I was on the beach in Costa Rica, vacationing with my family for spring break during my senior year of high school, when I learned that I’d been rejected from every single one of the Ivy League colleges that I’d applied to—including my dream school, Yale. I was predictably devastated, of course, but I was also deeply confused. On paper, my college counselor had assured me time and time again, I was a competitive applicant—my grades were stellar, my letters of recommendation were glowing, and my extracurriculars were as robust as anyone’s. I’d even done what I understood all Asian-American1 applicants to elite colleges were supposed to do—write a nauseatingly self-serious admissions essay in which I painstakingly mined the entirety of my seventeen-year existence for whatever shreds of prejudice or discrimination I could find to prove that even I, an affluent Indian kid from an affluent suburb who attended an affluent school with affluent classmates, had experienced my own form of adversity.

In the months that followed, at get-togethers and graduation parties, I was repeatedly told by relatives and family friends from my suburb’s small but tight-knit Indian community that this wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for affirmative action policies that put Asian applicants like myself at a disadvantage in college admissions. These were arguments that I’d heard more times than I could count, and that I myself had repeated on several occasions along with my Indian-American peers. At the same time as we vocally pronounced our righteous indignation at Rachel Dolezal’s decades-long blackface performance, we looked upon figures such as Mindy Kaling’s brother, who infamously feigned Blackness to get into medical school, as a comical and even vaguely sympathetic character, driven to ill-judged and extreme measures by a system that, while well-intentioned, in practice ended up discriminating against people like us—or so we believed.

These misguided beliefs about affirmative action stemmed not from outright prejudice, but rather from our naive acceptance of the fiction that such policies were meant to do anything other than redress the historical exclusion of marginalized groups from the same elite institutions on which we so desperately pinned our aspirations. Faced with the immense pressure of college applications that, we earnestly believed, would not only determine the course of our lives but would also serve to either vindicate or betray the sacrifices our parents made in immigrating to America, these bold-faced lies about affirmative action presented themselves as a welcome refuge. In all our teenage ignorance, we allowed ourselves to be seduced by them. 

The idea that college admissions are systemically biased against Asian applicants lies at the heart of the plaintiffs’ argument in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the landmark case in which the United States Supreme Court recently overturned fifty years of judicial precedent to rule that racial affirmative action policies in college admissions violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Many have criticized the case’s plaintiffs in the aftermath of the ruling, but the reality is that many Asian-Americans hold similar views—while data from the Pew Research Center indicates that most Asian-American adults who are familiar with the idea of affirmative action are supportive of it as a concept, the same numbers show that as many as 76 percent believe that race and ethnicity should not factor into college admissions. 53 percent feel that considering race in admissions makes the process less fair, and more than a third feel that doing so leads to less qualified students being admitted to colleges.

The actual statistics on college admissions, however, call these claims into question. A 2021 report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce found that statistically speaking, Asian-American applicants’ likelihood of being admitted to Harvard has remained on par with that of non-Asian applicants from 2000 to 2018. While the likelihood of getting into Harvard has declined over time, that decline holds true across the board, for all groups—not just Asians. Meanwhile, the share of Asian-American students at the most selective colleges over the same period has increased at the same rate as the share of Asian-American students at all colleges. If there really were some widespread institutional conspiracy at elite schools to keep Asians at a disadvantage, this simply wouldn’t be the case. It is true, the report finds, that Asian-American students do face higher rates of rejection from the most selective colleges compared to their non-Asian counterparts, but this isn’t due to systematic bias. Rather, according to the study, this trend is simply reflective of the fact that Asian-Americans—even those with below-average test scores—are more likely than non-Asian students to apply to these highly selective institutions in the first place.

None of this is to say, of course, that Asian-Americans don’t face bias in college admissions—or, for that matter, any other facet of educational or professional life. The truth is, however, that there is simply no credible basis for the argument that affirmative action policies aimed at creating opportunities for marginalized groups are to blame for this bias. The reality is that by buying into this narrative, Asian-Americans such as the plaintiffs in the Harvard case are aligning themselves with the forces of white supremacy, allowing themselves to be weaponized as pawns in pursuit of an odious right-wing agenda—and hindering the collective advancement of all marginalized communities in the process.

Much has been written about the closely interwoven relationship between the weaponized role Asian-Americans play in debates over affirmative action and the pervasive stereotype of us as so-called “model minorities”—supposedly more hardworking, law-abiding, and high-achieving than other racial and ethnic groups. The “model minority” stereotype has its roots in a 1966 New York Times article by the sociologist William Petersen, entitled “Success Story, Japanese-American Style.” In the article, Petersen attributed the relative socioeconomic success of Japanese-Americans—particularly in the aftermath of their internment during World War II just two decades earlier—to what he argued were innate cultural characteristics such as a strong work ethic, robust family values, and an emphasis on education. Petersen contrasted this “success story” with the experience of what he termed “problem minorities”—namely Black people—and while he did superficially acknowledge the role that historic oppression played in shaping the marginalized social position of Black Americans, implicit in Petersen’s argument was the deeply racist idea that this community lacked certain cultural traits that had predisposed Japanese-Americans to success.

At the time that Petersen was writing, Japanese-Americans already had deep roots in the United States. His arguments, however, would soon be extended to other groups whose presence in the country was much less established—the article was published just one year after the Immigration and Nationality of Act of 1965 opened the door for larger-scale immigration from other Asian countries by removing the national-origin national-origin quotas that had explicitly excluded Asians and largely restricted immigration to white Europeans from the 1920s onward. In place of these quotas, the Act instituted a new system which gave preference for admission to individuals who had attained higher levels of education and who worked in white-collar professions, while simultaneously making it more difficult for would-be immigrants from poor and working-class backgrounds to secure visas. Predictably, these requirements had the effect of ensuring that many of the Asian immigrants who came to the United States in the wake of the 1965 Act represented a particular social background—highly educated, professionally successful, upwardly mobile—that dovetailed conveniently with the widespread conception of an American Dream rooted in hard work and self-sufficiency further reinforcing the model minority stereotype in the eyes of many Americans.

The stereotype has remained pervasive ever since, and many Asian-Americans have embraced the model minority narrative as part of a frantic bid for proximity to whiteness in a country where whiteness is perhaps the single most powerful form of social currency an individual can have. (This pursuit of whiteness, it should be noted, is nothing new—in an infamous Supreme Court case from 1923, a Punjabi immigrant named Bhagat Singh Thind unsuccessfully sued for naturalized United States citizenship on the grounds that his background as a “high-caste Hindu” qualified him as “white” under the prevailing racial logic of the time.) This embrace of the model minority stereotype comes at a cost—internalization of the stereotype is associated with adverse mental health outcomes, barriers to accessing mental support, and a higher prevalence of anti-Black attitudes.

