Returning from America to India
By Suhasini Patni
Review of Won’t You Stay, Radhika? by Usha Priyamvada, trans. Daisy Rockwell (India: Speaking Tiger Books, 2023)
Usha Priyamvada, an emerita professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is one of Hindi language’s best known modern writers. In her first novel, Fifty-Five Pillars, Red Walls (1961), she wrote about Sushma, a professor of Hindi literature at a premier university in Delhi, whose personal ambitions are constricted by that of her family. Priyamvada’s work encapsulates the struggles of women who fought for the right to work, only to be burdened with both financial and reproductive labor. Their entry into the workplace meant making sacrifices; nothing came without a cost. In the case of Sushma, gaining financial independence means she must give up romantic desire. Her salary belongs to her family, and her duty is towards her younger siblings, not a clandestine romance. Although Sushma falls in love with a man who wants to take care of her and wants her to move with him to Holland, she refuses him to appease her family. Instead, she takes care of her aging parents and works on finding her siblings suitable partners.
Priyamvada’s second novel, Won’t You Stay, Radhika?, originally published in 1967 and translated in English in 2023, is radically different. One of the first instances of Indian diasporic literature, the book lays out the boredom and ennui of the protagonist, Radhika, who defied her father by leaving the country to study in Chicago and live with an American man outside of marriage. After years of studying and working abroad, Radhika arrives back at a cold airport with a “growing sense of despair.” Struggling to adapt to the familiar surroundings, she believes “she could lose herself here and no one would notice her.” Within a few paragraphs, fans of Priyamvada are greeted by her typical economy of language. One where no sentence is so ornate that it feels difficult to process but nonetheless jolts emotion into the reader.
Disappointed that nothing has changed in the city, Radhika waits to be greeted by a familiar face. Instead, she meets Akshay, a stranger her stepmother sent to pick her up. It is clear that Radhika has family issues: a father who does not come to pick her up, a younger stepmother whom she despises, and a brother too high on the power of being a successful married man. Akshay’s appearance in the airport is a signifier of all that is damaged in her family. Although he is dressed sharply and avoids her eye—a shyness she finds amusing—he is a stranger allied with Radhika’s stepmother, Vidya. He notices that she has a sadness etched into her eyes and that her laughter doesn’t sound joyful. He is taken aback when she refers to her stepmother by her first name, a practice uncommon in India, where all family members are referred to by kinship terms or with honorifics.
Akshay initially hesitates to take her to his home because he is “worried Radhika might be inconvenienced by his simple home, after the glitz and glamor of abroad.” His house stands in an affluent South Delhi neighborhood with a full-time employee and showcases a large Scandinavian chair and a populated bookshelf. The hesitancy with which he treats Radhika, who has lived away from India for only three years, is symbolic of the diasporic experience. People who return to their home country are suddenly treated like guests. Radhika is often asked about life in America. But the answers she supplies, though precise in their description, are not the ones her family members want to hear. Indians, especially from the ’70s, have been taught to look at America with equal measures of reverence and disdain. While the work opportunities and independence are often celebrated features of Western life, Radhika’s family, much like many others in India, can’t help but comment on divorce rates, lack of community life, and the evils of live-in relationships in the West. Additionally, when Radhika meets other America-returnees, she feels bored in their presence, unimpressed by their pretentiousness and privileged responses to “reverse culture-shocks.” When a man speaks to her in a thick Boston accent, she replies to him in Hindi until he completely stops talking to her. Therefore, Radhika exists in a liminal space; while she sees the independence of the West as an advantage, she does not hold the country in either high or low regard. To her, going to the US was an escape from her family and a chance at love. A way to put pause on a complicated life.
After her mother’s death, Radhika was attached to her father, both emotionally and intellectually. Late nights in his room researching alongside him bled into long hours in the library. If they fought, she would “arouse his sympathy” by appearing in a “pitiable state.” However, when he made the decision to remarry a much younger woman, Radhika’s usual tactics did not work. In the library she met Dan, who had come to India to write a book on the country for foreigners. Although he came to India with a wife, she soon left him for another man. Radhika wonders how a culture in which partners change so easily can function. Yet, she is not beneath taking advantage of the transitoriness of this culture and utilizes Dan’s expertise to find a way to Chicago. “Dan had only been a means to an end,” she realizes. After spending months traveling across the world for research together, he claims she is only comfortable with him because she finds “a reflection of her father in his maturity.” Although she disagrees with him, she doesn’t dispute this claim, and they break off their relationship. One can distinctly find Priyamvada’s brevity of style in how she portrays the relationship between Dan and Radhika. It is implied that she “lived like wife” with Dan, a trait that men in the future will come to find unattractive about her, but the author never gives the reader a real glance into the relationship. Radhika’s inner monologue doesn’t wonder about Dan. If she hears news of him, she simply nods. When asked about him, she doesn’t display any pain or sadness. This is not the detachment and coldness of the protagonist, but rather the ennui and boredom that is characteristic of Radhika’s life. Although Radhika is not unfeeling, her self-centeredness often makes the relationships of her life seem transient.
