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The three homes of Amitabh: The changing concept of home in an Indian student's life in America

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The three homes of Amitabh: The changing concept of home in an Indian student's life in America

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THE THREE HOMES OF AMITABH:
THE CHANGING CONCEPT OF HOME IN AN INDIAN STUDENT'S LIFE IN
AMERICA
by
Anirban Roy
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHTERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(Visual Anthropology)
August 1996
Copyright 1996 Anirban Roy
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UMI Number: 1381605
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UNIVERSITY O F SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA S0Q07
This thesis, •written by
ANiRBAN ROY_______
under the direction of AiS Thesis Committee,
and approved by a ll its members, has been pre
sented to and accepted by the Dean of The
Graduate School, in p a rtial fu lfillm e n t o f the
requirements fo r the degree of
. at
Masters Arts
Dtam
Z ? a f g ^ A u g 3 X S J L - ^ Q . , . . . 1 . 9 . 9 . 6 -
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Dedicated to my friend
Somnath Sen
who taught me the most about everyday life in America
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This project would not have been possible without the
support of many friends who shared the burden of every
difficulty I faced, whether during the production of the
film or in the writing of the thesis.
First and foremost, I would like to thank my friend and
informant Amitabh Barthakur for agreeing to devote his time
and energy towards this project. I consider his willingness
to be in the spotlight as a sign of distinctive courage. My
gratitude extends towards others whom I interviewed/filmed:
Hemen Barthakur, Sunita Borgohain, Aditi Raychowdhuri,
Anirudh Mukerjee and Gautam Bhatia.
I would like to thank my thesis committee - Professors
Peter Biella, Fadwa El Guindi, and especially Soo-Young
Chin, without whose encouragement and advice I would still
be stuck on the first chapter of this thesis. I also want
to express gratitude towards Karen Aragon, Professor
Alexander Moore and Dennis Miranda of the Department of
Anthropology at the University of Southern California for
removing many obstacles I faced during this project.
For support - intellectual and emotional - I want to
thank my partner and friend Gillian Goslinga, who has always
i i i
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been there for me when I felt discouraged. Deborah Mandel
helped me pull myself together when I was ready to quit the
program. I owe her many thanks. Other friends like Somy
Mukherjee, Kaustav Mitra, and Subharanjan Das have helped in
various ways - from pointing out useful citations to keeping
the computer manning. Todd Sali helped me in my battle with
equipment and technology. Thank you all!
The shooting of the film in India was particularly
difficult because of the dearth of funds. I would like to
thank my brother Amitabh Roy and my friend Indrajit Natoji
for taking care of my finances while I was in India. Smita
Vats, a dear friend and an established film director in her
own right, took time off her busy schedule to help me shoot
in Tezpur. Wituout her, the film would not have been
possible. For technical support in India, I would like to
thank C. B. Arun of BITV, A. Tyagaraju and Chinmay Khatri of
NDTV, and Rajiv Jain of CENDIT.
Last but certainly not the least, I would like to thank
my parents for giving me my first home, and a very clear
identity as an Indian.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication ii
Acknowledgement Hi
Chapter I
Introduction 1
1 Methodology and Rationale 3
2 Amitabh 7
3 Representer and Represented 14
4 Organization of Chapters 17
Chapter II
From Town to City:
Seeking the Childhood of Amitabh 20
1 Hemen and Ela's story 21
2 Jintu 24
3 The English Medium Schools 29
4 The City 31
Chapter III
The Metropolis:
The Emerging Adulthood 3 5
1 The Entrance Examinations 3 6
2 New Delhi 3 9
3 The Sixties in the Eighties 41
4 Sunita 46
5 "Life Goes On" 48
6 Vernacular Architecture 51
7 The Departure 54
Chapter IV
Homes:
India and America 58
1 The Contrast 58
2 The Conflicts 62
3 "India is Home" 65
4 The American Home 70
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Chapter V
Nostalgia and Identity:
Through Western Eyes 76
1 Seeking an Identity in Chaos 79
2 Here and Now 87
Chapter VI
Conclusion 94
Bibliography 98
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Chapter I
INTRODUCTION
You do not understand me.
I am tidying my life
In this cold, tidy country.
I am filling a small shelf
With my books. If you should find me crying
As often when I was a child
You will know I have reason to..1
A young Goan named Dorn Moraes, who later was to become
one of India's ambassadors to English literature, wrote
these lines in a poem he called Letter to my Mother. At
that time he was completing his education in England. Forty
years later, Amitabh and many other Indian migrant students2
like him have more reasons, and perhaps more excuses, to be
away from home.
Amitabh is not a political refugee, nor did any dire
economic situation force him to come to a foreign land. His
was a conscious and voluntary decision. He came to the
United States of America for "higher education" (Masters in
Building Science3, to be specific) . On the surface, the
cause seems simple and justified. However, for many who
1 Dom Moraes; Collected Poems; 1987:108.
2 Technically, Amitabh and other students like him are 'resident alien'
or migrant students in the United States. But more often than not, they
eventually proceed to become 'permanent residents,' or immigrants.
3 Building Science falls under the broader discipline of Architecture.
1
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have grown up in the so called developing countries, there
is often more than "higher education" or the subsequent
"standard of living" involved. In an interview Amitabh
explained:
I have an FI visa. It means that I am a
student, and the sole purpose of me being in
this country is education. However, that
might be only a small part in the bigger
picture, in the bigger plan so to say. The
FI visa is simply the beginning of a new way
of life for many.
Taking one step after another in this fashion, many
students like Amitabh have engaged in the process of
redefining their home for themselves. Along with the
obvious change of habitat, there are apparent changes in
values, philosophy, customs, habit — almost everything that
constitutes the emotional and physical entity called "home."
As Amitabh puts it, "...there are sacrifices and
compromises, but you still go ahead and exchange one home
for another, one dream for another. ”
This thesis examines the process of redefining "home."
It explores the reasons why a student like Amitabh would
have such a tremendous disposition towards chasing the
American Dream. The process of realizing the dream forced
Amitabh to sacrifice certain foundational elements of his
earlier home. These elements, like the security of a
network of friends and family in India, an active sense of
2
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past, and a sense of belongingness, were replaced by
individualism, nostalgia, and a sense of rootlessness. This
thesis evaluates these sacrifices against the dream.
Though this paper is written in a fashion that it can
stand on its own, it is important to mention here that this
paper is a part of a bigger project which includes a
documentary film on Amitabh's life, titled Portrait of a
Friend4.
1.1 METHODOLOGY AND RATIONALE
There is an abundance of detailed research on
migration. The focus of most of this research5 is on broad
issues such as history of migration, patterns of migration
and causes of migration. Many scholars have also reflected,
analyzed and critiqued life after migration and subsequent
changes of various aspects of life. It is interesting to
note that most of these studies are in the shape of
biographies of prominent persons of society. In these
works, the past is often ‘unfrozen' and re-presented to the
reader (Venkatramaiah, 1979) . Only very recently have a
handful of scholars attempted to observe the phenomenon of
migration as a process of change at the moment of change.
* At the time of writing of this thesis, the film Portrait of a Friend
is at a rough cut stage. The finished film will be available for
viewing at the Department of Anthropology of the University of Southern
California from September 1996 onwards.
5 See Journal of International Migration, 1995.
3
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Of those who have done so, very rarely has anyone treated an
individual as the subject of study. Instead, most scholars
have turned to study the community. In other words, only a
few works have been published on the life histories of
'ordinary' people going through the extended process of
migration, as they are going through it. This thesis is one
such study which attempts ot fill this gap.
There are very few published non-fictional accounts of
the lives of Indian students in search of the American
Dream. This is all the more surprising because the present
demographic trend6 shows that the size and importance of the
Indian student community in the United States is increasing
steadily. A trip to Silicon Valley in California, the Mecca
of the American computer industry, will reveal how a
thriving young Indian community — formed by those who come
to this country as students, and stay back to work as
professionals — has gradually established itself in this
backbone sector of the American economy. The changes in the
lives of these students-tumed-professionals, their changing
worldview, their acculturation, their reflections at the
past, their projections into the future and analysis of
other such facets of their 'new' life remain generalized in
figures and trends, or at best objectified observations.
What is flagrantly missing from these abstracted general
6 See The USEFI Journal, August 1994. (USEFI stands for United States
Educational Foundation in India.)
4
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studies is the experience of such changes from close
quarters. In other words, what is missing is the story of
these lives. This led me to consider the life story
approach as a research method.
One may ask why should the life history method be
chosen over others to explore such a social circumstance.
Before answering this question it is important to look at
what these social circumstances pertain to, both at the
community/social level and at a personal level. While the
apparent economic motivation to search for a better way of
life may be a social phenomenon that every such student is
bom to, the often painful process of leaving a way of life
behind and standing face to face with an alien culture, is
phenomenon that each student goes through alone, never as a
group. While the individual personal reasons behind this
form of migration sum up to create the social or econo
political phenomenon, the process of creating a new home is
far more a personal experience than a social one.
Mandelbaum (1973) makes the important and helpful
distinction between "life passage studies" and the "life
history" in Study of Life History: Gandhi:
Life passage (or life cycle) studies
emphasize the requirements of society... Life
history studies, in contrast, emphasize the
experiences and requirements of the
individual - how the person copes with
society rather than how society copes with
the stream of individuals, (p.177)
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A life passage study might, then, give the reader a clear
understanding of phenomena like "brain drain" or "collective
identity" or "how society copes with a stream of
individuals," but it will hardly be insightful when it comes
to under standing issues like an individual's fear of
alienation in a silently hostile society, or the role of
nostalgia in assuaging the dual morality that has been
established in a student's psyche by western ideologies and
traditional Indian way of life.
Nothing can effectively substitute the life history
method for the purposes of achieving a sense of nearness to
the informant and the core issues of his/her life. The life
history method, as outlined in Langness and Frank's (1991)
definitive compendium and study, Lives: An Anthropological
Approach to Biography, combines in depth and longitudinal
one-on-one interviewing with a subject and persons around
that subject, with techniques of participant observation.
Its strength lies in its willingness to enter the personal
and human dimension of a person's life with the express
purpose of locating the meaning that person attributes to
events experienced. This allows for genuine insight into
the "native's point of view." (p.29) Langness and Frank
identify this objective as the key goal of anthropology: "To
present the insider's view of a culture has long been one of
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the stated goals of the profession of anthropology and those
who have provided life histories." (p.29)
1.2 AMITABH: Cosmopolitan by birth, alien by
choice
In the moving essay Reflections on Exile, Edward Said
(1990) wrote that exile is a state where one is torn "from
the nourishment of tradition, family and geography." (p.358)
Is the dilemma the same when the estrangement is self
imposed? Is the pain the same if the person concerned is
already a cosmopolitan7?
For students like Amitabh, the severing of the
umbilical chord is a slower and more open ended process.
His arrival in the United States can be considered only a
symbolic 'beginning.' This is so because Amitabh is not
quintessentially and timelessly Indian, as the Western
imagination would have it. Encultured from birth in a
hybrid culture of Indian and the Western8, he is a product
7 On cosmopolitanism, Ulf Hannerz (1990) wrote:
The perspective of the cosmopolitan must entail relationships to a
plurality of cultures understood as distinctive entities. (And
the more the better; cosmopolitans should ideally be foxes rather
than hedgehogs.) But furthermore, cosmopolitanism in a stricter
sense includes a stance toward diversity itself, toward the
coexistence of cultures in the individual experience, (p.239)
8 The British Raj (1857 - 1947) left behind in India the legacy of
Queen's English and the famed British beauraucracy. But the Western
influence that Amitabh's generation experienced, came from further west:
from across the Atlantic.
7
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of both and neither at the same time. Arjun Appadurai
(1990) hints at the birth of this new hybrid culture,
More often, the homogenization argument
subspeciates into either an argument about
Americanization, or an argument about
'commoditization', and very often the two
arguments are closely linked. What these
arguments fail to consider is that at least
as rapidly as forces from various
metropolises are brought into new societies
they tend to become indigenized in one or
other way: this is true of music and housing
styles as much as it is true of science and
terrorism, spectacles and constitutions.
(p.295)
That Amitabh had already experienced an 'indigenized'
West in India is the reason his world view is essentially
and by necessity a "layered vision" (Kellner, 1985). As
Kellner points out,
A strong adaptive process sets in at the
individual level as society offers more and
more options in the way the world can be
looked at.... Often the individual finds it
beneficial to view the world from different
vantage points. In that sense, [the
individual] point of view is
scattered...(p.122)
From birth, Amitabh and his cohorts have learnt, as
Amitabh puts it, "to switch channels between one culture and
another. And, sometimes you see more than one channel at
the same time!"
Amitabh Barthakur was bom in 1970 in Tezpur, a small
town in the Assam, a Northeastern state of India. Amitabh's
8
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parents had what is described in India as a 'love marriage. '
Given the social circumstances in the 1950's, a 'love
marriage' was indeed a bold stance against the social norm.
This, as Amitabh's father puts it, "raised many eyebrows in
both the families. ' Most Indians at that time got married
traditionally, which meant 'arranged marriage. ' The couple
did not have a child for many years. Just as they were
getting ready to settle down to a life without a child,
Amitabh was conceived. Perhaps because of this, Amitabh has
been, as he admits, an extremely doted upon son all along.
Bom to a father who is an educator, Amitabh took to books
at a very early age. His first school was an Assamese
medium primary school housed in a mud building. At the age
of eight he was enrolled in The Central School. From here
started his 'English medium' education. Today, English is
the language in which he is most expressive in. "In that
sense," he says, "English is my first language."
