An Incongruous Indian
An Incongruous Indian
How do you define your identity? Is it in the color of your skin, the width of your eyes, the cut of your face? Is it defined by the history of your ancestors, the songs of your forefathers, the language that you call your mother tongue? Is it an accident that you must accept, or an immutable fact you must never question? What do you do when you have no answers but only questions?
If I could turn the number of times I’ve been mistaken for a foreigner into hard cash, it would be quite sufficient to buy me a plane ticket to Kuala Lumpur and back. To be fair, I must admit that I do not look like the ‘typical’ Indian, if there is such a species, with my lighter skin, my smaller eyes and my choice of clothing. Even so, if the number of instances I’ve been mistaken for Chinese or Japanese or Korean or Nepali or anyone else from the other neighboring South East Asian countries is any indicator of my fellow countrymen’s level of ignorance about the northeastern part of India, I’m afraid it will take light years to light up this particular area of darkness. What’s even more dismaying, it’s not just the uneducated man on the street who doesn’t know. It’s the educated ones who’ve gone through their geography textbooks and probably even marked out Assam and Manipur on their maps who make this faux pas.
I often wonder why this is so. How can it be that so many of my countrymen, from the southernmost tip to the west and the north do not know that Indians like me exist? It is true that Northeast India covers a relatively small area, just a jagged chunk of land linked to the mainland by a narrow chicken’s neck. If at all it has an image in the general perception, it is of an exotic, inaccessible place, alight with fires of separatism, another troublesome kink in the map. But then so is J&K. Yet no one mistakes a Kashmiri for a foreigner.
Identity, I was taught in my Psychology class, is formed gradually, beginning from the tender age when one begins to have a self-image, to perceive oneself as a separate entity. I have long passed that age, but I’m yet to achieve a sense of concreteness about my identity. Sometimes I long for the easy comfort of an identity that needs no explanation, no qualification.
You would too, when you get fed up of explaining to fellow Indians at historical monuments that they can’t charge you in dollars because you are an Indian even if you don’t look like an average one; or putting up with uncouth Delhiites in flashy cars thumping with loud bhangra remixes who call you “chinky” with all the gay abandon of the truly illiterate; or trying to explain to even more perplexed foreigners that you really truly are Indian and not Chinese, Malaysian, or even Norwegian as one Britisher once mistook me for. What’s even worse, for me, is having to face my fellow tribesmen with the confession that I am much more fluent in English, and pepper my conversations with colloquial Hindi, but can’t make a speech in my mother tongue because I never heard enough of it to go around. That’s when I wish I had an easier identity.
Because I am like this, my life has always been littered with conflicts. But I have learnt a lot too. I have learnt that what truly matters, especially in your closest relationships with people, the friends that you make, the ties you grow to cherish, is not the outer things, they are just trivia. I’ve found that in this wide bewildering world, you can find kindred spirits in all hues and appearances. Maybe at first you don’t recognize them because you have grown up with all the biases and prejudices that are an implicit input of all cultural upbringing. But if you make the effort to look beyond the outer façade you will discover that there is a language that transcends language.
I did think, at first, that I could not possibly have much in common with a Bihari, burdened as I was with all the stereotypes associated with people from that much-maligned place. And then I was pleasantly surprised to discover that she too adored Jane Austen and Simon & Garfunkel, and what’s more, introduced thekua and sattu to my palate and now I am hooked for life. And who would have thought that a sweet, salwar-kameez clad pahadi from the hills of Kumaon would have enough in common with a forever in jeans, Beatles and Bryan A fan to stay firm friends through the travails of life at the University and beyond? Or that I could have the best times of my life with someone who has an ancestry even more confused than mine, an Anglo Indian with a very English name who loves Western music and jiving and yet is as “Indian” as they come? Or that a Punjabi from Orissa could make me feel like I knew all about the Great Indian Joint Family and share her Daadi’s treats with more belonging than my own ever gave me? Or that I would find a soul mate from a place a thousand miles away with a language and a culture so entirely different from mine there can be no comparison, but who is, in thoughts and dreams, just one heartbeat away?
That’s what my experiences have taught me. That being an Indian, even an incongruous one, is a wonderful thing to be because you can be so many things! And no matter how confounded I am by questions of identity, or tired of clarifying my nationality to my ignorant countrymen, it’s enough to say that I belong here, in this mad, overpopulated, stereotyped, dusty, chaotic country that has more variety and beauty in its mad melee than the most well-run places on earth.
Thekua: A sweet deep fried cookie, a Bihari delicacy
Sattu: Powdered roasted gram flour
Pahadi: Colloquial Hindi for people from the hills
Daadi: Paternal grandmother
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