequent large
growth of a middle class during the past two decades, Indian spending
patterns and life-styles have changed dramatically. As Leela Fernandes
and others have observed, middle-class people have not only accessed
more goods and services, but that access has itself been constructed
as the quintessential face of today’s India, a construction designed to
102 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

convince citizens that all can potentially benefit from globalization.

The continuing impoverishment of the masses is thereby put to the side.12
Within middle-class circles, conspicuous consumption is no panacea for
anything, including the anxiety produced by such rapid change, and often
itself leads to a variety of other ills. It is beyond the scope of this paper
to outline these ills more fully, but for instance, among other factors, it is
consumerism that has led to increased dowry demands and greater phy-
sical danger for women in not fulfilling those demands; and the greater
marketing and affordability of liquor has led to a higher alcohol intake,
especially among men. In summary, the effect of US-style imported
consumerism on middle-class men has not received much exposure in
recent short fiction and Nair helps to begin that conversation.
Naseer, the protagonist of the humorous story “Video” has always
wanted to be an acclaimed building engineer, but, having familial duty
in mind first and foremost, he obeys his father’s wishes in managing
his dull hardware business. He suffers from his situation of living in an
extended family, jealous of his brothers’ engineering jobs and on guard
against their wives’ incessant gossip. To make matters worse, he regards
his marriage to Rasheeda, who is his intellectual equal, as something
that was forced on him once he turned twenty-three. Not wanting to be
outclassed, Naseer had not wanted a well-educated wife who is nearly as
tall as he is. Though they enjoy mutual pleasure in bed, he is emotionally
distant from her. For instance, after his parents die and Rasheeda receives
the keys to the household, everyone praises her competence, but Naseer
simply finds it eerie (p. 13).
As the story opens Naseer’s marriage is in turmoil. He has stumbled
upon a pornographic video with a blonde performing fellatio on a man
and he is obsessed with having Rasheeda give him oral sex, though she
keeps refusing. It is significant that the porn film is imported: the spread of
US consumer culture with its ceaseless quest to create new desires is the
catalyst for Naseer’s sudden dissatisfaction with his love life. After many
refusals, one night Naseer sees Rasheeda deep in sleep and directs:
his cock safely inside her mouth …. Just then Rasheeda woke up and
stared at him looming over her …. In her shock Rasheeda’s lips closed
automatically over him. She made a strangled sound. He thought
confusedly of pulling out, but he could not. Not then. Afterward, he
couldn’t remember when he thought she wouldn’t mind or how he held
her sleep-dazed head still and ignored her struggling. It was all over in
seconds anyway. She got up, ran into the bathroom, and didn’t come out
for a long time. (p. 18)

Naseer’s reaction to the coerced pleasure is telling:

I could have touched her brain if I’d wanted to, he thought, feeling
excited and mellow at the same time. I was so close to where she lives,
Masculinites in Recent Stories by South Asian American Women 103

not somewhere down there far away…. Then he fell asleep even as he
was thinking that he would never be able to sleep. (p. 18)
His mind never for a moment considers what it would be like to have
a cylinder forced down your throat; he is too overjoyed by the novelty
of his experience. Significantly, he wants to be “not somewhere down
there”; it is as if intercourse is too ordinary and reminds him of the other
dutiful choices he has made in his life. Furthermore, he is thrilled by the
invasiveness of his action. He wants to fondle Rasheeda’s brain: her brain
unconsciously threatens him, for her level of knowledge indicates that
the two of them could share equal power. His acute desire for sexual
dominance indicates that in his daily life he does not feel mastery of
anything he deems worthy.
The next day Rasheeda sprints for the bathroom twelve times: she
is literally unable to stomach his act. Naseer feels utterly displaced, as
Rasheeda not only moves her bed to the children’s bedroom, but, comic-
ally, makes the outside bathroom her personal chamber. He wants to
order her back to her former self, but such a move may cause Rasheeda
to broadcast their troubles and destroy his authoritative standing in
the family: “The thought of his sister-in-law looking up aghast at him –
the omnipotent respected elder – made him cringe at the potential embar-
rassment of it all” (p. 22). Collectivist communities prioritize preserving
peace among all who reside under the same roof. Here Nair shows how
society has molded Naseer to protect his image as an elevated male
authority and that this perceived need to maintain the image at all times
prevents him from beginning an honest dialogue with his wife as an equal
and from seeking out advice on the situation from anyone else.
Naseer’s seeking to impose himself spatially on his wife ironically
triggers a spatial reorganization that results in her asserting her author-
ity and wisdom. One day, a neighbour comes to the outhouse seeking
advice and is pleased with the answers Rasheeda whispers to her. From
then on, there is a queue of women outside her toilet door; eventually she
takes on new status as a counsellor or sage for women, becoming their
“Sandaz Begum – Madam Bathroom” (p. 23). Naseer is eventually forced
to acknowledge the toilet, of all places, and its chief occupant, as the nerve
centre of the neighbourhood.13 In the last scene of the story, Naseer’s
masculinist assertion of male sexual entitlement seems to have faded.
He has made several improvements to the outhouse and he humbly
waits his turn in the line of visiting women and then softly explains his
newest improvement through the outhouse’s mesh screen. It seems a new
spirit of living together has become possible for Rasheeda and Naseer.
He may not yet be ready to acknowledge the limitations of adhering so
closely to the responsible “elder-brother” role, but he has started to let go
of his belief that “man commands, woman listens”. Nair’s memorable
104 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

