I can’t remember what books I brought with me to Mauritius, but I do remember one my father gave me while we were there. It was a yellow hardcover storybook, The Panchatantra, full of superb and cruel Indian animal fairy tales. In one story, an annoying bird explains to a monkey that the food he’s trying to fish out is part of a trap that will snap shut and kill him if he gets to it. The monkey throws the bird against a tree, killing it, then grabs the food, discharges the trap, and is crushed to death. The last line is ‘And that is the way of the world.’
Even as a nine-year-old, I appreciated the lack of sentiment. It hinted at something missing from the shining distortions of the Grimms’ stories I’d encountered thus far, and seemed to suggest that the place where my skin came from was a place where people talked straight, a quality I aspired to possess.
Another memory from that trip: the entire country seemed to treat street traffic the way high school kids treat hallway movement. And I was genuinely surprised by how I was read on the streets—I asked my father, about a week in, why market vendors addressed me in English directly, why they tried to sell me souvenirs instead of groceries. ‘It’s… the way you walk,’ he replied, sparing himself a longer discussion while I dealt with this riddling proposition. Was it possible that I had a distinctive, Western walk—not a John Wayne swagger, but a sort of financially comfortable mince that broadcast my foreignness? Did I walk white?
With my family, I’d already visited Vancouver and London, and in those cities, I knew I could exist the way I wanted to, unnoticed and anonymous in an urban mass of skin and clothing so uniformly varied that individual distinctions became important only if you were looking through the crowd for someone you already knew. There, I’d blend right in. Despite the options on offer in these metropolises, we ate in Indian restaurants on every vacation. The food wasn’t like what my parents made at home—cream, butter, and ghee were absent from the version of Mauritian home-cooking I grew up with. But these vacation meals must have been nostalgic reminders to my parents of their student days, when those UK Indian restaurants boomed and Mom and Dad were out of their own parents’ homes for the first time. Dad sharpened his cooking skills in the residence hall of his Glasgow medical school, but Mom already knew her way around the kitchen, having learned to cook for her fifteen siblings before getting into nursing school and sending back money to provide for them in a different way. The Indian restaurants of Glasgow, and the formulations that the probably-Bangladeshi chefs were coming up with, weren’t a taste of home for them, but part of the new exotic of the world beyond their island: these creamy, meat-filled curries that had nothing to do with their family dinner tables, beyond garlic, ginger, some chili, and cumin.
Mauritian food is different, just as Mauritius is different from India, even if I constantly conflate the two in conversation, and also in this book, to avoid the multiply-hyphenated descriptors that pure accuracy would demand. The early history of the island is what teenage me would call a ‘colonial gangbang’ any time a half-interested friend inquired. A small dot off the coast of Madagascar, Mauritius was one of those barren islands that was in fact verdant and teeming with jungle and diverse species, including the dodo, lying fallow for colonising powers—pretty much all of them—to settle and make farms, staffed first with slaves, then indentured servants, depending on the barbarism of the empire and the time. The Dutch, then the French, then finally the English took it, with the Portuguese making a couple of apathetic visits sometime in the sixteenth century, when they were already nicely set up in Goa and Ceylon. The British Empire ‘won’ Mauritius in the Napoleonic Wars, carving out space for the island in Patrick O’Brian’s The Mauritius Command, perhaps the only international bestseller with my ancestral home’s name in the title.
Aside from that one visit, I know the place through stories, sketchy histories, and folk tales. But I can’t dress it in longing that I’ve never felt. The nostalgia that my parents feel for it, that they impart in their recounted memories, is one that anchors it as the past, not as a place of future revelation or truth for me. The language there, officially, is English, but it’s Creole and French that seem to come at you most on the streets. The 1.3 million people who live there are a true mix: 25 per cent are Black and mixed-race people primarily of Madagascan or Mozambican origin, many of whom are the descendants of the slaves brought over by the Dutch and French. When the British assumed rule and abolished slavery in 1835, the Indians who now make up about 70 per cent of the population arrived, mostly as indentured servants. Amitav Ghosh wrote of this exporting of coolies in a trilogy of historical novels— Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire—that I’ll get around to reading someday. Descendants of the French and British elite still live there, along with about 30,000 people of Chinese descent, Hakka and otherwise.
Somewhere in that influx of people in the late nineteenth century, with Indian servants in demand to fill labour and administrative roles after outright slavery had been outlawed, my ancestors arrived in Mauritius. The Colonial Office List for 1886 lists a V. Ruthnum as a clerk in the Stipendiary Magistracy at Black River in Mauritius (the British name didn’t stick—it continues to be called Rivière Noire on maps and in conversation). It was perhaps this V. who made the first diasporic step out from India, joining what I might fancifully envision as a Wild West trial run for the melting-pot urbanity I’d come to depend on as an adult. Except, in V.’s case, there was no escaping his place in the chain of subjugation where he was somewhere in the lower middle and a white man was at the top. There’s certainly a currybook to be written about V.’s journey, but the happy ending doesn’t come until a few generations after his death.
