For many of us this site is a place where we can explore the desi experience, not just as it plays out in news or culture, but also on a personal level. As a community we are coherent but not cohesive, united by a diasporic experience but keen to its many variations. What it means to be desi is still very much under negotiation, which is good: it means that we haven’t congealed, nor been taken over by ideological disputes or anointed leaders. This, combined with tools like the Internet which previous diasporas did not enjoy, has helped to keep the conversation open, generally productive, and most important of all, conducive to sharing personal experience.

babymacaca.jpgFor some of us, the idea of being desi comes with self-questioning built in, because we are of mixed race and ethnicity, products of unions where one partner was desi, the other not. I know there are a lot of people who read this site who belong to this group, and many more who are having, or are likely to have, mixed children. Among the regulars here who identify as both mixed and desi, the most outspoken in the past year have been DesiDancer and myself in the U.S. as well as Bong Breaker in the U.K.

Recently DesiDancer (portrayed here as a young macaca) and I began a conversation that aims to explore the experience of being a mixed desi in America today. It is also a blog experiment: A different format than usual, and a new way of engaging the many people here who have been so generous and thoughtful in sharing their stories. We are corresponding by IM and editing the transcripts for coherence and pace. And by making it a series, we can absorb your responses to each instalment as we prepare the next.

Today, in “Gettin’ Down with the Brown,” we talk about how we came to identify as desi when we had the choice of not doing so. Later we’ll discuss the ways we — and others — live, deploy, engage our “desi” and “mixed” identities in the world today. Whether you are mixed yourself, or the (potential) parent of mixed kids, or neither, your responses will help shape the discussion. (You may also share thoughts in confidence with either of us.)

So, here goes:

DesiDancer: “Dude, you look so exotic… what are you?”

Siddhartha: Exotic, eh? Like you, I’m mixed. My dad is Bengali, and my mother is Jewish American. That’s why I am so “fair.” My aunties in Calcutta always liked my skin color, the fact that it was achieved through miscegenation didn’t appear to concern them.

DesiDancer: Do you know of any other mixed marriages in your family?

Siddhartha: My uncle married a westerner. He is my dad’s only sibling, and older by a few years. He married an Italian woman. It was a little complicated for them, in terms of approval and how they handled it, and my grandmother wasn’t too thrilled. But it ended up paving the way for my parents’ marriage. Beyond that, I think pretty much everyone else in my Indian family married Indian. I have a female cousin who married a guy who is half-Indian, half-German. They live in Delhi. What about you and your family?

DesiDancer: My dad’s uncle came to the US, several years before Dad did. My uncle met an American woman — I believe at the university — and they got married a few years before my Dad came over. Again, it sort of paved the way for my Dad because when my parents got married it wasn’t something totally new. I don’t know how supportive or unsupportive my Dad’s family was… they were always fantastic to me, but I’d be naive if I didn’t suspect there was some talk behind my parents’ backs. I’m sure it wasn’t easy for them, but then again we lived here, and the family lived in India. As for my generation of the family, we’ll see how it plays out — the cousins in India are all marrying Indian, but the cousins here seem to have a wider perspective when it comes to dating.

Siddhartha: That’s an interesting similarity. How big an (Indian) family do you have here in the U.S.? I just have my sister — there are some more distant cousins but I’m not really in touch with them. I guess I should ask how big your Mom’s family is in the U.S. as well, since I think you told me your mom was not originally American, but naturalized?

DesiDancer: Up until a few years ago, I thought the only family here from Dad’s side was us, and the aforementioned uncle’s family. A few months after I went to India in 2002, I got an email from one of my uncles there. His English is a bit disjointed, so all I could understand was that someone in our family was coming to the US… or something like that. Turns out my dad’s cousin was living in the US, with her family, and they’d been here for YEARS! So we reconnected, and they introduced me to the rest of the family. Technically all of my cousins here are from my Dad’s cousin’s husband’s side (does that make sense?) but it doesn’t really matter to any of us — we’re more like siblings than anything else. So now I think I could count about 8 cousins, in the rediscovered family, and 3 sets of aunts and uncles. We lost our grandfather last year, but there were 4 generations living here — and unbeknownst to me. My mom’s family is in Canada and some are in the US, but there’s such a huge age gap between me and my cousins on that side… I think it’s 14 years between me and the next oldest (not counting my brother and sister, of course). How about you — is there a lot of family from your mom’s side here?

Siddhartha: There is, but I’m not close to that many of them. My cousins are a lot younger than me. A similar situation. Then you get to second cousins and whatnot. I guess what this makes me realize is that I’ve always lived mixedness my own way, by improvisation; I was never part of a “mixed” self-identified community, let alone one with my particular mix. All this being underscored by the fact that I spent most of my childhood years in a third country that was neither my mom’s nor my dad’s — France — and further, that I am a bit older than the big wave of desi Americans, since I was born in 1967. So it’s always been a bit of a solo thing, shared only by my sister.

