Arguably, the South
Asian explosion began with Arundhati Roy winning the Booker Prize
for her novel, The God of Small Things in 1998. However,
given the intellectual aspirations of the average hormonally-charged
ninth grader, the novel made a small dent in my friends’ larger
understanding of South Asian culture. I was still that kid whose
parents were from a faraway country, a place where there was a distinct
possibility that people lived in clay huts and female slave trafficking
was the largest contributor to the GNP.
It was as if the kids at Carlisle were searching
for some pure, exciting conception of South Asian culture that even
Arundhati Roy had begun to doubt the existence of. After all, what
was The God of Small Things if not a testament to a hybridist
culture in her native Kerala, India? One of her main characters,
Baby Kochamma, was an avid fan of American soap operas, her protagonist
Rahel went to graduate school in Boston and married a man named
Larry and her philandering brother Chako was an Oxford-educated
Communist. This family was the epitome of “east meets west,”
a direct product of globalization. Despite this thematic cultural
fusion that was occurring within South Asian literature, I continued
explaining the concept of arranged marriage, the cosmopolitan nature
of Lahore and the Desi obsession with education to my classmates
at Carlisle.
I was so used to being “different”
at Carlisle, that when I got to college, I was amazed at how much
the other kids already knew. I found that I no longer had to explain
South Asian culture in such great depth to them. No one asked about
whether horses were the main source of transportation in Pakistan.
They loved naan and chicken makhni, and their
best friends in high school had been South Asians with strict parents,
who wanted their child to conquer the world (by becoming a doctor,
no less).
Granted, I was in college now—at a huge
state university in North Carolina, an institution that reflected
the larger cultural shift that had occurred in American culture
as well. While the mid-1990s had been an era of the “Latin
Explosion” with J.Lo bursting onto the scene with Selena
and Ricky Martin living “la vida loca,” the early 2000s
was finally Desi culture’s time to shine. South Asian culture
was the new Paris Hilton, the “It” culture so-to-speak.
Cultural icon Madonna painted elaborate, shaadi-worthy
mehndi on her hands in her “Frozen” video,
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies won the Pulitzer
and Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding was nominated for
a Golden Globe.
South Asian culture has finally integrated itself
into mainstream popular culture. And the moment I realized this
was when the television show ER cast its first Indian doctor,
Parminder Nagra, as Dr. Neela Rasgotra, beyond the role of a mere
extra. When she was made series regular and given hefty plot lines
like a complicated love life, it was almost symbolic for me—I
had graduated high school already, but it was as if all of those
Carlisle kids were finally acknowledging that being Pakistani or
Indian was not that exotic or extremely different but something
that even Madonna and Michael Crichton tried to integrate into mainstream
pop culture.
Although the American obsession with South Asia
may be a temporary cultural fad that will go out of style like Beanie
Babies, boy bands and leggings, the lasting effects of hybridity
remain. People don’t usually ask me to explain “what
it’s like over there” anymore because they have realized
that it’s actually pretty similar due to globalization, the
Internet and MTV Asia. With Aishwarya Rai as the new cover girl
of L’Oreal, South Asia is no longer inaccessible and exotically
different as it once was.
Now as a medical student at the Medical University
of Ohio, I am no longer a person’s “first Desi friend!”
Even the folks at Carlisle School consider South Asian students
a dime a dozen. Or at least one can hope.
Ultimately though, even though mehndi,
bhangra and saris could be a mere cultural fad in the ever-capricious
world of pop culture, I realize that when someone asked me to explain
my “Pakistani culture” in reality, it didn’t even
exist in the pure sense of the word.
What did Pakistani even mean anymore? Pakistani-American?
Pakistani-born? An inhabitant of Rawalpindi?
Our cultural fads have seeped into the national
(as well as the Material Girl’s) consciousness, but by now,
we have already negotiated who we are as Americans and
South Asians. After all, I find that I can no longer adequately
describe what the culture is like back in the homeland—having
spent two weeks every three years there. I can, though, describe
the complicated politics of being an ABCD – the assimilating,
the hybridizing and the negotiating we have to do in order to straddle
both worlds or leave one behind. Although the cultural practices
of dholki parties, spicy foods and salwar kameez
remain the same, the cultural ideologies do not. Hopefully,
though, the Ginny Clays of the world will realize that I am not
the sole ambassador of an entire nation and that an individual person
can never represent or adequately explain the complexities of an
ever-fluctuating culture.
Mariam Qureshi just graduated with a degree
in English Lit from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
She is currently a first year medical student at the Medical University
of Ohio, where she hopes she will still find the time to analyze
contemporary Desi culture. Mariam can be reached at mariamqureshi1029@hotmail.com.
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