R E V I E W S:

The Boston Globe [read...]

Thrity Umrigar on 'Honor' and dishonor.

Learning to love your homeland, even when it’s complicated

By Anri Wheeler Globe Correspondent, Updated December 30, 2021

Honor, Thrity Umrigar’s ninth novel, opens with a newspaper clipping detailing the fate of Meena, a woman who becomes disabled after surviving a fire set by her Hindu brothers with the intention of killing her and her Muslim husband. Abdul, Meena’s husband, does not survive the blaze. Spurred on by a lawyer who’ll work pro bono, Meena is taking her brothers to court, an act unheard of in the rural community where they live. To many around her, Meena is seen to have dishonored her family by defying her brothers and entering into an interfaith marriage they had forbidden.

This article is written by Shannon, a white American foreign correspondent (as Umrigar reveals in the acknowledgments, the character was inspired by the real life work of Ellen Barry for The New York Times). It’s also a microcosm of the book’s central tensions, from the power dynamics inherent in who is telling a story; to the privilege wielded by men, Americans, Hindus, members of the upper caste, the educated, and urban dwellers; and the intersectionality of the two women around whom “Honor” is centered.

No doubt informed by Umrigar’s own experience as a journalist, the novel starts and ends with Smita, an Indian American journalist, at the Mumbai airport. Smita is returning to the city of her birth, a place she had vowed to leave behind forever. Invited by Shannon, who has injured her hip and needs someone to take over covering Meena’s story, Smita reluctantly agrees, traveling to meet Meena with the help of Mohan, another friend of Shannon’s.

The longer she spends there, and despite flashes of nostalgia for her childhood self, Smita’s distaste for India deepens. So too does the reader’s understanding of the traumatic events that led Smita’s family to flee to the US. Through Smita’s story, another central theme emerges: feeling rooted versus uprooted. Although exiled by the circumstances of her childhood departure from Mumbai, Smita also acknowledges the privileges she’s gained. “How American she had become to not see America for what it had been for her family — a harbor, a shelter, a refuge.”

Mohan, an upper caste man from Mumbai, acts as the ultimate foil for Meena’s brothers. He comes to represent a version of India that could be home to Smita. Of loving Mumbai, Mohan says, “I do. … But you don’t love something because you’re blind to its faults, right? You love it despite its flaws.”

As with the fictional article that begins the book, Umrigar’s strength as a writer is most potent in individual scenes that distill these tensions. Just as the arc of the story builds to a crescendo, both in its hastening action surrounding the trial of Meena’s brothers and the reader’s understanding of Smita’s history, so do smaller moments. In one, Smita goes from looking out her car window in rural India to thinking about Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” to the understanding, “Like it or not, this, too, was her land and she felt implicated and ensnared in its twisted morality and contradictions.”

One contradiction is highlighted by Anjali, the lawyer representing Meena. Meena is the bravest woman she knows, Anjali says, because Meena’s aware her case is being put forth to try to set a precedent, and will in no way improve her own life. As a journalist, Smita understands all too well how the media often try to individualize systemic problems — from violence against woman in India to mass shooters and police killings of Black men in America — without contextualizing them within “the culture from which they bubbled up.” Smita, who covers gender issues, wants to make clear such actions are enabled by the powerful forces and institutions that undergird them. “Sometimes, it seemed to Smita that the history of the world was written in female blood,” Umrigar writes.

Two-thirds into Honor the full story of what happened to Smita and her family is revealed, in ways that will help readers understand how Smita has come to define honor, in contrast to the conflicting ways it has been defined by others. In what feels like an epilogue, the final chapter of the book brings our understanding of honor full circle.

The many layers that comprise Honor unfurl like a peak season peony. Toward the book’s end, Smita is back in the liminal space of the airport, but changed. What has evolved: her ability to see India, her understanding of home, of love, of what is worth a sacrifice. She has stitched together what she once saw as desperate pieces of herself into a more present whole. She has done what she proclaimed was not possible at the outset of the book: found her way home again. Her experiences culminate in the precipice on which she stands as the book comes to its beautiful conclusion. Smita understands, “Maybe, in the end, that’s all that love was — doing the hard thing.”

