When I started writing romance, many of my Western friends and colleagues asked me, so how is South Asian romance different? My initial responses involved the usual themes: big families, their everyday involvement in all things, arranged marriages, class and ethnic differences. However, after having published two novellas and having had them reviewed, I’ve begun to understand that there are many more  dissimilarities that I hadn’t considered before.

The world is interested in South Asian culture and our stories. Yay, for that. However, social taboos and how they’re handled in our part of the world differs immensely from the West. Sometimes there can be huge gaps in understanding. What is perceived as virtue may not be regarded as such in the West, rather as a handicap or as primitive. Modesty, for example, is considered a virtue in both men and women in Islam. In many parts of South Asia, in fact. I don’t just mean not showing skin, but also for instance wearing loose maternity clothes that hide the ‘bump’, rather than showing it off as the ‘essential accessory’. It doesn’t mean that we’re ashamed, it just means we’re unalike.

Honor is tied with behaviour. The opinion of the community matters because we’re still bound as communities in Chawls, and mohallas, ethnic groups, and sub-cultures. Like the ancient Greeks, we have strict laws of hospitality, breaking them would be unthinkable. Beggars, eunuchs, street children are so much part of our consciousness, it may appear that we write about them unconsciously, perhaps even jadedly. That doesn’t necessarily mean we’re indifferent to their plight. It demonstrates how disparate our worlds are actually. Ours is a developing world, still struggling with post-colonialism and partitions. It’s a world where little girls get shot in the head because they want proper schooling. It’s a world where criminals often go scot-free because they know a general or two. It’s a world where half the women don’t even report sexual assault. Rape is a four letter word that somehow brings shame not to the perpetrator, but the victim. Even though we condemn the rapist and sympathise with the victim, it’s still something we’re learning to address in a healthy way.

In the West, people are very aware of their rights. In South Asia, rights are relative. It’s something others ‘give’ us. This is a delicate issue with as many heads as a Hydra. There’s the gender politics, of course but there’s also the rich/poor and literate/illiterate divide. The former in both categories are more aware of their rights and their civil duties. The latter fighting for survival, think human rights is just a fancy phrase NGOs use.

One of my novellas has marital rape as part of the plot-line. I wanted to highlight marital abuse and show that women could still have a healthy relationship. I focused on the heroine’s response to the abuse and how she copes with it. I felt that it wasn’t the hero’s battle but hers, so how he responded to the revelation wasn’t important. It was how he responded to her that mattered. His only reaction to her had to be of love and desire, because I was trying to prove the point that other men can still find a rape victim, a divorced woman, the mother of another man’s child, attractive and desirable. Acceptance of rape victims in society by men is not as hard in the West, as it is in our society.

Western readers may not understand certain cultural constraints. In fact they might even be misunderstood for something else entirely. South Asian men  differ from their Western counterparts. For one, I think they’re far more sensitive than the average Western male, thanks to the close matriarchal relationship they benefit from.  Also, South Asian men will not address sexual assault on their wives and sisters without the burden of shame because they share the pain and horror of it with them. Their honor is tied to their women, and again that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It becomes a bad thing when those same men will kill those women because they choose to fall in love. There are other considerations. I write romances for heterosexual women in mind . For a lesbian reader, my heroes would probably be harsh and cruel because I portray them according to the demands of the genre, so they’re very confident alphas. Janice Radway, details the demands of the genre rather well in her book, Reading the Romance.

Today, writers are aware of many demands like safe sex. There are no longer  sex-scenes without the mention of condoms. In fact, Susan Elizabeth Phillips usually has a line or two thrown in about safe sex for good measure just before the hero is about to seduce the heroine. It’s the hero who usually takes responsibility for that and is her mouthpiece.

As a South Asian romance writer, religion, social mores, tradition and culture are a huge part of my stories and I try to integrate these with the modern world that has ended up having a very Westernised sensibility. Now that’s not necessarily a bad thing either. However, I’m a writer trying to make a niche for my unique perspective. I have no desire to lose my pluralistic, hybrid point of view, to a Westernised cookie-cut vision, and that means that sometimes there’ll be things I write that the Western reader will not understand. Pre-marital sex is still an issue in South Asia, perhaps not in metropolitan cities, but largely it is taboo. Will I handle it the same way a Western romance writer does? Of course not. Difference is good. Different is interesting.

As Chinua Achebe has so wisely and eloquently said, “Let every people bring their gifts to the great festival of the world’s cultural harvest and mankind will be the richer for the variety and distinctiveness of the offerings.”