Writers, Bombers, India, and US

I live in Norway now, and when people ask where I’m from, I say, of course, that I’m American. If conversation turns to my writing, and to my forthcoming novel, Where the Sun Will Rise Tomorrow, set in early 20th century India, they sometimes ask why I don’t write about America. (In Norway, the word ‘texas’ is shorthand for crazy, so they ask why I don’t write about America in these Texas Times.) I do, I respond. The story is set in India, about America. For me the two are inextricable. 

The prime minister of India in my youth was a poet. I was a teenager spending the summer in my mother’s hometown, scribbling poems and stories of my own in a diary I’d never stop keeping, and this made me wonder: did I fit into this country more than I knew? I started reading about him in the local papers. He belonged to a newly ascendant political party, I read, one who was ready to put Hindus back at the center of the country where they belonged.

I looked around me. Patna, where my mother had grown up, was visibly multifaith – we’d visited its mosques and gurudwaras and churches – but there was no doubt that Hindus and our temples were already at the center. To this brown American teenager, Indian Hindus were the White People of India. I shrugged; in a few weeks I’d be back to the margins of the USA where I belonged. 

And then they tested the bombs.

To be a country ready and willing to drop a nuclear bomb is an embarrassment: to be from two such countries? It was time for me to understand what, exactly, I was a part of, what being American meant to me, and how exactly these Indian and Hindu roots entwined. I read Maya Angelou and Sandra Cisneros and Reetika Vazirani and realized that the idea of any American as marginal, in literature or in life, was worth dismantling.

I read selections from two thousand years of Indian literature and decided I didn’t agree with the way the poet-prime minister’s political party defined Hinduism as something static, something patriarchal, and something wholly removed from how I, as much a Hindu as any other, felt about the divine. And eventually, I began to write. 

Where the Sun Will Rise Tomorrow is the story of a brown teenager, but Leela’s relationship to her hometown – at least at the start of the novel – is very different to mine. She’s connected to the land and to the past in a way that has long fascinated me in American literature, from Little House on the Prairie to Educated. In particular, she idolizes the emperor Asoka. Asoka ruled India a few centuries BCE, and is remembered for uniting the nation and then converting to Buddhism and spreading his writing about his new beliefs throughout the union.

Although India today is not a Buddhist country, several of Asoka’s beliefs after his conversion – in animal welfare, for example, and in social welfare – are central to the beliefs of many Hindus today. But Asoka – and this becomes important to my protagonist later in the story – united the country in the traditional way: through a brutal war.

feaGrowing up in the US, the only Indian I learned about at school was Gandhi, who famously did not require a brutal war to get the British out of India. In Leela’s time, Gandhi is just starting to make a splash on the Indian scene, and Leela and her friends discuss whether or not his strategy is the right one.

They haven’t seen it work, yet – but they have learned about wars such as the American Revolution, and, in their very recent past, the Russo-Japanese War, seen by many at the time as proof that an ‘Eastern’ power could defeat a ‘Western’ one. As the 20th century begins to gain steam, Leela tries to figure out how her growing interest in freedom dovetails with her abiding and, to her mind, uncomplicated, love for her hometown. Does she want to be famous for her writing – like Asoka, like the prime minister of an India she hopes will soon exist – or for her might… also like Asoka, also like the poet prime minister? 

My novel is set in a past I hope will intrigue readers: I’d love for someone to read the book and immediately check their library for more about India before and after independence, for more about Hinduism than they are likely to see in today’s papers, for other novels that explore what it’s like to be brown, and a young woman, in a world that is often set up to force them into supporting roles.

But – and I don’t think this is uncommon – I don’t think my story has as much to say about India in 1905 as it does about America, one hundred years la

ter and beyond. The past presented here is not past, really, but myth – something created to stand alongside all the myths about India we read as American children, both those that marginalized and those that inspired. The setting was crafted and bolstered by research, sure, but not here so much to shed light on what happened as share in the marvel that back then, over there, were people grappling with the types of questions, the kinds of feelings, that hound us here and now.

 

Rashi Rohatgi is the author of Where the Sun Will Rise Tomorrow. An Indian-American Pennsylvania native who lives in Arctic Norway, her short fiction and poetry have appeared in A-Minor Magazine, The Misty Review, Anima, Allegro Poetry, Lunar Poetry, and Boston Accent Lit. Her non-fiction and reviews have appeared in The Review Review, Wasafiri, World Literature Today, Africa in Words, The Aerogram, and The Toast. She is a graduate of Bread Loaf Sicily and associate professor of English at Nord University.

WHERE THE SUN WILL RISE TOMORROW

It’s1905, and the Japanese victory over the Russians has shocked the British and their imperial subjects. Sixteen-year-old Leela and her younger sister, Maya, are spurred on to wear homespun to show the British that the Indians won’t be oppressed for much longer, either, but when Leela’s be

trothed, Nash, asks her to circulate a petition amongst her classmates to desegregate the girls’ school in Chandrapur, she’s wary. She needs to remind Maya that the old ways are not all bad, for soon Maya will have to join her own betrothed and his family in their quiet village. When she discovers that Maya has embarked on a forbidden romance, Leela’s response shocks her family, her town, and her country firmly into the new century.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing