by Varun Gauri
I suppose proud Indians are all alike, but every American-born, confused desi is confused in their own way.
The Ohio hills reminded me of the snow-capped Himalayas. Not that I’d seen the Himalayas. I had seen a documentary about the heroism of Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, the dynamic duo who first scaled the Everest summit (it was about Hillary’s heroism, mostly). Then a storm dumped over a foot of snow on Cleveland in January 1978, on top of the two or three feet already on the ground, and 80-mile-per-hour winds kicked up six- and seven-foot snow drifts along my newspaper route. I completed my deliveries, nonetheless, returning home, cold and frost-bitten, by 8 am. Obviously, Sir Edmund and Sherpa Tenzing wouldn’t have been deterred, either.
Another childhood hero was my mail order guru, Paramahansa Yogananda. I fell for him because, unlike the other mystical outfits I wrote to, his Self-Realization Fellowship accepted thirteen-year-olds. Also, Guri-ji and I had the same birthday. I started meditating on a metal folding chair covered with a white blanket, in my bedroom closet, because the Fellowship recommended insulating yourself from worldly currents. I continued to be a committed, avid disciple throughout my teenage years, even maintaining my practice at a high school summer program at Cornell University. My roommate Marc, from Dallas, was startled when, opening our dorm-room closet to grab a pair of his shoes, he found me seated on a blanketed chair, palms upturned on my knees. Marc and I later had a productive conversation about the cultural differences between Texas and Ohio.
At home, behind my bed, I mounted a glimmering handloom tapestry from rural Rajasthan. For a costume party cum talent show, I had dressed up in a saffron loincloth, with a trident staff and an alms bowl for props (plus some random forehead markings). I watched the Gandhi biopic three times, learned the basic cricket rules, read the Bhagavad Gita, fasted on fruit and nuts on Tuesdays, and ate pungent okra-in-chapati sandwiches at lunch in the school cafeteria.
I was on Team India. To be a fan is to celebrate your team’s wins as your own, and I felt honored that my country had apparently invented the number zero. Indians had built glorious temples, palaces, and ancient cities with impressive feats of engineering. “We” made major contributions to logic, philosophy, linguistics, and religion. Gandhi was the most significant figure of the 20th century. Yoga was taking off everywhere. These were vicarious victories, as when your team receives multiple All-Star selections.
The flip side, of course, is that team losses hurt. When the father of a preschool friend teased me about squat toilets, I couldn’t communicate, let alone understand, my feelings of shame. Teachers described desperate poverty and hunger in India, the swollen bellies and the illiterate masses. It came to light that there were these things called castes. Did Bengali widows actually set themselves on fire? Did “Hindu scientists” really champion the healing power of cow urine? I was thrilled to meet the Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and expected easy camaraderie based on our shared ancestry, but my icon was cool, indifferent, and remote, seemingly lost to the black holes he studied.
There were probably as many losses as wins, but at a young age I needed, and paid more attention to, the wins. Eventually, though, even the early victories came into question. It turned out that Everest was not in India, at all, but actually located in another country. Worse, I learned that many citizens of Kashmir – home of the Indian Himalayas, the mother of snow, the roof of the world, the abode of Lord Shiva – wanted to secede from India altogether. That would be awful. What was India without Kashmir? Who was I without special access to Shangri-La?
The idea of “India” was providing virtues I didn’t myself possess: a bit of divinity in a spiritually barren life. Visions of great mountains for a child residing in flatlands. Hand-woven khadi instead of artificial fabrics and alienating industrial production. Control over my snacks during an era of hyper-processed foods. Gandhi’s techniques of resistance, his “eternal negative,” and his curious sexuality were strategies to manage the storms of adolescence and all that high school machismo.
Ernest Becker argued that we use heroes and social groups to experience power, to shore ourselves up in the face of existential fears, and to participate in larger meanings and narratives than our own solitary selves can otherwise create: “When one merges with the self-transcending parents or social group, he is, in some real sense, trying to live in some larger expansiveness of meaning. . . Transference represents a natural attempt to be healed and to be whole though heroic self-expression.” But these heroes and identifications often prove hollow, or misleading.
Political changes have gutted the India of my childhood. Now, in the eyes of many Indians, Gandhi is viewed as a weak-kneed traitor. Hinduism, once a source of rich, intimate symbols and significance for me, has become, all too often, a weapon of political domination. A senior Indian official at The World Bank once chewed me out for a paper I wrote, essentially calling me a traitor to my country. The India of the arguments and debates, of syncretism and permissiveness, has faded painfully soon, shortly after I learned to cherish it. Fictional heroes are fine, but social groups will let you down. Clinging to countries and religions is reifying, a turning away, a coverup, a refusal to recognize that everything flows, and nothing stays the same. In the end, other people and social categories cannot substitute for your own powers of self-expression.
I was thinking along these lines when writing my first novel, For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus. My protagonist Meena struggles to understand arranged marriage among the Indian diaspora, how people around her rely on gender and religion to feel strong and purposeful. Toward the end of the story, she realizes that she’d prefer to wear her social identities lightly, the way she takes off her work clothes at the end of the day and puts on pajamas.
I took a course in political theory with George Kateb, at Princeton. (The future senator Ted Cruz was in my class, but that’s another story.) One student (not the famous one) was arguing that Locke and the classical liberals were parochial, even imperial, when they demanded the expulsion of religious language from the public sphere. Professor Kateb’s reply was, more or less: All cultures and religions impose so much repression that it’s folly to glamorize any of them. He might also have explained that because life is always changing, we cannot have fixed heroes. George Saunders once said something like that: It’s not that nothing is true, just that nothing is true for very long. Many Americans grieve the possible destruction of civic republicanism, the vandalism now directed at Lincoln’s idea of “civil religion,” the end of American exceptionalism. To take another example, the secular ideals of Israel’s founders have yielded to more instrumental uses of national religion. Public creeds are inevitably false gods. Social groups can provide protection and self-defense, not personal meaning.
A Chinese teacher once told me he missed the foods of his youth, that the stomach remembers best, and I agree that the distinctive cultural pleasures of childhood live on in the body. I relish aloo chaat and a crisp masala dosa. There are ghazals and bhangra music on my playlists. Watching films like Three Idiots is so much fun. I loved the dancing, singing, and family spirit at my cousin’s wedding in Jodhpur. But I don’t need to be on Team India to appreciate those delights. So, I’m saying goodbye. While I’m at it, I plan to part ways with America, too (also Ohio).