StarTribune [read...]

Review: 'Honor,' by Thrity Umrigar

A reporter returns to India to write about a grisly crime.

By Anjali Enjeti, Special to the Star Tribune
DECEMBER 31, 2021

Thrity Umrigar's latest novel, Honor, begins with a vacation cut short when Smita Agarwal, a foreign correspondent from Brooklyn, is forced to abandon the sunny beaches of the Maldives for an unexpected detour to bustling Mumbai. She is rushing to the bedside of her colleague Shannon Carpenter, a South Asian correspondent, who is facing imminent surgery. Before she's wheeled into the operating room, Shannon begs Smita to travel to Birwad, an all-Muslim village near the Gujarat-Maharashtra border, to report on a groundbreaking legal case in her place.

The complainant, Meena, a low-caste Hindu, goes against her community and religion to elope with her beloved, Abdul Mustafa, a Muslim. Meena's brothers, hellbent on exacting revenge on the couple for their interfaith marriage and the dishonor it has brought, set fire to the newlyweds' hut while they are inside. Abdul perishes instantly. Meena, pregnant and severely injured, barely survives. She eventually gives birth to their daughter.

Smita's hesitation to take on the assignment goes beyond her rusty Hindi and the uncharitable assumption of Mohan, Shannon's friend, who deems Smita a spoiled Indian American thumbing her nose at her country of origin. Smita's return to Mumbai triggers memories of an unspeakable act of violence and betrayal she experienced as a teenager before she and her family fled to Ohio. Though she wears her U.S. citizenship like armor, she knows spending time in a "city she'd spent the last twenty years trying to forget" will force her to confront her past.

Umrigar aptly tackles honor killings in rural India and paints Meena with agency and depth. Before her marriage to Abdul, Meena was a trailblazer who, along with her sister, defied her brothers' wishes and got a job at a sewing factory to help support their family. She believes that speaking out will empower other women who endure such horrors and that she must do her part to challenge a corrupt legal system that readily dismisses violence against women.

Honor is also a stirring critique of individual agendas surrounding Meena's high-profile case. This includes Smita, who, though a seasoned reporter, remains naïve to many of the forces at play, as well as Anjali, Meena's well-meaning but overeager feminist lawyer who, at times, seems to care more about sticking it to the patriarchy than about her client's well-being.

In her years of reporting on gender violence around the world, Smita takes care to avoid the kind of "trauma porn" typical of such articles. Curiously, in the book, Umrigar pens a gruesome scene that feels close to fetishizing female victimization. It neither fortifies the narrative nor deepens the reader's understanding of the cultural context of such violence. Less would have definitely been more.

Nevertheless, Honor boldly examines a system that continues to greenlight brutality and serves as a poignant reminder that despite all odds, "in every country, in every crisis, there are a handful of people who will stand against the tide."

Anjali Enjeti is the author of "Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change" and "The Parted Earth."

The Washington Post [read...]

Honor was selected as one of the "10 Noteworthy Books for January 2022". Check it out here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2021/12/28/january-books/

Los Angeles Times [read...]

A book of horror and hope in India, inspired by extremists closer to home

By Bethanne Patrick, January 5, 2022

Thrity Umrigar wants to talk about megachurches, which seems both apropos and slightly incongruous. Her new novel, “Honor,” turns on India’s two major faiths, Hinduism and Islam, and the violence that can erupt when an extremist faction holds sway.

Honor, which was announced this week as a Reese’s Book Club pick, involves — among many other events — a deadly clash between two brothers who believe India should be a Hindu theocracy and their sister’s husband, a Muslim from a nearby village. But Umrigar, whose eight previous novels have been set in both the United States and India, knows fundamentalism can spring from any faith.

