Identifying my Privilege
Coming face-to-face with my place in India and the world
This has been one of the hardest things I’ve written so far. I have had to rewrite it several times over the last few months, not because it’s a difficult thing to talk about but because it’s been a continuous series of realisations that change the equation constantly. It’s taken many uncomfortable conversations and a series ‘this-can’t-be-happening’ moments to connect the dots. I’m not sure if this is the end of my realisation either but this is where I stand today and this is how I acknowledge my privilege, in the country I was born in and in the world I belong to.
Reverse culture shock, anyone?
I first heard of reverse culture shock many years ago when a friend returned to India after living in France for half a year. When she told me about it, I couldn’t relate to what she was saying because I hadn’t left India yet. That changed in 2014 when I left for the US for a year and a half. I finally understood reverse culture shock upon my return. In retrospect, most of the things that bothered me then were the usual suspects, having a mini heart attack while crossing roads, rude auto drivers, and how most people I met were far more interested in when I was getting married than how I was doing. However, the two things that I found really difficult to adjust to were the feeling of uneasiness that creeps up your spine when you’re a woman on a street and the extent to which a person’s job matters in how much respect they get in India.
I left again in 2016 and not only was I away for longer this time, but my world had also changed pretty drastically in Argentina. I was in therapy, had become more socially aware, and had started questioning things that fell under the ‘aisa hi hota hai’ (that’s-just-how-things-are) category that I had accepted my whole life. I had faced situations where I was treated differently (sometimes for the better and sometimes not) because of the colour of my skin and the passport I carried. I met people whose upbringing and life experiences were so drastically different than mine that they expanded my view of things and the way that the world works.
Armed with all of this and after traveling by myself for almost four months, I thought I knew what to expect when I returned to India at the end of 2018; but I had no idea what was coming my way. Confession time, it was a full-blown identity crisis. It made me question who I was and what my place was in the country I grew up in and in the world.
I’m still unsure of how to present these thoughts but I do know that I need to. My first idea was to separate each aspect but I quickly realised that they are all intertwined and it’s quite difficult to separate one from another. So, I’m going to break down my privilege with encounters that made me question things and find some answers.
What’s up, India?
When I first moved to Buenos Aires, I met an Austrian guy at a party and we got talking. During our conversation, he told me about how seriously Germany and Austria take the Holocaust and that students are expected to visit a concentration camp in high school so that they can see the power of hate. He mentioned how they still talk about it today so that their history doesn’t repeat itself. Every country has its past and people need to know about it and its effects. After a while, he asked me what India was doing to make sure our history wasn’t repeating itself. I wasn’t sure what he meant. After all, we had been the colony, not the colonisers. His answer was simple: the caste system and it shook me. I grew up surrounded by the caste system but the only time I learnt about it as a form of inequality was in my civics textbook. I had never seen it for what it was — systemic oppression. Oppression that I didn’t face because of the caste I was born into. It took a stranger whose name I don’t remember to make me realise that.
I didn’t recognise how deeply the caste and class system were rooted in our society and that I accepted them because that’s just how things are. Earlier this year, one of our maids that used to work in our house years ago came to see me when she heard that I was back. After we greeted each other, I asked her to sit with us. She chose to sit on the floor; when I asked her to sit on the sofa, she said she couldn’t. This isn’t a criticism of anything or anybody but an observation because it made me really uncomfortable. Her sitting on the sofa has never been an option for her and it has never been an option for me to ask her to. I knew I was facing something much bigger than either of us and the only way to challenge that was to sit on the floor with her without taking away attention from the fact that she was there to see me. It was a small gesture but also a gesture that doesn’t change her reality or mine. It has and will be passed down in our families generation after generation. There’s a divide, and while I do believe that we’re trying to shorten the gap with each generation, that still exists and it needs to be acknowledged.
The class and caste system have been ingrained into our very existence. I’m not trying to take on the whole system and neither can I confidently say that I don’t participate in perpetuating it. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are things that I do without intending harm that actually cause harm. Also, it’s taken me a while to realise that I can’t act out of guilt of having an upper hand. Then there is the question of what does the upper hand look like. A friend once told me that every time we are in a situation where we feel an obvious imbalance of privilege, if we were to take a closer look, we’d see that it is more nuanced and that privilege isn’t quite that obvious. Privilege isn’t always a vertical ladder to climb. Many times, it’s a horizontal line where the other person may be more privileged in something that doesn’t meet the eye.
When I explain what being a Brahmin in India is like, I tell people it’s equal to being white. I understand that not all white people have the same lives and opportunities but the odds are in their favour more times than not. Because of the family I was born into, I have had more opportunities and chances. I’m not taking away from how hard my parents have worked and the sacrifices that they made to give us the life we have, but there is no denying the fact that we were on a higher platform to start off with.