image of the man as a subordinate waiting in line to see his wife shows
the householder learning humility.
It must be noted that while the story is clever, the hand of a young
writer is evident in the tale’s stereotyping. As has been well documented
by Edward Said and others, non-Muslims have often constructed Muslim
men as lusty and primitive, over-referencing the image of the harem and
perpetuating myths about polygamous households.14 Since the story
could operate similarly with Hindu or Christian characters, one can
only surmise that the choice of Muslim characters was for shock effect
to heighten humour (so that, for instance, we can see a wife call upon
Allah to preserve her from fellatio).15
“Vishnukumar’s Valentine’s Day” depicts a man, who feels obliged to
observe an outsider’s holiday, as Valentine’s Day approaches. The story
begins in a restaurant, where Vishnukumar, an assistant editor of a small
local newspaper, dismisses Valentine-giving as “utter crap”, an imported
and therefore “imperialist” non-event. Readers are immediately asked
to question the spread of US-style consumerism and of the demand to
accept bourgeois notions of romantic love.16 Vishnukumar’s behaviour
is significantly determined by his particular position: as an Indian urban
householder he must shelter and care for his needy relations, especially
his elders. This situation exacts a cost: he and his wife, Shanti, constantly
quarrel as they deal with the stress of living with his sniping mother and
Shanti’s mother, who has Alzheimer’s. Additionally, Shanti and her
mother-in-law eye each other warily: they disagree over the amount of
money Shanti spends. The story implies that Shanti is buying clothing
rather recklessly and is gleeful about hiding it from his mother. Again we
see that the procurement of consumer goods symbolizes a new life-style
which can be used as a form of questionable escapism and which may
increase cross-generational suspicion and tension. Vishnukumar feels
trapped between the two women. But, true to a collectivist ideal of stoic
and authoritative masculinity that demands a son’s life-long deference
to his mother, he stops himself from sharing his sense of inner conflict
with his wife: “He had … imagined elaborate scenarios where he explained
his position on these matters to her. But then … you didn’t talk about
your mother with your wife. Or vice versa” (p. 177). Vishnukumar avoids
confrontation with any adult family member, as it might lead to his
feeling pain: he finds it easier to focus on his wife’s imperfections instead.
While he is clearly insensitive to his wife, our sympathy for him increases
when we learn he is haunted by the death several years back of his infant
daughter. Over-investing in the masculine ideal of stoicism, he has not
let himself grieve but prefers to stay numb and busy. At work he is relied
on for his “Middle-of-the-roadness …. He was the fucking principal of
Masculinites in Recent Stories by South Asian American Women 105

