The Anthropology Song

She must make her teachers proud.

Dissertation writing year

This it it. The crunch year. Writing, trying to make sense of it all. Hoping my committee likes it. Trying to apply for jobs at the same time. Realizing that thousands of fellow anthropologists are applying for the same jobs, all over the country. Some of them might even have been on the market a few years. Most of them will have more pubs than me. I break out into a sweat thinking about reviewer comments, waking up at night screaming, “I DID proofread it! I do not write like an undergraduate!”

I really want to finish in a year, so I struggle to write as well as I can, as fast as I can. Sometimes, though, my mind refuses to cooperate, when exhaustion sets in. I’m teaching half-time, and sometimes I catch myself thinking that I have better things to do than teach. When I do that, I am horrified, because I love to teach. It’s just that, right now, it seems like teaching takes away from precious writing time. After all, I could be spending that time in front of a computer, staring blankly at the screen and pretending there’s such a thing as a Muse of dissertation-writing. You know there’s no muse, right? There’s only junk food. This is how it works. Stress-eat as much as you can. Close your eyes and go into a junk-food induced coma. Wake up, and notice your dissertation is already written! Wake up, and stare blankly at your computer screen. Stress-eat as much as you can. Close your eyes and go into a junk-food induced coma. Wake up, and notice your dissertation is already written! Wake up, and stare blankly at your computer screen. And so on.

It’s not easy, being a grad student. It’s not that cushy life that other people think it is. The brain gets tired, from constant, constant use, much of it involving new and exciting methods of procrastination (like blogging about writing instead of writing). And all the years of studying, all the years of work, seem to be crystallized into this one year, this year I want to be perfect. This is it. The writing year. The moment when I have to pull it all together, and stop discussing my dissertation over coffee, lunch, or beer. Instead, I put my ideas down on paper, where, as written words are wont to do, they take on a life of their own. Suddenly, thoughts appear on paper seemingly before they appear in my head. My research takes new directions in analysis. I sound intelligent! I make no sense! I print out my chapters and hold them close to me, murmuring to them, “my baby”. This is mine, all mine. I have loved, nurtured, humored, bullied it into existence. I growl and snap at people who take me away from it. I refuse to share. Except with my committee, those privileged people who get to participate in the rituals surrounding the birthing of this baby. Or else.

As rites of passage go, these are doozies. Starting with the Great Anthropological Hazing Ritual (fieldwork), and moving on the Rite of Incorporation (writing)…most initiates fall by the wayside, altered states of consciousness not being enough for them to see the Spirit of Diploma hovering fuzzily on the sidelines, just waiting for them to cross those final lines. I worry that I will be one of those initiates, and drive myself harder, as fast as I can go. Perhaps, I think, I can get this finished before I burn out. I enter the Twilight of Writing Zone. Where nothing else matters. Where all you think about is what you are writing. Where politeness requires mental effort, and seems like a waste of time. Where your partner says “good morning”, and you stare at them blankly, taking a moment to remember who they are. Strewn with rejected ideas, the Zone is a wide open desert, tumbleweeds lazily trundling across its surface. The heat is intense. You look for the source of it…and find it. A large, giant, Burnout, always threatening, sometimes enveloping. Its imminence is searing. The secret is, it can be quenched with a cold beer and a weekend of some serious R & R.

Then again, everytime I finish a chapter, I burn out. Then I start writing again, and you know what? I enjoy it. My work is interesting. My data is fun. At least, I think so. My committee seems to think so, or they haven’t said anything to the contrary yet, although there’s plenty of time for that.

But this is it. What I’ve been working toward all these years. So I take a deep breath, remember to rest my brain ever so often, and onward ho! I turn my head to smile at all my fellow initiates, these ABDs, these Kings and Queens of the Keyboard. The Spirit of Diploma shines clearer ahead with each step we take. I feel warm with togetherness and fellow-feeling, reach out my hand to my companions in the age set… and someone breaks it. The Spirit of Competition is strong in job-seeking year.

Oh well. Back to work. Enough procrastination.

The Right to be a Citizen

Citizenship is a funny thing. It is an artificially created membership in an artificially created community, and yet inflected with deep emotion. One’s passport is just a piece of paper, and yet it is a symbol of privileged membership in an imagined community – a symbol of belonging.

