Balli Kaur Jaswal (2018)

The premise of Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows is pretty compelling: Nikki, a young British-Punjabi woman, takes a creative writing job at her local temple, hoping to emancipate the community’s women with her modern ideals. She finds the women she’s teaching are barely literate widows who have no interest in her grand plans. But these women, who’ve spent their lives in the shadows of fathers, brothers, and husbands, have incredibly rich inner lives and some very interesting, and very spicy, stories to tell.

What really stands out about this novel is how it centers women who are typically ignored—in this case, older widows in the Punjabi community. As one reviewer put it, Kaur Jaswal gives voices to women who are generally voiceless, and she lets them talk about sex, no less. It’s a bold move that crashes through conventions and insists that every woman, no matter how invisible she may seem, has stories worth telling and deserves to be heard.

When we met on Zoom, I wasn’t sure how the conversation would go. I’d listened to the audiobook and found myself experiencing a weird mix of embarrassment, fascination, and unexpected interest—probably thanks to my Evangelical upbringing. The creative fruit and vegetable metaphors amused me (banana and cucumber I’d heard of at bridal showers, but aubergine and eggplant were new!).

However, what really drove our discussion was not the novel’s sexy shock value; instead, we dove into its many layers—arranged marriages, oppressive gender roles, double standards, generational cultural clashes, and even a murder mystery woven throughout.

As reviewers have noted, this book is wildly ambitious. It’s an immigrant novel in the tradition of The Joy Luck Club and White Teeth that offers serious commentary on the daily subjugation of women, as well as a murder mystery, a romance, and so forth. That’s a tough balance, and sometimes the book felt overwhelming with its multiple plots and stories-within-stories.

We noticed the generally negative portrayal of men in the novel, which contrasted with the actual Sikh men some of us have known. It made us think about how few fully realized, decent men appear in women’s fiction generally, perhaps because of the generally oppressive nature of the way various social systems uphold misogyny and the real risks women face from those systems, both at a general and personal level of violence or erasure.

We loved certain characters who felt fully developed (though honestly, most of the widows blurred together after a while, which we found a problem). The climactic scene of the older women’s collective capacity to rescue the younger more modern woman was powerful. However, the novel wraps up rather quickly with all loose ends tied up: it felt a bit too tidy.

The book deserves praise for its sympathetic portrayal of women across generations—the widows, the younger women, and their parents—all struggling for independence, love, and achievement in a larger society marked by racism, sexism, and materialism.

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows may not be perfect, but it’s a novel that makes you think, laugh, and see the invisible women around you in a whole new light.