Chitra Viraraghavan's novel The Americans is an eloquent and heart-warming debut from an exciting new voice that brings up questions of race, ethnicity and point of origin, and explores the puzzles of identity, place and human connection, which makes it perfect for fans of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. Learn more about the novel and Chitra in the interview below!
1. The Americans is partly about the experience of Indian immigrants in the United States. Would you say this is neither an Indian novel, nor an Indian-American novel but rather a novel about Americans, with all of its competing and sometimes conflicting identities?
It is Indian in the narrow sense of having been written by an Indian from India. It is not Indian-American. That makes it, I guess, a novel about America, and about certain types of Americans who are constantly having to negotiate their identities in America.
2. To what extent did you draw on your family’s experiences, or your own, in writing this novel?
Bits and pieces of my experiences and of people I know—but it’s a fragmented sort of reality. For one thing, there’s a fair bit of drama in the book which didn’t happen anywhere but in my imagination. Also, more than just stealing from the lives of specific people, I was looking at types of people—the "successful" immigrant, the one who doesn’t make it, the one who pretends to have made it to people back home in India, the one who falls off the map, the visiting parent, the second-generation immigrant and his/her issues, and so on. Some of the experiences, concerns and conflicts are common. I was interested in exploring the Indian-American community as a whole, insofar as that is possible. But I also have both major and minor characters of other ethnicities in the book so as to provide an overall sense of life in America.
3. Do you find that having lived in Boston while you were doing a PhD at Tufts gave you insight into the immigrant experience?
Certainly, although the student world tends to be somewhat insular. I had close friends and housemates who were not Indian and this gave me different insights into America. Of course, among the things we were reading in class was literature representing different types of immigrant experience. For me, my sense of the immigrant experience was sharpened when I came back after a gap of several years and travelled around the US and met different sorts of people, both from the Indian community and outside it. I took advantage of the perspective of being something of an "inside outsider."
4. What was the reaction of the Indian community when this novel was first released there? And what reaction do you anticipate from the American community?
People like my book, it’s been pretty well received. It’s had a fair bit of press, received several good reviews. There’s been a lot of interest because practically everyone one knows has family in America. When our friends, siblings, cousins and aunts come home, they are "American" to us! As for how the book will be received in the US, I’m hoping well, and with openness. I’ve tried to present different points of view in as true a way as possible, and from my own observations of life in the US.
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A Conversation with Chitra Viraraghavan, Author of The AmericansRead More »
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