Indian Born Confused Desi

There have been a lot of blog posts on the topic of culture and integration and all that so I thought I would put in my two paise on it.

I'm pretty familiar with the integration game, having been born and brought up in Delhi to Kannadiga parents. My parents were very clear that the mother tongue was kannada, and moreover they hated the 'hinglish' type of language, so we spoke in only one language at a time, which at home tended to be Kannada or English. Hindi was the language de rigueur everywhere else, though in those days, it was considered more hip to speak English with friends. We ate primarily Karnataka food and celebrated all the festivals with great enthusiasm, be it 'gombe koodasodu' for Dasara or Ganesh chathurthi. Mom would invite all her friends, which included a huge bunch of TamBrams for arshna-kumkuma - haldi-kumkum, as well as all our neighbours who were from all parts of the country - Bengalis, Gujaratis, Kashmiris and Punjabis. It was never a matter of either embarassment or superiority to be different from other people in some ways.

At the same time, Holi was celebrated with great gusto, and my parents made sure we had plenty of gulal and pichkaris at home, along with mithai. Christmas was something dad initiated us into, with Jim Reeves playing on the music system through December, and a little Christmas tree at home and presents being snuck under our pillows. Some years we just drew a Christmas tree on green art paper, decorated it with gold and silver foil from cigarette packets and pasted it up on a wall, with tinsel wreaths all over the house. Dad always used to bring home a Christmas Plum Cake, stuffed with nuts and raisins, and it always seemed as special a time of year as Diwali.

My mom's family is a polyglot one - they speak Kannada with grandpa, Telugu with grandma and write to each other in Tamil! My mom was brought up in Delhi and has spent most of her life here - so what does that make her? Of course, when she lived here with her parents, they brought non-assimilation to a new high, mainly because ajji was extremely traditional and orthodox. They weren't allowed to have friends who weren't south indian, they weren't allowed to eat anything outside, with North Indian food a particular taboo, or even fruit and vegetables that ajji considered 'foreign', like watremelon, which looked 'too meaty'. Certainly, the only movies they ever saw was when they were on vacation in Salem, mostly religious ones. Mom rebelled to get her first salwar kameez when she was in post grad!

Now my family is a pretty heterogenous mix. My husband is from the North and Muslim to boot. So if we were to get all het up about identity and integration, I don't know if we'd survive. For us, in a way it's about remaining who we are and being inclusive simultaneously. So we celebrate all festivals that we can, in the ways that we're used to celebrating them. My husband's family is not very religious so on Id they just have an open house rather than go to the masjid. So that's what we do. And he's used to celebrating Diwali and Raksha Bandhan - my sis in law sends him a rakhi from Canada every year. So most of the Hindu festivals, we celebrate with my parents, where they do the puja and mom and I do the festive cooking together, if the festival is a holiday. I want my kids to grow up learning both sets of prayers and more. My favourite memory of school ( I went to Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan) was the Friday prayers which were called SarvaDharma prayers. We had a Sanskrit shloka, a parsi prayer, a Kalma and a hymn, one after the other, and everyone sang along. We still celebrate Christmas at home, with a tree, presents for the kids and a Christmas lunch. The custom in my family with newborns is that the first place you take them is a temple. In our case that just meant place of worship and we wanted to make sure we were neutral and inclsive. So we started out at the Baha'i temple, which is at the other end of town from us, moved down to a Masjid and finally alighted at a south indian temple in RK Puram.

When A and I were in France, I admit there was a huge sense of missing home and therefore we found that all the desis spoke to each other more in Hindi. We got together more often. At the same time, all of us enjoyed our wine and cheese, A freaked on madeleines, we celebrated the Beaujolais nouveau and we loved wandering around the country. On the other hand, I remember back when I lived in Bangkok with my parents, we were the only family from the embassy to even try and learn Thai, while most others grumbled and cribbed that the Thais couldn't speak English.

To me identity is never about either-or, it's about both. A passport needn't mean one thing over another, because one of the things that makes the US interesting is the constant mix of new ideas and perspectives that immigrants supply. If all immigrants were to jettison who they were and what they believed before they came to the US and adopt a 'typically American' attitude, whatever that may be, I think the US would be the loser. It would lose the debates that keep the country thinking and democratic, it would lose the ability to look at itself objectively.

Just because you have a passport from a country doesn't mean you stop noticing the problems or issues. What it does mean though, is that you're part of the problem and need to help solve it. I find plenty to criticise about India though I live here and love my country passionately. I'm pretty vocal about the problems too. Just because an immigrant used to be from another country before he or she got his passport shouldn't mean that they have no right to criticise what they see. It just means that they have to see them as 'our' problems and not 'their' problems.

We know family friends who live and work in Singapore and are citizens of that country.Yet, when their sons turned 14, they sent them off to study elsewhere so their sons could avoid the mandatory 2 year army service. Of course, past that danger-point, the sons came right back and started their careers in Singapore. That, to my mind, is dishonest and unfair. You cannot take all the advantages a place gives you and not give back the basics that the place demands of all citizens.

As far as the rest goes - cultural assimilation and all that - I feel it's a highly individual choice. There are lots of Jewish people in the US who don't celebrate Christmas and that doesn't make them any less American. Celebrating Halloween, on the other hand, doesn't make you any more American. As long as you don't use your different customs as a point of superiority or inferiority, and as long as you see issues as 'ours' and not 'theirs', you're assimilated.