Reflecting on Sepia Mutiny, South Asia and South Asian Americans

So, Sepia Mutiny is shutting down.

At its height, from 2004 to about 2009 or so, I think it was the most active South Asian diaspora-oriented forum on the web. Posts on everything from M.I.A. to Bobby Jindal to interracial dating would routinely draw 200, 300, sometimes even 1000 comments. And while some of those comments were less than thrilling, we as bloggers could always count on interesting new voices to show up in between. Blogging on Sepia Mutiny was addictive for me (and I think not just me) during those years in large part because it was impossible not to be excited to encounter so many different perspectives and ideas.

Sepia Mutiny was always somewhat divided over its function and focus. On the one hand, the directive from Abhi and the other founders was quite clear: the point was to create a space for a South Asian American perspective. The "South Asian" part was important and essential (and we had many fights, mainly with skeptical readers, about whether it wasn't after all just an "Indian American" blog). Also important was the "American" part of the equation; Sepia Mutiny was never intended to be an "Indian subcontinent" forum.

This policy of not focusing on South Asia itself was, however, always a challenge for me, since I have a deep personal and professional interest in what is happening in the subcontinent itself in terms of politics, culture, the media, and of course literature. And this past decade has been a really interesting one on all those fronts, from the debates over communalism and secularism (and we had many good arguments about those issues in the comments), to the rapid changes in the style of commercial Hindi cinema, to the debates about economic trends like outsourcing and globalization. Despite the blog's stated policy of focusing exclusively on the diaspora, many of my colleagues at Sepia Mutiny joined me in posting frequently on these types of issues, leading to some very rich discussions. As I see it, it was a policy honored more in the breach than in the observance, and that's a good thing.

Another source of tension, not within the circle of Sepia Mutiny bloggers, but rather between bloggers and readers, was around generational issues. All of the founders of the blog were second generation Indian Americans (later Bangladeshi American, Pakistani American, and Sri Lankan American contributors would also join). However, many, if not most of the readership during the years I was involved seemed to consist of first generation immigrants (and many 1.5 generation folks -- people who immigrated between age 5 and 15). This reflects the demographics of the South Asian American population -- there are more immigrants than second or third generation South Asian Americans in the United States -- and the fact that these readers were all interested in hearing about and talking about the same stuff underlines the commonalities between different generations of immigrants. Recent immigrants from South Asia might be interested in reading my post in 2005 about Katrina Kaif, but they might also be interested in hearing about Kal Penn or Padma Lakshmi. I think both bloggers and readers evolved quite a bit on this kind of issue over the years. In the beginning, first and second generation commenters used to make fun of each other as ("FOBs" or "ABCDs", respectively), but somewhere along the line a more respectful and intelligent kind of conversation started to occur. The first generation scorn for ABCDs speaking Hindi badly started to lose its edge, while the second-generation's dislike of the "awkward immigrant" stigma also evolved. In short, I think we all grew up, and started to appreciate and understand one another better.

My dream would have been a half diasporic, half "home" oriented blog; it was very nearly there for a little while. Luckily, there are fantastic new, highly professionalized blogs hosted by the New York Times (India Ink) and the Wall Street Journal, that provide much of what used to be my Sepia Mutiny fix. I read them every day. And I get just a little smidgeon of what was once the excitement of the Sepia Mutiny comments on venues like Twitter (not so much, these days, from Facebook).

Finally, I should say that while the new social networking venues are helping to carry on the kinds of conversations that went on at Sepia Mutiny, they are a little lacking on some respects. For one thing, both Facebook and Twitter require super-compressed conversations. While it's true we may have been a bit too long-winded in some blog posts over the years, I think there really is value in spelling out an idea or a perspective at some length, and then giving readers as much space as they want or need to discuss it with you. I don't think I have ever changed my mind based on a discussion I had with someone on Twitter. But I did, often, in response to discussions on Sepia Mutiny.

I am not sure what the solution is. There's no question that social networking is here to stay, but maybe as that ecosystem continues to evolve we can again find a space for long-form (but still immediate, and unfiltered) discussions of the issues that are on our minds.

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I was a contributor at Sepia Mutiny for about 5 of its 8 years, and a full-fledged blogger for four of them (2006-2010). That period saw the birth of my first child (we now have two!), a period of severe illness in fall 2007, the publication of my book in early 2007, and the dramatic and sometimes difficult experience of going through tenure in 2007 and 2008. There was a Sepia Mutiny post (by Ennis), celebrating the birth of my son in 2006, and I relied quite a bit on the Sepia Mutiny community during the fall of 2007, when I was home sick. I also used the space to talk a bit about the ideas in my book when it came out in the spring of 2007. All of this meant quite a lot to me; my blogging was an extension of who I was in a very personal way during this time period.

I can link four academic articles to my blogging, and three of those four relate to Sepia Mutiny. The most directly relevant is an essay I wrote on Jhumpa Lahiri and the problem of naming of the "South Asian" diaspora. (I also have an essay out on Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues, which had its origins in a Sepia Mutiny post about the pluralistic nature of the Ramayana; an essay on Tagore's travel writing, which started as a Sepia Mutiny blog post; and finally, a more theoretical post on blogging pseudonyms and the changing nature of authorship.)

The years 2007-2010, when I wrote and published those essays -- while also blogging quite frequently at Sepia Mutiny -- were very productive ones for me in terms of scholarly productivity. At times I have thought that I was hurting my career as a scholar by blogging too much (and there's no question that the content of some of my public statements and interventions may have harmed me, especially during the 'Sonal Shah' debate). But considering that my academic writing has actually slowed down a fair bit since I left off regular blogging in 2010, I'm not so sure about the "distraction" argument against blogging. It may be that the daily regimen of composing in public is actually conducive to better discipline in academic writing, even if it means one is sometimes distracted by the latest outrageous comment from "MoorNam."

You can see a collection of my Sepia Mutiny posts here: http://sepiamutiny.com/blog/author/author11/

Speaker at Lehigh Today

I've helped organize this lecture:

Susan Stanford Friedman, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Cosmopolitanism, Women and War: 

From Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas to Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis

Wednesday February 15 4pm Scheler Family Humanities Forum (Linderman 200)

Me on Manto: Interview in "Viewpoint"

Qaisar Abbas of UNT interviewed me on Sa'adat Hasan Manto by email for a magazine he writes for called "Viewpoint." You can see the interview here.  Also see a new essay on Manto by the great Tariq Ali here. There are a number of other essays in the special issue on Manto, which I haven't read yet. The magazine in general is at:

http://www.viewpointonline.net

Probably the most arguable (interesting?) section of the interview might be this one:

Manto was tried in India and Pakistan for “obscenity” as he used images of women as sex object and prostitute in several of his short stories. How would you compare obscenity and portraying sex as a social reality in literature? Who defines standards of pornography and sex in fine arts and literature in South Asia?

