Exiled at ‘Home’ : the perplexities of an engaged self

It was sometime in the January of this year that I first understood or, to put it a bit prosaically, gathered into my inner being, (at least) something of what (some) women mean when they say that they find the ‘male gaze’ threatening and perceive it to be laden with ominous significations. I had returned from the UK after seven years, and had so thoroughly internalised the un/spoken rule that you do not stare at someone unless you wish to enter into some sort of conversation that the curious gawks of people eye-ing me made me feel uneasy, nervous and edgy. When I would step into a grocery, a cyber-café, a chemist, a milk-booth or cellphone-recharge outlet, the shopkeeper would, with uncanny regularity, stare at me and wait for a while, almost as if he were mulling over my question, searching for hidden contradictions in it. Matters were made worse by the fact that it was only after a few weeks that I ‘remembered’ that I am not supposed to ‘wait for my turn’ at Indian shops; I once waited at a grocery for half an hour on the assumption that I was standing in a (non-existent) queue. As time passed by, I gradually began to be made aware, through numerous subtle signals that dart through the dense criss-crossing chains that constitute the social matrix, that I was some sort of an ‘Outsider’. The owner of a cyber-café that I frequent once showed me a 20 $ note and asked me what its worth would be in Indian rupees; when I asked him why he thought that I would be capable of answering his question, he replied, ‘Oh, you are not from these parts.’ The slander (or the benediction?) that I was not ‘from these parts’ stuck on to my mind’s eye as the months rolled on. I suddenly realised for the first time that all the shopkeepers near my place never spoke to me in Hindi, and would try to match my circuitous Hindi with an equally tortuous English. When I would go to Connaught Place (a.k.a. Rajiv Chowk) in the evenings, tourist guides would walk up to me asking if me if I wanted to be shown into some five-star hotel or taken on a trip to Agra, and travel agents would press upon me to get my dollars exchanged at the ‘best market rates’.

Such experiences filled (and continue to fill) me with a curious ambivalence : simultaneously with dread, with irritation, and with ‘homelessness at home’. First, the dread. Though I suppose some people think that my ‘knowledge of the world’ is somewhat ‘bookish’, I would instead say that it is quite ‘filmish’. Over the last seven years, I have waded my way through such a deluge of movies based on the Crusades, World War I, World War II, Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, Vichy France, the French Resistance, Stalinist Russia, Algeria, Cuba, Panama, Indo-China and Vietnam that there are times, especially when I am in a bus, a market-place or the Underground (!), when I cannot help asking myself if the person sitting next to or in front of me is a CIA, MI5 or Mossad agent in plainclothes. In its dispensation of the spy-genre, Hollywood has cast such an enticing spell over me that I seem to ‘see’ schemes, intrigues, stratagems, ruses, machinations and conspiracies everywhere : to echo Shakespeare, the whole world is one gigantic Plot and I am but a Secret Agent (even if not quite of the 007 variety). Indeed, students, Ph.D. or otherwise, who wish to investigate the role that the media or info-entertainment plays in ‘constructing consciousnesses’ or in ‘in-forming subjectivities’ might do well to have a chat with me on these matters. I have absorbed so much from these war-movies that I feel at times that I am now capable, (somewhat in the manner of Sherlock Holmes’ lesser-known brother, Mycroft Holmes), of fighting an entire World War right from my laptop, matching strategy with counter-strategy, and wonder, in fact, why I am not yet in the Indian Ministry of Defence’s counter-intelligence wing. Indeed, I believe it is extremely juvenile, not to say ridiculous, to wage wars with ‘real’ guns, tanks and soldiers; wars should be fought ‘in the mind’ as a ‘hyper-real’ means of exercising the grey cells. Be that as it may, when people are able to mark me out as non-Indian, or at least, as one who is not from their parts, a cold dread, almost as a reflex-(re)action, runs through my spine at once. I have to force myself to be ‘sensible’ and to remind myself that if those around me were indeed secret agents they would have never asked me such questions and broken ‘radio-silence’.

