The relationship between a country and its diaspora – those people with ethnic roots in the country but who do not live there themselves – is a complex plethora of possibilities. Some people grow a fixation on keeping up with the country’s traditions or trends. Others dissociate themselves from it in an attempt to find a sense of themselves outside of the country they never knew. I think it’s safe to say, however, that at some point most individuals from diaspora will consider the possibility of one day visiting the country that their ancestors once called home.
I am realising as I grow older that this thought experiment is refracted somewhat when you are twice removed from your ancestral home. My mother’s side of the family call themselves Indian, but they are… not really? Or are they? My mother immigrated to Australia from Fiji, where she was born and raised, when she married my father, a white Australian. To call her “Indian” based on her ethnicity would be to call my father “British” based on his. Generation-wise, my mother is as far-removed from India as my father is from England. However, like my father’s family, many of the customs and inherited cultural relics from the “motherland” still remain. Sunday roasts and Christmas from my father’s family, curries and Diwali from my mother’s.
The Kav P family circa 2016: now with extra pink!
This coming week I’ll be travelling to India for the first time in my life, and it’s a journey I never envisioned myself taking. It’s a journey I actively fought against ever taking, in fact. But my friend is presenting at a conference in Delhi and invited me along, and it has made me reflect a lot on my reasoning and aversion to a country which has done nothing to wrong me.
So, if you’ll pardon the pun, what exactly is my beef with India? Well, that’s not an easy question to answer, but I’m going to try to break it down. Not just for you, but for me as well, because I’ve never really picked it apart into all its individual facets before. This should be interesting.
Part 1: The Australian Question
There is something that has really confused me growing up, and even to this day: I don’t know what to call myself.
Teaching my fellow children the joy of dance!
My mother would always tell me and my sister we were Indian. When we told this to other kids in our rural Australian town most would ask us if we came from India (besides that one boy who asked if I live in a teepee). No, I would reply, and then add defensively, I’ve never even been to India. Kids would usually back down then. Kids are pretty good like that. The whole world is new to them. You present them with new information and they’ll absorb it without judgement.
Teenagers are somewhat harder to please. After you say “I’ve never even been to India,” they want to know how that works. What might have been one simple question with a simple answer turns into exposing your whole family history, often to someone you don’t know that well. I started needing to quantify my identity to avoid the probing. Saying I was Fiji-Indian would still get the “are you from India?” question, but after they knew the Fiji connection it was easier to then point out that while I hadn’t even been to India, I’d been to Fiji multiple times. Ask me about Fiji.
It really took me until those teenage years to become aware of the fact that I was from an
Me enjoying the finer things – aka helping prepare crab curry – in Fiji.
unusual background having roots in Fiji – although there were finally some other Indian kids at school their families were more directly connected to India – and I still lacked the vocabulary to talk about it. I also increasingly lacked the patience to satisfy everyone’s curiosity, which often required multiple passes.
But Kav, you say. Why is your background such a big deal anyway? You could just not bring it up. Well, obviously white reader, I’m afraid that is never an option. The Internet has been around long enough that you can very easily encounter a variety of takes about this from people of a huge number of non-white backgrounds. If you look ethnically different from a herd of white faces, no matter how young or old you are, you are going to be asked where you are from, and people will not be satisfied until they have been validated in their assumption that you are different. Older people might cloak the question in innuendo:
“What’s your background?”
“No, I mean where were you born?”
“Well, where are your parents from?”
“What’s your ethnicity?”
And so on and so forth. But they all want the same thing. People feel entitled to an answer until you tell them what they believe they need to know. You are never allowed to just exist as a person while the people around you want to know exactly how they should be othering you. As a non-white person living in the areas of the world white people claim to own, there are parts about your background which can never belong to you alone. So, in such a world, the least you can do to try to get some closure is to own the identity that society forces you to reveal to them.
Me modeling a Fijian grass mumu with dignity and poise.
The indignant phrase “I’ve never even been to India” has, in some way, been the easiest way for me to do this, to distinguish myself as an individual who is more complex than my ethnic background. I’m as Indian as I am British, but the people around me never ask me if I can make Yorkshire pudding or if I like scones. This grates. My rebelling against India has less to do with issues I have with it as a country, so much as my issues with the assumptions that get placed on me as someone who shares ethnic roots with Indian people. And this is without even going into the inevitable cultural isolation that comes from being of mixed ethnicity, or the bizarre reverence that many Fiji-Indians seem to foster towards the “motherland”, which has bolstered my own unnecessary rebellion.
Part 2: The Fiji-Indian Dream
Raised in an uber-white rural Australian town, my mother wanted us to still be connected to her culture somehow and my dad was fully behind her on this one. As I started school my mother discovered that a group of recent Fiji-Indian immigrants in the wider rural area had formed an association and ran Hindu gatherings and cultural activities for children. Fantastic! My mother finally had a community that understood her again, and my sister and I, although we were not yet at the age when other kids at school realised we were “different”, had a group of children who more or less understood this half of us without requiring explanation. Of course, we never truly fit in there, being the only multi-ethnic children there, but that’s another story for another article. What matters is that we ostensibly had an accessible link to the Fiji-Indian part of us, even if at the time we didn’t realise how important that was.
Me and my sister in our dance costumes for the year’s Diwali festival.
One of the cultural activities my parents got us to participate in was Indian dance. The Fiji-Indian association would get an instructor to come all the way down from India to teach the enrolled children a few dances to perform at that year’s Diwali concert. Although I was always more drawn to percussion, for the sake of convenience both me and my sister were enrolled in these dance classes. Another activity organised for children by the association was Hindi classes. An instructor would teach us how to read and write in Hindi – “proper” Hindi, not that Fiji-Hindi dialect you might have immigrated to Australia speaking with your parents. Are you starting to see a little trend here?