Manto wrote about prostitution because it was a part of life in his era. Once he was asked this same question, and he had the following rejoinder: 

“If any mention of a prostitute is obscene then her existence too is obscene. If any mention of her is prohibited, then her profession too should be prohibited. Do away with the prostitute; reference to her would vanish by itself.” (via Harish Narang)

I do not think Manto was particularly obsessed with prostitution. It might be more accurate to say that he was part of a broader movement in Modern literature to depict sexuality more honestly and sincerely than earlier generations had done, and writing stories with characters who were prostitutes was one way for him to do that. Even within Urdu and Hindi literature, Manto was not the only one to push the boundary with regards to explicit sexuality in his writing. The first wave of Progressive Writers, emerging from the Angarey group, also did this. One infamous story by Sajjad Zaheer, for instance, was called “Vision of Paradise” (Jannat ki Basharat) which featured a Maulvi who begins to have erotic dreams while he intends to stay up late praying. The story was controversial at the time because it was seen as blasphemous, and reading it today there’s no doubt that Zaheer intended to be provocative regarding religious piety. But it is no less provocative because of its use of explicit sexuality.

Alongside the Angarey group, Premchand himself was often more direct about matters of sexuality than many people realize. His famous 1936 novel Godaan, for instance, features a cross-caste sexual relationship described quite frankly – though it’s by no means pornographic. Finally, it should be noted that Manto’s friend and rival, Ismat Chughtai, also pushed the line regarding the depiction of sexuality.

That said, there’s no question that Manto takes things a step further. A story like “Bu” (Odour) is significantly more explicit in its depiction of a random sexual encounter than anything written by Zaheer or Chughtai. As a side note, this story, which is one of Manto’s most infamous ones, is not actually about prostitution, but rather a middle-class man’s encounter with a poor woman (a Marathi “Ghatin”) working as a laborer. Other stories do deal directly with prostitution, but often with a focus on the hypocrisy and weakness of men. Manto’s prostitutes are often honest and even noble individuals – trying to survive in a society that treats the exploitation of women’s bodies as merely another kind of financial transaction. 

On the question of who sets the standards for obscenity. Here I think there’s no question that by the standards of his time, some of Manto’s stories could be found to be “obscene.” As is well-known, he was tried for obscenity six times during his career, some by the British Indian government before 1947, and some by the independent government of Pakistan. I certainly oppose the censorship, but I think Manto knew what he was doing in writing stories like “Bu,” and I don’t think he or his career suffered greatly because he got in trouble for it; if anything, it may have gotten him more attention and thus helped his career in some ways. That said, with the sexual elements in “Khol Do!” or “Thanda Ghosht,” I do feel these are worth defending, since Manto is referencing sexual violence not for titillation but to make an important ethical point. 

Notes on "Photo-Wallahs" (1992)

My friend Kate Pourshariati recently organized a screening of the documentary film Photo-Wallahs (1992) at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. She invited me to briefly introduce the film and moderate a discussion. Below is a slightly revised version of my notes from the event.

David and Judith MacDougall have been making documentary films since the late 1960s, and they’ve made films on people from numerous regions, from Africa, to Italy, to Australia, to India. Besides this film, they’ve done several other documentaries based in India, including Doon School Chronicles, on the elite boarding school in Dehra Dun, and Gandhi’s Children, focusing on slum children in Delhi. (Many of their documentaries are made collaboratively, but they have sometimes also worked on their own. Doon School Chronicles has David McDougall’s name on it exclusively, while a recent film, Diyas, was directed exclusively by Judith McDougall.)  In addition to making films, David MacDougall has written a fair amount about film and issues related to visual anthropology over the years, including two books, Transcultural Cinema and The Corporeal Image. 

Photo-Wallahs is a film about the culture of photography in the famous hill station of Mussoorie, with some scenes filmed in Dehra Dun. The method of the documentary is “observational,” which is to say there’s no background narration from the film-makers, and the audience has to do the work of putting together the individual pieces and themes themselves. The filmmakers focus on two different kinds of professional photography, 1) tourism photography, which involves middle-class tourists paying to be photographed dressed up in fanciful costumes with the Mussoorie hills in the background; and 2) more conventional studio photography, such as is used in matrimonial ads and wedding pictures. They also have brief sections involving people who are not photographers, including a segment with Sita Devi of Kapurthala (who was photographed by the fashion photographer Cecil Beaton in England in the 1930s), as well as a segment with the Indian writer Ruskin Bond, reading from his story “The Photograph.”

On "The Essential Tagore"

Just a quick note to say Happy New Year, and announce that I have a medium-length essay reviewing the new Harvard UP anthology of Tagore, The Essential Tagore.

The essay is up at Open Letters Monthly, and you can read it here.

Besides the usual reviewing and synopsis of Tagore's life and career I make a particular kind of argument regarding how I think Tagore should be read -- as someone who used three literary voices, (1) that of a lyric poet, (2) novelistic realism, and (3) satire. Some of his most interesting stories, poems, and plays are the ones where he shifts voices within the work, or uses more than one voice. The story "The Broken Nest" is one such example.  I also talk about a particular poem by Tagore called "The Poet," which isn't widely cited in English. And finally, I look briefly at one of the satirical Tagore plays included in the anthology, "The Kindgom of Cards."

Goa Think Fest: a View from Afar

A few months after a tumultuous (but nevertheless quite glamorous) Jaipur Literature Festival, there has been another major global-oriented event in India, the Goa Think Fest, which took place this past weekend. 

The ThinkFest is organized by editors of Tehelka (Tarun Tejpal and Shoma Choudhury) as well as Newsweek -- and one of the bold face names to speak at the event was none other than Tina Brown herself. Also on the roster were William Dalrymple (speaking on Afghanistan), the venerable Pakistani journalist Pervez Hoodbhoy ("Seven Ways to Rescue Pakistan"), psychoanalytic theorists Sudhir Kakar and Ashis Nandy, authors Shashi Tharoor and Hari Kunzru (the latter has a new book out), anti-corruption activists Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal (though apparently Anna Hazare did not end up showing up), hipster actor Abhay Deol and hipster filmmakers Anurag Kashyap and Dibaker Banerjee ("Movies Bollywood is Too Scared to Make"), architect Frank Gehry (!), oncologist and cancer writer Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee (who recently won a Pulitzer prize for his book on cancer), and Pakistani novelist Mohammed Hanif. 

First, the wow: seems like a great line-up of writers, intellectuals, and artists (I didn't mention all the musicians and visual artists who were also there) all in the same place for a weekend. I could do without Thomas Friedman and V.S. Naipaul, but I suppose there are others for whom these folks remain a big draw. 

I was hoping for an exciting Twitter feed related to the Think Fest (hashtags #goathinkfest and #thinkfest), but mostly what you see is a lot of famous and almost-famous people saying things like, "had a great time at #goathinkfest" "dancing to Kailash Kher at #goathinkfest", and so on. That said, I did come across one interesting thread via Twitter, a bit of drama behind the festival, starting with a critique of Tarun Tejpal and Tehelka by a "theater veteran" named Hartman de Souza in the Hindustan Times. Tarun Tejpal's subsequent defense of buying a property in Goa, his editorial policies at Tehelka as well as the choice of venue for the Think Fest, seemed mainly satisfactory to me, though I do want to know more about de Souza's claim that Tehelka might have shelved a story related to illegal mining in the state in order to secure some advantages from the state government related to the organizing of the Festival. (I should also mention that Hartman de Souza has a follow-up in response to Tejpal's response, at Kafila.)

In the absence of exciting chatter on Twitter, more conventional searches for headlines related to the festival turns up a story on NDTV, featuring Siddhartha Mukherjee talking about Steve Jobs' death. (As has been widely reported, Steve Jobs' decision to try an unorthodox/holistic treatment to his pancreatic cancer rather than immediate surgery may have turned what was originally a treatable diagnosis into a fatal one.) 