the don’t rock the boat do your job and take the money and go home
school of thinking” (p. 88).17
In the last scene of the story, it is February 14th and Vishnukumar is
walking to his office. Suddenly he is engulfed by schoolchildren pestering
him to buy Valentine’s balloons and roses. Comically, he hides behind
a large, foul-smelling trash can to avoid them, but he buys a girl’s last
flowers to get rid of her. We last see him imagining Shanti’s “face when
she opened the door and saw him with the flowers. He’d hand them to
her and leave quickly, no waiting around for the question and answer
session, he decided. Then he turned and started up the road toward
home” (p. 191). On one level this scene shows Vishnukumar as remaining
an unnecessarily frightened creature, scurrying from this holiday of ex-
pressiveness, extravagance and playfulness – the qualities he has erased
from his daily life. His decision to “leave quickly” indicates that he does
not want to think too much about what he is doing; he continues in the
robotic style that prevents him from having to re-examine any of his
assumptions.
But this reading neglects the surreal quality of the occasion. After
all, is not a demand to show love in itself a betrayal of caritas, of love’s
supposed spontaneity and selflessness? Perhaps Vishnukumar’s initial
resistance should be read as a heroic gesture, a refusal to perform the func-
tion of lover mechanically. Is he a bad person unless he participates in a
Christian, Roman custom popularized by British Victorians? Vishnukumar
rejects outsiders handing him a script of marital bliss. This story questions
the way that a “one-size-fits-all” hegemonic representation of romance
denies the self-sacrifice of other manifestations. For instance, we hear no
mention of Shanti’s appreciation for her husband’s agreement to house
her deranged mother, though this is a loving act, as a son is considered
to be responsible only for his own mother. “Vishnukumar’s Valentine’s
Day” shows a man resisting a custom that uses the word “love” to disguise
materialism; it thereby subtly suggests that heroism may be found in
unlikely places and encourages us to go beyond a knee-jerk negative
judgment of the male householder.
Jhumpa Lahiri also vividly represents how modern society increas-
ingly exacts flexibility from males, particularly highlighting the strain
of geographic displacement and cross-cultural interaction. In both
“Interpreter of Maladies” and “This Blessed House” the author wisely
chooses to narrate from the viewpoint of an unidentified third- person
observer who can only see inside one male character’s mind. The sex of the
narrator is not stated, emphasizing the universality of the perspective.
Lahiri’s deservedly praised “Interpreter of Maladies” (which won the
O’Henry Award) tells of a cross-cultural encounter between an Indian
tour guide, Mr. Kapasi, and the Das family, who are second-generation
106 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

South Asian American tourists. Mr. Kapasi, whose main job is as a medical
interpreter for patients who speak only Gujarati, has a sad home life.
His wife has no respect for his job as an interpreter of ill people; it only
reminds her that he cannot bring back their son who many years earlier
died of tuberculosis. The wife is still grieving, perhaps even blaming the
husband for the loss. We find him thinking,
In the end the boy had died … his limbs burning with fever, but then
there was the funeral to pay for, and the other children who were born
soon enough, and the newer, bigger house, and the good schools and
tutors … and the countless other ways he tried to console his wife and
to keep her from crying in her sleep, and so when the doctor offered to
pay him twice as much [for interpreting] … he accepted.18

Here his thoughts, distantly referring to “the boy” and “the other
children”, counter to traditional collectivist ideas, are dismissive of the
family in general and do not suggest that he took time to grieve the loss
of his son. Martha Nussbaum has argued that love, especially civic love
and compassion, can jump-start moral reflection that will help indi-
viduals push past societally entrenched prejudice against groups such
as women.19 Yet being a gentle, loving, sensitive person can co-exist with
being blind to one’s spouse’s full humanity, as the case of Mr. Kapasi
illustrates. This interpreter of maladies is very sensitive to others, but he
has not been able to interpret his own marriage to see how he contributes
to the negative dynamic between his wife and himself.
When Mrs. Das praises the usefulness of his work as a translator, this
unaccustomed flattery initiates a fantasy in Mr. Kapasi’s head: maybe he
and the glamorous, Americanized Mrs. Das are meant to start a romance.
By the end, Mr. Kapasi is forced to rescue the family from an attack by
monkeys, brought on by the parents’ lax supervision of their children. In
the process, the tour guide abruptly realizes that Mrs. Das is not a fetching
woman with a crush on him, but a creature of fatuous insensitivity, as
careless about other people as she is about the jumble of items in her
handbag. We are left to wonder about this encounter’s long-term effect
on Mr. Kapasi. Will he communicate a new way of seeing his work to
his wife, so that his daily minor acts of heroism can be recognized
within the family? Or will he simply shake his head at his dream about
Mrs. Das, registering yet another “failure”? In any case, Lahiri’s achieve-
ment is to have made Mr. Kapasi so multi-dimensional: he is sad, defeatist,
consummately considerate and loveable. He emerges as a vulnerable male,
who is both all too human and admirably humane. However, Sheetal
Majithia judges Mr. Kapasi to be “fixed and static”, since Mrs. Das dismisses
him, but the tour guide “still holds onto a memory of her”.20 Granted the
story ends with Mr. Kapasi having a “picture of the Das family” in his
Masculinites in Recent Stories by South Asian American Women 107