Beyond these individual harms, the stereotype itself is also riddled with grotesque misrepresentations. It obscures, for example, the fact that Asian-Americans have the largest economic disparities of any racial or ethnic group in America, or that Asians constitute some 17 percent of undocumented immigrants in the United States. It leaves little room for the Desi taxi drivers and Vietnamese nail techs, the Chinese restaurant workers and Filipino nurses who are no less Asian-American than their counterparts in medicine, tech, or business, but whose stories and experiences are never held up in the same way as examples of what “good” immigrants ought to look like.

Though this stereotype is often referred to as the “model minority myth,” simply calling it a myth risks obscuring the reality that the idea of the model minority is far more than just a widely-held misconception—it is a conscious narrative, intentionally constructed in service of particular political ends. Accepting the model minority narrative entails more than just falling for an unfounded belief—it means buying into the agenda that underlies this narrative, aligning oneself with a political project that seeks to reify a supremacist social order in which whiteness is elevated to the top of the racial hierarchy and all other groups are forced to scramble for the places underneath it. The model minority narrative, in other words, is not just a myth—it is a potent and insidious fabrication, and one which far too many of us bear responsibility for perpetuating.

Apart from being patently false, of course, this narrative is also extremely dangerous—for obvious reasons. While on its face it may appear to be a “positive stereotype,” the fact is that the model minority cannot exist without a counterexample against which its own “model” status can be measured—so-called “problem minorities,” whose social marginalization is attributed to laziness, ignorance, criminality, and other supposed markers of ontological inferiority. So long as some communities are held up as models of how racialized minorities ought to exist in a society whose very structure is premised on their Othering, there will always be other groups who are not so lucky—whose own marginalization is only exacerbated by the acceptance of their “model” counterparts. Little wonder, then, that the model minority narrative has long served to drive a racial wedge between Asian-Americans and other minority groups—forestalling the sort of radical cross-ethnic solidarity that emerged, for example, during the British Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps, had the stars aligned differently, such solidarity might have emerged in America as well.

This narrative’s harms are not just limited to undermining solidarity between different racial and ethnic groups. By reinforcing a particular, narrowly-defined idea of what “success” means for Asian-Americans, the internalization of the model minority narrative also drives an internal wedge between those members of our communities who conform to this constructed image and those who do not. The model minority narrative places the greatest value on those markers of success—elite education, lucrative employment, acceptance as unobtrusive members of “polite” society—which serve to uphold and reinforce the same structures of capitalism and white supremacy that have oppressed communities of color for centuries. Ultimately, the internalization of these criteria is about trying to secure Asian-Americans’ positions within these structures, rather than putting us in a position to effectively challenge them.

When Asian-Americans accept the model minority narrative, we become active participants in our own dehumanization. Internalizing this narrative means more than just setting impossible standards for ourselves—it means limiting the horizons of our experience to a narrowly-defined set of criteria for “success” that define us in the eyes of white America. It means leaving no room for the possibility of our surviving and thriving beyond the expectations set for us by the same forces that colonized our homelands, enslaved our brothers and sisters, and continue to hold us back to this day. By reducing ourselves to these arbitrary and oppressive standards, we deny ourselves the space to exist in this world as full and flawed human beings, capable of stumbling and faltering and, yes, even failing.

It’s undeniable that the model minority narrative is deeply entrenched in Asian-American culture and identity. But for as long as this narrative has existed, and for as long as Asian-Americans have internalized it, there have also been activists, organizers, and radical leaders who have bravely called on our communities to resist it. In 1969, just a few years after William Petersen coined the term “model minority,” poet and activist Amy Uyematsu wrote an article in Gidra—a revolutionary magazine which published writings on Asian-American identity and culture from a radically anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist perspective—entitled “The Emergence of Yellow Power in America”. In the article, Uyematsu took the Asian-American mainstream to task for its acceptance of model minority status in pursuit of whiteness by proxy, writing that “precisely because Asian Americans have become economically secure, do they face serious identity problems. Fully committed to a system that subordinates them on the basis of non-whiteness, Asian Americans still try to gain complete acceptance by denying their yellowness. They have become white in every respect but color.” By allowing the white-dominated American society to “hold up the ‘successful’ Oriental image before other minority groups as the model to emulate,” Uyematsu argued, “Asian Americans are perpetuating white racism in the United States.”

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Excoriating Asian-Americans for their general refusal to engage in radical political activism—a passivity which she attributed to a pervasive culture of fear—Uyematsu argued that this deferential stereotype of Asians only exacerbated the oppression of other groups, in particular Black people: “Asian Americans have formed an uneasy alliance with white Americans to keep the blacks down…Fearful whites tell militant blacks that the acceptable criterion for behavior is exemplified in the quiet, passive Asian American.” Uyematsu forcefully challenged this stereotype, instead arguing for a new conception of “yellow power” that would reject the “passive Oriental stereotype” and instead bring about “the birth of a new Asian—one who will recognize and deal with injustices” rather than silently accepting them.

In the summer of 2020, with the nation reeling in the aftermath of George Floyd’s brutal murder at the hands of four Minneapolis police officers—one of them himself Asian—many people issued renewed calls for Asian-Americans to abandon the model minority narrative, critically examine and reject patterns of anti-Blackness within our communities, and stand in unyielding solidarity with Black people in the struggle for justice and liberation. Some three years later, however, the cynical weaponization of Asian-Americans as pawns in an odious right-wing campaign to eliminate even the most basic protections for marginalized groups is a sobering reminder of just how far we still have to go if we want to build the sort of radical, cross-ethnic solidarity that is so direly needed to ensure our collective liberation.

Earlier in this essay, I critiqued the widespread tendency to refer to the model minority narrative as a “myth.” My critique was based on the common definition of a myth as “a commonly believed but false idea,” on the grounds that calling the stereotype a myth in this sense allows us to evade responsibility to a certain extent for our own complicity in actively upholding it. I suppose the argument could be made, however, that the model minority narrative does function in many ways as a myth in the other sense of the term, specifically as an origin myth—a story that we tell ourselves to help explain an aspect of the world whose true origins lie beyond our comfort or comprehension. Viewed through this lens, the model minority is a sort of origin myth—a way for Asian-Americans to more comfortably explain the unique position of relative privilege that many of us occupy in American society, rather than having to reckon with the far less comforting reality that this position is both contingent and predicated upon the violent marginalization and dispossession of other groups.

