In 1995, Pakistani-Canadian writer Uzma Jalaluddin first encountered Pride and Prejudice. She recognized Elizabeth Bennet immediately:  the wit, the refusal of condescension, the quiet ambition constrained by social circumstance.  She also noticed what was missing.  Years later, after completing the first draft of what would become Ayesha at Last (2018), Jalaluddin was struck by a friend’s observation that she had unconsciously rewritten Austen’s novel.1  What began as an original story thus entered a growing body of rewritings from diasporic perspectives shaped by histories of migration and colonialism—texts that have done something once thought improbable:  claimed Jane Austen.  The claim is not trivial.  Austen has long been treated as a quintessentially English property—her face appearing on the £10 note from 2017, her novels at the core of Anglophone literary curricula, her aesthetics domesticated into the heritage industry’s preferred image of a genteel, irony-free past.  As Devoney Looser has shown, Austen’s cultural authority has been continually remade through changing forms of readership, adaptation, and canonization (The Making of Jane Austen 78).  To rewrite Pride and Prejudice as a story of Muslim immigrants in suburban Toronto, or—as in the case of Indian-American novelist Sonali Dev—of an Indian-American family descended from royalty navigating the political ambitions of the San Francisco Bay Area, is to challenge that domesticated image of Austen’s fiction.  It is to demonstrate, through narrative form itself, that Austen’s analytical tools (irony, free indirect discourse, and the marriage plot as social diagnosis) are not confined to the historical world from which they emerged but remain capable of illuminating new cultural, racial, and political realities.

This essay examines how two diasporic retellings of Pride and Prejudice—Uzma Jalaluddin’s Ayesha at Last (2018) and Sonali Dev’s Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (2019)—extend Austen’s narrative techniques into new cultural and historical contexts.  I argue that these novels do more than update Austen’s settings:  they redeploy her formal machinery—irony, free indirect discourse, misrecognition, and the marriage plot—to explore questions of race, migration, and cultural belonging that lie beyond the historical horizons of the original novel.  In doing so, they reveal both the enduring adaptability of Austen’s social critique and the productive possibilities opened by the silences and limitations of her historical moment.

In 2000, Deidre Lynch observed that Austen had become a kind of literary property, a shared cultural resource mobilized by readers across vastly different interpretive communities (68).  Two decades later, the scale and diversity of that mobilization exceed anything Lynch could have anticipated.  Austen’s afterlives have generated an extensive and well-established field of scholarship encompassing adaptation, fandom, and global readership (Looser 78; Luetkenhaus and Weinstein 13).  Recent scholarship has increasingly turned its attention to the relationship between Austen and postcolonial writing, exploring the ways in which her fiction has been reimagined, appropriated, and rewritten across different cultural contexts (Park and Rajan 153).  Yet within this proliferation, one mode of rewriting has emerged as particularly sustained and theoretically significant:  the diasporic retelling, in which writers whose work engages with the histories and legacies of colonialism and migration lay claim to Austen’s narrative structures and redirect them toward the social realities of migrant and diasporic experience in contemporary multicultural societies.  Uzma Jalaluddin’s Ayesha at Last and Sonali Dev’s Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors are two of the most accomplished examples. Jalaluddin relocates Austen’s story to suburban Toronto.  Dev’s Darcy–Bennet reimagining offers a striking gender inversion:  Trisha Rajes, a socially awkward neurosurgeon descended from Indian royalty, assumes the Darcy role, while DJ Caine, a working-class Anglo-Indian chef raised in England, occupies Elizabeth Bennet’s position.  Despite these different settings and narrative strategies, both novels retain the structural architecture of Austen’s courtship plot—the misunderstanding, the pride, the prejudice, the eventual recognition—while systematically reworking its social and ideological coordinates.

My argument is that this double gesture, simultaneously Austenian and post-Austenian, constitutes not mere homage but a form of critical revision:  a rewriting that uses Austen’s narrative machinery to redeploy questions that remained largely outside the central concerns of the original novel.  To develop this argument, I draw on Linda Hutcheon’s definition of adaptation as “repetition without replication”—a process that simultaneously recalls its source and transforms it—alongside Homi Bhabha’s idea of the “third space” of cultural hybridity, in which identities and meanings are negotiated rather than simply transmitted (Hutcheon 7; Bhabha 55).  I also draw on John Wiltshire’s argument that the silences and omissions within Austen’s fiction are not incidental but structural:  they mark the limits of what the Regency novel could say (4).  Read against this framework, Ayesha at Last and Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors are best understood not as popular fiction that happens to use Austen’s plot but as deliberate interventions in the longstanding conversation about what Austen means, to whom she belongs, and what her fiction can be made to do.

Austen’s machinery: Free indirect discourse, irony, and the architecture of misrecognition

Before I turn to the novels themselves, it is worth attending carefully to the specific literary mechanics that make Pride and Prejudice so generative for diasporic writers, for the choice of source text is not incidental but structurally motivated.  Hutcheon’s concept of “repetition without replication” (7) captures the essential dynamic of adaptation:  every retelling repeats the recognizable features of its source while simultaneously reshaping them according to new cultural imperatives.  To understand why Pride and Prejudice proves so adaptable, one must attend to the formal properties that give it both its power and its limits.

Chief among these is free indirect discourse—Austen’s signature narrative mode, in which the narrator’s voice fuses imperceptibly with the consciousness of a character, generating an ironic doubleness that is simultaneously empathetic and critical.  The novel’s famous opening sentence—“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” (3)—is the mode’s purest demonstration.  The statement sounds authoritative; it is, of course, satire.  The “universal” truth it announces is the parochial obsession of Mrs. Bennet and her social world, not the narrator’s own view.  The irony depends on the gap between what the sentence presents as obvious and what the reader is invited to see through:  the marriage market’s violent reduction of human relationships to economic transactions.  As D. A. Miller has observed, this formal irony is not merely an aesthetic device but an epistemological one:  it trains readers to distrust the surface of social consensus and to recognize the mechanisms through which power presents itself as natural (ix).  Jalaluddin and Dev inherit this diagnostic function.  Rather than reproducing Austen’s style for its own sake, they redeploy her narrative techniques to expose new forms of misrecognition, shifting the object of irony from the marriage market of Regency England to the racialized and meritocratic hierarchies of the contemporary world.

This combination of formal flexibility and historical specificity explains why Austen’s fiction has proved so productive for later writers.  Her narrative techniques are remarkably portable, yet they emerged within a particular social world whose assumptions also shaped what could—and could not—be represented.  Critics have long argued that Austen’s fiction derives part of its power from productive omission, gesturing towards social realities such as empire, colonial wealth, and the violence underpinning polite society without fully articulating them.  Edward Said’s reading of Mansfield Park remains the canonical formulation of this argument:  “Everything we know about Austen and her values,” he writes, “is at odds with the cruelty of slavery,” even though the novel’s social world depends upon the plantation economy of Antigua (50).  More recent scholarship has complicated this account, however, moving beyond a simple opposition between silence and complicity.  As George E. Boulukos observes, discussions of slavery and the West Indies were “educational, topical, and even fashionable subjects” in early nineteenth-century fiction; he suggests that Austen’s engagement with empire demands a more nuanced reading than either explicit critique or total silence would imply (364).  Whether understood as omission, restraint, or historical limitation, these boundaries nevertheless help explain why later rewritings have found such fertile ground in Austen’s fiction.  Jalaluddin and Dev do not simply reproduce Austen’s narrative machinery; they extend it towards questions of race, migration, and cultural belonging that occupy a more central place in their own historical contexts.  Lynch’s observation that Austen has become a form of “cultural property” subject to competing claims of ownership is equally pertinent here (7).  To rewrite Pride and Prejudice around racialized protagonists is not only to adapt a canonical plot but also to participate in an ongoing negotiation over who may inhabit Austen’s imaginative world and what kinds of social experience her narrative forms can accommodate.

Ayesha at Last: Pride, prejudice, and the Muslim gaze

Uzma Jalaluddin’s Ayesha at Last transposes Pride and Prejudice to a South Asian Muslim community in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga, following Ayesha Shamsi, an aspiring poet working as a supply teacher (or substitute teacher), and Khalid Mirza, a devout, formally dressed young man newly arrived in town.  The novel’s central irony is announced from its opening pages:  when Ayesha first encounters Khalid, his ostentatious piety strikes her as priggish, while he dismisses her as insufficiently modest.  This is Austen’s initial misalignment—Elizabeth’s contempt for Darcy’s arrogance, Darcy’s pride in his own consequence—translated into the specific registers of Muslim community life, where the criteria for social legibility are drawn from religious observance rather than landed wealth.  The parallel is structurally close but tonally retuned.  Just as Darcy’s first proposal in Austen’s novel is framed as an act of condescension—as Elizabeth puts it, he offers marriage “‘against your will, against your reason, and even against your character’” (213)—Khalid’s early interactions with Ayesha are colored by his assumption that her independent manner represents a deficit rather than a virtue.  Jalaluddin reproduces Austen’s ironic framing with remarkable fidelity:  we are given access to Khalid’s interiority precisely to see its limits, to recognize the gap between his self-image as a man of principle and his actual behavior as a man of prejudice.

“Tell me, Khalid: Where are you from?”

“Toronto,” Khalid answered.  His face flamed beneath his thick beard; he didn’t know where to look.

“No,” Sheila laughed lightly.  “I mean where are you from originally?”

“Toronto,” Khalid responded again, and this time his voice was resigned.  (16)

Jalaluddin condenses the everyday mechanics of racialization into a seemingly banal exchange.  Khalid’s answer is repeatedly refused because the question presupposes that visible difference must correspond to foreignness.  The transformation of Austen’s scene of misrecognition thus points to a politics of belonging.

One of Jalaluddin’s most significant departures from Austen is in her treatment of Ayesha’s creative ambitions.  Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet has wit and intelligence but no artistic practice of her own; her interiority is expressed through conversation, not creation.  Ayesha, by contrast, is a poet—and her poetry becomes the novel’s most sustained exploration of the tensions between self-expression and communal obligation.  As she hides in the staff bathroom after her disastrous first day of teaching, she writes:

I can’t do this.

This thing that I should do.

I can do this.

This thing I don’t want to do.

I want to be away, weaving words of truth.

Not here, trapped between desk and freedom and family.  (7)

Rather than functioning as a decorative accomplishment, poetry becomes the only space in which Ayesha can articulate desires that remain unspeakable within her family and professional lives.  Unlike Elizabeth Bennet’s irony, which unfolds primarily through conversation, Ayesha’s resistance first takes written form.  In a community where a woman’s identity is expected to be primarily relational—defined by family, faith, and prospective marriage—Ayesha’s insistence on a private creative life constitutes a quiet act of resistance.  Jalaluddin here reinforces the contrast between Ayesha’s public performances and her private self through the novel’s recurring motif of code-switching:  Ayesha navigates different registers of English, Urdu, and cultural performance depending on her audience, a linguistic multiplicity that her poetry alone allows her to abandon.  She carries the notebook “like a child’s security blanket” (7).  The notebook functions not merely as a repository of poems but as the material embodiment of an identity that cannot be fully expressed in any of the social roles Ayesha performs.  Creativity thus becomes a form of cultural self-preservation.  The poem she eventually reads aloud at a community event does not reproduce a single moment from Pride and Prejudice so much as fulfill a comparable narrative function.  By making Ayesha’s inner life publicly visible, it becomes a moment of self-articulation that fundamentally reshapes the protagonists’ relationship, much as Austen’s letter scene transforms Elizabeth’s understanding of Darcy.

