Namaste

I’m reaching the end of my time here at Andrews. And as I reflect back on the past several years, there’s a memory that has remained in my mind. Hours after arriving in Michigan, I visited a Walmart in Benton Harbor. As my family and I entered the store, a worker greeted us.

“Namaste,” he said, nodding at us on our way in. He was a middle-aged white man in a blue vest. Suffice it to say, I was startled. I came from Maryland, a state where people who looked like me commonly walked into stores. In this instance, my family’s presence merited a special greeting–one that none of us ever used.

My relatives were all dressed in jeans, t-shirts, and other conventionally American clothes. Some of the people with me were not Indian: I arrived at the store with my Dominican dad and my white uncle, among others. Nevertheless, we were all welcomed with this traditionally Hindu greeting as we walked in the door, I suppose because those of us who looked South Asian just stood out.

In some ways, it was amusing to me to be identified this way. Maybe it’s because I have often felt like a watered-down version of who I’m “supposed” to be based on the way that I look. When I visited my grandmother’s family several years ago, I was often the only one eating with a fork instead of my hands. My great aunt had to remind everyone to speak English instead of Tamil so that I could understand their stories, and I was the only one dressed from head to toe in Abercrombie and Fitch. In addition to these discrepancies, there is the added complexity of being a Christian Indian, which has impacted my cultural identity in a myriad of ways.

My friend Steven Injety put it nicely. “My name is Steven,” he said on a 2020 panel about multiculturalism and religion. “Steven is not a very Indian name. And Christianity is not a very Indian religion.” Throughout his remarks, he shed light on the notion that Christian Indians cling to remnants of colonization; that they less authentically embody the culture of their country. Although India’s history with Christianity is decidedly nuanced–many believe that it was brought to the country in 52 A.D. by St. Thomas–it still carries troubling connotations to this day.

Like many, my family bears overt markers of religious conversion. My grandfather’s last name is Israel, changed from an original Hindu name that no one remembers. While many Indians celebrate Hindu holidays such as Holi and Diwali, my family abstains from the festivities. Factors such as these can cause the experience of second-generation, Christian immigrants to feel doubly removed from their culture, as they lack a degree of both geographical and traditional proximity to India. This isn’t to say that Indians and Christianity don’t mix in beautiful ways–they can, and do, as my family and millions of others will attest. But it is to say that aspects of our relationship with Christianity are complex.

Although there are moments of disconnect, there are countless instances where I have felt intimately connected with my culture. As a child, I sat in my grandparents’ kitchen and learned how to string Jasmine flowers to put in my hair. They had sheer curtains that blew in the breeze as we sat at the table with sewing needles, the sweet smell of the flowers drifting through the room. Sometimes, I wore salwar kameezes to church, yanking the pant strings tight around my waist and admiring the sequinned tops. Early on in my childhood, I learned to put dry bars of soap in my dresser drawers to make them smell like sandalwood. On certain nights, I’d stand in the kitchen with my grandparents, spreading balls of chapati dough for them to cook on the stove. Even now, as my family does some very western things–like make charcuterie boards for Christmas Eve with wheels of vegan cheese from Whole Foods–elements of our Indian culture are still integrated into our celebrations. This year, that meant having a board with samosas, pakoras, and south Indian mixture alongside the spread of everything else. All of this is to say that, like many immigrant families, our experiences are hybridized, but elements of our origins remain.

My experience as a multicultural kid in the United States has been a mix of things. Sometimes, it means I don’t fit perfectly into any space–I’m not one-hundred percent American and not entirely anything else. This complexity may sometimes get lost in the midwest when I walk into Walmart, but it is something I will always carry with me. I think that for many Andrews students, existing in rural Michigan for four years at one of the most diverse schools in the country is a unique, paradoxical experience. It’s an environment like nowhere else I have ever been–one where the bustling, heterogeneous community of our school provides a stark contrast to the world just outside of its gates. Sometimes, it’s a place that causes me to process aspects of my identity that I wouldn’t think twice about in my hometown. Overall, it’s an incredibly unique space, one that has impacted my self-perception in unexpected ways.