DesiDancer: I was actually just going to ask you that: how did you and your sister identify with your heritage? My brother and sister don’t seem to identify as “mixed” or “Indian”… and it’s never really something we’ve had much dialogue about. I think part of it may be the age differences, and part of it I think might be because I went to India when I was 2, whereas they never went… I wonder if somehow it made such an impression on me that I felt somehow more impelled to get down with my brown…

Siddhartha: Yes, you do seem to be more “down with your brown” than I think I am. But then again, we know each other from SM, which is a place where people are doing just that, so it’s hard to judge. But… I think we’ve always thought of ourselves as Indian, or at least semi-Indian. We too both got to go to India at a young age, I was 6 the first time I went, and she was 1 or 2 the first time she did. On the other hand, we didn’t have any kind of Indian community around us outside of India. We just had what came through my parents, which was my dad’s Hindustani classical music collection, my mom’s immersion in learning to cook Indian food, my dad’s general politics and, dare I say, patriotism (he still has just his Indian passport to this day), and the trips back. So there are tons of things I had no exposure to whatsoever. To this day I don’t know a damn thing about Bollywood, or bhangra for that matter.

DesiDancer: For me, all of the brownness was a relatively recent discovery, in my mid-20s or so. I mean, we were aware that we were brown, but growing up in the Midwest, in the 70s and 80s… there wasn’t any Indian community for us to interact with. We had a few 78 records that my Dad had brought over (kids’ songs and stuff), but for the most part I think the climate when my dad came to the US was more to assimilate than to hold onto their native cultures. Once in a while he’d hit up the Indian grocery and go on a cooking spree, so we knew what dosa and pakoras and stuff were, but we didn’t learn Hindi or grow up watching desi movies, or even celebrating the holidays. I knew what Diwali and Holi were… but we didn’t do anything about it. For years my buas sent rakhi to my dad, airmail. My sister and I would swipe them because they were such pretty bracelets, but we never bought rakhi for our brother.

Siddhartha: So, if you didn’t grow up self-consciously Indian, how would you describe the cultural atmosphere in your home growing up? And how did the notion of brownness—or non-whiteness—come into play?

DesiDancer: Ooh, good question. Because there was more of my mom’s family around than dad’s, we celebrated all the usual—Xmas, Easter, Thanksgiving. We were around my maternal grandparents and aunts/uncles a lot more, so we just sort of did what they did. I think my dad’s family was maybe out-of-sight-out-of-mind? We had picture books on India, some Indian art around the house, and my mom even tried to get us children’s books with Indian protagonists… But generally speaking we were raised in an Americanized household, for the most part. While there’s no denying that the 3 of us are brown (one of these things is not like the other) it wasn’t really a factor for us in shaping our childhood identities. Sure you get some idiot in school who wants to know your story, and then either asks if your dad wears a towel on his head, or your mom wears a dot… or they pat their hand over their mouth and do the idiotic rain dance (not that kind of Indian, yo!)… But we didn’t really dwell on it much.

Siddhartha: How about the name thing. You and I both have Indian names. My sister does as well and I imagine your siblings too? Did that get you questions about your origins, and how did you relate to your name as a marker of your identity?

DesiDancer: We all have Indian first names and Angrezi middle names. Which seems to suggest that at the time, my parents were very much about the biculturalism. The name was both a badge and a curse. Obviously I look sort of Indian, so it seemed to “match” that I had an Indian name. But oh my god the teachers in school just could not seem to get the hang of my name! I got called everything, all sorts of mutations and mispronunciations. I think around 7th grade, when kids start to get really vicious, and we all just really want to fit in and conceal our awkwardness I started asking people to call me an Americanized nickname version of my name (Re)… it just seemed easier because at that age I really didn’t want to get into a diction lesson every time they called roll in school. It seemed to stick well because I was a tomboy. But my family always called me by my given name. How about for you? Your name was probably much more of a challenge than mine.

Siddhartha: True dat. I actually don’t have a middle name. I guess my name was a challenge but growing up in France, it didn’t seem to bother my friends and my teachers. They used my full name, just pronounced it as if it were a French name with no effort to learn the “authentic” pronunciation. When I came back to the U.S. for college, that’s when two things happened: 1) Some people became interested in the “authentic” pronunciation, but also 2) Everyone else started calling me Sid.

DesiDancer: Blame “Dil Chahta Hai.” Do you not like “Sid”?

