I am grateful for the opportunity this Seminar gives me to discuss an issue over which I have been mulling a lot recently. I have not spoken on this subject before, even less written about it. I intend this presentation to be a prelude to a discussion to which I invite you. To that effect, I will be purposely challenging. It is my contention that the issue that I will address is important, and that the field of South Asian Studies has not yet faced it squarely. I will argue that, at this juncture, a revision of what we are about is required; I will argue that the social context in which we work has been so altered that we need urgently, perhaps even belatedly, to reset the parameters of South Asian Studies and to reach across past boundaries to find new partners.
So that you can appreciate where I am coming from, I must set forth the basis on which I found my theory of knowledge, and hence my approach to scholarship and pedagogy. I subscribe to a non-foundational view of knowledge. Knowledge is more than cognition, it is more than a binary relation between an individual scholar and an object of enquiry. Scholarship, the production and dissemination of knowledge, is a complex exercise in which scholars are engaged with other practitioners in their own field and in other fields of enquiry, and with publics that provide the subjects, targets, and consumers of produced knowledge. Knowledge is generated, configured, and marketed in temporal and societal ambits. It is incremental at times, yet is more endemically negotiated. The pursuit of knowledge is a social exercise.
Perhaps because I work much on the eighteenth century, the period of the Enlightenment, which was dedicated to the notion that knowledge is liberating and forward-looking, and perhaps also because I teach at an institution that was founded by Benjamin Franklin, I adhere to the notion that knowledge, at its best, ought to be useful. When Franklin spoke of "useful knowledge," the promotion of which he enshrined in the charge of that other Philadelphia institution he founded, the American Philosophical Society, what he had in mind was mostly of a technological order. My version of this is that, ideally, knowledge ought to be socially useful. At the risk of sounding corny, I will state that knowledge, its acquisition through research, and its propagation through publication and teaching, the entire business of scholarship, ought to contribute to the betterment of the world we live in.
In the past fifty years, area studies have been at the forefront of combating isolationism by stressing the importance, whether economic, political, or cultural, of the areas of the Third World with which we are concerned. Our educational mission has been predicated on the notion that South Asianists are informants on, or teachers of, a foreign culture that is insufficiently known and inadequately represented in an American curriculum and in an American culture at large that have not yet shed their presumed European sources.
Meanwhile, the world around us has been changing. In 1965, new immigration laws took effect which have drastically altered the American landscape. The United States, engaged in a technological race with the Soviet Union, sought to import ready-made talent rather than wait to have it come slowly and home-grown. New immigration laws were enacted which favored the educated, the talented, the skilled. It was the era of the brain drain. For all its self-serving siphoning of worldwide brain powers, this new immigration policy had its socially enlightened aspects. It removed the old barriers based on "national origin," that euphemism for the troubling, but more accurate, term "race." The new immigration policy did not favor Asians, but it gave Asians, for the first time, a chance to immigrate that was on a par with that of Europeans. This change was all the more dramatic since it was implemented only two decades after the Asian exclusion laws were repealed, when the racial discrimination ceased to be legally mandated that had denied Asians entry, stripped them of citizenship, barred them from land ownership, and culminated, during the Second World War, in the internment of Americans of Japanese descent.
The effect of the 1965 change in immigration law on South Asians has been particularly notable. With a tradition of learning that is at the root of Indian culture, with a strong system of advanced education, and with a knowledge of English and of Western ways which is one of the few blessings of their colonial past, South Asians were in a strong position to avail themselves of opportunities in America. This group of immigrants was very different from the early Indian immigrants who had come in the first decades of this century, and who were primarily manual, rural labor, mostly from the Punjab and primarily Sikh, on the West Coast, a community that attrited in California when Asian exclusion laws prevented them from importing wives and other family members and when this overwhelmingly male community was forced to find mostly Mexican wives steeped in a different tradition--the community of which Bruce La Brack and Karen Leonard among others have offered gripping studies.[191] The "new immigrants" of the post-1965 era were educated, ambitious, and upwardly mobile. They were predominantly young, and, with the introduction of family-reunification clauses in the immigration legislation, they were able to import spouses of their own background. Though the fertility rate of this immigrant group has been low, in keeping with their dual-employment trends and upwardly mobile aspirations, their children have now reached early adulthood and are joining the college population in increasing numbers.
