by Hari Balasubramanian
I came to the United States from India in August 2000 to start graduate school in engineering. I had just finished a college degree and had no idea of the history of any place, including India. I did not, for example, know that Judaism referred to a religion, let alone the religion of the Jews. Many students get radicalized, develop a political and historical consciousness during college. For some reason, during my own college years in the town of Trichy in south India, I did not develop an interest in either India's past or the world.
The milieu in the United States, in the sprawling desert city of Phoenix, Arizona, was a curious one. On the one hand, graduate school was full of highly motivated students from all parts of Asia. On the other, the neighborhood I lived in, a ten minute walk from the university, was home to immigrants from indigenous or mixed race communities in Mexico and Central America (the closest genetic relatives of the North American Indians). Many of the immigrants had made life-threatening journeys across the southwestern desert into the US, and now did restaurant and construction jobs, legally and illegally, for a living.
This change in my setting was as invigorating as it was confusing, a first glimpse of how complex the world was. Suddenly history, which I had long ignored and thought boring, became indispensable. I began to read a lot more. I remember what a revelation it was to learn that Muslims had been dominant in Asia, Europe and North Africa before the Renaissance; that Europe had experienced something called the “dark ages”, a fact that had once seemed unimaginable, and now somehow comforting; that Genghis Khan, a man born into a nomadic tribe, had through a combination of brutality, shrewdness, and military strategy, built an unimaginably vast Eurasian empire. I was equally surprised that India too supposedly had had a great past, a “golden age”, a claim that had earlier, living with Indian realities, sounded hollow and untrue. Without realizing it, I had, like millions of people the world over, internalized the idea of Western superiority. The fact that non-Western people could be dominant, that the fortunes of all regions and cultures fluctuated, was liberating.
