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The Power of Storytelling: An Interview With Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
The Power of Storytelling: An Interview With Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
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Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, born in India in 1956, is a prominent writer and poet who
currently lives in Houston, Texas, where she teaches in the Creative Writing Program
at the University of Houston. Divakaruni’s writing is fueled by her own experiences as
a first-generation immigrant and a woman between cultures and traditions. Her
concern for women of her own heritage is transmitted not only through her award-
winning short stories and novels but also her involvement with organizations that aim
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The Author
Author
Women’s
Women’s
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2012.
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Published
2011.6:2
by by Oxford
Oxford
July 2012. doi:10.1093/cww/vpr023
doi:10.1093/cww/vpr023
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to help South Asian or South Asian American women in distress and in situations of
domestic abuse, in the San Francisco Bay area and Houston. Children’s education in
India is another important interest of hers.
As a writer and a scholar, Divakaruni has been invited to judge notable
competitions such as the National Book Award and the PEN Faulkner Award. She is
a regular guest of literary festivals and conferences, mostly in the United States and in
her home country. In her essays, she has explained the stimuli behind her novels,
some of which are related to her own life-changing experiences in North America,
while others are more closely linked to her memories of India and the tradition of
myths and folk tales passed on from generation to generation. As an engaging lecturer,
she has often analyzed her own writing in the context of contemporary literature.
Students at a number of universities both in the United States and abroad continue to
examine her works within the framework of American Literature, South Asian
studies, postcolonial theories, women’s studies, and other interdisciplinary
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when ‘‘diasporic identities and communities’’ are being created. In consideration of
Divakaruni’s short stories, Sau-ling C. Wong’s study examines the impossibility of total
‘‘Americanization,’’ in opposition to the strong desire of protagonists to free
themselves from the patriarchal and stifling Asian background. Regarding the fate of
immigrant women, Susan Mollar Okin has been interested in the conjunction between
feminism, multiculturalism, transnationalism, and postcolonialism.
The combination of social concerns, hybridity, multiculturalism, immigration, racial
intolerance, and ‘‘mystical realism,’’ as examined by Gita Rajan in her study of
Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices, has defined the way in which some of Divakaruni’s
novels have been perceived and also criticized for appealing to Western desires for
exoticism (Rajan 227; Shankar 36). For her part, as she explains in her essay
‘‘Dissolving Boundaries,’’ Divakaruni perceives The Mistress of Spices as a new phase in
her writing. In the first place, she felt compelled to combine poetry with prose.
Second, in an ‘‘attempt to create a new fable,’’ she wished to bridge the division
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A: My first model and influence, from when I was in graduate school, was Maxine
Hong Kingston. I was much taken by her text The Woman Warrior. The themes of
recreating identity, immigration, family stories, changing roles of women, racial
conflict, and myth all resonated with me. I wanted to apply them to my background
and the stories I had grown up with, as well as the stories I came across, living in
America. I was also influenced by Bharati Mukherjee, especially her exploration of
race and multicultural relationships in books such as The Middleman and Other Stories.
Novels such as Jasmine and Desirable Daughters, which explore the changing identities
of immigrant women, though in the context of a more violent world, intrigued me. All
of these would become important themes in my own work. Jhumpa Lahiri and I share
an interest in the lives of the second generation – the children of Indian ancestry who
are born in America. How do they relate to India? How are they different from their
parents? What happens when they make the reverse journey back to the country of
their origin? This is the focus of several of my stories in The Unknown Errors of Our
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One aspect that did not seem very prevalent is spiritual writing – the connection
between the human and the divine. This dimension has become more and more
important for me as I continue to write. It is a major theme in my novel The Palace of
Illusions, which is a retelling of the Mahabharata from a woman’s point of view. But it
seems it is not an angle too many Indian writers wish to explore, at least not in fiction.
Q: In your latest published novel, One Amazing Thing, you explore a new
type of writing. Set in the post-9/11 United States, it brings together nine
characters with nine different perspectives and backgrounds. They have
never met before; yet they find a space of community and deep interaction
in a very difficult situation. The storytelling in this book, a trademark of
your writing, takes you back to your heritage, to your grandfather that you
so often mention in various interviews (for example with Rasia, Seaman,
and Swamidos), as one of the main resources for your own development
of storytelling in your writing. In One Amazing Thing, how have these
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Some issues in this book are related to my own experience in 2005, when
Hurricane Rita was coming through. Since Houston had to be evacuated, we were
stuck on the freeway. What happens when you evacuate such a large city all at once is
that nobody gets to go anywhere. We were on Interstate 10 for many hours, and
there was a lot of panic. Out of that panic, bad behavior arose, together with amazing,
compassionate attitudes. In the book One Amazing Thing, I wanted to explore the
spiritual question of what we do in such circumstances, a question for each of the
characters and hopefully for the readers. If I am in a situation of true danger where
the primal urge for survival kicks in, would I be able to rise to a level of compassion?
