Sometimes when you bravely and naively ask questions that are lingering in society, you follow down the rabbit hole and in your quest to find the answer you may realise that the question itself was wrong.
‘Indian-ness’ was the question. What is it? What are its identifying qualities? How can an individual faced with it, recognise it? Who can be a part of it? All good and valid questions from curious minds who were trying to learn rather than impose a set of knowledge on me – I was the one who was disappointing in this scenario with my answer- “I don’t know.”
I started questioning what it meant to be Indian because I felt cornered – or at least the slightly insecure part of me did. “How are you Indian?” With the head slightly tilted, eyebrow scrunched, elongated accusatory focus on ‘you’. *Me- not a direct visual translation of Otto Neurath’s Brown Turban Man, nor Mowgli from Rudyard Kippling’s Jungle Book, nor even a ragged slum Orphan from the Oscar winning Slumdog Millionaire- simply a brown-ish looking, curvy bodied, english speaking girl, in ‘western clothes’* A pointed question I have been asked multiple times, in different white parts of the world. Interestingly never in a black or brown part of the world, because they probably understand the bastardization that my race and I went through. Not even a question I had to grapple with when I lived in a bubble of similarity where everyone was a version of who I thought I was- just Indian. Only onlooking at ‘us’ from ‘abroad’ I started seeing hues and shades in our brown.
To tackle any problem I first define the key word, in this case- Indian: An Individualistic experience cultivated from being born or/and raised, or being related to someone who was born or/and raised on the arbitrary geographical soil demarcated India. But this definition is incomplete without considering the ‘historical process whereby the ‘West’ attempted systematically to cancel or negate the cultural difference and value of the non-West’, also known as colonization (paraphrased from Leela Gandhi’s ‘Postcolonial Theory’, page 16). Then… Indian: A bastardized identity, which is no longer fully ‘perfectly’ brown, but sodded with residue whiteness leftover from the British Raj. Salman Rushdie, in ‘Midnight’s Children’, (page 118) puts it more eloquently than I do, “In fact, all over the new India, children were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents”. Partially. Indian.
This partiality stands true today as well because currently we are oppressed by a different form of colonization- capitalism. We the youth of India have, to an extent, sold our souls to attain the American Dream. And I do not blame myself or any other individual trying to grasp for a ‘better future’ because our experience of being Indian is not just complicated by a period of colonization that we were ‘liberated’ from 74 years ago, but it is muddled by religion, caste and social status.
From the Indus Valley Civilisation, to the Mughal Rule, through the British Raj, we have landed ourselves into BJP’s Hindutva India. Modi’s India is intolerable to its previous existence as a secular country. ‘We’ now prefer disharmony and chaos to peace and sisterhood. Corruption is an understood and accepted part of living in this country. Indians are born into castes at birth. Brahmins (highest class of spiritual masters), Kshatriyas (high-ish class of warriors), Vaishyas (middle class of business owners) and the Shudras (low class of labourers). Extinct from large cosmopolitan cities but misunderstood and misused in rural parts of India. Social status, post demonetisation, is basically having families like the Ambanis and Adanis on top of the pyramid, owning, what should be public, airports to small ice-cream stands. There has always been disparity in our country, as unfortunately can be observed in most countries reeling from the after effects of colonization, but it is slowly starting to look close to an oligopoly.
That is an attempted birds eye view to what Indian-ness could mean. Now for a first-person lived experience account: I went to The British School, New Delhi. Then I did my undergraduate degree in Rhode Island, America, and my post graduate in London, England. More than having an ‘Indian experience’ in India, I had it in the latter two places. I was made Indian by their meticulous labelling system. I was sectioned off into the Other-Asian-South Asian-South East Asian-Indian category. If I never went to America I never would have known how mysterious and misunderstood my country or people are. I never would have had my identity crisis when Trump became president and starting seeing and categorising according to the ‘color line’ (a concept derived by W.E.B Du Bois). I wouldn’t have had to keep explaining my Indian-ness to people, thus I would not be here trying to figure the answer out.
Being Indian is a collective experience if nothing else. When I look back at my daily life in my familial home it occurs to me that I don’t know what it feels like to be Indian for the lower-caste dark skin lady who comes daily to my house to wash my ten-person family’s clothes. Nor do I know what it feels like to be Indian for the children who sleep huddled in a tarp tent in the slum adjacent my wealthy neighbourhood. I couldn’t even presume what it feels to be Indian to the old man wrinkled by familial debt, who cycles past my house every morning yelling, “kabardi” – trying to collect trash to trade it in for a meal.
I exist, live and identify myself around these very people, on this land which we call the NCR (National Capital Region) of India. But how can I, from my fairly high ivory tower, sitting in a chair in some Western part of the world define this experience of being Indian? How can I possibly tell all four, or more accurately 1.38 billion, stories with dignity and justice – I don’t know.
Over simplification for the sake of mass consumption is a capitalist phenomena. A country that doesn’t even speak the same language altogether, cannot be forced to confine themselves into one short story. Rather than asking “How are you Indian?”, or “What is Indian-ness?”, which supposes a blanket answer for the country. It is more worth while to ask “What is Indian-ness to you” or “What has been your experience of being Indian”. The age of tokening people and stories based on their sob-factor has come to pass. It may be frustrating and unsatisfying not getting that ‘whole’ answer to the question of ‘Indian-ness’ ever. But it is worth hearing each individual account to piece together the narrative for a people who may live under one sky, but have very different stories.
(Mis)infographics 