The model minority narrative is a powerful origin myth, and a deeply alluring one for any community seeking acceptance and security in a white supremacist society. It’s easy to understand why so many of us have internalized this myth, but that doesn’t make it any less vital for us to cast it aside (as we should have done long ago). We simply cannot afford for our comfort to come at the expense of others’ humanity—or, for that matter, at the expense of our own.

On a particularly busy stretch of London’s Strand, tucked away between a shabby newsagent and an expensive-looking coffee shop, a nondescript doorway opens out onto the bustling sidewalk. It’s the kind of place that you could walk past a thousand times without ever realizing it’s there—there is very little to make it stand out in any way, save for the slightly weathered sign reading “HOTEL STRAND CONTINENTAL” that hangs above the door, and even that is easy to overlook amid the dizzying perpetual motion of the London street.

There is no lobby when you enter the doorway—just a flight of narrow, uneven stairs. Follow them up to a small landing, where straight ahead you will find the hotel’s check-in counter, itself fairly unremarkable other than that it looks like it could have fallen out of a 1950s photo album. Turn right through the double glass doors, however, and you will find a short hallway leading you in to an airy lounge, where stained-glass windows and walls painted soothing shades of cream and sage welcome you to the India Club.

To step through the India Club’s glass-paneled doors is to step back nearly three-quarters of a century into the past, when the Club’s namesake was still a fledgling nation, only just beginning to take its first steps into a brave new world. The space appears to have remained virtually unchanged since its establishment following Indian independence and the end of British rule, and indeed, the faded grandeur of that dying empire’s final days still lingers in the air like a vanishing cloud of smoke. The India Club is far from ostentatious—the paint on the walls is chipped, the wood molding scratched, the furniture simple and even cheap—and yet the place is nevertheless permeated by an air of historical elegance. Indian artworks and framed portraits of freedom fighters line the walls, and the windows which look out onto the busy street below are lofty and commanding, adorned at the top with stained glass panels.

Often, when I come here in the afternoons to write, the lounge is entirely deserted—even the area behind the counter is empty. In the evenings, however, the place fills up quickly and without warning as the dinner crowd from the restaurant upstairs—a simple, no-nonsense curry house, with walls painted pale yellow and row after row of rickety formica tables—spills into the lounge below. It is the kind of establishment where the vast majority of patrons are longtime regulars, and in the evenings the walls reverberate with the same heady cocktail of voices, laughter, and clinking glasses that have filled the space for more than 75 years.

If these walls could talk, they would likely speak with the same aristocratic, English-inflected accents as the whisky-swilling, London-educated Indian elites who first inaugurated them. The Club was established in 1951 as a social hub for Indian intellectuals, nationalists, and activists in the run-up to Indian independence, and its founding members included Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, and V.K. Krishna Menon, the first Indian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. It served as the primary headquarters and meeting place for the India League, a prominent anticolonial organization founded by Menon in 1928 whose membership, in addition to Menon and Nehru, included leading intellectuals Bertrand Russell and Harold Laski, author H.G. Wells, and Labour Party leader Michael Foot, among other luminaries. In the years following Indian independence, the India League shifted its focus to promoting UK-India ties and the interests of Indians living in Britain, and the India Club quickly became a gathering place for London’s South Asian community. In 1964, the Club moved from its original premises at 41 Craven Street to its current location at 143 The Strand—though by all accounts, the India League had already been conducting much of its business at the Strand site for several years before the move.

Over the years, the India Club housed the meetings and activities of groups including the Indian Journalists’ Association, the Indian Workers’ Association, and the Indian Socialist Group of Britain. In addition to these formal associations, however, the Club also served a vital function as a “home away from home” for countless individual South Asians who immigrated to England over the years—in 2019, the British National Trust held an exhibition on the Club’s history and cultural significance, which included a series of video interviews and oral histories from longtime Club patrons. One such testimony comes from Kusoom Vadgama, a writer and doctor who first came to London from Kenya in 1953 and who began frequenting the India Club on a regular basis in the 1960s. The Club, she explains in her interview, is the essence of “India in Britain—literally, physically, and spiritually.”

All the historic and cultural significance in the world, however, has not been enough to inoculate the India Club against the looming threat posed by the forces of redevelopment and so-called “urban renewal.” In 1997, facing liquidation, the establishment was bought by by a Parsi couple named Yadgar and Freny Marker. (The Club has remained in the Marker family’s hands ever since, and their daughter Phiroza now serves as general manager.) For several years after the Markers took over, the India Club’s future seemed relatively secure, but this certainty was upended in September 2017, when the building’s landlord—Fulham-based Marston Properties—submitted plans to the Westminster Council to shutter the India Club and redevelop the site, with its coveted central location, into an upscale hotel complex.

The plans were met with widespread community outrage, and a petition opposing the planning application received more than 26,000 signatures. The public comments accompanying the petition’s signatures reflect the Club’s historic importance to London’s South Asian community—many comments highlight longstanding familial connections to the India Club, including parents and grandparents who were regular patrons in the 1950s and 1960s, while others emphasize the establishment’s unique significance as both a symbol and a site of history. As one commenter eloquently observed:

“This is a living monument to Britain’s imperial history that is also integral to the liberation movements Britain has inspired. There are few symbols that capture the complexity of Britain’s colonial past; India Club is deserving of protection and celebration.”

Nearly one year after the planning application was submitted, the Westminster Council voted unanimously in August 2018 to reject it—as Tony Devenish, chairman of the Council’s planning applications subcommittee, explained, the proposed redevelopment would mean “the potential loss of an important cultural venue located on its site, the India Club. The India Club has a special place in the history of our Indian community and it is right that we protect it from demolition.”

This victory, however, proved short-lived. In the wake of the devastation wrought on the hospitality sector across the United Kingdom by the COVID pandemic, Marston Properties served the India Club with an eviction notice in early 2021, notifying the Markers of the landlord’s intention to proceed with the planned hotel redevelopment. After a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the Club’s legal defense shattered its initial target in just a few weeks and raised over £50,000 in less than three months, the establishment reopened in May 2021 in defiance of the eviction order. At the time of writing, the eviction case is still working its way through the courts. For now, however, the India Club is still standing, doing exactly what it has done best for the last 60 years, serving the same comfort food and fostering the same sense of community under the same historic roof.

The fight to save the India Club is just one battlefield in a much larger war against the rising tide of so-called “regeneration” efforts that have, in recent years, threatened to displace and erase communities across London with rich and often underappreciated histories. As a city, London is no stranger to gentrification—in fact, the term itself was first used by the German-born sociologist Ruth Glass to describe the phenomenon of affluent Londoners moving into previously working-class areas in the 1960s. Most discussion of gentrification—whether in London or any other city—tends, for good reason, to focus on the human costs of such changes, from displacement to overpolicing. In addition to these costs, however, this phenomenon often also has the less tangible but no less devastating effect of erasing (in many cases, literally bulldozing) the historic and cultural institutions that have long served as pillars of immigrant and working-class communities. This is a pattern that has repeated itself over and over again across London in recent years, from the attempted eviction of a beloved multicultural grocery store in Brixton Market to the ongoing campaign to save Brick Lane, the historic heart of East London’s Bangladeshi community, from corporate redevelopment.