“A thing for Western readers to realize about India is, guess what? We [Americans] have people doing crazy things, too. Maybe a few fundamentalist Christians pick up ‘Honor’ and think, ‘Wow, why do I believe what my pastor says when he’s saying the kinds of things that sound nutty coming from one of my characters’ mouths?’”

If this kind of secular awakening is unlikely, Umrigar thinks she might know why. “The follow-up question to why we have these megachurches, I think, should be what is the secular equivalent? What do we have that gives people the same sense of community and belonging, which I think is essential to the human spirit?”

She anticipates the answer, then flicks it away: “You can talk about libraries and books and museums, but those are almost by definition, sadly, becoming elitist. What provides the same sense of solace and neighborliness that a church does?”

Perhaps a writer? Umrigar is speaking from her home in Cleveland, Ohio, where she has lived since the age of 21 and works as a professor at Case Western Reserve University. Her elegant demeanor, literary references and Zoom backdrop — bookshelves, art objects — could be considered, objectively, elitist. But Umrigar possesses a level of curiosity and compassion I rarely encounter in other human beings, even the many curious and compassionate authors I’ve interviewed.

A clue to her perspective comes from Sarah Willis, a novelist and the fiction buyer at Loganberry Books in Cleveland who has known Umrigar for nearly 20 years. They meet regularly for lunch with a group informally known as “The Pen Women” to talk writing — but not always.

“Sometimes we talk about shoes!” Willis says. “But Thrity would never talk about shoes. She’ll bring up politics. She says she writes her books to understand the world, but one of the things she’s writing about is how people treat each other…

“She believes that words can change people — that the words themselves have power, not her. Her books are always about someone trying to change and become a better person.”

In Honor, that person is an Indian American journalist, Smita Agarwal, who reluctantly flies to India to help Shannon, a colleague sidelined with a broken hip. Shannon has been covering a powerful story about a young widow whose brothers killed her husband, Abdul, and disfigured her. The widow, Meena Mustafa, has decided to take her brothers to court, an almost unprecedented move in the realm of honor killings. Shannon pleads with Smita to travel to the remote village of Birwad and interview Meena before the trial.

When I tell Umrigar this book, with its strong romantic elements, seems like a slight departure from her other work, she smiles. “I’m delighted to hear you say so, because maybe that will attract other readers! But yes, OK, there are two parallel love stories in this book and maybe that’s a little different.” Nonetheless, she maintains, “I’m still writing about issues that haunt me, about power and power differentials.”

A cursory look at the summary above might suggest the plot turns on Smita’s power in the situation. Instead, “It’s Meena who ends up being the teacher,” Umrigar says. “She’s more radical and courageous than any of the characters who hold what we currently call privilege in the developed world. Meena actually does something,” first by defying deep taboos and then by defending her rights. “These are radical transgressions for which she pays a very, very heavy price. Yet she still manages to teach Smita and her companion Mohan” — an Indian executive she meets during the assignment — “a great deal about love and, yes, honor.”

Honor is the first of Umrigar’s novels to be published by Algonquin Books; Executive Editor Kathy Pories says it was “the simplicity of the title,” with its many connotations, that first struck her. “You don’t know what it means until you read the book.” But it was the author’s “effortless writing” that made her want to work with her. “You trust her. You can tell that she has so much affection for India, through dark moments and beautiful moments both.”

For Umrigar, “India” is another word with many valences. “One of the things Smita winds up telling Mohan is ‘My India is not your India.’ She’s trying to tell him that the India he sees as developed and progressive is not the one in which she grew up, but her statement has a deeper meaning. India is multivarious, even for individual people.”

Mohan is perhaps the character most like the author. His India was once Umrigar’s too. She grew up there during the ‘60s and ‘70s, and “one of the joys of living in India at that time, at least in Bombay as it was called then, is that it was cosmopolitan and a genuinely secular city... But there has clearly been a backlash to all of that, with deep roots that are not simple. Remember, Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu fundamentalist.” Decades later, she believes “the Hindu right wing realized there was political gain to be made from wielding power.”

Once again, Umrigar invokes a comparison closer to her present home.

