When I posted about the new book “Marrying Anita” (Bloomsbury, July 2008) a few weeks ago, I was cynical about the arrival of yet another published work exploring the institution of arranged marriage. (So were many of you. Questions rolled in about author Anita Jain’s desire to find a “broadminded” husband in India and her impetus for writing the book. These were coupled with a heated conversation about dating in the desi community. You can see her answers to your questions and mine below the fold.)
Despite my pessimism at the time, I promised to give the book a 
chance. And, I’m glad I did. I expected “Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India” to be a straightforward chick lit read about a 33 year old woman who moves to India from the US in order to find a husband. “Oh great, she wrote a well-received New York magazine article and then decided to conduct one of those how-I-did-xyz-in-a-year experiments.” What I found instead was a candid, straightforward, and intelligent memoir that combines the author’s search for a kindred spirit with her experiences adjusting to life in contemporary (and middle class) India.
Jain’s move occurs during the summer of 2005, coincidentally perhaps, at the same point in her life when her father had moved to the US – at age 33. “I moved to India, reversing the migration pattern of my father,” she writes …
Historians will tell you Delhi has been home to nine distinct cities through the ages, the remnants of which are scattered everywhere, like seeds from a flower; a poet’s tom fifty paces from my front door, an old fort not far past the Sundar Nagar market. But I will tell you that there are ten cities of Delhi and I live in the last, one with restaurants where one can order mushroom-and-goat-cheese farfalle, use wireless broadband, and go to nightclubs where girls in spaghetti-strap tank tops gyrate to the latest hip-hop influenced Bollwood hit.
Comparing Anita Jain to Jane Austen might be too much of a stretch, but there is something of Austen’s spirit in Jain’s work which paints a vivid portrait of a particular generation of Indian middle class society. Her narrative is full of acute observations about economic and social changes, class relations, and the dating scene in India’s capital.
Jain does not “consider [herself] some kind of arbiter of dating.” In our email interview, she said, “I was simply one person who took a journey and wanted to write about it.” Indeed, while she is trying to figure out how to go about meeting the right person, she is also engaged in an equally (if not more fascinating) struggle to find an apartment (it’s tough to rent an apartment as a single woman in Delhi; not Mumbai or Bangalore, we learn) and to make new friends (one of her good friends ends up being the sister of a guy she met through shaadi.com back here in the US).
We don’t hear much about her work life as a financial journalist, but maybe that’s fodder for another book.
From the first page where she affectionately pokes fun at her larger-than-life father and his childhood stories of growing up in a household of several siblings and one comb, Jain is a likeable narrator. Unafraid to wear her heart on her sleeve or to mock herself and her situation, she quickly shows you that she has more on her mind than simply a desire to tie the knot. I found myself smiling often as I flipped the pages of this book, sometimes feeling myself wanting to race forward because I really wanted to know: Will she or won’t she find her soulmate in India?
I won’t give away the answer to that question, but I will say that as more and more of us wonder about and seek to explore the opportunities that could exist for us in India—professionally and personally—we can’t help but also wonder how different India is from the country that our parents told us about, or the one that we discovered as children and teens. For me, this book was an enjoyable read in that respect. It opened an interesting window into the rapidly changing world of my peers in India; a world that I don’t have much access to otherwise.
Whether the reverse migration ends up being a long term or permanent one (like the generation of Anita’s parents) or not, remains to be seen, I suppose.
In the meantime, here’s our Q&A for those of you interested in Anita Jain’s responses to the comments generated last month.
Q.What was the impetus for this book? Anita Jain: Getting married or finding a husband was certainly one imperative of the book; it was by no means the only one or even the most important one to my mind. My two other imperatives were to write about what I saw unfolding before me in urban India, which has changed more in the last five to ten years than it had in the preceding decades, and as well, to write an engaging, thought-provoking, and entertaining memoir.
Memoir, in particular, is an impoverished genre in India, unlike in the West, where there has been a recent profusion of memoirs to the point where every other book published these days seems to be one. It’s a glaring void compared with the explosion of literary fiction in the subcontinent in the last thirty years. Another popular form of writing for which India provides the backdrop is the travel narrative, in which a usually Western male comes to the subcontinent and narrates the tales of his interactions with interesting subjects.