We first experienced the impact of this new population in South Asian language classes. Here is how Gauri Bhat, who was a student at the University of Texas at Austin, describes the situation:
Last fall [that was in 1990] I took a first-semester Hindi course at the University of Texas which was wall to wall ABCDs (American-Born Confused Desis as we are disparagingly called). Non-Indians in the class included only a handful of (white) Asian studies majors and one intrepid zoology major who wanted to study large cats in Uttar Pradesh. The Indians were of the usual premed, business, engineering ilk . . ., and were from not only Dallas and Houston, but Amarillo, Lubbock and Temple. I had only recently returned from a visit to India, so it was still a slightly surreal experience to hear a slack-jawed, thick-tongued West Texas drawl issuing from the mouth of someone who, in a mundu and chappals, could have been our Bangalore rickshawalla. Culture is a remarkable thing.[192]
With apologies, I confess that the initial reaction that we, language teachers, had to this new clientele was mixed. They beefed up enrollments nicely at a time when deans were becoming number-conscious, but they tended to be--well, disturbing, that is disturbing of business as usual. We were used to cohorts of students who came in as blank slates and who proceeded in lockstep fashion predictably to acquire linguistic and cultural knowledge in amounts that we carefully dosed. We were suddenly faced with a motley group of folks, some of whom had been exposed to lots of spoken, let us say Hindi, at home, who knew the kinship terms and the proper forms of address which we devoted so much time inculcating in our prior clientele, who knew about foods and controlled a host of other elements of cultural knowledge which we used to package along with linguistic skills, but who were often illiterate in the language and were not always eager to work on reading and writing skills, or to ingest huge doses of corrective grammar. At Penn, coping strategies included creating a separate track, labeled "accelerated," at least for Hindi, where enrollments allowed it. For some other languages, such as Panjabi or Gujarati, enrollments consist almost entirely of undergraduates of South Asian descent. In all South Asian language classes at Penn, and I hear elsewhere, a majority of the population is now of South Asian descent.
The next area in which we noticed the influx of South Asian ethnic population was in introductory courses on Indian culture. At Penn SARS 101, "The Legacy of India," an undergraduate lecture course devoted to a cultural history of South Asia, has seen enrollments boom, braking for the first time the 200 mark last Spring. Of those enrollees 48% were of South Asian heritage and 23% of other Asian heritage, for a total of 71% students of Asian ethnicity in the course.
Whether in language or in other courses, we need to serve this population in sensitive ways. We can no longer teach South Asian Studies as a foreign subject, but we must view it as a form of ethnic studies, much as Jewish studies has been taught in ways that are not dominated by either world-civilization or antiquarian concerns, or by a location in the Near East. A majority of our students are no longer intellectual adventurers with an eye peeled for an exotic India, but young people who struggle to recover the cultural heritage from which they have been separated by a primary and secondary school curriculum that remains western and Eurocentric.
I have put pedagogical concerns up front because this is how I was first confronted with this issue, but the impact of this new situation on scholarship should be no less remarkable.
Let us think of economics, for example. The Helwegs' book, An Immigrant Success Story: East Indians in America, has an interesting chapter on the impact of expatriation on the Indian economy.[193] The Helwegs' estimate that the average Indian family in the US sends between $50 and $100 per month back to India. There are business investments as well. The impact of expatriate Indian investment has been massive in areas such as the Punjab, which owes much of its development into the breadbasket of India to such investments. The states of Punjab, Gujarat, and Kerala, which have the largest emigrant populations, have established bureaus to woo expatriate investment. Look at the advertisements published in the bimonthly magazine India Today that are specially aimed at Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) and which offer special breaks on investments in their country of origin and acquisition of real estate for after retirement. The assets of diasporic South Asians have now a significant impact on South Asian capital flow. On the other hand, consider the loss that South Asian countries sustain by the emigration of many of their best graduates. The Helwegs' estimate that the rate of emigration of graduates from the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology was about half the total in the years 1968 to 1976.[194] The medical profession also loses many of its best practitioners to emigration. It is estimated that the emigration of a qualified doctor represents a loss of $40, 000 to India, and his/her immigration a gain of $648, 000 to the U.S. The South Asian diaspora, not only to the US and Canada, but to Great Britain, Australia, Hongkong, Singapore, and the Gulf states, has a significant impact on the economies of South Asian countries.