“You have to understand that I wrote Honor during the Trump years,” she says. “I was writing about India, but I was also writing about my own adopted country. This othering of others is not a phenomena you can assign to any one country. The trend winds are blowing across the world’s two largest democracies, India and the United States. I am sometimes appalled and bewildered and dismayed by the parallels.”

Trying to make sense of it, and perhaps to explain the role of a writer and her words, Umrigar invokes the playwright Tony Kushner, “who is one of my heroes. He says something to the effect of: Hope is not a choice. Hope is a moral obligation. I try and live by those words. I may sometimes not feel hopeful about my own personal circumstances, which is absurd because I’ve had every opportunity and privilege in the world. But I always feel hopeful about humanity.”

Cleveland.com [read...]

Thrity Umrigar’s latest novel unravels the meaning of honor

By Anne Nickloff, January 6, 2022

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Thrity Umrigar’s latest novel revolves around the concept of “honor.” It’s where the book gets its name, and it’s also the force around which the book’s plot finds itself.

Honor arrived on Tuesday, Jan. 4, immediately earning attention around the globe for its powerful story about injustices in rural India. The novel even earned a pick in Reese Witherspoon’s book club for January 2022.

But what does “honor” mean in these 336 pages?

“What you see in the novel is instance after instance about how this beautiful word – one of the most beautiful words in any language – has been twisted and misrepresented,” Umrigar said.

In this story, “honor” is the supposed reasoning behind an attack on a couple – Abdul, a Muslim and Meena, a Hindu – which married despite their religious differences in rural India. Meena’s brothers set fire to the couple’s home, which kills Abdul and leaves Meena, who is pregnant, maimed.

“Human beings could apparently be turned into killers as effortlessly as turning a key,” Umrigar writes in the novel. “All one had to do was use a few buzzwords: God. Country, Religion, Honor.”

After the fact, Meena pursues a lawsuit to gain justice for her husband and push for societal change for their daughter, Abru.

That’s not where the story ends – the book follows Smita, a journalist reporting on Meena’s lawsuit. Smita must also confront her own past as she returns to India, a country she left behind as a teenager with her family due to their own harrowing experience there.

Though difficult and sometimes devastating moments take place in “Honor,” the book also follows threads of love.

“Once [Smita’s] there, a kind of parallel love story appears,” Umrigar said. “Once we hear about Meena and her affair and marriage with her husband Abdul, Smita, too, begins to see both the good and the bad about India, and has to navigate through her own conflicted feelings.”

Umrigar, who grew up in Bombay and moved to the United States when she was 21, said she was first inspired to write about conditions in rural India after following New York Times reporter Ellen Barry’s coverage while she served as the paper’s South Asian Bureau Chief. She also has regularly followed reporting centered on religious tension in the country.

“I have been struck about the growing resentment of the Muslim minority population in India,” Umrigar said. “Some of the changes in the law, and just this official act of marginalizing a group that has called India home for literally hundreds of years – I’m disturbed by that.”

Honor follows a string of other best-selling novels from Umrigar, including The Space Between Us, The Secrets Between Us and The Weight of Heaven, along with children’s books like Binny’s Diwali, Sugar in Milk and When I Carried You In My Belly.” Umrigar is an English professor at Case Western Reserve University.

Umrigar said she started officially writing “Honor” in 2017 or 2018, while Donald Trump was president of the United States.

“Some of the issues I was writing about – the demonizing of minority groups, that was very much in the air here, in our own country, at the time,” Umrigar said. “Even though I was writing about a country far away, I was definitely breathing all that in and having that come out on the page, with the kind of xenophobia that we saw here.”

Umrigar said she hopes readers can find moments of reflection and resonance through the story – wherever they happen to be.

“I don’t want American readers to read this and dismiss what I’m writing about as things that happen over there, across the ocean,” she said. “My hope would be that people could just ask themselves, ‘Ok, here we are, reading about the cultural blind spots or the prejudices of a certain society that’s not mine – but what lessons can be transferred from that, and how do we examine our own society based on what I just read?’”