If we change, who are we then? Oh, and if we don't change?

I grew up in a Tamil household in Tamil Nadu.  At the school that we siblings attended, English was the instructional language, and Tamil was one of the languages that we studied.  So, I grew up with an ability to read, write, and speak in English and Tamil, with a couple of years of exposure to Hindi and Sanskrit too.

Many friends from school were not Tamils.  When we spent time together, we joked and conversed in English.  Rangayya, Manibaba, and Srinivas were Telugu-speakers.  Srikumar and his family conversed in Malayalam.  When Vijay and I fought, we did that too in English, leaving aside our respective backgrounds of Malayalam and Tamil.  

While they all spoke their respective languages, they didn't learn to read and write in Telugu or Malayalam.  After all, the school did not offer those languages as options.  (I am not sure if their parents taught them how to read and write in those languages either.)  In order to satisfy the language requirements, my friends studied Hindi, with the exception of Manibaba who dabbled in Sanskrit.

All of them spoke Tamil, some more fluently than others.  If memory serves me well, none knew how to read and write in Tamil (unless they took Tamil for a couple of years in school.)  With stores and street names and bus routes and many more public services carrying signs in both English and Tamil,  they could easily navigate through the town and the state with the spoken language but were otherwise "illiterate" in Tamil.

More than literacy in their native languages--the mother tongues--I would imagine that these raised questions about identity.  Even though all their formative years were spent in the same industrial township in Tamil Nadu, which is no different from my experience, did they at any time wonder if they were Tamils?  Did they consider Tamil Nadu to be their home, or were Andhra Pradesh and Kerala their homelands?

Such questions did not bother us humans for the longest time because we rarely ever moved from the places where we were born and raised.  Our identities were clearly defined at birth, and continued to be no different all the way through the very end.  Spouses were found within that same group and the identity was reproduced over and over through the generations.

For me, my classmates, and billions of others in the brown world, European colonization changed everything before we were even born.  As Aatish Taseer wrote quoting the Sri Lankan art critic Anada Coomaraswamy:

‘It is hard to realize,’ Coomaraswamy writes in The Dance of Shiva, ‘how completely the continuity of Indian life has been severed. A single generation of English education suffices to break the threads of tradition and to create a nondescript and superficial being deprived of all roots—a sort of intellectual pariah who does not belong to the East or the West.’

My concerns about the usage of the word pariah aside, I wonder now if my friends felt that they belonged neither to Tamil Nadu nor to Kerala or Andhra Pradesh, while fully aware that English was an alien language that had been thrust upon us.

Language and all the related customs and traditions faced yet another challenge as we graduated from high school and college, and moved to completely new surroundings.  Srikumar ended up in the Czech Republic.  Manibaba was working in the Middle East when he passed away.  Rangayya and Srinivas settled down in Maharashtra, where the primary languages are Marathi and Hindi.  I am here in the US.  What has migration done to our respective identities of who we are?

Here in the US, the offspring of Indian immigrants were (are?) referred to as ABCDs--American Born Confused Desis.  The confusion arising from a lack of a clear identity.  Are they Americans?  Indian-Americans?  Tamil-Americans?  Muslim-Americans?  But, isn't it a reality that even the desis in India are confused desis struggling with identity issues?

I have forever believed that it is up to individuals to figure out for themselves who they are--even if they have not migrated across international or domestic borders.  The family and, therefore, the cultural contexts that we are born into are beyond our control.  My Tamil identity is an accident of birth, as much Rangayya's identity as a Telugu was.  Do we want to claim those accidental identities forever?  Are changes to those identities transgressions in life?  Are there other identities that we could explore?

In A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam writes in the English language about characters who are are Tamils in Sri Lanka.  He was born into a Tamil family, but in Sri Lanka.  Like many of us from the Subcontinent, he too grew up with the English language, and speaking with an accent just as we did and do.  He earned his undergrad and doctorate degrees in the US.  How does he think about identity, and how does he square the circle?   In the video that I have embedded here, he talks about migration and identity.  (The talk is in Tamil.)