In 2000, Vikram Chandra wrote an essay for The Boston Review addressing the concept of “authentic writing.” He challenged the gatekeepers who upheld a specific canon of Indianness and dismissed other works as catering to a global or Western (read: white) audience. These gatekeepers created a false binary between regional writers and Indo-Anglian writers, which Chandra argued reduced the Indian experience, contrary to their claims.
I never considered the authenticity of my racial and ethnic identity in my writing until it was brought to my attention. An early reader suggested I write my novel more in the style of Indian writers publishing in English. My book, they said, read as American; couldn’t I write more “Indianly?” Could I be more subtle with the queer love on the page, using symbolism like the peeling petals of a flower or a metaphor about water to depict longing?
However, I knew I couldn’t write “Indianly,” whatever that meant. My influences were not limited to Indian writers or even diasporic writers. If not for this early reader’s comment, the argument of authenticity would have seemed outdated to me. I understood the biases of the white gaze and the male gaze, but I was unprepared for the question of whether my writing was South Asian, Indian, or anything enough.
Despite rejecting the criticism, I pondered it. Chandra’s argument, now twenty-four years old, resonated with me, as did Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2015 interview with Francesca Pellas, where she spoke about the freedom of writing and the unpleasant feeling of being told how to write. Somewhere within Chandra and Lahiri’s notes, I found my answers and tools for addressing the question of authenticity. It became an experiment and, eventually, an exercise in craft.
Let me introduce you to “A Thousand Times Before,” a novel about Ayukta and her wife, Nadya. Ayukta struggles to explain to Nadya why she’s hesitant to have children. Her family has a fantastic inheritance: the ability to access ancestral memory and immense power. To decide if they will have a child and who will carry it, Ayukta must explain the consequences of this lineage.
“A Thousand Times Before” is an intergenerational, speculative novel exploring girlhood, queerness, familial, ancestral, and romantic love, and the true meaning of home. It is told as an oral history, making Ayukta, the narrator, bear the brunt of authenticity.
In the most reduced sense, my narrator wore a version of my filter—my politics, my knowledge of history—to orient the storyworld. But her identity wasn’t meant to be representative of myself or anyone else. Instead, her specificity, with a particular family history of migration and cultural experience, made her unique. Ayukta maximized my desire for political complication while minimizing my personal discomfort.
When I considered authenticity away from the drafting process, I wondered why I was trying to meet gatekeepers halfway. V.V. Ganeshananthan said it best: “Some argue that a diasporic position is inherently inauthentic. You should stay in your lane. But history lays the road of a diasporic person wide and far. My lane winds across oceans. Who is policing my route? Who is one person to declare another authentic, and what is the motive of a person who wishes to run me off the road?”
If diasporic writing was inherently inauthentic, I would never meet the minimum threshold. So I set my own bounds.
First, I did not want to homogenize. Quick-take nonfiction often feels this way: mobilize behind the VP because she’s a South Asian #girlboss; watch the latest “Never Have I Ever” because any representation should be lauded. These stories ignore subgroup privileges and differences in experience around caste, religion, class, color, language, and more. I wanted a narrator who could question their role and their family’s role in specific identity politics and history.
Second, I did not want to nostalgize. This was hard because I am a nostalgic person. Yet, dominant culture representation often turns nostalgia into a homogenizing project. I allowed my narrator nostalgia only as grief. This was easy because my subconscious was already consumed by grief. When I began drafting the novel in October 2019, my maternal grandmother passed away, leaving me stranded in a history I didn’t feel I knew well enough.
Third, I did not want to write a book that hinged solely on trauma. Nostalgia and trauma can be used to rally some and subjugate others. The Indian Hindu diaspora often revisits colonization and Partition, blaming India’s history solely on the British without analyzing the role of Islamophobia and Brahminical patriarchy. By instilling a narrator grounded in the present, I could avoid this. Ayukta’s story begins seventy years after Partition, focusing more on carrying through time than lingering on Partition.
Fourth, I did not want to mine myself. The market makes this difficult, as it often rewards personal bleeding for a book. I avoided writing a Western coming-out trope or the overdone narrative of East-West push-pulls between children and their parents. I wanted fathers who were more than stern and mothers who were more than silenced. I wanted to show love that felt real to me, both familial and romantic, without metaphor.
When Chandra wrote about authenticity, he referenced Jorge Luis Borges’ speech, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” which criticized the gatekeeping around authenticity. The white gaze and the desire to create distance from whiteness mean we criticize details that gesture towards catering to a dominant identity. I think of Chandra, Borges, and the avoidance of ideological restrictions on writers.
In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Bangladeshi writer Tanaïs spoke about not translating for whiteness but for readers who are not South Asian but are Black, Indigenous people rejecting dominant cultural storytelling. This translation’s value to my writing made me think of Ayukta, telling a story to a person she loves, describing her favorite moments via ancestral memory. It does not have to be for the white audience. This was the authenticity I needed: to write this book first for myself.
As readers begin to read the book, I feel freed. In “A Thousand Times Before,” I have grasped at a language, time, and place that feel both close and far away. It felt authentic to the writer I was. Even now, I feel myself shifting toward a new experience. The needle is always adjusting. Ayukta and the text remain. Through her voice and narration, her story can only be her own.
Source: Lit Hub Daily, Asha Thanki