Alienation and a sense of being severed from the past is visited on South Asians from the outside on a daily basis, in forms ranging from violent racial attacks to the ongoing, often lightly intended and genuinely curious ‘Where are you from?’ that isn’t asking where you grew up, but where you were supposed to grow up if your parents hadn’t up and left. Alienation has branches, and the thickest and most poisonous stalk of alienation in the West is fuelled by racism and the norm of whiteness. The actor Kal Penn, who played the protagonist in the film adaptation of Lahiri’s The Namesake, as well as my beloved Kumar in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, touched on this brand of alienation when he was interviewed with his White Castle co-star John Cho by the Chicago Tribune in 2005:
‘Along those lines, I was probably in 4th grade when Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom came out,’ Penn says. ‘There were all these Indian characters that were eating monkey brains and snakes for dinner, and doing all these things that had absolutely nothing to do with being Indian at all. I went into school, and with myself and every other Indian kid I know, nobody would sit next to us at lunch, for months, because they were convinced we had monkey brains in our sandwich. Those are the media images that go into people’s heads. If you don’t have close friends to disprove that—or even if you do but you’re only in 4th grade—that’s pretty powerful.’
‘That’s my favourite movie,’ Cho deadpans.
Penn sighs dramatically. ‘I hate you.’
Penn’s story, and many scenes in Harold & Kumar, capture the alienating effects of casual racism, whether malicious or ignorance-based, but his sweep of ‘every other Indian kid I know’ leaves out another form of exclusion that South Asians dole out and suffer from, not least of which because we’ve been rounded up under this loosely applicable term that covers all the differing cultures and countries of our manifold backgrounds. As Rushdie pointed out in 1982, ‘This word “Indian” is getting to be a pretty scattered concept.’ On my first day of high school, one of the older Sikh boys signalled me over at lunch and asked, ‘Hey, you speak Punjab?’ When I said no, he smiled, and the conversation was over.
My Mauritianness, as touristy as it struck the actual Mauritians, was also false currency when it came to recognition by brown kids of a more direct Indian origin, ones who had a closer relation to specific regions, religions, social strata, and experiences that make up that massive and complex country. Being second-gen made me counterfeit Mauritian back in my old country, and I continued to ring false to South Asians who were more closely aligned with India, Pakistan, Bangladesh—the core that we scattered from. The ways to not-belong as a brown teenager in white, small-town Canada are even more complex than my Beavis haircut and Black Sabbath T-shirt could express in 1996. If Indian is a baggy term, South Asian is parachute pants.
In the 2016 book Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone), which blends memoir with focused reportage, author Kamal Al-Solaylee speaks of brownness as ‘a continuum, a grouping—a metaphor, even—for the millions of darker-skinned people who, in broad historical terms, have missed out on the economic and political gains of the post-industrial world and are now clamouring for their fair share of social mobility, equality, and freedom.’ Al-Solaylee sees brownness as a ‘burden’ carried everywhere we go: ‘Pretending that it’s otherwise is intellectual dishonesty.’
Al-Solaylee’s intensively researched and reported book is a doors-open investigation, conducted in quite the opposite manner to the table-bound text- and-meal interrogation you’re reading right now. Al-Solaylee seeks out the particularities of brown experience all over the world, from Sri Lanka to Hong Kong to Qatar to Toronto. And yet, he begins and emerges with a sense of a united brown identity, even if it is one initially imposed by an outside gaze:
For much of our history, we’ve been defined by others—as the brown race, as the weaker tribe, as the civilisation-ready subjects of empires. But the time has come for us to self-identify as we wish. There’s strength in numbers and comfort in knowing that one’s experience is not isolated or an aberration. Whenever I get pulled aside when crossing the US border, I find it reassuring that I’m not the only brown face. I see the Iraqi or Pakistani business traveller, the Colombian student, the Sri Lankan chef or the Indian family with three or four or five children, and I know that while our stories are different, we find ourselves singled out because of our brown skins and histories.
Al-Solaylee’s version of self-identification isn’t a call for a flattening and universalising of brown experience to create one narrative of what it is to be brown. As his detailed exploration of regional and class differences in the experience and perception of brownness across the world proves, his is a nuanced vision of a collective experience. As a different sort of storyteller—not a journalist, but a fictional inventor—I buck slightly against even this multi-faceted take on what we share as brown people. Perhaps, and this is certainly born of coming from an upper-middle-class background and living in urban centres, I don’t want to self-define as part of a brown identity that is still shaped by outside perception, by the imagination that the majority imposes upon us. The realities of racism and the white majority dominance of life in the West defines how brown people are seen, how they must act, and what they are allowed to achieve—but this doesn’t need to limit our imagination of ourselves, or lessen the distinctness and individual nature of experience, especially as expressed in art, in memoir. As brown people in the West, our stories don’t have to explain ourselves to white people, or to each other—they don’t have to explain shit. They don’t even have to suggest that brown people are a we, or a they.
Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle came out in 2004, four years after I’d already moved to Vancouver, four years after it could have done me some real good, in high school. Rewatching the movie now, I can see how the casual objectification of the invariably hot female characters clutters the movie’s efforts to humanise the Asian and South Asian protagonists. H&K is a stoner movie, in direct genre lineage from movies like Half-Baked and the Cheech & Chong series, but it also has much in common with college sex comedies like Revenge of the Nerds, many of which had painfully stereotypical depictions of gay and non-white characters to accompany rampant, dehumanising misogyny. Harold & Kumar corrects the racial elements, even if the depiction of women as sex objects remains in line with long-standing genre conventions. Co-writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg started by writing their protagonists as young American guys.
