Dialogic disjunctions: diasporas, debates and “international” students at Tufts

About two years ago, as some elephants on campus might remember, an Indian American student had fervently expressed her anxiety over a “color run” organized by a Tufts fraternity; it was, for her, a blatant cultural appropriation of the festival Holi, and she argued that Hindu students should have been consulted before it.I, a Hindu from India, retorted immediately with an Op-Ed published on Nov. 4, 2013, shunning her response as a right-wing stance of cultural ownership that belied the cultural diversity of India. A largely unproductive, if fiery, group discussion followed, perhaps some settlement was reached, and soon dust settled on the matter.

I have ruminated over the event ever since, and have eventually realized that the terms of the debate had been all wrong.  Both sides needed to realize that the diaspora and the international students had quite different political agendas and that there was a definite disjunction between the two. Indian Americans had the legitimate political goal of preserving their cultural identity, being a minority community in the United States. We Indians were in turn concerned about right-wing Hindu nationalism that has vilified non-Hindu minorities in India for decades. Assuming that all Hindus on campus had the same political agenda had only produced a tower of Babel in which few understood each other, let alone sympathise.  Since this dialogic disjunction between the diaspora and international students has only grown since 2013, it is worth exhuming this incident, reflecting on the roots of the problem, and searching for possible avenues of solution.

Note my insistence on “political agenda” as opposed to “cultural identity.” The idea of “culture,” particularly in its consumerist neoliberal guise, produces objects consumed and enjoyed by all, thereby mystifying political fractures underlying them. Consider Bollywood, mango lassi, samosas, and saris: both Indians and Indian Americans consume and rightly cherish these as parts of their identity. That does not, however, mean that both have the same political ideas about incidents like the color run. This is not to say that culture is apolitical (it is not), but that culture serves different political purposes in different contexts. It is therefore far more useful to interrogate the politics of our practices, instead of getting entangled in intriguing but, in this regard, ultimately fruitless reflections on cultural identity.

And sure enough, it is mainly in the domain of politics that international students regularly find themselves in a rather precarious position. I am hopefully not the only one who remembers that it was only in 2014 that the student government approved an international student representative, with a gesture that is best described as lukewarm. While “non-resident aliens” like myself are accepted as equals in cultural and academic events at Tufts, we are told, implicitly or directly, in political discussions that we, “privileged” students from home countries, can never grasp the problems of the minorities. The myth of the “rich” international student prevails at large, despite a growing number of students, myself included, coming from rather humble backgrounds and receiving full scholarship from Tufts.

There is some truth to this accusation: we really do not have the experiences that minorities face in the United States. But it is equally true that we have our own political agendas to articulate and debates to conduct. For many Indians, these include the Indo-Pakistan Kashmir issue, the question of tribal minorities, or the increasingly totalitarian activities of the current Modi government. Alas, these issues have received negligible attention on the political dialogue on campus, despite there being a well-funded South Asian political forum: why bother with the armchair politics of the rich, privileged, non-resident aliens, who have surely never faced discrimination?

Misconceptions aside, the issue becomes more serious when our political agendas clash at critical points. Why do the same Indian Americans who fight for minority rights in America, for instance, often have nothing but the highest praise for the right-wing Hindu nationalist party in India, a party that has regularly inflicted violence on religious minorities? The answer is that they often see the party as an institution “upholding Hinduism,” a task laudable for the minority in the U.S., but one equally detestable, if not fascist, in a country where Hindus are the majority. It is not merely a matter of perspectives, but one of differential political logics in different countries. This is a classic example of a situation when accepting contextual disjunction is the sole solution to initiate a mutually productive dialogue. Else, groups end up calling each other supremacists or hypocrites, despite both actually having similar agendas of social welfare.

A false sense of the aforementioned “cultural” unity has also made us assume, at best, that a single political group can take care of all these viewpoints, or, at worst, that catering to the political agendas of the diaspora is preferable to discussing issues of international students.  After all, international students are a microscopic minority in this campus- which is unsurprising, since Tufts is after all an American institution.  As a result, we are regularly left with no choice but to surrender to the dominant political paradigm of the country we are non-resident aliens in. There is nothing wrong in this per se, for where would multicultural American politics be practiced if not in America? What has been wrong is the presupposition that one Procrustean bed of political paradigm can do justice to all political agendas from around the world.

The result, naturally, has been increasing antagonism: several of my peers, previously excellent leaders and important political voices, have withdrawn from their activities, causing Tufts considerable loss.  What could have been an enriching, interesting and multifarious dialogue has become a suffocating and checkered battlefield producing virtually no conversation, with outward smiles cloaking hidden smirks and sarcastic jabs. A relentless pressure to practice and support only one line of identity politics from a group with the advantage of numbers has left many of us frustrated and alienated, and remarkably deteriorated the vibrant political environment of South Asian affairs into merely a languorous shadow of its past self.

This is not to argue that diaspora politics is not important, but to stress that focusing exclusively on the minority identity politics in the United States does not do justice to the pressing political issues of those of us from the rest of the world. I merely want to highlight this disjunction, precisely the rift that a mystifying notion of “culture” occludes. A healthy dialogue is possible only when we appreciate, and not dismiss, this difference. Our respective political issues are asymptotic, divergent, or even conflicting. Each issue needs to be treated with distinct seriousness.

Sometimes accepting disjunctions can be ultimately more fruitful than cloaking differences under a false sense of unity. The Holi debate would have been more productive, and Tufts’ South Asian political climate far richer, had we simply accepted our differential agendas and worked towards multiple solutions. If we are to strive for political debates and environments that would make Tufts live up to its claims of internationalism, we must move towards provincializing the contemporary American political logic of minority representation as only one political logic among several other such logics across the world. Unashamedly embracing, respecting and celebrating our conflicting political stances will be a laudable first step.

 

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