East is East and West is West
And Never the ‘twain shall meet
-Rudyard Kipling
So many books and films have been written on the Indian diaspora in the West (e.g. East is East/West is West, Bend it like Beckham, The Bong Connection, Swades), ranging anywhere from surreal to downright ridiculous, that most Indians have stopped noticing them. So, it is nice to accidentally run into a quiet gem like Dollar Bahu (literally, Dollar Daughter-in-Law) that deals with the theme in a dispassionate way, and yet achieves a realistic and humane narrative.
The story revolves around an old middle-class Kannadiga couple Shamanna and Gouramma; and their children: Chandrashekhar, Girish and Surabhi, in that order. Shamanna was a Sanskrit teacher at a government school while Gouramma is a little-educated homemaker. Somehow, through their meagre savings, they have managed to get a house built in Bengaluru. Neither person in the family have ever travelled abroad, but Shamanna and Girish, being wise and contented men, are hardly bothered by it. Gouramma, however, feels isolated at parties when women congregate and discuss the foils of their NRI (non-resident Indian) sons and daughters and the foreign exchange they send back home. She too dreams of boasting of an NRI (specifically, American) son/daughter-in-law or daughter/son-in-law one day. Gouramma and her obsession with dollars and the NRI tag is such an omnipresent figure in the novel that I wonder why the book was not titled Dollar Mother-in-Law.
Much to her disdain, her second son, Girish, has taken after her husband Shamanna and his absolutely content being a clerk at a bank in Bengaluru. Luckily for Gouramma, Chandrashekhar and Surabhi share her ‘American Dream’. For Chandrashekhar, this means somehow landing up in the USA, getting permanent residence by hook or by crook; while for Surabhi, it means either ‘capturing’ an NRI husband or getting married to someone in India and then goading him to move abroad. As things unfold, Girish marries Vinuta, a Hindustani classical singer and leads a quiet life with his parents. Chandrashekhar settles abroad, even breaking a few laws in the process, and comes back to India for about a week and gets married to Jamuna after only a few meetings. Gouramma hastens since Jamuna comes from a wealthy family. Surabhi, however, fails in getting an NRI man and hitches Suresh, a lawyer in Bengaluru. The lure of money gets the better of Gouramma, so, as the influx of dollars increases Gouramma cannot stop praising Jamuna (the ‘dollar daughter-in-law’ in question) to heavens in comparison to the easy-mannered Vinuta, which drives the latter into depression.
Their intertwined journeys in and out of India and North America provide us a cross section of the Indian diaspora. Indians innocently arrive in the US, with visions of paradise, and are suddenly struck with a culture remarkably different from their own. The book traces their initial mild amusement at remarkably different cultural attitudes towards alcohol, drug-abuse, social affiliations, sexuality and relationships turning into very real fears as they have children of their own. (In all honesty, when I lived in the UK, even I found these different attitudes bizarre, and still do.) In the background of a rapidly changing twenty-first century India, such a study in sociology on material prosperity and identity crisis becomes even more complex and is, I feel, best accomplished through a work of grounded fiction. A work of non-fiction on the theme would probably become too unwieldy, which is why I am yet to come across a very wholesome and satisfactory non-fiction, academic study on the matter.
Through this densely packed and fast paced novel, Murty dissects the entire spectrum of the world-famous and oft-stereotyped Indian institution of ‘arranged’ marriage as it has metamorphosed to the present-day. Far from an obsolete medieval practice where children were allegedly forced to enter marital alliance to cement a contract between two influential families (yes, even in Europe: see Pride and Prejudice or Ivanhoe); Murty presents ‘arranged’ marriage in late twentieth and twenty-first century India what it truly is – an extremely well-oiled machinery, enough to put American dating apps or even Mexican drug cartels to shame. For the author, it is no longer just a system used by parents to get their children married to people of their choice; but is also a system cleverly milked by eligible bachelors and bachelorettes to find wives and husbands earning in dollars and living plush lives abroad.