Arguably, however, the India Club’s significance extends beyond the immediate local politics of gentrification and urban renewal. In many ways, it speaks to broader, far more fundamental questions of what spaces like this one, with their rich history and longstanding importance for immigrant communities, really mean given the historic and current context of immigration in the United Kingdom.

The history of immigration to Britain is inextricably intertwined with the history and ongoing legacies of the British Empire. As Ian Sanjay Patel, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Research at Birkbeck University of London, writes in the introduction to his 2021 book We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire, “only by retelling the story of immigration, not as a domestic national story confined to the British Isles but as a diverse international story connected to empire, can we begin to see it clearly.” In the wake of the Second World War, with its grip on the colonies loosening and a growing sense that the global winds of change were starting to blow in the direction of decolonization, Britain began to shift its attention toward the Commonwealth, which included current and former colonies alike, as a means of keeping the imperial project alive in a new, adapted form. In a “conscious attempt to keep Britain’s post-war imperial ambitious intact,” Patel explains, the British government held on to a uniform conception of British nationality that encompassed all Commonwealth subjects—an effort which “had the effect of granting British citizenship, and confirming the right of entry into Britain, to millions of nonwhite people in the post-war world. In other words,” writes Patel, “the constitutional unification of Britain with the empire and Commonwealth, and the post-war migrations to Britain that followed it, were intended and unintended consequences of a single post-war imperial project.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, realizing the implications of this expansive approach to citizenship, the British government began to pass a series of increasingly draconian laws aimed at reining in the parameters of nationality and severely restricting immigration—policies which had the effect, as legal scholar Nadine El-Enany has argued, of “[placing] the wealth of Britain, gained via colonial conquest, out of reach for the vast majority of people racialised through colonial processes.” This push to close Britain’s borders to its former colonial subjects was, of course, spurred on in large part by the racist fearmongering of right-wing politicians such as Enoch Powell, whose infamous 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech painted an apocalyptic picture of a Britain overrun by non-white immigration, where “in 15 or 20 years’ time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

This, then, is the context in which the India Club’s history has unfolded (and continues to do so). As South Asian immigrants to the United Kingdom from the 1950s onward found themselves faced with the harsh realities of an erstwhile colonizer that had initially welcomed them to its shores, only to turn hostile, spaces like the India Club played a pivotal role—as the aforementioned thousands of testimonies and petition comments indicate—in providing them with a gathering place and a crucial sense of community. Today, as the British government—even with an Indian prime minister whose ascent to power has been misguidedly hailed as a victory for South Asian representation—pursues an immigration policy whose defining features are its overt hostility and abject cruelty, the need to defend and preserve institutions like the India Club is arguably more urgent than ever before. In the absence of such institutions, the violent politics of anti-immigrant erasure that is increasingly being promoted by the British state—erasing not only immigrants’ physical presence in this country, but the vestiges of their history as well—will only be accelerated.

In the India Club’s lounge, underneath a massive plaque listing the names of every president of the “Curry Club” from 1962 to 2023 in shining golden letters, a large, slightly weathered guestbook rests on a wooden stand. Its wrinkled pages are covered in messages left by patrons, ranging in tone from the heartfelt to the irreverent. Of the countless notes that fill the pages of this guestbook, however, there is one in particular—from March of last year—that catches my eye, encapsulating with poignant simplicity the core of what the India Club means to so many people:

“This is more than a beautiful and unique place — THIS IS LONDON. All the great spirits of our city and shared past are here. I’ll defend it to the death, and I hope you will too.”

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This piece was originally published on November 2, 2022 in Electric Literature under the title “My Nostalgia for Enid Blyton is Complicated.”

I can’t quite recall how old I was when I read my first book by Enid Blyton, though I remember the book itself: Five On A Treasure Island, the first in her Famous Five series of mystery novels which feature an eponymous group of four adventure-prone children and their beloved dog. Perhaps the best-known of her many series, The Famous Five was my introduction to the works of the British children’s author, who in 2008 was voted Britain’s best-loved writer—surpassing literary giants such as William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens. When I started reading it, I was instantly hooked, and like millions of others who had found themselves captivated by her gripping plots and beloved characters, Blyton quickly became my favorite author. From that day forward, I was rarely seen without a copy of one of her books—I carried them everywhere with me, stuffing them into my backpack before school and stowing them in the back seat pockets of my parents’ cars so that I would never find myself without a Blyton close at hand. 

Like many writers, I was a reader from the moment my arms were strong enough to hold up a book on their own, and Enid Blyton’s stories marked some of my earliest forays into the world of chapter books. The charm that Blyton’s books held for my childhood self lay, in large part, in the fact that they spanned across a wide range of genres—her mysteries and adventures occupied a permanent place on my shelf right next to her school stories, with a healthy dose of fantasies and fairy tales sprinkled into the mix as well. As a child, I had always used books as a way of escaping into different worlds, and her books provided me with no dearth of worlds to choose from. Beyond their seemingly endless variety, however, her stories also tended to feature characters who were around my age. This meant that as I read, I was able to picture myself taking part in the action alongside her juvenile protagonists, sneaking out of boarding-school dorm rooms for illicit midnight feasts or rowing boats out to sea to investigate gangs of smugglers hiding in ruined island castles. 

In many ways, my childhood love for Blyton’s stories can be traced back to the fact that even her most thrilling adventures started out in unremarkable English villages that just as easily could have been my own home town, their quaint stone houses and neatly-arranged gardens closely mirroring the manicured lawns and cookie-cutter McMansions of the sleepy suburb where I grew up. These idyllic small towns were inhabited by ordinary children whose lives were no more inherently exciting than my own—save, of course, for the hair-raising adventures that they somehow managed to stumble upon whenever they came home from school on holiday. If these children could go on adventures despite their painfully ordinary lives, I figured, then there was no reason why I couldn’t do the same, and my fanciful mind quickly began to conjure up secret passageways hidden in our coat closets and fairy houses tucked away under the rose bushes in our garden. Blyton’s stories fed my overactive imagination and taught me to view the world around me with a wide-eyed sense of adventure, lending a fantastical air to an otherwise mundane suburban upbringing.

