Suketu Mehta: India – Maximum Democratic Experiment

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Suketu Mehta on Indo-US  Traffic of Ideas

It’s not often that you get to see heavyweights of the writing world together but this happened at the Indian Consulate in New York recently when Suketu Mehta, Salman Rushdie and Tunku Varadrajan all congregated in the ballroom of New India House. The occasion was the inaugural lecture by Suketu Mehta, initiated by Consul General of India, Ambassador Dyaneshwar M. Mulay, himself a noted writer.

Mehta, author of the much acclaimed “Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found’ and associate professor of journalism, New York University, spoke about the India he grew up in and the changing India. The moderator was Tunku Varadrajan, Professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism and Sir Salman Rushdie, Master Storyteller, was a guest.  We didn’t get an opportunity to hear him interact – but his mere presence is always compelling!

Mulay talked about India’s changing global image and the importance of starting a conversation on the perception of India and getting mainstream media as well as university students and second generation Indian Americans involved in a continuing discussion.

Suketu Mehta thanked Mulay for giving him “the diplomatic space to be undiplomatic” and then embarked on a journey to the old and new India, warts and all. It was an India seen through the prism of reality and also its changing role in a changing world.

For all those who did not get a chance to hear his talk, here are Suketu Mehta’s remarks. Later in a  lively question and answer session, lots of questions were raised by the audience, answered by Suketu Mehta and Tunku Varadrajan.

 

Maximum Suketu: India, Striving for the Limits of What’s Possible.

“As most of you know, I’ve written a book about Bombay called ‘Maximum City’. If Bombay is the maximum of the urban experience, India is the maximum of the democratic experiment. What does it mean to be ‘maximum’? By the middle of the century, India will be the world’s most populous nation, overtaking China. Biologically, at least, we will be number one. But ‘maximum’ isn’t just about population. It connotes generosity, openness, large-heartedness. It is about striving for the limits of what is possible. And it’s what characterizes the age-old cultural traffic between the country of my birth and the country of my nationality.

 

A Ping-Pong Game of Ideas

For around two hundred years now, there’s been a ping-pong game of ideas between the India and the United States. When the Bhagvad Gita first started being translated and making its way across the seven seas in the mid-nineteenth century, it was avidly read by a young American schoolteacher in a one-room structure on the banks of a pond in Massachusetts. Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal, “In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvad Gita, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma, and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the River Ganga reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water-jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganga.”

Deeply moved by the Gita’s message of doing your dharma no matter what the odds, no matter what the results, Thoreau refused to pay the poll tax to support a war he considered unjust – the Spanish-American war – and was thrown in jail for a night. Reflecting on this experience, Thoreau wrote a slim tract called ‘On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.’

 

The Story Behind Satyagraha

Half a century later, a young Indian lawyer was thrown off a train in South Africa for the crime of traveling in a first-class compartment while posessing brown skin. Looking for a productive way to channel his outrage, Mohandas Gandhi came across Thoreau’s book, which inspired him to launch a movement called Satyagraha, that first freed his people in South Africa, and then liberated an entire subcontinent. Gandhi later mentioned to the American reporter Webb Miller, that he actually took the name of his political movement from Thoreau’s book. “It would seem,” concluded Miller, “that Gandhi received back from America what was fundamentally the philosophy of India after it had been distilled and crystallized in the mind of Thoreau.”

The ping-pong match continued. Another half-century later, a young African-American preacher in the American South, looking for an ethical political philosophy that could bring his people into the light of full freedom, was guided by two African-American men, one a missionary named Howard Thurman and the other a gay Marxist named Bayard Rustin – to read Gandhi’s ‘The Story of My Experiments with Truth’. And so Martin Luther King traveled to India to see how ordinary people could resist injustice armed with nothing more than soul-force. “To other countries,” said Dr. King, “I may go as a tourist but to India I come as a pilgrim.”

A few years later, Dr. King and his fellow American campaigners for civil rights inspired the Dalit liberation movements in India, empowering those who were considered untouchables. As a result, for the first time in 5000 years of Indian history, political power is held by the majority of the people who live there. Maximum is the power of this idea, that knows no bounds of time or space, that is energized and elaborated by each volley and serve across the continents, and can topple empires without a shot being fired.