Siddhartha: I’ve written on Sepia before about my struggles with “Sid” or “Sidd” — how I eventually gave into it, used it myself, and it took me years to realize that I could do something about it. I reclaimed it first in my professional life, and then eventually I got everyone in my world to revert to my full name. I sent an email to all my friends, and I got lots of support, as well as other people testifying about their own name issues. Interestingly, after I wrote my post, on that thread everyone called me by my full name, and since then all these people have been using Sid! But it’s one of those things, once you’ve made the effort to reclaim your name, it no longer matters that much what people call you. It’s no longer that big a deal.

DesiDancer: True. I reverted back to my full name, when I moved to NYC. I figured with a city as diverse as NYC, I wasn’t going to have the freakiest name, so it wasn’t unreasonable to expect people to pronounce it correctly. I still have some girlfriends who call me Re. But it’s contextual — it’s how we know each other — so it doesn’t bother me, but even they try to switch it up. But when I meet new people, I use my full name. I have a friend who was nicknamed “Rick” for years upon years, and he’s tried reclaiming “Rakesh” for at least the last 2 years. It won’t stick, because all his boyz always call him Rick and refuse to switch. It’s probably a bit frustrating…

Siddhartha: I bet. If he really wants to switch and his boys won’t let him, they’re jerks. So, let’s talk a bit about the process of getting down with the brown. Can you identify the key moments/stages for you?

DesiDancer: Well, I always kind of had the “pull” from India. I don’t know if it’s because I’m the oldest, because I’m a girl, or because I went there when I was young enough to have retained impressions of the trip. And I can see photos of myself in India… I remember people or things… so I always asked about India as a kid, and wanted to go back. But after junior high school (and the great name change) I didn’t really actively pursue the topic much. It was in the back of my mind, but I was probably more concerned with fitting in than pushing the issue…

Siddhartha: So, did things start to happen in college?

DesiDancer: After. My big a-ha moment, as Oprah likes to call them, was around 2001. I went to visit my Dad’s uncle & aunt and we were watching a home movie of uncle’s last trip to India. He had gone to a wedding and had run into one of my Dad’s younger brothers. So we were watching this tape and my chacha came on screen… My Dad’s aunt asked me, “When was the last time you went to India?” and I told her, when I was 2… She immediately stomped her foot and directed her husband to take me to India that fall — he was planning on going back anyway. It was kind of the green light I needed to jump into the discovery of brownness. It wasn’t that it was off-limits or a no-no topic in our house, but we were told 100 times over that we weren’t going to visit India, ever. So I forgot about it as a possibility until that conversation with my dad’s aunt & uncle. I spent the next 8 months trying to contact family in India.

We hadn’t really kept in touch with people there, but my Dad’s uncle found the address for our family house in Dehradun, so we sent an aerogram over and waited to see if anybody wrote back. My Chacha still lives in my Dadaji’s house, and so he emailed us both back, and also sent me the email addresses for my cousins. When I went to India at 2, I only had one cousin who is 4 months younger than I am. Since then, I have 10 cousins, all slightly younger than me (20-29) and I had no idea! I started emailing with a few of them, and it was really the coolest, most welcoming experience. My cousins have a lot to do with why I’m so fond of my family and of India. They were so enthusiastic and awesome — we emailed all the time, back and forth, and right around then I’d started trying to watch Bollywood movies (I think Lagaan and Monsoon Wedding had just come out, and I was SO thrilled to see an entire movie with brown people in it) and learn some Hindi. So even before I went to India, I’d started bonding with my cousins over email. We’d send pictures to each other, my one cousin is an artist so she scanned in some of her work and emailed it to me, we’d argue over SRK and Hrithik, and because they were so open with me, it was really easy to ask my most ridiculous questions and not feel stupid for it.

And when I did go to India that fall, it was the most amazing thing — despite having never met my cousins, I truly felt like we weren’t meeting as strangers because we’d bonded so much before I got there. I’d tried to learn some Hindi, and they were great about teaching me the slang or not making fun of my crappy grammar, and we just had the best month together! It was almost as if we’d grown up together… and because of that we’ve been able to keep in touch for the last four years, despite some of us getting married, and the fact that I haven’t been back yet… The two girls, are really special to me, because they’re only a couple years younger than I am. For a girl to have an older sister is amazing, and so I take my role as such VERY seriously. I would do anything for those girls — I was a mess during the Mumbai explosions because I couldn’t reach one of them, in Mumbai. Despite the distance and weird circumstances, I’m closer to them than I am to my brother and sister. So I think a lot of my affection for the desh has to do with the wonderful openhearted love I got from my own cousins. Conversely, I had a chachaji call me a half-blooded witch, so I guess it runs the entire spectrum…

So that was that major turning point in my life. Despite the fact that my dad lost touch with his family and didn’t have any interest in rekindling it, he was very supportive of my trip to India. One of my buas came over for my shaadi, and to see her and my Dad face to face for the first time in over 25 years was just emotionally overpowering. It was the best wedding present ever. Ironically, the Bollywood movies that I studied in preparation for my trip got me hooked. Like crack. I can’t stop watching them, even the really crappy ones… and the dances really got me! It’s been a really satisfying and strange journey that my life has come full circle in a way. I always danced, since I was 3 or so; I rediscovered my family, which sort of led me to Bollywood, and now it seems the puzzle has come together with all the pieces—as I teach and perform my Bollywood dance. I gained a career, besides a family!

