Inside a 'Model Minority':

The Complicated Identity of South Asians

 

 

 

By Siva Vaidhyanathan

 

 

This was not the standard Friday-night crowd at the Angelika Film Center in downtown Manhattan. Usually, the Angelika is peppered with young East Village types, serious viewers eager to devour the latest Polish or French film. But this night, Pakistani families and Indian couples on dates complemented the dozens of curious non-South Asians. They filled the theater to see the highly lauded British film East Is East.

 

East Is East tells the story of a British family comprising a traditional Pakistani father, an English working-class mother, six sons, and one daughter. It opens with an aborted wedding for an arranged marriage that the eldest son cannot abide. The family unravels as the father -- pidgin-English-speaking, abusive, stubborn, and a bigamist - plots to marry off two more of his English-speaking sons against their will.

 

The film has gathered impressive reviews in both London and New York. Maybe it was destined to do well; everything flavored South Asian seems to be just right for the current cultural market.

 

Sony featured Bangra music in a recent advertisement for its recordable minidisks. Madonna wore a sari on the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards. A cuisine called "Indian fusion" (to South Asians, any restaurant marked Indian already suffers from a bit too much fusion) is attracting hip, wealthy diners. Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this spring. Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize in 1997. Yoga classes seem as common in the United States as Windows NT classes are in India. A window sign at the Body Shop extols, with remarkable ahistorical gumption, "Ayurveda: A New Word in Natural Healing."

 

Partially in reaction to such trends, a raft of new scholarly books is emerging. Since the mid-1970's, Temple University Press has published some excellent collections of scholarship that examine the diasporic condition of South Asians. The most recent issue of the Journal of Asian American Studies features an article written by seven scholars of South Asian descent, calling for a reconsideration of the long-established narratives of assimilation and resistance. This work emerges from the confluence of three factors in the academy: The rise of postcolonial and transnational studies, inspired by the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Arjun Appadurai; the proliferation of Asian-American-studies programs; and the rise in number and visibility of South Asians in graduate schools and on college faculties.

 

These times remind me of a Doonesbury cartoon from the early 1970's, just after President Nixon returned from Beijing, in which a Chinese exchange student encounters a crowd of overeager students clamoring to play Ping-Pong with him. Chinese people are in this year, the exchange student's guide explains.

 

Back when that cartoon ran, kids in my neighborhood in Buffalo would ask me what tribe I belonged to, or whether I was black or white. Today, people regularly ask me what caste I belong to. And a small British film about Pakistani immigrants and the supposedly oppressive nature of arranged marriages can fill a Manhattan theater. I suppose we have come a long way in 25 years.

 

But the current popularity of South Asian themes in popular culture disturbs me for several reasons. South Asians are hip and relevant because we are instrumental -- but merely instrumental -- in many of the crises facing the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. We are popular because we are symbolically useful -- and as long as we remain just symbols.

 

In East Is East, for example, the most traditional characters are ugly and mean; the least traditional are witty, lively, and ultimately more morally centered. The film collapses the real dilemmas that South Asian families face in new lands into a series of brutal misunderstandings on the part of the representative of tradition, the Pakistani father. That character is the most insulting and one-dimensional depiction of a South Asian in film since the Sikh deli owners in Booty Call (1997), who were played by a couple of white guys in brownface. Like the earlier film, East Is East allows its audience to laugh smugly at the cultural clumsiness of cartoonish South Asian immigrants. (An actual cartoon South Asian, Apu from The Simpsons, is much more nuanced.)

 

The real lives of South Asians -- in the diaspora or on the subcontinent -- are complex, multifaceted, and filled with creative compromises. There is no implacable conflict between "tradition" and "modernity," and not even a clear line between the two. Some things that appeal to traditional values -- like radical Hindu nationalism -- are merely recent inventions disguised to seem ancient. Other starkly modern developments - like the Internet -- promote what we might call "tradition." (Without e-mail and Web pages, half of the arranged marriages in North America might never have occurred.) West is East. East is West. Kipling is, and always was, wrong.

 

But in North America, South Asians operate like signs carrying bundles of conflicting meanings. We represent rationality and spirituality. We are expected to meditate at dawn, hack code all day, cook curry at dinner, and dance to Bangra music all night.

 

South Asians are overdefined for specific purposes: If you want to claim that American medicine is blinded by a mind-body split, you cite Ayurvedic medicine (even though no one who practices medicine would seriously defend such a split). If  you want to posit that multinational corporate investment can  pull a developing nation out of poverty, look to India. If you want to show the intractability of poverty, look to India. If you want to stir anti-immigrant sentiment, make fun of Bangladeshi cab drivers or Pakistani shopkeepers. And if you  want to argue that African-Americans are their own worst enemy, invoke South Asians as a "model minority."