 

Bhagavad Gita and The New York Herald

As Walt Whitman, another American influenced by the Gita, wrote in ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’: “What is it, then, between us? What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us? Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not.” It is no wonder then, that when Emerson read Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’, he called it “a remarkable mixture of the Bhagvad Gita and the New York Herald.” It’s like there’s this ongoing conversation between the greatest minds of our two countries, and neither time nor distance matter. And that conversation continues, flourishes, in this hall today.

That conversation, though, has not always been civil. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, when he was ambassador to India during the Emergency, said in a Playboy interview that if India ceased to be a democracy, the Americans would have no further interest in the country. “I mean,” said the Ambassador, “what does it export but communicable disease?”

I have an answer for Moynihan’s question. India exports, above all, stories.

 

The Power of Stories

When I was researching ‘Maximum City’ a few years ago, the editor of a Bombay newspaper asked me incredulously,  referring to my American publisher, “Why would the Knopf readership possibly be interested in a book about Bombay?”

It was a valid question. Why would those famously insular American readers possibly be interested in a city which the average American has never thought about except when shopping for furniture at the Bombay Store or drinking Bombay Gin? For the same reason they’re interested in a story of twins in a small town in Kerala, in a misfit son of Indian immigrants in America, in a snot-nosed freak from Bombay. Because we have the best stories: made-up ones like Midnight’s Children, or real ones like Veerappan, the moustachioed dacoit who kidnapped a Telugu movie idol because he wanted someone he could discuss the Gita with, deep in the jungle.

For several years now, the rich peoples of the world have been asking Indians – and Brazilians, and Nigerians, and Chinese – to tell them stories. They have run out of stories, and are looking for new ones: to comfort them, to provoke them, to fire their brains so that they can sell product. The story of New York today is being told not by people born here but by Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Gary Shteyngart.

The biggest export of America is not cars or computers; it is culture. It is movies, music, video games. But at the base of all the movies, and the video games based on the movies, is a story. Narrative. There are no new stories, only fresh interpretations of the old ones. India is a storehouse, a seed-bank, of myth. We are natural storytellers; most of us have grown up hearing our grandparents tell us the morally complex stories of the epics.

Americans need new stories to replenish the foundations of their cultural product. Notice the way the martial arts of the Hong Kong films have become incorporated into standard Hollywood action films. It’s only a matter of time before a Hollywood epic rips off the basic structure of the Mahabharata, as Star Wars fed off the Gilgamesh myth.

Since Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, and Vikram Seth started retelling those old stories to the world in English, we’ve found that our stories will sell abroad. Now every season the publishing catalogs announce more and more of these storytellers – both from India and its children abroad. Publishers, in the age of the conglomerates, are not gentlemen farmers. Someone is buying all those NRI novels about the scent of grandmother’s cooking wafting over the arranged marriage in the mango orchard.

 

 

Telling Our Stories

The Indian-American community, two million strong, is the richest and best-educated ethnic group in the country. The largest group of  overseas students in American universities is Indian. We earn, and we read. Today, when ten thousand copies in hardcover is considered really good sales for a novel, publishers justify publication of a book on the strength of its appeal to the Indian market alone. But it’s not just the Indian market that buys these books. I’ve been gratified to get favorable reviews from such regional publications as the Decatur, Alabama ‘Daily’ and the Davis, California ‘Enterprise’. All the people in ‘flyover country’, that vast no-man’s land between New York and San Francisco. They want our stories, too. It’s not just the Knopf readership.