mind (p. 69), but it is of the whole group, rather than Mrs. Das, and it is
an unflattering image of them lolling about self-indulgently, recovering
from the attack – with nary a thank you for their rescuer.
Lahiri’s “This Blessed House” is the most hopeful of these stories
from a feminist point of view, for it alone shows a man fully committing
to a new model of manliness. Like the other stories, it demonstrates how
adhering too closely to the traditional male gender role may distance
a man from his marriage and daily life.21 In this case, however, the tale
creates deep compassion for the male, because he is forging a life as a
member of an isolated minority in mainstream US culture and because
he is caught between business and companionate marriage models.
Sanjeev, an affluent second-generation American engineer who has little
experience with women and is addicted to order and routine, marries
Twinkle, also a second-generation American. They have lived on opposite
sides of America and so their four-month courtship has consisted of
phone calls and a few visits. Parental pressure and loneliness hurry the
pair into a Calcutta wedding and it is an unlikely alliance: the methodical
engineer now lives with a woman who totters on spiky heels, streaks her
hair and is writing a master’s thesis on an unnoticed Irish poet.
Ominously, the couple do not discuss their expectations about mar-
riage, even though the institution is shuttling through many changes both
in India and in diasporic settings. For example, both Susan Seymour’s
interviews with middle-class young women in Bhubaneswar in 1989
and Jyoti Puri’s interviews with Delhi middle class women in 1998 suggest
a growing hope or expectation for companionate love in marriage.22 And
in the edited collection Emerging Voices, sociologist Sangeeta Gupta
has traced many variations on and attitudes towards arranged and
non-arranged marriage practised by second-generation South Asian
Americans.23 While Western capitalist entertainment undoubtedly spread
the companionate model of marriage, it was picked up by and has become
a main theme of Indian women’s magazines, Bollywood productions and
television serials.24 Returning to the oddly-matched couple in “This Blessed
House”, we are not privy to Twinkle’s thoughts on marriage, though we
do know she has recently been abandoned by her white American artist
boyfriend and we can imagine that this break-up has hastened her decision
to marry a reliable and financially stable Indian-American instead. It
seems likely that Twinkle does not share Sanjeev’s attachment to an
older, more business-like model of marriage. We know the couple will
clash when Sanjeev reassures himself about his feelings with a checklist:
he got a “pretty one, from a suitably high caste, who would soon have a
master’s degree. What was there not to love?” (p. 148).
The couple’s awareness of their differences and varied views on
compromise within marriage grows as Twinkle discovers a series of
108 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

grotesque, garish Christian icons left in obscure pockets of their new

home. Each “treasure” becomes a comical opportunity for the exuberant
Twinkle to stretch stolid Sanjeev’s fixation with propriety. Their clash
reaches a feverish pitch when Twinkle uncovers an enormous, valuable
bust of Jesus in front of a large group of party guests. He comes face to
face with his own rigidity, realizing he hates the object simply because
she loves it. Yet in this moment he finally sees the value of having a wife
who is as unpredictable as confetti:
She would never put it in her study, he knew. For the rest of their days
together she would keep it on the center of their mantel …. Each time
they had guests Twinkle would explain how she had found it, and they
would admire her as they listened. He gazed at the crushed rose petals
in her hair … at the sparkly crimson polish on her toes. He decided
these were among the things that made … [the others] think she was
wow. (p. 157)

Sanjeev comes to recognize that a life-partner is a constant discovery,

not a static contributor to a home’s order.
Paul Brians reads the ending of the story as solely celebrating the
wife’s triumph.25 However we are left admiring the couple’s shared
willingness to compromise. Ready to be more accommodating, Sanjeev
stiffly tells Twinkle where her shoes, shoes with the heels he has been
begging her to stop wearing, are. She smilingly replies, “Thanks. But my
feet are killing me” (p. 157), suggesting that she, too, is willing to absorb
some of his values, to respect his cautiousness. As mentioned previously,
this story stands out for showing a man committing to a new model of
manliness, while his wife has helped him to see her as a unique person,
adopting a more companionate model of marriage. It seems likely that
with Twinkle by his side, Sanjeev will gradually approach decisions in
a more fluid way, letting go of his masculinist desires.
Capitalist culture, with its assumption of an economy of scarcity from
within which we must act to acquire a surplus of goods, increases com-
petition between humans and between the sexes. Asymmetrical power
relations hamper relationships in capitalist society and in India, as
the country is invaded by the demands of consumer society, husbands
and wives must negotiate new territory and marriages that are more
companionate. Told in a few sentences, the plots of most of these stories
would paint the main characters as insensitive muddlers. However their
rendering within a postcolonial context and thus from a politically ex-
centric position, illuminates the uneven steps people take when finding
their place amidst a new influx of Western and hypercapitalist assump-
tions. These fictions make clear that we must bear this changing context
in mind when considering the male role. To overcome the reality of male
Masculinites in Recent Stories by South Asian American Women 109

