Becoming Indian

In the summer of 1986, a police constable on a bicycle came to my home in the city of Patna to conduct an inquiry. This visit was in response to my application for a passport. Two weeks later, my passport was ready. I was 23 years old, preparing to come to the United States to attend a graduate program in literature. Did I first become Indian when I acquired my passport?

If so, it would be paradoxical that I became Indian at the very moment I was most eager to get away from India.

But there must have been earlier occasions.

I was 8 when Bangladesh was liberated with the help of the Indian Army in December 1971. I had a vague sense that the Indian armed forces, and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, had beaten the Pakistanis and that they had also outfoxed the rotund man with thick glasses in newspaper photographs, Henry Kissinger. Maybe it was then that I adopted my nascent national identity?

When I was a little older, my father’s job took us to Bokaro, a city in eastern India where the Russians had helped build a steel factory. One day, I met the Russian engineers and their families at an event where they were giving out gifts, including pins with Vladimir Lenin’s head on them. This first real encounter with foreigners, maybe this was the day when I thought of myself as Indian?

I’m forgetting something.

From my early childhood, my family would travel from our ancestral village in Champaran to a nearby town across the border in Nepal. This was in pre-liberalization India, when markets were closed to foreign products. In Nepal, we could buy Chinese and Japanese products. For our trip back, women hid new chiffon sarees under their garments. In my pockets, I would have anything from a new transistor radio to a sleek camera or just a pack of peppermint-flavored Wrigley’s gum. My first typewriter, a red portable Brother, was bought during one of these trips not long after I had entered college.

Passports were not required during these visits to Nepal. The cycle rickshaws we hired trundled past the customs crossing without rigorous checks. But what I want to say is that the knowledge that I was breaking the law (smuggling!) weighed on me more than the issue of national difference.

Now that I think about it, a sense of a self and the idea of this self also inhabiting a particular place, a place as large as a country, only came to me when I saw the outlines of a national literature, that is, when I had grasped the notion of a body of literature that told our stories. In other words, sometime during my late teens I became Indian because I had acquired a complex language—a gift given by writers who had come before me—that described the people and places around me.

Watch a live discussion about the magazine’s India issue with editor-in-chief Ravi Agrawal here.

I admired the grasp that Khushwant Singh, Dom Moraes, Anita Desai, Nayantara Sahgal, Ved Mehta, and a young Salman Rushdie had on a broad but also intimate language that established them as Indian, one that embraced history, landscape, people, and their mixed identities. Singh’s 1956 novel, Train to Pakistan, in particular was instructive about the history of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs having lived together peaceably and then, caught in the cataclysm of history, transforming into each other’s murderers. Even V.S. Naipaul, born in distant Trinidad, was Indian because he had so accurately, if dyspeptically, depicted the spaces in which was staged the drama of our large and untidy collective identity.

I should clarify that I wasn’t at all fluent in that language myself. In fact, I felt quite inadequate. In the 1980s, when I entered my 20s, India saw riots, a huge industrial disaster in Bhopal, and the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the killings of Sikhs that followed it. But it was as if I was looking at these events standing mutely behind thick glass. More years would pass before I could employ a vocabulary to communicate in that language of national belonging and translate that trauma onto the page in hopes of a reckoning.

A planned effort by an organized, ultranationalist party had unleashed the demon of hatred in Indian society.

By the time a Hindu mob destroyed the old mosque in the city of Ayodhya on Dec. 6, 1992, I was ready to speak out. I recognized that a planned effort by an organized, ultranationalist party had unleashed the demon of hatred in Indian society. I was finishing my doctoral studies at the time and saw zealots from my own Hindu community in the United States donating gold bricks for the construction of a temple on the disputed site. In the books I wrote over the ensuing decade, Passport Photos and then Bombay-London-New York, I argued that in the Indian diaspora, the soft emotion of nostalgia had been turned into the hard emotion of fundamentalism.

In the early 1990s, I was also training to be a scholar of postcolonial literature—a term describing, for the most part, the literature of countries in Africa and Asia that had achieved freedom from colonialism. My peers included people from Ethiopia, Ireland, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan. When we read, say, Rushdie or Jamaica Kincaid, Nadine Gordimer or Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Edward Said or Nawal El Saadawi, we were focusing on critiques of colonialism and its lingering history.

