(no subject)

[raven]

I am having a lot of thoughts & feelings tonight about India, and being Indian, and how I often worry I’m not very good at it. Partly it’s because the BBC are doing a wonderful adaptation of A Suitable Boy, which naturally drove me to reread the entire book in a week and a half, and partly because it’s just that time again. (Every so often, one must Remember Mother Bharat!! I’m starting to sound like Amit Chatterji.) And partly because it is about to be Independence Day again, and my father taught me the words from Nehru’s speech from when I was very young. At the midnight hour, while the world sleeps, India shall awake to life and freedom - and perhaps I had them even younger than most Indian children do, because I had English earlier? And there are plenty of adult arguments to be had about how much Nehru's conception of India has survived, and if it has, if it will survive Modi, and all the rest of it. And I feel like I've thought, and written, all of this before. India has to be an idea, not a religion or a language or a culture or a geography. We aspire to it as well as embody it. And I've definitely written the rest of it before, about Partition and colonialism and all that history which is right under the skin. (I don't think that we can let whiteness and colonisation define us - there's more to us than what we are not - but that's got to be part of it, hasn't it? You can't love your country, you can only fucking carry it.)

What makes this go round different, I guess, is my dad. He's the only Indian whose opinion on my Indian-ness has ever really mattered to me, and he's no longer with me. He’s still living, of course, but in a real sense I'm doing this alone now. I will never be in India with him again; I'll never see it again through his eyes. And if India is an idea we each have our own version of it and mine is the one that he wanted me to have. India shall awake to life and freedom! India in the capital city and the small towns; India in Roorki and Lutyens' Delhi and long train journeys across half a continent. India in the steel cups and the dust. It's my dad who told me that I write short stories about the small details of life, and so did RK Narayan and Premchand. I speak to him every day but he's not the same person as he was before the covid and the stroke. He will never be again, and I miss him terribly.

Comments

[raven]

Thank you. <3