There are two aspects to citizenship that I want to discuss here, both in terms of the non-resident citizen. The first is legal and the second, emotional.

By legal, I am referring to the laws of the nation that control whether or not non-resident citizens can participate fully in their national life. The biggest issue at hand is the right to vote. Non-resident citizens retain the right to vote, but not the means. You cannot go to your nearest consulate and vote, India has no provisions for absentee ballots, and the reason offered, when shaved of doublespeak, is that it’s too much of a bother. Being resident outside India means that your name cannot be on the electoral roll, except through accident or oversight. If your name is not on the rolls, you don’t vote – even if you have a permanent address in India.

Why deny Indian citizens their right to vote? It can’t possibly be legal, and it’s not all that inconvenient. Other countries do it. When the US elections took place, my husband, who is a US citizen, was in India with me. He wrote to the county where he was registered, gave them his India address, and got an absentee ballot. How hard is that? We’re supposed to be a growing technological superpower. We supply some of the best tech brains to the rest of the world! This should be a simple thing.

Of course, our money is good enough for everyone. The Hindu writes that remittances by NRIs amount to almost $25 billion. That’s just remittances – I don’t know if it includes other investments. That doesn’t include the money brought in person, or sent through someone else. NRI investments in the country are encouraged. I’ve never heard a single person say it was too much bother to set up systems for NRIs to send their money home, or to invest it in the Indian economy.

The emotional issue is harder to resolve. Indians in India often talk about NRIs as though they were stupid, or second-class citizens, or both, and say things like “You don’t know anything. You don’t know what it’s like in India”, which is sort of a stupid thing to say if the person is a recent, adult NRI. Unless the NRI in question is famous, in which case they will be proudly claimed even if they are about as Indian as John Travolta, and their ancestors left India two hundred years ago.

NRIs – especially those of us who are recent migrants – are emotionally committed to India in a way that people who have not lived outside India will never understand. Ask your family NRI why they left. Your answers will vary – better life, better education, more opportunity, so they can help their families at home. Ask them if it was an easy decision. I’m pretty sure that they will say no. Ask them if their move entailed major sacrifices. Most likely, they will all say yes. Ask them if there is even one day when they do not think of home, if they ever have moments when homesickness hits them like a punch in the stomach, when the guilt of leaving home overwhelms them until they have to focus to breathe. They will all say yes.

Life is hard outside India. Very hard. We have to work very hard, because we have everything to lose. We remember home with a desperate fondness that is in no way reduced because we chose to leave. If anything, it is heightened by our knowledge that it was our choice – a guilt that increases everytime a parent is sick, a friend gets married, a cousin has a baby, and we can’t go home.

We live with our choices because we have to, because we made them, and because we built our lives around them. This doesn’t mean we don’t take joy in our lives. But it also doesn’t mean that we lose our legal statuses as Indians, that we cannot vote, that we can be told that we are no longer Indians and have no say in the family or nation because we left the country. It does not mean that we have lost the right to be Indian, because being Indian is not a matter of where you live or what color the piece of paper you hold is. It’s a matter of being Indian in your heart.

Of Love, Culture, and Equality

I’ve been following, with great interest, comments from India on the Delhi High Court’s decision on Section 377. As you may know, the Court decided to decriminalize homosexuality and dropped it from the list of things Section 377 could cover. Read the judgment here. I speak now as an Indian, as a person with the benefit of living in two nations, as a professional student of culture whose area of specialization is India, and as a very proud ally and friend.

There is a lot of comment, of course, from people stating that homosexuality is against “our culture”, that this is “perversion” from Western culture, etc, etc. As Barkha Dutt wrote in today’s Hindustan Times, religious leaders are, for once, completely united in their disapprobation of the High Court’s decision. They suggest, very strongly, that “our” very moral fiber is threatened by this threat to “our culture”.

There are a number of issues here that need to be interrogated. The first, and most important, is the issue of constitutionality. As Shohini Ghosh writes, the HC judgment was a milestone in upholding the constitutional rights of Indian citizens:

“Arguing that Section 377 is violative of Articles 21 (right to life and personal liberty), Article 14 (equality before law and equal protection from law) and Article 15 (prohibiting discrimination on several grounds including sex), the judgement holds that if there is one “constitutional tenet” that can be considered an “underlying theme” of the Indian Constitution, it is “inclusiveness”.”