This tension is embodied institutionally in Jalaluddin’s deployment of the novel’s equivalent to Lady Catherine de Bourgh:  Khalid’s formidable mother, Farzana Mirza, who has arranged a prospective match between Khalid and Ayesha’s cousin Hafsa.  Whereas Lady Catherine functions in Austen as an emblem of aristocratic presumption whose authority rests purely on birth, Farzana’s authority derives from a quite different source:  the moral economy of the Muslim family structure, in which parental guidance in marriage is understood as a religious obligation rather than mere social interference.  Jalaluddin does not simply satirize Farzana; she grants her a perspective that Austen never extends to Lady Catherine.  Farzana’s insistence on an arranged match is shown to be rooted in genuine love for her son and in an anxiety—historically grounded—about the erosion of cultural continuity in a diasporic context where that continuity is fragile and contested.  The comedy of the original is preserved, but its moral texture is complicated:  Jalaluddin refuses to allow Western readers the easy assumption that Farzana’s traditionalism is simply analogous to Lady Catherine’s snobbery.

The novel’s secondary romantic plot introduces a Wickham figure in the form of Tarek.  In Austen’s novel, Wickham’s attraction rests on his performance of a social identity—the charming military officer, the wronged gentleman—that turns out to be entirely fabricated.  Jalaluddin’s Sulaiman, Ayesha’s uncle, performs a different kind of identity:  he is secularized, Westernized, and fluent in the codes of mainstream Canadian culture in ways that Khalid is not.  He represents the possibility of belonging without the friction of cultural difference.  Jalaluddin uses his eventual exposure to make an argument that has no equivalent in Austen:  the performance of assimilation is not authenticity but its opposite, and the Muslim woman who chooses the assimilated suitor over the culturally “difficult” one may be choosing a more insidious form of social conformity, not a liberation from it.

Bhabha’s concept of the “third space”—the site of cultural negotiation in which identities are neither purely originary nor simply assimilated—illuminates what Jalaluddin is doing formally as well as thematically.  Ayesha occupies this third space throughout the novel:  she is too independent for Khalid’s initial expectations of Muslim womanhood, too embedded in her faith and community for the secular Canadian mainstream.  Ayesha herself reflects that she is “part of both worlds, yet part of neither” (15).  This deceptively simple sentence condenses Bhabha’s theory into lived experience.  Identity is presented neither as assimilation nor as cultural purity but as a permanent negotiation between overlapping social worlds.  Her identity is constituted in the tension between these claims, and the novel’s romantic resolution—Khalid’s learning to see Ayesha on her own terms—enacts precisely the process of mutual recognition that Bhabha associates with genuine intercultural encounter.  The marriage plot becomes, in this reading, a narrative figure for the achievement of cultural legibility:  not assimilation into a dominant order but the creation of a shared language between two subjects who have, each in their different ways, failed to see clearly.

Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors: Race, class, and the limits of liberal meritocracy

If Jalaluddin’s novel works primarily within a single cultural community—the diasporic Muslim world of suburban Ontario—Sonali Dev’s Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors operates across a more explicitly racialized social landscape, and its formal choices are correspondingly more complex.  In a conversation with Jane Austen & Company, Dev explains that she conceived Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors not simply as a transposition of Austen into her own world but as an attempt to bring herself to the page while paying homage to the values and ideas she had inherited from Austen (“Austen Adjacent”).  Dev’s Elizabeth Bennet figure is Trisha Rajes, a neurosurgeon from a celebrated Marathi Indian-American family in California; her Darcy is DJ Caine, a struggling chef.  The novel pays sustained attention to the intersecting economies of race, class, and cultural capital in San Francisco:  the Rajes family’s success is real, but it is also shadowed by the perpetual negotiation of belonging in a society that assigns social worth through markers—accent, phenotype, cultural affiliation—that achievement alone cannot override.

