American Desi¹: Hybridity as Neoliberal Choice in Kavita Daswani’s The Village Bride of Beverly Hills

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

² Daswani’s books are published by Putnam and Penguin Random House. Aguiar mentions that Indian chick lit is “written primarily by and for Indian women in the subcontinent and abroad; arguably, however, their market extends more broadly to a South Asian professional class … . The market also includes a more general, mostly female Western readership. Readers’ reviews on Amazon.com suggest that these novels draw readers across ethnicities … . The presence of these works on Indian best-seller lists suggests that markets and readership are shared between India, the United Kingdom, North America, and other English language locations” (197–198).

³ This term, roughly translated as Indian Woman, is akin to the Victorian notions of the cult of domesticity or true womanhood and alludes to “a monolithic interpretation and pervasive stereotyping of Indian women with regard to their ‘appropriate’ behavior and roles that are based on the Hindu patriarchal ideology of stri-dharma (duties of the woman/wife), and pati-vrata (woman who is pledged to her lord/husband)” (Grewal 69).

⁴ I would like to clarify that being a journalist is, of course, not a career path that is only available in the West, but it is presented as such within the world of Village Bride since it is underlined how Priya’s father-in-law disapproves of this profession for her as an Indian married woman.