One good general summary of the event is up at the Daily Beast (only appropriate), by Lucas Wittman, while another (also appropriately) can be found at Tehelka.  There is a hint of snark in Manjula Lal's Tehelka piece pertaining to the hollowness and bombast of some of the speakers that I especially liked (cf. the comment on Aamir Khan and the silly quote from Shashi Tharoor suggesting that Delhi police officers report their daily activities on Twitter).

As a final note, I should add that Goa will soon also host the Goa Arts and Literature Festival (December 17-21). I would love to be there for that event  too -- many of the speakers there are people I would consider friends and colleagues -- but sadly I don't think it will be happening for me this year. Perhaps I will again be able to spy in from afar...

"Ulysses": A Couple of Documents Related to the Obscenity Trials

I am teaching "Ulysses" again this fall with undergraduates, roughly along the same lines that I described in a blog post I wrote after the last experience. It's still every bit as exhilarating and exhausting as it was three years ago.

This time I am paying a bit more attention to some of the legal history surrounding the novel, which as is well known was banned for obscenity in the United States in 1921, and unbanned in 1933. The immediate episode that provoked the ban was episode 13 ("Nausicaa"), which was printed in pieces by the journal The Little Review. The editors of that journal, Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, were the ones prosecuted in the initial trial, after a lawyer in New York complained about it. That lawyer stated that his daughter had read and been shocked by "Nausicaa" after receiving The Little Review in the mail. The figure of the innocent daughter, "the young girl" reader who might be corrupted by Ulysses became a key rhetorical figure in the to-and-fro over the novel that followed.

1. The documents related to the original trial are not easy to come by online. The best essay I have seen on the subject is a Washington University Law Review essay by Stephen Gillers that describes the history of the trial (as well as its precedents) in great detail. The key discussion related to Ulysses begins around p. 250.

2. One document that is online, but not in a very good form, is Jane Heap's initial printed defense of the novel, and of the Nausicaa episode in particular, which she printed in The Little Review in the fall of 1920 (before the first trial was decided). That essay is called "Art and the Law," and it can be found in an Archive.org uncorrected scan of several issues of the magazine here.

I have gone through that scanned version and corrected the mistakes caused by OCR. Since the document is, I believe, out of copyright, I am posting the corrected version of the essay here as a service to any colleagues who might find it useful:

In Defense of A.K. Ramanujan's "300 Ramayanas"

About two weeks ago, Delhi University voted to remove A.K. Ramanujan's essay, "Three Hundred Ramayanas," from its curriculum.

For reference, the essay is available here. I consider it essential reading for anyone who wants to know about the complex textual history of the Ramayana. Though a right-wing Hindu organization called the ABVP has claimed that the essay is offensive to Hindus (and they led a violent protest against the essay in 2008), in fact the purpose of the essay is primarily scholarly -- it's an attempt to document the different versions of the Ramayana that have been passed down in different Indian languages. Since the Ramayana was for centuries transmitted orally rather than on paper, it's no surprise that there are variants in the story. In addition to describing the different versions, Ramanujan talks about the nature of textual transformation, and introduces terms that help us categorize different kinds of changes and shifts (some of which may be accidental, while others may be more "indexical" -- that is, intentionally inserted to make the text fit different cultural and historical contexts).

See The Hindu's interview with Romila Thapar on the issue here. Another thoughtful account of the controversy is here. Also, it's worth noting left-leaning faculty and students at DU did do a protest in defense of the essay in the curriculum this past week, an account of which can be found here. Maybe this episode isn't over yet?

For reference, I have talked about this issue on several occasions over the years. I attempted to provoke a discussion of "versions of the Ramayana" several years ago on Sepia Mutiny: here (another version of the discussion occurred here). (Admittedly, I didn't know a whole lot when I put up that post; I know a bit more about this issue now.) And more recently, I published an essay on Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues in South Asian Review, called "Animating a Postmodern Ramayana." That essay can be found here.

Follow-Up: "Brown" and "White"

The responses to my post on Nikki Haley a couple of days ago have been interesting The pushback makes me want to clarify some of my arguments a bit more, though I don't have any aspirations of actually "winning" the debate; in any case my own views on South Asians and the peculiar American concept of race are very much in flux these days, and I am still thinking it through.

There are two salient themes that seem to come up in the discussion that perhaps could be underlined:

1) The real long-term goal is to undermine "whiteness" as a kind of racial default or endpoint for both immigrant communities in American society and for the established racial minority (i.e., blacks or African Americans). In response to one of the comments on my original post, I suggested that perhaps where we are headed eventually, at least in the urban parts of the U.S. is towards a kind of post-"white" society, where the barriers will be much more class-based than racial, especially for people from immigrant backgrounds who don't have the familial experience of slavery and segregation in their past. The configuration of race has changed several times in American history (see books like "How the Irish Became White" and so on), and it can and will change again.

2) If we can't displace whiteness as a default, perhaps we can redefine it. For at least the past 50 years or so, being understood as "white" in the U.S. meant that you were of European origins (earlier it would have meant more strictly northern and western European origins). I think it may be the case that with the rise of someone like Haley, who is perceived by many South Carolinians as white despite her South Asian immigrant origins (which are widely known), that this kind of subversion may already have happened.

Below I'm just going to paste snippets and comments I've seen by others on the web that address these two ideas, with my own brief responses.

* *

On Facebook, a friend posted a comment that I thought summed up where I've been on this issue myself for the most part:

I want to believe that one can claim whiteness if one wants. Depending on who's doing the claiming, it could be the ultimate act of subversion against the hegemon, self-loathing assimilation, or somewhere in between. And if any group could get away with it, Indians are the ones with the privilege. After all, Bhagat Singh Thind attempted to gain citizenship by arguing that Indians are Caucasian - even though he lost his case. But looking at Republican Indians in politics, namely Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley, it's hard for me to think they are up to anything other than an attempt to ingratiate themselves to the Republican establishment and their constituents. I say all of this as someone who was only dimly aware of being Indian until I went to college and UPenn's South Asian Student Association tried (unsuccessfully) to co-opt me. Yet, I've never once considered putting anything other than "Asian" in the race box (except for declining to answer when possible or writing in "human" on my census form).

I want to underline my friend's point about privilege. Many Indian Americans especially come from privileged backgrounds economically, and I think people who claim a "People of Color" solidarity amongst East and South Asians, Latinos, and blacks have to recognize this point. I may at times feel a "person of color" solidarity with poor blacks in America, but the solidarity is not shared: to them I inevitably sound a lot more like a white liberal when it comes to social and economic issues, even if I don't look like one.

That said, I don't dispute that Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley had to work hard to "Americanize" (one could also say deracinate) themselves in order to succeed in politics. On Sepia Mutiny over the years we had many (too many) discussions about whether Bobby Jindal would have had a prayer (loaded term!) of a chance in Louisiana if he had either run as "Piyush" rather than Bobby, or hadn't been a Catholic convert. (The answer is clearly "no, he would not have had a chance") The same probably holds for Haley if she were to have run as "Randhawa," or with a turbaned Sikh husband rather than her actual husband, Michael Haley.

