EXPATRIATES

Indian in America

Notes of a non-resident Indian: The voice of a new cultural politics.

AMITAVA KUMAR

PHOTOGRAPHS: AMITAVA KUMAR

A WELL-KNOWN short-story by A.K. Ramanujan, "Annayya's Anthropology", details the shock of a young Kannadiga man's discovery of his own family's history in a book of anthropology in the United States. In the story, Annayya is in Chicago, turning the page s of a book in the library stacks. The book, Hinduism: Custom and Ritual, is by a Ford Foundation scholar named Fergusson. The young Brahmin marvels at the American anthropologist's knowledge about India's culture, and says: "You want self-knowled ge? You should come to America. Just as the Mahatma had to go to jail and sit behind bars to write his autobiography. Or as Nehru had to go to England to discover India. Things are clearer only when looked at from a distance."

When looked at from a distance, it is not only India that takes on another shape. It is also the Indian in America who needs to be understood differently. Against the ordinary stereotype of the privileged non-resident Indian (NRI), can there be found sig ns of disturbing contradictions and even promising possibilities?

Hailing a yellow cab

On a recent night in New York City, Rizwan Raja, a young driver from Islamabad who works at a bank during the day to make both ends meet, sat down with me for dinner. We were in a small Pakistani restaurant called Chenab, at 40th Street and 9th Avenue, a few minutes away from the bright lights of Times Square.

Raja talked repeatedly about the 10 to 12-hour shifts which are common among South Asian drivers who are mostly lease drivers, purchasing leases on their cabs for anything between $550 and $700 a week. "Basically, when I came to this country," Raja said, "I had big hopes. I wanted to go up in life. I had an accounting degree. I was hopeful of getting a job. I applied to two or three places. I was told I couldn't get hired. My hopes had a downfall."

Images of Liberty, Staten Island, New York.

In this story of the loss of the American Dream, we find glimpses of the realities of the new class of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent. To quote Raja again: "Those of us who have come in the 90s from South Asia, we are doing the work that no one else does: the gas stations, the cabs, restaurant workers, street vendors. Do you know that while the legal minimum wage is $5.16 or $5.25, the minimum wage for restaurant workers is only $1.75?"

The class with which Raja is aligning himself here is the one that the more prosperous immigrants to the U.S. from South Asia regard as "the spoilers". In an April 1998 article in The New York Times Magazine, Tunku Varadarajan reported that among various ethnic or racial groups, "only Russians have a median household income ($45,778) higher than the Indians here ($44,696)." The rich, professional South Asians in Varadarajan's report have a lot they do not like in America: blacks top the list, the n the Hispanics, and, of course, their fellow South Asian cab-drivers.

When Varadarajan's Wall Street interlocutors complain that the cab-drivers are "lowering the tone" or that they are "spoiling things for us", they - these former citizens of the Third World - imagine they already have a piece of the American Dream.

Rizwan Raja has not told his bosses at the bank that he drives a cab at night. He hears his fellow-workers in the bank talk about drivers. Speaking about one of his colleagues, an Indian woman, he says, "Whenever she talks of taxi-drivers, she tries to s eparate them from the (larger) community." And yet, if one looks at films and television shows, the quickest way to find an Indian is by hailing a yellow cab.

Finding a role

A theatre review entitled "Taxi Strike" appeared in the June 23, 1998 issue of Village Voice. Its subject was Aasif Mandvi's one-man show "Sakina's Restaurant". The review commented that "it unfortunately comes as no surprise that the Bombay-born actor had to write (the play) for himself." "There's a dearth of South Asian roles on the New York state," the review went on, "and had he relied on the typical job offers from film or TV he might still be playing cab-drivers. From The Cosby Mysteries to Die Hard With A Vengeance (in which Bruce Willis stole his taxi), Mandvi has run the gamut of South Asian stereotypes." The performer, Mandvi, was also quoted in the review: "I refuse to play a cab-driver again unless they are paying me an extremely obnoxious amount of money."

