Community, Minority, and Communicative Memory in The Crow Eaters and An American Brat

Abstract

This paper examines the interplay of community formation, minority identity, and communicative memory in Bapsi Sidhwa's The Crow Eaters (1978) and An American Brat (1993). Drawing on Jan Assmann's theory of cultural and communicative memory, Maurice Halbwachs's concept of collective memory, and postcolonial frameworks, this study argues that Sidhwa deploys narrative as a vehicle for preserving and transmitting Parsi communal identity across generations and geographies. In The Crow Eaters, the Parsi community's minority status in colonial India is negotiated through humor, domestic ritual, and oral storytelling, all of which function as modes of communicative memory that bind the community together. In An American Brat, the protagonist Feroza's immigration to the United States stages a crisis of memory and belonging, wherein the diasporic subject must reconcile inherited communal values with the demands of assimilation. Together, the two novels illuminate how minority communities construct, contest, and transmit identity through narrative, language, and everyday practice. The paper concludes that Sidhwa's fiction constitutes a sustained meditation on the fragility and resilience of minority memory in the face of colonial, national, and global pressures.