Fancy a story about young, sassy women chasing professional and romantic success in the big city? Chances are that the novel you’re looking for will be shelved under “chick lit.” But, in the early 2000s, most protagonists in this genre were white women. And if they were South Asian? Well, that’s “Bollywood chick lit,” according to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

Pamela Butler and Jigna Desai resist Dowd’s assessment, arguing, that “[h]er analysis re-centers white women as the subject of feminism by assuming that chick lit’s women of color sub-genres and their concerns and interests are identical to or derivative of their white counterparts.”

In fact, they write that the study of chick lit is held back when scholars see it as a “homogeneously white normative genre to be read primarily for its relationship to feminism and femininity…. Such readings also understand chick lit as an ‘apolitical’ genre driven by blind and uncritical consumerism and individualism.”

Noting that chick lit “is not seamless in how it produces its subjects,” they set out to examine some of “the most popular South Asian American chick-lit novels” released by major publishing houses. Though many coming-of-age stories about South Asian American women were aimed at the “Young Adult” or “literary” fiction markets, Butler and Desai selected three novels that were specifically marketed as chick lit: Kavita Daswani’s For Matrimonial Purposes (2003); Daswani’s The Village Bride of Beverly Hills (2004); and Sonia Singh’s Goddess for Hire (2004).

In Daswani’s For Matrimonial Purposes, the young, well-to-do Anju moves from Mumbai to New York City “in search of fulfillment and belonging, as well as a suitable husband.” The story is written in first-person, from a perspective that allows “the narrator to sprinkle the text with the classed references to luxury commodities and cosmopolitan places that have become a chick-lit mainstay,” Butler and Desai explain. The text is stuffed with allusions to high street brands such as Manolo Blahnik, Louis Vuitton, Kate Spade, Barneys, and more.

Still, a central conflict in the story is Anju’s dissatisfaction with a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption, which she calls a “biodegradable life.” In this way, “[d]ifferentiating itself from dominant white chick lit, Anju’s critique focuses on the built-in obsolescence of a leisure- and luxury-commodity-centered existence.”

Though Anju tries to unwind at “power yoga” sessions, the authors point out that an Eastern spiritual activity originally opposed to materialism is now “not outside of the sphere of consumption, but rather appropriated and domesticated into first-world practices and commodities.” Anju’s participation dissolves the “easy binary of Western consumption and Eastern spirituality.” In this way, “what is more evident in For Matrimonial Purposes than in dominant white chick lit is the way in which Anju’s choices regarding commodity consumption mark her struggles with racial, national, and cultural belonging.”

Notably, Anju’s transformation into a cosmopolitan subject is shown by her choice to wear Paris-bought Manolo Blahnik designer shoes alongside a silk sari and diamonds at a fashion show. In this scene, Anju “find[s] the courage to stand out from the white American fashion editors’ slender, black-clad ranks,” write the authors, who call this an example of “hybrid ethnic style.”

A similar transformation takes place in The Village Bride of Beverly Hills. Its protagonist, Priya, who is also a first-generation Indian immigrant in the United States, must give up her traditional wardrobe of salwar kameez to work in Los Angeles. When she wears saris to galas, she is “[s]een as exotic and beautiful, but consistently misrecognized” as “Middle Eastern.”

While conventional scholarship analyzes Asian women as producers and laborers in the Global South, stories like Daswani’s instead put the spotlight on Asian women as capitalist consumers. As such, South Asian American chick lit has a very different relationship with the designer brand obsession that’s a staple of the wider genre, the authors suggest.

“Village Bride exhibits a preoccupation with clothing through its use of detailed descriptions of various outfits and a desire for beauty culture, but mediates such desires by entangling the economic and ethnic with style and social capital,” Butler and Desai observe.

The South Asian American ethnic sub-genre also stands out for its take on family relations, which contrast with the typical narratives about heroines who fly the nest and learn to live independently. For instance, Anju balks at a white therapist’s advice to “cut the cord” with her parents in India and to instead accept that “women in America have their own lives.”

“In dominant white chick lit, this separation from family is seen as essential for marking the self-sufficiency and maturation of the individual prior to marriage,” Butler and Desai explain. “In South Asian American chick lit, however, family frequently serves a different purpose, and the protagonist’s desire is not to sever ties of dependency, but to reform those connections to allow for the satisfaction of both the protagonist and her family.”

According to Butler and Desai, chick lit tends to celebrate an ostentatious culture of globe-trotting shopping sprees—mainly in Western centers of fashion and power, such as London and New York. But the transnational, multicultural cosmopolitanism of South Asians such as Anju and Priya differs from white characters’ experiences—because it “is connected to and engages longer histories and processes of global migration, racialization, imperialism, and diasporas,” they write.

The authors conclude that “simply dismissing chick lit or genre fiction as apolitical, retrograde, or fluffy,” is a mistake, as “there is much to be gained from readings that ask how, and why, this literature operates in regard to race, nation, empire, and political economy.”

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