privilege, Stanley Aronowitz says, we must do more than simply expose

it to public view. We need a “discourse on pleasure and pain … the secret
worlds of the two cultures must be revealed … [to] foster shared
experience”.26 South Asian American women’s short stories are beginn-
ing to reveal the secret worlds of men and represent memorably Indian
men’s internal conflicts within a framework of rapid modernization,
colonialist residue and patriarchal structures. Only a few stories, how-
ever, bear witness to men actually shedding the masculinism that may
limit actions, particularly their relations with women. Nair’s “Video”
and “Lahiri’s “This Blessed House” in particular attest to men’s potential
to outgrow masculinist ideology when it is keeping them from experi-
encing intimacy and spontaneity. While short stories are neither sermons
nor recipes, these stories do lead readers to admire men who question
traditional precepts and thus make a new contribution to South Asian
American feminist literature.

NOTES
1 See Chandra Holm’s reviews (http://www.ch.8m.com/main.htm) and the archives of
SASIALIT, a listserv from Rice University (http://is.rice.edu/~riddle/play/sasialit/).
Gita Rajan, “Pliant and Compliant: Colonial Indian Art and Postcolonial Cinema”,
Women: A Cultural Review, 13 (2002), 48–69, argues that Mehta caricatures men
in the film Fire.
2 Lavina Shankar, “Junglee Girls and Other Wild Women: Claiming the Body/Writing
Her-self”, unpublished manuscript, 2004, p. 23.
3 D.W. Connell, Masculinities, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, p. 43.
For examples of the injunction to break away from rigid notions of masculinity, see
Michael Kimmel’s Manhood in America, New York: Free Press, 1996; “Clarence,
William, Iron Mike … and Us”, in Transforming a Rape Culture, ed. Emilie Buchwalk
et al., Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1993, pp. 121–38; Sut Jhally’s documentary
Tough Guise (1999) which features Jackson Katz; and Lynn Segal’s Slow Motion,
London: Verso, 1990.
4 I recognize the limitations of the binary gender system I am referring to here.
Indeed, some theorists such as John MacInnes (The End of Masculinity, Buckingham:
Open University Press, 1998) argue that gender is merely an imaginary construct.
I believe at this point in time, for better or for worse, gender operates as a commonly
understood cognitive category, whether it exists in an empirical way or not. Further-
more, as some transsexual writers such as Max Valerio and Matt Kailey can attest
to from personal experience with hormone injection, a biological dimension exists
outside of linguistic constructs, and is one component that contributes to a male
identity.
5 Tahira Naqvi, Attar of Roses and Other Stories of Pakistan, Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner, 1997. Naqvi’s “The Good Wife” (2000), Monsoon Magazine, 23 August
2002, www.monsoonmag.com/fiction/i3fic_naqvi.html, is more of a short sketch,
but deserves mention for its male-narrated exposure of male vulnerability on the
day of a fifty-year-old’s death.
110 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

