But, Christ, there's a difference between exotic and foreign, isn't there? Exotic means you know how to use your foreignness, or you make yourself a ….

Ancestral habits of mind can be constricting; they also confer one's individuality..

What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children?.

In traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter. The neighborhoo….

I am an American, not an Asian-American. My rejection of hyphenation has been called race treachery, but it is really a demand that America deliver t….

One of the early tip-offs to me about the enormous changes that were going on with being in a Bangalore house, home, where the young woman from a nea….

What was the duty of the teacher if not to inspire?.

Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other..

Bengalis love to celebrate their language, their culture, their politics, their fierce attachment to a city that has been famously dying for more tha….

I have to put down roots where I decide to stay. It wasn't enough for me to be an expatriate Indian in Canada. If I can't feel that I can make social….

The traveler feels at home everywhere, because she is never at home anywhere..

I am aware of myself as a four-hundred-year-old woman, born in the captivity of a colonial, pre-industrial oral culture and living now as a contempor….

You see for me, America is an idea. It is a stage for transformation. I felt when I came to Iowa City from Calcutta that suddenly I could be a new pe….

I had never walked on the street alone when I was growing up in Calcutta, up to age 20. I had never handled money. You know, there was always a coupl….

In Hindu societies, especially overprotected patriarchal families like mine, daughters are not at all desirable. They are trouble. And a mother who, ….

My first novel, 'The Tiger's Daughter,' embodies the loneliness I felt but could not acknowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no man's land b….

The picture of Mother Teresa that I remember from my childhood is of a short, sari-wearing woman scurrying down a red gravel path between manicured l….

I feel empowered to be a different kind of writer. The longer I stay here, the more light filters into my work. I feel very American. I belong..

My life has gotten a little more complicated than my ability to describe it. That used to be the definition of madness, now it's just continuous over….

A farmer is dependent on too many things outside his control; it makes for modesty..

In other words, my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show how I (and the hundreds of t….