History Café: South Asian American Literature and Resistance

September History Cafe. I hope you all had a wonderful summer on our hiatus here, and for those of you who are here for the first time, welcome. We're very excited to present History Cafe: South Asian American Literature and Resistance. Thank you to everyone who's here, including those of you who are tuned into the YouTube livestream. I'm Sora. I work here in public programs at MOHAI. For our low or no vision audience, I am a white and East Asian person with long brown hair in a gray sweater. A few housekeeping notes before we begin. If you need a restroom, they are through the cafe doors to the left of the deli case. And today's History Cafe, we're very excited to present in partnership with HistoryLink and Tasveer. And I would love to introduce Vik to say a few words about Tasveer. Thank you so much.

Good evening, everybody. What a great, great gathering here. We're very excited to have Professor Nalini Iyer. So my name is Vik Behl, and I am a board member of Tasveer. How many of you have heard of Tasveer? Okay. Some of you. The rest of you? We must change that. So, the Sphere is a South Asian film and arts organization that's been around for 22 years here in Seattle. And so, we're getting ready for the 19th film festival coming up this October 15th through 20th, I believe. One thing that's unique this year, for the first time, is that the Sphere is also doing a film film market. And so what that means is for a couple of days that filmmakers, screenwriters, people with scripts, producers will have a chance to actually make deals to develop stories. So today's presentation is very much about storytelling as well, and so the Sphere is also about telling our own stories. And so I look forward to— please go to thesphere.org. I wish I would have brought programs for you all, but go to thesphere.org. You'll be able to find all the details of the 110 films that will be screened this October. So we're very delighted to partner with MOHAI to bring Professor Nalini Iyer today. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. And just to say a few words about our other partner for tonight's program, HistoryLink is a wonderful resource, and they are the largest free online encyclopedia of Washington State history. So very big thank you to our partners tonight. And as we ground in the space, it's important to acknowledge that here at MOHAI, we're on the historic and contemporary lands and waters of the Suquamish, Duwamish, Muckleshoot, and all Coast Salish people. Historically, Native communities were forcibly removed from this place with lasting impacts on the land, water, and people. Today, it's important that we hold deep respect and gratitude for their unbroken stewardship of this place. So we encourage you to visit the websites of local tribes to learn more about the people whose land you're on. Tonight's speaker is Dr. Nalini Iyer, professor of English at Seattle University, specializing in postcolonial literatures with a focus on South Asia, Africa, and the South Asian and African diasporas. She is the first woman editor of the South Asian Review, a Taylor& Francis journal published by the South Asian Literary Association. Please give her a warm welcome. All right.

Can folks hear me? Yeah. All right, thank you so much to all of you for being here. Um, as Sora said, my name is Nalini Iyer. I'm a professor at Seattle University. Uh, I've been teaching at Seattle U for 30 years, and this talk today in some ways draws from a lifetime of research. I have been fascinated by the South Asian diasporic particularly in North America because of my own, you know, life experiences and so forth. And so part of this work, about 10 years ago, my co-author Amy Bhatt and I, we published a book called Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest. And that book was based on oral histories of South Asian immigrants to this region. And after that book was published, Amy went on to publish another wonderful book called High-Tech Housewives about H-1B visa-holding people's spouses, mostly women and their life experiences. And I have been deeply immersed in South Asian American writing. I'm a literature professor, so I go back to fiction, I go back to poetry. And so what you're going to hear me talk about, draw upon, is about 10 years of research. The risk in that, it can be all over the map. and I apologize if that happens, but I'm going to try to maintain some degree of coherence. There will be some slides, but the purpose of the slides is mostly so that the books I'm talking about, you know what the names are and who the authors are. They're not heavy information-laden slides. So I want to start with— so as Vice President Harris has secured this nomination for the Democratic Party, the conversation that's been circulating in the public sphere, as you are very well aware, is about her racial identity. Some of it unfortunately comes from a rather negative space from the opposition, shall we say. Public sphere discussions of race in the US tends to have a— has a tendency to put people into boxes and to overemphasize phenotype, as in this is how you look so this must be your racial identity. As VP Harris— so VP Harris presents a challenge to many. She's biracial with a Jamaican father and a South Asian mother and is connected to both her parents' cultures. I am fascinated by Shyamala Gopal and— Dr. Shyamala Gopal and VP Harris's mother, who arrived in the United States in the late 1950s. She was a 19-year-old student who came to UC Berkeley for graduate school and has had a distinguished career as a scientist. And one of the things that fascinates me about this is it's remarkable for multiple reasons. Dr. Gopalan and I come from a very similar ethnic background. In fact, we're from the same hometown of Chennai. We're from Tamil Brahmin community, and the Tamil Brahmin community is very patriarchal and conservative and tends to believe that girls get married. You get a college education to make you look good in the marriage market, and then you get a a good husband and you are a good housewife and mother, and maybe you have a career, but the primary goal of a woman is to be a mother and a wife. And so I faced that in the 1980s when I came as a single woman to graduate school, and I can't imagine what it was like in the 1950s for her to have broken so many cultural and social taboos. And in some ways, I think it tells me so much more about who her daughter is and why she is who she is, right? Now, Shyamala Gopalan's arrival in the U.S. happens when the U.S. was using national origins quota system for immigration and allocated something like 100 people per year from India. The U.S. had just emerged from World War II and the Asian Exclusion Acts were being repealed and the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act had allowed folks to— Asian Americans to get citizenship. But the national origins quota did not shift until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, which opened the doors for a large number of immigrants from Asia. And it's interesting, I did some digging into that and it was quite unintentional. In 1965, when LBJ signed the bill, the discussions were around actually opening up immigration pathways for scientists from Iron Curtain countries. They did not expect the large number of migrants coming from Asia, skilled, college-educated scientists, doctors, and so forth, right? In general, when you look at Asian American history, the narrative begins with the late 19th century building of the railways, the arrival of Chinese laborers to support Leland Stanford and his pals and their imperial dreams. Because of the large number of South Asian immigrants who arrived post-1965, many see this as a new immigration, and that actually is a— scholars are pushing back against this through a lot of archival work and so forth, right? And there's actually evidence that goes back to the 17th century even showing that South Asians arrived often on East India Company trading ships as lascars or shipboard workers and then stayed on. They were not a huge number, but there were a few. Let's see. Okay, sorry, I would— let's see if we can switch the slide. Next slide. Yeah, thank you. So the purpose of my talk today is multifold. I want to explore the history of South Asians in this country and focus in on the West Coast and the Pacific Northwest wherever I can. I want to examine the history through the lens of literary works. My argument is that Storytelling by novelists, memoirists, essayists, poets, and others fills in gaps in the historical archive in ways that offers us personalized observations, lived experiences, and imaginative reconstructions that center people and events often overlooked by official histories. The third point is I want to understand how South Asians have been racialized and how writers have responded to this racialization. Storytelling offers counter-narratives to the storage stereotypes, omissions, and oversights in narratives about South Asian Americans that circulate in the public sphere. So my argument is that there are degrees of resistance in the very act of writing in these literary works. These narratives can also be complicit in promoting some problematic ideas like a model minority racial identity or to assume that all South Asians are largely Hindu or largely Indian and so forth and have a very heteronormative narrative structure as well. My talk will explore some of these complexities. And as I mentioned before, I'm drawing upon a lot of research done both for my first book as well as ongoing work. So a little bit of terminology. I'm using the term South Asian. I want to clarify it's different from Southeast Asian because South Asian nations are India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Maldives. And in the U.S., the term South Asian American is the preferred language to describe this community. Of late, second and subsequent generations of South Asian Americans are using the term Desi American to describe themselves. All of these terminologies have their limitations as well as present opportunities. I lean towards the term South Asian. I will note it does have its issues. One, as I noted earlier, confusion with Southeast Asia. It masks a largely India-centric worldview, and it also masks internal disputes and hostilities within the region based on national identity, religion, caste, et cetera. I use the term guardedly within the context of this talk, as many scholars do, to indicate the shared histories of migration and culture while recognizing the heterogeneity of cultures and histories. So when I refer to India pre-1947, I'm talking about the Indian subcontinent, and that includes India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, And Sri Lanka, when I talk about the Indian subcontinent after 1947 and I refer to India, I'm talking about the modern nation-state. So when we think about the history of South Asian migration to this country, I've noted that colonial United States did have a presence of South Asian immigrants. Scholars Anupama Arora and Rajinder Kaur note that many Lascars arrived in the colonies during the 17th And Padma Kanakamedala writes that, quote, slaveholding interests in India and the Atlantic world also resulted in the creation of an early Indo-Caribbean population. Kidnapped from India and brought to the Caribbean, enslaved people of Indian descent were regularly transported between 2 strong British colonial holdings, Barbados and South Carolina. And it explains in part the presence of advertisements in South Carolina newspapers for runaway East Indian slaves. And similarly, many natural-born, by which I mean natural-born as in children born out of wedlock, of English traders and their Indian paramours, a lot of the times the British fathers got work for these children, sons notably, on ships, trading ships, and they, those biracial folks ended up often in America. And there is actually evidence of a person named George de Grasse in 1804, he fought in New York for citizenship and was given that. So while the archives present traces of such East Indian presence, we know very little about people's lives. This is where novelists come in and they provide us a rich tapestry of life stories rooted in historical research and enhanced by the imagination. And one such— So what I'm going to be doing a bit for the next few minutes, I'm going to be talking about pre-1945 migration to the United States. I wanna start by talking about this 2023 novel by a woman named Brinda Chari, and that novel's called The East Indian. I find this novel fascinating. So Chari is a Renaissance scholar, and based on a reference to a little Indian boy in A Midsummer Night's Dream, this is part of Titania's fantasy moment, and also based on some, archival information where she draws on historical records of a mention of a Virginia landowner by name of George Menefee who had an Indian indentured worker on his property. Indentured workers from East India, South Asia likely arrived on East India Company ships, right? And so what she does is she imagines— we know nothing about these people other than there's like, you know, he might have been an indentured servant— so she imagines this young boy named Tony who is this child of— a natural-born child of Francis Day. Francis Day was the man who went on to found the city of Madras and Fort St. George and establish one of the first East India Company outposts on the east coast of India, right? So she imagines Francis Day as having had a relationship with a sex worker Her father has a child. Child's name is Tony. The mother dies. Tony is a teenager. And Francis Day, who's about to take off to found this new city, doesn't know what to do, but he feels obligated. So he says to this kid, go to England. So the kid gets on a ship. Father gets him a job, gets on a ship. He arrives in London. Brown kid arrives in London, 17th century London, and discovers life is very rough on the docks. And he makes friends with a few other street kids. And they are barely eking out a life when these kids get kidnapped and are taken aboard a ship along with a woman named Mad Marge who is, as her name suggests, not quite there mentally. And these kids are young boys. They're able-bodied. And the ship's people steal them and they bring them to America, right? And so he arrives. Arrives in Virginia and into Jamestown, and he's desperate to go home. He doesn't want to be in America. He doesn't want to be in England. He wants to go back. But he's an orphan. He doesn't know what he's going to do. So the first part of the novel, he spends a lot of time meeting up with people, trying to find a passage through the United States to find a way back home. Not successful. Along the way, he meets many people, including Indigenous folks as well as enslaved African Americans. He learns herbal medicine. He learns how to, how to treat illnesses, how to process herbs. He becomes a sort of a medic and works as an apprentice to a local doctor. And of course, in that time period, a person of color with magical herbal knowledge was going to be in trouble. So he is both wanted by the settlers to cure their ailments, but at the same time questioned about his morality, his ability to be trusted, and so forth. So there are a lot of adventures. He eventually marries an African American woman, gets his freedom, escapes to Maryland, and