Those who clean their own toilets are American;
those who get others to do it for them are certainly
desi.
In
early November, I spent a few days in Washington DC
at the South Asian Literary Festival (organized by the
Network of South Asian Professionals). It was a treat,
to be surrounded by great writers (Amitav Ghosh, brave
with his words, as in his new novel A Glass Palace,
and with his acts, as with his anti-imperialist refusal
to take the Commonwealth Award) and by avid readers
(who are often great writers, but without publishers).
It is always a pleasure to spend a few days talking
about novels and ideas, being indulgent in humanism.
Meanwhile, our chatter was interrupted periodically
with the murmurs of war. Television sets around us broadcast
updates from the frontlines, as the sounds of Afghan
grief filtered into our hotel rooms and reminded some
of us of our childhood fascination with that region:
Kabul (from where Tagore’s Kabulliwala hails), Kandahar
(which houses one of two of the most revered relics
of Muhammad in South Asia: here his cloak, and in Srinagar,
a lock of his hair), Bamiyan (where Buddha’s ideas took
a rest, en route to China and beyond). Talk of this
and that felt the presence of death, desolation and
the sheer fear that no change will come after the daisy-cutters
land, that whether the state is ruled by the principled
barbarians (the Taliban) or the unprincipled barbarians
(the Northern Alliance), the people will perforce have
to grow opium to survive, barely.
In the midst of this, someone asked me when we, as migrated
desis, become “American.” By American, the person with
the question meant those of the United States of America
(a linguistic tick that really bothers those who live
elsewhere on the continent).
When do we become American or USAian? Politically and
legally, this transformation takes place when we become
citizens, when we naturalize. But, since we all know
that many of us strategically (or nostalgically) hold
onto our subcontinental citizenships even as we are
able to work here through the resident alien regime:
do these strategic decisions curtail our ability to
be American? Is American so base that it simply takes
a piece of paper to become a part of it? Or does American
refer to some cultural features, to something that has
to do with assimilation? Is there such a thing as American
culture that can serve as the touchstone for immigrant
assimilation?
Is there any state that can legitimately offer up a
singular national heritage to its migrants so that they
may bone up on it and become a national culturally?
Even France, which seems to be fairly culturally homogeneous
from afar, is quite diverse and it would be hard to
tell a Moroccan migrant to assimilate to Parisian life
as a test of Frenchness when that sort of life is quite
removed from the existence of an Alsatian farmer. What
does a migrant to India have to do to become Indian?
No nation, I submit, is as culturally coherent as it
seems at first glance, so that the reproach of assimilation
seems more to keep us immigrants in line than to actually
expect us to eat hot dogs and apple pie and stretch
out our vowels.
The Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid was at the South Asian
Literary Festival. He is the author of Moth Smoke, a
book previously reviewed in Little India. In the middle
of his fine novel, Mohsin Hamid’s character Judge Julius
Superb offers his paper for a seminar on Social Class
in Pakistan. “There are two social classes in Pakistan,”
says the Judge. “The first group, large and sweaty,
contains those referred to as the masses. The second
group is much smaller, but its members exercise vastly
greater control over their immediate environment and
are collectively termed the elite. The distinction between
members of these two groups is made on the basis of
control of an important resource: air-conditioning.
You see, the elite have managed to re-create for themselves
the living standards of say, Sweden, without leaving
the dusty plains of the subcontinent They wake up in
air-conditioned houses, drive air-conditioned cars to
air-conditioned offices, grab lunch in air-conditioned
restaurants (rights of admission reserved), and at the
end of the day go home to their air-conditioned lounges
to relax in front of their wide-screen TVs.
And if they should think about the rest of the people,
the great uncooled, and become uneasy as they lie under
their blankets in the middle of the summer, there is
always prayer, five times a day, which they hope will
gain them admittance to an air-conditioned heaven, or,
at the very least, a long, cool drink during a fiery
day in hell.”
The parable of the air-conditioning gave me an idea.
Toilets.
The distinction between the immigrant to America and
the American who was an immigrant is in the cleaning
of the toilet. Those who clean their own toilets are
American; those who get someone to do it for them are
certainly desi. Almost all social classes in the subcontinent,
except the poorest among the working-class, hire someone
to clean their toilets for class and caste (purity)
reasons: few among the middle-class, whether men or
women, deign to wash their own toilet.
For this reason, Gandhians like Vallabswami wrote in
the late 1950s, “it is time for the liberation of the
Bhangi [the Dalit sweeper]. In truth, if every person
becomes his or her own Bhangi, that will be the ideal.”
Each morning, he continued, each person should get up
and “worship the filth” by appreciating the work that
it takes to cleanse the world in the “correct manner.”
Gandhi’s last lieutenant (and admirer of Indira Gandhi’s
Emergency), Vinoba Bhave wrote along this grain that
saints, such as Gandhi, cleaned toilets to “weaken [their]
ego and to acquire humility.” All this pressure, no
doubt, because most people felt it beneath themselves
to scrub their own toilets.
There is much that is reprehensible about life in America
— the hypocrisy of being in the “land of the free” when
our government spends its time undermining the destiny
of peoples to preserve such anti-democratic forces as
the Saudi royal family, for example, or else when our
government forces states to undo their economic arrangements
to suit those of rapacious transnational firms.
But where America is to be emulated is in the popular
urge among the working people of this country to do
many of the basest things by ourselves, to clean, cook
and repair things with the minimum of fuss.
Those of us who clean, who cook and who repair may say
that in our everyday life we have entered the cultural
world of America. Of course there are many within America
who do not clean, cook or repair, who take advantage
of the stereotypes of gender or else of exploitable
immigrant labor to behave otherwise than the cultural
populism of do it yourself: they are, perhaps, Un-American!
For the past many years I’ve felt neither Indian nor
American, but always foreign. And I think about this
mostly while I’m cleaning my toilet, washing my tub.
