Reproduced on the Sawnet site with permission

You call What The Body Remembers diasporic literature rather than Indian literature. How do you define diasporic literature?

SSB: I dislike this business of categorizing writers by who we are rather than what we write. But categories abound, and I'd like to point out how inappropriate are the old categories, before my novel is thrown in one.

In North America, publishers and academics called people who wrote in English from within India "Indian writers" -- although English is only one language of many for Indian writers. Then came the "Immigrant Indian writers" -- people like Nirad C. Chaudhari, Salman Rushdie, Bharthi Mukherjee, Bapsi Sidhwa, Chitra Divakaruni. Today diasporic Indian writers fit neither of these old categories: we're second-gen Canadians and Americans of Indian origin. Lumping diasporic writers into the old "Indian writers" or "Immigrant Indian Writers" categories is like saying Mordecai Richler and Amos Oz have similar world views or the same preoccupations. Such travesties result from the business of comparing writers.

Writing a novel set in present-day Pakistan or writing about Indian immigrants to North America is an exploration that engages and educates me, but does not express direct experience. As a reader, I appreciate a writer who uses writing, research, and imagination to launch herself beyond direct experience, and hope you will too.

What the Body Remembers primarily covers the turbulent years between 1937 and 1947, when the Partition occurred. The Partition of India is a subject that one rarely reads about. Why do you think more Indian or diasporic writers haven't written about those years?

SSB: My writing seems to rise from a sense that there is something missing, a subject, a story or an area that has received too little attention, and What the Body Remembers rose from that same dissatisfaction. The Partition of India in 1947 into India, East Pakistan and West Pakistan has received academic attention, but you can count the number of novels in English about it on the fingers of one hand. (For instance, Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan, Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India, most recently Manju Kapur's Difficult Daughters).

But so far, we haven't read novels in English that put Sikh women front stage center and certainly none that are about the experience of these women during Partition. I didn't set out to write a Partition novel at first but the allegory between the personal story of Satya and Roop, the two Sikh women in the polygamous marriage, and their rivalry for the children grew naturally into the political. Sardarji (women of those times never called their husbands by first names, so Sardarji is the equivalent of "mister" with the honorific suffix "-ji") is like the British in that for most of the novel, he gets off scot-free as the women battle it out, never blaming him for what he causes. At the end of this novel, no one is a winner, just as in Partition -- each community compromised its humanity, and so each community lost.

The problem any academic or artist has in describing Partition, is that the stories of 17 million displaced people came to one side of the Indo-Pak border while the setting was left on the other. Only cross border collaborations and third-country nationals can effect research in both India and Pakistan. I traveled with my husband in Pakistan to research the setting, with interview appointments set up by generous cyberfriends in Pakistan. Everywhere I was conscious that all trace of more than 4 million Sikhs who once lived there is gone, a result of the events of 1947 that would today be described by the dubious term "ethnic cleansing." A mere 1000 Sikhs live in Pakistan today (per the Pakistani newspaper Dawn). Conversely, in Pakistan I found that those who were kindest in showing us around, and who certainly had no reason to be kind to a Sikh writer asking personal questions, were Muslim refugees displaced by Sikhs and Hindus during the Partition, driven over the border and who still, after more than 50 years, find themselves living as second-class citizens in Pakistan today.

Because of the exact moment in history you chose to write about, did you feel that your novel had to strictly adhere to the exact dates of significant events and the exact occurrences, or did you feel you had the freedom to embellish things for the sake of the story, to make the larger point (much as Salman Rushdie felt free to change dates, names, places, etc. at will in Midnight's Children)?

SSB: I've kept political events in their historical place. Many readers get their history from novels, or at least their first introduction to a period, so I want you to feel you can trust my dates, names of politicians and policies. However -- and here's where the distinction between a diasporic writer and an Indian writer becomes relevant -- my research material did not include newspaper articles of the times, but relied solely on secondary literature and oral interviews, so where I quote newspapers saying "The Statesman said ..." it's poetic license.

Satya is an intriguing character. In the passages where we're privy to her inner thoughts she won my sympathy, but her actions toward Roop become so mean-spirited that -- even though I could understand her point of view -- I really began to dislike her. This appears to be a risky strategy for a first novel, to have an often-unsympathetic character framing the story. Did this seem so to you?

SSB: I want your feelings to be wrenched by Satya, the older wife, but for you to become increasingly concerned about Roop, the younger wife, who is my "she-ro." Satya is like the Indian Muslims of the time who wanted purity so much they pushed for secession and separation -- while you understand her motives, it's impossible to condone her methods and the hardening of her heart as she escalates her threat to Roop. When she succeeds in attaining purity it is a soul-stunted form, attained in isolation.

Throughout the novel your characters frequently use Urdu and Punjabi words, but you did not include a glossary for readers who may not be familiar with them. Was this because you felt the words were understandable from context, or do you believe in making the reader work a little?

SSB: I have confidence in your intelligence and willingness to enjoy an armchair trip to India in the '30s and '40s in preference to travel in a time machine and an airplane. What the Body Remembers is written as if all its characters think in rather complex English for the reader's benefit, but pushing that to an extreme would make them untrue to themselves. We don't live in a Star Trek world where everything is magically translated to English and it would be shortchanging you to let you believe these are characters "just like you" in an environment "just like yours." They are human like you, and they are products of their time, place and environment, too.