then his story ends with him blending into the African American community. Chari's novel is fascinating to me not only because narratively she links the growth of the East India Company in India with the American trade, she is able to imagine what is the life of a biracial person, what would have been the life of Alaska, what happens, they come on shipboard, they jump a ship, they become indentured servants, then what happened to them, what was their life like. And so using historical information, she's able to structure a narrative which is both very compelling but also reflects a lot on our own times. because it asks us, where do people belong? What is our idea of race and ethnicity and so forth, right? So after these earliest South Asians who came to colonial North America, I'm gonna pick up this immigration story with the book by Vivek Bald called Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asia. Was it about a year ago, maybe 2 years ago, that Vivek Bald was actually at the Swede Film Festival with his documentary on Bengali Harlem? And I would highly, recommend that film. Ball's work is remarkable archival work. He's a faculty member, I believe, at MIT, and he writes that Bengali peddlers from what is today Indian state of West Bengal in the nation of Bangladesh began arriving in the U.S. in the 1880s, bringing with them carpets and brass goods and embroidered things. There was a fascination for things Asian in this country, and these traders catered to it, but many of them who arrived on British ships working under disastrous indentured conditions often jumped ship using clandestine networks. They escaped into the industrial belt where they worked in steel and munitions factories and was— that were starved for workers because especially around World War I when the young able-bodied men were taken off to fight the war, factories here were desperate for labor and these East Indian men who jumped ship found work, and they were largely undocumented, right? So this is the East Coast story. And in Bengali Harlem, Bald traces the stories of people in Detroit, in Baltimore, in New Orleans. And he's examining really this interrelationship between South Asian Rajdhani Bengali immigrants and the Black community. So again, Harris and her history are not necessarily spectacularly different. There's actually a long history of Black and South Asian solidarities and community building that still needs to be discovered, researched, and so forth, right? And so on the West Coast, coming to our neck of the woods, the immigration starts here in the early 20th century largely by Punjabi migrants. They were mostly Sikhs and Muslims, and they arrived in Vancouver They worked in the timber industry and started moving south, and many of them ended up in Bellingham. And at Bellingham in 1907, there's the infamous Labor Day riots against South Asians. These South Asian men, largely men, they came, they worked in the timber industries, they were given housing and barracks-style housing, and they were willing to work for lower wages. Jayone Jensen in her book, Passage from India documents this history, and she writes that laborers in Bellingham were willing to work for $2 an hour, whereas the white workers charged $2.22. So the white workers felt their jobs were threatened, and so 1907 on Labor Day, these white laborers went on a protest march, and they demanded that the Indian, or as they called them Hindu, HINDOO laborers be dismissed, and using a flimsy excuse. excuse of disrespect to a white woman watching a Labor Day parade, the white workers attacked the barracks where the— and the housing where the Indian laborers lived, set fire to their stuff, threw the— beat them up, threw their stuff out. The police chief of Bellingham didn't know what to do with them. There were like 500 guys. They rounded them up, stuck them in the basement of the City Hall, which was then the jail. Today's— that building is the Whatcom County Art Museum. And they lived there. They stayed there overnight. In the morning, there was a sort of an inquiry, if you will, a kangaroo court type thing. And then the men were told, please leave. And so they got on the first train that was southbound and left. And that was quite an experience. It took many decades before Indians went back to Whatcom County. With any degree of confidence about not being excluded. So what was going on, of course, is that Indians who were arriving in the early 20th century were being treated the same way the Chinese laborers had been treated in the 1880s through the Exclusion Acts. And the exclusion of— Asian exclusion becomes stronger and stronger so that by the time the early 20th century rolls around, we pretty much got a complete ban on Asian migration, right? And when I think back on this history of exclusion and violence, and it didn't stop with Bellingham, as these folks made their way down the I-5 corridor, there were violent acts against them in other towns, Seattle, some places in Oregon, and eventually these Punjabi workers found themselves in the Imperial Valley, Yuba City, Stockton area and established themselves there. So what is interesting in all of this to me is if you fast forward to like 2017 and you think about this town, Olathe, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, Kansas, where a man named Srinivas Kuchibhotla was murdered by a white supremacist when he was having drinks at a bar with his friend because, you know, this white supremacist decided that brown guys like Kuchibhotla were disturbing destroying his ability to find a job. And it was a horrendous situation. And even as I'm talking about this, I'm sure you are all also thinking about Springfield, Ohio. It's not just Indians who got hit by this kind of thing. I mean, right now, the violence that is being threatened against Haitian immigrants in Ohio because of political rhetoric and false stories being spread. It's 100 years after all of that, and we still are in that same hate-filled, hatred discourse, right? So all this suggests to me is that the history of earlier discrimination rolls into newer forms of racialization and it targets multiple communities. Indian laborers experienced such violence up and down the I-5 corridor as they moved from timber town to timber town seeking work, but they encountered local rage. After our book, Roots and Reflections, was published, of Professor Manish Chalana at the UW published an article in the last couple of years where he actually started tracking down some of these folks who had left Bellingham and found some space themselves in Seattle. So he uses census records and so forth to track down where these people went because this is part of the curiosity. Who were these 500-some people? Where did they go? And there is a wonderful novel which I don't list here, but it's by a woman named Rishi Reddy and it's called A Passage West. And it's based entirely on this West Coast migration and starts with the Bellingham Riots. And one of her main characters is someone who survives that. He's beaten black and blue, gets on the train, arrives in Yuba City, is welcomed by the Sikh community there. And through the story of this man, she tells us the story of West Coast immigration. So she fictionalizes work based on the historical material already researched, by people like Karen Leonard and others in their work. So now, of course, Indians were not passive. They weren't just getting beat up and keeping their mouths shut and running away. They were also protesting and resisting. So in 1913 in Astoria, Oregon, the laborers there, the agricultural workers, largely Sikh, formed the Ghadar Party. Ghadar is the Urdu-Hindi word meaning revolution. And it harks back to the 1857 uprising against the British. And the Ghadar Party was socialist in its orientation, and they were very interested in— they had a twofold purpose. One was to fight British imperialism in India, and the other was to fight racist immigration laws here. They wanted citizenship. They wanted recognition. They were very active in that. They— and they're, by the way, their idea of an anti-imperial revolution in India meant gathering funds, producing newsletters that was then sent to Indian, global Indian diasporic communities, very socialist in its orientation. They gathered money, they gathered arms, and they were shipping armloads of weapons and so forth to the freedom fighters in India. So this was not the Gandhian nonviolence approach, which is very popular in the way Indian history is thought about, but this was the let's fight for our rights approach, right? And eventually, you know, many of these Indians settled in the Sacramento area of California and the Imperial Valley. Although South Asians were able to get citizenship starting in 1946, the number of people allowed because of the barred zone restrictions were about 100 people. And in this period of exclusion, South Asians were referred to as Hindus even though some were Muslim and largely Sikh. The derogatory terminology of the tide of turbans was used to describe their arrival, and it was as problematic a phrase as the Yellow Peril, which was used to describe Chinese arrival, right? So they were characterized as undesirable migrants, and immigrants at this time on the West Coast were either agricultural cultural laborers or students, and despite the class differences between the groups, they worked together to challenge imperialism globally. The passage of the 1965 Immigration Act moved away from race-based immigration quotas, as I said, and opened up the doors, and we have several writers I will be talking about later, but I want to talk a little bit about— we talked about the Ghadar Party, right, and I note that the Ghadar Party had a newsletter, and they also put out collections of poetry by their, by their members. It was called Gadar Di Goong or Echoes of Mutiny. And I don't read either Punjabi or Urdu, so I rely on translations from other people to do some of my own reading in this. And if you're interested in the Ghadar Party, there's a lot of material available online through the South Asian American Digital Archive. archive. So there was this very— one interesting guy that I've been unendingly fascinated with, a man named Jogesh Misra. And Jogesh Misra was actually a student here at the University of Washington. And then he went on to get a master's degree at Stanford. And the reason Misra fascinates me is that in 1915, he produced a thesis for his master's at Stanford, which I got to read from COVID to cover, and it anticipates a lot of the provisions of the 1965 Immigration Act. So it was fascinating that he already was thinking about moving beyond race-based quotas, about thinking about people should be, you know, welcomed for the skills and what they bring to this country. And Misra was, I mean, from his, you know, after he finished this work, he gets a PhD And then he takes— his career takes an interesting turn. He decides to become a poet. And he starts writing poetry in this sort of mystical romantic vein, very 19th century Bengal. And he published a collection of poems called Usha Sangeet or the Song of the Dawn, which was published in 1919. And I'm going to read a few excerpts, lines from a poem he called Ode to India. Ind, my Ind, how sweet thy memory, dearest land of sacred lores, shrine-abode of world-fates, man's hope of hopes. And then there's this ecstatic description of the land through birds and plants and the Taj Mahal and dusky maidens and all of these predictable tropes. And then he goes on to say, what a paradise on earth unfolds to these exiled eyes, soul's worship to thee and the heart's holiest homage, stronger than sword's sharpest pledge are thine and thine own above all the world for all time, all the time, o end. What is interesting to me is that here is a man who studied the consequences of the Exclusion Acts and so forth. And then in his— I mean, these were young men who didn't have a sovereign state backing them up. Their homeland was colonized by the British and they were unwanted here. And so in many ways, This imagining India, while it is Orientalist and kind of romanticized, it really speaks to his