Second, the irritation : for all my rationalising away, and implicit condoning, of people’s inquisitive stares in this way, I cannot help feel irritated when I (am forced to) become the focus of their attention or, to use a delicate word, their ‘interest’. I suppose the greatest dilemma that faces me is that of becoming as anonymous as possible while living at the volatile interstices of the social world, and the knowledge that I am being observed or scrutinised by someone threatens to rend the protective veil of comforting obscurity with which I wish to be perpetually enveloped. It is at these moments that I sorely and desperately miss the anonymity that I enjoyed (and relished) during my time in the UK; I could, if (an important qualifier) I so wished, hide almost everything about myself from even the proverbial girl-next-door. A popular argument that runs through the Indian social fabric is that the ‘West’ is a land of abstract, individualistic, and egomaniac atoms that flit through empty space with no sense of community, kinship, cohesion, or affinity. High rates of divorce, broken marriages, substance abuse, drug addiction, and teenage pregnancies are the instances that comprise the well-worn artillery of those Indians who direct their fiery wrath (read : self-righteous indignation) at the allegedly tottering citadel of the ‘West’. To fully engage with the whole gamut of issues that these ‘East-West’ culture-wars throw up will require several pages, if not volumes; for the moment, I shall simply retort, even if somewhat obliquely, that ‘those who live in glass houses should not throw stones at others’. I have seen and experienced enough of what happens to individuals within the sanitised zone of authentic ‘Indian values’ to regard the straightforward equation, in the manner of an ‘essentialisation’, of the ‘West’ as a land of perverse, deracinated and asocial individuals, as anything more than a school-boy subterfuge intended to camouflage the violence, implicit as well as explicit, that runs through the skeins of the ‘Indian family’. This, in turn, is connected to the reason why I never watch Bollywood movies except in ‘exceptional’ circumstances. I am not temperamentally a ‘reductionistic’ person, but when it comes to Bollywood I cannot help declaring in a reductionistic tone that the singular message that rings out clearly (even if there are notable exceptions to this rule, and may their tribe multiply!) through the morass of the movies that it churns out is this : ‘Such is the doom that awaits you if you fail to get your daughter married off, or at least ‘engaged’, by the age of twenty-five’. The Indian family-values that Bollywood dotes on, patronises as a gesture of ‘social service’ to the nation, and exalts to the skies are precisely the ones that I find extremely didactic, moralistic, paternalistic, vapid, insidious, invasive and intrusive; and its sickening success is perhaps a menacing reminder of how deeply-rooted these values must be in the swooning audiences that it commands, manipulates and controls with such frightening regularity, across all religions, all castes and all classes. Thus I can say unhesitatingly that, given a choice, I would rather watch a company of fifty French and German soldiers shooting one another to death in some God-forsaken valley on the Somme, the Rhone or the Rhine than endure a three-hour long saga where an Indian woman is painfully battered to a slow, lingering death as a kaleidoscopic host of so-called Indian values are drilled into her, in a gruelling moralising narrative ranging from her childhood through her ‘marriageable years’ up to her old age.

These family-values assault you on every side with the weight of Normative assumptions, if only you pause for a while to examine the ones that saturate practically everything that is handed out to you. Here is one from ‘personal experience’ : some months ago, I was informed by a ‘well-meaning’ aunt that she had found an Assamese ‘marriageable’ girl for me. As many as three Normative suppositions are condensed into this terse statement, and, as it so happens, they are ones that I find extremely hideous. First, she assumed that I am heterosexual, thereby replicating the view that heterosexuality is the Norm and homosexuality an aberration; second, she assumed that I would be ‘interested’ in marriage in the first place, thus strengthening the standpoint that institutionalised marriage is the Norm; and, third, she assumed that I would be drawn to an Assamese girl merely because she is Assamese, in the process furthering cultural/linguistic chauvinism or jingoism as a Norm.