 

Being a model minority can pay some big dividends. If you play it right, people won't fear you. They'll assume that you're honest. They won't accuse you of shoplifting, will even gladly let you play in the field of commerce. Of course, some people might call you "nigger" once in a while, and the occasional skinhead might beat you up. But most of your life will be fine. That is, it will be fine as long as you don't get too comfortable or too ambitious.

 

In a recent program on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition," the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Raj Kapoor noted that "America has come around from a place where it was difficult for someone that was not ethnically American to be successful here, to where in some cases it's actually an advantage relative to the majority." Kapoor, a Pennsylvania-born Indian, added that "the fact that you're Indian -- in Silicon Valley, for example, there's assumptions that are made: 'Well, this person's probably smart. This person's probably dedicated.'"

 The "success story" of many South Asian immigrants in the United States is well documented but poorly understood. The benefits are clear. The costs are not. That's where some of the best recent scholarship comes in.

 

Among that work, Vijay Prashad's The Karma of Brown Folk, recently published by the University of Minnesota Press, is unique. It does not try to show how South Asians "fit" into Asian America -- or, for that matter, into America -- and pays no mind to the issues of multiculturalism that figure in so much discussion of American culture. Rather, the book considers the peculiar dilemmas of the South Asian condition around the globe. As Prashad, an assistant professor of international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., explains, the costs of being a model minority include a capitulation to the ideology of white superiority, trepidation about forging alliances across class, ethnic, or religious boundaries, and a willingness to be used as a silent symbol in the rollback of social-justice initiatives like welfare and affirmative action.

 

Echoing W.E.B. Du Bois's focus on what it feels like, as an African-American, to be a "problem," Prashad looks at what it feels like to be a "solution." He explores the roots of American racial attitudes toward South Asians, and the ways that model minorities have been used as weapons against African-Americans. The Karma of Brown Folk is darkly lyrical, critical without being cynical.

 

In the short term, being a solution can feel really good. But, as Prashad says, it requires accepting the fact that white America wants "our labor, not our lives." Many South Asians in North America have abandoned the diverse, dynamic, and rich cultural mosaic of their South Asian heritage for a flat, inauthentic, and selfish vision of identity seen through American eyes. The quiet, honest, spiritual model minority is what America expects. So that's what it gets.

 

Like much recent scholarship that looks at the intersections of cultures, Prashad's work is ambitious. It is also an indication of the difficulty of opening up a whole new set of questions about cultural identity without slipping into stale debates over assimilation and acculturation.

 

Prashad has several missions. Among them are championing what he calls "desi" identity, and removing the "C" - confusion - from the term "A.B.C.D.," a cute but stereotypical mnemonic device among South Asian immigrants that stands for "American Born Confused Desi." Prashad succeeds at his first task, but not at the second.

 

What's a "desi"? And how does "desiness" work with, or outside of, "Asian-Americanness"? Why not use more specific identifiers of ethnicity, like "Indian" or "Hindu"? Well, most people do use those more exclusive terms, and that's the problem, Prashad argues. To define immigrants from India primarily as "Indians" severs their cultural ties to brothers and sisters from Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Sri Lanka who may live in the same neighborhoods with them, attend the same schools, and eat at the same restaurants. It emphasizes assumed affiliation with a distant nation-state over cultural alliances. And privileging "Hinduness" over a shared historical experience excludes the millions of Indians who are Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, and Jews.

 

In Hindi, desi means a "person of the soil," someone who identifies his or her roots somewhere east of the Khyber Pass, down slope of the highest Himalayas, and east of Burma. It posits a bond of imagined kinship, invoking alliances that cross thin borders of hostile nation-states. Prashad's vision of desiness holds people together with a common sense of history and anticolonial mission, a love of fluid cultural forms, and a respect for desis who speak different languages, wear different clothes, eat different foods, and attend different religious services.

 

Not only does Prashad want desis to acknowledge solidarity with each other, but he also wants them to forge links to other marginalized groups, like African-Americans. While other scholars have struggled to reveal common bonds among Asian immigrant groups, Prashad traces the deep affiliations and common political goals among the mid-20th-century black civil-rights movement, African freedom efforts, and the Indian independence movement. As the echo of the radical Du Bois suggests, those movements shared a radical political vision that cold-war analyses of history ignored. Prashad wants South Asians to rediscover their radical heritage and forge new global alliances with other people of color.