Siddhartha: This is a great story you’ve shared with me.

DesiDancer: I get long-winded sometimes because I think it’s such a cool story. I debate writing a book, but I think my dad would strangle me

Siddhartha: It really is a cool story. I’m interested in a couple things you alluded to — the way your dad burned bridges, or perhaps I should say allowed bridges to fritter away, with India, and along the same lines what you said about being told over and over, growing up, that you wouldn’t go to India. But it makes for a great story. You really got inspired and acted on it and followed through.

For me it was different because we went to India every 2-3 years. And we would go for long stays — three weeks to three months. We usually went to Calcutta, but later my dad, who is a scientist, began to work with colleagues in Bombay and so there were several trips there. In fact, my freshman year of college, my parents and sister spent the year in India and that’s where I visited them that Christmas. So by the time I was in college I’d been to Calcutta and various places in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, as well as Delhi and Bombay. At the same time, it was all in function of my family and my parents’ choices. In college, though, I took a number of classes that were directly about South Asia, or that were relevant (like development economics). I took a class about Hinduism, and one on Indo-Muslim culture.

DesiDancer: So did you grow up speaking Bengali? And, it seems that in your case the brownness was always in the background, but was it in college that you really began to explore that as part of your identity?

Siddhartha: It’s funny, I was just going to mention language. I grew up, I would say, knowing some Bengali, rather than actually speaking it. During time spent in Calcutta I would be able to say quite a lot, especially the phrases used to make requests of servants.

DesiDancer: Hahahahaha. Chai lao and all that?

Siddhartha: Yeah, all that. My command of kitchen words, foods and so forth, is OK. I probably have 200-300 words of Bangla… and maybe 50 of Hindi.

DesiDancer: We didn’t learn Hindi at all. The only words I learned were the ones my dad peppered his speech with: junglee, bandar, memsahib, suar, courpi (with regard to our need to clip our fingernails)… strangely they were all sarcastic…

Siddhartha: What is Mr. DD’s ethnicity?

DesiDancer: Mr. DD is desi. He came over when he was 3, so he’s about as westernized as I am. A lot of that is why we are great together—he’s not stuck in the old-school mentality and he gets my unusual (bad Indian girl) personality, though he hates Bollywood movies and wants to reclaim control of our Netflix.

Siddhartha: You realize this is very interesting, right?

DesiDancer: He knows more about the culture and traditions, whereas I’m more knowledgeable about the pop culture stuff and the current atmosphere in India.

Siddhartha: And you guys met after you began your re-encounter with India?

DesiDancer: Yeah :)

Siddhartha: I’ve dated desi and non-desi of many types.

DesiDancer: It is an interesting twist that he’s desi; I dated all non-desis prior to him.

Siddhartha: And my sister’s husband is non-desi but they’ve given their 1/4 desi daughter a desi name. Etc., etc. Lots of dimensions.

DesiDancer: Really? That’s cool.

Siddhartha: Yeah. In a way this is where a lot of the SM readership may be interested because it raises issues so many of them are confronting, either as mixed people or as people likely to produce mixed kids. So I’d like to be able to tell people just enough about ourselves, but then really get into the psychological aspects, the tradeoffs, etc—so we can spark some conversation on it.

DesiDancer: Fer sure. So here’s a question: obviously for our parents’ generation, especially those in India and their elders, there seems to still be a lot of partition-era separatism with regards to Hindu/Muslim/Sikh/Jain etc., even straight/gay, or the ostracism of those in non-traditional pursuits career-wise or dating-wise. Do you think our generation is freed up from some of those prejudices? Does being mixed ingrain a sense of tolerance in us that maybe some others don’t have? Like, I have Muslim friends, Christian-desi friends, Sikh friends, Jain friends, gay-desi friends, desis with crazy unusual careers, desis who married non-desis… And I know some auntie back home is clutching her chest over it, probably. :) Or we can hit that one later.

Siddhartha: That’s a great question. I think we should hit that one later. Maybe we should finish up the whole “re-encounter with India” bit and pause for today; then on the next convo talk about living desiness as mixed people today.