Like the protagonist she depicts in her novel, “Honor,” Thrity Umrigar has a complicated relationship with her home country of India.
She recognizes its finer points — like the closeness of family and how elders and kids are taken care of — but also its flaws.
“There is a lot to admire about that culture. The misogyny and patriarchal culture, yes I do have a problem with that,” she said.
Umrigar reckons with some of these feelings in “Honor,” which the Lake Oswego Public Library chose as its 2024 selection for LO Reads. April features myriad events inspired by the book and the author will deliver a presentation to the community at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 25 at Lakeridge High School.
“Honor” depicts an American journalist, Smita, who is tasked with covering a story in her home country of India. Her story centers on a Hindu woman, Meena, whose Muslim husband was murdered and who was severely burned by her brothers after the couple married and had a child.
Umrigar said the genesis for the book came from New York Times reporter Ellen Barry’s series on a group of Indian women who banded together to look for employment in rural India despite their families forbidding them. Many rural Indian villages, as the book shows, are dominated by men and religious creed, leaving women with little opportunity for agency or to marry outside their religion or caste.
“I was very shocked to read the story and was very moved. Immediately, I thought this newspaper story reads more like a novel. (I thought) ‘Somebody should make a film out of this,’” she said. “Over the next year or two, I kept thinking about this story. It kept haunting me, which is always a good sign that something is ready to be a novel.”
The novel’s name is ironic, Umrigar said, as the “honor killings” committed on the basis of religion aren’t honorable at all. Conversely some of the selfless acts depicted in the novel — like Smita’s dad renouncing his religion to save his family — might be considered dishonorable in certain people’s eyes.
“I wanted to rescue the word from the twisted notions of honor and restore it for the people with whom it truly belongs,” Umrigar said.
Overlap between author, protagonist
Umrigar and Smita share a few notable qualities, along with one crucial difference. Umrigar started her career as a journalist covering issues like the AIDS crisis, homelessness and social inequalities. Her last stop as a reporter was at the Akron Beacon Journal before she became a novelist and academic.
Like Smita, she left India for America at a young age. However, their fates diverge based in part on religion. Smita is Muslim whereas Umrigar is Parsi, a religious minority that Umrigar said does not face substantial religious persecution.
Smita’s religion forced her and her family to renounce their beliefs under duress during the Hindu-Muslim riots in the 1990s and eventually flee to America. Umrigar had already left India when the riots took place, but family and friends experienced them firsthand.
“When I was growing up in India it’s not as if these occasional outbursts of violence didn’t happen; they did. But they never truly seemed to touch the city of Bombay or Mumbai as it is called today,” Umrigar said. “We kind of grew up feeling sheltered or protected from all of that. Since the city was a cosmopolitan, secular, Western city, we were immune to what was happening elsewhere in the country. When these riots happened they really unnerved me because that sense of safety and security was gone.”
Questions about national pride, journalistic integrity
Smita’s skepticality of Indian society is counterbalanced in the novel by Mohan, a privileged young man who has a sense of pride and defensiveness about his country but grows to see its dark side as the events of the novel progress.
“I never thought of it in that way, but in some ways maybe I shared some of Mohan’s blindness,” Umrigar said.
Umrigar said she began writing the novel without the Mohan character but added him during a silent train ride from Boston to New York. The book juxtaposes Meena and her husband Abdul’s tragic love story with that of Smita and Mohan’s happier one.
“I pulled out a notebook and started writing what I thought would be the next chapter and all of a sudden I started writing about this guy who appears,” she said. “As soon as he showed up on the page I liked him and I thought, with his sort of blind love of country, he would be a nice counterpoint to someone like Smita, who is really very skeptical and cynical in some ways. I liked Mohan as a character and as he grew on me he grew in terms of his role in the novel.”
The book also ruminates on journalistic objectivity. Smita fights her urge to help Meena and remain detached, as journalists are told to do, but eventually becomes mired in Meena’s tragedy. Umrigar said in her career as a journalist, she grew skeptical about certain journalistic standards — particularly when the subjects are people in extreme poverty and deprivation. And she has met with journalists who have differing viewpoints on this question.
“I never absolutely resolved this question for myself. So I did a sneaky thing. I took an issue I couldn’t resolve for myself and threw it at poor Smita and gave her that same struggle,” Umrigar said.
Writing the book did not provide answers, Umrigar said, but she felt that Smita would shift closer to advocacy journalism following the narrative depicted in the novel.
For an American audience with little relation to India, Umrigar hopes they won’t fixate on how different things are in India but instead identify parallels with their own country and lives.
“The better response, the way I read books about other cultures, is to look for similarities. There is not a nation on earth that doesn’t have its cultural, social and political blindspots,” she said.
For those without a ticket, Umrigar’s April 25 talk with Oregon author Sindya Bhanoo will be broadcast live on TVCTV television channels as well as on the library's YouTube channel. For more information, visit www.ci.oswego.or.us/loreads/lake-oswego-reads-author-presentation.
“I am thrilled with the chance to come and meet with all of you. I hope people attend my talk,” Umrigar said.
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