When the ladder isn’t always pointing upwards
But when I see my place in the world for coming from a developing country, for being a woman, and for being brown, I’m very quickly shown my place on the privilege ladder. It happens every time I need to kill a small tree to prove to a country that I’m worthy of stepping into their territory. I realise how privileged I’m to be able to travel in the first place but being an Indian and trying to travel is not easy. It’s not fun when you’re sent back home despite having a ticket because you didn’t have a transit visa to merely enter the airspace of a country (I realise that I should have done my homework but my issue is with the fact that these laws exist in the first place). I’ll even take a further step and say that I also understand that there are reasons behind these laws, but they don’t make them any less insufferable. I acknowledge that I became more aware of my privilege only after realising how powerless I was in other situations. I probably would have been blissfully unaware if I had never been on the receiving end of unequal systems.
But turns out that I was a part of another such system long before the new realisations made their way into my life; I just never saw it for what it was. As a woman, I wasn’t taught to be afraid, it is something I learnt. I did not start looking over my shoulder every time I was by myself until a man came up from behind me and groped me when I boarding a bus at 16. I did not make sure I know where the exits were when I entered a room or to know how to get off a moving vehicle until an auto driver snuck his hand behind and wouldn’t let go of my leg at 19. I did learn it the hard way not to implicitly trust a man after men have time and again felt that it was okay to catcall, be creepy, and be outright sexist, sometimes even going to the extent of pretending to care. This isn’t an Indian thing. It’s a human thing. Every woman I have ever spoken to, whatever her nationality and her age, has her own calendar of special events that she can’t forget even if she wishes to. All of us have fear on speed dial.
For a long time, I didn’t think I could raise my hand and demand a seat at the table because I didn’t know it was an option. It took me a while to learn that not only can I sit at the table but I can also head that group of people. The more I speak with women, the more I realise that there is an unseen disadvantage because of the gender we are born with. There is a cost of being a woman that I didn’t know I was paying. I can’t even imagine what a person that doesn’t fit into our cookie-cutter world feels like and how difficult it must be for them to go through the journey of coming to terms with their own selves and finding a place in a system that has no place for them.
I wish we got a report card that mentions all the systems that will work for and against us at the beginning of our lives. Having these things spring up at random times feels like life throwing a curveball at you again and again, but I guess that is life. I know that racism exists but I have personally been made to feel unwelcome because of my skin colour very few times outside of India. Surprisingly and unsurprisingly, the colour of my skin matters more in India. Fair and Lovely and well-meaning aunties have told me for years that I can’t be ‘tanned’ a.k.a dark if I want to get far in life.
I’ve been shrugging the ‘can’t-be-dark’ remarks off for years, but what happened on 31st December 2018 when a friend and I were in Kochi is something I will remember for a long time. We met a fellow traveler during dinner and the three of us (it’s time to mention that they were both white) decided to check out the burning of Papaanji at midnight. After midnight, a couple of people walked up to us and wanted to shake hands and take selfies with my friends. At first, I thought it was a joke and then more people came and kept coming through the night. I spoke with one man and asked him why he wanted to shake hands with a white person. He thought that it would help his year get off to a great start. I couldn’t believe it. I spoke with a few of them and told them that it didn’t make sense and that they would have a good year nevertheless. But it didn’t seem to matter. By the end of the night, both my friends had learnt how to say namaste with their hands and that when you ask someone for money to take a photo with them, they walk the other way very quickly.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that night. Why did those men think that? The more I thought about it, I started questioning our obsession with being fair and how we’re taught to think it’s aspirational. It’s evident in how we treat people belonging to different races in India. What made Indians get to this place? Was it colonization or has it always been a part of our psyche? I had to ask myself the same question — did I think a white person was better than me? The person I am today believes that race doesn’t matter. It’s who one is inside that counts. But the younger me wasn’t so sure. I didn’t think I was lesser than anybody else, but I didn’t think I was equal either. I now know that at the end of the day, all of us want to be heard and loved, whatever our race. But it took me years of living and traveling outside of India to get to this place. It took meeting and interacting with different people to see them for who they were, for me to see myself for who I was.
Hope and privilege
I’ve been reading Cody McClain Brown’s Croatia Strikes Back the last few months and he has a very interesting take on hope. While comparing the United States with Croatia, he mentions that “for better or worse, the US runs on hope, hope is the oil in the American engine (the fuel is greed and money). In Croatia, it’s the opposite. Here, hope drains you. It weakens you, exhausts you, as elements in the system, the mentality, the culture conspires to make you stop, give up and give in. Here, in Croatia, hope is harder.” Cody’s definition of hope gave me a compass to measure my privilege against. Even though it feels like I’m on different ends of the ladder in India and the world and I’m not sure of where my place is, I realise that on most days, hope comes naturally to me. I believe that I can achieve things as long as I work hard. I’m privileged enough to be hopeful.
I know that there is a vast divide in so many aspects of the world that seeing the other side sometimes feels impossible. But here’s what I have learnt I can do.
- keep an open mind and listen without prejudice
- question anything that passes off under the ‘this-is-how-things-are-done’ umbrella
- fight my conditioning and change the way I react to situations that raise the ‘privilege alarm’
- pass the mic when it’s someone else chance to speak and let them tell their own story
Everyone’s struggle is different and nobody knows a struggle better than their own. What I know and believe is that all of our stories need to be told and heard. Because stories lead to conversations and conversations are the first step towards building the kind of world we want to live in and share.