Since I was invited to do this, I meant to write a post about cashews in an okra curry. I had this dish at a wedding reception during Thanksgiving break, and the table of the kids with whom I’d grown up thought it was tasty but not exactly home cooking. My little sister wanted to rebut this presumption; just because we didn’t recognize it, she argued, was no reason to assume that it was not Telegu, or not South Indian. Non-Indians seem to find these distinctions amusing and/or confusing. A white friend of mine is dating a Tamil Brahmin and I’m still trying to make him grasp that everything from her religious practices to her food preparation will be different from my family’s traditions. Still, these can be difficult to map out, literally: when I recognize that “we” do something that other people don’t, does that mean that the something is Indian, Southie, Telegu or just us? Overlapping with this question is another one I’ve been pursuing: what is the equivalent of Mexican gringo or Japanese gaijin in an Indian language? Telegu has “manavalu” (horribly misspelled), to mean “our people,” a term that can expand or contract depending on situation, such that in a crowd of non-Indians, the first Indian person spotted can be claimed as one of ours, but at a TANA conference, only people on our wedding circuit fit. All South Asians seem to use the term “desi” to signify a fellow brown person. But what is the term for those who are not our people, not our countryman?

The person who got me started wondering about this claimed that most languages have a word for outsiders, and I couldn’t tell if my inability to think of one in Telegu meant there was none or just was another example of how incredibly bad my Telegu is. But my sisters, whose language skills are much better, couldn’t come up with anything either. This may be symptomatic of diaspora life; living outside India, we have little occasion to identify others as foreigners because we are so persistently the foreigners, something we implicitly accept by referring to other people as “Americans” and not including ourselves when we say it. And when we are in India, we still are the foreigners — there we are the Americans, tagged sometimes even before we open our mouths.

Perhaps this is the particular attraction that Indians outside India have for me. I’ve never been a strong participant in the various desi organizations that have been open to me, but I’ve also never been the type to avoid or disdain them. I’m not really interested in ISA/ SASA/ SALSA for the opportunity to party with new South Asians, or even for networking. Instead, I see this as the space where I am wholly an insider, even when I’m left out of the cliques; or as I described it in an essay that asked me to describe my neighborhood, “Indian people outside India are my neighborhood.”

So I appreciate the virtual hangouts that blogs such as Sepia Mutiny create, and wish all the Mutineers much success in maintaining a contentious, colorful, cogent community.

I don’t want to be putting down someone whose circumstances and mindset I’m only gleaning from a website, but for a devadasi to operate for personal profit seems rather irregular. I suppose this independence removes it from the most objectionable aspects of the “traditional” devadasi system as still practiced today. Yet to be doing it so differently while working under the same name worries me, because that kind of definitional blurring often works to bury the problematic actions under the newly legitimized ones. Kama dismisses the question of why she isn’t working in a temple with “For many years it has been illegal to leave girls in the temple because of the many problems that have become associated with the poverty and exploitation of many Devadasi.” This answer seems to minimize the inherent problems of temple prostitution.I had a similar problem with Tracy Quan. As you might be able to tell from the titles of her books, Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl and Diary of a Married Call Girl, Quan operated in the higher socioeconomic echelons of sex work, and her criticism of Nicholas Kristof’s concerns about prostitutes in developing nations seemed one-dimensional. The women Kristof described and “rescued” (that being the aspect of his activism that I’d question) were in brothels, distanced from their families, being drawn into substance addiction — in no way exercising agency to gain a better life than the one they’d had before becoming prostitutes. Indeed, in Quan’s either-or of sex work or sweatshop, the women initially had intended to work in the latter and been coerced into the former.

At a pettier level, I also admit that I question the degree of religious sincerity involved in Kama’s venture, because it appears more likely to be a ploy for a customer who either believes he’s having a religious experience, or who gets off on the exoticism (“everything I know about Hinduism, I learned from the Kama Sutra“). This –

My fees are to be paid in cash, in UK pounds, to me before any session begins. I really appreciate being handed your offering to me in a discreet envelope when we meet. Many clients greet me with a kiss and use that moment to give me the envelope with your offering. It is not culturally appropriate for me to ask you for money so please be sensitive to my needs regarding this matter.

