455. Dual Identities

This is the fourth entry in a month-long series, Fifty years in the United States: An immigrant’s perspective, as part of the annual Blogging from A to Z Challenge.

Dual Identities. Back in the seventies there were very few Indians in the United States–Asian Indians, that is. Most of them had immigrated since the passing of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, that did away with the racially discriminatory national origins quota system, which had governed admissions to the country since the 1920s. It wasn’t until the 1980 Census that there was even a separate category for Asian Indians, and not until 2000 when Americans could check more than one ethno-racial category. However, it is estimated that in 1970 there were only 51,000 India-born immigrants in the country, only one half of one percent of all the foreign-born immigrants, and only 6.2 percent of the immigrants from Asia. By 1980 that number had risen to 360,000 and 10% of all Asian immigrants. But most Indian immigrants were living in New York-New Jersey, California, or Illinois.

In the Boston area, the Indian community in the seventies was a tiny one. There was only one Indian grocery store, India Tea and Spices in Cushing Square, Belmont, where we bought our essential ingredients, and where I picked up my first copy of India Abroad, a weekly paper founded in 1970, the year of my arrival in the U.S. (and which discontinued its print edition just last week). There were no other students of Indian origin in my high school nor, to my knowledge, in my college class, unless they managed to operate under the radar, or moved in very different circles from mine.
Every Sunday, IAGB, the Indian Association of Greater Boston, would screen a Hindi movie in MIT’s Kresge Auditorium, in collaboration with Sangam, MIT’s Indian student organization, and the whole community, it seemed, would make the scene, with saris, babies, loud talking all at once in multiple languages, and of course, plenty of snacks. Meanwhile the week’s movie provided the necessary background music and a feeling of home. Sometimes we would go with our friend Subhash, who knew all the songs and all the names of the stars. He named his son Amitabh, after Amitabh Bachchan, of course.

At that time the Boston-area Indian community was so small that just meeting an Indian was remarkable enough for me to go home and tell my family about it. It wasn’t until later in the decade that we would start to use the broader term “South Asian” to describe ourselves, to assert solidarity and commonality with our fellow subcontinentals: Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Nepalis, even the odd Burmese. And it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that I began to see myself as “Asian American.”

But in any case, “identity” wasn’t a thing back in the seventies, not for me anyway. For one thing, you had to have a community to have an identity, and I didn’t. In April 1977 the Combahee River Collective, a group of black feminists, issued a statement.  In it, they asserted their differences from the predominantly white, middle-class American  women’s movement and coined the term identity politics to describe the need for women of color to focus on their own oppression, rather than be subsumed under a larger umbrella that claimed to speak for them but in fact silenced them. Was I silenced? I don’t suspect that anyone who knew me would say so now, but I frequently felt obliged to be different things to different people.

Source: SAADA

Soon after I graduated from college in 1975, India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency and, in a series of Draconian moves, arrested many opposition political leaders, and muzzled the press. The Indian community in the U.S. hadn’t yet come of age, but it galvanized into action, organizing for the restoration of democracy, demonstrating at Indian consulates, speaking out on the issue at public meetings, making documentaries on the subject, writing speeches, articles, and letters to the editor, signing petitions, hosting speakers from India, and generally bringing global pressure to bear on Mrs. Gandhi to live up to India’s reputation as the world’s largest democracy. I became active in that effort as part of a group of mostly graduate students in and around MIT and Harvard, and these like-minded people from every country in South Asia became my fast friends. Together we forged a community of support and solidarity.

At the same time, I also found myself getting heavily involved in the flowering anti-nuclear movement, galvanized by the Clamshell Alliance’s opposition to the construction of the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plants in New Hampshire. For seven years, from 1977 to 1984 when our son was born, Andrew and I printed posters and bumper stickers, marched, organized civil disobedience (with me, not yet holding American citizenship, as a member of the support team), rallies, marches, and pickets, engaged in debates with nuclear industry spokesmen, published newspapers and magazines, wrote letters, speeches, press releases, and papers, and attended too many meetings to count.

The funny thing was, there was no overlap between these two groups, my South Asian activist friends and my anti-nuclear friends. So different were they that I found myself taking on a completely different identity in each, even to the extent that each  knew me by a different name. My group household consisted of young white Americans, all anti-nuclear activists, members of a food cooperative, living an “alternative” lifestyle (what would have been called countercultural back in the sixties). They wore faded denim jeans and plaid flannel shirts and listened to punk rock and the Grateful Dead. My South Asian cohort, most of whom lived in the same general neighborhood, were a little older and more highly educated, getting married and completing PhDs. Like my white American friends most of them came from respectable upper-middle-class families but had become more social and politically conscious after coming to the U.S. They were secular, intellectual and highly serious, opposed race, class, and caste discrimination, and lived for study and argument. My anti-nuke friends knew nothing of my life with my South Asian friends, and my South Asian friends thought the No Nukes crowd were naïve, earthy-crunchy, and not very serious.

In my group household I always knew when a phone call had come in from an Indian friend because one of my roommates would answer and when they heard the voice on the other end of the line their tone would change. “Jyotsna”, they’d call out to me teasingly, using the Indian form of my name and emphasizing the ‘y’ and the ‘t’, “phone for you.” There was only one fellow-South Asian, Hayat, who was active in the anti-nuclear movement at the time and I was overjoyed when I met her. Andrew and I printed the wedding invitations for her and Joseph and we became lifelong friends. There were a handful of friends in the South Asian group who accepted me as I was, rather than seeing me as a bit of an oddball. One of them was a couple whose apartment we all practically lived in and whose wedding celebration Andrew and I attended. We also became lifelong friends and, more than 40 years later, we had the pleasure of attending their daughter’s wedding. Only one of the group took the anti-nuclear movement as seriously as I did and I loved him for it. Then there were my mixed group of friends who didn’t belong to either group, with whom I shared a love of music, literature, and social concerns. Boy, were they a breath of fresh air!

I don’t know what the moral of this story is, except that if I have any identity at all it is plural; that, like everyone else, ‘I’ am made up of an infinity of constantly shifting and evolving elements. But there is another ‘I’ who looks on at this play of identities with amusement and waits for me to quiet down, drop my masks and performances, and just be. The people with whom I feel the most at ease know and love (or are annoyed by, as the case may be) the many parts of me. In my youthful insecurity, I tried too hard to fit in with the norms of one group or another, wanting to be liked, approved of, accepted. Nowadays I still hold back on sensitive subjects depending on the group I’m with, sometimes out of tact, sometimes out of respect. But older now, I am what I am, and what others think doesn’t matter so much to me anymore.

America of 2020 is a very different place from what it was half-a-century ago. As of April 2019 there were nearly 5.4 million people of South Asian origin in the United States, more than four million of them claiming either a singular or a mixed Indian identity. My heart doesn’t leap anymore when a South Asian passes me by on the street. Racism, xenophobia, and social segregation have not abated, however, and questions of identity are still fraught and hard to negotiate. But there has been cross-fertilization and change as a new generation of South Asian Americans have become engaged in all kinds of social activism both in the U.S. and in South Asia. In the 1970s there was no group like today’s South Asians for Climate Justice, which could have brought my disparate worlds together.

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