RTS- True Stories

REVIEW
ART //
(BEYOND BOLLYWOOD: INDIAN AMERICANS
SHAPE THE NATION)
True Stories
RAGINI THAROOR SRINIVASAN //
AN EXHIBITION ON INDIAN AMERICANS STRIVES TO PRESENT THE COMMUNITY’S
STORY ON ITS OWN TERMS
I
n Johnson City, Tennessee, in 1982, an Ethiopiaborn, India-trained medical resident named Abraham
Verghese coveted Dr Steven Berk’s doctor bag. He
saved enough money to purchase one for himself, then
rubbed it with neatsfoot oil to approximate the wellworn, talismanic quality of his mentor’s bag. Verghese
then filled it with his kit—eye drops, calipers, prescription
pads—and his hopes of assimilating into the American
medical establishment.
Three decades later, ‘The doctor bag of Abraham Verghese’ sits in a glass case in the Smithsonian Institution’s
National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC,
in an exhibition on Indian Americans in the United States.
In that time, Verghese has enjoyed a successful medical career—he is now a professor of medicine at Stanford University—and authored three books, including the celebrated
memoir My Own Country (1994) and the bestselling novel
Cutting for Stone (2009). The back of the display case features snippets of Verghese’s recollections of his early days:
“I had to ask someone how to tie my tie with a thinner knot
so I could fit in. And the only way I could eat the bland hospital food was to put Tabasco sauce on everything.”
Verghese’s words capture the familiar dual imperative of
immigrant life: on the one hand, fitting in, with a tie knot
of appropriate girth; on the other, maintaining one’s tastes,
through the strategic application of chilli-approximating
Tabasco. His story reminds us that even blue- and whitecollar immigrants have to negotiate resistance to the perceived “Third World invasion” of the United States, whether through neutralising accents or by softening the stiffness
of difference with neatsfoot oil.
Verghese’s doctor bag is just one of hundreds of objects in
Beyond Bollywood: Indian Americans Shape the Nation, the
largest exhibition organised to date by the Smithsonian’s
Asian Pacific American Center. The show, which opened in
February and will run through August 2015 before touring
the United States, is part of the APAC’s Indian American Heritage Project, which also includes an interactive website and
digital exhibit that features content from Beyond Bollywood.
Pitched as an act of collective Indian American self-representation, Beyond Bollywood seeks to distinguish itself from
ethnographic exhibits that put communities on display without involving them in the process of curation. Parag Mehta,
106 | THE CARAVAN | MAY 2014
a self-described “political operative” who was IAHP’s first
volunteer and a key contributor to Beyond Bollywood, said
the show is an example of “us taking responsibility for telling
our story on our own terms.” Pawan Dhingra, who worked
on the exhibition between 2011 and 2012, stressed that the
show “is not an Indian American story brought to you by
some other entity,” but rather “by the community itself.”
But self-representation may even raise the stakes of constructing a singular meta-narrative about a community as
diverse as the Indian American one. In the case of Beyond
Bollywood, the burden of speaking “as” a community rather than describing it introduces formidable expectations
about what the exhibition can achieve and the extent to
which the objects displayed can serve in metaphoric relation to their owners and producers.
At the entrance of Beyond Bollywood is a display of crowdsourced shoes—beaded chappals, moccasins, patent leather
dress shoes, the ubiquitous white sneakers worn by every
bachelor engineer. Arranged in an oddly manicured alignment, this is not the typical haphazard pile of footwear
strewn outside a Diwali gathering or cast off before a temple
by worshippers. Yet the installation effectively signals the
hospitality and sensibility of an Indian American welcome;
Mehta has even seen “grannies trying to figure out if they
should remove their shoes at the display by the glass doors.”
“Indian Americans: Who are WE?” asks an opening text
panel. Stepping into the exhibition’s representational embrace, visitors are reflected in mirrors strategically hung on
a wall amid family photographs of people clad in saris, wearing sunglasses, waving Indian flags. The Ghosh family at
Samuel P Taylor State Park, 1970. The Persards in Brandon,
Florida, 1988. As Benedict Anderson wrote in Imagined Communities, his seminal work on nationalism, “How strange it
is to need another’s help to learn that this naked baby in the
yellowed photograph, sprawled happily on rug or cot, is you.”
Here, Indian American viewers are invited to see themselves
through the taxonomic eye of the Natural History museum.
A soundtrack plays overhead, of songs from the Bollywood classics Mughal-e-Azam (1960) and Mera Naam Joker
opposite page: A picture from Beyond Bollywood of Hemendra
Momaya, the father of the show’s curator Masum Momaya,
departing for the United States from Bombay in 1965.
Courtesy Hemendra and Hansa Momaya
Courtesy Donald E. Hurlbert / Smithsonian
REVIEW
Beyond Bollywood is the largest exhibition organised to date by the Smithsonian’s Asian Pacific American Center. It includes a
“kitchen table” at which viewers can browse spice dabbas and read about Indian food in its American incarnations.
(1970). Short clips from Liam Dalzell’s documentary Punjabi Cab (2004), which depicts a day in the life of three Sikh
taxi drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area, play on repeat,
the audio mingling with Hindi lyrics at certain points in the
five-thousand-square-foot gallery.
“Jeena yahan marna yahan / Iske siwa jaana kahan?”
(You live here, die here / Where else would you go, but
here?)
“How long have you been driving cabs?”
“Do you like driving cabs?”
In the Smithsonian’s description, Beyond Bollywood is an
exhibition of “history, art, and culture.” Masum Momaya,
the show’s curator, calls the collection of photographs,
documents, artefacts and three-dozen artworks a “multimodal” telling of the story of Indian immigrant contributions to the United States and its national imagination. The
show unfolds in seven parts: Migration; Early Immigration;
Working Lives; Arts and Activism; Yoga, Religion, and Spirituality; Cultural Contributions; and Groundbreakers. One
of the largest installations is a spelling bee stage where visitors can emulate the thirteen Indian Americans who, since
1985, have won the National Spelling Bee. Other installa108 | THE CARAVAN | MAY 2014
tions include a mirrored yoga pavilion, a motel front desk,
and a “kitchen table” at which visitors can view spice dabbas and read, on plates used as panels for display text, about
Indian food in its American incarnations; for instance, the
“Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts” that approximate
the jhal murhi sold on Kolkata sidewalks, as described by
Jhumpa Lahiri in her novel The Namesake.
At first view, Beyond Bollywood seems complicit not only in
rehashing well-known tropes, but also in bowing to the cult
of celebrity, which Susan Sontag described as the practice of
“grant[ing] only the famous their names.” The most prominent image in the exhibition is of Dalip Singh Saund, the first
Asian American Congressman, pictured with then-Senators
John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson. Headshots of celebrities, including television star Mindy Kaling and Olympic medalist Mohini Bhardwaj, are framed by stainless steel
thalis on a wall displaying “Groundbreakers.”
On another wall, however, are quotations about religious
life in the United States from a collection of non-celebrities, almost all of them aged under thirty, including Aviva
Marer, Aditi Singh, Shivani Jain, Nupur Shambharkar and
Neville Dusaj. Evidencing an unusual and refreshing curatorial principle of selection, these young Zoroastrians,
Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Jains are allotted more
of the exhibit’s coveted real estate than many well-known
REVIEW
Verghese’s words capture the
familiar dual imperative of
immigrant life: on the one hand,
fitting in, with a tie knot of
appropriate girth; on the other,
maintaining one’s tastes, through
the strategic application of chilliapproximating Tabasco.
producers of Indian American diaspora culture. Indeed,
some of the most recognised American desis are missing
altogether: Anita and Kiran Desai, Fareed Zakaria, Vinod
Khosla, Deepak Chopra, Bobby Jindal, Nikki Haley, Chitra
Banerjee Divakaruni and others.
At the exhibition’s preview, Momaya explained that it was
“impossible” to represent the Indian American community
“comprehensively.” Instead, she strove for “balance in the
narrative.” What feels like the exhibition’s somewhat arbitrary selection touches on the difficulty of clearly determining who, and what, qualifies as Indian American. Individuals may be included in the category by virtue of immigration
or birth; phenomena are Indian by virtue of origin or association. The exhibit doesn’t feature Salman Rushdie, who has
resided primarily in New York for many years, but includes
Verghese, the film director M Night Shyamalan, and others
born outside of the United States. Jhumpa Lahiri and the actor and civil servant Kal Penn appear on the margins, while
the American football player Brandon Chillar shares space
with the Nobel laureate and biochemist Har Gobind Khorana, and the astronaut Kalpana Chawla.
Though geared towards an intergenerational public, Beyond Bollywood is heavy on individual profiles and documents accompanied by explanatory text, which can be offputting for audiences accustomed to the visual and sonic
stimulation of the new media world. However a few displays
do live up to Momaya’s goal of creating a “vibrant, loud exhibition” in which children can “touch, poke, [and] point at
things.” One of these is the motel installation, which features
and is inspired by ‘The Arch Motel Project,’ a series of images
from the photographer Mark Hewko and the artist Chiraag
Bhakta (who goes by the name Pardon My Hindi). A facsimile of a reception desk enables viewers to stand in place
for an Indian American motel owner, while also affording a
voyeuristic peek into the owner’s living and working space.
The installation does not, however, fully adhere to Bhakta’s vision, which he shared with me, for a tri-partite division of the space into the customer’s domain (the lobby), the
owner’s private living space, and the “transitional” space of
the office, where smells, sounds, accents, and aromas from
the private domain waft into the public, transactional setting. “Financial constraints,” Bhakta said wistfully in explanation. In his view, the installation could have captured
the constantly mediated nature of the Indian American
lived experience in a more sophisticated, subtle way.
In its most attentive moments, though, Beyond Bollywood
rises to Bhakta’s challenge. The food installation, for example, features vintage Corelle CorningWare plates (“lightweight, versatile, stackable, unbreakable, microwavable,”
my mother recalled), a familiar object for many Indian
immigrant families. In the Washington Post, the reporter
Lavanya Ramanathan criticised this particular brand of
ethnic representation through product placement. “Corelle
doesn’t belong here,” she wrote, “mere feet from dinosaurs
and great beasts whose existence is mind-boggling.” But
the exhibit could have used more artefacts with the sociohistorical specificity of the Corelle plates. For example,
as Bhakta noted in our conversation, in Indian American
homes, fennel seeds are more likely to be stored in reused
Ragu pasta sauce jars than in the stainless steel containers
on display in the exhibition. Indian American immigrants
“recycle,” he said, they try “to adapt.” That, Bhakta said, “is
what America is.”
I
n 1999, US president Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 13125, creating the White House’s Initiative on Asian
Americans and Pacific Islanders, which included the
Smithsonian in its broad mandate “to improve the quality
of life of Asian Americans … through increased participation in Federal programs.” Parag Mehta recalls that the
initiative’s director, Shamina Singh, worked with historian
Franklin Odo, the founding director of the APAC, to bring
to light immigrant stories that were “missing in history.”
Odo spearheaded a series of exhibits documenting the Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Vietnamese experiences in the
United States, which included From Bento to Mixed Plate:
Americans of Japanese Ancestry in Multicultural Hawai’i
(1999) and Exit Saigon, Enter Little Saigon: Vietnamese
America since 1975 (2007).
In 2007, Mehta, then working for the Democratic Party’s
National Committee (DNC), and Toby Chaudhuri, Al Gore’s
former press secretary, met at Delhi Club, an Indian restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, to brainstorm a way to present
the experiences of Indian immigrants. By its own tally, the
Smithsonian has over 137 millions objects in its permanent
collections, but at the time it had nothing representing the
3.3 million people of Indian origin in the United States.
With Gautam Raghavan, a prominent fundraiser for the
DNC who is now the White House’s public engagement advisor, they began marketing an IAHP exhibition prospectively titled “HomeSpun: Made in the U.S.A.” to potential
donors. “We [wanted to] spin our own yarn,” Mehta told me.
Konrad Ng, Barack Obama’s brother-in-law, succeeded
Odo as director of the APAC in 2011, and the sociologist
Pawan Dhingra was hired as the IAHP’s curator. Dhingra
jumped at the opportunity “to be, to do, more” than what
his academic job allowed, but in 2012 left for a tenured professorship. Momaya, a former curator at the San Francisco-based International Museum of Women, took his place.
The exhibit was renamed “Beyond Bollywood,” and the
project’s original logo, which featured the Statue of Liberty
with the spokes of a spinning chakra for her crown and a
bindi on her forehead, was scrapped. Dhingra was happy to
MAY 2014 | THE CARAVAN | 109
courtesy Eric Saund
REVIEW
At first view, Beyond Bollywood seems vulnerable to the cult of celebrity. One prominent image in the exhibition shows Dalip Singh
Saund (centre), the first Asian American Congressman, with John F Kennedy (left) and Lyndon B Johnson.
see the IAHP dispense with the “highly gendered, religious
and heteronormative” image of Lady Liberty. Momaya
hoped the new title would be a good hook for an exhibition
that could enter “mainstream public consciousness.” “We
do this work to be seen,” she said.
The Natural History museum is one of the most popular
in the world—second only to the Louvre—and ten million
people are expected to view Beyond Bollywood over the
course of its run. As the United States’ official historical
archive, the Smithsonian is the “nation’s attic,” the place
where school kids and tourists, citizens and foreigners,
come to see Dorothy’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz
(1939), handbills from the 1963 March on Washington, and
a baseball autographed by Babe Ruth. To be included in the
Smithsonian is to be accorded a place in the American story, to be not just known to other Americans but be of them.
Because the Smithsonian is a public trust, only a limited
amount of its operating budget comes from the US government, and programmes like the IAHP are funded primarily
by private donations. Mehta’s dream, still unrealised, was
to collect $10 from every Indian American family to fund
the exhibit, so that the entire community could feel like
“they own a piece of this.”
110 | THE CARAVAN | MAY 2014
What’s at stake in the conflation of
India’s legacies in the United States
and Indian American contributions
is not just a forgetting of history, but
an eclipse of the present, in which
India has assumed new prominence
on the world stage.
Community participation, the organisers envisioned,
would also ensure that Beyond Bollywood remained focused
on the diaspora, and not the India from whence they came.
“It was not [supposed to be] Holi and Diwali and Rangoli
and Hinduism,” Mehta said, alluding to 1980s Smithsonian exhibitions like Aditi: The Living Arts of India and Mela!
An Indian Fair. “It was, ‘let’s tell the story of Indians in the
United States, how they got here, where they came from,
what they did, and why it mattered.”
Yet Beyond Bollywood also illustrates the difficulty of separating uniquely Indian American themes from representations of India in the United States. The slippage between
“India” and “Indian” in America is evident right from the
rhetorical invitation of the opening text panel (“In the
western imagination, India conjures up … elephants, saris,
and spices; gurus, gods, and goddesses; turbans, temples
… But in America, India’s contributions stretch far beyond
these stereotypes”), as well as in many of the artefacts on
display: a 1960s Hills Brothers coffee tin featuring reductive images of the exotic East, a still of the actor Rudolph
Valentino from the 1922 silent film The Young Rajah, photos of Marilyn Monroe in sexed-up yoga poses for a 1946
fitness ad.
By placing the still of Valentino alongside promotional
materials for the director Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala
(1991), and by decorating the yoga pavilion with America’s
favourite pinup, the exhibit attempts to effect a connection
between India’s influences on American popular culture
and Indian American contributions to the political and cultural spheres. This is not in and of itself surprising, as the
line between Indian culture and its diasporic derivates can
often be thin. For instance, an eco-friendly “Green Holi”
is now celebrated in Texas, and Congressman Ami Bera
is leading an effort to have the US Postal Service create a
stamp commemorating Diwali.
But the distinction is nevertheless key, and it suffuses the
entire exhibit. For example, viewers may trace yoga’s journey from the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in
1893 to Bikram Choudhury’s innovations in the 1970s, and
on to its inclusion in the 2013 White House Easter Egg Roll,
an annual event meant to promote “healthy and active living” hosted by the US president and first lady on the White
House Lawn. This is a story of cultural appropriation and
expedient marketing, involving Indian, non-Indian and
Indian American ambassadors. The exhibit succeeds in describing the transmutation of a spiritual practice into a “big
business” in the United States, but it fails to plumb the larger implications of the fact that yoga is “India’s most popular
contribution to American culture,” and not necessarily an
Indian American contribution.
A semantic quibble? I’m not sure. What’s at stake in the
conflation of India’s influence on the United States and Indian American contributions is not just a forgetting of history, but an eclipse of the present, in which India has assumed
new prominence on the world stage and diasporic subjects
are increasingly returning “home,” or contemplating what
a return might look like. One of the exhibited artworks is a
series of photographs by Sejal Patel, titled “If I were Back
in India, Who Would I Be?” (1996), in which Patel re-enacts
scenes of Indian village life. Momaya’s explanatory text resorts to an essentialised view of rural India: “If she lived in
India, [Sejal’s] days would consist of rolling rotis, making
yogurt, carrying water, and fetching firewood. But because
she lives in America, who can she, and other desi women,
be?” While the images of rural domesticity are not themselves objectionable, the framing condition—“if she lived in
India”—does not qualify the India to which it refers, and
the pat “because she lives in America” reproduces a myth of
American opportunity that is doubly self-congratulatory:
first, to the non-Indian American viewer, who leaves with
Courtesy Corky Lee / By permission of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center
REVIEW
Members of Indian Youth Against Racism, a Columbia
University group formed in the late 1980s, that protested
violence against Indians in the state of New Jersey.
misplaced pride about the personal and professional opportunities supposedly provided women in the United States;
and second, to the Indian American viewer, who leaves
feeling smug about having left India in the first place. This
is a discordant note for the exhibit to strike in 2014 in an
Asia-rising world, one likely unrecognisable, perhaps even
amusing, to many readers.
But in Patel’s own artist statement, available online, she
suggests that her auto-ethnographic photography is not
self-Orientalising or ignorant of India’s modernity, but
a performative illustration of how she sees herself being
seen. This more nuanced point is lost in Beyond Bollywood.
The show does a better job of presenting Annu Palakunnathu Matthew’s photographic series “An Indian from
India,” which is another response to the Orientalist gaze.
Matthew juxtaposes images of Native Americans with her
own theatrical portrayals of Indian immigrant women, and
the text accompanying the work is her own: “I find similarities in how those photographers looked at Native Americans and the colonial gaze of British photographers working in India.” Matthew’s work is a compelling illustration
MAY 2014 | THE CARAVAN | 111
Courtesy Chiraag Bhakta and Mark Hewko / The Arch Motel Project
REVIEW
The photo series ‘The Arch Motel Project’ tries to capture the
world of Indian American motel owners.
of a common misrecognition to which Indian Americans
are often subjected (“Are you a Dot Indian or Feather Indian?”), suggesting a community with a sense of humour and
an awareness of the diverging trajectories of Native Americans and Indian Americans in the United States.
Further inquiry, however, is beyond the scope of the exhibit. Its eighty text panels were each limited to 150 words
by Smithsonian convention, and written with school-age
visitors in mind. “You just have to juggle how much you’re
able to complicate things,” Momaya said. “What we’ve tried
to do is plant the seed and pose some questions.”
B
eyond Bollywood touches on the preservation
of Indian culture in the United States, and on the
challenges of assimilation, but it is overarchingly
concerned with what Momaya calls “contribution.” The
show is, she stressed, an illustration of the “multidirectional relationship between communities and nation.”
In practice, this means that the exhibition foregrounds
people and phenomena that are assumed to resonate with
non-Indian Americans: football players, Weight Watchers
and yoga, rather than the Namaste America TV network
or Shastha Foods, whose idli and dosa batter has fed an
entire generation of Indian Americans, myself included.
There is nothing included about Indian grocery stores, the
Indian American ethnic media, or the Indian movie multiplexes scattered across the country. The inclusion of the
South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association in New York’s
India Day Parade in 2000 is relegated to a strip of wall easily missed behind the section on hip-hop and desi beats.
In this narrative, Nina Davuluri, the first Miss America of
Indian origin, becomes the apotheosis of contribution, but
112 | THE CARAVAN | MAY 2014
there is little space for the outlets and organisations that
explicitly serve the community.
That’s the critical reading, one voiced by the writer Aseem Chhabra in the Indian American newspaper India
Abroad (“The exhibit is all on the surface”), and also by
S Mitra Kalita, ideas editor of the news outlet Quartz (“Trying to define Indian-Americans is an absolute setup for failure”). But neither vein of criticism gets it quite right. What
Chhabra chafed against, namely an appeal to the lowest
common denominator, is what Momaya called a “very intentional politics of accessibility.” As for defining Indian
Americans, Beyond Bollywood does not define a population
so much as call one into being. The challenge is to read Beyond Bollywood’s surface-level treatment not as a failing,
but as an invitation; not an attempt to speak for an existent
community, but an occasion for possible identification with
an imagined and aspiring one.
The exhibit’s curator and advisors are keenly aware of
the political potential of its location and positioning. From
the show’s inception, Mehta, Chaudhuri and Raghavan insisted on framing the Indian American story as, in Mehta’s
words, “a truly American story,” in order to “give the credit
back to the country.”
This self-conscious, calculated framing inflects each of
the exhibit’s other primary aims: historical documentation
of the Indian presence in the United States since the arrival of the first immigrant in 1790; celebration of individual
and collective achievement; giving voice to an underrepresented constituency in the Smithsonian’s archives; creating
a meta-narrative about the Indian American community;
and producing counter-narratives to correct mainstream
misperceptions and stereotypes.
That’s a lot of balls for one exhibit to juggle, and for the
most part it does surprisingly well. Art is often effectively
used in place of a text panel or historical object, and despite
the exhibit’s location in a state institution, it is rightly critical of how Indians have been treated in and by the United
States. Beyond Bollywood highlights the race-based revocation of Army Sergeant Bhagat Singh Thind’s citizenship in
the early 1900s, hate crimes performed by “dot busters” in
the late 1980s, and—perhaps most poignantly—the murder
of Balbir Singh Sodhi in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Such painful moments of Indian American history are handled with grace, and even
President Barack Obama has congratulated the IAHP for
“call[ing] on us to recognise ourselves in one another.”
On 15 September 2001, Sodhi was shot three times outside the Arizona gas station he owned as he was arranging
American flags at its entrance. The flags were intended to
ward off just the manner of hate crime to which Sodhi lost
his life. Now, his signature blue turban is on display in Beyond Bollywood, and it has been acquired for the Museum of
American History’s permanent collection. Sodhi’s turban is,
on the one hand, a sign of Indian American difference—the
symbol that provoked his murderous assailant. On the other
hand, now encased in glass and labelled—“National Museum
of American History / Gift of the Sodhi Family”—it is a hopeful indicator of the evolution of the idea of America. s