One of Dev’s most significant structural departures from Austen is the redistribution of the class hierarchy across racial lines.  In Pride and Prejudice, Darcy’s pride is grounded in genuine social superiority:  he possesses ten thousand a year, Pemberley, and connections that Elizabeth’s family cannot approach.  The novel’s moral argument depends on Darcy learning to value Elizabeth independently of the social hierarchy that privileges him.  In Dev’s retelling, this vertical hierarchy is replaced by a more complex lateral structure.  Trisha’s family occupies one kind of elite—successful, socially celebrated within the Indian-American community, and culturally self-sufficient—while DJ occupies a liminal position that makes him an outlier within multiple frameworks simultaneously.  He is too mixed-race for some corners of the Indian-American community, too associated with Bollywood for the Anglo-American cultural establishment:  “‘You’re one of us, mate.  You got enough Desi blood for us.’ . . . Gulshan’s large-hearted acceptance had made DJ feel like he’d somehow finally found a place where he belonged.  But no amount of wanting to belong had meant anything” (154).  Unlike Elizabeth Bennet, whose social position is legible even when contested, DJ repeatedly experiences belonging as provisional rather than assumed.  Acceptance is shown to depend not only on class but also on racialization, migration, and competing understandings of national identity.  Dev thus relocates Austen’s concern with social recognition into a diasporic context where belonging itself remains unstable.  The misrecognition at the heart of the novel is therefore differently structured from Austen’s:  Trisha’s initial dismissal of DJ is not class condescension but a failure of cultural grammar—she cannot read him because the social categories available to her do not have a place for him.

The novel deploys food and cooking as its central metaphor for this problem of legibility, and it is here that Dev’s departures from Austen are most formally inventive.  DJ’s culinary practice—his capacity to work across South Asian, European, and Caribbean culinary traditions without belonging wholly to any of them—becomes the novel’s figure for mixed-race identity itself:  creative, cross-cultural, and persistently misread by those who expect cuisines, like people, to remain in their assigned categories.

DJ had created the dessert for her after spending a week researching her.  Not just her favorite restaurants, but where she shopped, how she wore her clothes, what made her laugh, even the perfume she wore and how much.  The taste buds drew from who you were.  How you reacted to taste as a sense was a culmination of how you processed the world, the most primal form of how you interacted with your environment.  (37)

Rather than treating food as a marker of fixed cultural authenticity, Dev presents cooking as a mode of reading people.  DJ understands cuisine not simply as the transmission of culinary traditions but as an interpretive practice through which identity, memory, and emotion become legible.  Food therefore functions as a language of cultural translation, extending Austen’s concern with social perception into a diasporic context where belonging is negotiated through shared sensory experience rather than inherited social codes.  When Trisha initially dismisses DJ’s cooking as “fusion” in a tone that implies derivative superficiality, Dev is staging precisely the failure of liberal multiculturalism that the novel sets out to diagnose:  the tolerance for diversity that depends on each culture’s remaining recognizable and separate and that has no category for the genuinely hybrid.  Austen’s irony, turned on Mrs. Bennet’s naive commerce in matrimonial prospects, is here redirected toward the equally reductive commerce in cultural identities that structures Bay Area progressive society.  This inversion allows Dev to place the dynamics of racial privilege under the same ironic scrutiny that Austen applies to class privilege.

Trisha is, in many respects, the novel’s moral problem.  Her intelligence, professional achievement, and personal integrity are consistently foregrounded, but so is her capacity for a peculiarly liberal form of condescension—the assumption that her own values and social norms are universal rather than culturally specific.  When she repeatedly fails to register DJ’s competence and dignity, Dev frames this not as simple snobbery but as the more subtle failure of a character who has internalized the hierarchies of the society she inhabits while believing herself exempt from them.  Here Dev draws on one of Austen’s characteristic narrative techniques, redirecting it from aristocratic self-regard to the neoliberal conviction that structural inequalities have been superseded by personal merit.  As DJ reflects after Ashna tells him he deserves his success,

Deserve was such a strange word, throwing out both blame and accolades with equal mercilessness.  Society’s skewed scale for assigning a value to human beings.  How many times had he been judged and found lacking?  Was there ever a way to measure what anyone deserved?  Or was it just another way to pretend that the randomness of the universe made sense?  (68)

