Crossings
_ Sumita Chakravarty

Having lived in the United States for upwards of two decades, the task of tracing the impact of American culture on my life seems both banal and forbidding. For what, after all, is there new to say? Either one is led to blandly acknowledge the definitive nature of this influence (I live here, after all, having first arrived as a student from India eager to take in all that America had to offer), or to embark on a path of cultural retrieval, highlighting all those parts of myself that remain obstinately "Indian." Yet to cast the issue in these terms is hopelessly inept. The "American" part of me (most obvious when I am in India) and the "Indian" part of me (intangibles I cling to as I negotiate everyday life in the New York metropolitan area) are as intertwined as are my allegiances to the country of my birth and the country of my adoption. I refuse to choose and I resent having to choose.

But the question of American cultural influence does not go away. It surfaces in likely and unlikely places: invariably in the "ethnic" gatherings of Bengali-Hindu poojas and festivals, parties and celebrations; in arguments with teenage children (my own) who refuse the burden of parental aspirations; and in the taut sinews of a body habitually serving as antenna for signals of rejection. In an intellectual climate when it is fashionable to be an outsider, I wonder what a cultural insider means. What is it that makes us belong? Whatever the answer to this question, I have realized that belongingness in not necessarily all that it is cracked up to be. Perhaps it is more pressing to consider whom or to what do we feel we belong, and under what circumstances. Belonging is, after all, as much a state of mind as is the feeling of exile.

As far back as I can remember America – through the Hollywood film and through the glossy magazines that my father borrowed and read from his office library – was a visible presence in the part of India where I grew up. An avid movie buff, my father was as devoted to American films as to the ones produced in Bombay. He regaled us with stories that convinced us of the unflinching pride, honesty and decency of American heroes and heroines and the superiority of the American way of life. Hollywood provided me with my visions of America and I was convinced that my destiny lay westward. And so it became. In the troubled 1960s and 70s, an impoverished India was faced with a brain drain as its youth, educated in its elite institutes of technology, went to swell the ranks of professionals in foreign lands, primarily America. I recall the envy, the aura that attached to those who came back home to visit: they (we) were the lucky ones, the fortunate ones who had moved on in the world. We were "phoren (foreign)-returned"!

I do not know what I have gained and what I have lost in succumbing to the lure of "America." There are the obvious emotional costs to bear in separation from one's immediate family and in the loss of a taken-for-granted cultural milieu. I believe one never quite lives down a feeling of guilt and vague betrayal of the country of one's birth in the act of one's leaving it. Immigrants abroad tend to cling on with ferocious attachment to the family traditions and cultural mores left behind. My own transplantation has been, I presume to imagine, less conflicted and as a consequence, perhaps, less colorful. Ironically, Hollywood has played a role in this process. For if Hollywood cinema had made American life seem distant and unattainable, it had also made it familiar. Thus it was comparatively easy, maybe superficially so, to get used to life in the U.S. But more importantly, my greatest gain has been to be disabused of the idea of America, of a mythic place and people with a special destiny. America signifies to me no longer the foreign country that would make me whole; rather it has taken on the accoutrements of the banal because of its familiarity. I love America because I can see it close up, warts and all. But not for the language of belonging. I want to be free.