The Immigrant

About the book

The Immigrant is the fourth novel by Manju Kapur, first published in India in 2008 by Random House India, with a British edition from Faber and Faber following in 2009. Kapur, born in Amritsar and for over twenty five years a teacher of English at Miranda House in Delhi, set the novel in the 1970s, a generation before she wrote it. Her publisher describes it as a story of the complexities of arranged marriage and NRI life, and that plain summary holds: this is a book about what it costs a woman to be carried, by marriage, from one world into another where none of her qualifications, habits or history count for anything.

The novel is built in two halves that mirror each other. First the reader watches Ananda make himself an immigrant in Canada; then Nina makes the same crossing inside a marriage, and finds the second journey, the wife's journey, the harder one.

What is The Immigrant about?

Nina is thirty, a lecturer in English at Miranda House, the Delhi college where she herself studied. She lives with her widowed mother in Jangpura Extension, in a home still shaped by her father's early death. She once had a secret affair with an older teacher who would not commit to her, and for eight years the family's ruling subject has been her marriage. Her mother consults astrologers. Nina, in the publisher's phrase, sees herself at thirty as increasingly off the shelf.

Ananda is a year older. After his parents died in a road accident, his maternal uncle, Dr Sharma, a dentist long settled in Halifax, Nova Scotia, brought him to Canada, where he retrained in dentistry at Dalhousie University, became Andy, and built a practice. His sister Alka, back in India, insists he should marry an Indian wife, and sends him Nina's photograph. The match is arranged in the usual way, by family, photograph and a brief acquaintance. Nina feels no great spark, but she wants a family, and she agrees. They marry in India; Ananda flies back after three days, and Nina, having given up her lectureship, follows some three months later, after a humiliating interrogation at Toronto airport, where officials pick through her papers and wedding photographs.

Halifax gives Nina nothing to do. Her Delhi degree opens no doors, the days are long and empty while Ananda is at his clinic, and, as the novel's much quoted line puts it, all she is, is a wife, and a wife is alone for many, many hours. The marriage is failing in private as well: Ananda has a sexual difficulty he has concealed from her and is treating in secret, and her hope of a child, the thing the marriage was for, goes unmet and becomes its own pressure. Each of them begins to lie. Ananda takes up with Mandy, his receptionist. Nina, finding friendship in a women's counselling circle, enrols in a library course, works part time in a library, and begins an affair of her own with a fellow student, Anton, which gives her a first taste of a self that belongs to her, before it too turns harmful. When her mother dies in India, Ananda arranges the journey but does not go with her. Nina comes back to Halifax knowing there is no one left whose expectations she has to meet, finds the evidence of her husband's affair, and leaves the marriage, heading, in the novel's closing movement, for fresh territories of her own.

Themes: the wife's immigration

Kapur's subject is the double adjustment of the immigrant wife. Ananda chose his crossing and was carried through it by work; Nina's crossing is chosen for her, and it strips her of the two things that made her a person in Delhi, her profession and her family, and replaces them with a single role. Scholars writing on the novel return to this point: a young woman's life, already pressured in professional and family terms at home, becomes an even harder balancing act inside a foreign culture, a point the Telegraph's reviewer Ruth Scurr also made when the British edition appeared.

The ending is the novel's argument. The Immigrant closes on the thought that immigration, honestly faced, is not a single journey from home to home but a discipline of reinvention: roots that stay shallow, a willingness to move on when a place or a marriage fails, and the discovery that home can be made where a person remakes herself. Nina's leaving is not written as tragedy. It is the first fully chosen act of her life.

ਲੇਖਕ

Manju Kapur (born 1948, Amritsar) taught English literature at Miranda House, University of Delhi, for over twenty five years. The Immigrant followed Difficult Daughters (1998), A Married Woman (2002) and Home (2006), and came before Custody (2011) and Brothers (2016). She had herself studied in Canada, taking an M.A. at Dalhousie University in Halifax, the very city where she sets Nina's new life, which gives the novel's Halifax its unusual precision. Her full story is in her Kosh entry.

Reception and legacy

The Immigrant was shortlisted for the first DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, on a six book shortlist announced in London in 2010 alongside novels by Neel Mukherjee, Amit Chaudhuri, Musharraf Ali Farooqi, H. M. Naqvi and Tania James, with the winner declared at the Jaipur Literature Festival in January 2011. Her publisher's author biography also lists the novel as a finalist for the India Plaza Golden Quill Award. British reviews were warm: the Guardian called it admirable and enjoyable, the Daily Mail intensely readable, in the words her publisher quotes, and the Telegraph carried a full review by Ruth Scurr.

For Punjabi and Canadian readers the book has a lasting double relevance. It is one of the earliest major Indian English novels to follow a Punjabi woman's immigration to Canada from the inside, and to ask what arranged marriage migration does to the woman who is its vehicle. The novel later reached a mass audience in adapted form as the Star Plus television series Pardes Mein Hai Mera Dil.