The freedom struggles of our own countries had been carried out under the flag of nationalism. But decades after independence, it was difficult to ignore the actions of our own governments run by the privileged and the powerful. We faulted our own postcolonial states for having produced parodies of nationalism.

But this produced a peculiar problem. If one said anything negative about India, for instance, one invited the charge of representing the “colonial mindset.” There was the criticism of writing in English, also that of living abroad. All variety of narrow nationalists accused my field of postcolonial studies of being inauthentic, a prisoner of the Western mentality that had traditionally looked down on the countries of the East. This situation was rich with irony.

In 2002, riots in the state of Gujarat killed, by official count, 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus, though other estimates place the total number killed as high as 2,000. The chief minister of Gujarat at that time was Narendra Modi, and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was also in power in New Delhi. In the aftermath of the riots, I reported from Ahmedabad’s relief camps for Muslim refugees and carried on my investigations into religious violence elsewhere, including in various parts of Kashmir. My writings earned me a place on a “hit list” run by Hindu ultranationalists in the United States, and BJP supporters accused me of being anti-Hindu and anti-India. India’s right wing saw me as a foreigner.

We faulted our own postcolonial states for having produced parodies of nationalism.

The Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore, a part of whose song “Bharoto Bhagyo Bidhata” was adopted as India’s national anthem, wrote in a 1917 essay that “nationalism is a great menace.” The sense of a national identity always relies on the idea of an “other” who is the enemy; in the case of India, it is not only a traditional rival such as Pakistan but also the enemy within, the non-Hindu, most commonly the Muslim. Since the BJP’s rise to power under Modi in 2014, Muslims have been fixed as that dirty, undesirable “other.” In the nationalist consciousness, they are the true non-Indians.

Tagore was warning us against what he called “social slavery” that “impels us to make the life of our fellow-beings a burden to them where they differ from us even in such a thing as their choice of food.” More than a century after Tagore wrote his essay, his words appear like grim prophecy when mobs have lynched Muslims in different parts of India on the suspicion of eating beef. In 2014, Modi supporters attempted to send prominent writer U.R. Ananthamurthy a ticket for a flight to Pakistan when he expressed strong opposition to the election of Modi and the BJP that year. The Hindu ultra-
nationalists would like to send to Pakistan—alongside India’s Muslims—all those Indian citizens who dare dissent and whom they call “anti-nationals.”

This year’s inauguration of the Ram temple at the site of the demolished mosque in Ayodhya, with the prime minister administering the rites, achieved the BJP’s goal of deifying the Indian nationalist identity as Hindu. The frenzied state-aided celebrations, the kowtowing in the media, and the establishment of a mythical history as a near-constitutional fact put the seal of majoritarianism on everyday life.

The recent events represent the culmination of a process that has upended all that was meant by “postcolonial.” For me and many others, to be postcolonial was to share a sense of historical kinship with others who had suffered under the lash of colonialism. Chinua Achebe spoke to us, and Kincaid was recognizable to us, because they were witnesses to what our countries, too, had experienced. To be postcolonial also entailed the right to critique our current regimes, because our tainted present wasn’t what we had been promised, and this mandated a fight for greater equality and the rule of law. Yet Hindu ultranationalists no longer talk of British rule as colonial conquest. Instead, for them, it is the arrival of Mughal armies 500 years ago, and the Islamic dynasty they established, that signals the onset of colonialism.

This is a cunning strategy on the part of the BJP and its increasing ranks of faithful followers. By painting the Muslim as the enemy, the Hindu right succeeds in consolidating the Hindu vote across caste and class lines, all unified in opposition to ever more marginalized minorities. Prices, unemployment, and economic inequality are all rising, but we need not address those problems because our leaders have told us that the real danger is 14.2 percent of India’s population.

Am I Indian? Yes, if it means finding the common cause of freedom across religious lines. No, if it means the idolatry of a nation built around a singular religious identity and the cult worship of a single leader.