An open letter to the white American male on why an Indian woman abroad fears him

My dearest lover,

I fear you. I fear that even though you are kind and generous and conscious and even conscientious, you will one day put me in my place. You won’t be able to help it or even know that you’ve done it, for this is, although not fully, your world. It is your world because you happened to be born in a place that understands you as male and white: white, something that has been venerated in our society and beyond for the past many hundreds of years; male, the object and subject of veneration for many thousands of years more.

While we have traveled different paths, yours being many more times treacherous than mine, we have some things in common. None of our parents were born here in the United States, nor do we come from money. We grew up in communities in which we were different and we tried in our various ways to be a little less different.

The thing that has brought us together for, perhaps, only a moment, is that we have been able to take advantage of a mobility that landed us at, what some like to call, the best university in the world. Many consider this an achievement and attribute it to our sheer talent, wit, and hard work. While this may be true to some small degree, it cannot possibly be anywhere near the full story.

You and I are both keenly aware that this university was never made for us, and the mobility that got us here is foreclosed for the vast majority of peoples at home and around the world. Not only is it foreclosed, but we also know that such mobility has been and remains predicated on the immobility of others, and the actual annihilation of generations of peoples before us. We also passionately hold the view that those for whom such mobility is not an aspiration should be left alone to live and love, to be in the world, to be in their worlds, be as they wish.

At the same time, we ardently honour our elders who made this mobility possible for us through their struggles, the shedding of their tears and blood — that is, by people of color, women, workers, queer people and civil rights agitators. Who, for decades, fought and continue to fight to ameliorate and innovate our collective ways of living.

But what is my point, you may be asking by now.

Here’s the thing. As an “Indian woman abroad”, I was asked if women of South Asian descent, born or living outside South Asia, are more empowered than their sisters in Jalandhar, Kanpur, Quetta, Colombo, and Chittagong.

How do I possibly answer this? Especially when I just finished telling you that I fear you, that I fear being put in my place? Could it be that the question doesn’t pose itself as one of more or less empowered?

It may be obvious to say that we are all products of history. And history has a way of making life too complicated, for us to fit neatly into easy categories and hierarchies that can be compared on a scale of more or less. But more importantly, as you well know, I refuse to participate in a discourse that conscripts women into a pernicious liberal politics. That allows women in the West and of the upper classes to look outward and downward at the bodies of poor and brown women, in order to posit themselves as saviours, and historically as civilizers. And all this as a means of escape, as a way to forget and never deal with the sources of violence and oppression that operate within their own lives and societies. So, perhaps, the best we can say is that the majority of people in the world live within particular conditions of what some call patriarchy and others male supremacy.

What if you asked me where I would rather be, here in Cambridge or in my maternal or paternal villages in Punjab? The only honest answer is right here — where I am, because this is the place I know. But also because here I can have you as my lover without ever having to marry you — you could even be a female — without most of my neighbours, family members, or friends ever batting an eye at such a prospect.

Not because I am in America, some supposed or essential land of the free, but because my mother risked and struggled within our family to make sure that she, my sister, and I have as much control over our bodies as possible, because my elders in the women’s and queer movements struggled to make sure they and I and future generations can simply be as we need and want to be.

As we have discussed and argued so many times, having control over our bodies, reproduction, and sexuality is no small matter, nor is it a privilege -- it is one of the central political issues of our times. But while we contend with the problems of gender and sexuality, we simultaneously confront the problems of class — in India the problems of upper-caste domination, and in the US the issues of white supremacy.

Since I was a girl I’ve felt the rage and injustice of my place as second after boys and men, as not quite American because of my allegedly difficult-to-pronounce name and the colour of my skin. I am also not quite Indian enough because of my manners and accent. But as my own life experience, and fights and conversations with you have taught me, the only way to deal with this rage is to be politically engaged, to work for social justice, to seek and figure out ways to put into action radical solutions to problems, and to act with empathy and compassion, in whatever place I call home. For, to keep our hearts and minds open, despite the layers of pain and hurt and cruelty to each other is a tremendously difficult but truly courageous, radical, and life affirming act.