– struck me as a bit silly. Being paid at the beginning of a sexual transaction is not such an uncommon practice that it needs to be justified as “culturally appropriate.”

My understanding was that India’s Constitution had requirements similar to those of the U.S. First Amendment, requiring that the government neither establish religion nor constrain the exercise of it. But a closer look shows that in this, as with so many things, the American Founders valued brevity over the locquacious explanation dear to desi hearts, and I hope that some Mutineers can help me understand how the difference works out in practice.The First Amendment says simply, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” and with that simplicity leaves room for scores of Supreme Court decisions and hundreds of books to try to figure out what those few words mean. To caricature somewhat, we thereby get the originalists, who say that this means what the Founders probably meant, that Congress could not prefer a particular Christian denomination; the textualists, who say that it means Congress can’t pass a law actually establishing a religion as the official state religion; and the “activist judges,” who say that this means all governmental entities must keep away from religion and religion must keep away from them, because such are the demands of a religiously diverse country.

In the example of government vouchers for religious schools, the originalists and textualists would OK them (and the originalists quite possibly permit discrimination against a school of a non-monotheistic religion) and an activist judge would nix them.

The Indian Constitution is far more explicit, and I pity the poor judges left with so little room to be activists. Article 15 prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion; Article 16 prohibits such discrimination in public employment; Article 25 guarantees freedom of conscience; Article 26, freedom for religious institutions; Article 27, freedom from paying taxes specifically marked for a particular religion. Article 28 is very detailed: it says that an educational institution supported wholly by the State cannot provide religious instruction, except for institutions administered by the State but established by a trust that requires such instruction; it also says that no State-recognized or even -partly funded institution can require attendance at religious instruction or worship. Article 30 applies Article 15′s non-discrimination to establishing educational institutions and receiving state aid for them; Article 325 applies it to being on an election roll.

There are plenty of “Nothing in this article shall”s to allow the government all sorts of interference with religion. Article 16 says there can be a “law which provides that the incumbent of an office in connection with the affairs of any religious or denominational institution or any member of the governing body thereof shall be a person professing a particular religion or belonging to a particular denomination.” Article 25 allows the government to interfere with Hindu institutions: “the throwing open of Hindu religious institutions of a public character to all classes and sections of Hindus.”

In short — too late! — I was wrong in thinking that India’s situation regarding church and state is much comparable to that of the U.S., notwithstanding this excellent article that attempts to draw parallels. India has a system much more like the one that conservatives prefer, in which government and religion are frequently “entangled,” to use the terminology of exactly what is not supposed to happen in the U.S.

However, India also provides an excellent example of what happens when such entanglement is permitted. A single Google of “India government temple” turned up a 1983 Hinduism Today article about the Tamil Nadu State Department of Hindus’ Religious and Charitable Endowments Commission’s plan to assume the administration of the Chidambaram Nataraja temple. Nor does this appear to have been an isolated instance of interference; a couple of years ago, the government attempted to ban animal sacrifices at the same temple, and Tamil Nadu government continues to interfere with the language and practice of religion at temples under its oversight. Not to trash TN alone, my home state of Andhra Pradesh has engaged in various shady transactions involving temple lands, to the point that the courts now have to become active, if not activist.

I doubt that those who claim to desire more “religion in the public square” would want to have the public square in their religion. While funding can be quite nice, restrictions and takeover rarely is so welcome. Religious groups of all types in the U.S. already balk at having generally applicable laws applied to them (hence the RFRA and RLUIPA), so having the government make rules specifically intended to govern religious practice would be anathema.

To me, outsourcing is preferable to immigration. It raises the standard of living in South Asia; increases the tax base (at least when people pay their taxes); provides some trickle down to the poorest people who never would have a chance to immigrate; keeps human resources in developing countries instead of continuing the “brain drain”; allows families to stay together without the disruptions and delays of the immigration process. This is not to say that immigration shouldn’t occur at all. Some people simply were born in societies for which their personalities are incompatible, and they ought to be able to move to more congenial ones. But we should not fall into the trap of assuming that merely because economic necessity drives people out of South Asia, that they are happy to be leaving.