‘We always had a very multicultural group of friends,’ Hurwitz told the New York Times in 2008. ‘One thing that struck us was that no matter our ethnic background, we were very much alike. But whenever we saw Asian or Indian characters onscreen, they were nothing like our friends, so we thought we would write characters like them.’
I was deep into cinema when Harold & Kumar came out, arguing about Antonioni’s lack of merit and making a case for Bergman’s Winter Light as being a more truthful re-envisioning of the director’s own The Virgin Spring—but it was Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle that had a marked effect on my 2004. The movie’s excellent performance on DVD after failing at the box office, and the fact that it was about stoners and goofy shit before it was about race and belonging, made it an incredible sneak attack of a film. Kal Penn as Kumar, who has all the mental equipment and skill needed to get into medical school but doesn’t want to fall into an Indian-American stereotype profession just to please his father, gave people around me, especially when I spent part of that summer in Kelowna, the equipment to actually perceive me. It was my first true experience of representation mattering, because it was the first time I felt my brand of the brown diasporic experience had been accurately represented onscreen. In a fucking stoner movie, of all things. Instead of being looked at as an E.T.-like curiosity by white people, Kal Penn is a legitimately attractive possibility for women, as is John Cho’s Harold—this made a real difference in non-cosmopolitan places, where coloured skin was an aberration in the yearbook. By aligning itself with so many of the standards of stoner films and college sex comedies, Harold & Kumar subverted the genre with the elements it flipped: colour and culture, making the ethnic leading men into a pair of American dudes who did indeed confront racism and address their thoughts on cultural pressures, but only along the way as they sought to get burgers, find meaning in life and work, and yes, to get laid. Ejecting the traditional immigrant narrative was what made H&K an important movie: it was allowed to be a dumb, clever look at smart and funny dudes whose cultural origin wasn’t the most prominent aspect of their thoughts and lives. The recent Master of None, Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang’s Netflix series about an immature Indian-American and Taiwanese-American best-pal duo in New York, owes something to Harold & Kumar—namely, this foregrounding of non-racialised aspects of the two main characters, even as Dev’s and Brian’s stories often do feature short dives into the past and their heritage via their parents. (Incidentally, Ansari tweeted that he and real-life friend Yang have been frequently mistaken for Harold and Kumar on the street.)
Brown people, especially young ones, are expected to have an opinion on Aziz Ansari and Mindy Kaling. When I tell people I love comedy, I know that three questions in I’m going to be asked how much I love Aziz and what I think of Master of None. Actually, I harbour some resistance to even watching that series and The Mindy Project, if only because I know I’m supposed to. It’s bizarre to have an expectation of watching a sitcom and forming an opinion about it placed on you, but as a brown person who thinks and writes about culture, that’s the deal: there isn’t much diasporic comedy on North American television, so it’s only fair that you turn up and take it in.
Perhaps Aziz doesn’t much want to be the mouthpiece of a brown generation, and Kaling may be equally uninterested. I know I don’t enjoy the general expectation that I’m a fan of either, or that I should have a stance on exactly how they let down the depiction of what brown life in the West is really like. Ansari, writing in the New York Times, points to a different truth: that representation, full stop, matters a lot to people of colour in the West, a fact he’s carried with him as he wields increasing control over casting his own show and appearing in work by others. Growing up in South Carolina, Ansari ‘rarely saw any Indians on TV or film, except for brief appearances as a cab driver or a convenience store worker literally servicing white characters who were off to more interesting adventures.’ Master of None has been part of changing that filmed reality: Ansari and Yang gave us South Asian and Asian leads who had fuck-up careers, dated girls, did the Seinfeld and Larry Sanders stuff that had long been white territory. Ansari, who plays, in the show’s first season, a constantly auditioning actor, has his character lose out on parts due to his unwillingness to do Indian accents. Both Dev in the show and Aziz the creator are staking out space for brown people in the West who don’t conform to the familiar Apu Nahasapeemapetilon take. It matters to see our first-gen and second-gen bodies and Western lives reflected in some form on the screen, by writers of comparable origin—of course it does—but what matters even more is that every mass-culture take on Western brownness from a brown voice isn’t given credence as the defining take, or the one that all succeeding texts, shows, or movies act in response to or in imitation of.
Even if it is a counterstream take like Master, there’s a genuine sense of despair when you see one story of Western brownness upheld by whites and members of the brown audience alike as the one that seems true: a sense that what you have to say or write may only be relevant in relation to the story they’ve seen or read before. That you’re either carrying on the same narrative or reacting against it and, either way, that original story is the one that matters.
And the movies and stories that don’t subvert the conventions of an immigrant narrative? They can still resonate. Hacks like Dan Nainan, the fifty-something comedian who poses as a millennial and groomed an intricate fake connection to internationally successful stand-up Russell Peters in order to snag high-paying gigs at Indian-American weddings, use their South Asian heritage as the basis for massive swaths of their material, relying on recognised commonalities instead of crafted jokes for laughs. And often (though not in Nainan’s case, as his act is just too terrible), those laughs happen. Diasporic audiences often crave confirmation that the alienation we feel individually is shared, that it resonates for others. In currybooks, an answer to that alienation is floated: embracing, even if only within the span of a few hundred pages, the realness of another place and culture, the one that was truly always our own.