* *

At the Volokh Conspiracy there have been a pair of posts on this subject, and many interesting comments (these predate my own post). One salient comment by a commenter ran as follows:

[A]llow a white Southerner to point out something about casual use of the word “white”: sometimes it just means “not black”. Meaning, believe it or not, that in common usage, a school (or gathering, or club, or church, or whatever) in the South that includes no black people is “all-white”. This is true even when there are, for instance, people of Korean or Indian ancestry in said group. Whether this is anthropologically correct, or PC, or even nice is beside the point. It’s just one of the common, casual usages. (link)

I have seen this in other cases, and not just in the South. I even have to admit that I've done something like this myself on occasion. For example, at one point I was teaching a class on a topic in postcolonial literature, with something like 12 white students, two (East) Asian American students, and one African American student. To a colleague I remember noting, "with the exception of **** [the African American student], all the students in my poco class this spring are white!" Somehow in the course of that conversation I unconsciously turned the two Asian American women in that class, with Christian first names, into white students.

If you read the many comments on that post at Volokh, you'll see that many other people also seem to unconsciously do this at times, even though they might later note the seeming "mistake." The question I want people who have disagreed with my previous post to address is: what might it tell us about the definition of "race" in American society that so many people are doing this?

To my eye, it suggests that second/third generation Asian Americans in particular are losing their "otherness" in certain contexts and social milieux. When it comes to college affirmative action policies, Asians have long since not counted as "minorities," and the spaces where that is true will only continue to expand.

(Also see this post from Volokh in 2008: "How the Asians became White." There the focus is on a study of doctors in California; Asians and whites are counted on one side, while blacks and Latinos are counted on the other.)

* *
Samhita at Feministing wrote quite an extensive post on this issue, responding to me and taking up some points made by Taz at Sepia Mutiny. Here is one of Samita's key points:

But, at the end of the day, it is not about what we say we are–race is a structural experience, as much as it is an interpersonal one, if not more so. Having access to white culture and more money doesn’t make you white, as many sociologists have found. Haley can self-identify as white, but she has had the lived experience of a person who is not white and as a result, will never be recognized as white or have access to “whiteness,” in the political sense of the word, even if some people once in a while mistake her for white on the street.

But I actually do think Haley has had the experience of being effectively "white," in part because of the peculiar racial configuration that holds sway in the American south (see the comment from Volokh I posted above), but also increasingly in other parts of the U.S. And I mean that she has been recognized as such by the dominant/white mainstream, not simply that she decided to call herself white on a lark, despite what everyone else around her thinks.

The fact that this is so is not necessarily a cause to celebrate; if anything, the comment I quoted above from Volokh suggests that while the definition of "white" may be broadening, it is still based on an opposition to (and sometimes exclusion of) "black." And that is real problem we have to address, one way or the other.

Nikki Haley, Race, and the U.S. Census

This is the kind of post I once would have written on Sepia Mutiny, with the full knowledge that it would have produced a firestorm of controversy. One of my former colleagues over there did cover the story, but as you can see the reaction is pretty much predictable: let's just call her an Uncle Tom because she's pretending to be white (to be fair, the comments do challenge the premise of the post in some interesting ways).

Here I wanted to push past the basic framework that people have for thinking about this issue and suggest that 1) Census and drivers' license racial categories help provoke this problem, since "East Indian" or "South Asian" is not a widely recognized racial category, leaving many people confused; and 2) it would not in any case necessarily be a "racial" sell-out for Haley to identify as white given her economic background, acculturation and appearance. She may just be recording what many other people are already thinking.

* * *

1. Generalized confusion over racial and ethnic categories

As many readers will have seen, it recently came out that Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina had her race listed as "white" on her 2000 voter registration card. The most detailed version of the story I've seen is from USA Today, which reveals that in large part this story has been generated by the Democratic party of South Carolina to try and embarrass the Governor:

South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian said the 2001 document the party unearthed shows the 39-year-old Haley plays on her race for political convenience.
"She can't even tell the truth about her racial heritage," Harpootlian said.

Haley spokesman Trey Walker said the governor's office did not plan to respond to the Democrats. State Republican Party Executive Director Matt Moore called Harpootlian's criticism "just more theatrics and that's all there is to it."

Haley's 2001 voter registration application was derived from information already on her driver's license.

It was not clear when that information may have been provided, or what options were even available on the form for racial identifiers when it was given.

South Carolina's current driver's license application asks people to identify their race as white, black, Hispanic, Asian or Indian, according to instructions for the form. It doesn't specify whether the description "Indian" refers to someone who is American Indian or of Asian Indian heritage, but it traditionally refers to Native American on government forms. (link)

Of course, "Indian" in South Carolina means Native American, so the only option for Haley other than White or Black is Asian. I myself would put down "Asian" in Haley's shoes, but I think that Indian Americans could be forgiven for not feeling comfortable with that category, since many people continue to understand "Asian" to refer only to East and Southeast Asians.

I posted earlier on the ongoing and broad-ranging confusion in the way government agencies classify different communities by race and ethnicity. The U.S. census racial categories have long been a source of confusion for many immigrant groups in particular. While the approach to race and ethnicity involving Hispanic/Latino people is now impressively nuanced and complex, the approach to immigrants from other parts of the world remains confusing and haphazard. "Asian Indian" is now a category you can check, but the "Other Asian" category seems to invite Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Sri Lankans to check that box despite the obvious connections between the different nations of the Indian subcontinent.

The question of course is what the U.S. government plans to do with "racial" information other than simply record it (as I understand it in countries like France the government does not keep official tallies of its racial and ethnic minorities for fear of encouraging discrimination). While there is an affirmative action argument -- it's important to know whether all members of society are getting proportionate access to government services -- it's not clear to me that Indians and Pakistanis would want or expect to be treated differently by a government agency based on their ethnic/racial background. I maintain that it would be far more sensible to have a broader category called "South Asian" that would include everyone deriving from the Indian subcontinent; other sensible categories would be "East Asian" and "Southeast Asian."

A second issue pertains more specifically to Sikhs and the "Sikh American" community. Many Sikhs I know in the U.S. do not identify strongly as "Indian American." Some who dis-identify as Indian come from families with strong separatist bents, going back to the "Khalistani" days of the 1980s. Others may have more muted ideological investments (i.e., they do not actively support the creation of a separate Sikh state of "Khalistan"), but still may have been raised in environments where Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims did not mingle much (this diasporic separatism is itself a legacy of the tensions in India from the 1980s). I do not know much about the Randhawa family in South Carolina, but certainly many of the Sikh families I knew when I lived in North Carolina seemed to fit this bill quite well; they had little connection to Punjabi Hindus and virtually no social connection to non-Punjabi speaking Indians. These are Sikhs that identify more strongly as "Sikh American" than as "Indian American"; I doubt that this applies to Haley herself because she has converted to Christianity, but it could, for some Sikhs, potentially add to the confusion at least regarding whether to check the box for "Indian" or "Asian Indian." Indian is a nationality; "South Asian" may be defined as a "race," depending on how we define race. In any case, "South Asian" was not one of the choices available to Governor Haley.

Given all this confusion, I think it may be wise not to jump to conclusions regarding the racial identification on Nikki Haley's voter registration card.

(I should also point out that Nikki Haley is far from the only one to have this confusion. Amongst second generation South Asian Americans, a full 25% of them checked "white" on the 1990 census, while 5% checked "black".)

2. Identifying as "White"

When Italians, Greeks, and Eastern European Jews started immigrating to the U.S. en masse in the early 20th century, they were not seen by other Americans originating from Northern and Western European countries as "white," at least not white in the same way they saw themselves as white. The "ethnic difference" of these immigrants was visible and it presented a clear social barrier.