desire to recoup India as a glorious culture from the perspective of people who have experienced this culture rather than the ways in which the stereotypical imperial narrative went about, you know, degraded culture and so forth. So I find his work rather interesting. And in the similar vein, I want to look at this guy Dhan Gopal Mukherjee briefly. Mukherjee is another fascinating guy, right? He won the Newbery Award, the Newbery Medal in 1923 for his children's books. He published a book called Gay Neck: The Story of a Pigeon, which is about a carrier pigeon in World War I carrying spy messages. I learned about this book because my daughter found it in the library in 3rd grade and did a book report for her Newbery Medal project. That's how I discovered this. You would be surprised the peculiar ways in which you land resources, right, for your work. And what he did eventually was he became this sort of mystic kind of guy, and he writes this autobiography, Caste and Outcast, which is totally fascinating to me. So Dhan Gopal Mukherjee, in the first part of Caste and Outcast, talks about his upbringing in India. India. He grew up in a very Brahminical Bengali family and even for his time had an extremely traditional upbringing. His mother taught him the sacred texts, made him a Sanskrit scholar. He learned all the rituals. So this was his life, a Brahminical life. And then he got involved in the Swadeshi movement in the margins, which was the resistance movement. He was under scrutiny by the British in India. So he left and he got on a boat that brought him to Seattle. And then from Seattle, he made his way to UC Berkeley. So he arrives in Berkeley and he's dreaming of an intellectual life and he spends all his money. He had $15 in his pocket and he put that down for tuition. Can you imagine tuition at $15? It's just mind-boggling, right? His first week in San Francisco, he was hosted in the home of a Jewish friend, this man he had met on, um, on the ship over, who provided him housing. And then we learned how much his life of the mind upbringing and his up— as an upper caste Brahmin man who lives a life of the mind, doesn't do any manual labor, right? Dude can't find a job. He doesn't know how to make money. So he finds jobs and he gets fired. He can't wait tables. He doesn't know how to sweep floors, et cetera. Eventually, he finds his way to a sorority house on the Berkeley campus where an African American woman takes pity on him and teaches him how to make beds and sweep floors and do dishes and wait at the tables. I find that story absolutely fascinating because it tells us so much about our idea of work and the kinds of baggage we bring with us based on our caste identities. And so much so that when Mukherjee, like Jogesh Mishra, writes about the glory that is India, he writes about the mystical history. So there's this tendency to glorify India. And note here, the glorified India is largely a Hindu India that they're glorifying through Vedic scriptures and so forth. And there is a phenomenal cluelessness, shall we say, about the discriminatory practices that one's position engenders in that context. So anyway, he goes to— he goes around. He's very intellectually very hungry. He joins like a socialist group, discovers that the socialists are too materialist for him, not for him. And then, you know, he starts to note that there are these Indian students arriving in Berkeley and he finds them all too radical. On an interesting note, most of these Indian students who arrived at West Coast universities University of Washington, Berkeley, Oregon. Many of them had been involved in local protests during the independence movement in India, and they were fleeing British scrutiny, didn't want to go to jail, so they jumped ship somehow. Some of them actually came through Japan and then arrived on the West Coast. So there's a fascinating story about the arrival of these students, and these students come with radical ideas, and they connect up with the people in the Ghadar Party, and they find a lot in common when they want to talk about labor and so on and so forth. Right? And there are some— there's a lot one can go into that history, but I'm just going to say that, you know, for Mukherjee's work, what is interesting to me is what— how much he doesn't feel at home in the US. He struggles. He married a white woman, has children. He goes on these book tours, and he writes numerous books. He's a successful author. But inside, he doesn't belong. miserable. And unfortunately, in the end, he takes his own life. And it tells us something about what that kind of profound alienation can be. It's not just material displacement or linguistic displacement, cultural displacement. It can also be a very deeply spiritual malaise, as it was in this, this man's case. So we've been talking largely about men— Dhan Gopal Mukherjee, the Gadhar Party— and I want to go to this this wonderful woman, Kartar Dhillon. Kartar Dhillon was the daughter of immigrants, so she's part of the first— first among the second generation of people here, right? So she writes about— she was born in Astoria, Oregon. Astoria, Oregon is the birthplace of the Ghadar Party. And her father worked there for a lumber mill. Her mother was one of the very few Indian women who had managed to come to the US. Remember that part of the exclusion processes also involved something called the Page Act, which kept women away because the assumption was women came here to be sex workers. And so they didn't allow many women to come. Very few men were able to bring their wives. Bakshish Singh Dhillon, the father of Kartar Dhillon, was one of those lucky people. Who managed to bring his wife to Astoria, Oregon, and Carter Dillon in the late 20th century, 80s and on forward, starts jotting down her life stories and memories. And she never really fully finished a book, but she's an important Sikh pioneer, and in part because she's one of the few women who was involved with the Ghadar Party and can tell you a lot about that as well. Right? So she writes, and her complaint is this about the Ghadarites: Her brother Bud Dillon. He's a fascinating guy too. At age 12, he joined the Ghadarites on a ship with arms and things to go to India to support the rebellion. He's 12 years old. Somewhere along the way though, he ends up in Russia, studies socialism, and becomes very— returns to the US extremely active in the Ghadar Party. Fascinating guy. I learned all of this because she wrote a beautiful obituary about her brother. But in that obituary, she says, you know, books have been written about the martyrs, the men who returned to India, to join the revolutionary forces there. The stories of their heroism, their suffering have been recorded, but she also notes, you know, that women's stories are lost. And she was born in 1915, and in her fragmentary life she starts talking about what those experiences were like. And she tells us, for example, about her in a piece called Parrot's Beak. She tells us about her mother and how, um, her problematic relationship with her mother. And we learned that her mother was a teenager when she came to this country, and had she stayed on in the Punjab, she would have had a cohort of women— sisters, sisters-in-law, mother-in-law, cousins, you know, a whole village full of people who would have supported her and provided her community as she raised children and did performed her role as a wife. Here she was phenomenally isolated. There weren't other women. She became literate because her husband taught her to read and write in Punjabi. And in the— when she was living in Astoria, she, you know, the Indian men needed somebody to cook meals for them. So she actually took on the job of making food for them and she got paid. And whatever she got paid, she was not a rich woman, she plowed that money back into the Ghadar Party. And so, you know, this was for them, revolution work was very significant. She also fought again. Her husband died when Kartar Dhillon was about 11 years old, and he wanted— when he was ailing, he wanted to marry off his daughters. She was 11, and the mother fought and said, we didn't come to this country so that, you know, we could marry off our daughters young. My child is going to get, you know, is going to be educated and so forth. And One of the things that Dilon remembers is that her— she runs across a newspaper article saying that her brother has won an award for perfect attendance in the Astoria schools. And she remembers how much effort it took for her mother— I see dropping things. Thank you. She talks about how much effort it took for her mother to have gotten up every morning, fed these children, clothed them, sent them to school so they had perfect attendance, right? This was her dedication to her kids. Later, Erica Surat Anderson, who was Kartar Dhillon's granddaughter, wrote— made a film called Turbans. It's a short film, was screened on PBS, in which she tells the story through actors, of course, of her brothers. They used to be turban-wearing Sikhs with long hair. And the kids got enormously teased in school. And then eventually the family makes a difficult decision of having their hair cut. And so the story is about, the film focuses on what a cultural and spiritual loss that was for them, right? So Dilnal's documentation of all of these elements, I think, offer us an extraordinary insight into what life was like, daily life was like, And particularly the place of the few women who were part of all of this. And so I want to then skip to post-1945. I'll give them a moment to settle in. Okay. So post-1945, India gets independence, the Indian subcontinent in 1947. Following a bloody partition where 2 nations based on religion, India and Pakistan, are formed. Later, East Pakistan breaks off into the nation of Bangladesh in 1971. We— there are untold stories of horror about rapes, mutilations, abductions, displacement. Something like 12 to 14 million people were displaced by the partition. More than a million people died. There are horrendous narratives about this. And if you're interested in people's partition stories, I highly recommend this online site called the 1947 Partition Archives, which is actually out of California, that documents over 11,000 stories of people who were children, many of them, during the partition. So I don't want to go deeply into the partition, another area of interest for me. I'm going to instead talk about what happens post-World War II in terms of immigration. Okay. And I want to talk about that through the work of Meera Khamdar. So in Meera Khamdar, I wrote a book in 2000 called Motibas Tattoos. And it tells the story of her grandmother. She's— Meera Khamdar is part Danish and part Indian. And she tells the story of her father's family, the Kamdars. Her grandmother and grandfather had lived in Burma, in Rangoon. And they left just— they left after the Japanese started bombing Rangoon. And they were actually a fortunate family in that they left Rangoon on a ship. A lot of Indians, when Rangoon was bombed, had to walk through dense forests, you know, infested with leeches, nonstop rain, horrendous conditions. A lot of people died. And it's a chapter of history that is often referred to as the Forgotten Long March. They eventually, those refugees, walked their way to Calcutta and places like that in India and found refuge there. But Kamdar's family ends up in Bombay. And her father, Prabhakar— Prabhakar. also known as Pete Kamdar. He chooses to go by Pete. Left Bombay in 1949 or so as a 19-year-old. The family was well off. They were businessmen and they were reasonably well off and they wanted the son to be educated. And it was customary for people to go to the UK, but they somehow decided to come to the US. They wanted their son to study at MIT. So they sent him to a high school, like a finishing high school. And after Pete Kamdar arrived at that high school, they realized how expensive American education could be. And so rather than go to MIT, this man made his way through multiple state institutions and eventually got a degree in aeronautical engineering at Oklahoma State. After that, he came to the University