"Toxic Nationalism and the Diaspora" in THE GOAN EVERYDAY (30 October 2016)

As the date of the U.S. General Election draws nearer, Trump and Hindu Nationalists find favour in one another.

Goans can breathe a sigh of relief that the once most famous South Asian American Republican, the arch-conservative Dinesh D’souza, has all but slunk away from the public eye, owing to the fact that he was found guilty of campaign finance violations. Instead, while that son-of-Goan-soil attempts to shill yet another book about what he believes to be wrong with American politics, from the comfort of the Internet, other South Asians have taken up the mantle of embarrassing subcontinental people in the homeland and abroad.  

Enter the Republican Hindu Coalition (RHC). In an event they hosted for U.S. Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump in New Jersey a fortnight ago, the RHC put on a clownish display that melded Bollywood, Islamophobia, and patriotism. Though several Indian American attendees were surprised to see Trump at the spectacle, which was billed “Humanity Against Terrorism”, perhaps their first clue that something wasn’t right should have been that the programme was presented by an organization that calls itself the Republican Hindu Coalition. Describing the affair in The Concourse as one where “Hindus and Trump Rallied together in a Xenophobic Fever Dream” (21 October), Giri Nathan marvels at how the “fundraiser for ‘victims of terror in America and around the world’” managed to “somehow set a new standard for surreality in the present election cycle, with a Donald Trump keynote speech bookended by hours of Bollywood song and dance”.

But not to be outdone by his hosts, Donald Trump upped the oddness ante by proclaiming, “I am a big fan of Hindu [sic], and I am a big fan of India!” As Eesha Pandit remarks in an article for Salon (22 October), Trump would be given to such effusiveness, since “[t]here are more than 4 million South Asian Americans currently living in the United States, and approximately 67 percent of them, or 2.7 million, are U.S. citizens. Additionally, South Asian-Americans are one of the most politically active ethnic blocs”. Trump went on to announce that if he was elected, “the Indian and Hindu community will have a big friend in the White House”.

Undoubtedly, the lynchpin in this unholy alliance between overseas Hindu nationalism and Trump’s pro-Hindu/Indian American stance is the Islamophobia both sides share. In The Guardian (17 October), Rashmee Kumar quotes Dalit activist Thenmozhi Soundarajan as saying of the RHC-Trump event that its “celebration of Diwali suggested that attendees were mostly upper caste…” In addition to a lamp-lighting ceremony, the audience was also treated to some sort of performance where make-believe terrorists and U.S. soldiers duked it out. The show was very much in keeping with Trump’s virulent anti-Muslim campaign, but it also speaks to Hindu Indian nationalism which posits Muslims as the other to the Indian nation.

That this then also appeals to the Trump-supporting Indian American, even if a miniscule demographic at just seven percent, bears witness to the perpetuation of toxic Hindu nationalism within the Indian nation-state and its diaspora. Further, in seeing India and Indian Americans only as Hindus, Trump additionally borrows from the community’s own self-presentation as manifestly upper caste and the authentic arbiters of Indianness.

Multiple incidents of post-9/11 xenophobia in American have shown that time and again racists cannot (and do not want to) tell the difference between Muslims, Arabs, South Asians, Latinos, Sikhs, Hindus, or anyone ‘foreign-appearing’ for that matter. Despite this, that the RHC would court a man whose supporters wish to “Make America Great Again”, which is euphemistic for making it White Again, is proof of a dysfunctional relationship. Equally enamoured, Trump has just released a campaign video in which he attempts to woo Indian American voters by speaking in Hindi. Maxwell Tani reports in Business Insider (27 October), that “[t]he ad prominently features an image of [Indian Prime Minister] Modi as well as Trump's take on Modi's popular campaign slogan, ‘Ab Ki Baar Trump Sarkaar,’ or, ‘This Time, We're With Trump's Government’”. Given Modi’s own history of drumming up Hindutva, this is not just the stuff of coincidence.

