Avik Jain Chatlani Prism
You can be part of the apparatus that governs the Western powers—a mascot that helps legitimize brutality against dissenters at home or populations living under occupation abroad
The Republican candidate to lead the Railroad Commission—the agency that regulates oil and gas—shared his disgust a few weeks ago at an image from a college football game. He had a problem with the South Asian students pictured in the stands.
Bo French’s hateful rhetoric—mostly targeting Muslims and Latinos—has typically gotten a pass from Republican Party leaders. But this time, he fucked himself. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas called his comments “bigotry.” Karl Rove, the former George W. Bush adviser, said he would vote for the Democratic candidate.
Now, this isn’t some sort of moral awakening. Cornyn and Rove were both lackeys of the Bush White House. And, incidentally, French’s Democratic opponent, Jon Rosenthal, has publicly declared his love for Israel.
Still, I found it interesting that, on the American right, the smearing of Indians isn’t quite as socially acceptable as slurs against other groups.
There are a few possible reasons for this. Maybe it’s the power of money; Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Reliance Industries Limited Chair and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani—whom Arundhati Roy refers to as “the real ruler of India”—attended President Donald Trump’s inauguration. Maybe it reflects a soft spot for the doctors and tech workers imported from India who keep America’s hospitals and data centers running. And, of course, tolerating anti-Indian racism becomes awkward when there’s a minor Indian presence at the helm of MAGA: FBI Director Kash Patel, the despicable Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy … and, most embarrassingly, the vice president’s wife, Usha Vance (née Chilukuri).
Many low-income white Americans rely on South Asian doctors and other healthcare workers. Old-money Republicans may enjoy dabbling in eugenics, but business-class Republicans make money with Indians and Indian Americans. Even French’s ex-wife sells dresses that are proudly made in India.
Who is an Indian?
In the Americas, the word “Indian” typically refers to an Indigenous inhabitant of the continent. The linguistic habit goes back to Christopher Columbus, who, upon landing in the Caribbean, thought he had reached the outskirts of Asia. When he observed the local people and wrote about them in Spanish, he described them as “Indios,” or Indians.
Columbus also thought—since the water was half-fresh and half-salty—that he “was near the garden of Eden,” the novelist V.S. Naipaul scoffed. “He was that kind of madman.”
Long after the native population was largely wiped out by European diseases, actual Indians from India eventually found their way to the Caribbean as indentured servants during the last century of the British Empire. But they didn’t reach far into the Americas; immigration to the United States and Canada came much later, during skilled labor shortages in the 1970s and 1980s.
I wasn’t washed ashore by either of these waves. When the British were pushed out of India (after having been invited in by the maharajas, who wanted to cultivate military alliances), the resulting Partition of 1947 created modern India and modern Pakistan (poorer East Pakistan bloodily seceded in 1971, becoming Bangladesh). The splitting of the land saw mobs kill, maim, and displace tens of millions of people. My maternal family escaped Sindh, heading to the south of India, as others fled in the opposite direction.
“Sind[h] is not a part of India today,” Naipaul reminds the reader in the foreword to “India: A Wounded Civilization.” “India has shrunk since [the] Arab incursion. No civilization was so little equipped to cope with the outside world; no country was so easily raided and plundered, and learned so little from its disasters.”
Perhaps because of a shared sense of vulnerability, outside of South Asia—despite the different splotches of color on the map—we still find each other. In unfamiliar cities, there’s mutual recognition. Once, as I started into a winter cold at a train station, an auntie tapped me on the shoulder. “Excuse me, are you from Karachi?”
When politicians call for a hijab ban in Canada, or France, or when they call for a ban on “sharia law” in Texas, or when they talk about “grooming gangs” in the U.K., I have no doubt that these people and their supporters don’t really see “Muslims” as being any different from “Indians” or “Arabs” or “Pakistanis.” The words are code for something completely detached from belief or geography or nation-state. The proposed laws mean “other.”
My maternal grandparents experienced a taste of this at the fringes of empire, in Panama, back in the 1950s. Arnulfo Arias—a nationalist candidate—made it clear that he had a problem with “oriental” immigration, referring to Turks, Chinese, Arabs, and Indians. My grandmother, Naina, remembers him on the radio describing saris as being unacceptable. My grandfather, Mohan—who, like my grandmother, fled the riots of Partition with his parents and siblings just weeks before the border closed—felt uneasy. And so, they went to Peru, where they became the first Indian immigrants.