Rather than accepting merit as a neutral principle, Dev exposes the ideological assumptions embedded within it.  DJ questions the very language of deservingness, revealing that social recognition is never distributed according to effort alone but remains conditioned by unequal structures of value.  Wiltshire has argued that Austen’s novels are built on the gradual revelation of the protagonist’s own blindness—in other words, that self-knowledge is always arrived at through the discomfort of recognizing one’s own limitations (87).  This structure applies with particular force to Dev’s Trisha:  her education is more uncomfortable than Elizabeth’s because what she must learn is not simply that she misjudged a person but that she misunderstood the social system she inhabits.  DJ’s struggle for professional recognition is repeatedly shown to be shaped by factors his merit cannot overcome:  the assumptions of industry gatekeepers who categorize him by heritage rather than skill, the invisibility of mixed-race identity within cultural institutions that reward legible difference, the persistence of networks of affiliation through which opportunities circulate invisibly.  In this sense, Dev rewrites Austen’s critique of the Regency marriage market—in which a woman’s social fate is determined by circumstances entirely beyond her control—as a critique of the contemporary meritocratic myth, in which the same structural determination operates through the language of personal choice.

Beyond rewriting: Readership, genre, and political possibility

Read together, Ayesha at Last and Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors constitute a coherent intervention in the Austen adaptation tradition.  They also invite a question that has received comparatively little attention in discussions of diasporic Austen retellings:  for whom are these novels written, and how does the answer shape what they can accomplish?  Both novels are commercially published, marketed through mainstream channels, and reviewed in outlets that reach a predominantly white, Western readership.  They appear on the same “best Austen retellings” lists as texts addressed to that readership.  This positioning is neither accidental nor purely commercial.  It reflects a deliberate choice on the part of both Jalaluddin and Dev to write texts that are legible to readers who do not share their protagonists’ cultural backgrounds, while simultaneously addressing themselves to readers who do.  The result is what we might call a “double-coded” text:  one that offers the pleasures of Austenian recognition to any reader who knows the source material while layering upon those pleasures, arguments, and experiences that bear specifically on the diasporic reader’s situation.

Hutcheon argues that adaptation works by activating the audience’s simultaneous awareness of both the new work and its source:  to her, knowing the adapted text gives an added dimension of enjoyment (121).  For the diasporic reader of Ayesha at Last, this doubled enjoyment carries an additional charge:  the pleasure is not only of recognition—Khalid is Darcy—but of vindication.  The familiar grammar of the Austenian courtship plot is now populated by people whose experience has historically been excluded from it.  For the non-diasporic reader, the same doubling produces a different, arguably more unsettling effect:  the familiar plot suddenly requires its reader to inhabit subject positions that the original text’s implied reader was never asked to consider—the second-generation immigrant negotiating family expectation, and the working-class mixed-race chef invisible within every available cultural category.

This asymmetry has significant implications for the reimaginings that these novels perform.  Both Jalaluddin and Dev write with an awareness that they are inviting readers familiar with canonical interpretations of Austen to reconsider some of the assumptions that have long shaped those readings.  Rather than presenting Austen’s social world as universally representative, the novels highlight the historical and cultural specificity of its horizons while demonstrating the remarkable adaptability of its narrative forms.  The novels are not, in this sense, simply representations of diasporic experience.  They also perform a pedagogical function, inviting readers to recognize, through the familiar structures of the courtship plot, the mechanisms of cultural exclusion that those structures have historically helped to naturalize.

This pedagogical dimension distinguishes these novels from the surface-level Austen aesthetics—the “Bridgertonization” of Regency England, the commodification of Empire-waist dresses and irony-free romance—that characterize much contemporary Austen-adjacent popular culture.  Both Jalaluddin and Dev use the courtship plot not only as a romantic fantasy but also as an analytic instrument through which broader questions of race, migration, and cultural belonging can be explored.