Born in South London in 1897, Enid Blyton published her first book, a collection of poems entitled Child Whispers, in 1922. Over a period of nearly five decades, Blyton published more than 600 books and quickly established herself as a giant of British children’s literature through beloved series such as Noddy, The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, and Malory Towers. To this day, she remains among the most beloved children’s authors in British history, her books having sold more than 600 million copies. In the decades since Blyton’s death in 1968, however her work has increasingly come under fire for what many perceive to be racist, sexist, and otherwise offensive attitudes, ranging from antiquated gender roles and crudely-stereotyped nonwhite characters to the casual use of explicit racial slurs—the original edition of one Famous Five story describes the character George, after climbing down a train shaft, as being “black as a n****r with soot.” 

While these criticisms became much more widespread in the 1980s and 1990s, prompting publishers to begin revising subsequent editions of her books in order to remove outdated and offensive language, Blyton’s reactionary views were not immune to condemnation during her lifetime. One 1966 column in The Guardian, written by Labor Party MP Lena Jager, sharply criticized racist themes in Blyton’s story “The Little Black Doll,” in which a doll named Sambo is accepted by his owner and the other toys only after his “ugly black face” is washed off by a shower of “magic rain.” Even her own publisher Macmillan, in an internal review of her manuscript The Mystery That Never Was (which they subsequently rejected), criticized the book for “a faint but unattractive touch of old-fashioned xenophobia in the author’s attitude to the thieves,” whose “foreign” nature “seems to be regarded as sufficient to explain their criminality.”

The controversies surrounding Blyton’s work have gained renewed attention in recent years, as the United Kingdom—like the United States—has started to undergo its own long-overdue racial reckoning. In 2019, the Royal Mint scrapped plans to issue a commemorative coin honoring Blyton, fearing potential backlash over the author’s “racist, sexist and homophobic” views, and last year, English Heritage—a charity which manages over 400 historic sites across England and administers London’s famous blue plaques, which mark places that have links to significant historical figures— acknowledged Blyton’s racism for the first time, updating its website to note the criticisms that her writing received both “during her lifetime and after” for its “racism, xenophobia and lack of literary merit.” This recent spotlight on Blyton’s personal bigotry, which she did little to prevent from seeping into her stories, has sparked a debate in British literary circles over the appropriateness of her enduring popularity. Less attention, however, has been paid to another, arguably more insidious facet of her popularity—the enduring legacy, more than half a century on, of British colonialism.

Although her stories occupied an outsized place in my early childhood, not one of my American peers growing up had any idea who Enid Blyton was—nor did they care. When, in elementary school, I purchased a boxed set of the Malory Towers series during a family trip to India and proudly donated it to my school’s library—an act of literary philanthropy that, in my mind, made me the second coming of Andrew Carnegie himself—I was disappointed to watch the books remain untouched on the shelf, gathering a thin layer of dust as my classmates ignored them in favor of other, more familiar fare. I quickly realized that, as the sole Indian student in my class, the only reason I knew about Enid Blyton at all was because I had been introduced to her by my parents, who had themselves been raised on her stories while growing up in India. 

To this day, Blyton remains immensely popular among Indians who, like my parents, grew up reading her. She consistently ranks among the top-selling children’s authors in India, and the managing director of Hachette India, which distributes her books in the subcontinent, told the BBC that “Blyton is one of the few author brands whose work remains unshakable.” Despite rarely, if ever, appearing on bookstore shelves in my hometown, Blyton’s books were always widely available in India, and whenever we visited our family in Bombay I would stuff my already-overflowing suitcase with copies of her books that I bought by the armful from the Crossword bookstore in Kemps Corner. During these outings, I never once stopped to ask how her books had gotten there in the first place. 

As a child, I never gave much thought to the subtle vestiges of British influence that occasionally asserted themselves in conversations with my parents, popping up every now and again in the inflections of their accents or the way they spelled certain words. I knew that nearly every aspect of the world they had grown up in, from the trains they rode to the schools they attended, reflected similar influences in one way or another, the result of two centuries of British rule over India. The fact that they, like millions of their peers, had grown up reading British authors like Enid Blyton seemed to me to simply be yet another example of this influence, and I therefore paid it little mind. Though I was aware from an early age that colonialism was a violent and exploitative institution which had robbed my mother country of incalculable wealth and innumerable lives, my juvenile understanding of colonial violence had not yet extended to encompass its less overt manifestations—the subtle mechanisms of cultural hegemony, such as the enduring adoration of a white author by millions of brown children, that enable and reinforce the violence of a colonial regime. 

Commenting on Blyton’s lasting popularity in India, Indian journalist Sandip Roy wrote in the Times of India that “she colonised us with crumpets and make-believe.” (Note, in Roy’s description, the British spelling of “colonized”—an irony so delicious that it could merit its own essay.) Captivated as I was by Blyton’s stories, my childhood self was not immune to this literary colonization, and I eagerly devoured her sanitized descriptions of British childhood. In a haze of Anglophilia that must have caused my freedom-fighting ancestors to spin in their graves, I wished for nothing more than to have been born British, to occupy the ginger-beer-soaked world of midnight feasts and countryside picnics that filled the pages of Enid Blyton’s books. 

Blyton’s was a world of prim boarding schools and sleepy English villages, where lily-white children with monosyllabic names ate meat pies and tinned sardines rather than the heavy, spice-laden Indian meals that filled my family’s dinner table each night. Even as I imagined myself growing up alongside her protagonists, it never occurred to me that I, with my brown skin and Indian name, would in all likelihood have been shunned as an unwanted intruder, or at the very least regarded with haughty suspicion for my supposed foreignness. Adding to this postcolonial irony was the fact that the England I longed to inhabit, represented so idyllically in Blyton’s books—most of which had been written nearly a full half century before I was born—no longer existed, making my misplaced nostalgia for the Britain of the 1950s not unlike that of the flag-waving, jackbooted ultranationalists who, to this day, fight tooth and nail to keep people who look like me out of “their” country. Rather than giving me a world in which I could truly see myself, then, Blyton’s stories presented me with a world in which I had to subconsciously whiten myself in order to fit in.

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As a child, however, I remained blissfully (and perhaps willfully) oblivious to these uncomfortable realities. Instead, I immersed myself uncritically in Blyton’s works, allowing my love of her writing to lay the foundations for a misguided Anglophilia that lasted into the early years of high school, spurred along by an adolescent pretentiousness that equated all things British with elegance and sophistication. Enid Blyton was just the gateway drug—the floodgates having opened, I began to eagerly seek out any and all of Britain’s many cultural exports. Sherlock Holmes, Downton Abbey, Jane Austen’s novels—if it was stamped with a Union Jack, I couldn’t get enough of it. 