As can be seen by the commentators I have cited above, many South Asian Americans have actively voiced their disdain of the RHC ‘fundraiser’ and Trump’s odious pandering to the religiously nationalist sentiments of Indian American voters. In a similar vein, a video crusade titled #VoteAgainstHate has begun making the social media rounds in an effort to educate “long-time Republicans and unaffiliated voters, particularly of immigrant heritage, to vote against hate by not voting for Donald Trump”. In the version of the video aimed at South Asian American voters, several younger generation Americans of subcontinental heritage address their elders and remind them of their immigrant hardships and desires for a better life. “You guys are the American dream”, one of the speakers states emphatically in a plea to those who fail to see that Trump’s America is a dangerous one. 

But while the video does well to point out to South Asian Americans that casting their lot with Trump would be a disservice to immigrants, it does so by relying on the unquestioned belief in the homogeneity of the South Asian American community, particularly along the lines of class privilege as epitomised by the constant references to the American success stories of this demographic. Not only is this an overstatement which essentially reads Indian Americanness and, likely, caste privilege, onto the diversity of South Asian America, but it also doesn’t delve into the very elitism and Islamophobia in the community that has drawn Trump to it. It is not until this community begins to ask difficult questions of itself about its investment in caste privilege and nationalism that change can occur.

From The Goan.

"And all I Got was this Lousy Hat" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (8 August 2016)

Bangalore’s Little Goa, New York’s Goa Taco, and Kajal Magazine’s Goa Way hats – cultural appropriation won’t Go Away.

Goans are all too familiar with the many ways in which their land and culture has been appropriated by the tourism, real estate, and film industries in India. Indeed, it is not only large scale players who participate in the use of what might be described as Goan caché, as was evidenced to me on a recent visit to Bangalore. There, amidst the bustle of happening Church Street, I spied a brightly lit sign for a store that calls itself Little Goa, its wares including all manner of paraphernalia associated with smoking not tobacco alone.

No doubt, the purveyors of these various accoutrements that allow one to partake of a herbal high adopted the Goa moniker to evoke the small region’s history as a hippie haven in the 1960s and 70s. Part of the experience for the Western nomads who journeyed to Goa, half a century ago, was bringing their friend Mary Jane along, as Little Goa hopes to remind punters. At the same time, the vivid hues adorning the shop’s signage are reminiscent of the psychedelic colours associated with the erstwhile rave scene of Goa at the turn of the 21^st century. Attracting a global range of visitors, these electronic dance music fests were augmented with chemical indulgences in settings festooned with sensory stimuli of the brightest colours, no different from those adorning the entrance to Little Goa. Together, these elements that evoke hedonism frame the Bangalore shop as a little getaway to the pleasure periphery of Goa.

But the cultural appropriation of Goa is not exclusive to the Indian context alone. Take Goa Taco, New York’s “pop-up paratha taco joint”, where hipsters have found a way to flatten out (like a paratha), all difference between foods from South Asia and south of the US border. As their website helpfully explains, a Goa Taco is an amalgam of “‘[G]oa’, like the vibrant trading port in [I]ndia (paratha flatbread comes from [I]ndia)” and “‘taco’, like a taco” because, clearly, a taco needs no further introduction. And hence is born “paratha taco: the buttery, flakey lovechild of the tortilla and croissant filled with all delicious thing [sic] from everywhere. [A]nd finally, ‘goa taco’ because we want you to: go-a-taco!” I wish I could tell you I was making this up.

Make no mistake; while the contemporary hipster might share the origins of the name given their subculture with the hippies of yesteryear, the two could not be farther apart. Though we might point a finger at both for being culturally appropriative – Black music and Native American garb for the love-children of the sixties and keffiyehs and penny-farthings for the more recent brigade of cool kids – the earlier generation of socially disenchanted folks still believed in creating community that was radically different from the mainstream. In comparison, today’s hipsters have largely appropriated fashion and other cultural elements to set themselves apart individually (while only succeeding in looking like every other hipster on the block). Yet, the other commonality shared by both these subgroups, even as decades might separate them, is their ineluctable whiteness.

Even so, hipster racism and cultural appropriation are not the domain of white people alone, even as they are markers of white privilege. Take the wares being sold online by the transnational South Asian publication Kajal Magazine, whose tagline reads “Make America Brown Again”. Commendably, while Kajal’s Instagram account expresses their solidarity with the Black Lives Matters movement in the United States and some of their articles cover racism, cultural appropriation, as well as marginalisation within South Asian communities, the magazine seems to miss the irony of selling hats featuring palm trees flanking the slogan “Goa Way”.