The most popular Indian stories are those we tell in Bollywood, with its complex appropriations of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata; Laila-Majnoon and Busby Berkeley. India, which makes more films than Hollywood every year, has penetrated into vast, and unlikely, areas of the globe; a hit Hindi movie will be dubbed or subtitled in dozens of foreign languages. In New York, whenever I get a haircut, I’m confident of getting a discount if the hairdresser is from the ex-Soviet Union. That’s where Indian movies were popular from the 1950’s onward. India and the Soviet  Union had signed a friendship treaty; they gave us MiG fighter jets and tanks; we gave them dreams in return. Indians watch them; Pakistanis watch them. Israelis watch them; Palestinians watch them. Dominicans watch them; Haitians watch them. Iraqis watch them; Iranians watch them. In a building full of immigrants in Queens, an Uzbek man once cornered me in a dark stairwell. I’ve been mugged before, and I thought: Oh no. He towered over me and started singing, “Icchak dana bicchak dana…”

 

The Power of Bollywood, Ramayana & Lagaan

All these people watch our movies because they’re pre-cynical. They still believe in motherhood, patriotism, and true love. Hollywood is too cynical about family for their tastes. My friend Abdel Ali, a Moroccan writer who grew up in Holland, told me why his people watch Hindi movies: “We like that, in the end, everyone bows down and touches the mother’s feet.” The standard Western complaint about Bollywood movies is that they’re melodramatic, but for the global diaspora that loves them, melodrama in the defense of entertainment is no vice. Or this explanation from a Dominican cabbie in New York, who along with his 14 siblings, grew up on a dirt-poor cane farm watching Hindi movies he can’t remember a single name of. “They have singing!” he exclaimed. Hollywood, nowadays, is past singing.

When we lived in Bombay, my son Gautama, then 4 years old, sang “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai” and “Chal mera ghoda,” in addition to “I’m a Barbie girl” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” He was gathering his sources of pleasure from East and West. He was building his own vocabulary of Hindi film music which I have carried around all my life. When he missed Bombay in New York, he sang “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai” – which is loosely based on Archie Comics – on the sidewalks of the far city. An Indian boy in America, singing a Hindi song from an Indian movie imitation of an American comic book: the ping-pong game of kitsch. Along with the Bhagvad Gita and the Upanishads, this, too, has wings.

When we came back to New York from Bombay, we enrolled Gautama in St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn. We were apprehensive about the school; it seemed to be full of rich white kids. How would it take our striving brown ones, with their accents, their utter lack of knowledge of American pop culture?

One of the parents did a documentary film on Gautama’s first-grade class. The interviewer asked various questions of the children: What’s your favorite color? What’s your favorite storybook? When he came to Gautama, he asked him, “What’s your favorite movie?” “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai,” my immigrant son said immediately. The name was flashed in subtitles, below Gautama’s smiling face: “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai”. None of his friends or their parents had any idea what he was talking about.

But the elite school got used to it; the next year, for Gautama’s second-grade play, his Jewish teacher put on a Bollywood version of ‘The Ramayana,’ and my parents had tears in their eyes as they saw seventeen mostly white, rich, private-school kids, dressed in saree scraps, dancing to the irresistible beats of  the movie ‘Lagaan’ in the school auditorium in Brooklyn. Gautama was the golden deer, but Yoni was the wise sage, and Luke was the ten-headed demon Ravana, and Lucy was Princess Sita. They were all doing dance moves which were a combination of the classical Bharat Natyam and the decidedly unclassical ones from Bollywood. The seventh-floor classroom in St. Ann’s had become a Bombay movie theater. And the immense power of pop culture, the global appeal of Bollywood, had made the unfamiliar – family.

 

 

“A Cultural Emergency”

But in order to tell stories, you have to feel that there is an audience out for them – the distant echo in the kindred heart. And the state has to provide an absolute, unqualified guarantee of your right to tell stories.

But India these days is experiencing what Salman Rushdie rightly calls a ‘cultural emergency.’ Writers and artists of all kinds are being harassed, sued, and arrested for what they say or write or create. The state either stands by and does nothing to protect freedom of speech, or actively abets its suppression. Publishers are no better, as we recently saw with Wendy Doniger’s magisterial work on Hinduism. Under pressure from a group that anointed itself guardians of the religion, Penguin India not only agreed to not sell the book, but to pulp all existing copies of it – an act of gross literary violence and a sin against Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge.

