In “Indian Movie, New Jersey,” poet Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni compares the value systems, customs and familial expectations found in the United States to those found in India, Divakaruni’s native country. This is my personal reaction to that poem. I will discuss newly revealed education on another culture, new words and phrases and the effect the poem had on me.
“Indian Movie, New Jersey,” did not feel entirely “foreign” to me, as I am fortunate to have some very close Indian friends. I thought of them, naturally, while reading this poem and I feel glad for my understanding; I could relate to this poem because of my connection with them. It is interesting, in a family with three grown children, how the middle child, the only son, is completely “Americanized,” and how the youngest daughter is fully committed to honoring her families customs – including making the decision to have her marriage arranged.
The Indian culture is a proud one. Values include family first, and secondly earning a good living. The lines that brought this to light are “…sons/who want mohawks and refuse to run/the family store, daughters who date/on the sly.” (Lines 21-24) These are much more serious offenses to an Indian family than to an American one, generally speaking. The hair situation, in speaking of the son reminds me of what I know. Indians boys are supposed to grow out their hair, long. The hair is wound around the cloth that forms the turban. (The family from which I learned much of this is Punjabi – Sikhs.) This holds great religious significance. In the poem, the depiction of how an Indian family feels when their son wants to cut his hair into a mohawk is going to mean something different – being an individual and expressing oneself as such is not looked upon positively in that culture. The daughter dating on the sly has much more to do with than just the concern as a parent of what trouble she might get herself into, and for dating too young. To an Indian family, this is disrespectful because tradition says that the elders (parents) are better suited to choose a mate for their children because of their wisdom and experience.
I’ve never heard of “Dotbusters.” I had to look up the significance of the name, or what it meant. Unfortunately, when I looked it up online, I found my answer in an article that had been published in “Hinduism Today,” that shed a bit of a negative light on Indians (though some of that came from an Indian dean of a university.) I’ll include the link at the end of my post. Anyway, the name “Dotbusters” has to do with the red dot on the forehead that is called a pottu.
Works Cited
Meyer, Michael. (2007). Poetry, An Introduction. (5th ed.). pp 534-552