of Washington for a master's in aeronautical engineering. He was an idealist. He thought that aeronautical engineering wasn't of great use. He wanted to go back and practice scientific agriculture to help a newly formed India to become food self-sufficient. So he decided to transfer to Oregon State to Corvallis to study soil science. So he goes to Corvallis and joins something called the Cosmopolitan Club, which was like a student organization for bringing international students as well as local students who were interested in global affairs together. They had dances, they had dinners, and there he met a lovely young woman who was the daughter of Danish immigrant farmers from Junction City, Oregon. And the couple got married, and Mr. Kamdar realized, okay, I'm not going back, I need to feed the family. He got a job at Boeing. They moved back to this region, and Meera Kamdar writes about growing up in Bothell and Bellevue, and then the family returns to California. They go back, they go to California mostly because there were more companies like Lockheed Martin and so forth, and her father worked in— he had a distinguished career, worked in research with the Apollo projects and so forth. And so she writes about that life and captures for us multiple things, right? So her mother being Danish American, at this time she's had 4 children. She becomes extremely well-versed in Gujarati Jain cooking, Gujarati traditions after spending many long months in Bombay with her mother-in-law. So she could put together, because her husband was Jain. Jains have significant dietary restrictions and so forth. They're vegetarian. Don't eat root vegetables, for example. So she learned how to cook all the great Gujarati cooking, Jain cooking. At the same time, she raised her daughters biculturally, biracially, and they participated in Junction City's Scandinavia Days and learned how to pickle vegetables and, and, you know, make applesauce. I mean, this was— it's fascinating to see how bicultural, biracial life worked at this time. The father was big into a And Meera Khandar also talks about the stressors that come with that, the pressures to help siblings migrate, the financial troubles when you're the sole breadwinner. Their parents' marriage was rocky. There was domestic violence. She doesn't cover up any of that. At the same time, it's very interesting to see what biraciality looked like. And I think Meera Khandar's father was few years older than Shyamala Gopalan. But the difference in biraciality is he married a white Danish immigrant and Shyamala Gopalan married a Jamaican. And so biraciality, even though the kids were from the, you know, born and raised in California in the '60s, their experiences are fairly different because of that racial distinction, right? So now I want to go to post-1980s. 1965, as I mentioned, 1965. And I'm going to bring us to a local writer, right? And this is the 1965 Immigration Act brings a shift, a huge shift to immigration. It's no longer nation-based quotas, no longer race-based exclusion. It is now skills-based. And so in the push-pull factors, India particularly had a lot of highly educated, underemployed scientists and others who found their way to the U.S., and thus began that boom. So we start seeing a critical mass emerge. While most of the folks who came came as scientists and scientifically trained folks, there were also a few people who showed up to study humanities and writing. One such person was Bharati Mukherjee, who I think of as a pioneer in South Asian American writing documenting life in the States as an Indian immigrant from the 1970s on. She went to Iowa to the Iowa Writers Workshop. Gayatri Spivak, who's known to many feminist scholars, postcolonialists, as a theorist, again came in the '60s. So there were people who did come for the humanities. Sometimes they seem to have been mostly women. And then immigration laws start to shift towards more family reunification in the 1980s. And then in the 1990s, we have this boom in the H-1B H-1B visas, which we're all familiar with locally. These are the temporary worker visas which the tech companies use to bring in large number of workers. And this— there's been a lot of criticism of H-1B visas. And one of the problems, among the many problems with the H-1B visa, is the pathway to a green card has become harder and harder for most people. So much so because we haven't increased the number of green cards given out And since like the 1960s, I think. As a consequence, we have people who live and work here, have full lives here, they are taxpaying folks, but they have no access to permanent citizenship. They don't have access to voting and so forth. And I currently, I've been reading, it can take over 100 years for someone to get from H-1B to green card. That's what the queues look like, which is why we desperately need immigration reform. And that is one of the many things. And one of the— all the stuff I've been talking about, you know, we talked a little bit about undocumented migration. But one of the things that's happening is those H-1B workers who come from India with children who were born in India or elsewhere, their children age out before the parents get their green cards, at which point the children who've been raised here have no legal status. They become undocumented. And the other thing, India, after Latin America, India is the largest sender of undocumented workers right now to the United States. It's a fact that is not known to many of us, and a lot of it is people overstaying their their visas, you know, whether it's visitor visas or, you know, this sort of situation. So anyway, so the 1965 law and its consequences, that was just a quick overview. But I want to talk about one of our local writers, Bharti Kirchner, who happens to be a good friend. Bharti came to the US as a— so in Roots and Reflections, Amy and I got to do an oral history with Bharti. So she came to the US to study the sciences. worked in the— worked for companies like IBM and so forth for many years, and then decided that she wanted to be a writer. She had stories to tell. So she took creative writing classes at the UW, I think through the extension program, and became a writer and published her first novel, Shiva Dancing. She is also a cookbook author, has had 4 cookbooks, and she's published something like 9 novels, including her most recent foray is into to mystery novels, what I would call cozy mysteries, featuring this woman Maya Malik, who is a detective. And what's interesting to me is that Bharati Kushner is breaking new ground in— okay, my other fun stuff that I like to do is I read mystery novels a lot. So what Kushner is doing is she's breaking some barriers in that genre, which is largely white authors. Largely white women authors. And also, you know, it blurs into police procedurals and psychological thrillers, but largely they tend to feature white lives, white folks. There are a handful of mystery novelists. I'm thinking of Sujata Massey as the other one, and now Bharti Krishna, who are starting to write with Indian protagonists, Indian settings. And Bharti takes her readers on adventures in the Andamans and Jaipur, all kinds of fun places. So if you're looking for a summer read for an airplane, I highly recommend— I recommend the mystery novels that she writes. But I want to actually look at one of her earlier novels. It's called Darjeeling. And it was published, I believe, in the 1990s. I don't recall when. I don't have the dates. Sorry. Anyway, the story is focused on 2 sisters, Alokha and Sudha. And they are growing up on a tea estate in Darjeeling. There's a love triangle. They both fall in love with the same man who was an employee in their father's tea estate and a labor leader. And strikes happen. The man's life is in danger. So he leaves with the older sister who he's engaged to. And with the help of the grandmother, they escape Darjeeling because his life is under threat. And they go off first to Calcutta and they get married and then eventually they find themselves in New York. The younger sister who is now heartbroken because the man she loves has run away to save his life with her sister moves to Vancouver and then eventually to Victoria. She starts out as an accountant and then decides that, hey, my expertise is in tea and she starts a wholesale tea business in Victoria. The older sister who married the— Married the labor leader. He was highly—he had two great skills: he was a Sanskrit scholar, and he had an incredible palate for tea tasting and grading tea. Neither of those skills, although they have skills-based immigration, come in handy finding a job in New York. And contrary to the assumption that you know immigration is an upward mobility economically, in his case, he ends up becoming an electrician. and, you know, does repairs and stuff. And he is unhappy. His sense of masculinity is seriously challenged. And yet again, the way I read it, I don't know if this is how the writer intended it, what I read there is actually a narrative about, just like with Dhan Gopal Mukherjee, of upper caste men who find immigration shifts their relationship to labor and then are unable to define themselves in this new way. What's interesting is the women are more adaptable. Alokha, the wife, eventually finds her way into a job with an Indian American newspaper, and she writes this Agony Aunt advice column in that. And, you know, we learn through her advice columns about the stories of other Indian immigrants in New York and their struggles with things like, you know, some one guy writes to her and says, I love to perform music on the streets, and my family thinks I'm terrible because I'm not a doctor or a lawyer. So the narrative definitely challenges Indian assumptions about model minorities, which is the idea which drives a lot of Asian American communities, that we have to doubly prove ourselves worthy of being here, that, you know, we have to be the best at everything. There are certain professions we have to follow, you know. We have to be doctors. We have to be scientists. It's very difficult for people to not feel pressure to do computer science, even if you might be interested in filmmaking, for example, right? Those kinds of things. And this is an ongoing conversation in the community about expectations and the mental health toll it takes on children, especially teens who are trying to figure out careers and professions, a whole other community problem. But anyway, going back to Darjeeling, The sisters go back. They're meeting after many years because they had a falling out. And the grandmother is— so the older sister is now divorced because her husband is— her marriage has fallen apart. She hasn't told the family back home. The younger sister doesn't know the older sister is divorced from the love of the younger sister's life. They meet up in Darjeeling and the grandmother is trying to set up this younger sister with another eligible Bengali bachelor. And this Bengali bachelor happens to work for a software company in Seattle, and they're trying to set up a meeting, you know, Seattle to Victoria. It doesn't happen. They meet in Darjeeling. Everything clicks. The romance is going beautifully. The younger sister wakes up to the fact that, you know, her love for the ex-brother-in-law was rather immature and in the past. She's ready to settle when the grandmother becomes bequeaths the tea estate to her and says, you should run the tea estate. You're the family tea person. You run the wholesale business. This is what you should do. She's very excited. And Mr. Boyfriend is like, but I got a job in a tech company in Bangalore and I want a wife who'll stay home and raise kids. She says adios and moves on to her tea business. Thank God. So, you know, what's interesting to me in this 1965 narrative is that in Darjeeling, is while this is largely a story about women's empowerment, there is a question that is raised about both whether migration actually has liberation possibilities from patriarchal experiences for Indian women. In other words, are you able to reinvent yourself in certain ways? This novel suggests that both sisters reinvent