I don’t know if this is universal among diasporic communities, but at least from my perspective, in the Fiji-Indian community there seems to be an unfortunate inferiority complex concerning India, at least in the way Hindi is spoken. As the years went on, pretty much every adult in the local Fiji-Indian association travelled to India at some point and gushed about it when they returned. It felt like a rite of passage – to be truly Indian – to visit the “motherland”. Indeed, although Hinduism is a huge religion with a myriad of texts, beliefs and customs that are sporadically shared and distinct between Hindu sects, one thing that appears to have almost universal significance (besides the “no beef” thing, of course) is that of the river Ganges as a sacred spot. Bathing in the river Ganges is an auspicious and purifying act, and of course, the implication is that physical closeness to the Ganges is an ideal to aspire to, at least at some point in your life. In short, India is the place to be if you are Indian, no matter how far-removed you are from the country by birth.
I didn’t like this.
I am a translator of three languages, and a speaker (to varying degrees) of several more. Hindi is not one of them. In fact, for a long time I thought I was bad at learning languages, because my Hindi classes always went so poorly and I had no motivation to study. I never really understood why I didn’t like learning Hindi. When I reflect back I think I see it now, though. The Hindi we were taught had no relevance to me. It wasn’t what my family spoke – there was little connection between the words I studied and the words I heard when my mother was with family or people from the Fiji-Indian association. I was being told that this language would bring me closer to my heritage, but it was not. I’ve travelled to Fiji many times growing up – it’s what I know. It’s all I know. But as much as I have tried to engage, I have faced resistance from the very people I want to connect with.
A moody young adult Kav at our first trip back to Fiji since childhood.
At various stages of my life I have attempted to ask about where I could learn Fiji-Hindi. The response from Fiji-Hindi speakers is always the same: “why would you do that? Learn real Hindi instead”. About ten years ago a friend of mine did a linguistic exercise with my mother whereby she read out a children’s story written in English, but in her own language, so that the friend could attempt to create a gloss (like a dictionary) of the dialect based on the reading. My mother’s sister was there and if you listen to the recording, you can hear my aunt correcting my mother’s Hindi throughout the story to be more “proper”. It runs deep, and I think particularly so once you are twice-removed from your ethnicity and encounter more “real” Indians in your everyday life who you feel a need to impress.
So again, what has India got to do with all of this? Absolutely nothing. All of this languishing, this frustration is within me and me alone.
I feel pressure to relate to India and Indian things in a way that I can’t. The curries all over the country are different to Fiji-Indian curries. The Hinduism practiced in India is different from in Fiji (we did away with the caste system before it was cool, for one). The language is different – so many people in India don’t even use Hindi, let alone Fiji-Hindi. There are plenty of cultural similarities, but Fiji-Indians’ love of Bollywood is akin to white Australians’ love and respect for the BBC. It is pastiche and nostalgia for inherited culture which bolsters unique diasporic identities; they are not one and the same. Furthermore, I am not the Indian non-Indians think I am, nor want to be the Indian many Fiji-Indians seem to wish they were.
This isn’t the whole of it, but it definitely covers the tip of the iceberg that is my frigidity concerning traveling to India. And yet I’m getting on the plane to Delhi this afternoon.
Part 3: An Answer?
In the end, my reasons for going or not going to India needed to be because the trip would benefit me in some way. I’ve never shied away from making difficult or risky decisions when it comes to travel: I’ve moved to Argentina for love, and I’m moving to Belgium in November as a base for my volunteer efforts at refugee camps in Europe. But I’ve never had to make a decision that was so personal before, one that cuts so deeply into this sense of self that I’ve spent thirty years trying to understand and develop.
Given that I can’t really be sure what I’d be gaining from going to India, I thought about this more in terms of what I could be losing.
What have I got to lose?
What could I lose from going to India? Well, for one thing I’d be losing the ability to truthfully say “I’ve never even been to India!” when interrogated by random white people about what my ethnic background means. Even reading this surely makes it seem like a trivial loss, but you have to understand that this has been my trump card for most of my life in these frustrating situations and I honestly can’t imagine life without it. Going to India also strangely feels like a betrayal of loyalty to the country that my mother is actually from, and a concession to the inferiority complex that seems to plague the Indian diaspora there. All the internal conflict that has kept me from India until now threatens to come into the open and I can’t predict how going might affect me. All I know is that once I’ve gone to India, I can’t take it back.
What could I lose from never going to India? Well, the obvious answer there is never getting closure from my worries. I can wax lyrical about what I think going to India will do to me as a person, but I will never know. What keeps me from India bubbles down in its essence to fear of the unknown. And when all is said and done, I aim to live life without regrets. One day I will be too old to travel comfortably. Is India going to be the question that I wish I had an answer for?
In the end, obviously, I have decided to take the plunge and go. I’ll be with another (non-Indian) multi-ethnic friend who understands my situation and supports me, and in a worst case scenario if I don’t like it it will only be ten days. That’s about as long as I was in New York earlier this year, and while I despised being in the United States during this point in American history, I managed to last the whole ten days without caving in to change to an earlier flight. In that sense, India should be a piece of cake!
I’m at the airport in Sydney. I’m not going to pretend I’m not absolutely terrified. I still don’t know if I made the right decision for myself. But for better or for worse, I am going to find out.
Tee hee. (Seriously though I’m really scared)
Have you experienced a similar kind of existential conundrum? I’d love to hear your story in the comments!