This is my last guest post for Sepia Mutiny, and I want to thank all the bloggers and readers here for their interest, comments and links.
Since I was invited to do this, I meant to write a post about cashews in an okra curry. I had this dish at a wedding reception during Thanksgiving break, and the table of the kids with whom I’d grown up thought it was tasty but not exactly home cooking. My little sister wanted to rebut this presumption; just because we didn’t recognize it, she argued, was no reason to assume that it was not Telegu, or not South Indian. Non-Indians seem to find these distinctions amusing and/or confusing. A white friend of mine is dating a Tamil Brahmin and I’m still trying to make him grasp that everything from her religious practices to her food preparation will be different from my family’s traditions. Still, these can be difficult to map out, literally: when I recognize that “we” do something that other people don’t, does that mean that the something is Indian, Southie, Telegu or just us?
Overlapping with this question is another one I’ve been pursuing: what is the equivalent of Mexican gringo or Japanese gaijin in an Indian language? Telegu has “manavalu” (horribly misspelled), to mean “our people,” a term that can expand or contract depending on situation, such that in a crowd of non-Indians, the first Indian person spotted can be claimed as one of ours, but at a TANA conference, only people on our wedding circuit fit. All South Asians seem to use the term “desi” to signify a fellow brown person. But what is the term for those who are not our people, not our countryman?
The person who got me started wondering about this claimed that most languages have a word for outsiders, and I couldn’t tell if my inability to think of one in Telegu meant there was none or just was another example of how incredibly bad my Telegu is. But my sisters, whose language skills are much better, couldn’t come up with anything either. This may be symptomatic of diaspora life; living outside India, we have little occasion to identify others as foreigners because we are so persistently the foreigners, something we implicitly accept by referring to other people as “Americans” and not including ourselves when we say it. And when we are in India, we still are the foreigners — there we are the Americans, tagged sometimes even before we open our mouths.
Perhaps this is the particular attraction that Indians outside India have for me. I’ve never been a strong participant in the various desi organizations that have been open to me, but I’ve also never been the type to avoid or disdain them. I’m not really interested in ISA/ SASA/ SALSA for the opportunity to party with new South Asians, or even for networking. Instead, I see this as the space where I am wholly an insider, even when I’m left out of the cliques; or as I described it in an essay that asked me to describe my neighborhood, “Indian people outside India are my neighborhood.”
So I appreciate the virtual hangouts that blogs such as Sepia Mutiny create, and wish all the Mutineers much success in maintaining a contentious, colorful, cogent community.
