ABSTRACT
Statement: Living and writing in America is for me at once a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge lies in trying to bring alive, for readers from other ethnic backgrounds, the Indian—and Indian American— experience, not as something exotic and alien, but as something human and shared. It lies in getting my own community to see the subject of my work (often the plight of women of Indian origin struggling within a male-dominated culture, even here in America). It is necessary and important and not, as many have complained, a betrayal of my people, an exposure of secrets that create a “bad impression” of Indian in American society. But the opportunities are more important: to be able to straddle two distinct cultures and depict both with the relatively objective hand of the outsider; to destroy stereotypes and promote understanding between different sectors of the multicultural society in which we live; to paint the complex life of the immigrant with its unique joys and sorrows, so distinct from those of people who have never left their native land. The possibility of achieving even one of these through my work makes me glad to be an Indian writer in America.