Over time, of course, those groups were assimilated, and today Italian Americans, Irish Americans, and Ashkenazi Jews who have a strong sense of identification with their families' countries of origin are seen as "white ethnics." Ethnicity is now seen as a barrier that can be easily crossed and lose its significance over time, while "race" is reserved to describe visibly different minority groups.

The question I often have for South Asian Americans, especially those who come from affluent backgrounds and whose acculturation is largely to Euro-American ("white") norms, is whether they really think they are so going to be very different from white ethnic communities down the road.

Isn't it fair that some South Asian Americans with little connection to South Asian culture or language would see themselves (and be seen as) "white" by others in their communities? Isn't it possible to be of South Asian origin and "white" at the same time?

To be clear, I myself don't describe myself as white. I just don't see why other South Asians shouldn't be allowed to do so if they have a strong identification with Euro-American cultural norms and others in the community accept it. To make this identification doesn't even require that you ignore or hide your family background; but it seems inevitable that for a significant number of South Asian Americans going forward their ethnic identity will play for them rather the same role it does for Italian Americans -- it's in your name, and maybe visible in your complexion (though with the growth of intermarriage this too may fade), but it doesn't necessarily pose any kind of other meaningful social barrier.

I understand that in the African American community this kind of thinking is deeply frowned upon, since it has a history going back to the Jim Crow era -- the old legacy of "passing" to avoid racial discrimination, which in many cases prevented true solidarity from taking hold. Even identifying as "multiracial" as Tiger Woods did many years ago is controversial along those lines: you are either with us in struggle ("black" as a term suggesting a racial identity that is always political), or you are not.

But in fact South Asian American immigrants do not share that history; many of us have never experienced that kind of discrimination, and it's unclear to me what political or ideological power comes with identifying as "Asian," as Nikki Haley presumably should have done to avoid the censure of the Democratic party in her home state.

I personally do feel a sense of political solidarity with other "brown" and "Desi" people owing to who I am and my personal cultural values and orientation. But I also know plenty of South Asian Americans for whom this is not really the case, and I'm not at all invested in policing whether they or their children see themselves as ethnically "white" or "South Asian," since it seems that anyway most people are not clear what these categories really mean.

UPDATE:

See this interesting discussion at Brownpundits.

Race and the U.S. Census -- from April 2010

I wrote this in April 2010, and tried to get it published without success as an Op-Ed. Printing it now in response to a debate some friends are having regarding race and the census. I may have a follow-up post on it soon.

More than sixty years ago, my grandparents left their home in a village in Pakistan, packed all their belongings in an ox-cart, and walked on foot for hundreds of miles – along with millions of other Sikhs and Hindus – across the border to a newly independent nation: India. Millions of Muslims from the other side of the border were going in the opposite direction, settling in Pakistan, where the immigrants from India are to this day identified by other Pakistanis as “Mohajirs” (“Migrants”), held to be somewhat separate from the old-timers who are really native to the region.

In 1973, my parents migrated again, this time from India to the United States. As my father still likes to brag, he and my mother came to this country with nothing but a medical degree from an Indian university, and about $300 in their pocket. My parents’ profile was not so different from that of thousands of other immigrants from various Asian countries, who came to the U.S. seeking economic opportunity after the reforms in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Four decades later, this wave of immigration has made the United States easily the most ethnically and racially diverse large nation in the world. As of 2000, the census recorded approximately 1.9 million Asian Indians living in the United States (counting people who checked two boxes on the Census for “race”), and this number is expected to be substantially higher as of 2010. By comparison in 2000, approximately 150,000 wrote in “Pakistani,” 43,000 wrote in “Bangladeshi,” and 20,000 wrote in “Sri Lankan” Unfortunately, the census data from 2000 gives us no way to ascertain how many immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka might have simply defined themselves, racially, as “Asian Indian,” since that is the closest category on the survey that does not require a write-in answer.

While the race question on the Census has for the most part remained the same from 2000 to 2010, there is one significant change, which comes in the form of a “hint” that has been added in the 2010 census to the category “Other Asian.” The hint, in parenthesis, points to a write-in box suggesting several nationalities that may be written in, including, “Hmong, Laotian, Thai, Pakistani, Cambodian, and so on.” The addition of this small hint in the 2010 Census might seem small – perhaps it is meant merely as a clarification, and not as a substantive change – but it raises some difficult questions for Americans whose families hail from the Indian subcontinent.

Why is it that my parents and I are “Asian Indian,” while our friends who came (more recently) from Pakistan – people who share our complexion, languages, and much else – are given a separate slot? Similarly, while Bengali-speaking Indians will almost certainly fill out “Asian Indian” for Question 9, Bangladeshis, who again share the same language, appearance, and many deep cultural links with Bengalis on the Indian side of the border, might feel encouraged to follow the lead of Pakistanis in identifying themselves as of another “race,” again under “Other Asian.” And this confusion can be seen yet again regarding the ethnic groups from the southern part of the Indian subcontinent: Tamil Indians, who speak a language and have a distinctive way of life that resembles their Tamil-speaking cousins in Sri Lanka. If Tamil Indians are “Asian Indians,” how are Tamil Sri Lankans “Other Asian” – which by the logic of the new hint, they must be? All of these groups now have significant immigrant representation in the United States. It is puzzling that despite the many cultural and historical commonalities shared by people from the Indian subcontinent, they are seen by the Census as separate “racial” groups.

The confusion over the nationalities of the Indian subcontinent is only one among several signs that the Census remains hopelessly confusing on “race.” How is it that there is a distinct box for the Samoan “race,” but no boxes for “Arab” or “Persian/Iranian,” both of which have substantial populations in the U.S., and who are likely to be split between “white” and “some other race”? And what about Afghan-Americans? Are they “Asian,” “white,” or “some other race”?

After some consideration of these categories, it becomes clear is that while some boxes in Question 9 on the Census (the “race” question) actually refer to categories everyone would agree relate to “Race” (“white,” “black,” “American Indian or Alaska native”), there are several others – “Asian Indian,” “Japanese,” “Chinese,” “Korean,” “Filipino,” “Vietnamese,” and “Samoan,” that refer to what are really nationalities. While official Census statements and directives suggest that the survey should have one question that relates to “ethnicity” (Question 8, addressed to Hispanics), and one on “race,” the reality is that Question 9 in particular remains a mish-mash of social groupings that could variously be described as “racial,” “ethnic,” or “national.”

Admittedly, the changes to the approach to race taken by the census are not all bad; indeed, the current configuration is a great improvement over versions of the “race” and “ethnicity” questions in earlier Census surveys. (Before 1970, for instance, Asian Indians, along with others from the Indian subcontinent, were all simply expected to check “white,” even if it was far from clear that they were going to be recognized as such by ordinary Americans.) The Frequently Asked Questions section of the current Census.Gov website, in response to the question, “Why doesn't the race question include more categories?” refers to a 1997 directive from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), setting up a general frame of reference that included five broadly defined racial groups. The 1997 OMB directive, which can be read in its entirety here [http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/fedreg_1997standards/], also states that, “The categories represent a social-political construct designed for collecting data on the race and ethnicity of broad population groups in this country, and are not anthropologically or scientifically based.”

