“Why
should you
一 who
doesn’t know
basic Indian
history, cannot
pronounce names,
chose Spanish over Hindi as your
second language
一 why should you be included in
Indian culture?” Hearing this from someone close to me in my family, someone
who had witnessed my tumultuous journey with my cultural identity, was a
little heartbreaking
一 but also, in a way, a relief.
For many years I’d felt like an outsider in my own country, standing
awkwardly out‑of‑place
in a
culture which
I knew I belonged
in, but
did not
seem to
have room
for someone like me. And
for many years, I blamed myself entirely. I blamed myself for not being
“Indian enough”.
I
was born
in Kolkata,
West Bengal,
to a
long lineage
of Bengalis
who’d married
Bengalis who’d married a
Bengali and then had me. When I was eleven months old, we moved to
Wisconsin, U.S.A. Though America was home, I had always identified with my
Indian roots. As part of a minority in a predominantly white region, being
Indian was integral to how I was perceived externally, and consequently, how
I perceived myself. Funnily enough, I only began to feel uncomfortable with
the Indian part of my identity after moving back to India. We moved when I
was nine years old, and for most of middle school, I disregarded and even
rejected Indian culture. There were a multitude of reasons for this. A
significant one was that I missed Wisconsin;
I missed
home. I
missed the
English music
on the radio and
I was
used to
celebrating Christmas and Halloween instead of Diwali or Holi, and
being able to communicate with everyone in English instead of my fragmented
Hindi. I missed my best friend. However, while this homesickness contributed
to my discomfort in a “new” country at first, it wasn’t the only reason for
my aversion toward Indian culture.
A common conception among my
fourth-grade classmates in India, many of whom had also moved back from
America, was that Western culture was “better” than Indian culture. For
example, English
music was
considered “cooler” than
Hindi music
simply because
the latter
was considered Indian, in the same arbitrary way that recent music
was “cooler” than older music.
Juvenile
as middle schoolers tend
to be, we didn’t know why
these norms were in place
一
we
just followed them. In school, Indian history was taught
unidimensionally; told, but never applied with contemporary relevance.
Colonial history was taught as something of the past, lacking emphasis on
its legacy. Our eurocentric attitudes therefore did not arise in a vacuum;
they were
reinforced by
media, by
adults, by
the stereotypes we were
exposed to,
and enabled
by the gaps
in the
education system.
As young
children, we
were conditioned to put
Western culture on a
pedestal, and too young to understand the problem with it.
So I dismissed Indian culture. I
didn’t develop a taste for the music or the films and I didn’t readily partake in
the festivals.
As my
aforementioned family member
put it
一
I didn’t
know basic Indian history and I couldn’t pronounce names and I didn’t
want to study Hindi.
As I grew older, however, that
changed. I studied humanities, and reinterpreted colonial Indian history in
a contemporary context to comprehend its persisting relevance in our
societal dynamics today. I learned to critically assess my personal role in
these social dynamics. By the time I was in ninth grade, I had consciously
reshaped my thinking to dismantle my internalised notions of eurocentrism.
Most of my other peers who’d moved back to India after growing up abroad had
also reoriented their dispositions toward Indian culture. With growing
maturity, cultural dissociation or shame was gradually replaced with
cultural celebration. I wanted to embrace
my culture
一
to love
the multilingualism and the
traditional clothes and
the festivals.
I wanted to wear my culture.
But with that embrace came an
unexpected estrangement, and the sting of alienation. The sense that
I, someone
who didn’t
know as
many movies
and didn’t
speak Hindi
at home,
someone with lighter skin
and an American-tinged accent, was not allowed to celebrate Indian culture.
The feeling that expressing my Indian identity was perceived as unnatural,
as if I were somehow “appropriating" my own culture. The smallest
expressions provoked an inevitable, howbeit not intentionally mean-spirited,
ridicule
一 “You?
Making a reference to a Bollywood
film?” or “You?
Choosing to
eat
dosa?”.
Even aspects
like my
fluency in
my mother tongue
or
background in classical dance
surprised people, and
they didn’t
hesitate to
comment. A
few weeks
ago, I said a phrase in Hindi, and my cousin immediately laughed: “No
way you’re speaking Hindi.” When I
asked what
was wrong
with that,
she clarified,
“It’s not
Hindi that’s
wrong
一 it’s
you speaking it. It feels weird.”
The words weren’t meant to wound, but they carried the familiar undertone I
had long anticipated. Eventually, I had begun to swallow my identity when it
threatened to emerge just to avoid the chagrin of facing this reaction
一 the reaction of “You?
Being an Indian?” I accepted
the rejection
I felt,
internalised it, and
in turn,
perpetuated it. But
somewhere in there, I knew that this wasn’t rooted in my rejection of
Indian culture many years ago as a child
一 that it wasn’t entirely my fault.
“Why should you be included in Indian
culture?” The words echoed long after they were
spoken.