This reconfiguration of the courtship plot is most visible in each novel’s ending.  Elizabeth Bennet’s eventual marriage to Darcy resolves, in Austen, virtually all the social pressures that have structured the plot:  Pemberley absorbs the Bennet family’s economic vulnerability, and Darcy’s prestige neutralizes the scandal of Lydia’s elopement.  Unlike Ayesha’s and DJ’s, however, Elizabeth’s belonging within the dominant culture is never fundamentally at stake; what remains contested throughout the novel are her social standing and her perceived suitability as Darcy’s wife.  For Ayesha and DJ, no such total resolution is available.  Khalid’s recognition of Ayesha does not dissolve the expectations of the Muslim community about how a young woman should live and whom she should marry; it creates, at best, a new negotiation within those expectations.  DJ’s acceptance by the Rajes family does not make him legible within the cultural hierarchies that have rendered him invisible in the culinary world; it changes his personal relationships without changing the structural conditions he faces.  Both novels end in romance, but they refuse romance’s traditional function as social resolution—a departure from Austen that is, finally, their most significant critical argument.

There remains one further question that a close reading of these novels must address:  why romantic comedy?  Both Ayesha at Last and Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors are, generically speaking, romance novels.  They deliver the satisfactions of the genre—misunderstanding resolved, attraction consummated, social obstacles overcome—with considerable skill and without apology.  Yet this generic commitment is not a concession to commercial pressure; it is, I want to argue, an essential component of the political argument each novel makes.  The choice to house a postcolonial critique inside a romantic comedy is not a dilution of that critique but its sharpest expression.

Consider what the romance genre demands structurally.  Its central formal requirement—that the narrative move toward romantic resolution—means that the protagonists must be seen to deserve happiness, must be recognized as subjects of desire and worthy recipients of love.  This ending is not a trivial achievement for characters whose literary and social history has denied them precisely this recognition.  The genre’s demand for a happy ending is, for diasporic protagonists, a political demand:  it insists on their full subjectivity at the level of narrative form.  Ayesha does not merely survive the scrutiny of Khalid’s pious community; she wins.  Trisha does not merely navigate the racial hierarchies of San Francisco’s cultural economy; she is loved by a man who sees her clearly.  The generic conventions make these endings not merely possible but mandatory—and in so doing, they stake a claim about who belongs at the center of a story.

Austen’s novels use the marriage plot to conduct a systematic examination of what can be called “the social distribution of value”—the ways in which a society assigns worth, dignity, and recognition.  The romantic resolution does not simply reward the deserving protagonist; it publicly redistributes the social recognition that has previously been withheld from her.  When Elizabeth Bennet marries Darcy, the novel is not only celebrating a love match; it is staging the recalibration of a social hierarchy.  The same argument holds, with greater political charge, for Jalaluddin’s and Dev’s protagonists.  When Ayesha wins Khalid and, through him, a form of communal recognition that does not require her to abandon her independent self, the novel is staging the recognition of a subject who has been doubly marginalized:  as a woman within her community, and as a Muslim woman within the secular Canadian mainstream.  The genre’s triumphant ending carries, in this context, an insurgent political valence.

There is also a formal argument about irony to be made here.  Austen’s irony, as has often been noted, depends on a readership capable of recognizing the gap between the social world the narrative presents and the critique the narrative embeds.  The famous opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice is not funny if you believe it; it is only funny—and only politically effective—if you can see through it.  Romantic comedy, with its conventions of comic misunderstanding and eventual recognition, trains its readers in precisely this double vision.  Both Jalaluddin and Dev exploit this generic training:  the reader who is primed, by the conventions of romance, to see through the protagonist’s initial misjudgements is simultaneously primed to see through the social misrecognitions that structure the diasporic experience the novel depicts.  The genre is not merely a container for the argument; it is part of the argument’s mechanism.  This has consequences for how we should read these novels’ relationship to what Bhabha calls “mimicry”—the postcolonial subject’s ambivalent imitation of the colonial culture’s forms (85).  Bhabha’s mimicry is always “almost the same, but not quite”:  it reproduces the dominant form closely enough to be legible within it, while retaining the trace of a difference that the dominant culture cannot absorb.  Jalaluddin’s and Dev’s use of the Austenian romance can be read in these terms:  they reproduce the form with sufficient fidelity to attract Austen’s established readership, while the difference they introduce—the racialized protagonist, the postcolonial social world, the unresolved structural conditions—is precisely the trace that the form cannot, finally, absorb.  The romance ends; the social conditions do not.  The generic convention of closure exposes, by contrast, the non-closure of the political situation it depicts.  Mimicry here becomes critique.

