HAUNTING STORIES: NARRATIVE TRANSMISSIONS OF SOUTH ASIAN IDENTITIES IN DIASPORA

KIRIN NARAYAN

Abstract

Family stories in the South Asian diaspora are an important link to a South Asian past and the formation of an identity containing facets of South Asia. Drawing on interviews with second-generation South Asian Americans, this essay explores two kinds of stories transmitted within families: family history, and folklore and mythology. In addi- tion to maintaining connections to an ancestral homeland, family sto- ries also connect a web of relatives spread across national locales. Par- ticularly when retold with critical reflection, such stories are an important imaginative resource for crafting diasporic identity.

“India haunted me,” observed Arjun in the course of recounting his experiences of growing up as an Indian-American in the mid-West. About 30 years old, of Gujarati background, and with intense search- ing eyes, he laughed ruefully as he remembered being a child. “Some- times I felt like our house was haunted. But now that I think about it, that was just another way of conceiving of difference. Because when something’s haunted, it’s marking it as different. I wasn’t very into ghosts or anything, but, of course, these stories are circulating all around.” In talking about stories “circulating all around” Arjun was refer- ring to narratives that brought shades of his parents’ homeland into their suburban Ohio house. His observation about how cultural dif- ference was signified through India-centred stories raises larger issues of the transmission of cultural narratives within diaspora. How are culturally haunting stories transmitted in diasporic families, and how do they carry South Asian identities forward to a generation born or brought up outside of the subcontinent? How might these stories be adapted and transformed, crafting revised identities? I argue that within diaspora, family stories help maintain links to an ancestral homeland and a web of relatives spread across national locales. In addition to family history, the folk narratives and mythology pressed 416   upon children by their parents might be viewed as another kind of family story intended to promote shared cultural knowledge. I argue that particularly when retold with critical reflection, such stories are an important imaginative resource for crafting diasporic identity. This essay emerges from the oral testimonies of roughly twenty sec- ond-generation Indian Americans and Pakistani Americans whom I interviewed in assorted sessions between 1995 and 2000. They were all connected in one way or another to the mid-West and to universi- ty life, whether as students, faculty, or the children of faculty. They had either acquired or were in the course of acquiring a college or graduate education, and were all of middle-class background. At the time of our first conversations, they ranged in age from 18 to 40. Most had been born in the United States, but a few had been born elsewhere, whether India, England or Libya, moving to the United States when they were young. Though the explosive politics between India and Pakistan has strained relationships between Indian Ameri- cans and Pakistani Americans, I have chosen to group both together as South Asian Americans to emphasise cultural continuities and to hope, along with some of my subjects, that such diasporic alliances might eventually ease the fraught politics of the subcontinent. I approached these interviews with the premise that all people con- struct selves and identities through stories (cf. Bruner 1986, 1989, Sarbin 1986, Rosenwald and Ochberg 1993, Holstein and Gubrium 2000). As Tridib, the wise older cousin in Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Shadow Lines consoles the narrator, “stories are all there are to live in, it [is] just a question of which one you choose,” (Ghosh 1988:184). Families everywhere seek to impart continuities across generations through telling family stories, or else attempt to break with stigma- tised or traumatic family experiences by enforcing silence (cf. Bertaux and Thompson 1993). For diasporic subjects, the transmission of sto- ries across generations appears to be a more fragile and self-conscious process since families are displaced and the stories that might be mul- tiply reinforced from different sources often become primarily the responsibility of parents. The self-conscious circumstances of such transmission can also entail an expanding range of stories and the possibility for hybrid formations. While diaspora is conceptually linked to displacement (Bammer 1994, Lavie and Swedenburg 1996), the act of storytelling within diasporas can also be seen as a form of emplacement, staking out imaginative space for changing conjunctions of cultural experience