They stung, yes
一 but they were also liberating. For years, I had
carried the guilt of being an outsider, convinced it was my own failure to
be Indian that landed me in this uncomfortable position. Yet hearing this
explicit exclusion from someone in my own family shifted the weight. The
blame no longer rested entirely on me. Witnessing behaviours I had long
since outgrown, remnants of
childhood “choices”, being held
against me
as a supposed
justification for exclusion
absolved me of carrying the entire onus of it. I had not abandoned Indian
culture; I had been barred from
it by
my own
people. And
so the question
arose: why
do individuals feel
the need
to impose cultural barriers onto their own people, within their own
culture? At what point does cultural pride unwittingly harden into toxic
possessiveness?
Cultural possessiveness often
manifests in ways which are unintentionally harmful and perpetuate
marginalisation within a culture. At the core of this issue lies an internal
competition of who
can be
“more Indian”.
Though this
competition disguises itself
well, it
remains pervasive in our
society. Beyond every joke mocking someone’s accent, beyond every
lighthearted insult for being a “whitewashed” or being “uncultured” because
of appearance or inclination toward Western media, lies the reinforcement of
one’s own cultural identity. There is a prevalent yet subtle
conception that
by making
someone else
feel “less
Indian”, one
is making themselves
feel “more Indian”. An adjacent, yet ironic, contributing factor to
this competition is the unpleasant but indisputable envy of Western culture.
It arises from the same colonial legacy that influenced us
as children
toward a
eurocentric mentality. The
ridicule of
Western influence
therefore acts
as a toxic outlet for this envy. Albeit an uncomfortable reality to
digest, the necessity to portray Western influence as negative stems from an
internalised glorification of Western culture.
As someone who is somewhat insecure
in her own Indian identity, I’ve even observed the competition to be
“more Indian”
within myself.
I had a friend
in high
school who
would get
a lot of the same comments
I’d faced. Someone would make a Bollywood reference and immediately add
with an
underlying contempt
一 “Of
course,
you
wouldn’t know.” Our
friends would
ask
her to speak in Hindi with an
amusement tinged with schadenfreude, waiting expectantly for
her American
accent to
seep through.
There was
relief in
the feeling that
within our
group, I
was no longer the “least
Indian” one there. I was no longer on the receiving end of every teasing
insult about being “whitewashed”.
But
this relief
was fleeting.
Despite being
an Indian
by nationality,
by citizenship,
by heritage,
by long-term residence, and above all else, by identity, I
continually face the sentiment that there is illegitimacy
in my
Indian identity
一
and I’m
not the
only one.
From my
half-Nepali, half-Telugu
friend, who gets incessantly teased about her East Asian appearance and
denied her Telugu heritage, to
my aforementioned school friend,
to ABCDesis
(Abroad-Born Confused Desis)
on Reddit, to the writers of personal essays I’ve read on lightskin
exclusion, to the widows systematically
rejected from
Indian traditions, to the
sectarianly othered portion
of the
Muslim community
一 none of these Indians seem to be deemed fit for
the box of being an “authentic”
Indian. At the root of these seemingly harmless jokes or comments is the
belief that the speaker can mock
someone they see as “less Indian”; an intracultural
competition.
But this competition is arbitrary.
Culture is not a limited resource. It is not diminished by inclusion;
it is
enriched by
it. Thus, the
people who
reinforce this
quiet competition tend to
do so without realising
it. That unexamined instinct is what turns cultural pride into a toxic
cultural possessiveness that fuels exclusion.
This exclusion is what leads to so
many diasporic individuals like myself having a fractured sense of cultural
identity. Many of those who grew up in India inherently
knew the culture, having been immersed in it from childhood, but
those of us who grew up abroad had to
learn it. It forms a barrier to our assimilation when we are
consistently made to feel like we are not allowed
to learn
our culture
if we
don’t already
know it.
I was
still a
child when
I started
to want to learn my
culture. By being made to feel like we are not allowed to be learning, like
we do not deserve inclusion, we may remain forever on the outskirts of our
own culture
一 where do we begin if we cannot
begin?
Nonetheless, this exclusion is
enabled by the individual being excluded themself
一 through submission.
The said
barrier to
assimilation is
not a
solid one,
and it
is the
responsibility of
the excluded individual just as much to overcome it. In my
experience, cultural exclusion is something which, as aforementioned, I have
accepted for years; for example, by surpressing Hindi
phrases that
come to
me organically and instead
using a
less conspicuous English
phrase. I have recently
started to understand my own complicity through the habit of silencing my
identity. Despite my frustration, I’ve realised that neither I nor society
is to blame for this cultural
exclusion
一
but both
parties play
a role
in inadvertently perpetuating it.
For as
long as
I let the
embarrassment get
to me,
I keep
the cycle
alive. To
break my
own shackles of
cultural rejection, this
embarrassment must be internally overcome. I have to swallow the fear of
someone saying “You? Being
Indian?” and be Indian anyway.