The fact is that we, as Indian citizens, have these rights. They are our fundamental rights, constitutionally guaranteed. These are our freedoms. We cannot have them taken away. We are a free nation – which means more than sovereignty. It means that we, as citizens, are free. Two (or more) consenting adults must be free to do what they please in their bedroom. How can the law legislate how you have sex? As Vir Sanghvi eloquently says, the regulation of private lives and relationships is not the business of the law.

The second issue is that of religion, and the place of religion in a secular society. Those who wish to illegalize homosexuality and deny gay rights in the name of religion forget that religions do not – and should not – legislate in a secular society. Article 15 of the Indian Constitution states that “the State shall not discriminate against any citizen on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth, or any of them.” Article 25 guarantees freedom of conscience and the freedom to practice and profess religion as we desire.

This means that the State cannot prohibit people from practicing their religions as they see fit, or not practicing them at all, as the case may be. Religious institutions, by the same coin, have the freedom to denounce homosexuality within their religion, to those who practice it, and are free to refuse to marry gay people. The State, being a sovereign, secular entity, is not. Two consenting adults, under our Constitution, have the right to have sex as they please, and have the right to marriage under law. Those who choose not to follow religious edicts cannot be legislated by those edicts, or laws influenced by those edicts, in a secular nation. It is unconstitutional and illegal. Sanghvi puts it out there: “I have some sympathy for the religious leaders who oppose homosexuality (well, okay, not a lot of sympathy actually!) but their writ extends only to those of their followers who choose to listen to them. No pandit, no padre, and no maulvi has the right to tell me how to live my life if I don’t want him to.”

The third issue is that of “culture”. People who speak of “our culture” are presenting an argument that is simplistic and unthinking. As a nation of over a billion people, hundreds of languages and dialects, scores of religions and sects, diverse regions and affiliations, it is ridiculous to talk about “our culture”. Is a culture really created by virtue of somehow being restrained within artificially created national borders? (Set up by the British, I might add). Indian culture is not a monolithic, homogeneous phenomenon. It is vibrant, dynamic, and diverse, and for every group of people who relate to each other as part of the same group, there is a shared culture or subculture. I certainly don’t share the cultural element of bigotry with any bigot I know. I refuse to be part of their culture, and I will have a whole lot of intelligent Indians standing with me.

Even if we accept this senseless and decidedly unintellectual argument, that means that gay culture, not being part of “our culture”, is its own culture. And gay people are certainly in the minority in India, or we wouldn’t be having this debate. In that case, Article 29 of our Constitution (which all Indians do share in common) protects the interests of minorities, and states that “any section of the citizens residing in the territory of India or any part thereof having a distinct language, script or culture of its own shall have the right to conserve the same”. Which brings us back to the constitutionality argument.

To the people who complain about this being something brought in from Western culture, I really don’t have anything to say beyond: pull your heads out of the sand – these issues are being debated in “Western” countries as well, with the same bellicose and jingoistic arguments.

The final issue I want to deal with has not been discussed very much in public comment, but goes right to the heart of the matter. So to speak. What is really at stake here? It is the right to love whom you please. If you put all our constitutional freedoms together, two consenting adults have the right, under law, to love each other as they please. However, time and time again this right is taken away from people in India. Inter-caste or inter-religious couples are killed, brutalized, ostracized, for the sin of daring to love each other. People from the same caste or class groups, who otherwise would have been perfectly acceptable spouses, are not allowed to marry each other if they commit the solecism of loving each other first. “Our culture”, which produces wildly unbelievable romantic movies as a matter of course, which prides itself on traditions of love between our epic heroes and heroines, has no room for love in reality. “Our culture” demands obedience from its children, and love, not being the result of “our culture’s” decisions, is above all disobedient, and thereby disrespectful. There is no love for love in this version of Indian culture, not even for straight couples.

Whatever your personal opinion, this is a matter of law. Whether you are gay, straight, or bisexual, transgendered, transsexual or queer, your rights are protected by the Indian Constitution. We must stand up together for those rights as a matter of principle, to recognize that those freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution were hard-won by our parents and our grandparents, through jail terms, through deprivation, at the point of a cannon, through death. We must stand up for those freedoms, even if we don’t, personally, agree with their consequences. Because they protect all of us. And if we cannot, then we must at least stand up for love.