by Sharmila Sen
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, signed by Lyndon B. Johnson, changed the quota system that restricted non-European immigrants from coming to the United States. People like me were going to become a bit more common on American soil. Hindoo, Asiatic, Caucasian, non-white, brown, Asian, South Asian. During the era of self-reporting in the early 1980s, I was a young girl faced with a plethora of racial categories based on a wild mash-up of genetics, linguistics, theology, and geography, who landed in Boston on August 11, 1982. The entry date is marked on my first passport.
I carried an Indian passport back then. Navy blue with thick cardboard covers. I received that passport in December 1979. On page four, there is a line printed in minuscule letters: “Countries for which this Passport is valid.” Below it a stamp, in purplish blue ink, slightly tilted, partly smudged, is still vividly legible after nearly forty years. It says (first in Hindi): “sabhi desh dakshin afrika aur rodeshiya ko chhorkar—ALL COUNTRIES Except Republic of South Africa and Colony of Rhodesia.”
Before immigrating to the United States, I had never left India. My 1979 passport was an aspirational possession. Yet, I was already becoming aware of certain countries that were forbidden to me. My parents explained that India did not allow me to travel to South Africa or Rhodesia because of something called apartheid. There existed places where people like us had gone as coolie labor, as merchants and traders, and even as lawyers (the young Mahatma Gandhi practiced law in Pretoria in the 1890s), during the time of the British. But white people did not treat brown and black people fairly and each group had to live apart. Unlike my forebears who had borne the “malodorousness of subjecthood” for two centuries—as the Indian political scientist Niraja Jayal once wrote—I was fragrant with citizenship and protected by the laws of my nation. And those laws prevented me from going to Rhodesia and South Africa, places where complex designations such as black, colored, Indian, and white would determine where I could live, where I could go to school, and who I could marry. But in the late 1970s, when I received my passport, I barely grasped what apartheid really meant.
Caucasian but Not White. Not White and Not Black. Minority. Non-Christian. Person of Color. South Asian. I never thought of myself as any of these things before the autumn of 1982. I had grown up back in Calcutta with an entirely different set of extended labels for putting people into boxes. What language do you speak? Which gods do you worship? Which caste do you belong to? Are you part of the bhadralok (the Bengali word for the bourgeoisie)? Do you eat with relish the flesh of animals, fowl, fish, and crustaceans? Do you eat beef? Or do you eat only plants and grains? “Veg” and “Non-veg” in India are almost as evocative and important as “black” and “white” in America. We can detect a person’s religion, caste, and ethnic group from the foods they eat and the foods they shun. Every society invents ways of partitioning themselves and methods of reading the hidden signs displayed by those who wish to cheat the rules. A person of a lower caste might want to pass as a Brahmin; a Muslim might want to pretend to be a Hindu when caught in the middle of a riot; a Hindu might pose as a Muslim to gain entry to a restricted space. We were taught to be vigilant about such trespassers. An Indian’s surname holds a multitude of information about her. In India, if you know my surname is Sen, you already know which language I speak as my mother tongue, my caste, the religious holidays I celebrate, my likely economic class, my literacy status, whether I am vegetarian, the birth, wedding, and funeral rites I might have. Conversely, a last name that holds very little information is suspect. What is this person trying to hide? The way one pronounces a certain word, the way a woman drapes her dupatta over her head, how her nose is pierced, whether a man’s foreskin is intact or circumcised, whether a little boy has a red thread around his wrist or a tabeez, an amulet, around his neck signifies so many things in India. In some cases, it can mean the difference between being killed by a mob during a communal riot and being pulled into safety. We had all these distinguishing labels. But race we did not have.