But this statement by the OMB raises more questions than it answers. If the racial and ethnic categories on the U.S. Census are not “anthropologically or scientifically based,” on what ideas or facts exactly are they based? While one understands the imperative to gather broad population data, wouldn’t that data be better if it were construed in keeping with terms and social groupings derived from scientific anthropology?

Let us briefly take a stab at a better system of categorization for Asians. Admittedly, there is no magic bullet – and certainly no simple way to balance the challenge posed by balancing ethnographical accuracy against the evident need to be brief and keep the form simple enough that it can be easily understood and filled out. Still, I would suggest that the various “Asian” nationalities could best be re-defined into three large, regional groups: South Asian, Southeast Asian, and East Asian. Though obviously culturally heterogeneous in many ways, Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, and Nepalis, come close to forming what ought to be an intelligible regional (if not “racial”) category – a category that anthropologists would call South Asian. Similarly, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese people might be identified as East Asian, while Filipinos, Burmese, Cambodians, Laotions, Thais, Indonesians, Fijians, Malaysians, and other Pacific Islanders, might all be Southeast Asians. Again, these three regional sub-categories of “Asian” are far from perfect, and each of the terms listed is abstract enough that it would probably need a list of “hints” along the lines of the hints currently given for “Other Asian.” While this change might not solve all of the analytic problems relating to Asian “racial” identity on the Census, it certainly would lead to better data than a survey that encourages Asian Indians and Pakistanis to see themselves as distinct “racial” groups.

On Wendy Doniger's "The Hindus"

I have been reading Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History for a seminar on India I am leading this summer with a group of Philadelphia-area high school teachers.

Doniger's book is a big, sprawling text, the culmination of a distinguished career as a scholar and teacher of Hinduism. That said, it's hardly a conventional or comprehensive volume on the subject. One of the most marked limitations of the book is that it doesn't really work as an "Introduction to Hinduism" for undergraduates; it is more a "deep" narrative requiring a more persistent level of attention than a college text book can safely presume. That's not to say that you have to be a member of the AAR to follow along; while there are some sections that might be of interest mainly to specialists, Doniger's book on the whole is directed at interested bystanders (like myself).

The group with whom I was reading the book did feel at times overwhelmed by the amount of detail -- the very large number of names and terms that came up over the course of the book. Doniger's book presumes knowledge of certain basics, and it lacks the usual introductory overviews one might expect of books intended to be comprehensive (Pankaj Mishra, writing in the New York Times, nevertheless referred to it as "staggeringly comprehensive"). While I have talked to people who dislike Doniger's informal, and sometimes idiosyncratic, writing style in The Hindus (one friend on Twitter complained of her penchant for bad puns), the group with whom I was reading the book actually enjoyed that aspect of the book; the informality helped them stay engaged.

As for structure and content. One of the most familiar criticisms of Doniger's early work was the focus on representations of sexuality in the Hindu tradition, an emphasis which which mainstream, middle-class Hindus resented in a somewhat predictable fashion. Here Doniger both engages and transcends the middle-class and high-caste biases of "Hinduism" and aims for a broader optic -- which explains the "alternative" in her title. Doniger picks three thematic threads -- one of them being gender and sexuality, another being the treatment of animals, and the third being the representation of various kinds of social "others" -- Dalits, Adivasis, and Shudras -- in the various primary texts Doniger considers. While chapters on texts such as the Rig Veda and the Upanishads do have some general introductory material, at the core of each of Doniger's chapters are readings that focus on one of the three themes I indicated.

There was a discussion of the benefits and dangers of Doniger's approach at Chapati Mystery (down in the comments) shortly after the book was released, and a very careful and considered follow-up post by Doniger shortly thereafter. I would recommend everyone take a look at those discussions, as they actually get at the core of the value of Doniger's work, as well as the potential disagreements or controversies it may provoke.

The key paragraph in that post might be this one:

I would particularly like to comment on the argument that the cases I cite, of concern for and sympathy with the lower castes, are just a few rare instances, not characteristic of Hinduism as a whole. This is indeed true, and, yes, I did fish them out, the way people who do not just want to say that all the Germans were Nazis fished out people like Schindler and the other “righteous Christians” who were heroes; the fact remains that many Germans, perhaps even most Germans, were Nazis. So too, without apologizing for Hindu attitudes to women and the lower castes, I wanted to lift up a few counter-instances to show that you cannot simply condemn Hinduism outright, as so many Americans want to do, for the cases that always hit the newspapers, of atrocities to Dalits and women. The balance here becomes clearer if you read the whole book, which does set these liberal, hopeful instances against the backdrop of heavy prejudice against women and Dalits. Indeed, what makes the counter cases so heroic is precisely that they are fighting against a powerful culture of oppression.

It isn't just a question of what is the Real Hinduism -- which is certainly more complex and strange than the dominant narrative would like to acknowledge -- it's also imperative to focus on how knowing about alternative traditions and counter-currents in Hinduism carries with it an implied politics. There is a backdrop of especially caste discrimination and violence in the Hindu tradition (and by extension, the Sikh tradition as well). But there are also stories and counter-narratives that show things playing out in a very different light, all of which are as authentically "Hindu" as the texts and practices of the main stream. Because there is no canon in Hinduism, those counter-narratives can be picked up and used -- and the tradition and the culture can continue to evolve.

* * *

I go way back with Wendy Doniger; indeed, some of my very first blog posts in 2004 dealt with the controversy at that time over her work as it was being reported at the time: see blog posts here and here. And there were numerous other posts and discussions over the years, especially at Sepia Mutiny, where her name was invoked by conservative Hindus as exemplifying everything that was wrong in western scholarship about India. She became such a punchline that a satirist calling himself SpoorLam found it fit to include her name in the following mock-litany of anti-Hindu entities:

We must rise and march to the new dawn of consciousness! We shall never stop marching until the ultimate greatness and tolerance and supremacy of our greatness is known by all! California State Education Board! MF Husain! Wendy Doniger! Anjana Chaterjee! Romila Thapar!

They shall shit themselves with fear at the brilliance of our Hindu civilisation! All you self-hating self-abasing so-called Hindus, understand the illimitable depths of the Universe can only be understood by wearing khakhi shorts.

Hindus are the best. If you don't acknowledge this, you know nothing. My name is SpoorLam and the Abrahamics shall bow to my tolerance, which is so much more tolerant of all other kinds of tolerances. (link)

I quit Sepia Mutiny a year ago, and I no longer have the level of interest in the to and fro of the debate over "communalism" I used to. Nevertheless this book might help bring closure to the "Rajiv Malhotra" era; it provides, through the weight of the scholarship behind it and the breadth of its empirical sources, a strong image of the kind of complex Hindu tradition that earlier works could only hint at.

Has Jhumpa Jumped the Shark?

(In response to Lahiri's latest essay in The New Yorker)

I have been a passionate defender of Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing over the years, defending her publicly on blogs (see this old blog post of Manish's), in academic contexts, and even at friends' book clubs. I’ve taught her books and even written an essay on naming that does a close reading of her 2003 novel The Namesake. Some critics and readers who are not fans complain that her books leave them cold -– there’s not to go on in terms of plot, and the characters, with their bourgeois New England backgrounds and relatively quiet lives, are not exactly the stuff Michael Bey movies are made of. Other friends and acquaintances of mine have come to her writing expecting her to be an “Indian” author, and been disappointed to discover that she’s really “not very Indian” –- South Asia only figures in her work periodically.