Still, shouldn’t approaching pain, alienation, displacement, and a sense of cultural unbelonging come from a place of incomprehension, not a predetermined inquiry that holds that the East has answers to the dissatisfactions of a life in the West? I’m not telling you, I’m asking. But it’s a pointed ask. Does Saroo, protagonist of 2016 Best Picture nominee Lion, based on the true story of Saroo Brierley’s incredible discovery of his village roots after being lost and raised by an Australian family, truly resolve core questions of his existence when he learns that he’s been mispronouncing his own name for his whole life? And what does his discovery do for us, for the audience?
It tells us that there’s an answer, a true and calming reality, in the embrace of the past. As a character—I won’t presume to speak for Saroo Brierley, co-author of the memoir Lion is based on—Saroo’s real name will likely always be the mangled mispronunciation of his authentic name, a variance on sher, the Hindi word for the film’s titular Lion. His immigrant existence is a mixed, complicated, in-between one, a balance formed by turmoil and forward motion, not the peace of answers found in the past. The popularity of these narratives, and the relationships that diasporic writers have with them as both authors and readers, are part of another tangled story we tell each other and ourselves, wondering ultimately if they are something that white Westerners are interested in for reasons that would make us uncomfortable.
Distance from questions like that is what I once wanted from travel, and now require of the cities where I choose to live. A society in which one’s movements and appearance are met with utter indifference is my ideal, one that comes closest to being incarnated—for people of South Asian descent, at least—in cosmopolitan cities. On that trip to Mauritius, seeing key chains and tubes of sand from Chamarel extended to me in automatic recognition that I was a tourist did feel like a kind of homecoming: a recognition that I wasn’t any more at home in that country than I was in small-town British Columbia. In BC, my race differentiated me—in Mauritius, it didn’t help me to fit in. I bought both the key chain and the tube of sand and showed them off to my friends when I got back.
It’s more than just a white audience wanting to hear our real experiences: it’s us, the diasporic audience, wanting to read experience reflected back, or to see a familiar version of a story. Fariha Róisín, writing on Bend It Like Beckham in the online cultural magazine Hazlitt, uses a collective ‘we’ in discussing South Asian identity while she points to some of the isolating historical wedges within the great mass of Western brownness, particularly the ‘realities’ of children being expected to follow cultural expectations enforced by the families:
… our language for who we are as South Asians in the West is still so young, still so undefined. We have so much internalised hatred amongst us; the running joke in Bend It Like Beckham is that Jess can marry anyone, just not a Muslim. We’ve refused to detail our shameful and horrific interlacing pasts. That the current Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, has been accused of participating in a cleansing of Gujrati Muslims in 2002. Or that my very own Bengali parents survived a Civil War, where three million majority Muslim Bengalis were killed by the Pakistani Army in 1971. Or that Pakistani Muslims killed Sikhs in Punjab in the ’40s, and vice versa. Or that Kashmir is still a tentative region over a debate of religion and ownership. We don’t give voice to the hatred we have for each other, and therefore we are unable to unpack the absurdity of it, when in so many ways our histories are richer, intensified, and made more glorious because of what we’ve shared through the ages.
Perhaps war is essentially absurd, and certainly conflict is inevitable among the various culturally and religiously diverse people assembled in one area of land over centuries, particularly when that land is colonised and partitioned—but calling a history of conflict between multiple parties something they have ‘shared’ is, to say the least, inaccurate. An experience of war isn’t commonly shared by both sides, nor is an outbreak of mass violence shared between one self-designated group and another: they can be discussed, common experiences exchanged, and attempts at atonement made, but to call the aftermath of war or ethnic cleansing a shared cultural history between all parties involved is to iron history into meaninglessness. Racial and cultural communities that share a fairly uniform history can arrive at an idea of shared, internalised hatred, but South Asians in the diaspora don’t have a firm, united past: their ancestors are on separate sides of the borders of countries, classes, and wars.
Just as curry doesn’t exactly exist, neither does the diasporic South Asian. If we’re attempting to build solidarity out of a shared history, it will never quite mesh, hold true, unless our great-grandparents happen to be from the same time and place. And even—perhaps especially—in a cosmopolitan city like Toronto, there’s every chance that the diasporic people I meet emerge from a past unlike my own genetic-historical soup of coolies, office clerks, a security guard, an auctioneer, a psychiatric nurse, and an ophthalmologist. Members of Team Diaspora may have skin of the same general tone, but each has a recent family history that is likely completely distinct.
As a collective, South Asians in the West are bound by the incredible range of possible origins they might have had, the unknowability of their pasts, and the comical accident of resemblance. ‘There are so many pockets across the world with an Indo-centric definition,’ Róisín goes on to write, ‘and brown kids from Brampton might have nothing in common with the brown kids in Heathrow, yet the echo of the undefined territory booms louder than our shared similarities.’ This undefined territory she’s referring to—‘what it means to be South Asian in the West’—is perhaps impossible and undesirable to bridge: why define a uniform way of being, of existing as a brown mass in the West, in reaction to our perceived resemblance to each other and the cultural overlaps that diasporic people do share?
