Letter To South Asians

Every time I try to write to you, about this subcontinent of ours, I get afraid of being exposed for afraud who doesn't know enough about it to be writing. And I try to overcome the fear, because there's usuallyso much at stake that it's worth a try. Even if I'm writing for a web site, in English, in the hope ofreaching South Asians. The whole exercise seems absurd, really. No wonder I fear it being discovered -- thatthe only languages I can read in are European ones, that my family in Kerala laughs at my anglo-accentedMalayalam, that they protect me and fear that I won't be able to handle myself on the mean streets of Indiancities without their help.

And yet maybe it's not so absurd. Because how sure are any of us about what it means to be South Asian?It's easy enough abroad, when racism lumps us all together because of the shape of our hair and the colour ofour skin. But racism can't tell us how to live in the world. And if I'm writing this in a Western language,others of us are pointing Western weapons of mass destruction at one another.

That tells me that this insecurity isn't mine alone. I'm not the only one who sat in an Indian historyclass taught by a wise old North American professor to a class full of desis. I'm not the only one trying tolearn some craft that my ancestors practiced in the hopes that it will make me more 'real'.

It's funny, too, that in India what so many want to do is leave. For one of us, to have been born in theWest or to get the chance to get here is like having a lottery ticket. And yet those of us who are out haven'tfigured out how to be South Asian any better than those who are in.

Why is that? Why is it that we can't even use the wisdom we have? Why is it that my uncle, a savvy farmerin the part of India with the savviest farmers, a man who knows how to make the land come to life, sinksfurther into debt and despair every year. Why is it that Punjabi farmers are suffering an epidemic ofsuicides? Why do we not have use for the wisdom of farmers?

Why is it that we believe everything they say about us, everything they tell us about ourselves, withouteven realizing we believe it? How many South Asians have I argued with about the 'population problem', havingto remind them that when 80% of the people live on 20% of the scraps, you can't call the resulting misery a'population problem'? How many have I tried to show, by quoting from their early writings, that theBJP-VHP-RSS and it's (equally) evil twin in the Jamaat-e-Islami are nothing but European nationalists inrather poorly-fitting subcontinental costumes? How hard is this to see?

From the wretched pieces of 70-year old American technology waiting to destroy the north-west of thecontinent to the repeated rhetoric about terrorism to the ethnic cleansing and pogroms, none of this is ourinvention, although it is true that we could manage to do all of it on a bigger scale than Europe did beforeEurope figured out that self-preservation demanded a change of ideas.

You can change Bombay to Mumbai and it still won't be ours. And if we manage to blow away 100 million ofourselves, as the predictions say, we still won't have figured out who we are and we still won't have solvedthe 'population problem', which is not a population problem at all but a problem of injustice that we allowwithin our societies and across societies.

We are not alone in not having the answers. Everybody who was ever colonized is still reeling from thenation-state systems we were left with and the capitalist globalization that came with colonization and neverreally went away. We just happen to be the place where the most people will die if we blow it.

This might be the time to long for Gandhi and Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah and Ambedkar and maybe even Jinnah.But these men did what they could in their time. Their genius wasn't only in taking what was useful in thepast and leaving the rest, because the Vajpayees, Advanis, and Musharrafs of the subcontinent can play thatgame too. Their genius, to the varying extents that they had it, was in using the past in the service ofdecent, humane outcomes.

Gandhi's brand of Hinduism, Ambedkar's brand of Buddhism, Sheikh Abdullah's Kashmiriyat, even the India andPakistan that Nehru and Jinnah were trying to found, went beyond the imitation of the West and beyondnostalgia or cynical manipulation of the past. And now we have our own reinventing to do.

I know of a few reinventors, andI know there are many I don't know of. The ones I know are all women. Maybe the men have had their chance. Maybe we can listen to the women and let them bring us back from the brink.  How much closer do we need toget before we listen?

(JustinPodur lives in Toronto and is a columnist and developer for ZNetand maintains their South Asia Watch)