In the book Hunger of Memory, Richard Rodriguez (1982)
makes a case of how 'public' language changes the world view
of an immigrant child and how it influences almost every
aspect of the child's orientation towards society. He
writes,
Once I learned the public language (English) ,
it would never again be easy for me to hear
intimate family voices. More and more my day
was spent hearing words. But that may only
be a way of saying that the day I raised my
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hand in class and spoke loudly to an entire
roomful of faces, my childhood started to
end. (p. 28)
Amitabh's situation, though not as severe, is
nonetheless highly comparable. Amitabh's childhood was not
spent in a society where the domination of the 'public'
language was so suffocatingly intense as was Rodriguez's
experience in America; but in a society where the 'public'
language — again English — carries a tremendous social
value. India almost uncritically accepts the cultural
domination of this foreign language. It is not just the
mere language, but also a mutated version of western
ideology accompanying the language that creates the
possibility for the upper class and the upper middle class,
to which Amitabh's family belongs, to have access to power
structures of the Indian society. In an interview Aditi, a
friend of Amitabh from the School of Planning and
Architecture, New Delhi, pointed out: "If you don't belong
to the 'English medium' community, you probably won't rise
beyond a point in life. And if you haven't done well in
life, chances are you won't be able to afford a real English
medium school." Aditi's observation and analysis may be
unrefined, but nonetheless, it is quite accurate.
There was another element in Amitabh's childhood which
hastened his inevitable cosmopolitizing: the radio. A
curious child, Amitabh quickly became an avid fan of the BBC
10
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Overseas Programme, spending hours listening to, what at
that point represented 'the outside. ' Soon came a time when
Amitabh took his first step outwards. His family moved to
Guwahati, the capital city of Assam. This was the first
city that Amitabh was to live in, and this was to be his
first experience of what it is to break away from the
intimacy of a small town. Still, "home" had not changed
much: "home" continued to be the family, and the family was
still living together.
Amitabh graduated from Central School in 1989.
According to Amitabh, he joined the School of Planning and
Architecture for his undergraduate education because:
In India we are forced to take decisions
about our careers very early on in life, even
though we are in no position to do so. But
in reality we do not have much of a choice.
We just land up wherever our previous
education takes us. Almost everyone sits for
engineering or medicine entrance
examinations. I also sat for them.
Fortunately or unfortunately, I did not get
accepted. And I got accepted in the School
of Planning & Architecture. That's about it,
and . .. architecture to me seemed like fun,
something interesting, something away from
mainstream education. . . I was happy with the
way it turned out for me.
With his arrival in New Delhi, started a new phase of
his life: that of being away from his parents, that of
having two homes. Certain values did change quite abruptly.
"Within the Indian context, Delhi is truly cosmopolitan, * he
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observed. All of a sudden Amitabh found himself living in
the midst of people who spoke different mother tongues and
were different culturally. Soon he started to identify
himself more and more as an Indian first, and then an
Assamese.
During this period of his life Amitabh lost his mother
to whom he was really close. This was a shocking blow, and
certainly was one of the reasons behind Amitabh's gradual
distancing from Assam. Around the same time he also fell in
love with an Assamese girl living in New Delhi. Within one
year of completing his B. Arch., Amitabh stood at a point
from where "higher education" in the United States started
looking like a possible dream. That dream became a reality
in 1994 when he got admission, with partial funding, at the
University of Southern California, Los Angeles. In August
of that year he moved half way around the world from his
earlier two homes in order to create yet another home.
Along with the geographical shift, there appeared a shift in
his sense of personhood and his sense of identity. For
Amitabh, the shift was not so telling at an economic level.
Neither did his political status or views undergo major
changes. What changed in his life was the culture that
surrounded him. Culture, in its broader sense, may be held
as a frame of reference against which personhood and
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identity is defined (Shweder:1991). Commenting cultural
differences, Ulf Hannerz (1990) writes,
[cultures] rather than being easily separated
from one another as the hard-edged pieces in
a mosaic, tend to overlap and mingle. While
we understand them to be differently located
in the social structure of the world, we also
realize that the boundaries we draw around
them are frequently rather arbitrary.
(p.239).
Often one draws and erases lines within one's conscious
self in order to preserve an orientation to a new culture.
These lines might be arbitrary, but quite certainly
necessary when one's identity is undergoing changes. Partly
out of his innate curiousity, partly out of admiration, and
partly for sheer survival, Amitabh has started internalizing
American culture. Knowing very well that this land will
never be completely his own, Amitabh has already started
growing tentative roots in the American soil. The question
that unnerves Amitabh today is: will he be a displaced
person forever? One day, will India too become too alien
or too small for him to fit into? Words like
'practicality,' 'economic security,' 'standard of living'
will become weak excuses if the experimentation with life
choices suddenly appears to have been misguided all along.
Amitabh, like so many of his cohorts, has grown up in India
with America on his mind. Now that he is here, and India
has become the land that is far away, is he playing similar
mind games with his "home"land?
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1.3 The Representer and the Represented
When I first met Amitabh, he was a student at the
School of Planning and Architecture. I met Amitabh at a
long distance calling booth in New Delhi. Telephones are
not so taken-for-granted objects there, especially in 1988.
I did not have a 'self dial' long distance facility on my
phone, and Amitabh lived in a student dormitory that had
just one 'local calls only' public phone. With nothing else
to do in the dimly lit decrepit phone booth but wait for our
respective calls to get through, we struck up a chat. He
did not strike me as an exceptional character. Just one of
those who is good to talk to when one is standing idle at a
calling booth on a cold, windy winter night. Before
parting, I bummed two cigarettes from him. I did not see
him for the next five years.
The next time around, we were standing under the famed
glory of the Southern Californian sun. We chuckled, "The
world is a small place." Indeed, India was not half way
around the world, but only twelve hours away. Now we do not
have to stand in cold windy public booths at the mercy of
the telephone gods to get our lines through. We even have
microwaves and can eat Kentucky Fried Chicken9 when we feel
like.
9 Kentucky Fried Chicken "arrived' in India in 1995. My father had to
wait in the queue for half an hour to buy a Crispy Thigh Combo at a
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Like Amitabh, I too came to this country chasing a
dream: a dream that was safely obscure, thoroughly
irrational and utterly desolate. My aim, looking back now,
was to escape. The intended escape was not from any
politics or economics, but from a sense of passive confusion
created by my imminent professional stagnation and constant
bombardment of the ever-attractive American Dream. As the
Thai Boeing 747 touched down at LAX one sunny August
morning, I pretended to feel momentous: The United States!
Written in big bold letters across the wall at immigration
was "Welcome to the Land of Immigrants.* Strangly, the word
"immigrant" made it very clear to me that I was alien to
this land.
The baggage that I came with was my perception of the
West, my bias, and my prejudice. These perceptions were
certainly not helpful in my adjustment to the United States.
What really situated me in this country, and nurtured my
nascent analytical faculty, were not so much the
intellectual debates in classrooms, but my interaction with
the people on the streets: the man who tried to swerve me
off the road for honking at him, the homeless man who gave
me company through the first lonely summer of my life, the
Mexican lady at the coffee shop who gave me free coffee when
price that can feed one person, two meals daily, for five days. In
India, of course.
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I did not have money for one, and a rival who was to become
my fiancee.
My disorientation in the United States was a result of
the conflict between my Indian past and my American future.
It was as if the two cultures — Indian and American — were
in competition with each other within me. What I did not
realize when I came here was that experiencing any culture
is essentially a package deal. Tailgating the American
Dream is a very American sense of independence, an American
sense of space, a perennial shortage of time, and
eventually, fast food. In the hurry and scurry of my
American life, the India that I carried in my mind had
started fading into a past. Gragually, over the period of
my first two years in America, I came to realize that the
word "home" would never mean the same again.
I chose Amitabh as the subject of this research for a
three fold reason: one, he and I have grown up in similar
social settings, and as a result, we mirror each other's
views on many issues. In most instances I could almost feel
his experiences instead of relying on pure analytical
under standings of situations. Keeping in mind the two-way
process of the life history method, such a situation can be
an immense gift to a project of this nature. This is so
because rapport and intimacy with the "native" language are
critical the success of this method of research. Two, we
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have spent many hours locked up in the same room. We work
at the same office here. Thus, we have had the chance to
have many uninsinuated discussions. Our association has
been rather free instead of being agenda driven. In this
way, we managed largely to bypass the difficulty of
suspicion that plagues many anthropological research in its
beginning stages. And three, Amitabh is extremely
thoughtful and articulate. He is also not afraid to express
thoughts and feelings many of us are unable to articulate or
scared to accept, or both. In short, he is observant,
sharp, and well spoken.
For people like Amitabh and I, it is easy to slip the
loneliness and joy of this imminent rootlessness through the
crack between achievement and misplaced nostalgia. These
emotions and perceptions can remain buried there forever,
quite invisible to an outsider. To me, nothing could be
more important than to take a close look at this dilemma, of
which I am a part.
For me, this is a rite of passage.
1.4 ORGANIZATION OF CHAPTERS
The chapters "From Town to City" and "Metropolis" are
ethnographies of Amitabh's school and college years. "From
Town to City" deals with Amitabh's early childhood in Tezpur
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and in Guwahati (both in Assam, India) . In this chapter we
see how a young Amitabh was brought up in the midst Assamese
traditions and family dynamics. Later on, the ethnography
turns to Amitabh's enculturation to "modernization" brought
about by the English medium school.
For his college education Amitabh moved to New Delhi.
The excitement of college years merged into a period of
reflection. It was during this time that Amitabh did his
first thorough introspective search for an identity. This
period of his life is discussed in the chapter "Metropolis."
He eventually came to the United States for higher education
and, in his own words, "to see the world."
The following chapters, "Homes" and "Nostalgia and
Identity," deal with Amitabh's life in the United States.
The former chapter spotlights the sense of alienation and
rootlessness faced by Amitabh in his attempt to redefine his
own conceptualization of the term "home." "Nostalgia and
Identity" problematizes the notion of "innocent yearning."
This chapter explores the dual morality embedded in the self
of an Indian student like Amitabh. It tries to analyze the
confusion of identity created and fuelled by the simultanous
existence of indigenousness and westernization. Following
this chapter is the conclusion.
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A NOTE TO THE READER: Throughout the text, I have used
direct quotes from interviews with Amitabh, Hemen (Amitabh's
father), Sunita (Amitabh's girlfriend), Aditi (Amitabh's
college friend) and Gautam Bhatia (Amitabh's previous
employer). The sources of these quotes are taped film
interviews conducted over the period of August 1995 to July
1996. In order to differentiate these interviews from other
citations (from publications), I have italicized the former.
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Chapter II
FROM TOWN TO CITY
Seeking the Childhood of Amitabh
Tezpur. A small town in Assam. Local knowldge has it
that it was the battlefield between two great warriors,
Anirudh and Baan. Today it serves as the transit town on
the way to the Kaziranga National Park famed for its
rhinoceros. Though I had been to Assam before, I had never
come this far north. Prior to this project, my only
knowledge of Tezpur had been a vague memory of reading in
school history text books about the Chinese army's
advancement till this town during the Indo-China war in
1964. Here I was, visiting the hometown of my friend and
informant, Amitabh Barthakur. He, however, was seventy
thousand miles away, in Los Angeles.
I was already four days old in this town, and nothing
seemed to fall in place. As the sun was setting behind the
house and the mosquitoes were warming up on their nocturnal
chorus, Hemen Barthakur — Amitabh's father, and I sat
sipping Assamese tea. Hemen, seventy-three, has been living
in this big house all alone ever since his wife passed away
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six years ago. There was an air of silence around the house
inspite of Hemen's jovial character. The moment his
cheerful voice would stop for a breath, silence would
descended on us heavily. It was obvious that Hemen had
learnt to coexist with this silence, in which I, a city
person who has always lived in a full house, felt
uncomfortable.
Partly in order to get on with the purpose of my visit,
and partly to break out of the awkwardness between us, I
asked Hemen about his younger days. I had a hunch that
there must have been something in his life that influenced
his son's philosophical attitude to life. Why had Amitabh,
unlike so many of his peers, not learnt to accept society's
dictates as something to be taken for granted? Why is there
always a hint of rebellion in his words?
IX. 1 HEMEN AMD ELA'S STORY: The family and
community
Hemen was then a professor of Physics in the Jagannath
Barooah College in Jorhat, Assam. He fell in love with one
of his students, Ela. Eventually, the inevitable question
of marriage came up. Their's was to be, what is termed in
India, a "love marriage." Love marriages are not the usual
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connubial practice in India, and especially not in 1956.
Without understanding the issue of "arranged marriage," it
is impossible to gauge the relevance or the oddity of a
"love marriage" in a semi-urban Assamese community during
the 1950s. 'Arranged marriages' are especially revolting to
Westerners, because quite often they are equated with "child
marriages," "bride burnings," and other such shocking
practices. My argument does not consider these other
troubling issues, since they are not pertinent to Hemen's
situation or my thesis.
In an arranged marriage, the head of the two families
meet and discuss the feasibility of a marriage between their
children. Most communities in India follow a patriarchal
family system. This means the key players in a marriage are
the fathers (or uncles and elder brothers, in case the
father has died) of the prospective groom and the bride. As
a result, the opinion of the prospective grooms and brides
in India are typically of lesser importance in comparison to
a similar situation in Western societies. The practice of
arranged marriage has attracted a lot of attention,
especially from Western scholars. Chatterjee (1989:155)
observes that Western scholars, and through them the Western
world in general, have been more concerned and interested in
arranged marriage as a phenomenon (or a problem) than
Indians themselves. Various justifications to explain this
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institution have been attempted by scholars. Of them,
Richard Shweder's re-presentation of an ancient belief as
the rationale behind arranged marriage point towards a
philosophy that most Indian communities would readily
identify with. Discussing traditional arranged marriage
among the Oriya communities, Shweder (1991) writes, "..it is
argued by Oriyas that many people, including ancestral
spirits, are affected in serious ways by the person you
marry. How can the marriage decision be left up to young,
vulnerable person driven by sex, passion, and infatuation?"
(p.31) Marxist scholars like Rudra Sen are of the opinion
that such explanation is essentially post-script. Sen
(1970) argues that the cultural logic in support of the
traditional arranged marriage is a vehicle serving the
interest of the dominant patriarchs of the various Indian
communities. He further purports with empirical evidence
that it was not philosophy which gave birth to the social
rules, as many proponents of Indian mysticism would like us
to believe, but the other way around. Whatever the analysis
may be it is clear that the system of arranged marriage
constitutes one of the core norms of social conduct,
flaunting of which amounts to going against the dictates of
community life.