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• • •
I grew up in India for the first twelve years of my life without race. After ruling us for two centuries, the British had departed in 1947. The India of my childhood was a place marked by what economists call “capital flight.” These were years preceding the arrival of economic liberalization. Before the Internet and cheap cell phones, our knowledge of the United States was channeled largely by a few Hollywood movies, occasional headlines in the newspapers, magazines such as Life and Reader’s Digest, and hand-me-down clothing brought back by relatives who had immigrated to the West. Television had not fully arrived in India during the first half of the 1970s. We tried halfheartedly to imitate American fashion, eat American fast food, or listen to American popular music. Still, we were always a few years behind on the trends. Of course, we were also happy with our own popular culture. We watched Hindi films made in Bombay, hummed along to the songs aired on All India Radio, and ate delicious street foods such as phuchka and jhalmuri without missing global chains such as KFC or McDonald’s. Our drinking water was procured daily from the neighborhood tube well. Ma, Baba, and I each had our own official ration cards. These rations cards were used for purchasing government-subsidized basic commodities—rice, flour, sugar—which we used to complement our groceries from the local bazaars. I had never seen a mall or a supermarket before I came to the United States. Ma and Baba did not own a telephone, a washing machine, a television, a cassette player, a car, or a credit card until we emigrated. Our sole mode of personal transportation was a blue Lambretta scooter purchased by Baba in the mid-1970s. When Baba was not there to take us around on the scooter, hand-pulled rickshaws, red double-decker buses, trams, and the occasional taxi were the usual ways we navigated the sprawling metropolis that was Calcutta.
We vaguely understood ourselves to be Not White because our grandparents and parents still remembered a time when white Europeans ruled us. The Indian notion of Not Whiteness was shaped more by nationalism than by race talk. The subcontinental obsession with skin color cannot be explained solely through the American grammar of racism. In a subcontinent where melanin can appear in wildly differing quantities among family members, the lightness or darkness of one’s skin cannot easily be used to mark rigid racial boundaries. Yet, the preference for paler skin was clear to all in Calcutta. Girls with “fair” skin were supposed to fare better than those with “wheatish” or “dark” skin when marriages were to be arranged. I grew up reading numerous sentimental tearjerkers about sisters whose fates were determined by their complexions—the fair one always married well and the dark one was forever shunned by all prospective bridegrooms. Rabindranath Tagore’s famous lyric about the beauty of the black-skinned woman’s dark doe eyes was quoted often in literary families, marked by the same self-righteousness with which well-off Americans buy fair trade coffee beans. Still, I never came across a matrimonial advertisement in any newspaper that boasted of a dark-skinned girl’s beautiful doe eyes.
I was warned regularly not to darken my own light complexion by playing too long under the noonday sun. Mothers and grandmothers had numerous homemade concoctions at the ready for keeping my skin pale. A ladleful of cream skimmed from the top of the milk pail, fresh ground turmeric, and sandalwood paste, as well as numerous citrus fruits, flowers, leaves, seeds, and nuts, were our allies in the endless war against the sun’s skin-darkening rays. Women walked around Calcutta brandishing colorful umbrellas during the sunniest days lest the “fair” turn into “wheatish” or the “wheatish” into “dark.” Some of us had complexions as light as any European, but we knew that an invisible line divided us from the pink-hued Dutch, English, French, and Portuguese. In the comic books of my childhood, the colorists painted the Europeans a homogeneous shade of pale rose and reserved every shade from light beige to dark mahogany to the brightest cerulean blue for Indians. This is how I saw the world as a girl—Europeans were pink. We were not.
It would
be a lie of the greatest magnitude if I were to claim that I lived in a society of equals, in a society without barriers, hierarchies, and labels, before I came to the United States. I have already said that I grew up as an elite—a speaker of the dominant language of my state, part of the dominant ethnolinguistic group, and a follower of the majority religion. I was an upper-caste Hindu Bengali. The maternal side of my family were haute bourgeoisie, or upper middle class, by virtue of their landowner past. Three generations ago, some of these landowners—called zamindars in India—had turned to law, one of the few professions open to Indians under British colonial rule. They trained in law in Britain and returned to India as barristers, dressed in European-style clothes, living in homes furnished with massive Victorian teak furniture. In time, some of these ancestors—men of my great-grandfather’s generation—had made the transition from practicing law to agitating for political freedom from British rule. Eighteenth-century American colonies had seen similar professional trajectories from law to revolutionary politics.