I have always been fascinated by memoirs and often opt for reading one over a novel, as I think we humans are deeply interested in the lived human experience, something that is ostensibly the ‘truth’. Because of the dearth of memoir from Indians, I decided that this approach would be the most innovative and effective for what I wanted to say. In my book, I attempt to marry (forgive the pun) the memoir with the travel narrative, using my search for a husband as the best way to tell the story of the ‘New India.’ So for example, instead of sipping chai with the Afghan warlord as a Western male writer might do in his travel narrative, I sip Indian wine with a gay male playwright from India’s northeast or I befriend a young man who represents the quintessential New Indian man by playing in a rock band and editing a laddie magazine.
Q. Why not try another American city instead of India? AJ: My book is in large part about the New India and that is why I went to India to write about my search for love and marriage. I was fascinated by what I would find in a landscape vastly different from the one our parents left and was eager to see what I would uncover and discover through writing about it.
Q. Why not non-Indians? AJ: I have dated non-Indians and will likely do so in the future. Because I went to India, the vast majority of the people I encountered were Indian and so I dated them.
Q. One commentor at sepia says:
“I spent almost 4 years there working and longed to have a serious relationship leading to marriage and could only get a few month’s short term relationship from each guy I met at best.Even the 2 who expressed interest in marrying me backed down under family pressure.It’s tough for a girl who does not fit into caste, class, cultural and ethnic expectations.”Did you experience this? AJ: Certainly what the woman describes is true. Much of the country is still concerned with caste and class and women are supposed to adhere to certain cultural expectations, but many of the men I met in this liberal and urban setting were not like this and this is one of the things I wanted to write about. Q. The use of the word “broadminded” came up a great deal. Readers wondered whether you were being unrealistic to go to India to find a husband who fits your cultural expectations of someone who grew up here. For example:
My problem is with the way she, and many women here, states things when looking for a partner in India. First and foremost, she uses the “modern enough” in a condescending way. Yes, it is condescending, because what she implies is that for a man in India to be “modern” and broadminded he has to be down with his wife’s past promiscuities and social excesses. And by default, even without saying it, she implies that if he is not accepting of the woman making all household decisions, drinking, smoking, and having an extensive past sexual database, he is narrow-minded. Do you get that? …Or:
Ms. Jain’s whole attitude of “well, I’ll just go to India and find a broadminded, modern guy who’ll just have to accept my strong, independent womanly ways” reeks of shadiness.
Can you speak to these comments?
AJ: I can sympathize with how using a term like “broad-minded” might set off some alarms. I was simply trying to write my story and used the word as shorthand for what I might be looking for, which is a man that is comfortable with many of the things I do or have done, which includes drinking alcohol, social smoking or having had sexual experiences. I’m sure there are “broad-minded” men, that is to say liberal and forward-thinking, who wouldn’t be comfortable with their wives smoking or drinking for health or other reasons, and I can understand that.
Q. Would you say that one of your conclusions was that the major cities in India are not all that different than the major cities in the US in terms of dating? AJ: Young people in Indian cities are currently in the throes of a sexual revolution very similar to the one the U.S. experienced in the sixties. I certainly try to portray that in my book.
Q. One of the distinctive qualities of your writing was your extreme candor about everything from your family dynamics to your sexual history. How did you navigate your worries about privacy and confidentiality to your concerns about what your parents, aunties, and uncles would think?
AJ: This was and remains the hardest part of writing such a book but it is important to realize that honesty is the raison d’etre of the memoir or it might as well not exist. As I mentioned above, Indians aren’t at all used to memoir the way they might be here, and disclosing things about myself and others might disturb loved ones but I have also received such supportive feedback from friends and strangers alike saying how courageous I am to be one of the first to do this. I have exposed myself and there’s no going back from that. Indeed, it’s a terrifying experience.
Q. Readers might be wondering: Did the move to India come before the book, or the book before the move? How much of an influence was the idea of writing the book upon your decision to move to India? AJ: Three years ago, I wrote a wildly popular article for New York magazine about my attempts to strike a balance between the New York dating scene and arranged-marriage set-ups. I was approached to write a book, and I proposed doing a book that would take me to India, where I thought the real story was unfolding.
Q. Are there any alternative dating methods besides shaadi.com and newspaper ads that you’ve seen emerging in India? Speed dating? AJ: Drunken hook-ups and friends-with-benefits are two rampant trends I see among young people in India. Young urbanites under 30 aren’t really doing shaadi.com. They’re meeting in clubs or online on sites like Orkut or Facebook.
Q. What next, Ms. Jain? AJ: Right now I’m in NY doing promotion for my book. Next month, I head to India to launch my book and do readings in various cities and after that, I travel to London and South Africa. I’m currently looking into opportunities that would allow me to live between India and the U.S.