But to return from the digression, the irritation at being denied this ‘right to anonymity’ is, of course, not simply a matter of being compelled to become willy-nilly the locus of curiosity, for this denial has implications that I can only categorise as sinister. One of the first questions that I am asked by those who want to ‘make conversation’ or ‘get to know me’ is about my father, and it is one that I find deeply odious, repulsive, and distasteful, for it is surely an indication of the pervasiveness of patriarchal values and notions in the Indian milieu that one believes that an individual’s identity, distinctiveness or personality is connected with Issues (no pun intended) of Paternity. Here are, by way of suggestion for those who just may wish, for whatever inexplicable reasons, to ‘make conversation’ with me, as many as ten non-odious questions they could ask me : ‘Would you rather watch baseball or football on TV?’, ‘Have you ever journeyed to somewhere within the Arctic Circle?’, ‘If you were living in 1918 Russia, would you have joined the Tsarists, the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks?’, ‘Who do you think are the greater racists, the Indians or the Europeans?’, ‘Have you watched the latest movie of Almodovar?’, ‘Who do you think was a greater composer, Schubert or Sibelius?’, ‘Is your mind one that is never at rest?’, ‘Who do you think sells better milk --- Mother Dairy or Amul?’, ‘Do you think Eva Longoria is over-rated?’ and ‘Have you ever been to the fort at Fatehpur Sikri?’ This pervasive obsession with the Family (and especially with the Sign of the Father), this all-encompassing perception that you have not ‘identified’ an individual unless and until you have ‘located’ him or her within some familial context is also associated with the omnipresence of the hierarchical notions of stratification that cut across the overlapping manifolds of the Indian social matrix.

Which brings me to the third type of ‘irritating’ experience, that of being addressed with the that most despicable honorific ‘Sir’. Looking back over the years, I can now see that the sole reason why I did not appear for the Indian Administrative Service or go into the medical, engineering, judicial or technical ‘streams’ was my horror that some so-called junior officer would, sooner rather than later, speak to me as ‘Sir’. The only time I came close to ragging a student during my college days in Delhi was when in my third year a freshman persistently addressed me as ‘Sir’ even after my repeated warnings to my contrary. So deep, in fact, is my distaste for such terms laden and permeated through and through with inegalitarian presuppositions and implications that it is with some degree of uneasiness that I speak Indian languages which make a distinction between the ‘personal you’ (Hindi : tum, Bengali : tumi) and the ‘honorific you’ (Hindi : aap, Bengali : aapni). (If I were some sort of a linguistic dictator, I would like to erase all traces of the ‘honorific you’ from Indian languages, thank you very much.) I once flipped through an examination text-book in a second-hand bookshop that declared on its cover, ‘50 Letters For Examinations’ and came across a letter written to a Bank Manager that went as, ‘Sir, I humbly beg [italics mine] to state that I am Mr.___’ A paradigmatic instance precisely of that servile ‘Sir-dom’ mentalite that is perhaps a lasting colonial hangover, one that I find so nauseating in so much around me.

A month ago, I was roaming through the vacant deserted places of Connaught Place at nine in the morning on a Sunday morning when a young boy walked up to me with the question, ‘What is your name, Sir?’ It was bad enough that he had ventured to ask me for my name, but to top it with a ‘Sir’ was infinitely more repulsive. I furtively glanced at the thick wad of tourist guides in his right hand, and could immediately see that he had taken me (not yet again!) for an ‘Outsider’, but not wishing to get drawn into another frustrating conversation over hotel-rooms, dollar-bills and Agra-trips, I walked straight into the underground market at Palika without answering his question. He tenaciously followed me in, and after a while I too gave in, trying to give evasive replies to a long set of questions that he began to hurl at me, until he came to this one, ‘Where are you from and what is your name, Sir?’ Swallowing my exasperation for once, I replied, ‘I am Pablo, from Spain’. What followed was a long-winded conversation in the course of which he told me that he was from Allahabad ‘only’, that he did not want any money from me ‘only’, and that he was trying to practise his English ‘only’. When we came out into the sunlight, he asked me for a 10$ bill for having ‘shown me around’, to which I could only reply that I had no such thing on me. Then he launched a Parthian shot at me packed with a crescendos of ‘Sirs’ : ‘Not worry, Sir. Anytime you need me, I am here, Sir. And I noticed you never asked me for my name. I am Ankur. You are not like the other tourists who come here, Sir. Although you are foreign, I think you are very Indian.’