Much of the story comprises Radhika lying down, “picking at the scabs of old wounds.” Her move to America causes a rift between her family and herself. Her father no longer lives with his new wife, the hair on his head turns into a sharp white, and the rest of her family pushes her to follow a more traditional path. Although she respects her father and greatly desires his affection, she recognizes his faults, as well as that of the other men in her family: “They respected women and gave them freedom as well, but only so long as they didn’t cross the boundaries drawn by men.” She continues to observe that the social milieu in India “hadn’t changed all that much” and that “despite the fact that her appearance and style of dressing were completely Indian, she was not bound by tradition.” Yet, marriage is an inescapable facade of Indian society that even a character like Radhika cannot fully ignore. When she meets Suneeti Mami, the wife of her mother’s brother, she notices her “housewife hands”—the result of a life hardened by home and children.
“When Suneeti Mami had first come to this house as a bride, her eyes sparkled, and a dimple appeared on her left cheek when she smiled. The dimple was all that remained.”
It is evident that she has seen only unsuccessful marriages in her life—either those that ruin the beauty and youth of the women, or those that damage the children. Yet, it is an alluring possibility to be married and settled down. She has two candidates to choose from: Akshay, the more traditional man who does not get her heart racing but provides warmth, comfort, and stability, and Manish, an older friend of Dan’s who is known to be a womanizer and charms Radhika through his creativity. Yet, Manish’s meaningless bourgeois life makes Radhika despondent. Towards the end, Radhika keeps asking people around her whether they’re happy and remains disappointed that no one around her has given a thought to happiness. Eventually, when the time comes to decide, she not only rejects Manish but also watches Akshay leave the city for a job. Instead of confessing her feelings to either man, she lies on her takht, staring at her ceiling.
Although Radhika’s live-in relationship and escape to America can be read as a feminist maneuver to take control of her life, it is as much a product of her privilege. Priyamvada’s characters are often ambivalent, but her descriptions are pointed. She details the continental breakfast menu that Radhika’s immediate family eats, the kind of whiskey they drink in the evening, the brightly lit verandahs where they entertain guests. None of the details she provides are without reason. Priyamvada’s writing is calculated and enriching. The book uses Radhika’s inability to make decisions in her life to expose the alienation and unbelonging brought through globalization. Those who have access to the lifestyles abroad are unable to adjust to their local surroundings but yearn for their homeland. Women who do not fit into the traditional docile role find it harder to commit to partners and are therefore not accepted by society. Radhika is unable to look at her family and friends without disdain. Yet, the fact that they do not wonder about their own happiness or contentment is so seductive that she can’t help but loathe herself. Priyamvada’s slim novel opens the possibility of inhabiting multiple lives and feeling unhappy in all of them. Ennui, which the translator defines from French as “serious afflictions” that are “weightier than boredom,” plagues not just Radhika but those who read about her life and live vicariously through her inability to make decisions. Although it was written in 1967, it remains just as relevant to readers today who are plagued by ennui just like Radhika.
Born in 1930 in Lucknow, Priyamvada spent much of her life in India. Won’t You Stay, Radhika?, despite being categorized as Indian diasporic literature, wasn’t written for an Anglophone audience living in America. Written in Modern Standard Hindi, her work endures for North Indian readers, especially those situated in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. There is no explanation for Indian society, the different neighborhoods the characters visit, or the regional food they eat. If there is at all an explanation, it is about the life of a student abroad and American culture. Radhika’s wandering, her lack of submission, and her general ambivalence reveal a greater sense of alienation that Indian women on the periphery felt and continue to feel. The book’s title is a question that remains unanswered, but leaves the reader tethered to the narrative, desperately wanting her to make decisions, but sympathizing with her inability to do so.
It is no surprise that the translator of both Priyamvada’s novels into English is Daisy Rockwell. Rockwell, who won the International Booker Prize for her translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, has called out the publishing industry for being “obsessed” with “the cult of the new.” Her work has brought books from authors such as Krishna Sobti, Khadija Mastur, and Upendranath Ashk into English. Rockwell is not just a translator but also a curator, bringing forward the rich complexity of Hindi and Urdu literature and promoting South Asian translation. Priyamvada, whose literary work made her the recipient of the Premchand Prize in 1976, is another figurehead of modern Hindi writing, whose work is now available to non-Hindi readers through Rockwell’s efforts and Speaking Tiger Books.
Suhasini Patni is a freelance writer based in Jaipur and Delhi. Her work has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Words Without Borders, Asymptote Journal, and elsewhere. She is currently completing her master’s in linguistics at the University of Rochester.
“In Southeast Asia, poetry is power.” Ng Yi-Sheng reviews five recent collections of Southeast Asian poetry.