South Asian foreign policy and domestic politics are also affected by diasporic constituencies. There were suggestions that India's policy during the Gulf War was mindful of the presence of great numbers of Indian citizens in the Gulf states. There is also little doubt that political groups in cultural or religious guise, such as the VHP and Sikh separatists, receive much of their funding from supporters settled abroad, a feature that makes it easier for them to flaunt bans imposed on their activities by the Indian government. Political and social affairs in North America may also be impacted. Think of the repercussions of the bombing of the AirIndia flight by terrorist cells based in Canada. On a less tragic, but still intriguing, level, I would love to know how it came about that AT&T put the VHP on the list of charities to which it contributed. There was such an outcry that they opened an 800 number for people who wanted to register complaints. I was startled, when I called that number, that the operator automatically addressed me in Hindi!
What lessons does the cultural evolution of diasporic populations hold for our understanding of Indian culture? There have been diasporic Indian populations in prior centuries, most notably those brought by indenture to the Caribbean and Fiji. That situation was, however, different, in that those populations, like that of the early California Sikhs, were made primarily of poor, rural-labor, uneducated males who severed contact with their homeland since they did not have the financial and other resources that allow today's diasporic South Asians not only to bring over spouses and other family members, but also to make regular family trips to South Asia at an estimated average of once every three years in the case of Indians settled in the US.[195] In the case of the later diasporic populations with which I am primarily concerned, it is harder to dismiss evolutionary patterns as little more than a loss of culture to be blamed on severance from the home country; active choices seem to be a key.
It seems clear that caste does not weather expatriation well. This was so for indentured, rural migrants to the Caribbean and elsewhere; it is equally so for professional immigrants from urban India in the US. I do not mean to say that Indian immigrants in America instantly forget and forego their caste identity, but commensality patterns and other social associations promptly ignore it, and it appears to be less important in the selection of mates for their offspring than other criteria such as financial and professional status and regional origin. Certainly, the American-bred generation tends to have little patience with caste. It seems to me that the concept and the importance of caste need to be reexamined against the lessons of the diaspora. Perhaps more than any other feature, caste has been considered to be a fundamental element of Indian culture; to use Louis Dumont's title, the Indian human has been defined as Homo Hierarchicus. Yet caste seems to be a fragile plant, not easily transplanted on foreign soil. Have we made too much of caste?
And what of regionalism? The preferred pattern of association for immigrants from South Asia is by regional and linguistic groups. Immigrants look forward to opportunities to converse in their mother tongues and about familiar haunts. Yet families in which English is the primary mode of communication place little emphasis on passing on their mother tongues to the successor generation, and young people raised in English have little interest in maintaining regional patterns of association. Most identify themselves by nationality, i.e. by the nationality of their parents as Indians, Pakistanis, etc. With young people of Indian or Pakistani origin, Hindi and Urdu have acquired the status of national languages. Even at places like Penn, where instruction in a wide array of South Asian languages is available, students of Indian/Pakistani origin whose family language is other than Hindi/Urdu are eager to study it, as the language they construct secondarily as the national language of their parents, according to a pattern that prolongs Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. As in Trinidad, Hindi has also acquired a sacred aura, displacing Sanskrit in much of the rituals, except for the sacred mantras. In the Caribbean, this evolution had much to do with the missionary activities of the Arya Samaj. Is the same influence at work in the United States, or are there other factors at play? Instead of regional groups, what appears to be emerging is a North/South divide, apparent, for example, in the existence of two temples in Pittsburgh, one North Indian, the other South Indian. Marriages that cross the North/South boundary are frowned upon, whereas more regional collocations, such as between persons originally from Gujarat and from UP, are increasingly frequent. There appears, therefore, to be a return to older, racial, Aryan/Dravidian distinctions, a phenomenon that raises the question whether this binary division was ever erased, or whether it was just made less apparent within more regional subtexts. I am puzzled by the fact that the steadiest ethnic clientele for my Sanskrit courses appears to be made of people of South Indian Brahman background, a pattern that raises a host of interesting, and possibly troubling, questions. Might Sanskrit knowledge constitute an ultimate self-affirmation by an elite (Brahmanical) minority of an ethnic (South Indian) minority of an ethnic (Indian/South Asian) minority in the US?
