Comments
Share this article
Print
Email
She needn’t have worried: mid-way over the Atlantic the airhostesses walked down the aisles with huge smiles and bib-like things with Obama Won scrawled on them. The co-pilot also announced the results to much applause. I couldn’t help but get caught up in the jubilation: had I been American I, too, would have voted for Obama.
Yet, there was something bothering me. It wasn’t just the huge sign hanging from a tree on the way to Dulles airport with Kill Barrack Hussein Obama in capital letters. Race was the subtext through much of the often nasty electoral campaign: Was Obama (his father was a Kenyan Muslim) American enough questioned the more extreme among Republicans.
But there was a niggling sense of guilt. American may be poised for an era of change with its first president of mixed race. We Indians, far too many of us at any rate, have a long, long way to combat our deep-seated prejudices about colour and race.
We all know how badly Africans and African-Americans are treated in India. Just ask any student or diplomat here and they will recount stories about being spat upon, called ‘Habshi’, and much worse. But what really made me bow my head in shame was the article published last Sunday in the magazine section of the Washington Post.
It was part of series by university students writing about their experiences living abroad. In an article titled ‘Color Connection…An African American in India learns that shame is skin-deep’, Austin Thompson, a student of Howard University, Washington DC, wrote about his time in India when he came to Delhi to study at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
It was not a bitter article. Yet, it was the calm and measured prose of the author that made it even more heart-rending to read. Austin had long been interested in different cultures and societies: it was India’s “rich history and culture” that first attracted him to this country. He lived in a home-stay, where you live with a host family as an adopted member.
The first thing his “host mother” asked him was what part of the Africa he came from. She looked incredulous when he told her that he was an American. This was to be the reaction of most people to Austin. It wasn’t the “awe” or “sense of intrigue” he noticed in other people’s eyes that threw him: as a black in America he was used to being invisible but here in India he was an object of curiosity.
Rather it was the sense of “disgust” he discerned in many of the Indians he came across. Once, a man on a bicycle deliberately tried to hit him. Austin stood his ground and walked away, while the crowd that gathered just giggled and laughed. But, when he got back to his room, the “sense of humiliation” got to him. All the strength he had mustered instantly evaporated.
Austin also tapped into something endemically wrong with the way we look down on others we perceive to be lower down the ladder in status, caste or colour. The most moving anecdote in the article is the encounter with the Tamil hotel employee in a hotel in Kerala.
The American always made it a point to “really make eye contact and smile and ask how he was doing” with the dark Tamil when he served him food. Soon, waiter was ladling out larger serving of chickpeas on his plate. When Austin was about to leave the hotel he stopped him, with tears in his eyes. In Austin’s words: “And he said: “Same face, same face,” pointing to the fact that we were both dark. He started crying, and I started crying too.”
The tour guide later told him that people who were his complexion didn’t dress the way he did. Nor did they “exude much confidence” either.
Well, perhaps, president Obama should invite the tour guide to a White House breakfast to teach him a lesson or two.
Email: jain_madhu@hotmail.com