While watching "Sakina's Restaurant" at the American Place Theatre, I could not but help think that the idea of a play based at an East Sixth Street Indian restaurant is also in itself an ethnic cliche. Every time an American, a stranger, on our first me eting tells me that they love Indian food, I cannot even say, "I thank you - on behalf of Indian food." In Mandvi's play, however, in which young Azgi promises his mother in India that he will write to her "from the top of the Empire State Building and t he bottom of the Grand Canyon, even from Cleveland, home of all the Indians," the idea of America is hollowed out as a cliche and filled with the truths of the immigrant condition. Somewhere, the idea of "Have a Nice Day. Welcome to K-Mart" gets translat ed into Azgi's sense of puzzled wonder at new realities that accost us and the need to make sense of, for example, the money being paid to a stripper at a bachelorette party for Sakina which makes Azgi say: "In India, for 200 dollars, I'd run around nake d for one week!"

Frantz Fanon, writing on the topic of "National Culture" in his famous treatise The Wretched of the Earth, delineated three stages of writing in the colonies. The first stage would be that of slavish imitation of the colonial culture; the second s tage would be one of complete rejection of the colonial culture and a retreat into the traditional culture of the pre-colonial times; and the third and final stage would be one of creative independence from the rigid demands of either acceptance or denia l.

How does this schema play out in the diasporic setting? I do not know. The South-Asian Sakina shouts at her white ex-boyfriend for telling his present girl-friend who has just called Sakina a "nigger" that "Sakina's not a nigger, she's Iranian." At that moment, Mandavi is quite emphatically contesting the plain, wide-ranging ignorance and complicitous prejudices of white America. More than that, however, what Mandvi's play means to me is that it is beginning to happen here in the U.S. - the adoption of a strong, unconstrained narrative voice, to give artistic expression to South Asian experience, free not only of stereotypes but also the binding pressure of always, necessarily, perforce having to respond to stereotypes set by the dominant culture.

Where the people dwell

"Free from didacticism" isn't quite the phrase I want, though that is a small part of it too; perhaps what I really want to say is that, beyond the uncomplicated opposition that didactic exercises represent, is the exploration of complex contradictions t hat shape the details of diverse immigrant lives. Our writing needs to approach that inventive difficulty. I believe that is what Fanon had in mind too when he exhorted radical, post-colonial intellectuals to come to that "zone of occult instability wher e the people dwell."

Last summer, for the first time, a pan-Asian theatre group in New York City, "Peeling the Banana", worked with South Asian youth in Elmhurst, Queens ("the most diverse zip code in the country"), to produce an evening of performances at the Papp Public Th eatre. "Peeling the Banana" is an arts collective that draws upon autobiography in order to, quite literally, perform the tasks of community building and political expression. The youth group, South Asian Youth Action (SAYA!), was founded only two years ago and aims to bring social and cultural empowerment to immigrant South Asian youth. The youth, with the older members of the theatre group, participated in various skits that portrayed various facets of their lives: travelling on the Number 7 train, a train that some New Yorkers dub "the Orient Express"; tales also of falling in and out of love; stories of "coming out" and "arranged marriages" and so on. "Peeling the Banana" members such as Tamina Davar and Geeta Reddy performed skits about racial har assment in New Jersey and New York City. Hugo Mahabir and Ngo Thanh Nhan presented a brief skit called "Cabacus" that dramatised the arithmetic of cab-driving and ended with a call for a strike by exploited cab-drivers.

An Indian cab-driver features in a display in a subway station in New York City.

In many ways, this is the work that needs to be done, and not only because it involves the youth as well as the audience in the task of learning about - and speaking out on - the condition of South Asian lives. More crucially, there is a specificity here that demands attention. This is the specificity of recognising the stage at which the narrativisation of South Asian immigrant lives is. I was reminded of the Web site of a West Coast, South Asian theatre group, "Chaat", where the following lines from a review appear on the screen: "Chaat organisers revel in defying the docile Indian American penchant for middle-class nirvana... The Indian-American community prides itself on its success, but its narrow-minded fixation of the prerequisites of middle-cla ss life have robbed the community of a narrative voice that can provide a much-needed mirror to its soul."