The situation has somewhat changed since then. The
stigma against the so called love marriages has reduced in
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intensity, but arranged marriages still remain the most
practiced form of matrimony in India. ”However, ' Hemen
pointed out, "it was quite different in our times. * Being
an educated man, Hemen was very outgoing for his times.
Raised eyebrows of the community and a virtual boycott of
his wedding by his side of the family did not deter him from
marrying Ela. Amitabh, who thinks that his father must have
been temperamentally like him when he was Amitabh's age,
says:
I guess my father had to pay a price for
that. Our family was not considered
'normal, ' especially before I was bom. In
that sense, my father did face ostracization
of sorts. The opposition came more from my
father's side of the family. And, because my
mother's family was very wealthy, people
thought that my father was reaching out for
something higher than what was due him. I
admire him for being so bold.
Along with the thirst for knowledge, Hemen had perhaps
unknowingly infused in Amitabh's life a spirit of variation,
if not deviation, from norms.
ii.2 JINTU s Amitabh's eaxly childhood
Being a childless couple for fourteen long years had
left Hemen sad and Ela embarassed. In the Indian society,
perhaps more than in the Western societies, the blame for
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childlessness has often been directed unfairly towards the
woman (Chatterjee: 1989) . In a low voice Hemen commented:
I was really unhappy about not being able to
be a father, and Amitabh's mother was even
more unhappy to see me sad. We went to every
doctor and took every kind of medical help we
possibly could. But nothing happened. Just
about when we had given up all hope, we met
this Christian missionary doctor. He took me
aside and said, "Do anything to re-install
her faith. That is the only thing that will
work. n So we went on a pilgrimage that my
wife had always wanted to go for. After we
returned, my wife conceived. That is how
Amitabh was born.
In context of the age and the social circumstances,
Amitabh was the unconventional child bom to an
unconventional marriage. When Amitabh was bom, both Hemen
and Ela were well into their middle life: Hemen was forty
nine and Ela, thirty five. In many ways, Amitabh was the
validation of a marriage that the community did not accept
fully. As a result, Amitabh was a child who was doted
upon, especially by his father. "Jintu, ” as Hemen lovingly
calls him10, "has grown up to he a fine young man, I think, '
declared the proud father.
10 In most Indian communitites, especially the upper and middle class
Eastern Indian communities (like the upper class Bengali, Oriya and
Assamese communities) every child has two names. One is the formal
(official and religious) name which has a meaning and significance, like
Amitabh (which is a name of Gautam Buddha) , - and an informal (home) name,
which may not mean anything, like Jintu. As is obvious from this
example, one is not a short form of another. The formal name is used
for official purposes like birth certificate, school enrollment, or for
religious ceremonies. An acquaintance would prefer using the formal
name even though s/he may know someone's informal name. The home name
is used by family members and friends. Thus, it is often possible to
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Jintu grew up in a very residential neighborhood on L.
B. Road. At the end of the road is a Shiva temple that is
well known all over Assam. With fairly religious parents,
he was a regular visitor to this temple. For the little
child, religion was quite incomprehensible. He willingly
went to the temple because while his parents were immersed
in the worship, he could play with other children and watch
the monkeys that lived on the trees of the compound.
The residents of the neighborhood were very gregarious
and friendly. After school Amitabh spent most of his time
in the neighbors' houses or playing with other children. "I
was never home," reflects Amitabh, "We didn't have
television, like children of today. We used to play hide
and seek, marbles and gulli-danda11. Chasing cows was a big
thing. Children of today chase monsters on screen, don't
they? *
Though Amitabh did not grow up with television, there
was something that held him under a spell for a major part
of his childhood. It was an old shortwave radio12. What
judge the closeness between two people by noting which names they use
for addressing each other.
11 An indigenous game played with a wooden stick and small spindle
shaped wooden ball.
12 In the book Media Culture, Kellner (1995:338) points out how the
extent and quality of influence that radio has/had over its audience is
ditstinct and different from effect perpetuated by television. Also see
the chapter Television, Advertising, and the Costruction of Postmodern
Identity.
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fascinated the young mind was that while sitting in his
living room, he could strecth out and reach a world that was
far away. Eager for knowledge and curious about the world,
he absorbed any information that came his way, be it new
kinds of music, talk radio or international news. BBC and
The Voice of America were already a part of his daily life.
In other words, while his peers were content with playing
gulli-danda, Amitabh was also growing up with Rock Salad1 3
and the BBC World News. At that time it did not occur to
him that perhaps his childhood curiosity about distant lands
was already transforming itself to the addictive fascination
with the West.
Amitabh's schooling started in an Assamese-medium
school housed in mud huts. When I visited this semi-rural
school, I had difficulty in visualizing the confident and
the apparently well-adjusted-to-the-West Amitabh I know, as
a student there. My own prejudice, in equating knowledge to
Western education, rose to surface. I spent two hours
sitting in the courtyard of the school watching children
play cricket with a locally improvised bat, desperately
trying to picture my Amitabh running around in the field or
sitting at a desk in one of those mud huts. The shrill
voices of the children vocalizing their excitement in the
local Assamese dialect, and the vision in my head of Amitabh
13 Rock Salad was a bi-weekly rock music program on BBC.
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showing me short cuts at using the UNIX system, forced me to
accept something that I had been fighting against: Amitabh
had transcended to a different life altogether. There was
something in the sound of the language of the children that
hit me hard at that moment. The effect of a group of
carefree children screaming in a vernacular was something I
had not felt for a long time. Both Amitabh and I have lived
for the last three years in a world aurally so different.
Richard Rodruigez (1983) who identifies himself as an
American, talks about the sound of a language in Hunger of
Memory:
Sometimes, even now, when I have been
traveling abroad for several weeks, I will
hear what I heard as a boy. In hotel lobbies
or airports, in Turkey or Brazil, some
Americans will pass, and suddenly I will hear
again - the high sound of American voices.
For a few seconds I will hear it with
pleasure, for it is now the sound of my
society - a reminder of home. (p. 14)
However, for me it was not a pleasurable sound. I felt
distinctly uncomfortable at the thought of me being an
outsider in my own country. Like the silence at Hemen's
house, each syllable of those screams seemed overwhelmingly
alien. The import of a sentence Amitabh had repeatedly
uttered during interviews, "I will never fit into Tezpur
again" suddenly became very clear to me.
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XI. 3 THE ENGLISH MEDIUM SCHOOLS
In 1976 Amitabh. was enrolled in an English-medium
school- This officially inaugurated Amitabh's bicultural
existence, and sanctioned the inevitable duality of modem,
upper class Indian eduction: the duality of the private
language and the public language. The chapter Aria of the
book Hunger of Memory illustrates how a child's life is
altered forever by the introduction of a public language.
Rodriguez (1983) argues that though a public language on its
own can not alter intimate relationships - "Intimacy is not
created by a particular langauge; it is created by
intimates" (p.32) - but its definitive and extended use at
places of work or studies eventually results in altering the
sense of self - "It is because I used public language for
most of the day, I moved easily at last, in a crowded city
of words." (p.32)
In an interview I had with Amitabh after my return from
India, Amitabh said:
There is a distinct difference between a
student who has gone to an English medium
school and another who has gone to say, an
Assamese medium school. When one goes to an
English medium school, one is encouraged to
read more in that language. And after having
read books in English for twelve formative
years, most of which have been written by
non-Indians, one obviuosly will have a
different perspective to life than someone
who has read mostly Assamese authors. So,
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that part of the difference is not created by-
ideology, but simply by availability or
unavailability of resources.
However, a closer look will reveal that English-medium
education is not really ideology-free. Though there is
nothing evil inherent in any medium of instruction, and
English medium education does fecilitate access to more
global opportunities, it nevertheless has created and
maintained a class division within Indian society. Ever
since 1887, when English education was first introduced to
India formally, it has been the prerogative of the upper
class. As Das Gupta points out (1976) the situation remains
more or less the same today inspite of the rapid spread of
English education in the urban centers, and the various
government policies to encourage Indian languages
(especially Hindi) to be the operative language at public
offices. Power and education still remains within the self
contained English-medium class, entry into which is
virtually impossible for someone who is vernacular-trained.
Though there are more and more Indian authors today writing
in English with a distinctive Indian flavor to their
languages, the literature does not percolate down
effectively to the middle and lower classes. As a result,
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the new Indian identity expressed in the English language
remains alien to the middle and lower classes.14
II. 4 THE CITY
Hemen's family moved to Guwahati, the capital city of
Assam, in 1982. Though Amitabh had visited Guwahati
regularly while he lived in Tezpur, he had not lived in a
big city before. Guwahati opened up many more avenues for
Amitabh to access other cultures. This move in his life
hastened the process of his cosmopolitanization, seeds of
which had already been planted. According to Hannerz (1990)
defines cosmopolitanism:
The perspective of the cosmopolitan must
entail relationships to a plurality of
cultures understood as distinctive entities.
(And the more the better; cosmopolitans
should ideally be foxes rather than
hedgehogs.) But furthermore, cosmopolitanism
in a stricter sense includes a stance toward
diversity itself, toward the coexistence of
cultures in the individual experience.... It
is an intellectual and aesthetic stance of
openness toward divergent cultural
experiences, a search for contrasts rather
than uniformity. To become acquainted with
more cultures is to turn into an aficionado,
to view them as art works, (p.239)
14 So far, I have not dealt with Western philosophy's disregard to any
other school of thought, and the attitude of conversion exhibitted by
various Western political philosophies, of which Western education is a
part.
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One may argue that a person like Amitabh should not be
considered a cosmopolitan. I take a different stand on this
issue. The concept of cosmopolitanism (I cite a definetion
below), in its strictest sense, is bias free. To accept
that only Western communities are eligible for qualifying as
cosmopolitans (as is often implied or understood) is to
accept that the Other is always non-Westerner. In today's
time it is difficult for anyone who has had any
understanding of reletivism or universalism15, to buy into
such a tenet.
Amitabh's curiosity coupled with the general attitude
of 'worship of the west' (Dasgupta 1989:43) that affected
upper class Indian society did turn him into an aficionado
of the Western culture. By the time he was in High School,
he had already an established interest and an active link
with the Western culture. Even though Amitabh had arrived
from a small town, he soon became far more cosmopolitan and
westernized than an average child of his age. Here we may
note that though in the Indian context the West has often
been epitomized and symbolized by the United Kingdom for the
obvious reasons of colonization, by the time Amitabh was
bora the United Kingdom had long lost this influential
position to the United States of America. In India it has
15 For a very clear understanding of relativism, universalism and
developmentalism, see Richard Shweder's Thinking Through Culture
(1991:30-34) .
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been colloquial!zed as phoren. Bora out of the English word
foreign more often than not it refers to America.
One important and qualitative change that occured after
Amitabh's move to Guwahati was his proximity to relatives
whose sons and daughters were settled abroad. Three of
Amitabh's first cousins live abroad. Of them, two were in
the United States and one was in the Gulf. The personal
stories that Amitabh heard from them when superimposed on to
his previous picture of the West (through books, cinema and
radio) created an exciting mix. In one of our very first
interviews, Amitabh reflected:
I'd say that I saw my first mental picture of
phoren through the eyes of family members who
had gone abroad. You know, every time
someone coming from abroad would open his or
her suitcase, it would smell so nice! And
one got the impression that everything
outside India were so clean. The photographs
of them posing in front of their homes showed
wide roads, tall trees, beautiful houses...
And as a child you think "Wow! Life must be
really good there!"
Amitabh's interest in music also led him through the
journey of discovery of classic rock bands. From Beatles
and Bee Gees, he 'graduated' to Led Zeppelin, The Doors and
Steely Dan. Though still quite 'clean' - he was not into
drugs or alcohol - the euphoria of the American sixties had
started entering Amitabh's life. Quite well read by then,
Amitabh would get into long winded argument with his family
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members regarding the validity of the socially accepted
concept of a "good boy." Amitabh's dress code too was
altering. With fashionable clothes of the West being
brought in by his cousins, he had started looking different
from his peers. In other words, by the time Amitabh was
ready to enter his college life, he had already acquired all
the elements of 'coolness' that were prerequisites for
hipeness of that time.
After finishing his high school in Guwahati, Amitabh
moved to New Delhi, his last Indian home. After Amitabh left
for New Delhi, his parents shuttled between Tezpur and
Guwahati for a couple of years. In 1990, after Ela's
untimely death, Hemen moved back to Tezpur permanently.
Amitabh in the meantime had started setting his sight at the
United States of America.
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Chapter III
THE METROPOLIS
This chapter deals with the influences in Amitabh's
life during this college years (1987 - 1992) and his last
year (1993) in India. Michelle Rosaldo (1984) asserts "that
the notion of 'self' does not grow from an 'inner essence'
that is independent of the social world, but from the
experiences in a world of meaning, images and social
bond."{p. 139) Leaving home and going away to college is
recognized as a time for turning over meanings, images and
social bonds of one's family and childhood; it is a time of
concentrated change and exposure to new ideas, new peoples,
and new realities. Realities, Bruner (1990) points out
are, however, "the result of prolonged and intricate
processes of construction and negotiation deeply imbedded in
the culture." (p.24) The evolution of the personal
narrative is, therefore, a product of what Bruner refers to
as the "dual landscape." That is "events and actions in a
putative 'real world' occur concurrently with mental events
in the consciousness of the protagonists" (p.51) in the
development of personal narratives. Therefore, an
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examination of the meanings of events, images and social
bonds, both in Amitabh's family past and during the volatile
college period will provide a context for understanding
Amitabh's subsequent journey and his changing concept of
home. As occupational scientist Mandel (1996) writes,
"college is by design a cultural laboratory.. a social petri
dish for creation of new realities for the adoloscent."
