Austen Remapped: Diaspora, Race, and the Rewriting of Pride and Prejudice in Uzma Jalaluddin’s Ayesha at Last and Sonali Dev’s Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.