 “Our new Goa Way baseball hats have been added to the Kajal Store! It comes in two colors: popsicle pink and sunshine yellow. Get yours just in time for end [sic] of this ‪#‎IndianSummer” their Facebook page proclaims. What exactly is the “Goa Way”, one wonders. Is it the idea that anything goes in Goa? Much like the hipsters that brought New York the delectable Goa Taco, Kajal Magazine seeks to roll Goa and India into one without accounting for the colonial relationship between the two. At the same time as the magazine’s “Make America Brown Again” catchphrase is supposed to call out the inherent racism of US presidential hopeful Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant slogan “Make America Great Again”, it reveals a strain of Indian American ethnocentrism that is predicated on a blind faith in the greatness of the homeland. Really, it is much akin to the self-absorption of hipsterism.

First, there’s the unquestioning belief in the notion that all is well in India if one has a beach to lie on. This colonial fantasy relies on those ubiquitous markers of alleged Goan culture used to package Goa for mainstream Indian consumption: sunshine, coastline, and palm trees. In this, the diasporic Indian community proves itself no different in consuming Goa with no engagement with local concerns about the environment or equal access to housing – problems caused by Goa’s location as a holiday and second home destination for India. And then there’s the casual use of the term Indian Summer, which fails to grapple with a history of appropriation from Native Americans, and not least their land. Perhaps one expects more from ostensibly socially conscious South Asians, but we’re going to have to let that indulgent impression Go Away. 

From The Goan.

"Guilty of Walking While Brown" - INDIA CURRENTS (California - March 2015)

On February 6, 2015, an elderly Indian man was left partially paralyzed following an encounter with the police in Madison, Alabama. News of the event spread on social media and elsewhere online. When it became known that a police car had captured video of the incident on its dashboard camera, an online petition was circulated to exert pressure on the Madison City Police Department to release the footage. But even before the petition had acquired the threshold of 1600 signatures it had set itself, the police had made the video public.

Watching the video for the purposes of writing this article was difficult. At the edge of the screen, one sees Sureshbhai Patel (57), with his hands behind his back, possibly handcuffed, being thrown to the ground by officer Eric Parker. Later, when Parker, along with one of the other officers on the scene, attempts to get Patel to stand up, it becomes apparent that the “suspect” is unable to, and is literally hauled onto his feet before sagging back down. Patel, it was discovered, had suffered a neck injury that would cause him paralysis in some parts of his body. 

As the video spread virally, the indignation, particularly of South Asians, was instantaneous, and rightly so. It would be revealed that Patel, a citizen of India, had come from that country to help care for his grandson, born prematurely and, to do so, was living in his son’s home in Alabama. As more of the story became known, perhaps we likened Patel to members of our own family. We saw in this grandfather our own parents and grandparents, those transnationals and migrants who connect our lives between continents. In fact, I had heard of this case of police brutality from a cousin whose children my father took care of in Texas. Like Patel, my dad and other relatives like my aunt and uncle, had come to the States for the function of temporarily helping out with childcare. And while I appreciate how much coverage the event has received, there is something about the nature of the conversation around the incident that leaves me dissatisfied. 

This is not an isolated event of police brutality. To regard it as such runs the risk of reducing it to a sign of South Asian American exceptionalism. Consider that the police had been alerted by a resident of the neighborhood who claimed that a “skinny black guy” they had “never seen … before” was “just wandering around,” and who was estimated to be in his thirties. That the police would be compelled to respond to such a call should make one question who and what they wished “to Serve and Protect,” as the police motto goes. In all likelihood, the call probably originated from a white household, but what is unmistakable is that the police reacted precisely because the person being reported was believed to be black. Evidently, it was unfathomable to, both, the caller and law enforcement that a young black person should have any business in such a neighborhood.