themselves in ways that they couldn't have where they were growing up. And that, you know, becomes an important thing to think about. And now I want to get us to the 21st century. And I am going to talk about 2 very, very recent novels. The first one, Sonora Jha's The Laughter. It was published last year. It is now up for the Washington State Book Award. And the announcements will come later this week, I guess. Full disclosure, Sonora is a good friend, colleague at Seattle University, and she's a journalism professor, had started with— wrote a novel called Foreign about farm worker suicide in India. That was her first novel, 2012, 2013, thereabouts, in which she features a Seattle area academic who goes— who studies farmer suicides and goes back to India and, you know, her transformative experience. And Jha has mentioned, noted that while those were her areas of academic research, for her storytelling has been an important way to actually convey more to a larger audience. So then she goes on to write in 2022 a rather interesting memoir and manifesto called How to Raise a Feminist Son. And then the third book that she published last year is the most one called The Laughter. And I love this narrative. It's very clever. It also happens to be set on my campus in a fictional— vaguely fictional setting. In 2016, my campus had a student sit-in and an uprising where students in a particular college fed up with the administration had a sit-in in part because they found their curriculum too Eurocentric. They found their dean very problematic. They staged a sit-in. They brought the administration to the table. And eventually that dean was let go. That college dissolved. The program reformatted with a much better curriculum. So student activism works. Jha borrows this historical moment, but shifts it Shifts it dramatically. And I don't want to do too many spoilers. Anyway, her protagonist, the narrator, is this English professor who's a G.K. Chesterton scholar. And I swear I have spent a lot of time wondering which of my colleagues she's modeled this on, and she swears it's nobody I know. But— And we do not have a G.K. Chesterton scholar on our staff either. But this man gets very hung up He's liberal, as he sees himself. He gets very hung up on this Pakistani-American law professor, befriends her. He is sort of stalking her. And she has a nephew, a teenager who comes from France where he has struggled with Islamophobia. He's a young boy who's being targeted by the French. So he comes here to be with his aunt. And the professor befriends him. And the narrative really looks at Islamophobia in Seattle. What is it like to be a Pakistani American faculty member? What is it like— and, you know, what I find remarkable here is Jha is neither Pakistani nor Muslim and is able to write about it. And the other thing that's narratively interesting is she focuses this novel through a white male character, which is rather unusual. The only other novel I can think of where a South Asian writer focuses on white characters is Vikram Seth's Unequal Music. And so this is a remarkable craft ability, but, you know, if you've read J.M. Coetzee's Disgraced, there are some echoes of that novel as well. Her protagonist is an eminently dislikable guy, but you are also deeply rooted and fascinated in him. And through him, she skewers liberal Seattle, which makes it very interesting to me because I think when you ask people of color about their experiences in this city, it's a very different story. And Ja channels that. If I say anything more, I will do spoilers, so I'm not going to. I'm going to say read the book, and I've got my fingers and toes crossed that it will win the Washington State Book Award for fiction. I think I think it's really good. But then I'm biased, she's my friend. The other book that again fascinates me immensely is Vahini Vara's The Immortal King Rao. This was published also in 2023. It was up for either the— it's a finalist for the Pulitzer National Book Award, one of them. So well known. The narrative here— So Vahini Vara is somebody who grew up partially in this area. And then was a technology reporter and such in Silicon Valley. This novel, which she's been writing over a period of several years, is a sort of dystopic near-future narrative. It weaves in 2 plotlines. One is the rise— is the story of a Dalit family in India. And the other narrative thread is of the growth of the tech industry. in Seattle, right? So the protagonist, King Rao, that's his name, King Rao. The story is told by the daughter of King Rao. And King Rao grew up in a Dalit family. And rather than a story of— a lot of Dalit narratives are about consciousness raising, about the horrors of the caste system. This narrative was a little different in that it shows us the rise of Dalit people in postcolonial India as entrepreneurs, landowners. And through, you know, various strategies, the patriarch manages to get possession of a coconut grove, and he becomes this big coconut industrialist, right? He's selling coconut products. His family expands as an extended family-run business. There are lots of politics within it. And King Rao is his oldest grandson about to inherit all of this. A variety of things happen. King Rao decides to— he leaves India with the help of a Dutch doctor who practices medicine in his town and arrives at the University of Washington as a graduate student in computer science in the '80s. And at that point, we start seeing a history of the computer industry in this narrative. A fictionalized, you know, a little bit of Apple, a little bit of Microsoft, a little bit of everybody else looped into this narrative where basically this professor at the University Washington computer science, who's a hardware expert, takes the student on who's a brilliant software guy, and they develop in this narrative the first personal computer. Become immensely rich. The company takes over the world in many ways. And then the narrative shifts into its futuristic mode because what happens is after a particular election, a president decides to privatize all the infrastructure and hands off the tech infrastructures, you know, internet software, all of that, to King Rao, who is the most prominent and powerful man. Now King Rao is very interested in artificial intelligence. He is interested in the interface of the brain and the ability to trans— He wants to transfer stories and memories. And he comes up with something, some device which is called the harmonica where if you inject it into people then they have automatic connection to the internet and they can download their memories and stories and so on and so forth. And, you know, neural networks, all kinds of stuff. Anyway, the experiment goes bad. A lot of people die. So there is a huge revolution. And if you were in Seattle in 1999 when the WTO movement, the resistance happened, you see a lot of echoes of that in this book, in that resistance description. So a bunch of people— now the whole world is run by the board of corporation run by King Rao, who is the CEO, and a bunch people leave. They're not citizens, they're all shareholders. And you have a social capital that you buy into that gives you your— like your credit rating, but it's your social capital rating that gives you power, right? So it's a very clever critique of late capitalism. And a bunch of people who fought, resist, they check out of the shareholder thing, they go off to neighboring islands and establish— they are the exes. They establish a separate utopian community where they grow their own food, they generate their own solar electricity. That's a great book. The world is getting hotter and hotter. Climate change is coming about. And King Rao, after the debacle with his thing, disappears to Blake Island, which at this point in this novel is just a rundown island. And he has built this house. And he— his wife is dead, but they had saved some embryos. So using a surrogate, he, in his 90s, has a child. And it's that child that's the narrator of the novel. of this novel. And then let's just say things happen. Interesting things happen. I don't want to do spoilers, but the narrative is fascinating for the ways in which it entwines questions of race and class. Because King Rao is told if you go to America as a Dalit, you can leave caste behind. And we know that is— that if you look at the, you know, what has happened recently in the US politics largely relating to the South Asian community. Seattle was the first city about a year ago to pass an ordinance banning caste discrimination. Former Councilwoman Kshama Sawant sponsored that. Later, the state of California passed— because there were lawsuits in companies like Cisco about caste discrimination. So California legislators came up with a bill that banned caste discrimination, that passed both the Senate and their House, but was vetoed by Gavin Newsom. And this week there is a wonderful article in Harper's by Andrew Cockburn that talks about the California Caste Discrimination Act. And he speaks about how Gavin Newsom was co-opted by very powerful Hindu upper caste lobbies into vetoing the bill should he ever desire a political future in this country. It's a fascinating article. And it— so the intertwining of race and caste is something that we would think about, because if you think about South Asians as simply as people of color, brown people who've been discriminated against— I've given you a long litany of discrimination experiences, they're not wrong— but we have to weave in questions of caste into this. So when in 1923 Bhagat Singh Thind sues the United States for citizenship, he says, I'm Aryan, and aligns himself because he's upper caste with whiteness, which of course then the Supreme Court says, but not in the way the common man understands whiteness. So adios, no citizenship for you, right? So this becomes an interesting thing, and now this idea that somehow you transcend caste has been proven wrong. Because Indian immigrants come with their baggage. They come with their cultural baggage. And so taking us back to my opening where I was looking at VP Harris, it's important to recognize the cultural privilege that comes with being the child of a South Asian Brahmin woman. You know, with access to highly educated grandparents with— who had economic, political power, may not have been extremely wealthy, but they had political power. A lot of the— Indian caste system favors upper-class migrants, upper-class Indians in terms of access to high technology institutions, educational institutions. The caste privilege then translated into migratory privilege. People who were highly skilled came from upper castes, they migrated, they brought their caste baggage with them. I speak to you here as a person who was born and raised in the upper caste. My last name will tell you I am a Brahmin. And so I understand caste privilege. I also understand gender complexities and the ways that interweave. And that when I see myself as a woman of color, it is a rather complicated identity to navigate. There are moments of privilege, there are moments of lack of privilege. And I think when we think about racialization of South Asians, we need to recognize that it is not a— it's not an easy simplistic understanding. That is a much more complicated thing. And so going back to these literary works, these works of fiction, whether they're award-winning novels or popular works of fiction, there is a lot in the ways in which our writers not only document the life of this community, but they're also critiquing it while maybe occasionally also falling into certain stereotypes. themselves. But it is a fascinating look into South Asian migrant history through the storytellers. And so that was sort of my primary goal for today. And I would just move on to the Q&A. And I want to say a big thank you to Sora Nance from MOHAI for having coordinated all of this, done all the marketing, been a fabulous communicator. And thank you. And also to Tasveer, particularly Vikpal and Rita Meher, because this was their idea to draft me into this 6 months ago. So thank you very much. And I'm open for questions and discussions and all of that.