In the Hinduism I know, books are sacred. If my foot so much as touches a book, I will reach out with my right hand, touch the book, and then touch both my eyes and my forehead, in respect and apology. What sort of Hindus are these that demand that books be pulped and thrown into the trash? This is surely not the Hinduism of the Rigveda, from which the Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan takes its motto: “Let noble thoughts come to us from all sides, which harm no one; are unimpeded and victorious over the forces of division.”

This is the philosophy that makes me proud to call myself a Hindu, one that is not afraid of any kind of thought from anywhere in the world. The people who want Doniger’s book banned and pulped are cowards, afraid of thoughts from all sides. They live in a dark cave where they call out in ignorance, and their followers echo back with bigotry. Thanks to people like them, this year, the world’s largest democracy ranked a miserable 140^th out of 179 countries in the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index. Today, Zimbabwe, Libya, and Afghanistan have a more free press than India.

Manufacturing Outrage

A couple of years ago, the Indian government, aping its giant northern neighbor, cast its beady eye on the internet, demanding from companies like Google and Facebook that they ‘pre-screen’ content and remove items slighting political and religious leaders. In November of 2012, a girl in Mumbai was arrested for complaining on Facebook about the shutdown of the city after the death of Bal Thackeray; and another Facebook user was arrested for ‘liking’ the first girl’s comment. The grounds for arrest: ‘hurting religious sentiments.’

Rushdie, who after ‘The Satanic Verses’ has to his chagrin become a human weathervane of the right to free speech, was to travel to Kolkata last year to attend a literary festival. At the last minute, he was advised by the police in West Bengal that he would be sent back on the next plane out if he traveled there. With this one act, Kolkata lost its claim to be, as the organizers of the literary festival and the local politicians who applauded the ban call it, the ‘cultural capital of India’. An official in the Trinamool Congress told me, “Rushdie’s coming to Kolkata was a no-brainer. He should never have been invited. 30% of Bengali voters are Muslims.”

So the truth was out: Rushdie was banned from Bengal to appease Muslim voters. But it turned out that the Muslims weren’t even aware that the author was going to be coming until the police started calling up Muslim groups in the city and telling them that Rushdie was going to be there in two days. “What are you going to do about it?” the police said, egging them on. The outrage was not spontaneous. It was manufactured.

At the other end of the country, another depressing spectacle was unfolding at the Jaipur Literary Festival. With 120,000 visitors, it is the largest literary festival on earth, living proof of Indians’ hunger for books. But precisely because it is so big, it is the victim of its own success, an easy way to get publicity for politicians looking to get elected by stoking outrage among voters.

Last year, fringe groups of Muslims in Jaipur demanded, successfully, that Rushdie’s invitation to speak at the festival be rescinded. They wouldn’t even allow him to attend over videolink. Not to be outdone, the BJP demanded that Pakistani writers should be banned. (The festival stood its ground, and several Pakistanis spoke at the festival.) But no sooner had it navigated this controversy than another sprang up. On a panel titled ‘Republic of Ideas’, the sociologist Ashis Nandy, perhaps the country’s most prominent public intellectual, offered a nuanced argument about the prevalence of corruption among the lower castes. It should have been as unexceptionable as an American pointing out that the early Irish and Italian immigrants who joined political machines like Tammany Hall used corruption to advance up the socioeconomic ladder, until they were secure enough in the country to afford rectitude in their public dealings.

“Ashis Nandy says OBC, SC, ST most corrupt,” screamed the headlines. Nandy promptly found himself charged under, of all things, the Prevention of Atrocities act. In India these days, free speech is itself considered an atrocity.

 

No Need for Mobs, Just File a Lawsuit…

In India, you don’t have to marshal a mob to harass writers. You just have to file a lawsuit. Four of my friends had cases booked against them when they courageously read out sections of ‘The Satanic Verses’ at the Jaipur Festival, literally standing up for the author. The police filed cases against them, and they were advised to flee the country. The Jaipur police commissioner wrote to the festival’s organizers, warning them “to be mindful of not hurting the sentiments of any community.”

A casual browser of Indian newspapers will often chance upon this  puzzling phrase: ‘hurt sentiments.’ Muslims, lower castes, Hindus, Christians – any number of people will claim the right to shut down an unpopular film or ban a book on the grounds that the work in question ‘hurts our sentiments.’ A highly sentimental lot, Indians must be.