On my father’s side of the family, our cultural capital outstripped our financial capital. Ours was a family of scholars and intellectuals. In some parts of our home state, West Bengal, the mere mention of my grandfather’s name endeared me to total strangers. I did not need to read the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s book Distinction in order to learn that one can inherit cultural capital just as conveniently as one can inherit property, stocks, jewelry, or money. My paternal grandfather did not leave me a house or a trust fund. But he did give me a slight edge over my peers.
Our school textbooks often included short essays on historical topics written by well-known Bengali intellectuals. One of those essays focused on Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, a nineteenth-century Indian queen famous for going to battle against the British who annexed her kingdom. Whenever we read that essay in class, I sat up a little straighter. We were supposed to take pride in our female ancestors who fought British men on the battlefield long before the independence movement was born. My pride, however, was of a pettier sort than grand nationalist sentiments. My grandfather was the author of that essay. Each time I saw his name in print, I felt a secret pride swell inside me. I was the descendant of a man whose writing was part of the official school syllabus. Even though I did not always tell my classmates or my teachers that the author was my grandfather, the knowledge itself was my cloak of protection. It gave me confidence—a bit of smugness even—that I took for granted. This is how elitism works.
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My education in Calcutta began before I turned three. My parents enrolled me in a preschool modeled on the Italian doctor Maria Montessori’s theories of education. It was a coeducational school for middle-class children. Most of my classmates were Bengali and the teachers spoke to us in Bengali. We played with blocks, separated white rice from yellow lentils, and began learning the English alphabet phonetically. At that point in my life, I could read “cat” or “bat” or “rat,” but I could not really speak or understand any English. When I turned four, I was admitted to a school for girls run by Catholic nuns. Most middle-class parents tried very hard to enroll their children in private schools because state-run schools were considered inferior to even the most mediocre of private schools. In a poor country where jobs are scarce, enrolling one’s child into the “right” school by the age of four easily balloons into an existential crisis. I had to be interviewed by a small committee in order to gain admission into this school. But how was an interview to be arranged? That required a form as rare and as precious as diamonds from the Golkonda mines of India. The admissions form for this school was released on a particular day each year. Like many middle-class fathers at schools across the country, Baba stood in a line outside the school building all night to procure the form on the day of its release. Yet, he was not successful. Later, as it happens often in Calcutta, a distant acquaintance who knew someone with a connection to the school administration managed to get us a form. Baba filled out that form. I never laid eyes on it. I was told that it was very difficult to procure the form. Baba had done his part by turning to his network. Now it was my turn.
The interview that followed was entirely my responsibility. I remember every detail of that interview. A nun opened the school gates and took me in. Baba was not allowed inside. Ma had dressed me in a cotton frock and crepe-soled white sandals purchased from Green & Co. in New Market, Calcutta’s upscale shopping arcade before the era of malls. My short hair was oiled, parted on the side, and kept off my face with a black metal bobby pin. My neck had been dusted with perfumed talcum powder.
The main trick for passing that interview was to remain calm. The questions themselves were very simple. I am sure four-year-olds are quizzed on far more academically rigorous subjects in India’s school admissions process nowadays. In 1974, the nuns were testing me to see if I would burst into tears when separated from my parents and faced with women in strange-looking clothes. Frocked, sandaled, oiled, powdered, and pinned, I was a battle-ready four-year-old Bengali girl. I did not burst into tears. The gray habits and the large crucifixes hanging from their necks did not frighten me. My comprehension of English was tested next. Could a young Bengali girl with no prior English-medium education be able to conduct a rudimentary conversation in English? I have no memory of when I had learned the little bit of English that saw me through that morning. My Montessori school had offered no lessons in conversational English. I spoke Bengali with my family and neighborhood friends. I spoke broken Hindi with our doorman, Hriday Singh, whom I called Darwanji. I understood Hindi from having watched many Hindi movies since I was a toddler and from the near-constant stream of Hindi film music emanating from various transistor radios around the neighborhood. Baba and Ma could speak English. Perhaps I had overheard them speaking with other adults. And they had taken me to see Hollywood films.