On the religious side, there appears to be a worrisome tendency among diasporic Hindus to conflate Indian and Hindu identities, that is, to define Indianness in Hindu terms. This may be due in part to the influence of the VHP of North America, which has stepped in the Indian cultural vacuum and provides summer camps for youths, in which Hindu rituals are taught and Indian culture reinforced in a purposely integrative fashion. But there may be other forces at work as well. The North Indian temple at Pittsburgh is labeled, and organized as, a Hindu-Jain temple, a result, it would seem, of a reasonable desire to meet the needs of a community in which Gujaratis constitute a majority, and Jains a significant minority among Gujaratis. Yet the temple landscape in Pittsburgh raises puzzling questions, in that it is laid out in ways that accommodate two religions, Hindu and Jain, for Indians of North Indian extraction in a single temple structure at the same time that it segregates Hindus from North and South India in two distinct temple complexes. Sikhs clearly have separate gurdwaras and appear to emphasize a close-knit religious community rather than seek a common ground with other South Asian religions. John Fenton, in his book Transplanting Religious Traditions: Asian Indians in America, forecasts a movement of South Asian Muslims toward pan-Islamicism. He may be right, though this trend is unlikely to apply to Ismailis, many of whom were displaced from East Africa and have a tradition of maintaining strong communal ties. I tend to doubt Fenton's assessment of Indian Christians, who he forecasts will assimilate promptly with majority-community churches. All the evidence I have points, to the contrary, to Indian Christians emphasizing their Indian identity, establishing their own separate churches as soon as their density allows, and generally joining Hindus in an effort to maintain their Indian culture. Similarly, there appears to be no impending merger of the Hinduism of immigrants with that of American converts to Krishna Consciousness, Ramakrishna Mission, and other proselytizing groups. Even though, in smaller communities, Indian Hindus may link up with Western-style Hindu movements that may provide them with a venue for their functions, such linkages appear to be temporary, ad-hoc, remedial measures. Other evidence points to a direct affiliation between temples in America and orthodox religious centers in India, such as the vertical link between the South Indian temple in Pittsburgh and the Srivenkatesvara temple in Tirupati. Ultimately, the current emphasis on temple construction may be misleading. In most cases, and as community leaders freely admit, temples are not primarily intended as places of worship, but as community centers, meeting grounds for immigrants and marriage markets for their children. Those of my students who identify themselves as Hindu, including those who have participated in summer camps organized by the VHP, seem pessimistic about the maintenance of Hinduism in America. In order to survive, Hinduism may have to become congregational, and may require a switch to English for rituals that successor generations find gratingly obscure. Such modifications are unlikely to come easily as long as priests are imported from India; and there appears to be little interest here to create American Hindu seminaries, and even less interest in directing children to priestly careers. Perhaps the notion that some of us have long held, that Hinduism is more a way of life than a religion of worship and dogma, has merit, and, if so, Hinduism may not be easily maintained. Hinduism in America deserves to be watched closely, and I will be curious to see the results of Diana Eck's ongoing and encompassing project.
