“Names Can Wait”: the Misnaming of the South Asian Diaspora in Theory and Practice

13 “Names Can Wait”: The Misnaming of the South Asian Diaspora in Theory and Practice Amardeep Singh Lehigh University I love the word “desi.” It is so beautiful. I can go around saying it over and over again. I'm of the view that it is the best word to describe ourselves . We who use it do not hearken back to the “homeland” of the subcontinent, because we are generally not nationalistic in that sense. Our homeland is an imaginary one . —Vijay Prashad, “Smashing the Model Minority Myth” Without a single grandparent or parent or uncle or aunt at her side, the baby’s birth, like most everything else in America, feels somehow haphazard, only half true. He needs to be fed and blessed, to be given some gold and silver, to be patted on the back after feedings and held carefully behind the neck. Names can wait. —Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake his special topic issue of the South Asian Review is intended as a Tstarting point in a dialogue about the nature of what might be termed “South Asian literary studies,” a subfield caught between the conventional area studies category, “South Asian studies,” and the emerging, interdisciplinary rubric of “postcolonial studies.” The context is presumed to be the western academy, and perhaps the North American academy in particular, though certainly a point that needs to be considered is how categories such as “South Asianness” are perceived within universities in South Asia itself. As a rhetoric of identity, “South Asian” is an important corrective to nationalistic thinking, but it is weakly supported by the long history of the Indian subcontinent, and it is damaged by the lingering animosity that accompanied South Asia’s “birth” at Partition (the “parturition of South Asian Review, Vol. XXVIII, No. 1, 2007 14 Amardeep Singh partition,” as it were), as well as its early history in the western academy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, “South Asian” has greatest weight in the context of diasporic communities, but even there the term has had a complex life, as illustrated in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake, where the second-generation protagonist Gogol Ganguli struggles with a sense of namelessness on the one hand and what might be thought of as nominal overdetermination on the other. Gogol’s struggles with naming, I argue, might be seen as emblematic of the nominal crisis that prevails in the diasporic community to which he belongs. “South Asian,” in short, is a term widely used, and perhaps ideologically necessary, but it cannot be said that the term is used with great comfort by those who deploy it. Indeed, insofar as it is used sociologically, it may be that to be called “South Asian” is to always be subject to a misnomer—to be subject to what Gayatri Spivak has described using a term from ancient Greek poetics, “catachresis”: “South Asian” is the name used when there is no proper name (Spivak 141). Catachresis in The Namesake Lahiri’s novel represents—perhaps definitively—the experiences of a particular, emergent ethnic community. But which community? The community to which I am referring has no name that is not clunkily sociological or somehow pejorative. Sociologically, they are second-generation South Asian immigrants, or South Asian Americans, though only a limited number of people thus identified regularly use these terms to describe themselves.1 Second-generation immigrants are often called ABCD’s (American Born Confused Desis), while the ABCD’s themselves have referred to recent immigrants as “Fobs” (Fresh Off the Boat). Eschewing both pejoratives and the labels derived from sociology, the critic Vijay Prashad has attempted to simplify and unify diasporic identities by appropriating the in-group name desi, for formal academic discourse. In his book, The Karma of Brown Folk, Prashad generally deploys desi to refer to South Asians sociologically and culturally. Anecdotally, it can be confirmed that many diasporic South Asians, who may or may not have read Prashad’s work, have long used this word as a community marker, irrespective of when they immigrated or whether they are immigrants at all. Among the various communities that recognize the term, desi may work, but it remains a name like a Bengali daknam (pet name), a name used around the house rather than recognized by a broader public (bhalonam).2 With Prashad, the formal usage of desi throughout his book leads to a certain ambiguity regarding his intended audience; it is unclear whether The Karma of Brown Folk is a general sociological treatise on the emergence of a South Asian American cultural politics, or whether it is in effect an in- “Names Can Wait” 15 group text, written by a progressive desi, whose use of the term might limit its audience, potentially reifying—through linguistic exclusion— the very culturalism it claims to critique. This ambiguity is present from the beginning of Prashad’s text, as he provisionally embraces desi as an “unalloyed” cultural identity: Given other circumstances, I would have much rather addressed this book to an unmarked human subject, who is like the Subject of so much European philosophy, but such a choice is not available as long as ‘race’ continues to be a searing category through which we are so habitually forced to live. The resilience of race in our lives cannot be easily dismissed in favor of an imputed universalism, since we might want to allow those who fight from standpoints of oppression to come from concrete identities . to produce forms of unity that can only be seen in struggle rather than in some abstract theoretical arithmetic. Most notions of identity are not unalloyed, and many celebrate the importance of the politics of identification; we must learn to harness these identifications in the hope of a future rather than denying the right of oppressed peoples to explore their own cultural resources toward the construction of a complex political will. (ix-x) Here, Prashad is arguing that that racialized markers of identity among “oppressed peoples” can and should be accepted by progressive intellectuals and activists, even if the latter do not personally share the unalloyed sense of identity in question. Unfortunately, however, the idea of a constructed identification with authentic ethno-racial group can be deeply problematic, as Prashad’s own investigations of religious fundamentalisms in various diasporic communities might illustrate. Moreover, desi has its own problematic limits, which cannot be merely overlooked in the interest of an activist agenda. Dravidian languages, for instance, do not have the word desi, thus potentially limiting the recognition or usefulness of the term even within South Asia. Various South Indian communities have resisted the hegemony of North Indian languages since the 1950s, and this animus against Hindi and other north Indian languages can also extend to the word desi. South Asians from South India—and Sri Lanka—might therefore insist on articulating the “construction of a complex political will” in their own idiom or, perhaps, in English.3 Moreover, Prashad leaves more or less unexamined the fraught concepts of “unalloyed” racial and cultural identity that are presupposed by desi. Are persons of mixed heritage, for instance, also desi? What about individuals of European descent who have lived, or are currently living, in South Asia, or otherwise have a strong investment in South Asian cultural forms? At the limits of desi identity, it becomes clear that the term, which at times seems to be more indicative of “race” than it is of “culture,” is as potentially limiting as the names it is designed to replace. What is needed is an 16 Amardeep Singh approach to naming that remains open to the possibility that authentic cultural identity will always remain a vanishing object. As a side note, it seems worth pointing out that the struggle with naming in South Asian diaspora communities might be seen to echo that of African Americans, who have as a community also struggled with a series of public names, most of them interpellated rather than chosen: “colored,” “Negro,” “black,” “African American,” the highly diluted “people of color,” and the hybrid derogatory/pet name “nigger/nigga.” The points of comparison are interesting and potentially very compelling, but beyond the scope of this particular essay.4 To the extent that the experience of African American naming and self-naming has been difficult, however, it seems that the struggle to name the diasporic community, and of naming within the community, will be a long and difficult road. The great conceit of Lahiri’s novel is that her Gogol, the ambassador of a community without a name, is himself misnamed. His parents legally give him the surname of the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol as a first name in the Massachusetts hospital where he is born. The name is chosen with the understanding that it is merely a formality, and will in time become just a pet name, because at the moment the grandmother’s letter, on which the ritually selected Hindu name was written, was lost somewhere in the mail from Calcutta. Gogol, the name of his father’s favorite writer, goes on the birth certificate and stays with him in his early school years. His family does later give him a proper name, Nikhil, but it is an afterthought and does not stick. As he goes to college, Gogol wants to redefine himself in terms that he feels are his own rather than those that come from his parents’ Bengali immigrant culture. In an amazing act of self-definition, which loses nothing by the fact that it is in fact a common event, he abandons the name Gogol and tries to become Nikhil, the conventional Hindu name that was given to him late.

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