Identity = questions, questions, questions.

Arriving in a new place (or old, if returning after a long period away) usually means one thing: lots of questions. Although you may want to sleep off the side-effects of travel, arrival often entails dealing with people’s curiosity.

Meeting other international students and Delhi students at the Delhi University guest house and on-board the train was physically, as well as mentally, exhausting but, at the time, I only put it down to jet-lag and a sleepless flight. However, it wasn’t the physical tiredness that was new to me but the mental adjustment which I had to go through when answering questions based on ‘Who I am’: “Where do you come from? (does this mean where do I live, where my parents are from, or where I study?!); What is your family’s surname (surnames play an important role in India in indicating caste, religion or regional ethnicity); What language do you speak?; Why do you not speak Hindi?”, and so on.

A few of us on our induction tour of Delhi University.

I wasn’t offended but it did mean I had to redefine myself in a group of strangers as soon as I had landed which was disorientating. Up until this point, I did not have any trouble with my identity as I’ve usually travelled with a group of known individuals where I know my place in this familiar ‘community’ – a stable group outside the familiarity of ‘Home’. When holidaying in India, I visit Gujarat where I can speak Gujarati and am surrounded with family members where my identity is never questioned as I’m automatically considered ‘One of them’ due to surname. My ‘Britishness’ is never really problematic (although it has been mocked many times!) because my name, the Gujarati language and my family ties supersede, what my family consider to be, just my country of residence and just the type of passport I hold. My English education and surroundings; a different, ‘Western’ society; and the ensuing hybrid identity have never triggered questions or wiped out my essential ‘Indianness’, (even if these factors have allowed locals to tease my accented Gujarati and my pitiful fear of lizards and mosquitoes).

However, finding myself in another part of India was just as daunting/unfamiliar as being in a country that I’ve had no exposure to at all. And the reason for this is because India is not just a large homogeneous entity. There is no such thing as ‘the Indian people’, ‘Indian culture’ or ‘the Indian language’. Many have said that it is more appropriate to consider India as made up of many ‘Indias’; an amalgamation of cultures rather than possessing an unified culture. If that is the case, then what seemingly holds the country together is the coincidence that these diverse cultures are found closely side-by-side within a shared geographical land-mass.

Flying kites for a festival called Uttarayan – celebrating the decline of winter – is a particularly Gujarati way to celebrate. I was surprised to learn from my Delhi friends that this is uncommon elsewhere in India!

The string is glass coated so that you can have a sort of kite-war – if you cut down someone else’s kite you win. This also means your hands can get cuts and sores.

I was completely de-familiarised in my new surroundings, not just because I was away from my home in London where I’ve lived for twenty years, but because I was also distanced from another ‘home’, the perceived land of my origins, the homeland of my parents. India was a country that I thought was always there, readily a part of me and available if I chose to embrace that aspect of my identity if I wished to. This pride was thwarted when I realised how little I knew of the other 27 states besides Gujarat and their further regional subdivisions, and so couldn’t really call myself fully Indian. I had gone from totalising India and taking my experience of Gujarat as the norm, to being shocked into a particularly raw openness which then allowed me to experience the cultural nuances and particularities that exist all throughout this heterogeneous country afresh.

Unlike the students of Caucasian, East Asian, or African-Caribbean appearance, I just did not look ‘foreign’ and so was often mistaken for a home ‘Indian’ student, until, that is, I opened my mouth and started to speak in my ‘Norf London’ accent. That’s when the questions started rolling in. Once, I even got asked if I was an Anglo-Indian. I automatically said ”Yes” because I heard the word Anglo and Indian together and assumed it meant British-Indian. However, since coming home and studying a course entitled ‘Colonial novel and British India’ (which I was motivated to choose because of this trip) I learnt that the term could refer to:

A) a person of mixed Indian and English ancestry
or
B) the name that was given to British officials (and their families) living in India during Empire, and which now refers to the remaining ‘white’ community in India.

Well, that made me particularly self-conscious of how categories or labels are used to define, and contain such different lifestyles and individualities into controllable, static groupings. How can terms like ‘Anglo-Indian’, ‘English’, ‘British’, ‘Indian, ‘Brown, ‘White, ‘Black’, ‘Western’ or the countless other labels we tick off when we are filling out the ‘Equality opportunities’ part of a form construct our identities? Does my command of English at the expense of Indian languages make me any less ‘Indian’? Do I need to call myself something else if so and, indeed, WHY do I need to call myself anything at all? Can’t Payal just do? (And on that note, I think this blog on ‘Questions’ has found a good point to end on before I have an existential crisis).