Every prophet began as an apostate. Religion, no less than science, is advanced by a series of heretical paradigm shifts. In India, the Vedic religion was remade and reformed multiple times over the centuries: by the atheistic, materialist philosophy of Caravaka; the nondualistic reformer Shankara; and the compassionate prophets Gautama Buddha and Mahavira. It is still refashioning itself in creative ways to remain relevant to the times.

All major religions in India, including Islam, have had a long, robust tradition of innovation, of questioning orthodoxy, such as the Emperor Akbar’s syncretic din-e-illahi, and the mysticism of the great Sufi saints.

But under the modern Indian constitution, freedom of speech is highly qualified, subject to what the government deems ‘reasonable’ restrictions. They include ‘public order’, ‘decency and morality’, and ‘friendly relations with foreign states’.

So it’s not like Indians can turn to the courts to protect free speech. The Supreme Court, while staying Nandy’s arrest, also said he had ‘no license’ to make such statements: “It’s the idea that’s creating all sorts of problems,” the Chief Justice opined. “An idea can always hurt people. An idea can certainly be punished under the law. An idea is a summation of verbal acts and it can be penalized.” The Chief Justice’s name – you can’t make this stuff up – was Kabir.

It is clear that what the country needs is an unqualified constitutional amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech – like the American First Amendment. Otherwise, its claim to be the ‘world’s largest democracy’ is disingenuous. Democracy does not give me the right to hurt people physically, but any democracy worth the name surely protects my right to say what’s on my mind, even if it hurts someone’s ‘sentiments.’

The freedom to be affronted over freedom of speech.

But no law will work unless people understand why it should work. Indians need to understand that free speech, the right to think and exchange ideas freely, isn’t just an elite privilege; it is at the core of the democracy that we so cherish. The problem is that large sections of the country seem to prefer the freedom to be affronted over freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech isn’t just a nice liberal virtue to have. It saves lives – tens of millions of lives, as Amartya Sen has demonstrated in his studies of famine. “No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy,” noted Sen. The lack of a free press in China led to twenty million people starving to death in the Great Leap Forward, because no-one could raise the alarm in the government-controlled newspapers. Around the same time, in the late ‘50s, India successfully eliminated famine, due to the combination of a free press that vigorously pursued reports of mass starvation and an opposition that would take up such reports in legislatures.

India and the US also have this in common: we’re constantly comparing ourselves to China. Is efficiency more desireable than democracy? While New York has been trying to build the Second Avenue subway since the 1960’s, and Bombay has been trying to get rid of its slums, China has built a hundred new cities from scratch. To make the Beijing airport, the government evicted 10,000 people in 15 villages with the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen. The ministry that moved the villagers explained “Democracy sacrfices efficiency”. To that end, the Chinese government ruthlessly persecutes writers and artists of all kinds. Just yesterday, the Chinese refused to return the artist Ai Weiwei’s passport, preventing him from traveling to the PEN World Voices festival in New York.

In most countries, at most times, writers are defenseless. We are the easiest to attack, because words are not bulletproof. We do not have a vote bank, we do not command blind loyalty from our followers. We question, and urge our readers to question. We are soft targets.

But tyrants and religious fanatics be warned: we become more powerful with time, and our words will outlast your mobs. Threaten us, and we will sing the truth louder; imprison us, and others will take up our chants; kill us, and we will come back with ten new heads.

 

 

 

Searching for Home

I would like to talk now about my own ping-pong game, my personal back-and-forth between India and the US, searching for home. Throughout Hindu philosophy, we see the law of three: there is a proposition, then there is something in opposition, and then there is a transcendent reality that is both proposition and its opposition, a vanquisher of duality. It’s a useful construct to take on the question: where is home for people like us? Are we Indian? Are we American? We are both, and neither. We are interlocal.