Got a mic here, so if you want to raise your hands to ask questions, I'll come over to you.

Thank you very much for your interesting talk. So a few years back, I read a novel that was not about South Asia, but it was about Latin American migration into the US. And I thought the novel was very profound and moving and told a very important story. But then later I learned that the author actually received criticism because she was not Latin American.

Was this the one about the drug cartels and things? Yes. Yes, okay, the one that was mired in controversy, yeah.

So since then, I've just really questioned in my mind, If you can be criticized because you're not authorized to tell a story, or you have an important story to tell even though it's not your personal history. So is it cultural appropriation, or are you telling an important story? And as a literature professor, how do you feel about that?

Well, that's often a topic of conversation in my classes, actually. I think it was— I'm trying to remember what the name was. It was American Dirt, I think, was the name of the novel, right? Yeah. But

you had talked about your author friend.

Yeah. Yeah. And so my— the challenge— so my take is that I think we have a rather sometimes binary view of how— who gets to write what or who owns stories. I definitely do think that cultural appropriation is a problem. I do think that we should bring voices to the table. So the publishing industry needs to bring more people. I mean, and I'm thinking of people like Percival Everett, his book that became called Erasure became the film American Fiction where he takes on cultural appropriation. So does— the novel The Other Black Girl by Zakiya— I forget her last name— brilliant novel about the publishing industry and the appropriation of African-American women's stories. So yes, there is a problem with that. However, I think we're also limiting ourselves if we say we can only write about that which we know, because there are ethical ways of writing about another culture, and that involves deep immersion. It involves research into archives, into experiences. It involves— I know a lot of my writer friends use beta readers, for example, to say, okay, you know, I'm a cis straight woman writing about a trans character. I would like a beta reader who could look at this and talk to me about where I might be overstepping, where I might be carrying my own biases, etc. So there are ways in which we do this. And I think American Dirt unfortunately got caught up in— it was a good novel. Yeah. And I don't know what went wrong. It, you know, it helps writers if they would disclose. I think they need to be— there are ways in which one can present where one writes. Because one of the challenges my friend had with placing her book was people didn't understand what she was doing with a white male narrator. Because her primary protagonist was a white male. And that was also remarkably radical in some ways because people expect South Asian women to write as South Asian women. But white male writers in particular have written about every— everything they could think of. So she reverses the gaze. Writers Workshop. There is— have a nice book called Write— I think it's called Writing the Other. It's about how do you write across racial and cultural lines. And it's a creative writing craft kind of thing. And I find that fascinating because there are really good ways in which people can do that. And I'm thinking of Kristin Millares Young's novel Subduction, which takes the author into the Makah community. And but the way the narrative structures itself is there's a lot of reflection on how we write about the other. How do we write about indigenous communities and their stories? How do we— so the narrative itself, there's a metafictional element in there that examines that. And to me, that is an ethical way of doing it. Rather than saying I won't write, it is engage in that. I mean, we all have to think about our positionality regardless. It's like— I'm a feminist-trained scholar, and for me, social position, understanding intersectionality is absolutely central. key when I approach any scholarly work.

Hi. Hi, can you hear me?

Yeah, I can.

Okay, this is— I'm trying to frame it so that it's not like a 1,000-word question right now. So Writing about any immigrant, the immigrant experience today versus like N years ago, right? The N years ago, you had a choice of having the immigrant come over and interact only with the place they immigrated to versus today, if you write— I mean, increasingly sort of in a kind of graph kind of forming, right? You can start writing about the immigrant's interaction with the immigrant community, which increases in size. For example, me who showed up like in Seattle sort of had a built-in community in there, and that sort of changes the maturing or whatever the word I'm looking for here is of that person. Just their life experience. experience in general. Do you get a comment on the sort of difference of how this worked out? And, you know, you've done it a little bit in—

Yeah, I think first of all, I think that's what 1965 did for us, is raise the numbers, right? We're now like at like 5.4 million or something in this country who are foreign-born South Asians, largely of Indian origin, right? And this doesn't even take into account the children and grandchildren one of those who came in the '60s and so on. So we're a palpable presence, we're an economically advantaged presence, we're also among the highly educated communities, all of this. If you look, which is why when you look at the earlier times, you know, when there was one or two sailors or whatever and they blended into the community, that's what Vivek Bald writes about. And if you look at other diasporic communities, especially indentured diasporas because they didn't have the technology, the ability to travel back and forth like we do. We get on a plane and we're back. They, they, when they left, they left. So if you look at stories in Guyana, you look at stories in Mauritius, then what's fascinating is there are these— so they, you know, they came on the same ship, they traveled for months, they endured hardship. In Caribbean writing, they talk about themselves as jahaji bhai and jahaji bahan, as in shipboard sisters and brothers. So you leave your family behind, but you form other kinship networks. And you leave behind things like, you know, I'm from this place and this caste, and you form a new community. And if you travel to places like Mauritius, you travel to places like Trinidad, what you see is a longer history of South Asian migration where people were not going back and forth that much. So the culture evolved. Very differently in these places. And I think it was the post-World War— I would argue, I don't say think, I argue that it was post-World War II migration which coincided with technologies of transport where air travel became easier and cheaper, where ships became faster, that allowed people to go back and forth a lot. And that changed the nature of our sense of belonging so that when people in— if you read Mauritian or Guyanese writing, for multiple generations there is a hankering to go back to India. They haven't imagined India through the stories their ancestors told them, but they've never really been there. The foods and things are reflective of that, the way holidays are celebrated, for example. But What's different with, you know, the post-1945 migration to say the UK, to Australia, to the US, Canada is that ability to connect back and forth. And it just changes the nature of one's sense of belonging, one's sense of disconnect from home. It's not saying that we're not disconnected because most of us will also talk about after many years of living this here and there life is that you belong in neither space. You go back and you feel you're like too American. You are here, you feel too Indian or whatever, right? So there is, there is that as well. So what scholars will call a diasporic double consciousness.