“This is a good neighborhood. I didn’t expect anything to happen,” Chirag Patel, the victim’s son told the press, possibly explaining why he had thought it would have been all right for his father to walk around in broad daylight as he had become accustomed to doing in their town. Speaking to The Washington Post for their February 12 report, the younger Patel had said: “It is a dream for me [to live here] because I came from a very poor family and I worked so hard … I’m totally devastated that I might have made a big mistake.” 

Even as middle class aspirations and immigrant desires to live the veritable American dream prove to be no protection against racism, there is no doubt that the Patels – just as anyone living in the United States – should not have had to feel that the commonplace act of walking out one’s door would put one’s life at risk due to the commonplaceness of racism. Nonetheless, it is specifically because of the assurance felt by a community that is often emblematically deemed the upwardly mobile model minority that South Asian Americans can believe themselves to be immune to systemic racism. Moreover, this extends itself to the notion that the police, rather than being embedded within such systems, are testament to the protection of those who are considered ideal subjects in the multicultural civil society of the United States. 

To cut to the chase, Sureshbhai Patel, who speaks very little English and is an Indian farmer who was visiting this country, was severely injured by a white policeman because Patel was identified as being black. Following the recent verdicts in the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases, where the white policemen who were responsible for the deaths of these two black men were tried and found not guilty, I would argue that the incident involving Patel received as much attention as it did because of the growing inescapability of questions surrounding abuses of power. As crystallized in the trending hashtag “Black Lives Matter,” these questions center on how racial difference is perpetuated by such abuses, both by the police and laws that protect them over minorities. 

While Parker was swiftly charged with third degree assault, the attack on Patel should not be seen as an outlier to forms of racialized violence that have been manifesting increasingly through the involvement of the state, be it in the form of the police or even politicians. Note the lack of irony in Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s declaration in a January radio interview with the Family Research Council’s Washington Watch that the United States was under threat of a Muslim invasion because immigrants of that faith background “want to use our freedoms to undermine that freedom in the first place.” An Indian American who converted to Christianity from Hinduism, Jindal’s opinions are those of the garden variety Republican, but the danger lies in those views emanating from a politician of minority racial origins. They serve to obfuscate the very real threat to the lives of Muslim Americans, such as Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha, the three young relatives who were executed by a white gunman in Chapel Hill a week after Parker attacked Patel.

In that South Asian American immigrants are of many faiths, Jindal’s callous statement, made for political gain, diminishes the post-9/11 Islamophobic violence his own community faces, let alone those other Americans who so happen to be Muslim. Being deliberately oblivious to xenophobia, coupled with a sense of insulation that can emanate from being considered a model minority, especially because one is not black, can easily lull one into being complacent about institutionalized racism. But are you sure “they” know who you are when you take a walk around your neighborhood?

From India Currents. The longer version appears as "Walking While Brown While Looking Black" on Media Diversified, and a short piece on the subject appears in The Goan as "To Serve and Protect (Someone Else)."

"The Journey Home" - INDIA CURRENTS (California - October 2013)

It was a strange, yet somehow very Indian American moment. In January, this year, I was to meet Andy in front of McDonald’s. “The one across the street from the KFC,” I had said on the phone. The McDonald’s in Bandra, that is. By the time I got there, Andy had already arrived. The post-work traffic whizzed by on Linking Road as we embraced in front of the golden arches. “I am SOOOO happy to see you,” Andy said. “Can you believe we’re here? In Bombay? In front of this?” I asked, indicating the Mickey D’s behind me. “I know right?!” Andy said with that unforgettable chuckle in his voice. We laughed together at the delicious irony of the American fast food company dishing out such fare as the “McSpicy Paneer.”

This was Andy’s first journey to India. It was a lifetime in the making, and the trip of a lifetime. I got to know Andy in 1998, during my junior year at UCLA. In the years following, he would often express his interest in visiting India, knowing that I went to see family. However, after a while, I could not help but think: “Sure… that will be the day.” So, when he emailed to say that he was actually going to do it, I could barely believe it. Having already been in India a few weeks at that point, I was all the more excited at the prospect of sharing Andy’s experience.

