Vaid Urvashi Transcript 03 24 15

LGBTQ Oral History Project – Urvashi Vaid Page 1 of 22 Vassar LGBTQ Oral History Project Interviewee: Urvashi Vaid Interviewer: Priya Nair Date of Interview: March 24, 2015 [start audio part 1] Priya: Okay. I’m Priya Nair, I’m a senior at Vassar College, and the student interviewer for the Vassar LGBTQ Oral History Project. It’s March 24, 2015 and I’m with Urvashi Vaid in her office at Columbia Law School in New York City… um, hey! Urvashi: Hi there. Priya: Could you first state your name, date of birth, and where you were born? Urvashi: Sure. I’m Urvashi Vaid, I was born October 8, 1958 in New Delhi, India. Priya: So could you first talk about where you grew up and what it was like. Urvashi: Absolutely. I was born in India, as I said, into a large extended family and… my first eight years were spent either in Delhi or a town called Chandigarh in the northwest. It was the state of Punjab. We’re Punjabis. My mom and dad in India were both teachers and my dad taught at Punjab University and my mom taught at a high school there. I went to a Catholic school as a little kid and then we moved to America in 1966 when my dad got a job. He had studied here, done his PhD and then he’d gone back to teach and somebody offered him a job at the state university of New York at Potsdam, New York, which is way north in New York State, like thirty miles from the Canadian border where New York state goes straight up, straight north of Albany. And… that’s where I grew up, I went to elementary school and high school in Potsdam and then when on to college at Vassar. Priya: Cool. Urvashi: I mean that’s a condensed version, I don’t know what you want to know [laughs]. Priya: So do you remember anything about the transition from India to the United States? Urvashi: Oh yeah. It was… it was really exciting for a little kid to see snow [laughs] and I saw a lot of it. We came in, I think it was November, and I remember actually the drive from New York City to Potsdam, which is like eight hours. And, you know, I remember it was a big cultural adjustment because my family is and was very Indian identified. We spoke Hindi and Punjabi and English all mixed up at home and my parents still do, they’re still alive in their late eighties. And I have two sisters who LGBTQ Oral History Project – Urvashi Vaid Page 2 of 22 are older than me so I’m the youngest… so I was eight and they were eleven and thirteen when we came. And so it was, you know, so I felt like I had a little pod, us. And there were other Indians in Potsdam, lots of students attending Clarkson College of Technology, faculty and students at SUNY Potsdam, and there was an India Association of Potsdam. And we would get together on all the different holidays and movies and cultural concerts and so on. So I felt like… but it was very different growing up in a little town than it is growing up in New York City, where there’s such a large community. In the sixties, you know, finding other South Asian, Indians, was really exciting and rare and so you kind of checked each other out and bonded [laughs] because it wasn’t common… and especially in a small town. So like, you know, everybody knew each other and looked out for each other. I definitely, my experience of being an immigrant is one of the formative experiences of my activism and of my life. I think, you know being, growing up in India you… India is amazing. It’s an amazing country… and it’s a mess as a country. So corrupt and so… energetic…all of those… a lot of different contradictory things… and I love India and I love that part of me but I didn’t, coming to America initially, I didn’t… I mean, I immediately wanted to fit in to the place that I had, that we had come to. And I was… spoke with an Indian accent, I had long hair down to my waist, thick hair, thick glasses, very nerdy looking and… I identify as a nerd, I was and still am very nerdy. Bookish, you know, my dad was an English professor so we just, we all were encouraged to read and think and pay attention to the world so I was very… intellectual, as were my sisters, and my mother, everybody. And Potsdam was just a small white town with farmers and we would get ignorant questions like, you know, did you grow up in a tipee? And do they have hospitals in India? And how, you know, like, like, basic basic stuff… because the awareness wasn’t very deep in America in 1966, ’67,’68, now the Beatles and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi popularized, Ravi Shankar, popularized awareness about India in a funny way in the sixties. But it was a particular take on India, the mystical India, the kind of, you know, oh I’m going to go find myself in India, that mystique. Instead of the real life of people. And the poverty, and the kind of, you know, tensions that were simmering in India in the sixties. So growing up here was a funny experience of being in two cultures all the time, at home and then outside the home. You know, the home culture is very Indian. And, you know, thankfully for that I know how to cook [laughs]. We… my mother is an amazing cook… and, you know, it was… we loved to cook and we threw a lot of dinner parties for the Indians and Americans in our lives and so we grew up with lots of cooking, and cleaning of course. All that stuff. But I really… the only thing I can cook is Indian food and the only thing I love most is Indian food to this day. Best food in the world really, when you think about it. Come on. Priya: For sure. Urvashi: For sure. Infinitely varied. But… even with all of that… like even as a kid I loved Indian food and I loved many things about being Indian but I felt very… I stuck LGBTQ Oral History Project – Urvashi Vaid Page 3 of 22 out, we all stuck out… you know, my mother wore saris…in Potsdam it was very noticeable to be Indian. And I didn’t like it. And so I think I assimilated with a vengeance, my accent disappeared very quickly… I mean I never changed my name but people could never pronounce it so my whole life I was called “Urv” and… or “Urvy” and it was… the assimilation piece of it… I don’t, I think the racial consciousness for me was always there very very early on and… but I really didn’t realize how damaging that kind of all white environment and my own like drive to assimilate into it was to me until… I didn’t realize it until I was well in my twenties and then I started to process that and the damage it had done to me and how I had participated in it and… you know, my disowning pieces of myself. It was really not good. But I discovered… I was very politically aware as a kid and involved, always. I, you know, would sit around and sketch sort of policy platforms [laughs]for campaigns and… [laughs] as if I was going to run for office. My favorite things were when we all, my family, we’d all watch the conventions, you know, gavel to gavel they would show the coverage in the old days. It wasn’t just this scripted television evening performance it was like the Rules Committee, everything was on all the time and you could just sit there and watch it. And I loved it. And then of course in the late sixties there were protests even in that little town. In the anti-war movement, cause it was a student town so, you know, I was aware of all of that, certainly watching the Civil Rights movement on TV and the anti-war movement and the Women’s movement emerging. It was very much, I thought these are my people. I thought that early on and I identified and I just followed it cause, I mean, I was a child I was ten years old in 1968, you know, twelve years old in 1970. But I vividly remember in the early seventies the Nixon administration and Watergate scandal and the Watergate hearings. And… they were stunning. And my family all, we all watched them, was riveting theater, you know, just the lies that these people told in front of the Senate testimony and the Judiciary Committee and eventually the resignation of Nixon. And… so, you know, I think my first political speech was in eighth grade when I was graduating and… you know, from the junior school to high school graduation and we all went to high school, sorry to ninth grade. And I… why did I get to speak? I must have been like… probably I was valedictorian or salutatorian I can’t remember, probably, I don’t…it’s one of those. And… I remember giving a pro McGovern talk [laughs] in 1972.

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