(p.22)
During this period five important events took place:
his association with the bygone 'sixties' - vestiges of
which still remained in India - during the first two years
at college; his meeting with Sunita, who today is his
fiancee; the passing away of his mother and his subsequent
distancing from his past in Assam; his new-found interest in
architecture near the end of his college life; and finally
his departure for the United States for higher education.
The idiosyncrosies of Amitabh's college path can be
understood when viewed in contrast to the normative Indian
approach to education.
m.l THE ENTRANCE EXAMINATIONS
In India, the idea of education is very profession
oriented. Education is seen as a means to an end, with the
end being a prosperous and happy married life. Margaret
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Gibson (1988) , who has studied Sikh immigrants in
California, writes in her book, , Accommodation without
Assimilation
Punjabis stress the necessities of formal
education for obtaining "good: jobs and a
"good" income. The basic purpose of
education is pragmatic, as they see it.
Almost all parents we interviewed saw a
strong positive correlation between the
amount of education one has and the type of
employment one can expect to obtain. . . .
They always tilt education itself in the
direction of the practical and the material.
We found little interest in the social
sciences or the humanities, (p.109)
Though Gibson's study of children of Sikh immigrants
focuses only at one community (a group of Sikh immigrant
students in high schools in Valleydale, California), her
findings hold true for all Indian communities for several
reasons. A high unemployment rate, one of the direct
results of a large population16 and a weak economic
infrastructure17 means a large group of educated candidates
16
India has the second largest population in the whole world. The
country is expected to overtake China, today's leader in this statistic
by the turn of the century. Figures of the National Survey of India
(1989) show that the rate of increase of population in India is still in
high positive figures (2.4% per year). For a more tangible idea of its
growth, it suffices to note that every year India increases its
population by more than the entire population of Australia.
17 How the Indian economy, dictated by the whims of ill informed
ministers, has not achieved the basic standards of development is often
cited as example of effects of wrong policies. Arun Shourie (1996)
writes in a highly emotional article, "The Cult of the Commonplace:*
What a state to have been reduced to! That fifty years after
independence a Prime Minister should have to list these [drinking
water, health, primary education, housing, the public distribution
system] as his priorities!. That the mere announcement should be
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are turned away simply because there are not enough job
openings to accommodate them. So, education for the sake of
education, or for an intellectual stimulation is held as
conceptually unsound in the Indian scenario. As a result,
the advice of parent to the school aged children is to
prepare for a career from a very early on. And, more often
than not, by good career they mean a handful of professions
that will always be in demand in society: engineering,
medicine, or at least, accounting. This view is also
supported by the schooling system which, like any other
system, is governed by the principles of supply and demand.
This is evident by the the cut-off grade points18 for
science majors in high schools are invariably the highest,
followed by commerce, and the lowest for humanities. In
other words, to be a science student one has to be good in
studies, but to be a humanities student one need not be that
brilliant.
Amitabh was not exempt from these pressures. It was
clear to him that he wanted to get into a career that was
creative. And, science or engineering did not show enough
scope for that. Influenced by an elder cousin who was
cause for cheer! After all, how may times have these very things
been listed as priorities by such worthies?
18In India, the system of evaluation of performance is slightly
different from the American grade point system. Indian schools follow a
percentage system, which evaluates performance of a student against one
hundred ' marks. ' There are .10 letter grades or curves incorporated in
the evaluation system.
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already studying architecture, and inspired by the
'strangeness' of the discipline of architecture, he decided
to sit for the entrance examinations to two of the four
major schools of architecture in India. In an interview
Amitabh recollected:
Architecture seemed like a 'fun' discipline
and a strange profession, - It is scientific,
yet it is not science; you draw yet it is not
as subjective as Fine Art; you build models,
yet it is not as uncreative as engineering.
And at that age [17-19 years], most students
do not want to study too much. To me,
architecture did not seem like a discipline
where I would not have to read fat, boring
books.
A personal preference of a quieter New Delhi over a
hectic Bombay helped Amitabh make a choice between the two
schools in which he had obtained admission in. In July 1987
Amitabh began his architectural education in the School of
Planning and Architecture (SPA) in New Delhi.
XII. 2 NEW DELHI
New Delhi, the modern metropolis, was planned by the
British architects Sir Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker in
1912 on the outlying adjacent areas to the old historic city
of Delhi. Historically, the present day New Delhi is the
seventh city built in this area (Khan; 1964) . The first
reference of a city in this area dates back to 1400 B.C. as
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Indraprashta, the capital of King Yudhishthira, as mentioned
in the epic Mahabharata. The first reference of the name
'Delhi' appears in Raja Dhilu's account of his capital city
Dilll (of which the word 'Delhi' is an Anglicized version)
in 1st century B.C.1 9 The next two thousand years saw four
more cities built on this land, and destroyed or abandoned,
before the British colonizers in India decided to make it
their new capital city.
Today New Delhi is the second largest city of India,
both in terms of population and area20. It has a
population of 4.5 million, living in an area of 580 square
miles (Crowther, Raj and Wheeler; 1981:108). In terms of
ethnic composition, this city is highly cosmopolitan and it
is difficult to pinpoint at any one community as being truly
dominant. As Bhatia (1994) points out in Silent Spaces, the
culture of consumerism gives the city its identity. He
describes New Delhi as "a constantly mutating gigantic
cultural organism, whose roots are anchored deep in the
universal notion of Punjabism. "21 (p. 103) Bhatia, a Punjabi
19 It is of incidental interest that the School of Planning and
Architecture, where Amitabh studied, and in the hostel of which he
lived, stands on what was Indraprastha, the capital city of the Pandavas
in 1400 B.C. Today this area demarcates (Old) Delhi form New Delhi.
20 The leading city of India in terms of land area is Bombay, whereas
Calcutta leads the table in population.
21 Bhatia has an interesting way of justifying this apparent bias
against Punjabis. On the sarcasm expressed in the title of his previous
book Punjabi Baroque he has to say, “A friend suggested ’Punjabi
Baroque. ’ But I said no. There was no reason to offend any one
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himself, writes, "The Punjabi is a symbol of the new India;
he is a staunch idealist, but never lets idealism ruin his
own life. The Punjabi is rootless, ruthless, he works hard
and he drinks hard." (p.ix).
It was in this city that Amitabh was to find his
professional calling and a burgeoning sense idealism, which
he refers to as "the contribution" (towards the country and
community) . In many ways, it is this sense of duty and
contribution that has created the dilemma in his search for
home. Before going any further let us look at the factors
that influence him during his college days.
in.3 THE SIXTIES IN THE EIGHTIES:
The continuing saga of rock'n'roll
The first two years in the school of architecture,
Amitabh was, in his own words, "busy enjoying life in
college." This meant skipping classes once in a while,
partying heavily, drinking, smoking — the usual story of a
young mind intoxicated with the sense of new found freedom
of college life. Other than the basics of architecture, the
most important education he received during these two years
was his exposure to a shadow of the sixties of America.
community; especially since the narrative was meant to be offensive to
all the communities of the country" (1994; ix) .
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This aspect of his freshman and sophomore years stayed with
him for a long time, and influence his thinking in many ways
even today.
What were the 'sixties' in India? Like the 'sixties'
of the West, in India too, it initiated not from art or
poetry but from political movements. It so happened, as in
many cities all over the world at that time, that the local
conditions in some urban centers in India, Calcutta in
particular, were ripe for a leftist youth uprising. Thus,
the movement of Danny the Red in Paris in 1968 and the
Naxalite (youth) movement in Calcutta during 1968-71 were
not purely copy-and-follow phenomena. The Naxalite
movement22 of Calcutta (West Bengal) was an armed leftist
youth movement against the state supported corruption which
had almost paralyzed normal functioning of society. Anger
among the job seeking youth which had been brewing silently
for a decade, burst open in 1970. Thousands of
intellectuals, mostly college students and young professors,
joined the movement. Unfortunately, the Naxalite
revolution, like the 'sixties' of the West, lost its
original purpose and ideology. Brutal state police
crackdown under the directions of the then Chief Minister of
22 For further details on the Naxalite movement, see "The Naxalites and
Their Ideology: by Rabindra Ray (1988) .
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West Bengal, Dr. Siddartha Shankar Ray23, brought the
Naxalite movement to a bloody end.24
Besides the political stance against some ruthless
right wing policies, the sixties also introduced a hippie
way of life. Hippyism and with its own highly visible
symbols found its way in the intellectual urban youth of
India. While the West was turning to Eastern mysticism, the
section of the Indian youth which was not politically
active, drifted to the tune of the West. Without completely
detaching from their Indian roots, they took a social stance
of internalizing the "freedom" aspect of the Western
movement. Contrary to the image of this generation commonly
perpetuated by a conservative media, this generation had
expressed keen interest in various indigenous forms of art,
like Baul music or traditional jatra (plays). But to the
(Indian) public eye what seemed most noticeable were
symbols such as western music, marijuana, "peace," and
"love." Thus we see that 'sixties' too was a legacy of the
West in the end. In fact, it was one of the most definitive
imports among non-official ideologies from the West.
23 Ray was later to become the Governor of the state of Punjab struck by
terrorism in the 1980s, and eventually the Indian ambassador to the
United States when the two countries had strained relationships. As is
apparent here, his 'victory' over the Naxalite youths in 1970 had earned
him a reputation. His political nickname is "the Policeman."
24 x It may be noted here that the Congress Party, to which Dr. Ray
belonged, has never returned to poser in West Bengal. In fact, the
Communist Party of India (Marxist) has remained in power since 1972.
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However, the difference was that the 'sixties' in may ways
was also a brought in a sense of liberation among the youth.
There seemed to be a common fraternal feeling extended by
one youth for another across borders of nations.
The highly attractive appeal of the 'sixties' remained
a cultural identity among liberal art students in India for
one and a half decades after Woodstock (which arguably
signaled the end of the movement) . A m Jalal (1989) in his
critique of the film Annie (a film about a group of Indian
students during early seventies, and about which I shall
write later) writes: "The intimidated eighties refused to
produce an icon of the dimension of Dylan or Hendrix."
(p.27)
The social identity of the School of Planning and
Architecture (SPA) through most part of the eighties echoed
heavily of the past decade. For example, Archetype, the
band of SPA found its popularity among students not by
performing the Grammy versions of Stings and U2s, but the
cover versions of Clapton, Dylan and the Who. It so
happened that during one of these years a feature film
titled In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones25 was made on
location about the (real) Sixties generation in SPA. The
25 It is a curious coincidence that I acted in this film (as a "junked
out guitarist' who was always singing Dylan songs) . Amitabh did not
know me then.
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film won the award for the Best Screenplay in the National
Film Festival of India and was screened on Doordarshan, the
National Television of India. The success and the
popularity of the film renewed an interest in the sixties
youth movements in general, and the SPA of the sixties in
particular. One direct outcome of the film's popularity and
the subsequent renewed interest in the sixties was the
immediate creation of separate boys and girls hostels in
SPA. "Because of concern expressed by parents," was the
official reason given by the institute. The dream had begun
to end.
Reflecting over his first two years in architecture
school, Amitabh shared:
Frankly, I did not overdo anything. But, it
was strange to live through some Sixties and
Seventies in the Eighties. All of us knew
the fate of the real Sixties. (Laughter) So,
it really was a pseudo experiment of
imitation for us. No one expected any big
revolution. To be honest, no one was
thinking on those lines to start with.
Everyone knew that one day we will have to
throw the "free association" and "free verse"
out of the window and go looking for nowkri
(job) . So, eventually when the party was
really over for me, there was no big
heartbreak . . .just some reminiscences of a
couple of nice drunken nights of fun!
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in. 4 SUNXTA
Amitabh met Sunita Borgohain at a party in 1988.
Sunita was an undergraduate student of political science at
the Indraprastha College of the University of Delhi. Today,
she works for the Thai Airlines in New Delhi as a travel
representative; and lives in a small apartment there. About
the first meeting between Amitabh and her, Sunita says:
He (Amitabh) was a bit intoxicated, like
everyone else at the party. He came up to me
and started talking about Shakespeare or
something as odd as that. He was not exactly
a pile-on, but certainly highly irritating
that evening. I don't know where he got my
number from, but one day he called up. We
remained acquaintances for some time. . . He
eventually turned out to be quite a nice guy
with a great sense of humor. I guess, that
is how it started...
Thus started the relationship between Amitabh and
Sunita, which will culminate in a wedding in December of
this year (1996) . Here too, one finds some odd connections
between the lives of Hemen and Amitabh. As we have seen
before, Hemen married Ela in a marriage that was 'out of
class.' Today Amitabh is going in for a marriage that is
not only out of caste, but also out of community, both of
which are bigger taboos in the traditional Indian society
than marrying outside one's economic class. Though Sunita
too, hails from Assam, she belongs to the Ahom community.
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The Ahom community, considered a separate caste, is arguably
placed lower in the social heirarchy in relation with the
Brahmins, the caste of Amitabh's family. Ahoms claim that
their tribal origins can be traced to Thailand. The
physical features of an Ahom, being noted for their
Mongoloid features, is different from the more Aryan
features of an Assamese. It can be argued that Assamese
people tend to consider themselves culturally superior and
educationally more erudite than Ahoms. On the issue of his
culturally conflicting love affair with Sunita, Amitabh has
to say:
Though my father was not enthusiastic abut my
love life. . . whose father is?.. . and I did
not get a full acceptance from him right
away, I must say that it was not because of
anything else but a typical parental fear
that romance is going to jeopardize the son's
reasons for some people pointing fingers at
my family if I lived in Tezpur all my life.
But I guess, because I moved to bigger cities
at the right time, and also because of my
father's attitude towards these matters, it
was never made into an issue for me.
Amitabh, Hemen and Sunita were surprised by one more
connection that eventually unearthed itself: Sunita's
father, during his college years, was Hemen's student.
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h i .5 LIFE GOES ON: Ela's death
Just as Amitabh and Sunita were entering into a more
permanent phase of their relationship, a terrible tragedy
struck. In August 1990, Ela was diagnosed with cancer.
