For Matrimonial Purposes
by Kavita Daswani
Putnam Publishing Group

"For Matrimonial Purposes" is the sort of novel that you read in a night. It's airy and amusing, designed — from its garish cover to its bold typesetting — to keep the pages turning. The novel, Kavita Daswani's first, comes at a time when Indian influence is raging in movies, books and fashion. From the widespread popularity of films like Bend it Like Beckham to the racks of ohm-emblazoned baby T-shirts crowding your local J.C Penney's, the subcontinent is at the center of mainstream pop culture.

Daswani's novel takes its cues from previous work by Indian women, following the romantic fumblings of a thirty-something Indian woman in the Western world. Like the novels of Meera Syal or the films of Gurinder Chadha, it concentrates on the struggles of its heroine, Anju, to reconcile her New World values with the traditional belief structure ingrained in her by her homeland. An immigrant Bridget Jones, Anju fumbles from arranged meeting to chaperoned date and crumbles under her parents' authority, while she secretly yearns for the torrid romance of bad pop songs and Harlequin novels.

The novel's central action is motivated by Anju's deeply held belief that she must find a husband and fulfill the role of dutiful wife if she is ever going to have any worth. Even her successful career as a fashion publicist cannot take away Anju's sense of inadequacy. Traveling from India to New York and back, Anju's life is one whose every moment is filtered, every moment in Anju's life is filtered through her desire to find a mate. At home in India, Anju's parents encourage this endeavor, firmly believing that finding a husband is the most important thing for their daughter's life, despite the unhappiness and loneliness the fruitless search causes her.

Like "Bridget Jones's Diary," Daswani's novel breaks Anju's world down into simple dichotomies: East vs. West, romance vs. duty, man vs. woman. The complexities of a modern woman still operating under the influence of traditional hegemonies are lost in the oversimplification of Anju's relationship to her parents, men and India itself. At no point through the course of the novel does Anju consider any compromise with the beliefs of her native land, nor are those beliefs shown to meld with the modern world in any way. Her parents, brothers and peers are uniformly obsessed with their traditional beliefs, as well, and Daswani doesn't allow even a hint of modernization to show through the cracks. Instead, Daswani's India, like Anju, is stubborn, archaic and unyielding, perhaps appearing to change on the surface but otherwise stolid.

While a caricaturized version of interpersonal relationships may have worked for Bridget Jones and her urban Singletons, Daswani applies the same treatment to cultural relations, lending deeper connotations to her lighthearted prose. In a world so obsessed with fetishizing the exotic, novels like Daswani's take on a role greater than that of simple fluff reading. They become informers of culture to a Western audience. Nothing lent greater familiarity with the traditions of Indian weddings and celebrations than last summer's Monsoon Wedding and few books have placed Indian immigrant culture on the seminar table like Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize winning "Interpreter of Maladies. " For domineering Western culture, these fragments of the foreign turn into testimonials of the Eastern experience, speaking for the millions of residents of the subcontinent and the varied cultures therein. Few people would look at a book like "Bridget Jones's Diary" and assume it spoke for all English women, but the mystical nature with which the West regards the East allows it to look at works like "For Matrimonial Purposes" as typifying the Indian experience.

"For Matrimonial Purposes" is not a terrible book. It's fun, easy and ultimately uplifting. But the obtuse manner with which Daswani treats her subjects ultimately undermines the message of her own story. As long as the East remains shrouded in exoticism and mystery, books like this will only further obscure it.

— Madhu Krishnan (moutarde_mechante@hotmail.com)