Throughout all of this, I never sought to deny the painful history of British colonialism—instead, I simply chose to look the other way, putting it out of my mind in favor of more comfortable, depoliticized aesthetics. It wasn’t until I got older, and my nascent left-wing sensibilities had finally begun to develop from an ill-defined patchwork of amorphous principles into a more coherent, systemic political ethos which held anti-imperialism as one of its central tenets, that I began to confront these questions for the first time. What did it mean that as a child, having never learned my mother tongue or expressed much interest in connecting with my roots on any meaningful level, I felt more connected to the art and literature of my people’s colonizers than that of my own culture? What did it mean that this author, so beloved not only to me but to my parents, and to millions of their fellow countrymen and women, was a household name in India solely because of colonization’s far-reaching legacies? And what does it mean, even knowing all that I know now, that I still can’t seem to shake the warm, nostalgic comfort that I feel when I think about those stories? 

My feelings towards the nostalgia that Enid Blyton continues to inspire in me are, predictably, complicated—colonial legacies notwithstanding, it is highly unlikely that without her stories I would have ever developed the all-consuming love of reading and writing that has since come to define me. These complicated feelings appear in some ways to resemble those that many people who grew up reading the Harry Potter series, to which many similarly attribute the genesis of their own literary passions, have had to grapple with in recent years, as J.K. Rowling’s transphobic bigotry has become increasingly difficult to ignore. Rowling is arguably the first and only British children’s author to approach the levels of adulation and name recognition that Blyton has long enjoyed, and like Blyton, she too has come under fire in recent years for her trans-exclusionary views, forcing millions of people who grew up on her books to suddenly reckon with this newly-unearthed dark side to their childhoods. 

The controversies surrounding Enid Blyton and J.K. Rowling, though different in many ways, both raise important questions about the limitations and pitfalls of childhood nostalgia. For most of us, immersing ourselves in nostalgic reminiscence is the only way we know how to revisit and relive the joyful simplicity of childhood, when everything made sense (and that which didn’t, we simply chose not to bother ourselves with). In the process, we tend to romanticize those touchstones of our younger days—the books we read, the movies we watched, the songs we listened to—that stick out most prominently in our memory, even years later, and we project onto them an additional (and perhaps undue) degree of symbolic significance. But what happens when these touchstones, and the people that created them, cannot easily be separated from movements, ideologies, and institutions that are diametrically opposed to everything we stand for? What happens when they cannot be separated from social ills that affect not only us, but the people we love? To simply abandon nostalgia altogether in the name of dearly-held principles is far easier said than done, and doing so does not erase the fact that, regardless of our values or principles, these touchstones played an integral role in shaping us into the people we are today. 

Unfortunately, I don’t have the answer to any of these questions—I don’t think anyone does, which is precisely what makes these questions burn so intensely in the first place. The fraught touchstones of our childhoods are just one small facet of a much larger reality—the reality that we have all been shaped by a world over which we never had any real control, by people and places and cultural artifacts that may have dark sides as well as nurturing ones.  Perhaps there is some comfort to be found in the apparent universality of this experience. Whether our cherished childhood memories involve reading The Famous Five or Harry Potter under the covers with a flashlight, watching The Cosby Show with our families on Thursday evenings, or listening to Michael Jackson and Eric Clapton on our parents’ car stereos, few of us have managed to come of age without having to confront, at one point or another, the painful realization that some aspect of our childhoods was not as innocent as we once believed it to be. Maybe that’s what growing up is all about.

no more mangoes is a blog by Pranay Somayajula, a London-based fiction writer and essayist. Click the button below to subscribe for free and receive new essays in your inbox:

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On the evening of October 12, 1915, former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt took the stage at New York’s Carnegie Hall to deliver an address to 2,500 members of the Knights of Columbus’ New York chapter. In his speech, which he gave on the topic of “Americanism,” Roosevelt directly addressed the question of immigrant communities’ patriotism, arguing that immigrants, if they did not wish to be branded as traitors, had a responsibility to completely and unquestioningly shed any foreign loyalties in favor of a patriotic American identity. “There is no room in this country,” he infamously proclaimed, “for hyphenated Americanism.” A few months later, in May 1916, Roosevelt delivered another speech, this one entitled “America for Americans,” in St. Louis, in which he once again condemned “hyphenated Americanism” as a threat to national unity and denounced the use of the hyphen as an “effort to keep our citizenship divided against itself…[and] to breed a spirit of bitterness and prejudice and dislike between great bodies of our citizens.”

Roosevelt delivered these speeches during the peak of European immigration to the United States, at a time when the patriotic loyalty of immigrant communities—particularly Irish, Germans, and Italians—was increasingly being called into question. A few years later, then-President Woodrow Wilson echoed Roosevelt’s sentiments in his famous “Pueblo speech,” declaring before a crowd of 10,000 that “any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.”

In their calls for immigrants to adopt Americanism as their sole national and political identity, both Roosevelt and Wilson invoked a trope that had been used in media and political discourse since at least the 1890s—that of the “hyphenated American.” For Roosevelt, Wilson, and others who capitalized upon paranoid public sentiments to dabble in anti-immigrant fearmongering, the use of a hyphen in terms such as “Italian-American” and “German-American” carried a significance that went far beyond the grammatical, denoting not only dual heritage but dual loyalty as well.

The use of the hyphen to describe immigrant and minority groups has long been the cause of considerable controversy, due in no small part to its checkered history in the rhetoric surrounding American immigration politics, and in recent years many institutions have moved to drop the hyphen altogether. At the 2019 annual conference of ACES: The Society for Editing, the lead editor of The Associated Press Stylebook announced that the updated edition of the stylebook would eliminate the hyphen’s use in “expressions denoting dual heritage.” The decision cited the advocacy of longtime Los Angeles Times editor Henry Fuhrmann, who wrote in one essay that “hyphens serve to divide even as they are meant to connect. Their use in racial and ethnic identifiers can connote an otherness, a sense that people of color are somehow not full citizens or fully American: part American, sure, but also something not American.”

While the AP Stylebook was among the first major media institutions to eliminate the hyphen, other journalistic giants have since followed suit. In 2021, the New York Times quietly dropped the hyphen in its own style guide—a decision that was commended by the Asian American Journalists Association, and which apparently came in response to a letter sent by the Association for Asian American Studies which described the hyphen’s elimination as “an additional step toward recognizing…the dignity and humanity of Asian Americans.”