 

In 1998, UCLA hosted the South AsianYouth Conference (SAYC) for high school students, primarily. Most attendees were from schools in and around Los Angeles’ Little India: Artesia and Cerritos, for example. The conference had been organized by a group of students who called themselves Sangam, a word in Hindi that means coming together. The organizers who had constituted Sangam solely for the purpose of the youth conference were spurred on by its success, and decided not to disband after. I had attended SAYC, and thereupon was invited to join Sangam. It was where I met Anand “Andy” Shah, a staff reporter for UCLA’s newspaper the Daily Bruin. While there were other South Asian American student organizations on campus that served a social purpose, Sangam strove to educate about progressive causes that had a political bent.

It was a heady time as protests erupted over issues of affirmative action and the dwindling numbers of Latino and Black students on campus, along with other underrepresented minorities from Asian and Pacific Islander communities. What Sangam did was to include South Asian students as activists by building awareness and solidarity within and across lines of race. We were on the front lawns of Royce Hall protesting along with other student groups as the Regents made decisions that would impact generations of Californians. We tried to remind the UC system that as a public university, it had a mandate to serve the community in all its diversity.

These were the kinds of goings on that Andy reported on for the school newspaper, while also being involved in Sangam’s activist efforts. Additionally, he was part of various community outreach and educational projects the group undertook. Among others, these included a SAT tutorial project in the Bangladeshi community in LA’s Korea Town, a mini festival of films from South Asia and its diaspora, and

efforts to expand South Asian Studies at UCLA. But Sangam was not just an organization that was somehow different from other ethnic student groups because it was more political. Like those other groups, we bonded over our commonalities. Andy was part of a community of young South Asians who were not what might be considered typically “model minority.” There is little doubt that what drew us together was the sense of family we felt in our shared differences from the norm: we were the offspring of divorced or separated parents, or parachute kids and new immigrants, or queer and otherwise non-confirming. And it was in knowing that we had each other that we gained an education our classrooms could not provide.

This intimate knowledge of why social justice was so important to us and others like us, and to those whose causes we might have little personal experience of, led Andy to be an advocate for change even after his time at UCLA. Because he knew only too well about domestic abuse, the marginalization of those who are both queer and of color, and anti-immigrant sentiment, he sought to build awareness around these topics through participation in community and national organizations and also by writing about these matters. For Andy, who always had an interest in journalism, the issue was representation. Or, more aptly, how the media skews representation, particularly when it comes to minorities.

On September 5, 2013, while Andy was crossing a street in Beverly Hills, he was struck by a vehicle. At the time of writing, the driver in this hit-and-run incident has not been identified. At the age of 33 when he still had so much more to give, my friend was no more. From India, I made the mistake of watching the online story about his death as it was reported on by a Los Angeles news station. I will forever be haunted. It was not just that my friend’s entire life had been reduced to a nameless image of his face in this report that referred to him as, only, “Norwalk Man.” It was not just that the news channel felt the need to display the crime scene while Andy’s remains were still there. It was that none of these elements bore any relevance to the ostensible reason for the story, which was to bring to public awareness that the perpetrator had fled the scene of the crime. This was a telling instance of the usual manner in which Los Angeles news deals with cases of this nature. There is no thought to how such callousness affects a grieving family and only adds to our desensitization to violence, because of the proliferation of such decontextualized images in the media. What irony that a person so aware of the media’s distortion of representation should be so represented.

I am saddened not to be in Los Angeles with Andy’s mother and brother, and our friends, as they say goodbye to someone who touched our lives so deeply. There is some solace in knowing that in those brief days in Bombay, which would be the last time I would see Andy, I was part of his life’s journey at such a significant moment for him. Though he had never been before, I remarked at how he seemed as comfortable in bustling Bombay city as he had always been in Los Angeles. He navigated the town like a native, hailing cabs and rickshaws, informing drivers where to take us, and pointing out the city’s sights to me. Now, neither Bombay nor Los Angeles will ever be the same for me Andy, because I was lucky to know you. Rest in peace.

The print and online versions of this India Currents article can be seen here. Obituaries for Andy appear in the Los Angeles Times and on the Road Peace memorial website. An open letter to ABC 7 about their coverage of the aforementioned accident runs on Streetsblog.

Anand "Andy" Shah (February 19, 1980 - September 5, 2013). Photo courtesy of Sanna Malick.