Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth-century poetry. In this essay, he discusses “Daughter-Mother-Maya-Seeta” in the context of the experience of Indian immigrants to the United States.

As a poet of the Indian diaspora until her tragic death in 2003, Vazirani was a lively contributor to the outpouring of writings by South Asian immigrants to the United States that has made its mark on American literature over the last quarter of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. The essential task of this new Indian American literature is to come to terms with the immigrant experience in all its variety. As Craig Tapping puts it in his essay “South Asia/North America: New Dwellings and the Past,” “Like other ethnic literatures in North America, writing by immigrants from the Indian subcontinent is concerned with personal and communal identity, recollection...