When discussing past South Asian conflicts, our sometimes-fatal inability to get along in the centuries of the past, the collective ‘we,’ the ‘us,’ sounds right because the idea of a vast South Asian collective makes sense. ‘We’ also makes sense when we’re talking about some of what we do share as diasporic subjects: great swaths of cultural artifacts and attitudes, lots of food, and the fact that we’re perceived as part of the same mass, one that we’ve gradually unified under for the sake of political, academic, and cultural advocacy. The key to defining diasporic South Asian identity isn’t letting go of or healing the past: it’s in stridently resisting definition, the idea that we should have to tell stories that reflect the shared, collective experience of what is in reality an incredibly diverse category of individuals from complicated, different pasts and places. But in the West, brown people are perceived as being on the same racial team and, in fact, many brown people do feel that that’s exactly true, as Róisín seems to when she sees ‘us, not an appropriative version of us’ in Bend It Like Beckham.
Inventing a shared past to create a unified diasporic culture is, in part, the project of currybooks, of narratives such as Bend It Like Beckham, which are built on easily recognisable touchstone tropes. But the past can’t be altered to fit a desire for belonging and solidarity in the present: what people in the South Asian diaspora in the West share is that people looking at us assume that we all come from a similar past and place. But we don’t, and there’s no need to pretend that we do.
I’ve always found Bend It Like Beckham to be a shallow parade of annoying stereotypes of older-generation South Asian stiffness and their grudgingly dutiful, big-dreamin’ children. I also understand that I’m not at all the target audience, and understood that I wasn’t anywhere close to the target demographic when I saw the film in the Park Theatre in Vancouver at age twenty, alongside my equally bored and annoyed father. It was precisely the placating notions of unity and shared experience that bothered me about the movie. The cut-out parents, in particular, with their finger-wagging admonitions barely exceeding the character development in a Twisted Sister music video until the inevitable, predictable, third-act relinquishment of tradition and acceptance of their daughter’s person-hood, frustrated me in their prêt-à-porter relatability. But the film’s impact on brown girls and women who saw their own wishes to escape cultural expectations is undeniable—and, as Rajpreet Heir wrote in the Atlantic, director Gurinder Chadha works to create a sense of hybrid identity in protagonist Jess, played by Parminder Nagra:
In showing Jess in so many traditional situations—making Indian food, dancing at her sister’s wedding ceremonies, and trying to wrap a pink sari in the locker room—alongside the scenes of her trying to pursue football, Bend It Like Beckham helps viewers better understand Jess’s masterpiece invention of a hybrid identity…To play soccer in the park with the boys and then secretly play for a team, while also trying to be a good Indian daughter, requires nonstop maneuvering.
I didn’t even come close to noticing this about Bend, but upon rewatching, I can’t disagree with Heir, and have to acknowledge the reactionary nature of my analysis of the film as it exists in my memories. Despite the hammier aspects of the film around her, particularly her strident ‘Respect your elders!’ parents, the hybridity of Jess’s identity is delicately and cleverly depicted. As much as I like to hope that my critical skills have some degree of purity, my response to Bend is entirely in line with my earlier resistance to reading diasporic novels simply because they were diasporic novels. But I’m more sympathetic to my post-adolescent reaction to Beckham: a packaged version of what it’s like to be a nontraditional brown person in the West agitating against old-fashioned parents was something I had every right to be utterly uninterested in. Bend It Like Beckham arrived at my eyes as part of an old genre, a descendant of Footloose and Pump Up the Volume, the racial and cultural elements decorations on a story I’d seen many times. A story like this adjusting itself to Western contours—the teen rebellion movie browned and bangled—truly did mean something to brown teenagers and kids who it hit at the right time. But the film’s power isn’t in how fresh and South Asian it is, but in how familiar and Western it is. It casts people of a relatable colour in a narrative that was previously just-for-whites: while Bend doesn’t say anything profound about South Asian culture, and likely didn’t intend to, the movie does say something to secular South Asian teenagers in the West—that their struggles are analogous to the ones they’ve seen in white, Hollywood narratives. Like so many stories of rebellion, this is a movie about discovering you’re just like everyone else, and that’s okay. It shares this with Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle: both films are mainstreaming narratives, stories that don’t efface the unique aspects of diasporic experience, but do concentrate on just how Western brown people in the West can be.
There’s ingrained colonialism and empire in the mere existence of any brown narrative written or filmed in a non-Indian language: for the ones in English, the connection is inescapable. Indian diasporic writers and a large proportion of Indian writers, whether they stayed on in the country or not, seized this linguistic tool for expression, recognition, and financial betterment with resounding results, from Midnight’s Children to The God of Small Things to Narcopolis. When I was a teenager listening to death metal and black metal, I wondered why these Nordic Europeans sang in English. As an adult listening to death metal and black metal and reading diasporic literature, the question rarely occurs to me: you write in English because you have to, because history and movement have rendered your mother tongue a novelty. Or, crucially, because you don’t have a mother tongue—you never learned it from your mother, or maybe she didn’t from hers. Either way, writing in an Indian language would shrink your market, and if you’re second-gen, you’d likely never come close to the fluency you have in the language that arrived at your tongue courtesy of historical and economic machinations that didn’t pause to ask what you wanted to speak.