Perhaps, as with other Asian communities, Indian culture may be largely lost in time, except for the usual three Fs: food, films, and festivals. Each of these aspects would deserve some discussion, but let me pass on to what is clearly the most important for the South Asian community in America, the F of family. the maintenance of family ties is the primary concern of the immigrant generation and, in spite of their worries that their children will sever these bonds, all the evidence shows that the pattern of family closeness and of extended family ties is the tradition that South Asian immigrants have transmitted most securely to the next generation, so securely that that generation is likely to emphasize its transmission to the next. There have been some comparative studies of family trends in India and in the diaspora.[196] More are needed.
What does the apparent evolution of Indian culture in America tell us about its nature? In a short but stimulating article entitled "The Diaspora in Indian culture," Amitav Ghosh argues that diasporic Indians carry with them less items than processes. Thus, he says, "India exported with her population, not a language, as other civilizations have done, but a linguistic process--the process of adaptation to heteroglossia."[197] Ghosh sees in the diaspora an extension of the importance of the periphery, which he considers to be characteristic of Indian culture. He contrasts this phenomenon with the notion of "the colonial" in Britain. In Britain, being a colonial, whether Canadian, Australian, or South African, is being "imperfectly British." This argument resonates with me even more in the French context, in which being merely "francophone"--and within France itself, being "provincial"--is being imperfectly French, which is defined as being Parisian, in a culture in which there is no one, no thing perfectly French outside Paris. Ghosh argues with considerable merit,
It is impossible to be imperfectly Indian. There is no notion comparable to that of the colonial. Were it possible to be an imperfect Indian, everybody in India would be. This is not merely because India has failed to develop a national culture. It is not a lack; it is in itself the form of Indian culture. If there is any one pattern in Indian culture in the broadest sense it is simply this: that the culture seems to be constructed around the proliferation of differences (albeit within certain parameters). To be different in a world of differences is irrevocably to belong. Thus anybody anywhere who has even the most tenuous links with India is Indian; potentially a player within the culture. The mother country simply does not have the cultural means to cut him off.[198]
I urge that we not dismiss or neglect the evolution of diasporic South Asian cultures as of little or no relevance for a deeper understanding of South Asian culture, but rather that the boundaries between features of South Asian culture in South Asia and South Asian culture elsewhere be systematically questioned and problematized.
Another boundary line that I urge be crossed is that which has thus far separated South Asianists from intellectuals of the South Asian diaspora. Intellectuals of the South Asian diaspora constitute a small, but notable group in the American academy. They often express misgivings at being treated as privileged voices and at being charged with the burden of speaking for, of "representing," South Asia or the Third World at large. That this burden imposed on them stems from considerations more of race than of birth, and that it affects women in particular is attested to by Gauri Bhat:
The voices of political correctness in academia, where I now reside, were indeed correct when they told me that my color is incontrovertibly relevant to my life. But they did not tell me that, barring those spotlight moments of truth, I would feel more brown in a room full of leftist academics than I do walking down the street. In the classrooms of radical discourse, the darkness of my skin is like a badge of honor. I am marked as an Empath. Guilty and solicitous white male scholars tiptoe around my privileged understanding of texts. And I think: I was not raised in the barrios, in the ghettos, under the British colonial empire, so how is my color a window? Sometimes the academic attentiveness to women of color dovetails with that long fascination with Asian women as exotic sexual objects, so that I begin to feel like the flavor of the month--dark and mysterious, and politically correct to boot.[199]
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, one of the leading Third-World feminists in this country, speaks likewise:
in speaking ]about Third World peoples, I have to watch constantly the tendency to speak for Third World peoples. For I often come to embody the "authentic" authority and experience for many of my students; indeed, they construct me as a native informant in the same way that left-liberal white students sometimes construct all people of color as the authentic voices of their people. This is evident in the classroom when the specific "differences" (of personality, posture, behavior, etc.) of one woman of color stand in for the difference of the whole collective, and a collective voice is assumed in place of an individual voice.[200]
South Asian diasporic intellectuals tend to be located in departments of English, of comparative literature, of women's studies, and the like, in which they teach subjects such as cultural studies, postcolonial literature, or Third-World women. South Asianists have tended to view them as more bent on theory than on the specifics of South Asian or other cultures. This is indeed the case, and yet, while South Asian diasporic intellectuals are mostly engaged in building theoretical constructs, the examples they use often come from South Asia. I amazed at the prominence of South Asia in the fields of postcolonial literature and cultural studies. There are obvious reasons for this in the colonial past, such as the abundance of South Asian literature in English. Yet, we, South Asianists, need to ask ourselves why it is that we still need to insist that attention be paid to South Asia within Asian Studies, when South Asian issues are so prominently and seamlessly featured in fields such as postcolonial literature and cultural studies? Contrast, for example, the job lists in the Newsletter of the Association for Asian Studies, in which openings for South Asian Studies are few in between openings for East Asian Studies, and, on the other hand, the fact that the only time we had an overflow crowd in our 47-year old South Asia Seminar at Penn was when Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was the featured speaker. We had made no special effort to advertise her lecture, but huge crowds showed up, colleagues in other departments who had never attended a South Asia Seminar, and hordes of undergraduate majors in English.