There is, finally, a question of pleasure.  Both novels are deeply pleasurable to read—and this pleasure is not incidental to their political project.  The pleasure of the Austenian romance is partly the pleasure of wit:  the reader enjoys being in the company of a narrator who sees more clearly than the characters, who places ironic distance between social performance and social reality.  Jalaluddin and Dev invite their readers into this same enjoyable position of knowingness—and then, gradually, implicate them in the misrecognitions they are enjoying.  To laugh at Khalid’s initial misjudgment of Ayesha is also, eventually, to be asked whether one has been guilty of similar misreadings.  To enjoy Trisha’s intelligence while watching her fail to see DJ is to be invited, eventually, to examine what one has been failing to see.  The pleasure of the romance is inseparable from the discomfort of the critique.  This duality is one of Austen’s characteristic narrative strategies—and it is one important reason why her formal machinery serves these novels’ arguments so well.

The portability of Austen’s narrative forms

The critical value of Ayesha at Last and Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors lies not in their fidelity to Austen but in the uses to which they put her.  Both novels demonstrate that the marriage plot—Austen’s central form—is not culturally neutral but ideologically loaded, shaped by assumptions about belonging, social worth, and the proper subjects of romantic narrative that exclude as much as they include.  By placing racialized protagonists at the center of the Darcy–Bennet dynamic, Jalaluddin and Dev expose these exclusions while simultaneously claiming the canon for readers whose stories it has historically failed to tell.  They are, according to Elleke Boehmer, performing the rewriting of dominant story lines from the perspective of those on the edge (58)—but they are doing so from within the dominant form itself, a choice that gives their critique a particular structural elegance.

For Austen scholarship, these novels pose a challenge that the field is only beginning to address.  If Pride and Prejudice can be rewritten as a story of Muslim immigrants and Indian-American elites without losing any of its essential formal logic—the irony, the misrecognition, the moral education—then what does this capacity for revision suggest about the relationship between Austen’s narrative machinery and the social world she ostensibly depicts?  The diasporic retelling implies an answer:  that the machinery and the social world are separable; that Austen’s analytic tools are not expressions of Regency England’s particular social configuration but instruments sufficiently flexible to illuminate social realities far beyond the historical circumstances in which they first emerged.  To read Ayesha at Last and Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors is to be returned to Pride and Prejudice with a sharpened awareness of what Austen’s irony was always doing, and of the social world it was—by necessity, by convention, by ideological limit—not yet prepared to address.

Ultimately, these texts confirm Wiltshire’s intuition that Austen’s fiction achieves part of its power through productive omission (4).  Rather than abandoning Austen’s narrative framework, Jalaluddin and Dev demonstrate how it can be extended to address questions of race, migration, and diaspora that lay beyond the historical horizons of the original novel.  Austen’s novels endure because they are rewritten.  In the hands of diasporic writers, that rewriting becomes a form of critical reading:  an act of claiming, contesting, and expanding what the canonical text can mean.  The reader who finishes Ayesha at Last and returns to Austen’s opening sentence—“It is a truth universally acknowledged”—may find that its irony cuts deeper than before.

NOTE

1In a conversation with Jane Austen & Company, Jalaluddin explains that she only realized she had unconsciously rewritten Pride and Prejudice after a friend pointed it out upon reading an early draft of Ayesha at Last (“Novelist”).