A Question Of Identity

Where are you from?

It’s a question most of us have been asked sometime or the other. I used to encounter it often, though it’s been a while since I last heard it. Americans seem to find the question offensive, or politically incorrect at the very least. In a society made up of disparate immigrant groups desperately trying to homogenize and blend in, that’s hardly surprising. Perhaps probing questions about ethnic or national origins in this country bring back memories of an ugly past, or worse, ugly prejudices.

Indians in India, however, are not too big on political correctness, thankfully, and don’t make a big deal out of this innocent question. It’s regarded as just another way to familiarize yourself with a stranger.
And so, over the years, especially since I migrated to the south of the country sixteen years ago, I have been bombarded with the question. Which is not to say that I dislike being asked. It’s just that I tend to get more than the usual share of enquiries. I have always wondered why.

But it is the answer to the question that’s so difficult to provide sometimes. And it is equally difficult to explain this predicament to those who are rooted in the lands of their ancestors, who can identify with a place they can truly call ‘home’.

So where am I from anyway?

Well, for starters, I’m Bengali.
Mention that, and you are immediately accosted with “Ki dada, roshogolla khabo?”, or “ami tomake bhalobashi”, or “are you happy now that Ganguly is back in the team?” or something to that effect. You get the gist. Of course, it’s all well-intentioned and in good fun and all that, but it does get a bit annoying after a while.

Especially since I’ve never lived in Bengal. The place is as alien to me as Jhumritalayia is to you. I love visiting Kolkata for its famed ‘character’ (it’s an acquired taste, apparently) but it’s not home, never will be.

I was born and grew up in Shillong, in north-eastern India. Spent sixteen years there. Primary school, high school, friends, favourite teachers, school plays, cricket matches on sunny Sunday afternoons, first girlfriend, first cigarette with friends in a back alley, the first sip of beer, you know, the formative years. Memories, good and bad, the ability to close my eyes even now and feel the warmth of the kitchen on a cold winter night, nostaligia, the components that make up a feeling of home, they’re all there.

But is Shillong home? Hardly.

For all the nostalgia and the longing, Shillong was a hostile place. Deep ethnic schisms existed beneath the veneer of quaint small-town happiness. Tribal vs ‘non-tribal’ flare-ups were common and just accepted as a fact of life. A few ‘contained’ acts of violence would take place, curfew would be clamped, schools and offices would close. After a few weeks, things would just get back to normal, as if nothing ever happened. Problems would be swept under the carpet by the government, where they would continue to smoulder till the next flare-up.
In a sense, I never really belonged there. Very few, if any, of my friends still remain there. My family moved out years ago. And the last time I visited was five years back on a three-day trip. If there’s anything that reminds you with a stark suddenness how much things have changed, it’s an experience of living in a hotel in your own home-town. But I’ll go back for sure…if only to show my daughter where daddy went to school and the alley where he used to bowl his legendary beamers to terrified neighborhood kids every evening.

The move to Karnataka was as sudden as it was permanent. Not that I knew it at that time.
It’s been sixteen years…sixteen years! Does that make me an honorary Kannadiga? Not till you speak the language, you say. And as shameful as it sounds, I still don’t. Heck, sixteen years in Shillong didn’t help me learn Khasi either. My wife speaks five languages. I was cut out for two. And that’s just the way it is.

And so it goes for thousands of Bongs like me, who trace their roots back to the erstwhile East Bengal, today’s Bangladesh. Displaced. Migrants. Not at home in West Bengal, and not at home in our adopted homeland of north-east India. We speak Sylheti, Dhakaiya…alien tongues with alien cultures in Tagore’s Bengal.
Our previous generation faced the horrors of Partition, and we are reaping the benefits of their struggle. Ours is the story of a migration that will perhaps be told by an obscure anthropologist in an equally obscure book three generations later.

Today many of us have turned into global citizens, and we put on a show of calculated disdain for ethnic, religious and even national boundaries. But deep within us, we long for a place called home, where we still belong and where we’ll always be welcomed with open arms. 

Will my daughter, with her American passport, growing up in an ever shrinking world, feel the same way and understand me twenty years down the line? Or will she consider me a dinosaur, a relic unable to shake off his baggage from another era?

~ by Shubho on February 26, 2007.