What I argue is not that we should attempt to merge our scholarly concerns with those of these, indeed very differently focused, scholars, but that we should make it a point to read them at least occasionally. Read articles such as "Postcoloniality and the Boundaries of Identity," published in Callaloo, a journal of African American and African Studies, by critical theorist R. Radhakrishnan, past the theoretical jargon, for the way in which, groping for the familiar, he brings up South Asian examples--Salman Rushdie, Nehru and Gandhi, Ranajit Guha's subaltern group--and for the references he makes to a bevy of authors both from South Asia and from the South Asian diaspora.[201] For relief, and still to appreciate the impact of these current trends on American campuses, read Kirin Narayanan's just published novel, Love, Stars and All That, about a student who comes from Bombay to study postcolonial literature at Berkeley and goes on to teach at a Whitney College--nicknamed Whitey College--in Vermont. It features delightful spoofs of academic jargon and mores, such as a portrayal of a flamboyant avant-garde, feminist lecturer whom she names Kamashree Ratnabhushitalingam-Hernandez.[202] I also argue, on the evidence I have that theoretical books by authors of the Indian diaspora are constantly out on loan or locked in reserve in the Penn library, that, when we offer general undergraduate courses, we should not assume that European American students have no clue about South Asia if they have not had instruction in a South Asian language or taken a course on South Asian civilization. Many may have been exposed to various strands of information about South Asia, made to support a theoretical point in some general course or in theoretical books that are assigned readings, strands of information that we may help them collocate and build into a broad perspective on South Asia that may again be tapped further in support of their general education interests. The South Asian diasporic intellectuals who provide this information may also lead us to rethink the way in which we approach our task: the information they provide may be scattered as far as an integrated view of South Asian culture is concerned, but it is probably more integrated in the intellectual lives of American students than what we provide. Let us attempt to minimize, not maximize, the geographical distance and the intellectual exoticism of South Asian culture.
