Authors Share Immigrant Tales

Two South Asian authors spoke to students last night about being Indian immigrants and incorporating their experiences into their fiction.

The South Asian Association hosted writers Rishi Reddi and Pradeep Anand, two authors who recently published narratives drawing from their personal histories.

Reddi, whose short story “Justice Shiva Ram Murthy” appeared first in the “Harvard Review” and later in the 2005 edition of “The Best American Short Stories,” began the discussion with a disclaimer.

“I have to say I feel like I’m totally unqualified to write about the diaspora,” Reddi said, referring to the title of the event, “Depicting the Diaspora.” “I just wrote out of the need to tell the story about the group of people that I knew as a child. It was intensely personal.”

About 20 students attended the talk, asking the authors for advice on how to become a writer in the face of societal pressures to pursue professional careers.

Recently, the experiences of Indian immigrants have become a hot topic in literature. Last year Kiran Desai’s “The Inheritance of Loss” won the Booker Prize, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000.

Last month, a film based on Lahiri’s novel “The Namesake”—about a boy raised by Indian parents in America—opened in movie theaters.

The authors stressed that there is no one, all-encompassing Indian immigrant experience.

Anand, whose first book “An Indian in Cowboy Country: Stories from an Immigrant’s Life” was published last year, said he was part of an immigrant wave which first arrived in the U.S. to fill jobs vacated by Americans then fighting in the Vietnam War. He spoke about the differences between the experiences of the first wave and that of the second generation.

“Coming here to do a job and being accepted are two different things,” Anand said. “Our generation’s experience, your parent’s generation, is very different than your generation’s experience. The second layer builds on the first layer.”

But Reddi reminded the audience that the wave of immigration in the 1970s was not the first to hit America. According to Reddi, in the 1910s and 1920s a smaller number of mostly Punjabi immigrants moved to California to become farmers.

“That generation is virtually ignored,” Reddi said. “And what they did for the country in terms of the desert land they made fertile is tremendous.”

Neither Reddi nor Anand is a writer by trade. The former was an environmental lawyer until she recently gave up working to write full-time, and the latter is the owner of Seeta Resources, a consulting firm in Houston.

“For most of my life I rarely told people that I wrote,” Anand said. “I’m a right-brained person, but throughout my childhood my brain was tortured into a left-brain person. I mean, that’s what an Indian kid is supposed to do.”