Patriarchy, Feminism and Sexuality in Bapsi Sidhwa's An American Brat: Migration, Marriage and the Communal Control of the Female Body

Abstract

Scholarship on Bapsi Sidhwa has concentrated overwhelmingly on Partition, nationhood and Parsi ethnic identity, with Cracking India and The Crow Eaters receiving the bulk of critical attention. An American Brat (1993), her novel of a young Parsi woman's migration from Zia-era Lahore to the United States, has more often been read as a comic novel of cultural adjustment than as a sustained inquiry into how patriarchy governs female sexuality. This article addresses that gap by asking how Sidhwa represents patriarchal power that operates not through violence but through love, family duty, religious belonging and communal survival, and how her heroine, Feroza Ginwalla, negotiates that power through migration. The study adopts a postcolonial feminist framework drawing on Chandra Talpade Mohanty's critique of the monolithic "third world woman," Deniz Kandiyoti's concept of the "patriarchal bargain," Nira Yuval-Davis's analysis of women as bearers of collective identity, and Michel Foucault's account of internalised surveillance, alongside diaspora theory from Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall and Avtar Brah. Methodologically, it combines close reading with attention to narrative form, examining how Sidhwa's ironic, comic omniscience and her adaptation of the Bildungsroman shape the novel's feminist argument. It also draws on ethnographic scholarship on the Parsi community to situate the novel's gendered exogamy rule, under which a woman who marries outside the faith risks exclusion while a man does not. The article argues that the novel exposes a "quiet patriarchy" whose most effective agents are loving women, and that it refuses the binary of an oppressive East and a liberating West that Mohanty and Lila Abu-Lughod have criticised. Feroza's agency is real but costly: she gains the capacity to choose while losing the relationship she chose. The article contributes a reading of An American Brat as a feminist migration narrative, demonstrates how comic irony functions as a mode of feminist critique, and extends postcolonial feminist theory on the communal control of women's bodies into the context of South Asian diaspora.