Much of what we do as South Asianists has featured a western gaze at South Asia--a western-gaze attitude to which South Asianists of South Asian extraction are not necessarily immune, and which is one of the points on which I take the anti-orientalist critique seriously. Diasporic intellectuals have, quite differently, developed a double gaze directed at both South Asia and America. Many are long-term green-card holders, who react, often sharply, to the threats of racialization and minoritization that American citizenship would involve. Their intellectual stance is not a comfortable one. R. Radhakrishnan describes the diasporic consciousness as "a condition of pain, and double alienation," and a location "of painful, incommensurable simultaneity."[203] Bharati Mukherjee, who did become an American citizen and who is a contrary voice on behalf of a commitment to purposeful immigration, argues, to the contrary, that the diasporic stance is a position of snootiness. In a piece published in celebration of her new American citizenship she writes:
I thinks there is . . . some forgivable fraud involved in the maintenance of expatriation. In literary terms, being an immigrant is very déclassé. There is a low-grade ashcan realism implied in the very material. The exiles (or their even haughtier cousin, the God-help-us! émigré) come wrapped in a cloak of mystery and world-weariness. By refusing to play the game of immigration, they certify to the world, and especially to their hosts, the purity of their pain and their moral superiority to the world around them. In some obscure way, they earn the right to be permanent scolds, soaking up comfort and privilege and nursing real grievances until privilege and grievance become habits of mind.[204]
Wherever we stand on this issue--and I admit to oscillating between these two positions depending on the specifics of the case-- I argue that South Asianists ought to explore this diasporic consciousness. It is a space occupied by creative minds, with whom we ought to be in dialogue, sometimes even in alliance, particularly when, instead of speaking from a perspective of double privilege, they speak from a perspective of double responsibility. In a sensitive piece dedicated to his eleven-year old, bicultural son, in which he probes the different validities of competing perspectives on South Asia, that of the resident Indian, the diasporan--his own-- and the bicultural--that of his son's second generation-- R. Radhakrishnan states:
As diasporan citizens doing double duty (with accountability both here and there), we need to understand as rigorously as we can the political crises in India, both because they concern us and also because we have a duty to represent India to ourselves and to the United States as truthfully as we can.[205]
At is best, the diasporan perspective is less that of a double distance than that of a double engagement.
I realize that, by urging a rapprochement between South Asianists and diasporic intellectuals, I propose a partial deprofessionalization of our field. It is my opinion that we may have placed too much emphasis on too narrowly defined professional credentials and been too dismissive of people whose primary qualifications may appear at first blush to be that they happen to be South Asians by birth. One of the challenges of having in our midst a host of persons of intellect and of influence who are concerned with South Asian issues is that we may have to let go of professional smugness and make judgments solely on the basis of whether the thoughts that are being expressed enlighten the issues. I suggest that we ought not to try to protect our academic turf, but that we should cross academic boundaries that have so far hemmed us in a foreign East. We may do well to follow the path that Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge have blazed with the journal Public Culture: Bulletin of the Society for Transnational Cultural Studies, and to heed the diasporic voice of those whom Appadurai calls "transnational intellectuals." Read his piece entitled "Patriotism and Its Futures" and the revised version of it that appeared under the title "The Heart of Whiteness."[206]
In this prelude to our conversation, I have brought up a host of different considerations, all linked by my contention that we need to rethink South Asian Studies as a part of ethnic studies, no longer as a division of foreign studies. Let me conclude by suggesting some of the practical steps that we might take to effect changes in our activities that meet some of the challenges which the presence of a permanent South Asian community in North America poses.
As teachers, we ought to think through and ethicize our role as providers or boosters of cultural knowledge for South Asian ethnics. We need to do better than dish out to them in a marginally revised version materials we had prepared as an introduction for European Americans to the cultures of South Asia. It is all the more crucial that we teach thoughtfully, responsibly, ethically, since the only alternatives for our new clientele may be total ignorance or parochial notions such as those provided by the VHP. The programs for youths organized by the VHP of North America perform an important function, in the order of what a Sunday school provides for youngsters brought up in other creeds, but majority-community youngsters have a host of complementary and competing opportunities to learn about the underpinnings of their culture; their entire cultural training does not come from Sunday school. South Asian American youths also need to learn about their culture in ways that are not hemmed in by parochial concerns.
We need also to modify our outreach work to and on behalf of our South Asian community. Our outreach efforts have often focused on helping high schools develop responsible curricula for world-culture courses, a role predicated on the notion that South Asian culture is foreign. We need now to develop a consciousness among primary and secondary school teachers and in the public at large that there is not just a South Asia out there, but that there are people of South Asian heritage right here, as part of our ethnic make-up, who are not just our friends and our neighbors, but who are us. We must work to establish the notion that Indian curry is no less American than European apple pie, that being brown is no less American than being white.
Our outreach to the community has all too often consisted of showing up at formal functions on invitation, and delivering predictable remarks about the greatness of Indian culture. Now that there is a South Asian American community, and particularly a second generation, who may need us to enlighten issues about which they care, we must accept the duty of occasionally voicing thoughts that might be controversial. We may not shirk the responsibility of challenging tendentious propaganda and of setting the record straight on issues that relate to South Asia.