Wealth is another pervasive, although often hidden, actor in this genre stream in South Asian narratives: these memoirs, novels, films, and stand-up comedy acts are most often written by the wealthy, or at least the middle classes. The kind of people whose families had servants in the old country, perhaps, and who regenerated wealth in the new one. As I heard at many a family-friend dinner party growing up, this rebuilding of class status and money often wasn’t easy, with the transfer of educational and professional credentials from the subcontinent to the West rarely being straightforward. The fall from the past in a diasporic story is often also a fall in signifiers of everyday comfort, as in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, where rural cook’s son Biju embarks on what he thinks of as a trip upward, living as an illegal immigrant in New York City. Instead, he lives in horrible conditions, contending with rats running over his sleeping body by night as he works for minuscule wages by day.
While deceptive portrayals of a better life in the West (and often direct lies about the fortunes that await across the ocean) have propelled emigration for decades past, a longing for escape to the West is a staple of many real-life immigrant stories. In Lion, for example, Saroo’s wresting from his family also uplifts him into economic circumstances that would likely have been far beyond his reach had he stayed in his homeland. In Hari Kunzru’s 2004 novel Transmission, Indian programmer Arjun Mehta is deceived with prospects of a job that matches his vision of a luxurious life in the West, but ends up working in contract-employee servitude, barely scraping by and at the mercy of employers who could cut them loose at any time. What fuels Arjun’s move is a vision of life in a permissive society where companionship and bounty are a given:
His current favourite daydream was set in a mall, a cavern of bright glass through which a near-future version of himself was traveling at speed up a broad, black escalator. Dressed in a button-down shirt and a baseball cap with the logo of a major software corporation embroidered on the peak, Future-Arjun was holding hands with a young woman who looked not unlike Kajol, his current filmi crush. As Kajol smiled at him, the compact headphones in his ears transmitted another upbeat love song, just one of the never-ending library of new music stored in the tiny MP3 player on his belt.
Abandoning actual India for a false vision of America proves to be a mistake for Arjun, who sinks into increasingly depressing work situations and eventually becomes a fugitive from justice. But this downward trajectory isn’t always the story: for diasporic hoppers such as my parents and many of their friends in the UK and Canada, the nursing professors and the software successes and the business people, it worked out. Some visit back-home more than others (back-home ranging from Guyana to Mauritius to Gujarat), but I don’t think any of them seriously entertain the idea of moving back for good. And, almost certainly, they wouldn’t reconsider having emigrated in the first place: the elements that they miss, they can go back for, or simply feel nostalgic for. What would have been missed by not leaving is their lives: the substance of their careers, the families they made, their existence itself. Diaspora worked out better for some than for others—much better—but the success stories complicate feelings of longing for the past and a different land. But that’s fine—stories and literature are methods we have for dealing with complexities.
When such complexity is calcified into clichéd tropes, it becomes simplified and rote. British journalist Bidisha was asked to speak at an event on Indian literature and languages at the 2016 London Book Fair. Writing about the event afterwards, she called attention to repeating narratives:
the forbidden romance between the Mughal princess and the servant boy in a lotus garden; English stiff upper lips melting in the heat of the Empire’s monsoon season; the fraught narratives of being tempted by religious fundamentalism or condemned to a forced marriage, of struggling to survive destitution and poverty, of being torn between parental tradition and youthful self-determination, the clichés of cruel brown men and suffering brown women, vast differences of equality and opportunity, the agonies of culture and identity. These things do happen, but they are not the only stories.
Not the only stories, indeed. I’m sure Bidisha would agree that novels and collections appear every year that push against the edges of these stories, exceed or ignore them completely, but the sheer percentage mass of repeating stories in the field of South Asian letters is impossible to ignore. Her prescription for the future involves a loosening of strictures on what authors are expected to produce, even defying these expectations outright and defending ‘our inclinations as artists who are Indian, or Indian diaspora, or second- or third-generation writers of Indian heritage living far from the birthplace of our grandparents. We have as much right to produce a bourgeois comedy of manners, a psychological thriller or a ripping space opera as we do to craft realistic, sober literary fiction.’
Even within that category of realistic, sober literary fiction, South Asians diasporic and otherwise encounter a restriction, which novelist Rumaan Alam indicates in his review of Rakesh Satyal’s No One Can Pronounce My Name: ‘There is a tendency to presume autobiography in fiction by women or minorities. Guys named Jonathan write universal stories, while there’s this sense that everyone else is just fictionalising their own, small experiences. That can be charming but it doesn’t approach importance.’ Race and cultural background are inextricable from an author’s life, experience, knowledge of other people—but the empathetic, individual, particular vision that is the value of any good literary effort must be allowed to look outward, must be given permission to rove outside of the parameters of experience that other books have convinced you that an author with a brown-sounding name is allowed to have.
Bidisha trains her critique of what brown writers are allowed to produce on the white-dominated world of UK publishing—she was addressing them directly at the London Book Fair—but her words would be just as apt in a much wider context of not just publishers, but readers. The modes of expression available to brown writers may be dictated by the industry’s commitment to the immediately marketable, but also by what readers of all races are interested in reading.
My own hubristic crime as a young reader, skipping over the brown-name books on my parents’ shelves, was not believing that particularity could exist in any of those books, that they could be anything other than versions of each other—and later, while writing, that I’d only find what I wanted to write about in flight from the stories that other brown writers were supposed to tell, when really I did want to write about race, about culture, about family—just my own particular version of it, which seemed utterly out of step with what I found in the sari- or-mango-on-the-cover books.