Once again Hemen, now an aged man, was taking Ela from one
doctor to another, from one city to another. However, this
time, there seemed to be no solution at hand. The cancer
had progressed to a terminal stage, and the doctors finally
suggested that she be taken to a place where she would be
most comfortable in. Amitabh, who does not want to be
reminded of that time, said:
It was heartbreaking. Here was this couple
who had finally done their share of work and
were really looking forward to a peaceful
time. My father had retired, and they had
built a house for themselves ... it was a
pretty sight. When we came to know of the
news (of Ela's illness), my father's
immediate concern regarding me was that my
studies should not suffer. He is a strange
man, he has never shared his pain with
anyone.
Amitabh shuttled between Delhi and Assam (Tezpur and
Guwahati) trying to keep up with his studies and be next to
his mother at the same time. Amitabh feels that Ela wanted
to spend her last days in Tezpur because of the attachment
to the house they had built for themselves. However, due to
the fact that Hemen would not have anyone to depend upon if
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an emergency arose, and because there were no hospital
dealing specifically with cancer patients in Tezpur, Ela was
moved to Guwahati. She spent the last days of her life at
her sister's house there.
On December 30th 1990, when the whole city was getting
ready to celebrate, Ela passed away.
Just like Hemen was worried Amitabh, Amitabh too was
very concerned about how Hemen would take Ela's death. Much
to Amitabh's comfort and peace of mind, Hemen seemed to
adjust to a new life quite well. Hemen returned to Tezpur
and started involving himself in education and public
service. Amitabh, on the other hand, immersed himself in
his studies. He got back into a regular rhythm of classes
and projects within a month of returning to New Delhi. "You
can not look at an incident like that (his mother's death)
in any other way. It is not correct to hold on to a bad
memory. You have to realize that no matter what, life goes
on, * he explained.
However, from this point onwards, home has never been
the same for Amitabh. When Amitabh would go to Tezpur
during his holidays to be with his father, the two men would
sit face to face trying to build up a conversation in order
to ignore the void that Ela's absence had created. At the
end of the day, Amitabh and Hemen would retire to their
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respective rooms, both feeling alone but trying their best
not to let it show. I asked Amitabh if the death of Ela had
brought the father and the son closer. He said, "X don't
think so. He and I remained standing- where we stood before,
just that there was a place in our home that had become
empty. "
Like never before, Amitabh realized that home was not
merely a geographic location, or a set of situating cultural
conditions, but also an intense sense of nearness created by
the presence of intimates. With his mother not there, he
had one less person that he could communicate with or relate
to. Though his father, towards whom he is deeply
respectful, was still alive, Tezpur was only "half the home
that used to be. ' From then on, Sunita and other friends in
New Delhi started to hold more and more importance in his
life. His New Delhi identity, incorporated with symbols of
youth, change and movement came in to his rescue from the
memories of one part of the past which now lay void. There
was one less string between him and Tezpur, one less reason
for calling it the home. Amitabh said:
I still call Assam my home; but that is
mostly because I speak that language, and
because it comes handy to express my
ethnicity. In reality, I relate far more
closely to New Delhi. That is where I became
an adult, that is where I know most people
today, and that is where I feel most at home.
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For the next three years, Amitabh lived with this
definition of home. His conceptualization of it has changed
after he came to Los Angeles. Today, he has, in his own
words, "a very relative concept' about the idea of home.
But before he left India for the United States, he went
through a period of serious introspection with regards to
his "purpose in life. * This, in turn, gave birth to his
desire for "contribution. *
in. 6 VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE
"J started enjoying architecture as a subject only
during the last one and a half years of my SPA years, '
confessed Amitabh. What attracted him towards the
discipline was its permeating nature. More than the
creative design involved in architecture, what drew him in
was the social aspect of architecture. How a structure
influences, and is influenced by local cultural factors - be
it a cultural relationship to space, local ergonomics,
cultural ecology, local aesthetics, or a combination of all
- was what fascinated him. It was during these one and half
years at SPA, and the year after that when he was working,
that Amitabh started sensing a new under standing of being an
Indian. What fostered this sense of Indian-ness were not
the dictates of the community or norms of society that he
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lived in, but the logic behind indigenous architecture, and
the history of its evolution. The architects who most
influenced Amitabh were Laurie Baker, Vasant and Rewati
Kamat, San jay Prakash and to some extent Gautam Bhatia.
Amitabh considers himself lucky to have worked with both the
Kamats and Bhatia.
Amitabh, who has come to believe that architecture
should be a region based science, commends the 'Indianness'
of the architecture education at SPA. He says, "Only after
coming here did I realize how important a local flavor is,
in architecture. " He points out:
The architecture of America is like the
country itself. There are a lot of styles
and genres. Most of them are individually
quite good, but they exist in isolation -they
don't come together.... What style are they
(American architects) talking about? Here,
two buildings often stand face to face
accross the street and keep screaming at each
other! Some justify that it is this
"diversity" which gives American architecture
its identity. To me it speaks of lack of
history.
His admiration towards vernacular architecture26 as
practiced by Baker or the Kamats took him away from the
common architectural practices in India. The common
architectural practice in India today - as is evident by the
26 The school of 'Vernacular architecture' propogates extensive use of
locally available material and utilizes labor intensive methods (as
opposed to capital intensive methods) in building techniques. Non-
traditional mud houses is a perfect example of vernacular architecture.
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so-called modem buildings that have come up in every city -
does not consider local factors too seriously (Bhatia:1994) .
Or worse, a universal 'master' plan of a neighborhood, like
government or private planned neighborhoods, as is visible
all over New Delhi, is arrived at and applied everywhere
regardless of local and cultural conditions27 (Bhatia:1994)
One of the few locally practicing architects who seemed
interesting an insightful to Amitabh was Gautam Bhatia.
Gautam Bhatia, who eventually became Amitabh's employer, is
perhaps as much a writer28 as he is an architect. Though
not educated in India29, he seemed to have acquired the
Indian sense of architecture better than most architects of
New Delhi. "Working with him was intellectually highly
stimulating, " says Amitabh. The validity of this view
appears to be true because, when at one point Bhatia's firm
was in financial doldrums, all the employees of the company
agreed to work with defered salaries, whereas almost each
one of them could have walked out for financially better
jobs at any point.
27 The slang for such a practice in architectural circles is "rubber
stamp architecture".
28 The books Bhatia has written are The Life and Works of Laurie Baker,
Punjabi Baroque, and Silent Spaces. His most recent work is due to be
published later this year (1996). Though primarily these books deal
with architecture, one often finds in them very interesting studies of
modern Indian aesthetics, social psyches and class interests.
29 Bhatia is an architecture graduate from the Princeton University. He
graduated in 1975.
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Perhaps because of his immense respect for the
legendary architect Laurie Baker30, who is a staunch
Gandhian, Amitabh started reading Gandhi. It was not really
Gandhi's philosophy of non-violence that appealed to Amitabh
the most. Instead, what captured Amitabh's intellect (and
should I say imagination) was Gandhi's philosophy of self
sufficiency.
Amitabh's dissagreement with certain practices that are
common in purely money driven commercial architecture, and
his exposure to alternative grass root methods that were
being constantly discussed at work led him to view his
intended professional role slightly differently. At this
point in life, he was willing to try out, at least
intellectually, a different path.
111.7 THE DEPARTURE
There was also something else that altered his life
completely. By 1993, Amitabh had started applying to
30 Laurie Baker, an English architect, came to India before its
independence. Highly influenced by Mahahtma Gandhi and his philosophy,
Baker has remained in India ever since. He has worked with low cost
methods and has been the architect and planner for innumerable rural
projects. He eventually married a Keralite woman and settled down in
Kerala. Many argue that his architecture too has become a social status
symbol today. However, his dedication to his cause and ideals go
unquestioned in the history of Indian architecture. As Bhatia
(1994:112) comments in the book The Life and Works of Laurie Baker,
"Baker is perhaps more Indian than any contemporary architect of this
country.'
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American universities for admission to graduate programs in
architecture and related fields. Friends and family alike,
everyone commended him for his decision to pursue higher
education instead of getting rutted in a job. Bhatia
reasoned out why even the most dedicated Indian architect
might like to go abroad for education, "You want to do rural
projects? Sure. But most probably, you would need that
phoren degree to obtain the grant.*
"There is nothing as pure as education. Education is
something you can never take away from someoneAmitabh's
father justified when I asked him if he knew the reason why
Amitabh had applied for higher education. When I returned
to the United States, I asked the same question to Amitabh,
this time very bluntly. His answer was simple and clear,
"To see the United States."
If one is to look at the patterns of his own ideology
in his life, it will be clear that there has always been an
interest and motivation of trying out something new. I am
not implying that he has always been a rebel. However,
curiosity has led him to venture out and test the logic of
social and cultural norms and even some assertions.
It is difficult to typecast a person like Amitabh. He
is not a socialist, yet he believes in aspects of socialism,
as is evident in his taste in architecture. He is neither a
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sell-out to the West, though he has always been entirely
fascinated by the West right from his childhood. He would
quote Gandhi on how the West's imperialist and predatory
idoelogy consumed the entire world reducing indigenous
cultures to mere vestiges of the past. At the same time, he
wished that he could drive along the freeways of California
with the FM radio blasting a live U2 concert (this is
something he shared when I asked him if he wanted to return
to India. He said, "Here I am doing what I always wanted to
do.."). He hates corporate architecture and its
"ideological prostitution." But neither is he an idealist
who is willing to put his life and soul in search for the
contemporary architectural idiom. In his own words, he
"didn't know which way to go,- there was so much happening
all around. "
This period in Amitabh's life provided a rich landscape
of opportunity for novel experience and confronting
traditional Indian cultural constructs of education and
marriage. The free verse context of the Sixties culture,
the Punjabian energy of New Delhi, and immersion in a
creative, philosophical education were all influences in
Amitabh's choices of non traditional paths. And at the same
time these choices were also "the result of prolonged and
intricate processes of construction and negotiation deeply
imbedded in the culture " (Bruner; 1995 :102) - the influence
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of Hemen and Ela's marriage and life. In his childhood home
Amitabh observed and absorbed the process of negotiating a
life whose structure threatened to placed their family on
the margins of Indian tradition. This is evident in
Hemen's support of Amitabh's college choices with "there is
nothing as pure as education" while other parents are
pushing their children into safe professions. This
philosophical stance, arising from the margins, is evident
in Amitabh's being motivated by trying out something new,
and in his commitment to a career of contribution rather
than the safety of the corporate ladder .
On August 12, 1994, Amitabh boarded a Thai Airline
Jumbo heading towards California.
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Chapter IV
HOMES
Los Angeles. It is a city where many have realized
their wildest dreams, and many who lost their dream forever.
Amitabh came here chasing his own dream: to learn more about
the world outside India, and to learn more about
contemporary thoughts in architecture. Perhaps what he
learnt the most here was about himself. It is here that he
faced the conflicts between his Indian self and two distinct
American identities: one of his imagination and one that he
lived. It is here that he was forced to take a sharp look
at what "home" meant to him.
This chapter explores the possibility and the reality
of a multiperspective view of individual identity and
personal priorities set against the backdrop of individual-
social relationship.
iv.l THE CONTRAST
In an attempt to construct a sense of her self, Meena
Alexander (1993:30) writes in Fault Lines:
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Sometimes I am torn apart by two sorts of
memories, two opposing ways of being towards
the past. The first makes the whorls of skin
and flesh, coruscating shells, glittering in
moonlight. A life embedded in life, and that
in another life, another and another. . [The
other memory is] flat, filled with the
burning present, cut by existential choices.
Composed of bits and pieces of the present,
it renders the past suspect..
In this book, Meena Alexander repeatedly, and in my
opinion excessively, points out that she has not lived only
in her native Kerala, and that her sense of self draws from
the diverse geographies and cultures that she has lived in -
that of "Allahabad, Tiruvella, Kozencheri,.. Kartoum, Cairo,
Beirut,.. London, New York, Minneapolis,.."(p.31) Is it
just because she spent her life all over the world that she
feels a desire to express her sense of self? Perhaps not,
because if that was so, she could have simply written an
extended travelogue. The reason she wrote Fault Lines: A
Memoir was her desire to express the conflict within her
self. As Vincent Crapanzano (1985:9) writes, "The life
history and the autobiography, all writings for that matter,
are essentially self-constitutive; they are moments, fixed
in time by the word, in the dialectical process of self
creation." These diverse senses of self, expressed here
through "memories," become "opposing" when there is a
competition between the diverse memories, or as in
Alexander's case, "imagination" too. When one is anchored
to a particular social context for considerable length of
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time, the multiplicity of these identities are not so
clearly visible, and hence not perceived as competitive. As
Rodriguez (1983) points out the noticability of the
distinctive "high, nasal tones" of American voices when
heard out of context, as in "hotel lobbies and airports...
in Brazil or Turkey." (p. 14) The distinctness, however, is
not that apparent and striking in its natural environs. He
writes, "But inevitably - already on the flight headed home
- the sound (of high American voices) fades with repetition.
I will be unable to hear it anymore." (p. 14) In other
words, what brings to notice a certain memory (or
imagination) is not its presence, but the sense of its
absence.
When Amitabh came to the United States, certain aspects
of his Indianness came to the forefront. Perhaps because
Amitabh was so well read about the West, he did not suffer
from any immediate culture shock. For him, the differences
came to the surface in a more gradual, though more gnawing
way. He said,
The difference between India and the United
States did not really surprise me. We have
read, heard and seen enough of the United
States in India. What stmck me sharply was
how ’Indian' I was. (For example) though the
freeways did surprise me a bit, I would not
call it a shock... I will not put [the
experience] past a general sense of
intimidation. But what was shocking to me
was that I actually wondered if I will ever
get used to it.