I am a city-dweller, like my father and my grandfather. My great-grandfather lived and worked, like his forefathers, in the villages of rural Gujarat – as did the forefathers of Mahatma Gandhi, who declared, “The future of India lies in its villages.” This is no longer true for my family or my motherland or, for that matter, most of the planet. We have become an urban species, living in a globe of cities. Just over half of human beings now live in cities, for the first time in human history. In 1900, only 10 percent of us did; by 2050, 75 percent of us will. There is, properly speaking, a stampede to the cities.

Gujaratis like my family have been migrating for centuries to trade – to the East Indies, to Africa, to the UK and North America. Indians have been in the vanguard of this restless migration – for reasons as varied as colonialism, indentured labor, economic want, or just the unexpected benefit of colonialism: the acquisition of the English language. Increasingly, people like us don’t just go from a village in India to a city in India; we go from a village in Punjab direct to Paris. There is no acclimation station. Within fifteen hours, a villager from Gujarat can be transported to New York City. Jet-lagged, he tries to make sense of the subway, white women in short skirts, the Empire State Building. Everything is different in the city, but the city makes no accommodation for this difference. He is expected to adjust, immediately, even though he has traveled not just through countries but through centuries.

 

The Cult of the City

 

The attraction of the urban is more successful than the attraction of religion; it is the one thing that most of us can agree on – that we like to live in cities. We are voting with our feet. The greatest mass conversion of our time isn’t to any religion; it is to the cult of the city. And how do we pay tribute for this conversion? How are we tithed? We give up: personal space, homogeneity, and nature. We live in ant colonies and commute in cattle-cars. We mingle promiscuously with people unlike us. We walk on the hot concrete and miss the passage of the seasons. These are huge things to give up. For all our history, for the entire duration of our collective memory, we have lived close to where we grew our food, with our caste, surrounded by fields where we could be alone at midday. We flocked to medieval city-forts only when we felt threatened in the countryside. When the threat passed, we went back to the land.

The central question of our time is this: within these enormous, historically unprecedented, and continuously mobile agglomerations of people, how do we form a community? Who do they belong to, these eight or twenty or sixty million people living side-by-side, and on top of each other?

The communities of people that move these days from locality to locality, from village to city, or across countries, are not exactly transnational; they owe no allegiance to nations. I call them “interlocals.” The dictionary defines the word as “situated between, belonging to, or connecting several places.” It is possible to identify oneself – as I do – as an Indian, an American, a resident of Greenwich Village and Bandra, a Hindu, a professor, a writer, a straight male, a father, middle class, a Democrat. All these identities are rooted in the local, the specific. To be a nationalist means that you must exclude the international; a nation-state is often defined by what it’s not, like the Hindutvadis’ version of Hinduism.

Because of this plethora of identities, I find it impossible to hate or exclude the totality of a human being – because at least some of our identities overlap. If I meet a Pakistani, I may not like the part of him that is a fundamentalist. But I will like the part of him that is a brown man, like me. I will like the part of him that is a father, like me. I will like the part of him that enjoys a samosa, most definitely like me.

 

 

Meet the Interlocal Migrant

 The interlocal can be quite firmly fixed in his localities. I live in Greenwich Village and Bandra, and I am attached to both of these places. But that doesn’t mean that I am “globalized.” Being interlocal is also something subtler, finer, than being globalized – like the international class of rich corporate flotsam, who move among the business hotels and convention centers of the world, without ever being conscious of what is local in the cities they jet back and forth between.

The interlocal migrant, on the other hand, is keenly aware of his immediate physical surroundings, and conducts commerce with them. He may be defined by his locality, but he is not limited by it. He plays a role in connecting the places he travels between. It is hard for the interlocal to conceive of going to war on behalf of his locality, unless it’s for a soccer game. America and India might conceivably go to war, but Jackson Heights could never go to war against Andheri.

Interlocals bring news of food and music to the localities they travel between. Thus, in Jackson Heights, my family became aware of pizza, tacos, and falafel. And when we went back to Bombay we cooked these marvelous foods for our relatives, so that they could relish them too. In multiple ways, interlocals enrich the places they connect.