Yeah, thank you. Very wide, expansive range of history and texts. I have just a quick story relating to who can tell whose stories. And this is a quick comment, and then I'll ask the question. So I was listening to an interview with Tommy Orange, who wrote the novel There There. And he has another novel too, Wandering Stars or something. Yeah. That's out. In any case, one thing that was interesting in this interview They were just that the woman who was interviewing him, some professor of literature, I think from Oklahoma, was talking about reading groups, and that there was a Native American women's reading group who had read his novel. And so she posed some questions for from them. And so one of the questions that they asked him was how it is because he had written very powerfully and seemingly. Convincingly about— there was that. That was just a quick little anecdote. The question that I have really is about the second generation, and you spoke about that with regard to the Dylan memoir. A lot of the novels, I believe, that you covered today—

Except Vahini Vara, she's second gen.

She's second gen, okay. But a lot of them are first gen, right? And so I'm wondering whether we're seeing— whether, first of all, we don't have That many? I can— there's a couple that I can think of whose names I'm— I mean, that I've looked at, but whose names I'm forgetting. But I know that there's been some important anthropological work, young Desi youth and hip-hop, for example. And so I'm just wondering how that's showing up in literature, and if not in novels, like also in poetry and— Mm-hmm. Performance.

I would say, for example, Ayad Akhtar's Disgraced and his novel Homeland Elegies. He's Pakistani-American, born and raised here, so he writes about that experience. And Homeland Elegies is a work of autofiction, so it's absolutely fascinating. Highly recommend it. Where it's actually interestingly popping up, where second-gen is writing, is in young adult and children's fiction, which is a thing that I've gotten into lately. So there are people like Saadia Farooqi, there is the Newbery or something award-winning Veera Hirannandani's Night Diary, which is a partition narrative, and a recent novel by Saadia Farooqi which is also about— called The Partition Project. So my interest in partition and diaspora kind of converge, and one of the first books that came out maybe 20 years ago by a second generation was one of the first YA novels. It's called ABC— American Born— it's called Born Confused. And it takes its thing from American Born Confused. They see that acronym that was derogatorily used. And so Born Confused tells the story of a young girl growing up. So that's where— and, you know, to some extent, Jhumpa Lahiri channels that. She's kind of one— she was a year old when she came to the US. So when she writes, when she writes, although she's technically Gen 1.5 or Gen 1, she writes with the sensibility of someone who's grown up here. If you read like The Namesake, for example. So we are seeing a lot of that generation that are the children of the 1965 immigrants who are now adults who are writing. And we're seeing memoirs. We're seeing graphic narratives. We're seeing a whole range of production.

That was a very nice presentation. Thank you. You covered a lot of different things, but I think they are all connected to one topic which you started off— racial identity. And all these other stories you told they were all related somehow to the racial identity issues, and you ended up with that. So what do you think that these people should face, or how they should— they should— racial— those who have a racial identity problem, or they have a racial identity, how they should live in this society?

My answer to that is I find engaging with— the reason I love these literary works is because I can— the storytellers grab me in ways that— and this is where I find teaching this literature wonderful to young people as well— is because literature allows you to engage with something empathetically. You're engaging multiple emotions, both your intellect and your heart. And your spirit to think about what seem intractable problems, right? If I approach this purely from— of course, a lot of my work is informed by social science research on race and gender and things like that. That's the nature of the beast. But the reason I use literary texts is because I think storytellers have always had the power to educate society, And there's not one single way. So often I will have students and young people who read something say, oh my gosh, I wish I had read this before, or this speaks to me. I remember when my daughter, she's now 28, was maybe— she was a precocious reader. She was about 10 years old when I gave her a copy of The Namesake because she was— at the time there weren't that many Now there's a proliferation of South Asian American children's books. There wasn't that much when she was growing up. And Born Confused, this other book, was one of the others I got. And her response was she related deeply to The Namesake. Not because of the, you know, even though the characters are Bengali and so forth. She said, you know, it really speaks to me because I understand what Gogol went through in school. It speaks to them on a very, very, gut level first, and then you start thinking about it, you know, more and more. So I would say I don't think there's one way in which we can eat— there's one method by which you grapple with questions of race. They shift. Racialization is not a static thing, it is a contingent thing, and it happens in one's interactions with the larger community and depends. So when we interact with other South Asians, the way we perceive ourselves is very different than when I am say, in a community of other women of color. They might be Latino, they might be African American, and we experience life differently as opposed to when I'm in a predominantly white setting. And in each of those moments, I navigate the worlds differently. And I'm aware that people navigate the world with me differently. I'm in a classroom as a woman of color, full professor of a certain age, and I'm dealing with 18-year-olds. It's hard— I'm hard-pressed to say I lack power in that situation. I have plenty of power. I'm professor. I have the degree. I have the power to grade them and not, you know, flunk them in classes. All of those things. And so to be aware of that situationality and the recognizing, which is what feminist scholars call intersectionality. We recognize power is— power structures are constantly shifting. And where we are positioned in that web of power also shifts from moment to moment. So being aware of how we are navigating that, that's what I have found useful for myself. Which means there are a lot of times when I find myself caught flat-footed and I have to learn from the situation. You know, there are, there are awkward moments, there are mistakes one makes, there are assumptions and biases. So what literary work, storytellers help one do is also open oneself up to to experience this. Sometimes vicariously you can experience things and, you know, not make mistakes in your real life if you— I would say a lot of the reading, a lot of the second-generation YA narratives where one of the themes is generational conflict between parents and children made me a better parent. I understood my kids a little better in the process. So. Thank you.

I think we have time for one more. Thinking. See another one in the back? Another question?

I think I'm just going to add a little bit to the earlier question and see what you have to say about that one. At least as an Indian-origin guy here. So sometimes I have this very interesting thing where I walk down the street and I see someone and say, that person is Indian, cool. And then I talk to them and it turns out they're not Indian, they're actually Malaysian or African. They just look Indian to me because they are second-time— Multiply migrant.

Multiple migrants.

Um, this is a totally, totally different set. I think that perhaps this is a totally different set of experiences, or perhaps it's just multiplied by 2.

I think that— I think when you multiply— I— so my, my short answer to that is we are each shaped not only by our personal immigrant histories, how I arrived in this country, but also the migration laws, histories of our community, about the country we migrate to, etc., etc. So, you know, I might run into a Sri Lankan Tamil person, but my migration experience is very different from someone who came as a refugee from the Civil War, right? We speak the same language, more or less same. At least we can cross dialectical differences and talk to one another. And I imagine someone who's Bengali from say, Calcutta, talking to someone from Dhaka has a similar thing. There's a lot of commonality, but there's also like, you know, there are differences, right? And I think we look at that and I find these different histories of migration especially fascinating. One of my favorite novels is V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas, which captures that. The other writer I love is the Indo-Tanzanian-Canadian writer, M.G. Vasanji, who has written novels about the Indo-Canadian. You know, they were people who were from Tanzania and Kenya who were ousted and arrived in Toronto and places. And Vasanji is basically the chronicler of that community. And it's marvelous what he does with multiple generations of migrants. And when— he has this book called The In-Between World of Vikram Lal, which I love. which he really looks at Indian immigrants in East Africa, in Kenya in particular, and the racial dynamics there between Africans, the British, and the Indian immigrants, and how that shapes the migrant experience to North America. Very different than, say, mine coming out of southern India. So.

Fantastic.

All right.

Thank you so much, Professor Iyer. Please give her a warm round of applause.

Thank you all so much. Thanks for coming. You've been a great audience.