Most of us might prefer to stay in strictly academic, and hence presumably safe, zones. Yet the parameters of such zones shrink when we live and work in the midst of people for whom issues that may be of professional interest to us are of intense personal relevance. On contentious subjects, academic coolness, tempered by sensitivity--let me underscore this--academic coolness tempered by sensitivity to the fact that such subjects are, and are legitimately, of intense personal relevance to a segment of the American public--academic coolness of this kind can produce much that is both scholarly legitimate and socially useful. An outstanding example of such a collocation is that of a conference that was held at Columbia University in the Spring of 1989, and of the publication that ensued from that conference. Studying the Sikhs: Issues for North America is all the more remarkable because of the particular difficulties that have surrounded Sikh studies; it is a model of both impeccable scholarship and sensitivity to the community concerned, a community that is acknowledged as a constituent part of the American fabric.
We should also educate ourselves in the American part of the hyphenated identity of South Asian Americans, and of Asian Americans in general. We should read anthologies such as Our Feet Walk the Sky: Women of the South Asian Diaspora; Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and about Asian American Women; Asian American Experiences in the United States; and Growing Up Asian American among other books. We should also have more than a nodding acquaintance with the concerns of ethnic studies generally, and of Asian American Studies in particular. It is probably no accident that one of the most sensitive pieces in the book Studying the Sikhs is the liminal essay by Mark Jurgensmeyer, who happens to be married to Sucheng Chan, the grande dame of Asian American Studies.[207] In an article published in one the yearly anthologies of the Association of Asian American Studies, Sucheta Mazumdar observes:
Though some scholars of Asian Studies do, on a personal level, have some interaction with faculty and curricula in Asian American Studies, by and large most ignore Asian American Studies. Asian American Studies, with its politics of protest and challenge to existing curricula of higher education in America, has been seen as "too political" by a field used to thinking of politics only in distant lands. The centrality of race and issues of racism in scholarship on Asian American Studies have also been uncomfortable topics for Asianists who have tended to leave such issues unexamined.[208]
I am told by the friends I have made in the field of Asian American Studies that the writing course on the Indian American experience I introduced at Penn last year is the very first course in which South Asian American Studies is taught in an ethnic studies mode. Look for a report on the first run of that course to appear in the next anthology of the Association of Asian American Studies.[210] The need for social services grows as the profile of the community changes. After the influx of highly educated, professional, and now affluent immigrants of the late 1960s and 70s, family sponsorship clauses and other factors have brought since the mid-1980s immigrants who are less skilled. More of today's South Asian immigrants man newspaper stands, Seven-Eleven counters, and taxicabs in cities like New York Philadelphia than they do hospitals and research labs. More live in cramped quarters in inner-city little Indias than in suburban ease. These latest immigrants need the support of social workers who are not only capable of understanding their language--for a knowledge of English is no longer standard--but who are also sensitive to aspects of South Asian culture, deportment, and family dynamics. We lag far behind Canada in meeting this need.
Perhaps most important, we ought, as individuals and collectively, to expose and combat anti-South Asian racism, which is on the rise. By this I do not mean denouncing only the hate crimes committed by the infamous "Dotbusters" of Northern New Jersey, but also, and vigilantly, seemingly innocuous instances of insults, crude jokes, taunts, and the like, which exemplify and nourish a climate of prejudice. We must communicate to any offenders that our role is not just to teach about South Asian culture and society in the rarefied groves of the academy, but also to demand that Americans of South Asian descent by treated with respect.
In sum, I submit that we must link the pursuit of knowledge with social responsibility. We must remove the boundary between the academy and the world we live in. We must cease treating South Asian affairs as a foreign topic, to be investigated only on research grants funded in Rupees. We must acknowledge our responsibility toward the ethnic South Asian community at home. We must re-constitute South Asian Studies, by which I mean that we must form a special bond with, and accept a special duty toward, a new "constituency" here at home.