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In other words, a part of Amitabh cried out for the
security of the crowded Indian roads. A tourist does not
react the way Amitabh did. S/he would admire or be
intimidated by the fast freeways, but s/he does not have to
face the fear of getting used to it. It is clear that
Amitabh had already started situating his self in the
American context. He was reacting to a possible threat to
his Indian identity, as is evident in his seemingly absurd
fear of getting used to the freeways of North America. For
him - and I would almost generalize here and say, for every
student like him - getting used to the freeways of America
means falling out of touch with the narrow Indian roads.
And this in turn symbolizes a loss of a certain part of his
Indian identity.
This is an example of how Amitabh's Indian narrative31
became highlighted against the American narrative. Perhaps
the internal comparison of the two narratives, as
illustrated by the freeway example, is natural. This is
because, by the time Amitabh came to the United States his
sense of self as an individual was well established, and the
internal logic of the Indian narrative formed the basis of
comparison and comprehension. Any new input, such as the
31 As I have discussed in the Introduction, Bruner (1995:33,42,58)
justifies how events, memory and imagination (which are the key
"internal* factors employed in developing a sense of self) is played out
or rearranged in a plot with sequentiality, or simply put, in form of a
narrative.
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freeways, was tested against the backdrop of the Indian
narrative. Not all elements of the American narrative sat
well against the Indian narrative, and as a result, certain
conflicts came to the forefront.
IV. 2 THE CONFLICTS
Amitabh grew up in India with the West on his mind.
The West he knew comprised of images from the radio,
television, cinema, music, books and magazines, and stories
he heard from friends and family. For him, the West existed
in his imagination. Before Amitabh came to America, the
dissonance between the Western narrative, plotted by the
imaginary, and the Indian narrative, plotted by both the
real and the imaginary, was an externalized dialogue. The
reason I say it was externalized is because for the most
part of his life, the resistance that Amitabh faced during
his attempts at internalizing dissonant forms of
westernization - such as the 'sixties' - came primarily from
institutions that were external to him - like his parents,
school, religion and society. However, after coming to
America, the resistance towards the West became an internal
dialogue. It was as if, a part of Amitabh came in part, to
represent what those external Indian institutions stood for.
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The conflict in Amitabh's mind was not limited just to
the expected "America vs. India." There was also a strange
battle between the two Americas: the America in his mind,
and the America in front of his eyes. Though the image of
America trapped in Amitabh's mind was not the quintessential
Sixtie's "sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll" ("No one is as stupid
or as uninformed as that!" he snarled) , and he had read a
lot about the socio-political climate of present day United
States, the difference between the America of his
imagination and what he saw in reality when he started
living here were conflicting. Referring to this conflict,
he illustrated:
Remember Whiskey (a bar on Sunset Boulevard) ?
We had a pretty wild and romantic picture of
it in our minds - associated with the Doors,
Van Halen. . / You come here and look at this
rather run down joint and wonder "Is this
what it was all about?"
The story that Amitabh told to himself (through the
medium of music, magazines, friends, etc..) about Whiskey
was emotionally, and perhaps also empirically, dissonant to
the building standing on Sunset Boulevard. One may argue
that the Whiskey he knew in India was a 'tale, ' and what he
sees here is 'reality. ' However, even if we grant the
validity of such an argument, does it mean that one should
relegate the 'tale' solely for the purpose of amusement?
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In the introduction of the book Tuhami, author
Crapanzano critiques Suzan Langer, who is of the opinion
that "fairytales" are "irresponsible" (Langer; 1957:175).
Crapanzano (1985:7) writes:
The contrast... depends on the absolute
distinction between the imaginary and the
real that has dominated Western thought (cf.
Lacan 1966). The imaginary - the product of
unconstrained desire at its limit - is
relegated to a status inferior to that of the
real, which parades under the standard of
truth. The problem of what is or is not real
is left to the philosopher. To Everyman, the
real is both distinct from the imaginary and
at one with truth.
Crapanzano describes how Tuhami, a Moroccan tilemaker
would tell different stories explanating the same events.
Crapanzano's initial frustration was soon replaced by an
insight into the difference between the "real and the
"true." He writes:
Like so many of those fragments of
information through which anthropologists
come to understand the culture or the people
they study and which they can never
incorporate into their ethnographies,
Tuhami's tale... revealed to me the
presumption of our collapsing the real and
the true. (1985:22-23)
Thus, we may infer that till the memories of the Indian
version of the Whiskey story is erased from Amitabh's mind,
it will continue to hold importance and significance in
Amitabh's life. As Bruner (1995:44) puts it, "The narrative
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can be 'real' or 'imaginary' without losing the power of the
story."
IV. 3 "INDIA IS HOME"
"India is home" is a commonly heard phrase in any
gathering of Indian students in America. More than anything
else, it is an abbreviation of two very saturated terms:
"India" and "home." How appropriate is the abbreviation?
During a discussion with Amitabh regarding the fidelity of
the phrase he tried to analyze his concept of "home in
India." He said:
What did "home" mean to me in India? It
meant a network of family and friends which
could be taken for granted, or at least be
stretched quite a bit without it breaking.
It meant the languages, more than that - it
meant the *lingos' (colloquial versions of
the languages) ... It meant a sense of
belongingness, a sense of attachment:
something that told you that you belong to
this place and this place belongs to you. . .
It meant all that, but strangely you never
thought about all the time.
The very first contextualization of home is neither
cultural nor is it in terms of ethnicity. The first
situating reference is simply a generalized "family and
friends. " But what is more interesting is the metaphor that
is employed here: "a network." In other words, Amitabh
defines his self in reference to an already established
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interconnected group. He does not say "circle" of friends,
which would have drawn attention to the ego around which the
circle is defined. There could not be a truer
representation of Amitabh's group of intimates. Indian
family ties are extremely strong. Even in the most
cosmopolitan situations, the 'uncles and aunts' cire integral
parts of one's life. As a result, it is easy to see that
Amitabh is not the sole reason why his other family members
remain in close touch. Even Amitabh's group of friends are
highly interconnected. A classic example from Amitabh's
life is Sunita's identity with respect to what used to be
Amitabh's architecture school friends when the couple
started dating each other. In the beginning, Sunita's
relationships to Amitabh's friends were only through him.
Given the permeating nature of interpersonal relationships
among consociates in India, and the relative unimportance
attached to individuality, such a situation typically does
not last long. Today, Sunita is as close, if not closer, to
Amitabh's architecture school friends as is Amitabh (and the
process has replicated itself between Amitabh and Sunita's
friends too). And, because it is a "network," which means
the pressure caused within one individual relationship is
distributed among others, it can withstand more stress
and strain.
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Why is this "typical" to India and not to America?
Richard Shweder (1991) , who has conducted research on
comparative concepts of personhood among Oriyas (an Eastern
Indian community) and Americans, has to say in Thinking
Through Cultures:
In America, people-in-society conceive of
themselves as free of the relationships of
hierarchy and exchange that govern all social
ties and are so central to the theories of
self in Orissa... The sociocentric conception
of the individual-social relationship (of
Orissa) lends itself to an organic metaphor.
Indeed in holistic sociocentric cultures like
India's the human body, conceived as an
interdependent system, is frequently taken as
a metaphor for society (and society conceived
as an organic whole, is taken as a metaphor
of nature). (p.150)
In short, the American conceptualization of individual-
social relationship is "egocentric contractual," whereas the
Indian counterpart is "sociocentric organic" (Shweder;
1991) . Thus we see that the reason for "network of family
and friends" to be the first thing to come to Amitabh's mind
in his attempt to define "home" is not a coincidence or a
personal whim, but the result of a deep rooted social
schooling. And, this "network" will remain the most
important ingredient of his "Indian" home.
The next element of his definition of home is: ”..the
languages, more than that it meant 'lingo. '" In a
preliminary attempt to draw out the relationship between
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language and community, Jyotirindra Das Gupta (1975)
debates, "Language provides a bond of unity among its
speakers and defines a line of separation marking off one
speech community from another. " (p.470) But that explains
only the first part of the sentence. Amitabh associates
"home" not only with languages (in the dictionary meaning of
the word), but with "lingo," the customized version of a
colloquial language. Das Gupta's earlier description of the
relationship between language and community is correct but
not accurate, as he explains later on. Taking the example
of English (arguably the most "international" of all
languages), he points out the inaccuracy of the logic put
forward earlier,
It is difficult to imagine how and what
useful sense the mother tongue speakers of
English language, ranging from Englishman,
Americans, Canadians, Australians, to the
Eurasian community of India can be considered
either a categorical ethnic community or a
politically relevant community, (p.475)
Thus we see that just "language" is a vague and
possibly misleading marker of identity. It does not capture
ethnicity beyond a very basic generalized level, and may be
quite inappropriate a benchmark for any detailed analytical
purpose. "Lingo," as Amitabh stylizes it, on the other
hand, is not a language that is officially instituted by
society. It is a version thereof that one picks up while
living in a place for an extended period of time. In other
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words, "lingo" is very region specific - like that of Delhi,
period specific - like that of the Eighties, and often class
specific too - like that of college students. Understand
such a version of a language requires understanding the
subculture of use, whether this identification is done
consciously by an ethnographer, or subconsciously done by
the informant. For example, University students in India,
as almost everywhere else, are noted for customizing their
language. Sometimes it sounds more like a code rather than
a language.32 To appreciate the Delhi University student
subculture and their world view, it is essential to
comprehend and organically relate to their "lingo." A
"lingo" gives a group a distinct identity, a sense of
separateness from the rest of the community33. Amitabh's
association to the "lingo" of his college years in Delhi
marks him off as a member of a distinct taxonomical entity.
In a typical Delhi-ite Hindi (which is a crude mix of
classical Hindi, Punjabi and Haryanvi34) , Amitabh said, "It
is strange, ... a particular tone, a particular vocabulary,
can sometimes open a few floodgates and send you reeling
32 Often, college "lingo* has very interesting allusions to the root
words. For example, "Funda," derived from the word "fundamental*
usually refers to someone's personal opinion/understanding,- "Hallu, *
from the word "hallucination,* stands for day dreaming. So, a typical
exchange between two arguing Delhi University students about the
division of workload in a joint class project might be something like
this: "Hey! You too have been hallu-ing all semester. So, don't give
me your fundas about how to run this project.'
33 See Diego Vigil's Barrio Gangs.
34 Haryana is a neighboring state of Delhi. Haryanvi is the local
dialect spoken in Haryana.
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into an intense bout of homesickness. " Thus, it may be
infered that beyond the traditional Indianness that was
discussed in the previous pages, Amitabh's evaluation of the
concept of "home" is also highly localized and temporized.
In other words, Amitabh does not categorically place any
Indian town (and time) closer to his understanding of "home"
in comparison with Los Angeles. Thus the phrase, "India is
home" is not only factually erronized, but also an emotional
misrepresentation.
iv. 4 THE AMERICAN HOME
My first attempt at ferreting out Amitabh's concept of
his American home met with strong resistance. For days he
was replying in jokes like, "My American home means a micro
wave, a computer, a telephone, a firdge, and a few other
extremely important things." Even though I realized that
there was a truth behind the humor, I wanted him to
articulate the sense of his American home in a more easily
analyzable form. After a few days he confessed that most of
the criteria by which he had judged his home in India were
not applicable here. So, our attempt at defining the
American home began with comparisons of the criteria of
j udgement.
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What sprang out first in an attempt to compare life in
the two countries was the autonomy of personal life in
America. The American sense of personal space is what makes
a non-Westeraer feel unwelcome, or at least uncomfortable.
Shweder (1991) argues:
Western individualism has its origins in the
institution of privacy - that privacy
promotes a passion or need for autonomy,
which, for the sake of our sense of personal
integrity, requires privacy... Practices
cultivate intuitions, intuitions about what
is decent, which then support such Western
notions as freedom to choose, autonomy in
decision making, sanctuary, and "my own
business." (p.153-154)
An Indian like Amitabh, who has considerable
theoretical knowledge about American history, geography and
culture, can certainly feel lost in a crowd here. However,
if seen in the appropriate context, privacy does not
necessarily mean shutting of doors. "In fact, it is very
freeing- in some sense, " points out Amitabh, ”You are not
bothered what neighbor thinks of you, you know that the
grocer will not ask you uncomfortable personal questions..."
For anyone who has grown up in an atmosphere of gossip and
silent social condemnation - often best expressed by
ostracization, will perhaps not view privacy as something
completely selfish.
The sense of independence that is cultivated from birth
in the West enables an individual to peruse his/her own
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ideas without much constraints laid down by the social
contracts. About the Balinese concept of personhood, which
is very similar to the traditional Indian concept, Clifford
Geertz (1975) wrote in On the nature of anthropological
unders tanding:
A persistent and systematic attempt to
stylize all aspects of personal expression to
the point where anything idiosyncratic,
anything characteristic of the individual
merely because he is who he is physically,
psychologically or biologically, is muted in
favor of his assigned place in the continuing
. and, so it is thought, never-changing pageant
that is Balinese life. (p.50)
As we have seen before Amitabh, like his father Hemen,
has at various points in his life reacted in resistance, if
not in rebellion, to some social dictates. So,
individuality and privacy did offer a sense of a comfort
that Amitabh had always wanted.
How is individuality tied to the economic aspect aspect
of the American Dream? Economic opportunity is arguably the
most important ingredient of the American Dream. As one of
America's founding economist John Mynard Keyenes (1964:119)
points out, "capitalism is... enlightened self interest."
History has shown that capitalism has enabled most of the
Western nations to progress materially, even at the cost of
other nations' poverty, as some would argue. Economist
Jonathan Smith (1991) describes as the "display of national
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wealth on the shopping wracks of common America" (p.22).
Recalling his first days in Los Angeles, Amitabh said:
When I first came here, I heard people say
that the 32nd Street Market (a supermarket
next to University of Southern California) is
dirty, and it was a pain to shop there. But,
to me everything looked very clean and
organized. It was a vast improvement from
the Hauz Khas market (New Delhi) or the
Mahahhairab Bazaar (Tezpur) . . . [However, ]
today, I too say that the 32nd Street Market
sucks. And this change has occurred within
the first year of my coming to Los Angeles.
