The World - Farewell to an India I Hardly Knew - NYTimes.com”

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July 5, 2009

THE WORLD

Farewell to an India I Hardly Knew

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

MUMBAI, India The first thing I ever learned about India was that my parents had chosen to

leave it.

The country was lost to us in America, where I was born. It had to be assembled in my mind,

from the fragments of anecdotes and regular journeys east.

Now, six years after returning to the country my parents left, as I prepare to depart it myself, the

mind goes back to the beginning, to my earliest pictures of it.

India, reflected from afar, was late-night phone calls with the news of death. It was calling back

relatives who could not afford to call you. It was Hindu ceremonies with saffron and Kit Kat bars

on a silver platter.

India, consumed on our visits back, was being fetched from the airport and cooked a meal even in

the dead of night. It was sideways hugs that strove to avoid breast contact. It was the chauvinism

of uncles who asked about my dreams and ignored my sisters.

It was wrong, yet easy, to feel that we did India a favor by coming home. We packed our suitcases

with things they couldnt get for themselves: Jif peanut butter, Hellmanns mayonnaise, Gap

khakis. These imports sketched a subtle hierarchy in which they were the wanting relatives and

we their benefactors.

My cousins in India would sometimes ask if I was Indian or American. I saw that their self-

esteem depended on my answer. American, I would say, because it was the truth, and because I

felt that to say otherwise would be to accept a lower berth in the world.

What it meant to be American was to be free to invent yourself, to belong to a family and a

society in which destiny was believed to be human-made.

I looked around in India and saw everyone in their boxes, not coming fully into their own,

replicating lives lived before. If only they came to America, I told myself, so-and-so would be a
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millionaire entrepreneur; so-and-so would be as confident in her opinions as her husband; so-

and-sos marriage would be more like my parents, with verve and swing-dancing lessons and

bedtime crossword puzzles; so-and-so would study history and literature, not just bankable

practicalities.

I moved to India six years ago in an effort to understand it on my own terms, to render mine

what had until then only belonged to my parents.

India was changing when I arrived and has changed dramatically, viscerally, improbably in these

2,000 days: farms giving way to factories; ultra-cheap cars being built; companies buying out

rivals abroad. But the greatest change I have witnessed is elsewhere. It is in the mind: Indians

now know that they dont have to leave, as my parents left, to have their personal revolutions.

It took me time to see. At first, my old lenses were still in place India the frustrating, difficult

country and so I saw only the things I had ever seen.

But as I traveled the land, the data did not fit the framework. The children of the lower castes

were hoisting themselves up one diploma and training program at a time. The women were

becoming breadwinners through microcredit and decentralized manufacturing. The young people

were finding in their cellphones a first zone of individual identity. The couples were ending

marriages no matter what society thinks, then finding love again. Thevegetarians were

embracing meat and meat-eaters were turning vegetarian, defining themselves by taste and faith,

not caste.

Indians from languorous villages to pulsating cities were making difficult new choices to die other

than where they were born, to pursue vocations not their fathers, to live lives imagined within

their own skulls. And it was addictive, this improbable rush of hope.

The shift is only just beginning. Most Indians still live impossibly grim lives. Trickle down, here

more than most places, is slow. But it is a shift in psychologies, and you rarely meet an Indian

untouched by it.

Grabbing hold of their destinies, these Indians became the unlikely cousins of my own immigrant

parents in America: restless, ambitious, with dreams vivid only to themselves. But my parents

had sought to beat the odds in a bad system, to be statistical flukes that got away.

What has changed since they left is a systemic lifting of the odds for those who stay. It is a

milestone in any nations life when leaving becomes a choice, not a necessity.

My parents watch me from their perch outside Washington, D.C., and marvel at historys sense of

irony: a son who ended up inventing himself in the country they left, who has written of the self-
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inventing swagger of a rising generation of Indians, in a country where self was once a vulgar

word.

At times, my mother wonders if they should have remained, should have waited for their own

countrys revolution instead of crashing anothers. And as I leave India now I can only wonder

how history would have turned out if the ocean of change had come a generation earlier.

Because it came between their generation and mine, the premise of our family story has been

pulled out from beneath us. We are American citizens now, my family, and proudly so. But we

must face that we are Americans because of a choice prompted by truths that history has undone.

They were true at the choices making; in India, I saw their truth boil slowly away.

They dont crave our mayonnaise and khakis anymore. They no longer angrily berate America,

because they are too busy building their own country. Indian accents are now cooler than British

ones. No one asks if I feel Indian or American. How delicious to see that unconcern. How

fortunate to live in a land you neednt leave to become your fullest possible self.

And how wondrous, in this time of revolutions, to have had my own here.

I grew up in America defining myself by the soil under my feet, not by the blood in my veins. The

soil I shared with everyone else; the blood made me unbearably different. Before I loved India, I

loathed it. But that feeling seems now like a relic from a buried past.

I leave now on the journeys next stretch, with sadness and with joy, humbled by India, grateful

to have been at the revolution and to have known the revolutions within.

Copyright 2009The New York Times Company

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The World - Farewell to an India I Hardly Knew - NYTimes.com”