The ability to maintain the outsourcing boom, however, is dependent on the free movement of service workers. If a Bangalore company builds a new system for an American corporation, people from the former need to be able to visit the latter for training, testing and other work that cannot be done wholly through telecommunications. This means that business contracts that otherwise would go to South Asians who could perform them most efficiently will be withheld, for fear that visa trouble will slow down the process.

If we are interested in the successful future of India and Indians, we should be lobbying the U.S. government to loosen its restrictions on the non-immigrant movement of people. This is currently under discussion at the World Trade Organization talks, but as with many aspects of international trade, under the radar of front-page politics. South Asian Americans should become an interest group supporting India’s position on ending the trade barrier to the continued growth of India’s economy.

I had thought that having American Heritage Dictionary recognize “oriental” as problematic was a step forward, but I suppose I can count on the thick-brown-skinned folks at CNBC-TV18 to maintain the status quo. Nonetheless, I will complain that the subject of the show doesn’t even seem relevant to the name; what does foreign investment in India have to do with that old binary of “Oriental” versus “Occidental”? Particularly when some of the global market gurus include non-Occidentals like Ayaz Ebrahim, the Asia-Pacific CEO for Asia-based HSBC. The explorers of the exotic East, at least when it comes to the international flow of capital, no longer are solely Caucasians.

The prompt for an economics writing competition when I was an undergraduate was something like, “Free trade contributes to peace.” I don’t know if that is true, but I would think that genuinely free trade — in contrast to the protectionist economies of 18th and 19th century imperialism, against which Adam Smith wrote — might erase some of the old ways of Orientalist thinking.

My understanding is that with the approval of the Reserve Bank, she can buy property for residential purposes, and Wikipedia claims, “Citizenship of India by naturalisation can be acquired by a foreigner who is ordinarily resident in India for twelve years (continuously for the twelve months preceding the date of application and for eleven years in the aggregate in the fourteen years preceding the twelve months).”

Anyone know more about this than just what a Google search turns up?

All Mixed Up – i sort of have a soft spot for christmas trees… i think they’re fun. when i have kids i’m going to decorate my tree with Om ornaments and little sita, ganesha, and ram ornaments…and my tree is going to be topped with a flute playing krishna. [okay i probably won't do that...but it was a fun picture to paint in my head]. Not mixed up after all – I actually did that last year. Put up a tree with ornaments and bulbs and topped it with a silver idol of Krishna playing the flute…My “Krishmas” tree

The Christmas tree already was up when I went home at Thanksgiving, and was quite pretty except for the hideously oversized red bow at the top. What to do with the top of the tree is an annual problem. Many years we’ve just stuck a random ornament, or left it bare. This year, I suggested that Mom replace the aesthetically distressing ribbon with a big gold OM that was gathering dust on a high shelf in the kitchen. This way we could avoid distressing the Christmas fanatics by not secularizing our tree, without having to put an angel or star in which we don’t believe there. Manish, this doesn’t fall into the schlock category of a tree in the shape of an OM, does it?

Yes, despite what you might have thought after reading my grumping about the made-up “discrimination” against Christians, I celebrate Christmas and have done so for years. My mom claims that when we were very little, she would give us gifts on Diwali instead (supposedly some people do this for Pancha Ganapati), but we would cry at Christmas because we didn’t get presents then. As they couldn’t easily afford two gift-giving seasons back then, my parents opted to assimilate a bit more and get in on this Christmas thing, and now that they’re better off, we go for the full materialist extravaganza of gifts, food and travel.

But thanks to William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and the man who got Wal-Mart to fire the poor schmuck who knew about Christmas’s pagan origins (and now is launching a boycott of Land’s End), I might have to give up Christmas.Donohue’s latest way of getting his name in the news is to complain about the White House holiday card sent to 1.4 million friends and supporters and funded by the Republican National Committee. (My barely-Hindu and not-at-all-Christian father likely got one of these, because Jesus doesn’t donate to the GOP and Dad does.) When told that “holiday” is the government’s and retail sector’s way of including everyone, Donahue is not mollified. “Ninety-six percent of Americans celebrate Christmas. Spare me the diversity lecture.”