Despite being a feminist (you will get this impression from Murty’s other books), Murty does not hesitate in dealing with the subject matter in an unbiased way: NRI men (like Chandrashekhar) go through lists of Indian women wanting to marry an NRI man (much like Chandrashekhar’s sister and Gouramma’s daughter Surabhi), like products on a shopping website before swooping down to conduct brief ‘job interviews’ before marrying and ‘whisking’ them away to the land of nectar and honey. The favour is reciprocated with much fervour: Indian women go through lists of NRI men on the lookout for a bride as well. In this positive feedback loop, it’s not just women who are gold diggers – men are not far behind either. And much like the NRI man on the lookout for Indian women, there are NRI women as well on the lookout for nice Indian boys from nice families. Throughout the novel, characters have been very appropriately placed to drive home the truth.
Gouramma’s one-year visit to Chandrashekhar in the US forms a significant part of the book. Her desensitisation process begins right from the first day when her son tells her that he is paying a heavy mortgage on his house and car. The dollar hadn’t come easy – after all, her own house in Bengaluru was hers by right! She also encounters a wide spectrum of Indians. There are the Radhakrishnas, who hail from a family of Vedic scholars in India, who are distraught because their daughter works as a waitress in a restaurant and is living-in with a Brazilian man. The Radhakrishnas feel that migrating to the US was too heavy a price to pay for them, especially as it had happened to them by accident and they had never wished to! Then there are other Indians, like Vatsala or Padma, who have accepted that these altered relations with their children was a price they simply had to pay for financial and professional growth. Gouramma is surprised at their nonchalance at this changed nature of parent-child relationships, which would in India have instantly been labelled as ‘fraught’. Radhakrishna’s daughter drives home a key point about Indians abroad when Chandrashekhar runs into her at a restaurant she works at: ‘you people want the best of both worlds, which isn’t possible… you cheat yourself!’
The final nail in the coffin is driven by Jamuna, whom Gouramma overhears badmouthing her and her entire family and even saying Chandru was considered eligible for marrying her just because of his green card. She immediately repents greed getting the better of her and pushing her son in the transactional marriage, devoid of emotions; and realises that Shamanna, Girish and Vinuta, whom she had always scoffed at, were the only ones with any real love or concern for themselves or for her. She also overhears Jamuna and her friends talking of how they push their discarded things to folks back home in India as ‘gifts from America.’
There are certain instances that I feel were treated by the author in a one-sided manner. There are Indians who, for example, feel that, unlike in India, their lifestyle and personal choices are not seen in a dim view of by Americans. It does not dawn on either of the characters that that is simply the case because their American partners too have the same lifestyle and just as many exit doors to the relationship as them. Some aspects have been overdone, only to be contradicted by the narrative later on. For example, Gouramma is found marvelling at the carpets at her son’s house. I found this strange, since merchants have been flooding European markets Indian and Persian textiles for centuries, and, contradictorily, Gouramma too encounters an Indian businesswoman who does brisk business by importing and selling Indian textiles in New York. The concept of ‘gifts from America’ has clearly become very passé in twenty-first century India, especially with the advent of online shopping, and the episode where Chandrashekhar visits India with expensive watches or cutlery or spices was overdone (seriously, bringing spices, of all things, from US to India?!). Not surprisingly, characters in the book admit to carrying an empty suitcase to India, filling it up by purchases in Mumbai or New Delhi or Bengaluru and passing them off as ‘imported gifts.’
Although the book largely deals with the changing nature of relationships, families and traditional roles in twenty-first century India, for me it was also a tacit commentary on archaic Socialist governance in India, which killed private enterprise and homegrown entrepreneurs, forcing many skilled Indians to migrate abroad looking for jobs. Unfortunately, this socialist hangover still casts a massive spell over our government policy and for some reason is still romanticised by Indians. Talented and skilled people – there are many sprinkled across the book – wandering unemployed or settling for mediocre opportunities in small towns of India because they could not find anything better was something I could totally relate to. Socialist sluggishness and our arrested infrastructure development simply did not allow for more urban centres to properly develop, leading to the existing metropolises (Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru) becoming saturated and unmanageable. Amidst this narrative, simple Girish and his contented wife Vinuta (the only couple who’d had a ‘non-arranged’ marriage), who choose to lead a quiet life in Dharwad, a hub of Indian classical music, provide a nice contrast and balance to Indians mindlessly wanting to go to Amreeka. So does Shamanna, who regularly keeps peppering any situation with stories from ancient Indian philosophy, as if reasserting one’s roots.
Dollar Bahu can be downloaded from https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Sudha_Murty_Dollar_Bahu?id=WcYDAQAAQBAJ.
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