There are plenty of Indian and Pakistani readers who will not understand Punjabi or Urdu words, too, not only Western readers (remember that contemporary India has 18 official languages and many dialects). But Punjabi and Urdu words are necessary in this novel because there are concepts and objects in those years and locations that did not exist in European cultures -- nor even in today's contemporary urban Indian culture. My editors and I tested the text on several readers to ensure that Indian words are understandable from context.

I am against glossaries because I feel these, and the practice of italicizing non-English words, are quaint hangovers from colonial times and should be dropped in our Internet era. Nothing is "foreign" or "exotic" now, except if we continue to make it so. We don't use dictionaries to teach children new words, we believe context is the best teacher. Glossaries have never been provided for books shipped from Europe/North America to anywhere east of Suez, so we know it is possible and common to read novels about far-away settings, times and cultures sans glossaries. A glossary makes you jump back and forth between the text and the end of the book and jolts you out of the story, besides making it very clear that all the concepts defined in the glossary are "foreign" and "other," to be promptly erased from your memory when you close the book. The alternative way I've chosen, definitions embedded within the text, always immediately after the Indian word or in the same paragraph, has the disadvantage of being repetitive for the bilingual/multilingual reader but is more helpful for the monolingual reader.

In the West, we're not familiar with the concept of a body memory, of the soul remembering past lives and past experiences. The nearest we have is regression therapy, which isn't highly respected. I had initially thought that this was a metaphor you developed for the novel, but then I came across the concept of body memory in Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Is this a common aspect of Hindu and Sikh culture, where reincarnation is accepted as undisputed fact?

SSB: Though the belief in reincarnation has long been excised from Christianity and Islam, it has always been an aspect of Sufi thinking and of the Bhakti mystical traditions of Hinduism. Sufism and the Bhakti movement in Hinduism were the precursors of Sikhism, the religion of the point-of-view characters in What the Body Remembers. The idea of body memory and collective memory naturally follows beliefs in mind-body connection, and oneness. Nothing new about that, although I know it can be a radical idea to readers raised in Judeo-Christian traditions. (In psychotherapy, Jung's theories of collective memory and the shadow side of human nature repackaged and gave scientific gloss to Sufi and Hindu ideas that had been around for centuries, but Jung's work has been less popular than Freud's in the USA. Some Western thinkers are making the journey back to integrating the mind and body in Western thinking -- see the works of Fritjof Capra or Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error.)

A minor character in What the Body Remembers tells Roop "stories are not told for the telling, they are told for the teaching." In a society of low literacy, a community's memories are passed down in story and because it is oral, the story morphs to fit the political needs of the moment. What the Body Remembers often points out what the characters "forget to remember" thereby examining the creation of collective memory, the role of storytelling in reinforcing and shaping that sense of shared suffering and shared glory essential to the creation of all nationalisms.

The whole status of the second wife seemed very precarious. Although tradition allows a man to take more than one wife, the whole of polite society frowned on Roop. And, after her first son was born there was the feeling that she "had done her job" and could be thrown out of the house or returned to her father at any time. Was the position of a second wife really this precarious? Was Sardarji a typical husband (in his kindness and attention to Roop) or was he kinder than most?

SSB: Second wives I spoke with had mixed experiences. For the most part, they liked their situation once they had produced children because it came with few responsibilities, lots of parties, jewelry and pretty clothes, plenty of servants, and a built-in day-care provider in the person of the first wife -- a material girl's dream marriage, you might say. But theirs was a hierarchical society; the early years of marriage were rough.

At the same time, first wives couldn't complain because polygamy was society's way of ensuring that they didn't end up homeless, fighting for custody of their children, or requiring public assistance. First wives paid the terrible psychic cost of polygamy unless they asserted themselves as Satya does in the novel, and unless the husband saw to it that fair treatment was the norm in his household.

By the time Roop was married in 1937, polygamy was a dying practice among Hindus and Sikhs, particularly in progressive circles such as Sardarji's. Maintaining separate apartments for the wives, and often two or more households, required a level of resources that made it possible only for the very rich. Think of how many divorces male Hollywood stars can afford in contrast to the average man in the U.S., and you have something to compare to.

Yes, Sardarji is kinder than most men of his time because he could simply have placed Satya in a separate house/household and brought Roop in, in her place. Of course, Satya is a good manager and Sardarji may not want to lose her skills -- perhaps he does feel something for her, as much as it is possible for Sardarji to feel. He allows Satya ten years in which to find him a second wife she can live with -- a kindness that must have felt to Satya as if she had been asked to chose her own instrument of torture. But he didn't need to perform his second marriage in secret; he could have done it in public, but probably knew that would have hurt Satya more, for Satya is always very status-conscious. Another reason for doing it in secret was, of course, his "modern man" image -- a public wedding would have obliged him to invite his (English) "superiors."

If Satya had not treated Roop as a surrogate mother and if she had been, as many first wives were said to be, able to accept a younger woman with no hesitation, Roop would have felt much more secure. But Satya can't accept Roop -- there's a class distinction between them and Satya doesn't like "adulteration of the high-up with the low" -- her problem is always that she wants things pure, in their proper slots, compartments. Moreover, Satya's love for Sardarji is exclusive and possessive, an aberration for her times, when love was not expected in nor believed essential to marriage.

I should mention that polygamy was legal for Hindus and Sikhs up to 1956 in independent India and is no longer legal except for Muslims in India. Also per the New York Times, "anywhere from 20,000 and 60,000 people [in the USA] live in families where one man is married to 2, 3, 5 as many as 30 women." There is some support for the few women who have access to the web and are in polygamous situations: Tapestry of Polygamy at www.polygamy.org based in Utah, USA.