That’s likely true, even though the 2001 census found that 20% of Americans do not identify as Christian and almost 50% are not adherents to a Christian church, because the U.S. has done such a thorough job of secularizing and universalizing the holiday that non-Christians feel like they can participate. If Donohue et. al succeed in their crusade to force everyone into their narrow conception of what the holidays mean, fewer people will want to be part of it. Nearly every American may exchange gifts and take the day off from work, it being a federal holiday and all, but a much smaller number go to church or otherwise advert to the religious nature of December 25 — which is not even approximately the day on which historians believe Christ to have been born.

The idea of having George W. Bush track which Americans are Christians and which are of other religions, though not of Ashcroftian levels of creepiness, is nonetheless disturbing. The Kennedys and Johnson briefly attempted to send Christmas cards to Christians and Happy New Year cards to everyone else (perhaps being aware that Hannukah is such a relatively minor holiday on the Jewish calendar, that to send Hannukah cards without noting Yom Kippur would be obviously pathetic). Because doing so required keeping track of Christian and non-Christian recipients, however, they gave up.

Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association in Tupelo, Miss. and boycotter of Macy’s and Target, excuses President Bush for the cards by assuming that they are “just political correctness run amok.” He makes what almost sounds like a plausible argument when he says, “It bothers me that the White House card leaves off any reference to Jesus, while we’ve got Ramadan celebrations in the White House.” Hey, maybe we really are giving more time to minority faiths than to the majority one.

Oh, wait, never mind.

My reaction to this news was complex. On one hand, I’m very opposed to the laws in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat that briefly attempted to ban mythical “forced conversions” and required people to register any change in religion with the government. If people wish to peacefully convince others of a particular belief, even one with which I don’t agree, they should be free to do so without fear of punishment or deportation.

On the other hand, I find conversion activity vaguely displeasing because it inherently pre-supposes the superiority of one religious faith over another. For whatever reason, I don’t mind thinking liberalism preferable to conservatism, capitalism to communism, but a similar judgment on religions tends to raise my hackles. Moreover, one could claim that the Indian government appears to treat all conversion activity as objectionable, even when it doesn’t involve Hindus. Ennis’s mention of Indian Jews two months ago neglected to note that the Indian government objected to having the previously-Christianized, long-ago descendants of Jews officially converted to Judaism on Indian soil.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s office sent to India six rabbis, who converted 600 members of the tribe to Judaism to ensure they could immigrate to Israel under state law [...] India had pressured Israel to stop the conversion activity, implying that it violated Indian law, Regev said. In response, an Israeli parliamentary committee asked Sharon to reconsider the location of the conversions, Regev said.

Another little-known fact about the Bnei Menashe members brought to Israel is that most were settled in Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, which Israel recently evacuated.

I have seen religion give neither more nor fewer benefits to my Hindu family than it has to my Jewish and Christian friends, which is not something that I can say of my shallow observations of political and economic regimes. A good person seems to produce an equally generous Christian or kind Muslim, depending mainly on the culture in which that person was raised, whereas the same nation subjected to highly restrictive economic and social conditions versus reasonably liberal ones will turn out quite differently.

Thus the amount of effort expended in altering others’ beliefs about deities often strikes me as wasted. It is effort people should be legally free to waste, just as they can waste it on computer games and other things that give them pleasure. But it is nothing I can applaud regardless of what alteration has been made, though I encourage the work of missionaries who bring significant secular educational, medical and capitalist resources to India along with their tracts.

Of course, this is the inevitable viewpoint of an agnostic, and perhaps that of a person raised as a Hindu, if one remembers the infamous exchange between Gandhi and Jinnah: Gandhi – “I am a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Zoroastrian, a Jew.” Jinnah – “Only a Hindu could say that.”