To be interlocal is to be grounded. You may feel very much at home on the Lower East Side of New York, as well as in your parents’ retirement community in Florida, as well as in your aunt’s home in Bandra. You may not even be conscious of nationality when moving between these very different places. But you are acutely aware of the texture of the neighborhoods; you have certain transactions with the people around you, you know where to eat, where to shop. You will feel a strong allegiance to these places, but it is an open, even promiscuous sort of allegiance that allows for multiple, heterogeneous belonging. You can be an interlocal and a patriot – but, unlike the standard definition of patriotism, you can feel patriotic towards more than one country.

The new interlocals will be part of the cities and city-borders they move to, without fully surrendering themselves to the new places. They feel no inclination to be fully an “American” or “New Yorker” like previous migrants were under pressure to do. Their children might, to varying degrees. But even the children will retain strong ties to the countries or cities their parents were born in. The children, too, are interlocal, and better equipped for the 21^st century world. Where is home for them – for me?

 

“The Rootless Cosmopolites”

 

I am one of the tribe that Hitler called “rootless cosmopolites.” We have always been the target of genocidal hostility by nationalists, since the old tribal antagonisms don’t apply to us. But we are growing in number, every day, every year. Most of my friends travel in this orbit. I meet people in New York this week that I saw in Bombay last week, and might see in London next week. I do not live in America but I do live in New York. I am a megalopolis-dweller. I can move easily between Paris and New York and Bombay but I am not at home for long in Lille or Fargo or Gorakhpur.

The first and the third worlds are distributed over the cities of the world; and in each one, they live side by side. There are people who live in Malabar Hill as they do on the Upper East Side or in the Eighth Arrondisement of Paris; and in each of these cities, their neighbors are the universal fraternity of the poor. There are sections of Harlem which have a higher infant mortality rate than Bangladesh. The psychic distance between Malabar Hill and the Dharavi slums, or between the Upper East Side and gritty East New York, is much greater than between Malabar Hill and the Upper East Side.

Some time before I came back to Bombay I had stopped thinking of the city as home. Home is not a geographically intact entity; it is where my people are. My map of home is composed of a living room in New York, a bedroom in Paris, another in Bombay, and a long-locked store-room in Calcutta. I shuttle between these cities, to the houses and apartments of my friends and relations, and I am equally comfortable in any of these well-known spaces. The country outside these rooms is kept at bay; the furnishings and the routines of these rooms resemble each other. In all these cities, I have the same rituals: Colombian coffee in the morning, an Indian vegetarian lunch, and pasta and wine in the evening. If any component of this entity is missing, I will long for it. Thus will I long for Bombay when I’m in New York.  But it has stopped becoming an anguished longing, especially since the birth of my sons. Most of the time, home is pretty much wherever they happen to be.

Sixteen years ago, I went to Bombay to find out if I could go home again, twenty-one years after I’d first left the city. After two and a half years back in Bombay, I knew the answer: cursing it, complaining about it, hating it passionately sometimes, wanting to go back to America all the time, yes. I could live in Bombay, and be accepted back into the country in every significant way; as an Indian, a Bombayite. They push you out, but they also pull you in. And, having made that discovery, having established that to my satisfaction, I was free to leave again – with confidence, once more into the world. I can be cosmopolitan because I know that I am Indian.

And so I came back to New York, twenty-three years after I first stepped out into the lobby of JFK Airport, with the knowledge that I will always be moving to and fro. I can live neither in New York, nor in Bombay; but in a personal hybrid of both. I have decided, or the decision has been made for me, that I am going to live a distributed existence. I will not choose. I assert, with confidence, with pride, that I am not rooted in any one city. I refuse to live in one room. My home has many rooms. My home is a palace; it is the Earth.”

-Suketu Mehta

(C) Suketu Mehta. Used with permission.

(Media India series can be a real bonus for both Indian-Americans and the mainstream in New York to delve into issues, and the consulate has provided opportunities for everyone to get involved. The next talk is by Bobby Ghosh, the editor-in-chief  of Time International on April 11 on ‘How the World Sees India’s Elections’ . To attend the event send a request to culture@indiacgny.org. Another initiative is the monthly talk on  India state by state, dissecting everything from the economy to tourism to food and culture.)

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Suketu Mehta’s Tale of Two Cities