Notes on ABCD

As a second-generation, sort of American Born Confused Desi (I was born in India while my folks were visiting from the United States), I can speak to these frustrations. Identity politics is tricky and often self-defeating, and in an era in which the United States is trying to construct a post-racial narrative (as opposed to a postcolonial one), we as the second generation are increasingly ashamed about playing such politics.

Though the term ABCD is grounded in the relations between South Asian Americans and their immigrant counterparts, it is more appropriate for the second-generation folks who have come of age and “settled down.” How much of our Indianness – or, applied more broadly, South Asianness – do we incorporate into our daily lives? How do we conceptualize Americanness?

These questions can be so frustrating that we have a tendency to run to the extremes, either embracing a static and unrealistic version of the subcontinent constructed by our parents or our peers, or running from anything resembling the mythical Motherland altogether. Becoming American, unfortunately, is still grounded in the power relations of colonizer and colonial subject.

As the great anticolonial thinker Frantz Fanon noted, by “becoming,” we are in fact shedding our native skin for the skin of our masters. This country has been based upon the chase of a fictitious ideal, one that has been draped around a cloth of whiteness that projects into the global sphere.

Fanon observed that the settler is imbued with privilege over the native, and that in the hierarchy of power, the settler’s only strategy to deal with the equal playing field on foreign soil is to affirm his sense of superiority over the native through psychological and structural means. In the South Asian subcontinent, it meant passing out Bibles, implementing Lord Thomas Macaulay’s plan to create a race that was “English in taste, but Indian in color,” and creating a sense of inferiority among South Asians by exploiting their insecurities about skin color and caste.

But in our modern world, the settlers who left the subcontinent for British, Canadian, and American soil did not have the same sense of superiority. In fact, they were made to believe that they were ascending by leaving native soil for the West.

This is why our parents’ generation, raised in the dusk of colonialism and not yet fully sovereign in mind, embraced the American Dream – economic prosperity and the symbolic capital of education. It is why we who followed them are forced to fulfill ideals they could never fully realize. We, after all, are Americans by birth, right?

The Indian postcolonial scholars Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak have articulated the idea of Desis occupying a third space while creating their own hybridized identities. However, these identities are always carved in relation to – whether in accordance or opposition – whiteness.

It’s been said that our parents’ generation live in a time capsule because they romanticize India and the subcontinent. I would argue that they don’t romanticize India as much as they reminisce about how they learned to be Indian – as docile subjects, postcolonial in body, yet colonized in mind.

Our parents, especially if we hail from the dark-skinned South, value fair skin as a standard of beauty, aspire to live in the suburbs where they can surround themselves in the norms of middle-class whiteness, and take on Anglicized names as a means of fitting in. They want to pass down a sense of heritage to their children (us), but if only it means not challenging their conceptualization of what makes them Indian. Of course, they don’t know, because they never knew how to know.

We are Indian Americans, Indian Brits, and Indian Canadians, but the presumption is that the suffix will grant us the privileges of whiteness. For example, when we use the term “American” to describe our friends (or possibly significant others), we are not referring to a fellow person of South Asian descent, a Black or a Latino. We are of course, referring to the “American” who is plastered on billboards, broadcast on the silver and small screen, and forever etched in our minds as the one we aspire to be.

But within the dominant structures of whiteness, those of us who seek to rebel often run to the other extreme, identifying with the signifiers of Blackness. Yet identifying with Blackness and African Americans does not mitigate our own prejudices; rather, it exacerbates them, as we seek solidarity with an essentialist (and reductionist) version of Blackness that doesn’t exist. I find this most troubling among fellow second-generation Desi activists who call for embracing the “authenticity” of Black culture, when the only thing authentic about it is the billions of dollars that corporate conglomerates make from selling “the real Black experience.”

Our embrace of the extremes exposes our own insecurities about where and who we are. We are afraid to question our parents’ generation, partially out of fear that we may be scrutinized for not already knowing how to be Indian, but more out of fear that our parents don’t know. We waver in limbo, looking for anything or anyone – Kal Penn, Padma Laxmi, Freddie Mercury, Apu – who can give us a clue to who we are.

Another task we have been saddled with is uncoupling ourselves from the burden of patriarchy, which was largely passed down to us from white colonial standards of masculinity. Even today, the (white) masculine standard is the ideal, as we second-generation men – with very little communication about manhood from our fathers and with each other – try to adopt and practice our own forms of patriarchy.
Many second-generation Indian American men are “mama’s boys,” not because they have a close relationship with their mothers, but because they seek refuge in what many of their mothers are: subjects to a system that places familial honor above personal happiness, privileging a male’s right to rule over a female’s right to voice. In a diasporic generation, we have collectively destroyed Draupadi and any hopes of reconstructing her.

Similarly, many second-generation Indian American women are not “daddy’s girls,” but instead recoil at the thought of marrying men who resemble their fathers. They conflate rebellion with liberation, as if the emancipation they seek can ever be fulfilled by bringing home Josh instead of Jagdish.

But these acts of rebellion only highlight our generation’s conflict and confusion. We try to seek clarity, but the answers to who we are rarely come from our peers or our parents, both of whom are as illiterate as we are.

We as second-generation Desis have come to accept Indianness – or South Asianness, for that matter – as a combination of Bollywood and Bhangra, and our identity is judged by our proximity to such commodified symbols. Our Indianness has been essentialized while we have come to learn how to incorporate self-hatred into our daily practice.

Hatred of self, after all, means reducing or narrowing our self-conceptualization to a set of signifiers. After all, how many of us know significantly more about our identities than the symbols, rituals, and oral traditions passed down to us? We are maddened by the thought that the homeland seems so close yet so intangible.

Does knowing Amitabh Bachan or Aishwarya Rai make us culturally fluent Indians? Does avoiding the stereotypical “Desi” parties – replete with loud Bhangra music, occasional rap, and a lot of alcohol – make one “unhip” to what it means to be South Asian in America?
We suffer this daily torment. We are still outsiders in the country of our birth, yet distanced enough from our ancestry that the Motherland – one that has been created through a convergence of broadcast images, our parents’ fantasies, and our own biases – has been reduced to a set of aesthetic symbols or an obligatory family vacation. And yet we exist, trying ever so subtly to resist the model minority-ness that hangs above us, yet being so damnably comfortable in our torment.

This is the state of the American Born and (still) Confused Desi.