My defense of Lahiri has generally followed a two-fold pattern: first, craft matters, and Lahiri pays attention to her sentences. That's why I value Lahiri and have generally dismissed sentimental Indian diaspora writers like Meena Alexander or Chitra Divakaruni. Secondly, Lahiri has been one of a very small number of writers to explore the mainstream second-generation immigrant experience with a degree of seriousness and care. For that reason, I respect the fact that Lahiri does not try to play her Indian cultural heritage for "multicultural" exoticism, but rather considers it as merely one among many pieces of the contemporary American puzzle. (If some people are disappointed at the absence of the smell of curry powder, perhaps we should be asking them to reconsider what they were looking for to begin with.)

Alongside her short stories, Lahiri has published several autobiographical essays in recent years that have all covered somewhat similar ground (see this essay, for example, from 2009).

With her latest piece in the New Yorker Lahiri seems to me dangerously close to jumping the shark. Lahiri’s essay is ostensibly a reflection on her childhood experience of books and her growing interest in becoming a writer. While there is as always a high degree of care and precision –- the emphasis on craft again –- the full extent of Lahiri’s navel-gazing often leaves the reader struggling to remain interested:

In the fifth grade, I won a small prize for a story called “The Adventures of a Weighing Scale,” in which the eponymous narrator describes an assortment of people and other creatures who visit it. Eventually the weight of the world is too much, the scale breaks, and it is abandoned at the dump. I illustrated the story—all my stories were illustrated back then—and bound it together with bits of orange yarn. The book was displayed briefly in the school library, fitted with an actual card and pocket. No one took it out, but that didn’t matter. The validation of the card and pocket was enough. The prize also came with a gift certificate for a local bookstore. As much as I wanted to own books, I was beset by indecision. For hours, it seemed, I wandered the shelves of the store. In the end, I chose a book I’d never heard of, Carl Sandburg’s “Rootabaga Stories.” I wanted to love those stories, but their old-fashioned wit eluded me. And yet I kept the book as a talisman, perhaps, of that first recognition. Like the labels on the cakes and bottles that Alice discovers underground, the essential gift of my award was that it spoke to me in the imperative; for the first time, a voice in my head said, “Do this.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/13/110613fa_fact_lahiri#ixzz1OumKmTyV(link)

Read charitably, this passage is simply an incidental event from childhood that helped validate Lahiri’s early interest in writing and her confidence in her abilities as a storyteller. Read less charitably, the passage could be read as: I decided I wanted to become a writer when I won a prize for a story I wrote in the fifth grade.

Again, this essay is far from all bad. There is a poignant passage where Lahiri describes how she came to write her first story as an adult (at age 30) after taking a trip with her parents to Bengal: “It [the first story] was set in the building where my mother had grown up, and where I spent much of my time when I was in India. I see now that my impulse to write this story, and several like-minded stories that followed, was to prove something to my parents: that I understood, on my own terms, in my own words, in a limited but precise way, the world they came from.”

But not long after this, we are back into personal anecdotes that feel distinctly like padding to take advantage of the New Yorker’s generous per-word pay scale –- the story of another Indian family dealing with the loss of a child in childbirth, life for Indian immigrant families in the suburbs, and so on.

When I read these sorts of reflections, I worry that Lahiri has perhaps run out of ideas or inspiration. Aren’t there other kinds of narratives to work through than the one she has by now dealt with several times (in both essays and stories): of growing up as an Indian American in New England, going to college and graduate school, and finally, deciding, perhaps against her family's wishes, to become a writer? Doesn’t Lahiri have an interest in representing or engaging voices other than her own?

I will probably continue to be a fan of Lahiri’s, but I must admit my patience is wearing thin.

A Few Scattered Notes after Visiting Trinidad

Our visit to Trinidad coincided (purely by chance) with the national T&T holiday known as Indian Arrival Day, as well as a 20/20 Cricket match between India and the West Indies in Port of Spain, and we were able to experience a bit of both. My son also really enjoyed seeing nesting Leatherback Turtles (in Tobago), as well as various rainforest snakes and birds (Tree boas! Scarlet Ibises!). And we had a superlative experience staying at Pax Guest House for three days in the foothills of the northern range.

The conference I attended seemed to be very well-organized, with some snafus here and there –- the keynote by Leela Sarup, for one thing, wasn’t announced on the web version of the program, so I didn’t learn of it until after it had already happened.

The quality of the presentations was also a little uneven, with non-academic rants and reflections mixed in with traditional academic papers. Sometimes this led to intriguing chemistry, other times it just made for wasted space. While the conference did describe itself as focused on “Global South Asian Diasporas,” the most interesting discussions really had to do with the Indo-Caribbean diaspora – but of course that’s perfectly fine.

Literature. This was not really a literature conference, but there was at least one panel on Naipaul, and I was fortunate to meet two Indo-Caribbean writers, Cyril Dabydeen (who is from Guyana originally, and lives in Canada) and Raymond Ramcharitar (who is from Trinidad and continues to live there), in person.

At the Naipaul panel, I enjoyed papers by Nivedita Misra (a recent immigrant to Trinidad from Delhi) and Kevin Baldeosingh. Misra did a helpful survey of Naipaul’s various writings on India, arguing that his Trinidadian / diasporic background remains the central lens through which he sees the “homeland.” And Kevin Baldeosingh helpfully mentioned and quoted from some Indo-Caribbean writers besides Naipaul – including Harold Sunny Ladoo (“Yesterdays”) and Raymond Ramcharitar (“The Island Quintet”).

At another panel, I was happy to see the poetry of my friend Christian Campbell cited as part of a paper on Indian women and Chutney music. The poem cited was “Curry Powder,” which is about Campbell’s Indo-Caribbean grandmother – who married an Afro-Caribbean man, and left her Indo-Caribbean / Hindu heritage behind. The full text of Christian’s (remarkable) poem can be found here: link; here is an excerpt:

Coolies and niggers fighting these days
But great-grandmummy Nita did not fight
When she found herself facing the West
Instead, touching the Negro face of a Bajan,
Manny. She did not wear saris no more.
Calypso she liked and could wind down
With the best of them. She became deaf
To the ethereal ballad of Krishna’s flute.
She chose Manny, not Lord Rama in her
Hindu epic gone wrong. At her wedding
She never once uttered Ganesh'sname
And she loosened the grasp of Vishnu’s
Four hands from round her waist.
So her sisters disowned her in the holy
Name of Mother India. But she made
Dougla babies anyway and did not give
Them the sacred names of gods: Brahma,
Shiva, Gauri. She named Grandaddy
Leon, a good English name, like all the other
Rootless Negroes. And so Trinidad became herself.

Race Relations. One of the deficiencies of the conference was a seeming reluctance to engage with the issue of the sometimes vexed relations between Afro- and Indo-Trinidadians. There were Afro-Caribbean presenters, moderators, and audience members around, but people generally didn’t seem that interested in talking about some of the problems between the two commuinities. By contrast, if you look at the writings of Raymond Ramcharitar at the TT Guardian, you see an enthusiasm for tackling this sticky subject -– and not shying away from the seamy underbelly of Trinidadian history in the interest of an anodyne multiculturalism. See Raymond’s blog, archiving his TT Guardian columns here: Trinidad Media Arts and Culture. I don't know if everything Raymond says is correct or verifiable -- there is a fair amount of bitterness in his writing that makes me wonder -- but it's at least interesting reading. Here's a bit of one of Raymond's recent columns, outlining the history of racial conflict between Indo- and Afro-Trinidadians in the 1990s:

All this was allowable in the name of Ken Gordon’s “press freedom” —which also allowed Indian Review Committee agents (Anil Mahabir, Rajnie Ramlakhan etc) into the daily press to spew Hindu fascist rage and racial contempt for AfroTrinidadians. This was exactly what the Creole world believed all Indians were like, so (in their minds) justified talk radio’s filth. “Indian” talk radio content was a stream of bewildered rage that this was happening in daylight.



