The Karma of Brown Folk
By Vijay Prashad '89, University of Minnesota Press, 2000,
248 pp., 21 b/w photos, $24.95.
The Color of a Myth
By Zayn Kassam
In his incisive study titled The Karma of Brown Folk, Vijay Prashad takes a cue from W.E.B. Du Bois's famous question: "How does it feel to be a problem?" and asks an intriguing question of his own: "How does it feel to be a solution?"
Asked of brown folk--South Asian Americans, otherwise dubbed "desis"--this is a disturbing question. It is disturbing because the likes of Thomas Sowell and Dinesh D'Souza have compared the successes of immigrant South Asians to the failures of black folk, for if the former, who have only been here for a few generations, can make it, then why not African Americans? Indeed, for Prashad, "this question asks us brown folk how we can live with ourselves as we are pledged and sometimes, in an act of bad faith, pledge ourselves, as a weapon against black folk."
Why should anyone but a South Asian read this book, concerned as it is with the image of South Asians in America?
The most compelling argument to be offered for taking the time to absorb and digest this work lies in its ability to lay bare the fantasy constructions of India and South Asians offered by those who, on the one hand, see in India a spiritual culture that offers a panacea to the ills of materialism and, on the other, see in South Asians the "right" kind of immigrant who is willing to work hard, remain apolitical, and demonstrate a drive to succeed (and who are abetted in these constructions by many South Asians themselves).
Rather, the reality remains, as Prashad's searing analysis of "godmen" such as Deepak Chopra reveals, that while an appeal to India's deeply spiritual philosophies offers an escapist solution to the meaninglessness spawned by consumerist excesses, it ignores both the far-reaching structural poverty of the homeland (India) and the inescapable social discontent experienced by large sectors of the population right here.
Further, in exhorting individuals to look inside themselves and discover the essence within, philosophies such as Chopra's locate responsibility for happiness within the individual, thereby isolating the person from social interaction and engagement, or, in other words, from creating a platform of solidarity to fight against the systemic social inequities that chain the poor and the working classes into a life of struggle and unequal access to services such as health care. While idealizing the poor of India as contented folk (because they are spiritual), a trivialization that is unconscionable, Chopra lauds, as the title of one of his books suggests, the creation of affluence, without stopping to ask at whose expense affluence is created.
But if the idealization of India as a spiritual culture whose philosophies provide a panacea for Western ills is a fallacy that ignores the social realities found in India, equally false is the construction of the South Asian American as the ideal immigrant who has made it good in America, as opposed to the African American who has been here far longer--and who must therefore be lazy or addicted to welfare. This is utter nonsense, argues Prashad.
Such a view ignores two critical realities. First, U.S. immigration policy was very carefully constructed so as to bring in the cream of the techno-crop of South Asians from their countries of origin (as diverse as Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and the Caribbean), thereby draining their own countries from reaping the benefit of their social and educational investment in these immigrants. And second, the history of South Asian settlement in America is replete with incidents of racism, class struggle and unfavorable immigration policies that saw South Asian immigrants as workers valuable for their labor but not as members of families who wished to accompany them. Hardly a model minority, this is rather a very carefully selected minority consonant with the labor needs identified by U.S. authorities.
How possibly could African Americans as a whole expect to compare favorably with such a selection? To make his point, Prashad provides the following statistic: between 1966 and 1977, roughly 20,000 scientists (Ph.D.), 40,000 engineers and 25,000 medical doctors, altogether comprising 83% of South Asian immigrants, were allowed to enter the United States. No wonder then, that many assume South Asians are "genetically" predisposed to be scientists and doctors.
Since the 1980s, techno-immigrants no longer dominate the scene as families of earlier immigrants join them and comprise the largest component of South Asian migrants, along with many who came as sponsored relatives and have joined the ranks of the working class in the U.S. Thus, on the one hand, while South Asian Americans are still lauded as the model minority due in part to their techno-status, on the other hand, the working class realities of many South Asians, such as the fact that 50% of New York taxi drivers are South Asians, has led to incidents of racism and a struggle to make a living that give the lie to the myth of the "model minority who has made it."
The organized protests of these taxi drivers along a broad coalition of support against Mayor Giuliani's anti-liberal measures in 1998 also gives the lie to the construction of the South Asian American as an apolitical creature. Contrary to both external and internal perceptions that South Asians are purely a spiritual and disengaged lot, Prashad argues that political engagement is very much part of the history of South Asians, who, as one obvious instance, campaigned against British colonialism in the 20th century.
Prashad also turns his lens onto the desi search for an authentic cultural identity, and its turn toward a "Yankee Hindutva" ideology and practice. This search is sparked by the anxieties caused by civil society in the U.S. and the experience of racism, as well as the awareness that desis have an ancestral past, further reinforced by family ties to South Asia.
This section of the book is a thought-provoking analysis of trends that cause deep concern to the author, and rightly so, given the turn to the homeland as the repository of authentic culture in the modern context. If such a turn is accompanied by a perpetuation of gender inequities, a turn to communalism, an ideology espoused by the contemporaneous Hindu right in India (articulated in the ideological Hindu solidarity platform of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, whose political arm is the Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP), then it casts a gloomy shadow over the need for all South Asians in America to build networks of support across race, class and gender boundaries and among the disenfranchised so as to create a more equitable civil society in the U.S. Which is our home, after all.
Zayn Kassam is assistant professor of religious studies at Pomona College.