In the end, there wasn’t much to worry about. Panama has a respected Indian community today. And, across Latin America, there are too few of us people of South Asian origin to be hated. We’re a curiosity, not a threat. Shah Rukh Khan is still the king in Peru and Panama, even if the Bollywood star is despised by the Gandhi-killers who now rule India.
A difficult heritage
“India is for me a difficult country. It isn’t my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and too far.”
I identify very deeply with this admission, expressed by Naipaul almost half a century ago. He adds that, for him, “the distress of India was—and is—almost insupportable.” For me as well: The most wretched poverty I’ve seen in Latin America cannot possibly compare to the memories I have from, say, the north of India. I was constantly putting myself in the position of the families living on the streets. The condition of stray animals hurt me even more than that.
“Indian poverty,” Naipaul writes, “is more dehumanizing than any machine.”
In the diaspora, the Indian subcontinent is an abstraction. It offers solace to women (and some men) who practice yoga and meditation. They go to India to live the ashram life. Israeli soldiers go there to relax after shooting Palestinian children in the head. Meanwhile, Indians in the diaspora are either welcomed or go unnoticed, even if they’re subject to derision on English-language TV, or romanticization in Spanish-subtitled Bollywood movies. Or, in the case of, say, East Africa, they’re often resented for their clannishness and the economic power that they wield.
In the Persian Gulf, although there are exceptions, South Asians are mostly migrant laborers, brought in from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal—countries whose governments have been incapable of creating stable economic conditions and enough decent-paying work for their people. Oftentimes, they’re mistreated in the oil-rich vassal states; they die building air-conditioned monuments to money in the desert.
Their standing in Europe and North America is better. But increasingly, South Asians are being lumped into the “mass immigration threat” that’s waved around by nativist parties. In Canada, the housing crisis—a matter of Canadian incompetence—has been blamed on Indian students. And rather than allowing the few thousand Indian and Pakistani surgeons who are already in the country to salvage a collapsing healthcare system, the provinces leave their credentials unrecognized.
On the American side of the border, the position of South Asians is more complicated. The highly selective intake process has contributed to the myth of a model minority: tech workers, engineers, and doctors who keep their heads down. Entrepreneurial success, on the other hand, comes with risks. For instance, about half of convenience stores in the country are run by South Asians. During the years I lived in Washington, D.C., I saw how unsafe this life is, learning about the awful things that happened to the Bangladeshi family who owned the neighborhood 7-Eleven.
Nowadays—back to the rumblings in Texas—there’s even wariness about those who have assimilated.
Feeling angry about racist comments online is a waste of energy. It’s more logical to feel pain upon witnessing Palestinian, Iranian, and Lebanese kids being blown up by Israel, young girls in India being surrounded by Hindu nationalist mobs, or French students being beaten by police. Even if a political candidate and some online commenters taunt them, the sports fans in the photo posted by Bo French are generally safe in the Western society that they inhabit. It is, after all, presided over by a real estate developer who celebrates Diwali in the White House.
Coconut power
On a layover from Peru to India, in the 1980s, my uncle was pulled out of the customs line in London. The officer was of Indian origin—unusual at the time—and he turned out to be crueler than his white compatriots. Not satisfied after digging through the suitcase, he unwrapped each one of the chocolates that my uncle had bought for his nephews and nieces, letting the wrappers fall to the floor.
Despite our expectation of recognition, there are ugly moments when, upon looking for camaraderie, we are confronted with self-hatred.
In an attempt to distance themselves from who they are—in an attempt to win favor with authority—the people we thought would be kinder to us in the diaspora (either because of shared origins or experiences) repeat the same behavior that was once directed at all colonials. Despite our expectation of recognition, there are ugly moments when, upon looking for camaraderie, we are confronted with self-hatred.
We saw more jarring versions of this in the early months of the Gaza genocide. From Nikki Haley (Nimarata Nikki Haley, née Randhawa) writing, “Finish Them!” on a bomb about to be dropped on Gazans, to then-British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak telling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “We also want you to win,” it was appallingly clear that some well-placed brown people didn’t see themselves in the families being vaporized.