Cultural exclusion is just as enabled by me, the excluded individual, as it
is by those enforcing the intangible barrier. Therefore it is
crucial for
reformation to
acknowledge the
excluded individual not as
a victim, but rather a
contributor to the system which harms them.
Yet this complicity does not exist in
isolation. It is sustained by the rigid boundaries society draws around
cultural belonging
一 boundaries which dictate who
is deemed “authentic” enough to participate. The notion that one must
satisfy externally imposed standards for cultural legitimacy is harmful
to the
people of
the culture in
more ways
than one.
Not only
does it
worsen the emotional turmoil of disbelonging, but it also perpetuates
stereotypes. By essentialising the Indian identity to an inconsequential set
of criteria based on appearances or preferences or citizenship, etc., a very
broad and nuanced cultural identity is reduced to a very narrow stereotype.
Look around
一 an Indian is not someone who
necessarily speaks Hindi as fluently as
English, or someone of a specific skin tone, or a Hindu, or someone
who wears traditionals more often
than T-shirts. We speak hundreds of different languages; we practice our
faiths or pujas according to
unique family
traditions and personal
values; no
Indian’s accent
or appearance is the same as
another’s. The phrase “Unity in Diversity” is commonly invoked as a source
of cultural pride in India
一 but how can we claim to
celebrate our diversity when we alienate those who deviate from the
caricatured Indian?
Culture
in itself
is a
perpetually shifting
concept in
history
一
it has
never been
unidimensional or
constant. We have
reclaimed and reformed
the Indian
identity to
reestablish our
dignity after colonial
rule, but we now risk swinging to the opposite extreme by othering Western
influence itself in
a newly
globalised world.
We lose
ourselves in
this path
of reclamation, we digress,
by thinking that it is constructive to ostracise those who display
this influence through nuanced identity.
We cannot erase or reject the
contemporary influence nor the historical influence of the Western world
一 we must allow it, embrace it. Rejecting an
individual on the basis of being “whitewashed” or “uncultured” or not
“Indian enough” remains just as eurocentric as the ideology
of Western
supremacy. By
determining Indian identity
in opposition
to Western
identity, we reestablish its
colonial centricity;
and we
become what
we think
we’re fighting.
We must aim to redefine Indian identity as not just a multicultural
identity within India but also without
一 broadening our acceptance of “diversity” outside
our borders.
But redefining identity also requires
a turn inward. To feel cultural acceptance, it is as important to
embrace Indian
culture as
it is
to broaden
the internal
concept of
Indian culture;
to deconstruct it and thus
give leeway for nonconformity. There are parts of the universal or shared
Indian culture I still don’t fit into, and don’t have to. There are
festivals that are too loud for me, and religious traditions I won’t follow.
I might never be more fond of Bollywood cinema than Hollywood. My Hindi
grammar will
never be
fluent
一
my Bengali
grammar is,
but the
point is that my identity
is not contingent on such parameters. Fluency in languages or preferences in
media are not measures of belonging. These characteristics do not make me
“less Indian”, and cultural identity is not something that has to be
proved.
So
what then
is
cultural pride?
Culture, as
a social
construct, requires
some degree
of exclusivity. It belongs
to a demographic, and the definition of this demographic is essential for
the formation and continuation of the culture. So what comprises the group
of people who get to be included? What does it mean to be “Indian”?
We
cannot unanimously decide what
cultural exclusion
is
一
who
should
and
shouldn’t be included
一 so we must shift our focus to the question of
who feels excluded. Cultural
exclusion is only a problem that people who have experienced it can feel.
Those who do not belong in the Indian culture simply will not feel this
exclusion. A classmate of mine who is Singaporean by nationality and Indian
by ethnicity once told me that if someone claimed he isn’t “Indian”, he
would not be offended, because he
isn’t Indian. However, if someone told him he’s not Singaporean, this
would spark an indignation. Likewise, for any other part of one’s identity,
an external rejection will only cause harm if that facet is part of the
internal identity. If someone came up to me, a woman, and told me I’m not a
man, it wouldn’t impact me at all. But someone behaving as if I’m not Indian
strikes a nerve
一
because I am Indian, and I’m proud of being Indian.
Therefore, the
notion of
identity we
invoke is
not definable, but manifests
emotionally in clear ways. Cultural identity is solidified by the expression
of cultural pride.
The
Indian identity,
not just
as a
concept, but
also in
its manifestation as a
visible and
tangible practice, cannot be reduced to a monolithic ethos; rather it
is an amalgamation of the unique customs of each individual which tie back
to India. The universal cultural identity exists as a summation of
individual cultural identities; it is molded by us, not the other way
around. Indianism, what
we see,
what we
wear, how
we speak,
does not
define us.
We, as
the people, define the
culture.