In 2003, following the demise of A Magazine—once a leading pop culture publication geared towards Asian America—a group of writers and artists in the San Francisco Bay Area founded Hyphen, with the aim of filling the need for “a publication about Asian America that would go beyond Lucy Liu, sushi and yet another examination of the ‘model minority’ story.” The magazine takes its name from the debates surrounding the eponymous punctuation mark—debates which, its editors write, “reflect the dynamism and complexity that define today's Asian America.” (It should be noted that the magazine does not stay neutral in these debates—the FAQ page on its website states that “we do not hyphenate Asian American, or any other ethnic minority,” explaining that “without the hyphen, Asian American is comparable to young American, or liberal American — it provides extra and optional information about this American. With the hyphen, the ‘Asian’ part becomes a necessary component, as if Asian-Americans are a different set of people from Americans: a contiguous but non-overlapping set in the Venn diagram.”)

As the above-mentioned note from the editors of Hyphen indicates, arguments against including hyphens in expressions of dual heritage often tend to center around the idea that the hyphen’s use constitutes a form of grammatical Othering, that hyphenating the identity of a given subject marks that subject as not being a “true” American. According to this line of thinking, by rejecting the hyphen, immigrant communities whose patriotic loyalty is so frequently called into question can send the message, loud and clear, that we are Americans, too. To a certain extent, this logic is hard to argue with—given the alarming resurgence of anti-immigrant politics in the United States, spurred on (though certainly not started) by the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the rise of a chauvinistic American identity politics that is increasingly defined on the terms of white Christian nationalism, it makes sense that immigrant and minority communities would feel compelled, now more than ever before, to assert their status as full and equal Americans.

That said, I am not altogether convinced that dropping the hyphen in the name of emphasizing our Americanness necessarily has the intended political effect. It is, after all, worth bearing in mind that the historical use of “hyphenated Americans” as a pejorative by the likes of Roosevelt and Wilson has always been rooted in the deeply prejudiced expectation that, in order to be viewed with anything other than hatred and suspicion, immigrants must shed all hallmarks of their own culture and heritage in favor of an unadulterated, unqualified American identity—hence Roosevelt’s assertion in his Carnegie Hall speech that “the only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.” Such an expectation sees any attempt by immigrants to hold on to the “foreign” facets of our identity—whether through the languages we speak, the cultural practices we engage in, or the terms we use to refer to ourselves—not only as an unacceptable refusal to assimilate, but as an existential threat to the very concept of Americanness itself.

Ultimately, while calls to drop the hyphen may be well-intentioned, it is also true that the line of argument advanced by the punctuation mark’s many critics—namely, that hyphenating the identity of immigrants somehow undermines our status as equal Americans—plays into this same xenophobic logic, implying that our American identity is somehow more important or valuable than any other identities we may hold. To call myself an “Indian American,” sans hyphen, is to assert while my experience of Americanness may be influenced in some way by my Indian roots, at the end of the day I am an American first and foremost. In this formulation, “American” is the noun that describes my identity, while “Indian” is the adjective that qualifies the noun.

To call myself an “Indian-American,” on the other hand, is to place these two identities on an equal footing, sending the message that I am both of these things at once and in equal measure. While it does not reject Americanness outright, the hyphenated label, unlike its non-hyphenated counterpart, maintains the noun status of both identities, refusing to subordinate one to the other. Viewed through this lens, the hyphen thus becomes an assertion of pride and agency rather than a marker of difference, an oppositional instrument rather than an Othering one.

In his seminal essay “What is this 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?,” first published in 1992, the Jamaican-born British sociologist and activist Stuart Hall wrote that

“blacks in the British diaspora must, at this historical moment, refuse the binary black or British. They must refuse it because the ‘or’ remains the sight of constant contestation when the aim of the struggle must be, instead, to replace the ‘or’ with the potentiality or the possibility of an ‘and.’ That is the logic of coupling rather than the logic of a binary opposition. You can be black and British, not only because that is a necessary position to take in 1992, but also because even those two terms, joined now by the coupler ‘and’ instead of opposed to one another, do not exhaust all of our identities.”

Though Hall was of course writing about the experience of the black diaspora in Britain, his words are no less applicable to immigrant politics in the United States. The argument could certainly be made that for so-called “hyphenated Americans,” the hyphen dividing their dual identities can and should function in an analogous manner to Hall’s “and”—as a marker of potentiality that follows a “logic of coupling rather than the logic of a binary opposition.”

My childhood, like that of most young people growing up in a post-9/11 America, was defined in large part by a ceaseless, cultlike indoctrination into the customs and credo of American patriotism. American flags, it seemed, were everywhere—hanging on the porches of my neighbor’s houses, affixed as decals to the rear windows of cars, flashing across television screens alongside promises of bargain prices on sofas and mattresses. Each morning in elementary school, immediately following our daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, our teacher would choose a patriotic song or two for the class to sing together, a dozen reedy voices warbling in off-key unison about the majesty of purple mountains in the land of the pilgrims’ pride.

When I was around ten years old, following months of pestering, my parents finally allowed me to join the Boy Scouts of America. Thanks in no small part to the additional battery of patriotic evangelism that I encountered during my brief time in that organization, the many hues of red, white, and blue that already flowed through my veins only grew more intense. When my fifth-grade teacher assigned classroom jobs to each student—watering the plants on the windowsill, feeding the class fish, etc.—I jumped at the opportunity to be the student entrusted with hoisting the flag each morning on the pole outside the school building, a responsibility I viewed with all the dire gravity of a clandestine military operation.

Though patriotism was certainly foisted upon me from all directions, it would be a lie to say that I did not willingly accept its imposition. On the contrary, I wanted nothing more than to be seen as American, to be accepted by my lily-white peers as one of their compatriots, and as far as I was concerned, the endless stream of flag-waving propaganda that constantly came at me from all directions was an invitation to do exactly that. Any trappings of my Indian heritage—the color of my skin, the food my family ate at home, the multisyllabic unpronounceability of my name—were of secondary importance, mere footnotes to the fact of my total and unqualified Americanness. At times, they even appeared to me as obstacles to my assimilation, shameful markers of difference that must be hidden (or at least downplayed) at all costs. In the process of adopting this newfound patriotism, one might say that I dropped the figurative hyphen, reducing my Indianness to the status of mere adjective as I subordinated it to my Americanness—though of course, at my tender age I was far from mature enough to think of my identity in such formal terms.

The predictable result of all this was a prolonged estrangement from my roots, the manifestations of which ranged from passive alienation to outright rejection. It took several years, in addition to the development during my teenage years of a radical political consciousness which turned an increasingly critical eye on the very idea of Americanness, before I was able to regain some level of comfort with my non-American background. (This process is, of course, far from complete—I have yet to learn my mother tongue, the names and dates of religious festivals still run together in my mind, and try as I might, I remain unable to shake my preference for eating rice and dal with a spoon rather than with my fingers.)