 

A fragile desiness does exist in South Asia, despite interstate conflict, religious zealotry, and regional chauvinism. A vestige of the influence of past leaders like  Kabir, Ashoka, Mohandas Gandhi, and Rabindranath Tagore -- all of whom stressed common concerns over ethnic differences - desiness serves as a humanistic counterpoint to provincial sparks and noise. Such cosmopolitanism is ancient and deep, but fragile nonetheless.

 

In the diaspora, the struggle for desiness succeeds best in New York City, where the identity is on display in multicultural and multifaith markets and neighborhoods like Curry Hill and East Sixth Street, in Manhattan, and most spectacularly Jackson Heights, in Queens. Young desis in New York dance together in clubs to "Asian dub" music, with strong hip-hop, Caribbean, and Punjabi elements. They share anecdotes of violence and discrimination against South Asians in schools and on streets. They bond over generational conflicts with their parents, regardless of region or religion.

 

While tensions among the governments of India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka are as high as at any time since 1971, desis in New York find reasons to cross ethnic, regional, national, and religious lines for the sake of solidarity. "Let me give you an example," Prashad told  an interviewer in the recent documentary Desi: South Asians in New York, broadcast in March by WNET-TV, in New York. "On the 11th of May 1998, the government of India explodes nuclear devices. Two days later, in New York, the taxi drivers went on strike." That the city's taxi drivers, about half of whom are desis, could unify to defy the legal and financial pressures placed on them by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani offers hope for desiness, Prashad said.

 

A similarly vibrant desi sensibility thrives in Toronto and London and other diaspora cities. But, with the exception of university campuses, desiness is harder to find in the rest of North America, where separate Indian, Pakistani, Hindu, and Muslim identities solidify with relative ease. Most of North America does not have urban South Asian enclaves in which multiple classes and ethnicities find comfort in solidarity.

 

Prashad finds the roots of such provincialism in the pervasive atmosphere of American Orientalism, which defines Asians by their exoticism and passivity. Desis find it comfortable and rewarding to stay quiet, atomized, and apolitical in their exoticism, because American society expects them to do so. And among the forces that reinforce such provincialism, religion is often key.

 

No one has taken greater advantage of the exoticized, Orientalist image of the spiritual Hindu than Dr. Deepak Chopra, perhaps the most visible desi in America. Prashad provides a devastating critique of Chopra, detailing the ways in which he believes that the doctor has duped Westerners into paying for his oversimplified "wisdom" from the East.

 

Chopra, Prashad explains, "laughs along with the United States as he dons the robes of the East to peddle a form of escapism that not only trivializes the conundrums of people in the United States but ... also mocks the real crises of the people of South Asia. ... [D]o not struggle, he says; work hard and be as self-interested, self-indulgent, and selfish as possible."

 

Prashad's most important chapter -- yet in some ways, his least satisfying -- considers the ways in which American desis have financed and fueled Hindu fundamentalism in India. He did some of the earliest research on the American wings of the fundamentalist Hindutva movement, which promotes Hindu nationalism, and his revelations raise disturbing questions about the irresponsible religious politics that some desis have chosen.

 

But in his hostility to religious extremism, Prashad fails to ask how one might be responsibly spiritual, how one might use the best aspects of Islam, Christianity, or Hinduism to build bridges, communities, families, and satisfying lives. How can one be a good Hindu while worshiping next to so many irresponsible ones?

 

The answer to that question, as he hints but does not declare, lies in the pile of diverse doctrines and practices that Muslims and Christians in South Asia called "Hinduism. "Hinduism can be (and sometimes still is) pluralistic, contradictory, sloppy, malleable, and messy. It has room for monotheists, polytheists, and atheists. Hinduism has a long, but almost forgotten, tradition of pluralism and tolerance.

 

But pluralism and tolerance thrive best when not threatened. In India, social, political, and economic turmoil have neutralized much of what is best about Hinduism. Now the intolerant are in charge, and they allow or encourage the anxious to rewrite history, tear down mosques, and kill Christians. Concurrently, in America, immigrant Hindus are fearful that their children will grow up worshiping Michael Jordan or Britney Spears, forgetting the culture of their ancestors. Diasporic Hindus need a "portable Hinduism," and they find it in Hindutva, a 20th-century doctrine that conjures an exclusive and intolerant catechism out of what was once a diverse tangle of complementary and competing beliefs.

 

By not confronting the need to find a way to raise wise children without indoctrinating them into intolerance, Prashad leaves us with a fundamental element of confusion about desi identity. At issue is one of the most pernicious costs of life as a model minority. It is a problem that East Is East handles clumsily and cruelly. It also is, as its omission in The Karma of Brown Folk reminds us, likely to be the central challenge to desis of all faiths as the century unfolds.

 

 

Siva Vaidhyanathan is a faculty fellow in the department of culture and communication at New York University.