Against middle-class nirvana, we have working-class protest; against the romance of hetero-normative assimilation, we have the resistant strains of unassimilable difference.

U.S. sojourners

Yet, whose words are these? Rather, who are they shared with? How widely do they spread? I find myself returning to the words with which Mandavi ended his play: " 'This is not me. This was not supposed to be my life.' Everyone speaking my words, everyone except me. Where did I go, ma? What happened to the top of the Empire State Building? The bottom of the Grand Canyon?"

In a story for The New York Times in 1997, Somini Sengupta wrote of "a distinctly South Asian youth culture, rooted in hip-hop and Hindi pop, flourishing in New York City." In Sengupta's report on the deejays and music fans at Planet 28 in Chelsea , I want to see an answer to Mandavi's question. Here are the children of the immigrants producing their own, inevitably mixed culture. The words that Azgi seems to have lost now return in the new sounds of the youth, with new inflections and also streng th.

Volunteers of Sakhi, a women's organisation, at the India Day parade on Madison Avenue, New York City, 1997.

This emergence is also a condition of a new fusion. The cultural critic, George Lipsitz, remarks on the possibility of coalitions when he notes in Dangerous Crossroads, "One survey showed that more than eighty per cent of West Indians and more tha n forty per cent of East Indians felt that they had more in common with British whites than with each other... Yet, alliances between Southwest Asians and other groups that might appear unlikely in political life already exist within popular culture." Li psitz provides us an example, "For Apache Indian, the 'street' is a place where Afro-Caribbean and South Asian youth learn from each other."

Our South Asian immigrant acts must sustain such dialogue. Our stories are also the stories of others. Let me make this point by quoting another story by Somini Sengupta, also from the pages of The New York Times last year. The report was entitled "U.S. Sojourn Ends in Debt, and Death by Burial". Luis Gomez, 32, a construction worker, was buried alive in a six-foot hole. This worker had spent $7,000 to get to America from his native Ecuador and was still working to clear that debt. He hoped somed ay to be able to send money to his wife and six children. Now, his younger brother Lucas would need to continue working in order to pay off new costs. Sengupta concluded her story thus: "It will cost about $6,000 to send Luis back to his hometown, Cuenca - almost as much as it cost to bring him to New York."

Our stories are also the stories of the immigrants of the past. The tale of Luis Gomez recalls so vividly the figure of Pietro Di Donato's Christ in Concrete. Opening a dialogue across time and changing global patterns of immigration, it also reminds us of the words of a 19th century Italian story. Those words are to be found engraved in one of Janet Goldner's sculptures, in the Sara Delano Roosevelt Park on the lower East Side: "When I got here I found out three things: first, the streets weren't paved with gold; second, they weren't paved at all; and third, I was expected to pave them."

I want to emphasise these words because, separated only by a few pages from Sengupta's moving story about the dead immigrant worker, was a full-page advertisement in The New York Times for an internet service that hid from us the stories of the hi gh-tech braceros, the new immigrant workers from countries such as India. The advertisement showed the Statue of Liberty in the distance, and, inscribed in bold letters beneath it, was the promise "The Streets Of America Are Paved With Gold And Soon They 'll Be Lined With Fiber-Optic Cable."

Amitava Kumar, currently a Fellow at Yale University, teaches English at the University of Florida. He is the author of No Tears for the N.R.I.(Writers Workshop, Calcutta) and Passport Photos (University of California Press, Berkeley, f orthcoming). His writing has appeared most recently in Critical Inquiry, Race and Class, Rethinking Marxism, and The Nation. Kumar has recently completed an award-winning, collaborative documentary film, Pure Chutney.