I guess what I am trying to get at is that we
change our standards rather quickly.. .
The question that is becoming more and more pertinent
in Amitabh's life today is if it is just a change of
standard or is it altogether a change of view. The change
of view is engendered by a change in attitude towards one's
environs. What impressed him more than anything else was
the fact that "everything worked here." For someone who has
grown up in a city where the power supply is interrupted for
two to three hours everyday, common aspects of American life
like MCI or AT&T competing for "your business," or the fact
that one does not have to bribe the ticketmaster to buy an
ordinary railway ticket, can indeed be convincing.
Commenting sarcastically on the stifling sense of fatalism
and an inevitable feeling of stalemate that characterizes
the Indian politico-cultural scenario, Gautam Bhatia (1994)
writes:
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The country is like a benign cancer, a banyan
tree rooting and rerooting, never dying,
slowly gaining new and effective footholds in
the ground. Sometimes it is difficult to
live in the eternal overdose of India; its
daily message of violence, the generous
hostility of its ordinary working life: the
persistent symbols of piety and fanaticism.
Yet, despite the despair of its reality - the
oddities, the unrest, the disquiet, the
polluting face of its cities - India can
always be kept at bay.(p.102)
Baggage of this sort is difficult to carry around with
pride in a country like America. Sooner or later, the urge
to shed the load and mix into the "life is here and now"
philosophy of America, as Paul Simon (1992) expresses it,
starts to itch the mind. From then on, the reality of the
congested roads start coming into mind when one considers
going back to India - this time in a more menacing form.
One day, in the middle of our complicated, and often
confusing intellectual discussions about the American Dream,
Amitabh commented on the pleasures of living out a dream.
He said:
When you are cruising down [Interstate
Highway] 10, with the mountains rolling by on
one side, and the ocean glittering on the
other, ... and the radio playing a heady U2
live album. .. You say to yourself, here is
what I wanted to do all my life! And not
anymore is it a third hand story circulating
in the [college] hostel... It is for real!
And it is happening now!
It was clear that Amitabh, inspite of the high ideals
and ideas of "contribution," was utterly affected by the
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glitter of America. Objectively, there is nothing wrong in
admiring America and utilizing what it has to offer.
However, what bothered me, and more importantly, bothered
Amitabh himself was a sense of guilt. Torn between
memories, imagination and reality - the Indian past, the
America he dreamt of, and the America he sees - Amitabh
still stands where he stood three years ago: "..there is so
much happening all around.*
For many Indian students who never had the desire to
"contribute, " it is easy to make a decision and cross the
'threshold' (Fix and Passel; 1994) of national boundaries
and emotional attachment to their erstwhile home. But such
students are usually preoccupied by the call of self-
interest - the green card, the international job, the
Japanese car, . .. the American Dream. That is the sole
reason for which they come to this country. However Indian
they might be in color and features, they have already
assimilated with the fierce individualism of America.
Though their past may bear conflicts of cultures, their
future is not confused. For Amitabh, however, the future is
not ideologically as clear.
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Chapter V
NOSTALGIA AND IDENTITY
Through Western Eyes
Nostalgia is the yearning for a past period, the
longing for some irrecoverable condition. It can be
described as a desire to return to a history which, if at
all, had existed in highly altered realities. Nostalgia - a
pleasurable state of mind - hides the actuality of the past
behind filters of apparent fondness, innocence and beauty.
It seems that nostalgia often invades at points of
disjuncture, when the present and the future appear
disjointed with the past. According to Renato Rosaldo
(1989) :
We valorize innovations, and then yearn for
more stable worlds, whether these reside in
our past, in other cultures, or in the
conflation of the two. Such forms of longing
thus appear closely related to secular
notions of progress, (p.70)
This link between nostalgia and progress can not be
overlooked. For, while this yearning for the past appears
to be an innocent escape from the present, the longing for
simpler times is ideologically laden. Rosaldo points out
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that nostalgia, by its very nature, can be understood as
imperialistic.
Imperialist nostalgia revolves around a
paradox: A person kills somebody, and then
mourns the victim. In more attenuated form,
someone deliberately alters a form of life,
and then regrets that things have not
remained as they were prior to the
intervention. At one more remove, people
destroy environment, and then they worship
nature. In any of its versions, imperialist
nostalgia uses a pose of “innocent yearning"
both to capture people's imagination and to
conceal its complicity with often brutal
domination. (Rosaldo; 1989:70)
Since progress has increasingly become associated with
the imperialistic introduction of technology and ideas from
the West, nostalgia is a misplaced sentiment. Like a
plaster, it is constructed to hide the main structure - that
of the Western domination over the rest of the world. It
offers an apology that masks the West's systematic
dismantling of other cultures, and then expresses sadness at
the loss.
For a metropolitan non-Westemer who has been
surrounded from birth by various mutated versions of Western
ideology, the consequences are significant, and for him or
her, the logic of nostalgia can be even more insinuating and
the insidious. For example, the English education is almost
expected for the middle and upper class Indian children.
And by virtue of the dissonance between the indigenous and
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imperial histories, he or she learns to view his or her
personal and national past through the bifocal lens of
indigenousness and westernization. Schooled in the
imperialist narrative, the indigenous perspective is held to
be 'precious' part of the past, while the imperial
imperative grabs the imagination and carries more weight in
terms of success and progress.
Who else would face a keener expression of this dualism
than a young mind in pursuit of the American Dream? In an
impressive yet alienating jungle of evident success and
progress, this young mind stands today facing two immense
cultures. His or her identity is a product of both. Eighty
five percent (USEFI35; 1992) of Indian students who come to
the United States exercise the conscious choice of staying
in this country. For them, India is a personal past.
However homesick they might be, they are by choice, not
willing to return to that past.
What are the reasons behind such a contradiction? How
are students such as Amitabh and I situated in this
hypocrisy of longing for, yet consciously staying away
from a past?
3S USEFI stands for The United States Educational Foundation in India.
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V.l SEEKING AN IDENTITY IN CHAOS: The Indian
dualism in personalized pasts
In our immediate family, both Amitabh and I belong to
the first generation bom in independent India. We only
heard of the British Raj, never experienced living in it
personally. The British system of education was introduced
in India in early nineteenth century. In other words, the
minds of Newton, Shakespeare, Voltaire, and Rousseau,
educated our fathers, our grandfathers, and our great
grandfathers36. The language of instruction for Amitabh and
me has been English from as early as second grade in junior
high school37. It is not surprising then, that we have
taken so naturally to the Western concept of progress. The
truth is, if we did have an understanding of another concept
of progress through, say Indian mythological tales that we
heard during our infancy and childhood, we quickly learned
to disregard them as 'stories.' Descartes and rationalism
ruled supreme from the very early days of comprehension, and
36 Unfortunately (or fortunately), the same does not hold true for our
grandmothers and our great-grandmothers. Education, until about two
generations ago was typically tailored for male consumption.
37 Many westerners were surprised that we spoke English with the ease of
a mothertongue. Conversely, while we were teaching assistants at the
University of Southern California, we were dismayed by the brutal
spelling and grammatical mistakes found in the test papers of the
average American undergraduate student there.
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later on, the viewpoints of Hegel and Weber made perfect
sense38.
However, besides the bedtime mythological stories, we
were also taught to admire the philosophy of the Bhagwad
Gita and appreciate the kinship system that our families
followed, often contrasted with the recentness of the
history and society in the West. We were taught that
progress could not be measured in one lifetime; that the
goodness of being a life transcended human reasoning. Betty
Heimann (1964) has this to say on the Indian transcedental
philosophy:
India is traditionally imbued with the philosophy
of eternity and assigns to transitory events only
a relative and minor importance. Since the time
of the Greeks, the West has had a tendency to
overestimate the power of human reason and human
judgment: 'Man is the Measure of all things.' The
Indian philosopher on the other hand, has always
recognized the limited faculty of unaided Reason.
He postulates a higher superrational cognitive
power as a necessary complement, (p. 17)
We were taught that the aim of every human life is to
draw away from the immediacy of life's experiences:
38 G. W. F. Hegel, one of the most prominent modem Western
philosophers, said in 1837 (these lectures were later published in the
book Reason in History) :
“..it may be said that world history is the exhibition of spirit
striving to attain knowledge of its own nature.... Orientals do
not yet know that Spirit - Man as such - is free. And because
they do not know it, they are not free.' (1953:23)
He further goes on to say, “Only Germanic peoples came, through
Christianity, to realize that man as man is free and that freedom of
Spirit is the very essence of man's nature.* (1953:24) Hegel's view,
unfortunately is not one of the past. Variations of it has been readily
heard throughout this century.
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happiness, sorrow, success, failure. For the immediate is
but transitory:
One earthly life, one short present, can not
unfold the full picture; the relatively brief
span of some seventy years of human life is not
considered sufficient to develop all innate
tendencies and dispositions of their fullest
fruition. Only a series of interconnected lives,
extending backwards into the past and forward into
the future, is able to develop and display the
full volume of maturity. For each moment of the
present is but an instant of transition from past
to future, (p.20).
The British Raj mercantilism and modem day capitalism
has shown and taught us just the opposite. The entire
premise of Protestant ethics rests on the significance of
the 'here and now' (Gordon:1991). The beauty of abstraction
in the Indian philosophy was gradually dissolved by the
practical political philosophy of the West: the British did
build the bridges, the British did form the Indian
Government, the British did rule over us. After the evident
Western political domination, the economic concept of gain
(Smith: 1991) and material development has gradually come to
be held synonymous to progress. However, some painful
vestiges of the old Indian way of life still holds profound
meaning to even the most contemporary of urban Indians. For
example, though men in most urban North Indian weddings wear
western suits, the women still wear saris or salwar kurtas.
The dinner arrangements are often made in Western buffet
style, but the mantras (sacred chantings) of the wedding are
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still from Hindu or Sikh scriptures. If History gives a
community or race a culutre, an identity, an ideal, we
clearly have had two Histories.
Amitabh's father, who is an educator, speaks in the
same breath about how fortunate Amitabh is at having the
opportunity to be in the country which is more developed and
can offer Amitabh more and that he is scared that Amitabh
will lose out on reaping the benefits of the rich Indian
tradiations that he was fortunate to be bora in, if he is
not in touch with India. This is a vivid example of a
polarization of our ideals. His contradictory statement
illustrates the common belief that for an Indian to be
successful in life today, s/he can not adhere to the just
one culture (Western or Indian) . This is the disjuncture
that Amitabh has been facing from the day he was bora. Our
generation was bora in a world that has been shrinking
exponentially, a phenomenon brought about primarily by
technology. As a result, the basis of comparison has
somewhat changed. Often, an intercultural comparisons is
far more fruitful and valid than intertemporal ones. For
example, Amitabh's interests and ambition, even when he was
in India, was far more comparable to a student abroad, than
with his father. At other times, intertemporal comparisons
amounts to intercultural ones. In other words, the two
generations are so different that it appears that they
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belonged to two different places altogether. Commenting on
the transitory global community, Appadurai (1991) writes,
"The central problem of today's global interaction is the
tension between cultural homogenization and cultural
heterogenization" (p.259) . His model seems to hold true
even when comparing the interaction between two generations
- father and son - as opposed to two places - as in the
global community. But why do these differences arise?
Appadurai writes,
The critical point is that both sides of the coin
of global cultural process today are products of
the infinitely varied mutual contest of sameness
and difference on a stage characterized by radical
disjunctures between different sorts of global
flows and the uncertain landscapes created in and
through these disjunctures (p.308).
For Amitabh and I this disjuncture manifests itself in
a constant dialogue between our generation and the one that
precedes us. In an early interview, Hemen had vehemently
supported Amitabh's desire for higher learning, which is
Western. When the the film crew was winding down Hemen
remarked, "Kya rakkha hai us desh mein?" [What's so special
in that country?] In other words, what is so attractive
about the culture of the United States that we prefer that
over Indian culture? What he was hinting at was that his
son's generation did not really know their own motherland
and their own tradition. Hemen's idea of the West is dated
by atleast thirty years. As a result what he gathers from
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news, letters, and stories seems extremely chaotic. But
what is more important is that Hemen's idea od India too, is
dated. In the book Silent Spaces, the architect-author
Gautam Bhatia (1995) points out:
Societal changes [in India], driven primarily
by foreign technology, have been so rapid
that history appears to be almost
discontinuous. The changes that Europe saw
over two centuries have been compressed into
fifty years, or less, in the case of many
developing countries, (p.76)
Examples of such leap-frogging change is not difficult to
come by. When I left India (in 1992) we had just three
television channels. Today, my television in New Delhi
switches to thirty-nine. How is this change dealt with by a
wide eyed generation which is politically independent, and
culturally confused? Comaroff and Comaroff (1992) write:
Money and commodities, literacy and Christendom
challenged local symbols, threatening to convert
them into a universal currency. But precisely
because the cross, the book, and the coin were
such saturated signs, they were variously and
ingeniously redeployed to bear a host of new
meanings as non-Western peoples - Tswana prophets,
Naparama fighters, and others - fashioned their
own visions of modernity (cf. Clifford 1988:5-6).
(p.5-6).
A classic contemporary example redeployment of signs is
the Durga Pujas39. In idols of some Durga Pujas in Calcutta
39 The Durga Puja (worship of Goddess Durga) is the biggest religious
and cultural festival among Bengalis in specific, and Eastern Indians in
general. Celebrations are held in pandals in almost every neighborhood
in the cities. Calcutta (the capital city of West Bengal) sees more
than 1,500 such Pujas every year.
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last year (1995) , the sculptors made the Asuras (a demon)
emerge from T-Rexes instead of the traditional bisons.
Another classic example is found in some highway dhabas
(cheap roadside restaurants) in Punjab (Northern India)
where cooks were using washing machines to make bulk lassi40
for the thirsty truck drivers.
The generation to which Amitabh and I belong, has
learnt not to situate itself completely in any one history.
