Brown bag

"How is it that you know my name?" she asked. "Knowing names is my art. To weave the magic of a thing, one must find its true name out. In my land, we keep our true names hidden all our lives long, from all but those whom we trust utterly; for there is great power and great peril, in a name." – Ursula Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan

I never seriously encountered the term South Asian until I began visiting the US. There, I heard it often, evoking immigration, basement bhangra, bindis and unorganised labour. I saw it on Internet listservs from groups that tracked the mentions of Southasia and Southasians in the US mediascape with dogged numerical lenses. I heard it from 'intelligent but beautiful' brown girls with straight hair and black pants, as they spoke of identity, gender, art. I noticed it in the names of the university departments that sponsored my films' screenings. Soon I came to understand the joke that was going around: How do you know you're Southasian? When someone does research on you! I was ambivalent about the term.

In my own work as a documentary filmmaker, I have always been resolutely local. This is not a coincidence of domicile, but rather a conscious decision, allowing me to define the political against differences, blurring narratives of pan-national, masculinist, progressive film. So, as a habitual discontent, I immediately looked on this expansive term warily, with that niggling feeling that progressive elites who speak of inclusion are often the most benignly exclusionist of all, unable to acknowledge the margin within the margins. I could see the usefulness of the term to a diasporic community – a platform that could bring together people of the region, with shared immigrant and racial experiences, while offering greater political leverage. But I could also see other things. For instance that, reflecting regional hegemonies, Southasia and India were often interchangeable, and not just for non-Southasian onlookers; that Southasian organisations had primarily Indian memberships and thematic pursuits; that while many organisations had progressive or leftist agendas, the more prominent activists and spokespersons were usually male and middle class, unless the organisation focused specifically on women's issues.

Communalism as an issue – a primary focus of many general progressive groups in India, as well – was high on the agenda, so that the Hindutva-identified, wanting to distance themselves from these politics, preferred the rubric 'Indian-American'. Meanwhile, Bangladeshis or Sri Lankans might continue to feel a vague unease. As the Bangladeshi sociologist Naheed Islam put it in her well-known essay, "In the Belly of the Multicultural Beast I am South Asian":

Some of us have remained invisible in the new name, devoured by the multicultural zeal. The ideal of multiculturalism assumes that everyone placed in these categories has equal space and voice within and between them…We are trying to create a single space while ignoring the politics of positioning and our fluid positions within a complicated nexus of gender, class, race, religious, cultural, sexual and national positioning. And who is making this new box for me? … Who does it make visible and who does it negate?

Anti-Orientalist swerve
The term's history is uncertain. It apparently began appearing in Pentagon strategy documents around World War II. Southasia Studies departments in American universities proliferated from the late 1950s, often expanding outwards from India Studies or Ancient Cultures. Perhaps this was an academic counterweight to Cold War India-Pakistan policies of the US, besides being an anti-Orientalist turn.

In the 1980s, economically powerful Southasians began to push for the term as a census-taking category – to increase political visibility but also, as importantly, to set themselves apart from 'Asian', which for most Americans meant people from East and Southeast Asia. In the UK, too, this need to distinguish oneself from the 'other' seems to have given the usage added impetus. Filmmaker Sanjay Kak, whose documentary This Land, My Land, Eng-land! looked at London's brown diaspora of the late 1980s, observes that the term had just begun to gather traction at the time.

However, he also suggests that this had more to do with the fact that Indians were searching for an identity that would set them apart from the racist victimisation of the abusive term 'Paki'. Not quite bhai-bhai, then. For those in the diaspora, the term has as much to do with how they are seen as how they see themselves. But what's in a name for those who live in Southasia? What is its possible cultural power? The historical writer John Keay points out that during Partition, "No tussle over the word 'India' is reported because Jinnah preferred … 'Pakistan'.

Additionally, he was under the impression that neither state would want to adopt the British title of 'India'. He only discovered his mistake after Mountbatten had already acceded to Nehru's demand that his state remain 'India'. Jinnah, according to Mountbatten, 'was absolutely furious when he found out. The use of the word implied a subcontinental primacy.'

That's the truth of the Indian imagination – Subcontinental primacy. Eventually, for most Indians, 'Southasia' mostly invokes the neurotic relationship between India and Pakistan. And often the term Southasia is a platitudinous one, spinning the difference-effacing myth of a 'common heritage'. For instance, peace activists often return from Pakistan saying something along the lines of how, "They're just like us."

But surely, peace and friendship are not about loving those just like us; last time I checked, that was called a Karan Johar film. It bears repeating that the goal has to be about recognising and respecting differences, where Indians learn to recognise the selfhood of Sri Lanka or Nepal or Bhutan, as well as becoming curious and informed about these places. For that, perhaps, we will have to have powerful re-imaginings and iterations of the term, and these probably cannot and should not come from India.

With the limited reference of a filmmaker, I personally encountered the term at home with reference to Film South Asia, the documentary film festival held every two years in Kathmandu (and organised by Himal). True, I was glumly disposed towards it for constantly rejecting my films; but it is also true that the idea very simply re-oriented my gaze, refreshing the possibility that, as rather different and differing neighbours, we can make what we like of the deep links of historical accident, as well as the tenuous and associative links of a contemporary moment. In fact, arriving at this idea through someone else's terms was in itself an important thing.

When I finally did end up at the film festival, last year, I recognised the altered sense of community that it could offer, just by tipping the balance of identity through the minimalist act of who declared the identity. I think this sort of vibrant political re-imagining can happen only through the term, and not under it. We need to come up with a series of shifting performances of this idea – not just take home leftover meanings offered by funding organisations, old colonial histories and contemporary geopolitical imbalances, packaged up neatly in a brown bag.

~ Paromita Vohra is a Bombay-based filmmaker and writer.