Kamala Harris, who was raised by an Indian mother and grandmother, and Suella Braverman, the U.K.’s home secretary during the first weeks of the genocide, are both married to Zionists. And when their respective administrations funded the annihilation of thousands of Palestinian girls, they likely didn’t see themselves as women of the East. Rather, they acted in the service of races and supremacies that are alien to them.
A word often used for these Desis is “coconut.” Brown on the outside, white on the inside. But beyond language or skin color, it refers to a colonial tradition: the idea that if you are subservient and self-erasing, you can find a place in the ruling class. You can be part of the apparatus that governs the Western powers—a mascot that helps legitimize brutality against dissenters at home or populations living under occupation abroad.
Why do I expect traces of blood from a subcontinent to signify gentleness? I’m trapped by the same naivete when I hear someone like Marco Rubio speaking Spanish. We share a language and a familiarity with a region, respectively caricatured as being the language of drug dealers and the home of cartel wars … and yet, the meaning behind his words is one of violence.
The Indian subcontinent, like Latin America, is filled with discrimination. And just because there are moments of familiarity and community in the diaspora doesn’t mean that the people with roots in those societies are going to suddenly practice a more compassionate form of politics.
Until the 21st century, South Asians were almost completely absent from Western political spaces. Nowadays, they pop up here and there … but they’re mostly uninspiring. In fact, they’re quite frightening in their conformity. It’s as if history doesn’t exist and they simply fell out of a coconut tree, to quote Harris.
Money speaks every language
My father’s family, Jains, have lived in Delhi for generations. He was sent to live with family in Vancouver in the late 1970s because he was badly behaved. But after meeting my mother on a flight to Peru (where she was born), he also went to seek his fortune in the ruins of the Spanish Empire, among the Sindhis, the merchants, who were made into refugees.
They determined that money was the best protection against violence, a belief largely shared by most South Asian communities. Prosperity can give you the power to move in a cosmopolitan world; it can be a refuge, protecting you from the vulnerability that comes with your low caste, your minority faith, your brown skin.
In “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf (who herself had a bit of Indian ancestry) recounts how her aunt (referred to as Mary in the essay, and given a fictional death in India) left her a sizable inheritance:
My aunt, Mary Beton, I must tell you, died by a fall from her horse when she was riding out to take the air in Bombay. The news of my legacy reached me one night about the same time that the act was passed that gave votes to women. A solicitor’s letter fell into the post-box and when I opened it I found that she had left me five hundred pounds a year for ever. Of the two—the vote and the money—the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important.
Money offers something tangible. If you’re destitute, the chances that a vote can change your circumstances are scarce. For South Asians living in corroded pseudo-democracies, or living further out in the world, having wealth (and being able to pay bribes) is a safer bet than running for office. Just look at Texas, where one white candidate’s digital attack against a tiny underrepresented group was eviscerated by the highest levels of political power, who are surely on the take.
A wounded civilization
India has always been looted by its rulers. You cannot blame South Asians in the West for steering clear of politics; wanting to be involved in such a dirty business carries stigma. Parents prefer that their children stay out of civic life, seeing it as dangerous and fruitless.
Still, there have been a couple of admirable politicians who’ve emerged from a wounded civilization. Instead of behaving as servants of power or subjugating others, they’ve tried to oppose violence. I think of U.K. Member of Parliament Zarah Sultana, a young woman of Pakistani descent, who has taken on the Labour Party establishment. And, of course, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
My mother showed me the 1991 film “Mississippi Masala” when I was probably too young to understand it. But I identified with Roshan Seth’s character, Jay. From a motel in the Deep South, he writes letters to Uganda, demanding that the government give him back his house, which was expropriated by dictator Idi Amin.
Mira Nair, Zohran’s mother, made the film. And Jay, to me, feels like he is based on Mahmood Mamdani—Zohran’s father.
Their son is a mystery to me. I still cannot grasp why someone of his background would have wanted to be an assemblymember in Albany. But I do know that he planted an olive tree alongside survivors of the Gaza genocide. He makes an effort to speak every language. He doesn’t shy away from his heritage.
Maybe it doesn’t change anything structurally. But it could at least be a small step, a gesture, toward atoning for the sins committed by vanquished people, in their desperate quest to rule again
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The main photo that accompaned our commentary on Indian Americans’ growing political visibility and the divisions within that rise. For further reading, see Jeet Heer’s “The Divided Landscape of Indian American Politics” in The Nation, which examines how race, religion and caste shape competing political allegiances.