Brown Women Have Everything - Sayantani Dasgupta - ★★★★

AUTHOR: Sayantani Dasgupta

GENRE: Anecdotal Memoir

PUBLICATION DATE: September 24, 2024

RATING: 3.9 stars.

In a Nutshell: A delightful OwnVoices collection of essays about the author’s experiences as a brown woman in the USA. Note that the title and the blurb are somewhat misleading. This is not a generic book on racism or stereotyping or ‘othering’, but an anecdotal memoir: the story of ONE brown woman, and a privileged one at that. It’s wonderfully written, but don’t look for generalised ‘brown woman’ life experiences.

There should be no doubt about why I grabbed this book. That title, “Brown women have everything”, beamed out to me like a beacon. As a brown Indian woman, I was thrilled to see someone of my skin colour (or at least in the same brown-shade family) pen a set of essays about brown experiences. This turned out to be a slightly incorrect estimation.

The title is taken from something a white woman said to the author, so in that context, it is represented in the book. Unfortunately, as a label, it makes the book sound like a generalised experience of brown women, as a kind of manifesto against racial or other discrimination experienced by women of this colour. But the book is very much an autobiographical memoir, with the author talking about her early life in India, her move to the USA, and her experiences in different cities in both countries (and beyond.) If you read this book expecting anything except a memoir, you might not enjoy it.

The tagline, ‘Essays on (Dis)comfort and Delight’, is more accurate. Both the moods are reflected variously in the book, with both positive and not so positive experiences getting equal focus.

The author’s note at the start clearly indicates her writing prowess and her sense of humour. The range of topics is quite clear from the quirky titles of the essays, so no write-up feels like it talks about the same topic. Sometimes, a part of the content (especially wrt her racial background) feels a little repetitive, as if she is introducing herself and her origin yet again. It is quite possible that some of these essays were published elsewhere and compiled in this book without being edited for redundant information.

The author is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina, and her writing talent is quite evident in this book. Her words have an easy conversational flow to them, which means that she sometimes goes flitting from topic to topic within an essay in a way that made me forget where she began. But after a roundabout narration of linked anecdotes, she smoothly returns to her initial point and the whole thing makes perfect sense in retrospect. Thanks to her personality seeping through the content, we get healthy doses of humour (Loved it when she called ‘chai latte’ a monstrosity!) and introspection. There are serious topics such as school shootings and body image issues as well as lighter ones such as the struggles of cooking desi food in a new country. The reading experience is akin to sitting next to a skilful raconteur while they are narrating something captivating.

It must be made clear that this is not a typical immigrant narrative, just in case you were expecting one. The author is a privileged Indian and not representative of a majority of the country. Her story is the authentic life experience of *one* Indian-American. This in no way nullifies her experiences as there's no standard or uniform Indian narrative anyway. But it is not as dark or gritty as some immigrant stories tend to be. The racial issue is not the dominant thread in most of the essays.

I thought I would not have much in common with the author, other than the colour of our skin, our nationality (well, before she got the green card), and our gender. But to my surprise, we are the same age as well! This means that our childhood experiences in urban India have some conjunction thanks to growing up in major metropolises around the same time. While she was born in Kolkata to Bengali Hindu parents and moved to New Delhi, I was born in Mangalore to Christian parents who moved to Mumbai. (Basically, between the two of us, we cover the North, South, East and West of India! 😆) While our paths diverged when her narrative shifted gears to the USA, I still felt a strong sense of compatibility with her ideas. (If the author is reading my review: Please know that I've used 'compatible' deliberately.) There were so many instances where I felt like giving her a hug and saying, “I understand you! I feel the same! I have lived through the same!”

What I truly, truly appreciate is how the author doesn’t choose one country in favour of another. She brings out the pros and cons of both India and the USA without bias. She is respectful of both nations, and shows her fondness for both. Unlike many desi authors in the USA, she doesn’t diss India in favour of her new country of residence. If only all Indian expats in the USA wrote this way about their home country without any stereotyping!

As I always do for anthologies, I rated the essays individually. I did recalibrate my reading sensor from cultural nonfiction to memoir, and this worked excellently. Of the eighteen essays, a whopping nine essays reached or crossed the four-star mark. Six more got between 3-3.5 stars. An exceptional performance! My top favourites with 4.5+ stars each were ‘A Tale of Two Chutneys’, ‘Killer Dinner‘, ‘Valentine's Day’, ‘A Café of One's Own’, ‘Chocolate-Marmalade Green Card’, ‘The Boys of New Delhi: An Essay in Four Hurts’, and ‘Judith and Holofernes.’

All in all, I had a wonderful time reading this essay collection. Though our lives are so disparate, I identified with a lot of the author’s emotions. Whether you have something in common with this author or not, her fears and joys, her anticipations and apprehensions are so universal that everyone will find at least some points of resonance with her views.

Much recommended to every reader fond of OwnVoices memoirs.

3.9 stars, based on the average of my rating for each essay. (If you are familiar with my ratings, you know that an average coming close to 4 stars is wonderful for an anthology.)

My thanks to University of North Carolina Press for providing the DRC of “Brown Women Have Everything” via Edelweiss+. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.