6 I use Stanley Aronowitz’s term “masculinism” here to indicate the process of

justifying male domination “on the basis of psychological and physiological
categories”. For instance, masculinists would regard “male physical strength and/or
gender differentiation with respect to sexual reproduction” as justifying privilege
or might well insist on unproven “gender-determined mental propensities (such
as superior skills in logic)”, Stanley Aronowitz, “My Masculinity”, Constructing
Masculinity, ed. Maurice Berger et al., New York: Routledge, 1995, pp. 316–17.
7 I am referring here to scholarship from a Men’s Studies or Critical Men’s Studies
framework. For more on this distinction, see Jeff Hearn, “From Hegemonic
Masculinity to the Hegemony of Men”, Feminist Theory, 5,1 (2004), 49–72.
8 Caroline Osella et al., “Introduction: Towards a More Nuanced Approach to
Masculinity”, South Asian Masculinities, Delhi: Kali for Women and Women
Unlimited, 2004, p. 8. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited in the
text.
9 See, for instance, Morris Carstairs, The Twice-Born: A Study of a Community of
High Caste Hindus, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1957; Veena Das, Structure and
Cognition: Aspects of Hindu Caste and Ritual, Delhi: OUP, 1977; and Sudhir Kakar,
The Inner World: a Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India, Delhi:
OUP, 1981. For a strong opposing view based on ethnographic texts in Kerala, see
Carolina Osella and Filippo Osella, “Contextualizing Sexuality”, in Coming of Age
in South and Southeast Asia, ed. Lenore Manderson, Richmond, Surrey: Curzon,
2002, pp. 113–31.
10 For an overview of collectivist versus individualist cultural patterns, see H.C.
Triandis, Individualism and Collectivism, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996.
11 For instance, in “My Grandfather Dreams of Fences”, a story depicting a struggle
over land ownership, Nair’s sensitive characterizations generate an appreciation
of several generations of men from two widely different classes. “A Certain Sense of
Place” familiarizes us with an unusual love triangle, an equilateral triangle of
friendship. The story reveals a romantic couple’s co-dependence on a mutual and
needy female friend. It is told from the man’s perspective and he is a sympathetic
figure in his sincere desire for a woman with whom he can be a true confidant.
12 Leela Fernandes, “The Politics of Forgetting: Class Politics, State Power and the
Restructuring of Urban Space in India”, Urban Studies, 41 (2004), 2415–30. For a
longer description of the rise of the middle class, see, among others, Rachel Dwyer,
All You Need is Money, All You Want is Love: Romance in Modern India, London:
Cassell, 2000.
13 Here Nair cleverly riffs on both Virginia Woolf and Alice Walker. The woman who
would like to create and make something for a larger community needs a “room
of her own”, even if only a bathroom. And when we seek to discover our mothers’
source of fulfillment beyond the kitchen, in search of our mothers’ gardens, to borrow
Walker’s phrase, we have to be ready to find that women have used whatever source
is available. I am grateful to Nalini Iyer for pointing out this connection.
14 Edward Said has shown how Asians were stereotyped in a number of ways to further
Western supremacy, geographic expansion and intellectual conquest. See Orientalism,
1978; New York: Vintage, 1994. Mary John’s “Globalisation, Sexuality and the
Visual Field”, A Question of Silence, ed. Mary John and Janaki Nair, New Delhi:
Masculinites in Recent Stories by South Asian American Women 111

Kali for Women, 1998, pp. 368–96, 395, provides one example of mainstream Indian
stereotyping of Muslims as oversexed.
15 I have not seen other criticism that refers to Nair’s handling of religious identity.
But Nair’s collection did receive mixed reviews, the chief complaint being that the
plots are too neatly assembled to seem inspired. See Sophie Pinkham, “This Indian
Life”, The Yale Review of Books, Winter 2005, p. 3; and Taylor Antrim, “Young,
Gifted and Workshopped”, Voice Literary Supplement, May 2002, p. 3. However,
critics generally praised the story “Video”, which won the Asian American Literary
Award in 2003.
16 Such notions of love are circulated by Bollywood films (originally following the
emphasis on romance in Hollywood films) and by Western-style English magazines,
aimed at the female middle class, such as Femina.
17 His fondness for Kafka, a man who emphasized his own failure, may suggest
that Vishnukumar identifies with defeat too strongly to be able to try to alter his
course.
18 Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies and Other Stories, Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1999, pp. 52–3. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited in the text.
19 Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, New York: OUP, 1990, pp. 83, 157, 160, 193,
210.
20 Sheetal Majithia, “Of Foreigners and Fetishes: A Reading of Recent South Asian
American Fiction”, SAMAR, 11 September 2005, p. 5. While the stories “Interpreter”
and “Mrs. Sen” conflict with Majithia’s formulation, her analysis of Bharati
Mukherjee and Chitra Divakaruni is commendable.
21 Significantly Vishnukumar, Nasser and Sanjeev do not have close male friends, which
in itself may be a critique of traditional masculine norms that sometimes interfere
with casual, non-competitive connection.
22 Susan Seymour, Women, Family and Child Care in India, Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1999; and Jyoti Puri, Woman, Body, Desire in Post-Colonial India, New York:
Routledge, 1999.
23 Sangeeta R.Gupta, Emerging Voices, New Delhi: Sage, 1999.
24 For more on the interchange between Hollywood and Bollywood, see Rachel
Dwyer, All You Want is Money, All You Need is Love, London: Cassell, 2000,
pp. 96–147 or consult K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake, Indian Popular
Cinema, Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books, 1998.
25 Paul Brians, Modern South Asian Literature in English, Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 2003. p. 202.
26 Aronowitz, “My Masculinity”, p. 318.