The Indian Diaspora Playlist

Bollywood brought the NRI experience into the mainstream (and made millions of dollars doing it). After a spate of NRI focused movies, we had not only another demographic hooked onto Bollywood but also a cultural narrative to discuss the “neither-here-neither-there” feeling that many in the diaspora feel. Although the Bollywood portrayal of the diasporic experience is hardly nuanced and heavy-handed on the “Mera Bharat Mahaan” trope[1], it does represent a group of people who are often ignored in the popular culture of both their home and adopted countries.

Sometimes when I’m in the mood to wallow in my NRI angst I’ve wished that there was a convenient Bollywood playlist that I could access. Unfortunately, although there are playlists for everything under the sun including the oxymoronic “Best of Himesh Reshamiya”, there don’t seem to be too many playlists catered to us. So I decided to put together one of my own. Below are some of my most-played “NRI” songs, from Bollywood and beyond, in no particular order.

1.     Mera Joota Hai Japani – Shree 420 (1955)

 

“Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start” – Maria Von Trapp

Shree 420 has nothing to do with NRIs and is instead about the birth of an independent India, and the rural-urban, modern-old world conflicts that come along with it. Yet the lyrics could be lifted straight from the diary of any Indian student going abroad for the first time with gems like:

            Upar niche, niche upar, leher chale jeevan ki

            High and low, low and high, the waves of life flow

            Nadaan hai jo baithe kinaare, puche raah watan ki

Naïve are those who wait by the shore and only look towards the motherland

           

And of course the iconic opening verse that has become even more relevant in our globalized world:

            Mera joota hai Japani, yeh patlunn Englishtaani

            My shoes are Japanese, these pants are British

            Sar pe lal topi Russi, phir bhi dil hai Hindustani

            There’s a red Russian hat on my head, yet my heart is still Indian

I like this song because it reminds us that these feelings of being lost between two worlds, of missing a home that exists only in our imaginations, is not restricted to just confused desis, but has been felt through the years in lots of different contexts.

The Indian Kid

You’re Indian. You may not carry an Indian passport, you may never have lived there, or even ever set foot in the country, but by virtue of your brown skin, you’re Indian. India to you is the place your parents came from, a small part of the complicated tapestry that you’re dying to illustrate every time someone asks you “where are you from?” But India is more than just a place for you. It is the invisible nametag on your shirt. If your school has students from a hundred countries, you are known as “the Indian kid”. If your school only has kids from a single neighbourhood, you are still known as “the Indian kid”. You are always the “Indian kid”. Never a Hong-Konger or American or whatever else you may be.

You visit sometimes. You eat the Technicolor versions of foods that you’ve only eaten before in grey scale. You politely decline tea (and nevertheless have it forced upon you) in the homes of people with whom you share little more than blood. Your ancestral village (you’ve only just escaped having it as part of your last name) is more alien to you than Diagon Alley, a place that exists only in your bookworm imagination. You finally learn to accept that “going home” isn’t the perfect putting together of puzzle pieces that you had imagined. You console yourself with the thought that even you are not familiar with your homeland; at least it is familiar with you.

Every face is a variation of your own. The first day you join an Indian school, you are unnerved by the profusion of brown faces before you. Later, as you learn to push the boundaries of punctuality, you’re relieved that your teacher cannot immediately point you out in assembly. You begin to count on the brown ocean to embrace you, a shield you never knew you needed. After a couple of years, you begin to pride yourself on your ability to blend in; to temporarily try living without the hyphen that you’ve been carrying along all these years.

You’re not fooling anyone. The hyphen isn’t going anywhere. The first time it happens, you’re at your state’s most famous tourist attraction. As you gaze up at the filigreed stone, at the buxom woman forever contorted into a Bharatanatyam pose, both pride and wonder fill you. “This exquisite art belongs to my state”, you think.

“Madam.” A little boy is hovering around you. He looks a little bit like your second cousin. You turn hesitantly, expecting him to peddle a tourist guidebook that you know is half-price outside. But he has nothing in his eyes except curiosity.  He drops a bombshell. “Which country are you from?”

Which country are you from? “I’m from here! Can’t you see that?” You want to yell.  “I’m from Bangalore,” you say instead, in what you hope is unaccented Kannada. Who knows, you could be wrong on that count too. You sit down on the hot temple steps in a daze. You know you don’t look “exotic” (horrid Orientalist term), never keeping people guessing about your ethnicity. Your hair and eyes are dark, and in matrimonial ad parlance, your skin is a firm “wheatish”. In your eyes, and in the eyes of all the foreigners you’ve ever met, you’ve always been “the Indian kid”. In the eyes of a “real” Indian kid, you are ambiguous.

It happens again and again. The words leave your mouth as Kannada but reach people’s ears as English. You pay local entry fee at tourist sites and watchmen ask you suspiciously where you are from.  Twenty other Indians have just crossed the gate without incident. Conversations invariably switch to English when you enter them.

Sometimes you feel proud. You’re sick of blending in. You’re relieved that such a big part of your identity refuses to hide itself. But mostly you feel weary. Looking, thinking, living differently from everyone else has left you with an ache you never knew you had. And being “the Indian kid” has transformed from burn to balm. You cling to the thought that once you return to India the label that once set you apart will show you where to belong. You come here and realise that everyone, and therefore no one, is “the Indian kid” in India. You shed the nametag you’ve been wearing your entire life and learn to accept a new one – “the foreign kid”.