Or would I say ‘‘Survival at any cost’’? How do we learn to move from one end of the
spectrum to the other?
Q: Each of these main characters is retelling something so amazing that
it can amaze the others and help them survive. The stories of their
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fates, races, and cultures that cannot be uprooted by somebody else’s
supremacy.
A: I really wanted that to happen. In the beginning, there is much agitation in the
minds of the characters, because they wonder who is better, who is in charge. But as
the stories go on, they begin to realize that perhaps there can be another paradigm,
where no one needs to take control of the group. We are each good at something,
and we use it to help the community. This is very much a community-based ensemble
novel, similar to tales within tales in ancient Indian culture and also in many other
ancient cultures.
Q: You use a similar approach in your previous novel, The Palace of
Illusions. Your rewriting of the Mahabharata takes us back from today’s
life to a time that seems remote but actually speaks to us of our
contemporary quest for truth and understanding of life. The women in
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A: If we are to put the woman in the center of the work, we have to show her in all
her complexity. She is not the perfect gender, as we all know, but she is worth
celebrating – with her flaws, as long as there is some kind of growth, as long as she is
aware of the ways in which she can become not only a better woman by her own
definition, but a better human being, ultimately a better spiritual being. In some way,
that is Panchaali’s journey in The Palace of Illusions. From a position of little power, she
wishes to move to autonomy, but autonomy brings its own challenges, with negative
aspects that she has to recognize.
Q: The Mahabharata, with the Bhagavad Gita at its center, is
considered to be the epic most closely linked to Hinduism, in all its
syncretism. Lord Krishna stops the battle in order for Arjuna to
understand that beyond life, and even the slaughter of the enemies or
cousins, there are other dimensions, and then he shows himself in his
fullness of being. I guess you could not deal with the Bhagavad Gita in the
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achieve during her earthly existence? In other words, what modes of
existence and revisited mythical paradigms does her character suggest?
A: Panchaali may serve as a model of how a woman progresses as a being in the
world and then moves into the spiritual, the subtler realm. At first, she is scorned, or
she is put down as a woman. Even though she is a princess, we know right from the
beginning of Panchaali’s life that the world where she exists is very limited. She cannot
leave the palace. She cannot learn the things that her brother is learning. Our
Panchaali, being very resourceful, will get around those things and will not follow the
social rules by which her role as a princess is very circumscribed.
Q: In following with the original setting in the Mahabharata, Panchaali
was not expected to be born; yet she was thrown into this life. Her coming
out of the fire next to her brother Dhri was a big shock for her father.
A: Regardless of such a start, there was a prophecy that she would change the
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values and her ethics. Only then can she go beyond, into that other dimension where
love becomes a universal theme.
Q: The notion of impossible love is also present in Sister of My Heart
and The Vine of Desire.
A: Such love, an all-time literary theme, is present in many of my works. Each of my
characters deals with it differently, making choices that are sometimes positive and
sometimes flawed, leading to many problems, not only for themselves but also for
people around them. In The Vine of Desire, Sudha has to make a very complicated
choice, because her dearest cousin, sister of her heart, is married to the man who
loves her and has this great desire for her.
Q: In your novels, yearning is also presented through men, not just
women, as in all those characters in Arranged Marriage, who deal with
their own hopes and desires.
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once from her entire support system of family and other women who might help her,
and she has to make a decision. At the end of much painful thinking and trying out
different things, she decides to leave the relationship.
Q: But she would not leave her husband without the help of Tilo, the
‘‘Mistress of Spices,’’ an eternal archetype of female inner power who also
represents the complexity of human nature incarnated in women.
A: With The Mistress of Spices, I wanted to bring in another facet of what I was
growing up with: the elements of the folktales, the tales of magic, and mythical tales.
They contain important and powerful women figures, usually older wise women, who
have learned the secrets of the natural world and can use those secrets to help
others. In the process, they become very powerful. They become leaders of their
community. Such stories from my culture relate to those from many other traditions,
with wise women in other Eastern contexts or maybe in Eastern Europe, sometimes
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reverse that process, how to make ‘‘the other’’ yourself. That is what happens in
literature, with the experience of reading. When you enter the fictional world of
a book, all those others become yourself.
