"You want self-knowledge? You should come to America. Just as the Mahatma had to go to jail and sit behind bars to write his autobiography. Or as Nehru had to go to England to discover India. Things are clear only when looked at from distance."
Annayya, in Ramanujan's short story, is learning in what ways he is Indian - as he sits in a library in Chicago! Many other commentators and writers have written about the ways in which nationalism is born in exile or away from home.
We have not remained immune to that impulse but, at the same time, we have wanted to ask ourselves; what does it mean to be "Indian"? how do we introduce history and geography into that question?
We went to Trinidad to find out what it meant for others to be "Indian". We were taking steps in the opposite direction from V.S. Naipaul. The Trinidadian-Indian writer had gone to India to examine his roots. We were only retracing the journey of those who had come from India to Trinidad as indentured laborers.
But, we were also moving in the opposite direction from Naipaul in another sense. Whereas Naipaul discovered an "area of darkness" and confronted the neuroses, real or projected, of a long colonized people, what we encountered in Trinidad was a populace interested in re-inventing their past in a variety of ways.
We were involved in many dialogues, some of them even difficult, about what it meant to be "Indians". And not.
"To theorize, one leaves home," James Clifford has written. This video, a record of our travels and our seeking, is both a theoretical and aesthetic attempt. It journeys into a difficult zone marked by acceptances and refusals, where we begin to see more clearly the contestations that are defining lives in the Indian diaspora.
In Ramanujan's story, the protagonist Annayya is stopped short by the American anthropologists discovery of his own family. Our video attempts to engage in a self-anthropology in the beginning-step of documenting the Indians of the diaspora.
pure chutney was made possible by: University of Miami, School of Communication Research Grants, University of Miami, General Research Grant University of Miami, Max Orovitz Summer Research Grant
individual contributors: vibhas madan, celine azizkhan, gyan prakash, sanjay joshi, sanjam ahluwalia, sanjay kalra, nandini ooman, ali mir.