The first film I recall watching in a movie theater was Bruce Lee’s last film, Enter the Dragon. The final fight sequence in a hall of mirrors is perhaps the earliest recollection I have of an entire film sequence. I can see the villain being impaled on a spear and hanging from the mirror even now. A Hong Kong–Hollywood martial arts movie, the last one the legendary Lee would make, might have been responsible for giving me just enough English to pass my first school interview. Bruce Lee died in Hong Kong in July 1973. I did not know that when I looked the nuns straight in the eye and answered the questions they asked me in 1974. I did not know Bruce Lee changed how Asians were depicted in Hollywood movies. I did not even understand he was Asian, just as one day Americans would call me Asian.
“What is your name?”
“My name is Sharmila Sen.”
“What is this?”
“A banana.”
“Do you know what color it is?”
“Yellow.”
“Well done.”
That was all. I had managed to answer three questions in English and I had done so without resorting to Bengali. I was admitted into the school. Baba was happy as he walked me home. I had not let him down. Not everyone had managed to gain admission to the school that morning. All around me I saw other girls who were in tears, being led away by frustrated parents who were scolding them for not acing the interview. Some of these girls would be admitted into other English-medium schools. Others would go into a separate educational track—Bengali-medium. To the list of labels we use to categorize people in India, let me add one more—English-medium. Those who are lucky enough to be educated in English-medium schools usually find more employment opportunities, more economic benefits, more upward mobility, and more cultural capital than those who attend schools where the medium of instruction is one of the numerous modern Indian languages. This was true in the 1970s and is even more true in the neoliberal economy of twenty-first-century India. How else would we become the world’s back office? How else would call centers be staffed? How else would we send white-collar emigrants who excel in
the STEM professions to the United States?
Having supplied my name, correctly recognized a fruit, and identified its color, I was on my way to a privileged English-medium life. Every morning I dressed in a blue pleated skirt and a white blouse, wore black Mary Janes with navy socks, and got on a gray school bus. On gym days I wore white canvas shoes and in the winter I wore a navy blue cardigan over my blouse. My fellow classmates and I recited the Lord’s Prayer at least four times a day. Once before the bus reached school, then during morning assembly, again at dismissal time, and finally when the bus departed from the school. The majority of us were not Christian. Our nuns were Indian, not European. Only the most elite schools had white European nuns or priests. My family could not afford the fees of such schools.
Miss Solomon was my first teacher. She had a dark brown complexion, bobbed salt-and-pepper hair, and wore Western-style clothes to school. Miss Solomon was an Anglo-Indian. Somewhere in her family tree she had a European ancestor and she was Christian. Anglo-Indians have always occupied a complex position in Indian society. In the nineteenth century, the British derisively referred to biracial men and women as Pickled Harry or Chutney Mary. Indian society—Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs—generally treated biracial men and women as outsiders. Some Anglo-Indians tried to pass as white and went to great lengths to keep their Indian blood a secret. In turn, British India had numerous cautionary tales about olive-skinned individuals trying to pass as Spanish or Portuguese. The stakes were high on both sides. Those who wished to pass knew that if their secret was revealed, they would face social ostracism or economic loss. Those who policed the racial lines feared that their culture would be endangered by alien invasion. Merle Oberon, a renowned Hollywood actress who appeared in such 1930s classics as The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Dark Angel, was Anglo-Indian, a fact she hid from the public until her death in 1979. Her nephew wrote a thinly disguised novel about her life, Queenie, which was later adapted into a miniseries for American television. Anglo-Indians in fiction, particularly women, are often portrayed as beautiful and a bit tragic. In this, the Anglo-Indian bears a faint resemblance to her distant literary cousin, the tragic mulatto of classic American fiction.