Of Diaspora and its Disontents

Hola Global Jigsawers,

What a week it’s been. I am referring, of course, to the war in Ukraine. For those who remain bewildered by India’s stance on the Russian aggression I suggest reading Tanvi Madan’s excellent tweet threat on the issue. It succinctly unpicks how India is caught between a rock and a hard place and how its national interest is seen as best served by maintaining its strategic autonomy. This shouldn’t be read as condoning Russia’s actions, even as it stops from condemning it outright. Yes, a lot of diplomatic juggling is involved.

At the Global Jigsaw we continue to talk about cross-border culture. Today’s newsletter is a guest post by Sukhdev Sandhu, who is a Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.

I have known him since my days at university in the U.K. and have never ceased to be gob smacked by how his mind ranges almost vertiginously.

He writes about taking his students on some of the wilder and weirder journeys in books and cinema being crafted by the Indian diaspora during a time of pademic and lockdowns. It’s an introduction to texts that speak of “dislocation and delirium, movement and madness.”  Enjoy!

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In recent years, students on the South Asian diasporas class I teach here in New York have been more and more frustrated and restless. The angsty, articulate ones among them talk of being bored by coming-to-America stories. By avuncular but insipid, brown-skinned stand-ups. By warm, worthy narratives about growing up in an immigrant family, culture clash, over here versus over there.

What they crave, they tell me, are wilder, weirder journeys. Books and films that speak to them about dislocation and delirium, movement and madness. That hunger has only grown during the last couple of years of Covid, a time that barely felt like time, a time when for long stretches they were penned in charmless dorms and unable to explore downtown Manhattan, far less further fields.

Of late, I’ve started to introduce them to vagrant South Asians, misfit South Asians, off-piste South Asians. I’ve tried to flag up the work of mad and inspired travellers. To show them flightpaths real and imaginative and sometimes a bit of both.

A case in point is Himali Singh Soin. She makes artist books, films and music. Her father was a mountaineer and trekker, and she herself was named after the Himalayas.

We are opposite like that is a strange almanac – full of poems, astrology and made-up maps – based on trips she made to Svalbard in the Arctic Circle and to the Antarctic Peninsula.

There she pondered brownness – that of her skin and, increasingly, that of the melting poles. She thought of the Victorians who, in the mid-19th-century, feared not only that the British Isles would soon be overrun by Johnny Foreigner, but that it might become covered by glaciers.

Himali Singh Soin

She thought too of Indian politician Bal Gangadhar Tilak who, in the 1890s, argued that Aryan history began at the North Pole. Moving across these treacherous, fragile continents, she found herself looking ahead to a world after climate catastrophe, one in which many of us have been turned into “literal aliens, in search of a new place to live.”

Just as befuddling (mostly in a good way) to the students was an early film by Anjalika Sagar and her art partner Kodwo Eshun. The pair go under the name of The Otolith Group. The otolith is a part of the ear that affects one’s sense of stability.

Otolith I is an eerie video-essay shot in the aftermath of the global and ultimately futile mass protests against George Bush’s decision to wage war on Iraq. It’s set a hundred years in the future and features an Indian-African paleoanthropologist sifting through visual relics of the past – including Sagar’s grandmother, Anasuya Gyan-Chand, who was President of the National Federation of Indian Women, and Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, travelling the world to address female delegates from non-Aligned nations.

Anjalika Sagar in Otolith I

These are visions of a better tomorrow. Visions that were thwarted. Look! – here is Sagar herself, floating in microgravity at Star City, the Russian astronaut training centre just outside Moscow. Estrangement is the dominant mood of Otolith I. It's a resonant mood too. Many of us feel impaled or entombed these days. Many of us dream of levitation or floating away.

More oddsome still is Shy Radicals by Hamja Ahsan. Its subtitle is ‘The Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert’ and it’s essentially a manifesto for a new state – that of ‘Aspergistan’. This is a place where quiet, sometimes socially awkward people, Asians or otherwise, can retreat from the noise and bombast of modern life. How will it be created, you may ask. By a reticent rebellion, Ahsan believes; by the emergence of an Introfada and campaigns such as Occupy Bedroom. How will it be governed? By Shyria Law!

Ahsan used to be a curator one of whose projects was REDO Pakistan, an alternative history and vivid re-imagining of that country. For much of his adult life he has campaigned on behalf of his brother Syed, a poet and translator diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, who in 2006 was arrested and placed in solitary confinement for six years before being extradited to the States where he was charged with supporting Islamic terror movements.

Having faced down such violence, who can blame Ahsan for wanting to dream into existence a quieter utopia?

My students were rather discombobulated by Shy Radicals. It spoke to them – but its treatment of identity was very different from the kind they’re normally exposed to in the States. They didn’t know whether the book was meant to make them angry or to laugh.

One of them asked a good question: why had he never heard of books like this before? Why was it so hard to find these kinds of mongrel texts? And so, using Zoom, I had the class meet Siddhartha Loknandi – born in Hyderabad, educated in Wales, resident for nearly 20 years in New York. A short while ago, despairing of finding an affordable storefront, he left the East Coast and headed to Berlin with $5000 in savings and the goal of opening a bookshop. 

He succeeded. And how! It’s called Hopscotch Reading Room (after the Julio Cortazar novel) and is on the site of what, back in the 1980s, used to be a butcher’s shop. Inside are books, fanzines, wild ephemera from and about what is sometimes called the Global South. Samizdat copies of out-of-print curiosities. Tiny editions of titles no one knew existed.

Loknandi, a lifelong bibliophile, describes it as “my inner world exteriorized” and sees it as a haven for “rogue scholarship”. He believes that “a diasporic subject is open to everything”. It's a lovely possibility.

Hopscotch celebrates the kinds of idiosyncratic and fiercely independent artists I've been talking about. It's an ark, a seedbank. A haven for Asian art that is restless and refusenik, that spurns bromides about interculturalism and assimilationism, that is fearless in drawing up new maps of the imagination. It's for diaspora and its discontents.

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Thanks for reading and for supporting The Global Jigsaw. More next week.

Pallavi