Born in a free India without a tangible enemy like the
British rulers, educated to cherish the West, this
generation has inherited a very confounded sense of
morality. In some ways, this has been a liberating
experience too. For, the history that we have created for
ourselves is a one of convenience. Trapped between the
opposing forces, many of us have adapted to the situation by
standing on the battle-line, so that it is easy to shift
camps.
A way to deal with the multifarious pulls and pushes on
our moral fiber is often exhibited in a self-righteous
silence. (If you can't do anything about it, don't worry
about it!) This denial to action is more than an escape,
it is almost an angry deductive statement aimed towards the
40 Lassi is a popular sour milk drink, which is prepared by vigorous
shaking.
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previous generation. An excerpt from an interview with
Amitabh:
Amitabh: No one has the time!...
Everyone is so busy guarding one's own end
that you just don't have the time to consider
other reasons of who you are, what you are,
why you are. You just give up [to the
present situation] and say 'Alright I am!
Now what to do..' (Pause) I just don't have
time to think of my uncles and aunts and
other relatives as they thought of, or cared
for me. Yes, you take them for granted and
carry on. .. And the funny thing is that this
system seems okay to them too,.. at least,
even if it is not, they don't let me know.
Anirban: So do you think we have become
selfish?
Amitabh: Yes. (Pause) - but you can't keep
looking at it that way.
The society that Amitabh and I are nostalgic about is
not the pristine land described in Tagore's poems. Our
yearning is for a far more contaminated land. Amitabh's
favorite reading material as a child was the Phantom comics
by Lee Falk. The story that fascinated me the most when I
was a child was not the Jataka tales - though those too were
read out to me - but that of Sound of Music. In the United
States, both Amitabh and I have been the subjects of wonder
and amazement when we have 'exhibited substantial
knowledge'41 on various aspects of everyday Western life.
People have quieried for example, "How do you know so much
41 A phrase I borrow from a recommendation letter that Amitabh received
from a client he worked for in the summer of 1995.
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about the American Revolution?" In the passionate work
Hunger of Memory, Richard Rodriguez (1982) writes, "Perhaps
because I am marked by indelible color they easily suppose
that I am unchanged by social mobility, that I can claim
unbroken ties with my past." (p.5) . The past that is being
sarcastically referred to here, is the 'pristine' colonial
times. I am tempted to say that this past never existed for
us; and that Amitabh's father and Amitabh did belong to two
different lands.
V. 2 Here and Now: The dilemma of being a 'desi'
The word desi literally means 'Belonging to one's land'
or 'of the country.' However, the general context in which
it is used for refering to Indian students in America, the
term has a derogatory connotation of unsophistication42.
What is the acquired identity of a desi? In an interview,
Amitabh tried to bring forward some elements of desi -ness:
What do we associate with the desi crowd out here?
What picture comes to mind of the median Indian
student here? The Indian store-going, Chitrahaar-
watching43, green card-monging software engineer
42 From the concept of desi, various other entertaining forms of
identification have sprung up. For example, someone who is ethnically
Indian but was born here, and thus is a citizen of America, is referred
to as an "ABCD, ' which stands for 'American Born Confused Desi."
43 Chitrahaar is a half hour program of Hindi film songs on the Indian
Television. It has had record viewership year after year. Here, one
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crowd. I am gradually becoming a part of it.
That is what is so scary. It's strange, - when a
white person, or any other non-Indian person for
that matter, talks about the Indian community
here, one vehemently defends 'the clan. ' You say
things like "What the hell are you talking about?
It's us who keep your computers running and
develop fancy software so that you guys can boast
of them as American productsI" But when you are
alone, you have a tendency of emotionally
distancing yourself from these same desis you so
vehemently defended.
Amitabh is plainly illustrating the sense of dual
morality we carry within ourselves. How were we taught to
look at ourselves? The picture of ourselves that we have
grown up with - painted by media, the education system,
family and friends - has largely been in comparison with the
outside, essentially the West. The very fact that the
medium of instruction in any respectable school is English,
plants the seed of a latent self-degradation from a very
early age. But what is more damaging is that such an
attitude of Worship of the West (Dasgupta: 1976) is
encouraged by the family. When one is confronting an
'outsider, ' such as a white person, one is aware that the
outsider is clubbing the Indian in question in the same
category as the so called 'median'44 Indian student. Hence
gets to see it on some cable channels on Sundays. There are some
viewers who openly 'confess' to be fans of this program, and others who
enjoy watching it, but rather not be caught doing so.
As Bob Dylan puts it: "There are many people scared of the bomb.
But a whole lot more are terrified of being seen at the news-stand
holding a commonplace magazine.' [Infidels: Jacket Notes; 1979].
Similar sentiments apply here.
44 The median is a mathematical average which corresponds to the highest
number of occurances (frequency) of an event in a given sample. Here,
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the defensive reaction. However, when the threat of the
apparent mistaken identity is lifted, what emerges is a more
'real' emotional reaction to our national identity. In
India, people like Amitabh and I have associated mostly with
the elite class45. Our peers were students who came from
'good families,' went to public schools, could speak fluent
English, and kept up with the trends of the West. We
inherited the idea of a attaching importance to family
backgrounds partly from the Indian feudal history and partly
as an influence of British beauraucracy. It is interesting
to note that 'good family' - a moral concept - usually
coincides with 'rich family - an economic concept46.
Children of most 'good families' are typically enrolled in
public schools. Education in public school is more
expensive than other schools. Public schools, on the other
hand, being better off financially, can afford to hire the
best of teachers. Due to a better standard of education
received, a public school students are relatively more
successful in the college entrance examinations. As a
by 'median Indian student, ' I am refering to the subgroup of Indian
students in America, who are representative of the most popularly
pursued academic discipline. This, according to USEFI (1992), is
"Engineering and Computer Related Professions." (p.32) .
45 This is especially true for the two of us who went to the so called
'arty' schools: architecture and cinema. However, this also stands true
to a large extent for most Indian students who come to study in the
United States.
46It might be noted here that most of these 'good families' have had a
long service history tinder the British rulers (typically clerical, at
best administrative).
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result, most good colleges have a domionant student
community belonging to rich families, who could afford to
send their children to public schools. Because of the kind
of education and upbringing these students are far more
westernized than other (average) college communities. For
example, during undergraduate college years of Amitabh and
I, the typical signs of 'cool'-ness were jeans, as opposed
to teri-cotton trousers, easy-fit shirts or T-shirts, as
opposed to exact-fit shirts, interest in Western music and
foreign films, as opposed to Hindi films, Hindi songs, at
ease with the English language, as opposed to Hindi or any
other local language47.
In the United States, the peers of Amitabh and I are
Westerners by default, and thus naturally satisfy most of
the peer-selection requirements: they can speak English,
they come from rich if not 'good' families, and they are
generally more aware of trends of West than we Indians are.
At this point a dichotomy takes place in the reaction. On
the one hand we hanker for any Indian-ness that we can find,
on the other we look down upon the same Indian-ness among
other students. Aditi48, a friend of Amitabh form the
School of Planning and Architecture (New Delhi) who has not
47The situation is somewhat changing. However, these basic guidelines,
or variations of them, stand true even today.
48 Aditi, herself, is planning to come to the United States this fall
(1996) for her graduate education.
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visited the United States yet, had a pertinent question.
She asked, ”How come you guys (Indian students in America)
live in the same apartment complexes and party together when
you can't stand each other? Is it because no one really
accepts you out there other than your own kind?"
In the case of Indians, the reason why one would
dislike being associated with one's own brethren is not
political, but cultural. The hand of politics in this
dichotomy is concealed behind the veneer of culture. The
acceptance of the Western ideology and its tangible sense of
progress is what creates the hierarchical power structure in
our minds. In this structure, we equate "progress" with
"western." And because we do so, we Indians, often see
ourselves as a community of 'have-nots.' If we had not seen
our Indian selves as the have-nots we would not have ended
up living through this dualism. And, if we really believed
in our cultural independence and the validity of
transcendental philosophy, or if we really attached more
value to what India has to offer, the length of the queue in
front of the embassies of United States, United Kingdom,
Germany and France would have been shorter. And,
acknowledging this final victory of the West are every man,
woman and child standing in these queues. The logic that
seems inspired by common sense, and is most consistent with
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self interest is: why should we associate ourselves with
those who have lost?
The India that one escapes to in moments of yearning is
a private India, devoid of the soon-to-be desis in the
queue. One escapes to the romantic land of survivors who
are carrying on despite the harshness and inefficiency of
the land. Yearning for those hot sleepy afternoons with the
desert cooler switched on seems idyllic and blissful. But
does one really want to return to that? If statistics of
the past decades are of any forecasting value, it is plain
and clear that this year too most of us will not return to
India. By staying back in the United States one has
participated, whether one likes it or not, in the politics
of domination. Our only victory has been that we have,
literally and figuratively, shifted camps to the side of the
winner. And in the end, it is not surprising that we too
have taken to reminiscensing the way the winners do: "We
valorize innovation, and then yearn for more stable worlds,
whether these reside in our past, in other cultures, or in
the conflation of the two." - Rosaldo (1989:70).
The fond 'returns' to the land one has willingly
forsaken is best expressed by Dom Moraes (1987) :
If you should find me crying
As often when I was a child
You will know I have reason to.
I am ashamed of myself
Since I was ashamed of you.
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Your eyes are like mine.
When I last looked in them
I saw my whole country,
A defeated dream
Hiding itself in prayers,
You pray, you do not notice
The corpses around you.
Sorrow has stopped your eye.
Your dream is desolate.
It calls me everyday
But I cannot enter it.
You know I will not return
49
Forgive me, my trespasses, (p.108)
49 Incedentally, Moraes did return to his native India.
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Chapter VI
CONCLUSION
Amitabh Barthakur will be twenty seven years old on
January 14, 1997. Very soon it will become imperative for
him to choose between the three distinct homes he has had in
his life. His first home was the small town of Tezpur,
Assam, where now his father lives alone. His second home
was in New Delhi. This place remained his home till the
time he departed for the United States of America.
Consequently, from 1994, his third home has been in Los
Angeles.
Of these three homes, the first one (Tezpur) is the one
to which Amitabh's return is least likely. Hemen, Amitabh's
father is perhaps the only reason why Amitabh still refers
to Tezpur as a home. Amitabh has grown out of what Tezpur
has to offer. Here he has become the object of wonder, the
"scholarship boy" (Rodriguez: 1982) of the neighborhood. Not
only will Amitabh be a misfit in this small town
professionally, he has outgrown it socially too. Amitabh
has drifted from the security of traditionality of a small
town to a hardened and relatively volatile cosmopolitan
existence. However, it was in this small town that the
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seeds of his adventure were sown. Be it the short-wave
radio which brought in the curious taste of "the world
outside," or his launching into an English-medium education
that was to alter his life forever, Amitabh owes much to
this small town.
New Delhi is the city that gave Amitabh his first real
identity as an adult individual. It was here that he
learned to look at himself and the society around him as
mutually interactive entities. As seen in the chapter
Metropolis, Amitabh's passive experimentation with the
Sixties during the eighties in the first two years of his
college life instituted in him a path of liberal thinking
and seeking out alternative routes both in his personal
philosophy and his professional outlook. Along with
Ginsberg and Dylan, he had also dabbling in contemporary
Indian philosophy like that of Gandhi. In other words, it
was during the New Delhi chapter of his life that Amitabh
started stretching out his arms in two opposing directions.
One pulled him deeper into his Indian identity, and the
other towards the cherished dream of the West. Inspired by
the writings of Gandhi and Radhakrishnan, and by the work of
people like Baker, the Kamats and Bhatia, he moved towards a
more founded understanding of common Indian existence. On
the other hand, his innate curiosity fueled by books,
movies, music, and friends drew him towards the intoxicating
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glitter of the America. His mother's death and his
relationship with Sunita, both of which happened during this
period, contributed in Amitabh's distancing from his earlier
home of Tezpur. It was as if, there was nothing much left
to return to, and that life lay outside, in the "bigger
world. *
Amitabh finally arrived at the "bigger world" when he
came to Los Angeles in 1994 to pursue a Masters program in
Building Science from the University of Southern California.
In Los Angeles, away from the Indian cultural symbols and
institutions, Amitabh started to feel his ethnicity very
strongly. In many ways, it was the West which reinforced
his Indian identity. Lost in an alienating land of dreams,
unable to give up the challenge of the life that he faced, a
confused Amitabh was forced to question the ideology within
which he had grown up for the first twenty three years of
his life. Along with the changing idea of life and its
goals, Amitabh's concept of home too was changing.
Questions arose about the validity of cherished institutions
like the intimate social bonding that is the hallmark of the
Indian communities. Doubts about the truth in
transcendental philosophies, the childhood stories, and the
eternal Indian tenet of sacrifice came to the surface
against the luster of a Southern Californian life. And
through this confusion, India, now the distant land, has
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started to acquire - in his own words - "a sense of past
ness. " Colored by the contrasting tints of fond nostalgia
and utter disgust, both of which contributed in the process
of mythologization of India in his mind, his motherland has
started becoming a place in his mind. At the same time, he
has not been able to surrender his ' * social duty" towards his
community, country and family. His dilemma is best
expressed in his own words: "Jt was confusion in the
hegining; now it is doubt. "
In the Fall of 1996, Amitabh will be signing up for yet
another Masters program - this time in Urban Planning. I
asked him how much of this decision was because he wanted to
see or learn more, and how much of it was an escape from the
decision to finalize a home. He replied, "Fifty-fifty."
97
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Toronto: JM Dent and Sons Canada Ltd.
102
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Roy, Anirban (author)

Core Title The three homes of Amitabh: The changing concept of home in an Indian student's life in America

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Visual Anthropology

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag anthropology, cultural,education, bilingual and multicultural,OAI-PMH Harvest,psychology, social

Language English

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-6430

Unique identifier UC11337485

Identifier 1381605.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-6430 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 1381605.pdf

Dmrecord 6430

Document Type Thesis

Rights Roy, Anirban

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA