Monday, February 19, 2001
The annual international symposium sponsored by the Center for Humanities and Arts dealt this year with “Globalization and Change in South Asia,” and included a roundtable discussion of “The South Asian Diaspora in the Arts” by writers, artists and scholars. Bharati Mukherjee, novelist and professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, was one of the panelists, who carried on a lively discussion about the questionable validity of “South Asian” or “Indian” as a category for contemporary writers in English. Some excerpts:
“When I was growing up in Calcutta we didn’t think of ourselves as South Asians, or Indians, at all—we were Bengali. . . . It was only when I came to the States . . . as a foreign student that I learned to think of myself as Indian, that I was made to feel Indian. . . .
“For writers and artists, group identity is dangerous to art. But I do believe there is a role for nationalism, for roots—that there has to be some cultural specificity within the globalization and internationalization. . . . Those of us who have chosen to move from one continent to another are saying, ‘That was my homeland then, this is my homeland now, my use of the language has changed, the people I write about have changed.’ . . . The problem is that those of us who see ourselves writing in the American immigrant tradition are constantly asked why we are so subject to self-loathing. Articles are written constantly about those of us who say we are American writers of Indian descent rather than Indian writers in a post-colonial world.”

—Beth Roberts
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