While my laptop’s already suffering from too much spyware to withstand finding a cure for HIV, I did want to note World AIDS Day in some way. Via Anupam Chander, I see that HIV+ women in Golaghat, Assam joined a rally “to acknowledge they are living with AIDS and should not be shunned.” From what I can tell, India is doing surprisingly well, particularly compared to some African nations, in admitting its HIV crisis. When I last visited in 2003, there were bilboards with giant pictures of condoms, which is something I’ve never seen even in Houston or Dallas, where conservatism appear to be greater than in Bombay and Hyderabad. Though the government is unwilling to say just how big the population of HIV+ Indians is — as a NYT editorial puts it, “India is providing numbers no one believes” — it has not gone through the lengthy period of denial that the U.S. government did in the 1980s, which allowed HIV to threaten to become epidemic among margnialized groups.

The problem now is getting treatment to sufferers, and unlike the issue of accepting the existence of the disease (though that certainly is far from complete, and contributes to the difficulty of accessing treatment), seems likely to get worse, not better. The WTO is supposed to be giving developing nations more time to comply with patent rules, but Indian already reformed its laws last year. This has had the benefit of drawing large pharmaceutical companies who previously feared that their investments would be unprotected. On the downside, however, are millions of Indians who cannot afford the cost of a patented drug and whose salvation previously had been the cheap generics that local drug makers had pirated.Fierce advocates of intellectual property claim that no cure for HIV/ AIDS ever will be found if pharmaceutical companies cannot be secure in reaping the rewards of past R&D and in making money from any future discoveries. I take little stock in this argument for several reasons, chiefly because the initial round of treatment medications developed during the late 1980s were funded by grants from the government and medical foundations, but also because I think there is sufficient incentive to commit resources for a cure even if some developing nations do not respect the patent on it.

In the short term, the cost of patent-protected AIDS treatment is prohibitively high, and the lure of more pharmaceutical companies’ working on a cure doesn’t outweigh the negative of the patients who will die — often orphaning children thereby — without medication.

Random Note: When I was in high school and convincing my parents that I should go to law school, I used to gather examples just of Indian Americans in the legal field. Now that there are so many — there’s even a desi helping to lead the Federalist Society, one of the whitest games in town — I’m focusing on Indian law professors, who have gone the extra step of becoming academics instead of enslaving themselves to Skadden.

Chander is one. Another is Anup Malani, a professor at my alma mater currently visiting UChicago Law and posting on their faculty blog. Or at least he’s listed on the sidebar; I haven’t spotted a post from him yet, not even in response to Martha Nussbaum’s multi-part on “India: A DemocracyÂ’s Near Collapse into Religious Terror.” Nussbaum’s been on this tear for some time.

Recently I’ve marked the onset of each winter by complaining about the people who complain about the de-Christianization of Christmas. My last post on the matter focused particularly on the bizarre spectacle of some Christian extremists who are offended when Wal-Mart fails to greet them with Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays, and who assume they are being discriminated against because Christmas, unlike Kwanzaa and Hannukah, didn’t have a section separated from Holiday on the giant retailer’s website. I found their desire to have their religion associated with trees and Barbies very bizarre, concluding “Personally, I’d be annoyed if paintball places declared themselves to be celebrating Holi.”

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p> Then I stopped and thought about whether I’d feel differently in India, where I’d be in the majority rather than in a small minority. Maybe there I’d feel that something was being taken from me, that my place in the majority was being disrespected, if the day before Diwali, someone merely wished me “Happy Holidays” in an attempt to be inclusive of Eid (which this year came the day after Diwali). Can anyone who’s been in India more recently than I recall instances of Hindu holidays being traditionally tied to secular items, and Hindus’ being offended when the secular items were dissociated from the religious holiday?

Speaking of commercial acknowledgments of faith, I’m not offended, but I am a little puzzled that my planner notes Christian, Jewish, Muslim and even Buddhist holidays, but nothing of Hinduism. I think the maker, Quo Vadis, is based in Canada, but surely there aren’t so many more Buddhists or Muslims in the Great White North than there are Hindus?

UPDATE: Here’s one way to get a multicultural holiday — put bindis on Mary and Joseph.