This is also how mythologies intersect between different cultures. We have similar
mythological figures, similar mythological creatures in the natural world, and we really
have much more in common than we sometimes think.
Q: How can we draw upon the wisdom of old ages to understand where
we stand in life? As in One Amazing Thing, with one earthquake, one
catastrophe after another, how can we face the future that is not very
bright?
A: I think One Amazing Thing at least suggests to the reader that we may find
a common space where we can respect each other’s stories as we share them. In
hearing a story or reading a story, or experiencing a story, the other really becomes
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framework of esoteric teachings from the Himalayas, you make them into
spiritual heroes who may save the planet.
A: In the three books of the Conch Bearer trilogy, the hero becomes two, male and
female, coming out of our ancient tradition of Lord Shiva, where Shiva is portrayed as
half male and half female. Together he is the being that upholds the world. It is
a powerful symbol and a powerful metaphor that Anand and Nisha, the two heroes,
can only achieve their quest together. Neither of them can be a hero, separately. In
some of my other works, feminine characters had to be given a central position and
their stories had to be told, but at a certain point, the man and the woman have to
come together, to do their task in the world, to achieve the quest, to save the world
as presented in these books.
I am very interested in the outcasts, the marginalized in these stories. I have tried to
bring them to the forefront. In the first book, The Conch Bearer, we meet two street
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in which she grew up, where you did not praise women too much because you did
not want it to go to their heads. I would ask, ‘‘OK, mom, what do you think?’’ She
would reply, ‘‘Hmmm,’’ which meant that it was good. For this one she said, ‘‘Not
bad,’’ a high category of praise.
Q: What are you writing next? Are you going to write about your
mother? She probably comes through all the time.
A: Mothers are very hard to write about. I think she comes through many other
characters and even objects or places I write about. My next book is to be titled
Oleander Girl and is a quest novel of some sort, with a young woman who has grown
up in India. She has been brought up by her grandparents. She has been told her
mother died giving birth to her and her father died even before that in a car
accident. As she grows up this way, she is about to be married. She has met
a wonderful young man, and they love each other. The engagement takes place.
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Q: You anticipate it in Arranged Marriage. Also, there are similar
stories in Sister of My Heart.
A: As there are in The Unknown Errors, where some characters are involved
in riots. The whole question is about safety and how religion changes this
safety. In my most recent text, at some point the young woman’s fiancé will
say, ‘‘You cannot go to America. America is different now. It has changed
for people who look like us.’’ She will say, ‘‘But look what is happening
right here in India, where people of different religions are killing each
other, even though they look exactly the same.’’ That is going to be a debate in
the book.
Q: It is appalling that we are ready to sacrifice everything for some
ideas and kill for those ideas. Yet there are so few ideas we are
willing to live for. That is where you revert to love, wisdom, and ethics,
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Acknowledgments
The interview took place during the Contemporary Women’s Writing Network conference, held in San
Diego, 7–9 July 2010. It was subsequently revised and edited with the help of the writer. My thanks go to
Edith Frampton, who invited me to conduct this interview; Sherry Shopoff, who did the audio and the video
recordings; and Charlotte Lewis, who completed the transcription of the original audio file, through a grant
by Robert Olin, Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Alabama.
Works Cited
Cheung, King-Kok. Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers. Honolulu:
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Mahesh, Chitra. ‘‘The Focus is on Women.’’ The Hindu. Online Edition of India’s National
Newspaper. 6 April 6 2001. Web. 4 July 2011.
Mukherjee, Bharati. Desirable Daughters. New York: Theia, 2002.
—. Jasmine. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989.
—. The Middleman and Other Stories. New York: Grove Press, 1988.
The Mistress of Spices. Nayar, Deepak, Gurinder Chadha, Paul M. Berges, Aishwariya
R. Bachchan, Dylan McDermott, Nitin C. Ganatra, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje,
Caroline Chikezi, Shaheen Khan, Anupam Kher, and Chitra B. Divakaruni.
Santa Monica, CA: Weinstein Co., 2007. Film.
Okin, Susan Moller. ‘‘‘Mistresses of Their Own Destiny’: Group Rights, Gender, and
Realistic Rights of Exit.’’ Ethics 112.2 (Jan. 2002): 205–30.
Pañchatantra: The Book of India’s Folk Wisdom. Trans. Patrick Olivelle. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1997.
Rajan, Gita. ‘‘Chitra Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices: Deploying Mystical Realism.’’
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