The PNM still lost the 2000 election, but when they were “let back in” by Ramesh Maharaj and PNM stalwarts ANR Robinson and Abu Bakr, in 2001, they mobilized their police, judicial, and media arms. The media spread the gospel: the UNC (Indians) were all corrupt, evil, and tiefed from “real” Trinidadians. The judiciary and police initiated lengthy, public prosecutions of the Indo Chief Justice, Sat Sharma, the Indo chief doctor, Vijay Naraynsingh, and Indo voter padders (all acquitted).

The disengagement with race-relations issues was particularly awkward at the Naipaul panel near the end of the conference. It seemed that no one on the panel really seemed to have noticed that Naipaul’s early novels, including the canonical House for Mr. Biswas, are often contemptuous in their engagement with the Afro-Trinidadian community. (Enough so that Walcott famously wrote a rejoinder in “The Fortunate Traveler, mocking Naipaul as “V.S. Nightfall”). The black characters are subservient (like “Blackie” in Mr Biswas), and there’s generally little reference to the class of upwardly-mobile and ambitious black Trinidadians Naipaul would have met at Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain. (Some of these figures do appear in later books like A Way in the World, but they are often hysterical figures or desperate showmen. It is difficult to think of even one affirmative portrayal of a black character anywhere in Naipaul's writing...)

Dance and Music. If race-relations was a bit of a blind spot at this conference, the discussion of music in particular was much more satisfying. A book that seems to have been influential for people doing cultural studies of Indo-Caribbean musical culture is Tejaswini Niranjana’s “Mobilising India” (Duke, 2006). It was cited in both of the papers I saw that dealt with Chutney Soca music. It’s available on Amazon via Kindle ($13) or more for the regular book.

One presenter, Ananya Kabir, was working on the phenomenon of Indo-Caribbean women engaging in “wining,” which is a highly suggestive kind of dancing. It’s normally associated with Afro-Caribbean women dancing to reggae, rapso, or soca, but it’s also quite common with Indo-Caribbean music, especially around Carnival time. You can see the trailer for Jahaji Music here:

Jahaji Music from surabhi sharma on Vimeo.

Pichkaree Music. Another presenter gave a very interesting paper on a kind of music called “Pichkaree” music after the tube that is used to spray color at Holi (known as Phagwah in Trinidad). Pichkaree music could be defined as “conscious Chutney” – equivalent perhaps to “conscious” reggae and hip hop in black diaspora music. One major veteran of Pichakaree music, Ravi Ji was actually in the audience. I spoke to him after the panel briefly and asked him where I could find his music: “We didn’t have money to record much of it.” This is sad, though Ravi Ji did assure me that more recent generations of Pichkaree performers have been recording their music.

Meanwhile, you can read some columns by Ravi Ji at the TT Guardian if interested.

The same presenter, Sharda Patesar (a graduate student at the University of Trinidad and Tobago) also mentioned that the emergence of Pichkaree music had something to do with the apparent rise of anti-Indian lyrics in Calypso music beginning in the 1970s. (I tried to confirm this online with examples, but couldn’t find too many. At the Trinidad and Tobago News, there is even a discussion disputing the basic premise that there are in fact Calypso songs with anti-Indian lyrics. In his recent column, Raymond Ramcharitar does mentino two songs from the 2000s, “Kidnap Dem” by Cro Cro and Singing Sandra’s “Genocide,” as having lyrics along these lines.)

More Music: neo-traditionalism and Tassa. By far the most comprehensive discussion of Indo-Trinidadian music was Peter Manuel’s presentation, which focused more on the evidence of traditional Bhojpuri musical forms in Indo-Trinidadian musical culture than on the newer, hybrid Chutney Soca genre.

Manuel pointed out that you can find Trinidadians who still practice very traditional Bhojpuri folk forms, such as “Chautal” and “Birha”.

He also had some interesting comments on the style of drumming called Tassa – that is prevalent in Trinidad but not so common in India itself. Manuel seemed to suggest that in Trinidad that Tassa drumming has become something more complex and “virtuosic” than it is anywhere in India.
Manuel has produced a documentary called “Tassa Thunder,” which is excerpted on YouTube here:



Language. There’s a fair amount of Hindi in Chutney soca music, mostly derived from Hindi film songs, but it seems the vast majority of Indo-Trinidadians have lost access to Bhojpuri or Hindi. Hindi has been introduced in many Trinidadian public schools, but it’s not clear whether that will lead to a substantive increase in the number of functional Hindi speakers in Trinidad.
It was curious at first to hear the Pujari at the Mandir at Waterloo doing interpretation in English (in between hymns sung in Hindi). But of course it makes perfect sense – and it probably won’t be long before we start seeing Hindu and Sikh services that resemble this approach in the U.S.

Jhandis. One of the things you notice around Trinidad are the “jhande” – little colored flags. (Trinidadians call them Jhandis.) There is of course a tradition of using Jhande at specifically Hanuman mandirs in India, but in Trinidad (and other parts of the Indo-Caribbean world), the “jhandi “ has become much more widespread than that –- many Hindu households use them to mark their houses at the font gate.

Off to Trinidad

I am going to Trinidad next week with family. The ostensible reason is to attend, and present, at a conference at UWI on Global South Asian Diasporas (see the conference program here).

But I am also very much looking forward to exploring in person an island that has figured large in my thinking for years (largely because of V.S. Naipaul). I feel I already know Trinidad, but what I know is a series of representations and abstractions; I am looking forward to replacing those abstractions with at least a brief glimpse of the reality.

Apropos of the trip, I am posting a chapter of my 2006 book, Literary Secularism, online in case anyone wants to have a look at it: here.

The chapter is first and foremost on Naipaul's evolving relationship to religious communalism in India; I am perhaps predictably critical of his extremist statements, though I find that they are quite different from the more even-handed tone of Naipaul's earlier writing (where he was critical of all forms of religious or ideological fanaticism).

Naipaul has had an outsize influence on subsequent generations of postcolonial writers and critics, especially South Asian diasporic writers. In the second half of the chapter then, I look at how Amitav Ghosh and Amitava Kumar, both of whom are self-consciously Naipaulian in their approach to mixed-genre travel writing, have critiqued Naipaul's posture of detachment regarding specifically religious fanaticism. Both writers have written movingly about the difficulty in standing up to religious extremism at different historical moments (Ghosh, during the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, and Kumar, in response to Ayodhya and the riots that followed in 1992).

Finally, I return to Naipaul's own early autobiographical writings, which reflect a highly anxious, even tortured personal relationship to his family's religious practices. My larger argument is that Naipaul's posture of secular, writerly detachment is an attempt to counter a version of religious experience and identity, inherited from his father, that threatens to fundamentally undermine his sense of personhood.

A long time ago I also posted chapter one of Literary Secularism as an HTML file. You can read that here.