While these straight-up, mango-gnawing examples of currybooks certainly exist—those homecoming-comfort-authenticity blends that present a packaged version of what it is to be a disconnected brown person in the West—finding exactly what I was looking for when I began researching them intently was harder than I thought. That base blend I describe was certainly present in many books, but I was surprised by how many of them—Lahiri’s The Namesake, Ali’s Brick Lane—had markedly excellent qualities, weren’t just show-and-tell roadside zoos of exoticism and alienation. The broad emotional and cultural notes being struck, of an over-there and back-then being absent from a central character’s existence, resonated strongly in many of these books, but it didn’t make them all hackwork. When the genre is explored by thoughtful writers with unique insights, the result is a quality book—which makes it all the more difficult to step outside this genre as a brown writer. Still, there are also books by brown people that riff on the tropes without surrendering to them. Often, they have the same kind of fruit-and-silk-adorned covers, but books such as Canadian writer Pasha Malla’s recent Fugue States do something to eke out more space for stories unburdened by the tropes of the currybook. As Malla told Aparita Bhandari at NOW Magazine, his return-to-Kashmir novel explores a homecoming that isn’t a plunge into the past, but into the realities of socio-political change:
‘The character [Brij] in my book is based a little bit on my father,’ explains Malla. ‘My father was able to go back to Kashmir. But for Brij, the inability to go back creates an identity around the place that’s rarefied. And for Ash, Kashmir has become a fantasy land that exists only in stories.
‘The book is an exploration of how identity—not just national but personal, gender, political—is created through storytelling… writing this book I was owning the clichés in order to undermine them.
‘The whole first generation seeking their roots from trauma is a problematic story. It’s a solipsistic way of understanding trauma… By eventually forcing the character into it, and by undermining the script, I wanted to illustrate the falseness of those stories.’
Malla’s previous work successfully evaded addressing the clichés: in the story collection and novel preceding Fugue States, Malla had sidestepped the curry game completely, delivering closely observed and sometimes surreal character-based stories that had little to do with his racial or cultural origin. In the same interview, he describes avoiding writing about his identity partially in reaction to the way ‘South Asian writing is commodified…Writers of colour are expected to explain themselves to a larger [read white] [interviewer’s insertion] audience…I was not comfortable participating in that mechanism.’ Malla’s interviewer, Bhandari, herself of South Asian heritage, transitions from this quotation by writing that in Fugue States ‘Malla finally decided to explore his heritage.’ That ‘finally,’ from a brown reader and writer, is telling—it’s not just the majority-white audience that anticipates identity- and heritage-focused stories from brown novelists and memoirists: it’s the brown audience, too. Bhandari’s interest in this novel that, as she writes, confronts ‘tropes and archetypes head on’ also points to an eagerness on the brown (and, I’d argue, much of the white) audience’s part to read different stories, to have their expectations that a novel by a brown writer is going to be all about heritage, about looking back to the homeland, frustrated.
Nostalgia fuels everything from revivalist rock to right-wing political movements. As American political scientist Mark Lilla has pointed out, European nationalists, the American right, and extremist Islamist organisations all embed a vision of life lived better in the past in their vision of the future. South Asian immigrant fiction, memoir, and cookbooks—all of them contributors to the currybook genre—are often deeply marked by nostalgia, by a drive for discovering the authenticity left behind in another time and place. South Asian Writer is an identity, not just a pair of adjectives and a noun: and it’s an identity that establishes a tacit promise to an audience that is seeking it, whether the author intended it or not. What’s promised? Authenticity, a sense of the past, of a realer elsewhere.
As Changez, the narrator of Mohsin Hamid’s brilliant 2007 novel-in-monologue-form The Reluctant Fundamentalist, realises in post-9/11 Manhattan, looking back has become part of the cultural order of Western life. As the foundations of his American existence begin to fracture beneath him, he notices everyone around him looking backwards, to a past where he may not belong—it’s only natural that his own gaze, later in the novel, will become fixated on the rear-view.
Possibly this was due to my state of mind, but it seemed to me that America, too, was increasingly giving itself over to a dangerous nostalgia at that time. There was something undeniably retro about the flags and uniforms, about generals addressing cameras in war rooms and newspaper headlines featuring such words as duty and honor. I had always thought of America as a nation that looked forward; for the first time I was struck by its determination to look back. Living in New York was suddenly like living in a film about the Second World War; I, a foreigner, found myself staring out at a set that ought to be viewed not in Technicolor but in grainy black and white. What your fellow countrymen longed for was unclear to me—a time of unquestioned dominance? of safety? of moral certainty? I did not know—but that they were scrambling to don the costumes of another era was apparent. I felt treacherous for wondering whether that era was fictitious, and whether—if it could indeed be animated—it contained a part for someone written like me.
