Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
California: Shaping immigrant writers
California has had an enduring influence on generations of writers. It has been a horizon of reinvention, where the Pacific crashes against cliffs, deserts sprawl into silence, and cities teem with innovation. Writers arrive here, as immigrants do, carrying the weight of past worlds. But once here, they find their words bending toward this place in their own unique way, carrying the gravitas of its sunshine, its diverse landscape, and the peculiar optimism of the West Coast.
Like others before me, I write under the influence of California’s sweeping magnificence. It was the High Sierras, Big Sur and Yosemite that inspired my recent book of poems, Yosemite of my heart – Poems of adventure in California.
For the Indian diaspora, California is both a destination and a canvas. Software engineers arrive in Silicon Valley, students step into Berkeley and Stanford, families settle in Fremont or Cupertino. In their stories, the freeways, tech campuses, and oceanfront are not merely scenery — they are stages where identity unfolds. Commenting on “immigrant fiction” in an interview with The New York Times, writer Jhumpa Lahiri said, “From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.” On the West Coast, that exile often transforms into a new beginning and belonging, producing a literature inseparable from California itself.
New reckonings of identity
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, who lived and taught in California for a long time before moving to Texas, often charts the collision between India and the United States in her novels. In The Mistress of Spices, Divakaruni places her mystical shopkeeper in Oakland, a city where immigrant neighborhoods rub shoulders with the gentrified. California’s multicultural texture becomes the fabric where magic and memory entwine. In her book or poems, Leaving Yuba City, she deals with her Indian experience in America and California.
Similarly, Minal Hajratwala’s Leaving India — part memoir, part history — stretches across continents but returns often to her upbringing in the Bay Area. The freeways and suburbs here are not anonymous; they are where immigrant families wrestle with belonging. Her California is a mosaic: part homeland, part in-between land.
Namrata Poddar, a Greater LA area-based author, explores the themes of displacement, class and the struggle for belonging in her debut novel Border Less. For these writers, the West Coast is not merely an escape but an encounter with the inner self. The fog of San Francisco, the palm-lined boulevards of Los Angeles, the orchards turned into tech campuses in Silicon Valley — each landscape forces new reckonings of identity.
The Californian sentence
But how does geography translate into style? The West Coast has always bred a different literary tone than the East. Where New England gave us the dense psychological terrain of Nathaniel Hawthorne and shaped F. Scott Fitzgerald’s glittering angst, the Pacific nurtures something more expansive, more restless.
Consider Joan Didion, California’s great chronicler. Her Sacramento upbringing and years in Los Angeles taught her to write with clarity and cool detachment, sentences honed like sunlight against glass. The freeways, the Hollywood illusions, the endless sprawl of suburbia — all informed her prose, making it sharp and shimmering.
Indian American writers in California, too, absorb this stylistic lightness. There is often a spaciousness in their narratives, a willingness to blend myth with modernity, a tone that feels in tune with the openness of the West. In Divakaruni’s work, you sense the Pacific horizon, even when her characters are thinking of Calcutta. In Hajratwala’s memoir, the sprawling structure mirrors the geographical sprawl of California itself.
Silicon Valley as the story
No place has shaped contemporary Indian American life more than Silicon Valley. For many, it is not only a place where careers unfold but also where narratives of ambition, alienation, and adaptation are staged. Vauhini Vara’s novel The Immortal King Rao — longlisted for the Booker Prize — embodies this perfectly. The story of an Indian immigrant who becomes a tech titan in California, it blends family saga, corporate parable, and speculative fiction. Vara, who grew up in the Bay Area, captures both the utopian and dystopian sides of Silicon Valley: a place where immigrant dreams collide with the relentless pace of technological reinvention.
The Valley itself is becoming literature — freeways as metaphors, start-ups as stages for epic rise and fall, tech campuses as contemporary village squares where diasporas gather, mingle and disperse.
The legacy of voices past
Of course, the West Coast literary tradition extends far beyond the diaspora. John Steinbeck’s Salinas Valley, immortalized in East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath, remains one of the most powerful literary landscapes in American letters — fields and farms made mythic. Jack London’s Oakland and Sonoma County, too, shaped his tales of wilderness and survival.
For today’s immigrant writers, these predecessors matter. To write California is to write alongside Didion, Steinbeck, London, and others who turned the state into a literary geography. But it is also to push the literary canon forward — to include voices from India, Vietnam, Philippines, and every community that has remade the West.
Reading ourselves in a place
For Indian American readers, this intertwining of place and prose carries particular resonance. Many of us live between landscapes — the dusty streets of a remembered hometown in Gujarat or Bengal, and the palm trees of Santa Cruz or the dense fog of Daly City. Our children grow up speaking English laced with Hindi or Tamil at home, navigating both Bollywood and Hollywood.
When we read about Divakaruni’s Oakland or Vara’s Silicon Valley, we recognize our neighborhoods rendered visible in literature. When we read Joan Didion’s reflections on the California dream unraveling, we hear echoes of our own cautious faith in the immigrant promise. Literature becomes a mirror — one where California is not simply a backdrop, but an active force shaping who we are.
A story still unfolding
California is still writing itself. The Indian diaspora here is only a few decades old, yet already it has produced voices that resonate globally. In time, more stories will emerge from Fremont, LA or Sacramento’s suburbs.
When I arrived here, I too felt the pulse of this place – in the long workdays, the optimism of startups, the intensity of reinvention. Yet in quieter hours, I found myself reaching for poetry to reconcile ambition with memory.
Geography and places have infused literature for decades and will continue to do so. Just as Steinbeck’s Salinas became myth and Didion’s Los Angeles became legend, so too will immigrant California — with its fusion restaurants, its temple courtyards, and its tech corridors— take root in prose and verse. For now, the Indian diaspora continues to write between two worlds, with California as both host and collaborator. Place, after all, is not only where we live; it is what teaches us how to tell our stories. And perhaps that is the truth of the immigrant writer: we do not belong to any one place, but to the dialogue between places we have inhabited. Our stories are forged in the crossing.