So I walked back through the still-vacant spaces of Connaught Place, feeling curiously unsettled and yet at ‘at home’. The words of Jawaharlal Nehru, a much-maligned figure at present in some circles, came floating to me, and despite the jarring note struck by their gendered invocation of India as ‘feminine’, they resonated ‘somewhere’ deep within me : ‘India was in my blood and there was much in her [sic] that instinctively thrilled me. And yet, I approached her [sic] almost as an alien critic, full of dislike for the present as well as for many of the relics of the past that I saw. To some extent I came to her [sic] via the West and looked at her as a friendly Westerner might have done.’ In some respects, I have perhaps become that much-hated figure of the R.S.S. and parallel formations, a Nehruvian pseudo-secular Indian alienated from the wellsprings of the cultural heritage. And yet, if it is ‘secularism’ and ‘Hinduism’ (incidentally, two extremely slippery terms) that are stake, I am certainly in a highly ambivalent position, for if ‘Hinduism’ constitutes, whether in part or in totality (and this is an extremely disputable point), the ‘wellsprings of the cultural heritage’, I have by now been engaged for seven years with the plurality of socio-cultural traditions that go under the umbrella-term of ‘Hinduism’. That is, far from having studied too little of ‘Hinduism’, I have perhaps studied too much of it! Which is why the statement ‘Exiled at ‘Home’’ is not quite a helpless lament, though it is not quite a jubilant exultation either; it is rather an expression of my perplexity at finding myself so out-of-place in a space that I recognise to be my ‘home’.

Elsewhere, Nehru, struck perhaps by a somewhat similar perplexity, asked : ‘Which of the two Englands came to India? The England of Shakespeare and Milton, of noble speech and writing and brave deed, of political revolution and the struggle for freedom … or the England of the savage penal code and brutal behaviour, of entrenched feudalism and reaction? For there were two Englands … The two Englands live side by side, influencing each other, and cannot be separated; nor could one of them come to India forgetting completely the other.’ Perhaps there are likewise (at least) two ‘Indias’, and these two are so densely intertwined with and imbricated in each other that they cannot easily be taken apart, and my own bafflement emerges from the fact that while I know which ‘India’ I wish to go to, I cannot disentangle myself from the other ‘India’ in which I am rooted. The former is a ‘India’ that somehow manages to keep alive the sense of a yearning, a longing or a hankering after a primordial Silence that slumbers not beyond but in the midst of the racket that ineluctably stamps itself on the valences, ambiguities and uncertainties of quotidian existence, and the latter is a ‘India’ that is propelled by a mindless Noise that is believed to be the motor of a self-propagating automaton hurtling away to a so-called shining future. Like Nehru’s ‘two Englands’, the ‘two Indias’ that I have outlined here (even if in some ideal-typical fashion) have, in fact, co-existed throughout the historical record; and finding myself immersed in the latter ‘India’ while craving for a fleeting foretaste of the former ‘India’, I often find myself ‘homeless’ even when I know I am at ‘home’. Thus living on the fault-lines (even if not always clearly discernible) of these two ‘Indias’, life has become, so to speak, an experiment in being amphibian, with one foot in the one and another foot in the other. Or, perhaps it is precisely this experience of a separation, of a rupture or of a drifting apart from my ‘deepest roots’ that is the truest homecoming, even if that homecoming is only the temporary interlude before yet another estrangement, and so on ad infinitum before death mercifully intervenes to terminate this painful dialectic of partition, reconciliation, partition, reconciliation ...