It feels unnecessary to belabour the ‘Make America Great Again’ overtones to the America that Changez sees, but what’s perhaps slightly less evident is the role that Changez has found and that he plays throughout the novel: he is narrating his past, in this long monologue, to an American in the Old Anarkali district of Lahore, Pakistan. That is the part written for him—to discuss the mistake of thinking he had a place in America, and the story of his voyage to the homeland. Hamid is riffing on the currybook, too, without directly acknowledging its touchstones. In this story of a young, successful Pakistani who can’t find happiness or a place in America, against a backdrop of terrorism, menace, and everyday racism, Hamid crafts a sinister homecoming, a nostalgia imposed from the outside that drives his protagonist back to the nation where he came from, and makes storytelling and visitations into the past itself a charged weapon against the American who is hearing his story in a state of heightened alertness and fear. As Changez points out, nostalgia can be ‘dangerous.’ It’s not just classic rock and vanilla milkshakes: it’s a close ally of extremism and racism in America, Pakistan, and the rest of the world.
The restricted stories of brown homecoming and nostalgia that form the tropes and clichés of currybooks don’t reflect the variegated, class-divided, and culturally widespread experiences of brown people in the West. They present a comforting, streamlined, and largely untrue version of what brown people were and are, to a multiracial audience of readers who are supposed to recognise themselves or their neighbours. They also continually point to the fact that brown people aren’t from the West, even if they live in the West, even if they were born in the West. A link to one’s genealogical and geographical roots can be fulfilling and enriching, but when it’s imposed on you from the outside that you’re supposed to know and tell these roots, to be able to present the papers that explain your skin to a waiting audience, the homecoming trip feels a little less heartwarming.
Samad Iqbal, a character in Zadie Smith’s 2000 domestic-cultural epic novel White Teeth, carries out the project that Chanu in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane intended: he brings his offspring back to Bangladesh. Chanu, alone in the old country, peacefully comes to the never-the-same-river-twice realisation that his homeland was never the place he remembered it as, and it certainly isn’t the wish-fulfilment he expected when he returns. He’s still himself, in a place that is almost as new to him as England was when he emigrated. Smith’s Samad brings Magid, one of his twin sons, back to Bangladesh. Instead of Samad having produced a tradition-steeped, pious son, Magid becomes an atheist, a scientist, a lover of the modern world. The twin who stays in England, Millat, is the one who has the serious flirtation with fundamentalism and the past, joining a rugged Islamist cult that perpetrates minor acts of terrorism. In keeping with Mark Lilla’s averment that extremism and nostalgia are intimately connected, Millat’s slide into fundamentalism is made possible by his unfamiliarity with the realities of his homeland in combination with his discontentment with London life. His twin has actually made the trip back: the ultimate disillusionment, the actual, inevitably disappointing enactment of homecoming.
A poisonous, crucial element of this imposed expectation is that brown people and their books should look back, into a past and a place that may never have existed. Ash, Malla’s protagonist in Fugue States, is also a writer, and his second novel ‘was supposed to have been “about Kashmir,”’ but his ‘inability to invent characters, resistance to research, misgivings about treating tenuous cultural heritage as material’ prevent him from ever starting this novel. Ash’s father offers his son comments on his attempt at a short story set in Kashmir, remarking on just how many details his son has gotten wrong, from people keeping dogs as pets during the worst of the Troubles to the inclusion of non-existent cobble-stoned streets. ‘You have made the city vague. You have missed its particulars. Where is Dal Lake? One must either go to Kashmir so one might write something accurate or one must write about some place one has been and knows. One has a debt to the people of any forgotten or ignored place.’
Brij, a reader with stern expectations of what a book about the homeland should do, may have it right when he talks about the debt a writer owes to the real people who live in the real places he or she writes about: but does this have anything to do with the invisible contract the writer has with the reader? Ash’s (likely bad) short story about Kashmir could still do something for its audience: it would show the disconnected, racialised writer questing for truth in the past, even if he is inventing that past and place as he feels it out. As Ash considers a trip to Kashmir after his father’s death and the discovery that Brij left an unfinished novel of his own behind, he constantly feels warded off by the burden of cliché, by the pressure of the unseen, page-flipping audience: ‘Besides: brown boy’s dad dies, brown boy flees to the fatherland to discover who he really is? No thanks. I’ve seen that movie and it sucks.’ And: ‘Picture it: me scattering the cremains from some mountain, and then honoring his memory by completing the opus. And then what? People read it and are so moved that peace descends on the valley? Or worse, I win a prize?’
The valley, Kashmir, is part of the audience that Ash imagines, with the prize jab denoting the white literary establishment over in this hemisphere. It’s a broad crowd to imagine ‘explaining’ oneself to: and this is the expectation that Malla told his interviewer he sees imposed on books by South Asian writers. Opening the audience question both ways, as his character does, making writing by South Asians an explanation of Westernised brown people to the East, and an explanation of brownness and the eternal truths of the tumultuous homeland to the West, shows just how multivalent a set of coded clichés can be. Telling the same story of brownness over and over doesn’t only express a coherent notion of race and history to white readers, it creates an impression of commonalities among a brown audience who may come from vastly divided pasts and have little in common in their present, other than they ‘all look the same’ in communities where they’re part of a box-tick minority category.
There are near-infinite tellings of South Asian experience possible, a library labyrinth of potential novels about everything from white serial killers to brown university janitors. It’s just that accepting that diasporic identity is as slippery as personal identity is as thrilling, daunting, and worryingly progressive as acknowledging the total unpredictability of the future and the lack of comfort to be found in the past.