India, Transplanted

The fascination, the curiosity, the unease 8212; it works both ways. If Indians Abroad appear to yearn for constant updates from South Asia, Indian Indians are ambivalent. They thrill in the successes notched up by Indians Abroad. But this joy is interleaved with resentment. Why did they leave? What are they willing to contribute in return for the dual citizenship they seek and the NRI deposit schemes they exploit? How exactly are they honouring old allegiances besides showing up so garishly in their Bharat Army attire for the India XI8217;s away matches?

Answers have been provided in bits and spurts in fiction from the Indian diaspora. At times the postcards have been heavy with a strident disconnect 8212; in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni8217;s pulpy fairytales, where flight from India could well be a fall through the trapdoor to a better future; in Bharati Mukherjee8217;s evocations of exile, where running hot water seems to signify an abundance of human rights. More often the narratives have been masterfully, if discomfortingly, nuanced 8212; for instance, in Jhumpa Lahiri8217;s short stories where a single biscuit dipped in milky tea summons visions of home, visible but always tantalising out of reach like those black threads our eyes chase on long, tiring days. And as it happens, in Transplanted Man, a novel by Sanjay Nigam out last summer, which provides the most illuminating portrayal of the Indian Abroad.

8220;India is too Indian for me,8221; says his Sonny Seth, a doctor in a state-of-the-art medical facility in New York City8217;s Little India. Fragments of India invade every nook and cranny of his life. The American-Born-No-Longer-Confused Desis among his fellow staffers 8212; some practising cutting-edge surgery, others spewing new age mantras to augment familiar psychotherapy theory. Tiger8217;s, the neighbourhood hub with an immigrant from Uganda serving authentic masala fare. Manny, an attendant of Indian origin from Trinidad, using coordinates picked up from Sholay to nurture travel plans to a subcontinent he knows nothing else of. In the regular stream of patients from India, among them cynical politicians and paunchy filmstars.

But Sonny, true to his thirtysomething status, is confused, he wants to belong, he wants a little more of India. Manny is counting up his savings, he8217;s off to India, plotting 8220;yeh dosti8221; style rides across the land. Why don8217;t you too try India, suggests the politician-patient, the transplanted man of the title. No, says Sonny, India is too Indian for me. Instead, he espies comfort in the Trinidad Manny8217;s left behind, in its Afro-Asiatic cosmopolitanism, in the sanitised Indianness on offer.

Get used to India Lite. Nigam hints that the Indian Abroad may seek the accessories of Indianness, but the India he desires has little to do with geography. Just as the transplanted man is a jigsaw puzzle of organs acquired from India8217;s various states 8212; with the blood from Ladakh to Kanyakumari flowing through his veins giving his electoral campaigns a snappy nationalist pitch 8212; Indians Abroad have transplanted chunks of India in their new homes. They strive for a balance: not too little India, not too much either.

Look. Hindi films are screened in Bangkok and Berbice 8212; with subtitles, without the prospect of stepping out of reel fantasies into the glaring inequalities of the real India. India XI are on tour throughout the year, making it so easy for South Africans of Indian origin with nary a relative in India to zip across to Harare, the Tricolour in hand to provide a sense of national allegiance for folks still buffered from their adopted lands by memories of apartheid. And oh, the consolations of Oriental spirituality 8212; why leg it to ashrams in the Himalayas and risk rickety busrides and bouts of diarrhoea when one-time oncologists can be summoned for crash courses in the holistic joys of Ayurveda. As for the scholarship on the land left behind, American academe ensures tenures for the best and the brightest, gathers the rest for periodic seminars.

Indian writers based abroad are profiling the new Indian Abroad, at ease with his ethnicity, demanding chicken tikkas and sequined kurtas in neighbourhood alleys, but distancing himself from the heat and dust of his country of origin. It8217;s a theme Lahiri promises to return to this September with The Namesake, her first novel about a second-generation Indian-American trying to understand his heritage. It8217;s troubling but it8217;s informative.