The hypocrisy of Indian celebrities tweeting hashtag-blacklivesmatter, while not paying any heed to injustices in India, is perhaps a symptom of a deeper malaise that infects the brown mind.
Art practice has taken me to foreign lands in the last decade and to stranger experiences; artistic studies, research and residencies are often unpredictable, poorly managed, sometimes unassisted, and need to be endured alone, occasionally on subsistence level support. You have to learn to adapt to a foreign land quickly - with it or against it - to be able to make your work. To do this, you begin by catching the scent of people who live against the existing order. Every society has common people who live, to some extent, outside, in opposition to the system. Not just the natives, but the diasporas too. I have met some lovely folks - Slavik, Japanese, Swiss, Australian, Nigerian, Lebanese, Russian, Brazilian - engaged in one manner of subversion-living or another in several parts of the world. One diaspora I have sorely missed encountering in these realms is the Hindu Indian diaspora (henceforth HID).
In every part of the world I have temporarily lived in, the HID has not just been shockingly absent from the world of subversive politics and action (let alone from the world of art and theatre), but in sharp contrast, has avidly towed the line of the hegemonic culture like no other. It was a rare sight to spot the HID student in foreign universities I studied at, and later taught in. The HID is not in attendance in theatres and exhibitions either, not the ones I have traveled to since. I can accept that it was simply a matter of luck that I missed them, but it isn't luck if it runs out not even once.
I have often been told that white culture has intentionally kept non-white communities away from participating in urban western culture, and while this was largely true, it also drove the non-brown communities' need to perform subversions in their own right, which they did. I have been told that brown communities migrated under dire circumstances and inhabited poor neighbourhoods, but we also know that the richest minorities in several parts of the world today including U.K., U.S., Canada etc. are brown people, especially HID (watch Netflix’s Sex Education and you’ll know what I mean). When despite having clinched better lives by migrating to better lands, brown communities do not, as a rule, engage with their surroundings in politically alert, intelligent, subversive ways, we need to ask the question - is to be brown to be apolitical?
The HID is occasionally seen as aspiring to white culture, both from within the community (the racial slur “coconut”) and without (its cowardly abstinence from solidarity movements against white discrimination). Is to be brown to be inherently discriminatory; an identity that is borne only in and as an act of discriminating against others? Even in lands foreign and free, it is rare to come across brown families that aren’t conservatively structured, that are not ruled by the iron fist of the traditional patriarch and not assembled as a heterosexual hierarchical tiered house. Is to be brown to be shackled to oppressive notions of power and control? The HID is seen repeating the vocabulary of safe and unsafe neighbourhoods in the voice of the hegemonic class, instructing their children to avoid places where non-whites live - Is to be brown to be committed to erasure of oneself in the image of the "higher" race, only to replace them when they leave the spot?
Today, HID is being rightly called out for silently supporting anti-blackness and hatred towards black communities. Today, HID is justifiably being asked in real terms: do you have any real or concrete thing to offer to humanity? Will you stand in unconditional solidarity with People Of Colour? Will you call out discriminatory practices across the world, especially in India? Today, HID will need to reckon with the casteist, racist and islamophobic world of their elders, and for once, contribute their own recipe towards a cultural and social revolution. Really, the time for this new "curry" is now.