Though their intentions are noble, I worry that the logic of those who clamor for the hyphen’s elimination in the name of asserting our status as Americans may perhaps resemble too closely the logic which motivated me, and so many other second-generation immigrant kids like me, to shun our roots in favor of embracing the stars and stripes. Perhaps, rather than abandoning the hyphen on the grounds of its problematic history, we would do better to recognize the mark’s potential, in Stuart Hall’s words, to replace the “logic of binary opposition” with a “logic of coupling,” to “replace the ‘or’ with the potentiality or the possibility of an ‘and.’ Instead of subordinating one identity to another, there may in fact be more to be gained from placing our American identities on an equal footing with their supposedly “foreign” counterparts, proudly wearing the hyphen as a badge of honor rather than of Otherness.

Contrary to what the non-hyphenated version of my nationality might suggest, I am not an American who happens to have some Indian heritage. I am an Indian and I am an American, and my Indianness is every bit as important to who I am as my Americanness is—a fact which can only be fully captured by hyphenating my identity. A century ago, the worst thing an immigrant in the United States could do was to be a “hyphenated American.” Today, that is exactly what I am, and I could not be prouder of it.

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I got my first tattoo in September 2021, at a small shop in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The design is simple—a plain black outline of the Hindu-Urdu word आज़ादी (azadi), meaning “freedom,” in the handwriting of one of my closest friends from university. The tattoo is about an inch tall and two and a half in…

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When I was a child, years before streaming services and video-on-demand brought the totality of human cinematic achievement to our fingertips, the world of media available for my consumption was for the most part limited to the collection of DVDs that lined the shelf next to the TV in my family’s living room. Because neither of my parents were particularly devoted cinephiles, our library was fairly small—my father’s James Bond and Indiana Jones box sets, my Disney classics and Dreamworks animations. Also lining the dusty shelf, however, was a small collection of Bollywood films that my parents had picked up over the years, from the Indian grocery store in our town or during occasional visits back to India.

One of these films was Swades, Ashutosh Gowariker’s award-winning 2004 drama starring Shah Rukh Khan as an Indian-born engineer living in the United States. I don’t remember how old I was when I saw it for the first time, but I remember falling in love with it almost immediately.

Early in the film, after taking a temporary leave of absence from his work at NASA, Khan’s character Mohan boards an Air India flight to return to the country of his birth in search of the woman who helped raise him—his first time going back, the audience is told, in years. As the plane begins its descent into the Delhi airport, Mohan looks out the window at the landscape below—a warm pastoral patchwork of greens and reds and browns, just visible through a haze of wispy clouds. The camera shows a close-up of Mohan’s face as the music in the background begins to swell, and we see in his eyes a look of wistful awe—perhaps even the faintest hint of a tear.

In an essay written last year for her column in Catapult Magazine, Nadya Agrawal describes the nostalgia that many immigrants feel for the countries they left behind as “a Hydra—a lashing, many-headed thing made of grief.”

As Agrawal points out in her essay, nostalgia often plays an outsized role in the lives of immigrant communities. Indeed, nostalgia is in a way baked into the very essence of diaspora itself—the word comes from the Greek diaspeirein, meaning “to scatter”, and originally referered to the displacement and dispersion of the Jewish people after the Babylonian exile. In its original usage, the term thus carried a sorrowful connotation, evoking an experience of displacement and dispossession coupled with a profound sense of yearning for that which had been lost. Even today, though it has been expanded in common parlance to refer to any scattered population whose roots remain planted in a different soil, the tumultous and often violent forces that drive global migration mean that the word has not yet been wholly rinsed of its linguistic baggage.

Given these connotations, it is not surprising that nostalgia features so prominently in the diasporic experience. As with ‘diaspora,’ a look at the origins of the term ‘nostalgia’ can tell us a great deal—first coined by a 17th-century Swiss physician to describe the “affliction” suffered by Swiss mercenaries fighting far away from their homes, the concept of nostalgia has since its inception remained closely intertwined with the experience of migration. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, nostalgia was viewed by most doctors as a psychiatric disorder that was closely linked with feelings of homesickness, and some 20th-century psychologists described nostalgia specifically as an “immigrant psychosis.”

Indian-American psychoanalyst Salman Akhtar describes immigrant nostalgia as “a poignant mixture of pain and joy,” in which “pain is evoked by the awareness of separation from the now idealized object and joy by a fantasized reunion with it through maudlin reminiscences.” This duality manifests, according to Akhtar, in two types of fantasies, which often coexist simultaneously in the immigrant imagination—the “if only” fantasy, which idealizes the life that the immigrant led before leaving their homeland and wistfully mourns what could have been had they never left, and the “someday” fantasy, which dreams of an eventual return to the homeland, whether in old age or as a final resting place. These nostalgic fantasies serve for many immigrants as a defense mechanism, a way of contending with the harsh realities of an unfamiliar (and in many cases, unwelcoming) environment by redirecting their attentions elsewhere—whether towards an imagined past, in the case of the “if only” fantasy, or an imagined future, in the case of the “someday” fantasy.

What makes nostalgia such a potent defense? Arguably, the answer lies in the very nature of memory itself, which derives its seductive power from the fact that the moments and experiences which constitute its subjects are located in the past—and therefore, by definition, are no longer with us. Their absence makes them uniquely malleable, subject to whatever interpretations and reimaginings we wish to project onto them. It is from within the space created by this absence that nostalgia extends itself to us, siren-like, simultaneously deadly and irresistible as it beckons us back into the comforts of the bygone. We flirt with it regardless, most of us aware on some unspoken level that this flirtation is not without its dangers. To give into nostalgia’s seductive draw is to risk being consumed by that seduction altogether—when we immerse ourselves too readily in the idealized, quasi-illusory images of the past that nostalgia offers us, we all too often lose the ability to discern between illusion and reality.

In an increasingly turbulent world, the line between finding solace in nostalgia and being consumed by it is both narrow and delicate. The deeply disturbing resurgence of far-right nationalism across the globe is a sobering reminder of just how easily that line can be crossed, and how quickly the joys of nostalgia can turn sour. The central role that nostalgia plays in ultranationalist politics is well-documented—as Swedish sociologists Gabriella Elgenius and Jens Rydgren argue, nostalgia is “a key ingredient of the ethnic nationalism and populism that defines the rhetoric of the radical right.” Nationalist leaders of all stripes use nostalgia as a political tool, galvanizing their bases around mythic narratives of a so-called “golden age” that has been corrupted by an ever-expanding array of internal and external enemies. Playing on the nostalgia of their audience, they couple these narratives with messianic promises to lead the nation—that is to say, the “true” nation, purged under their benevolent leadership of foreigners, minorities, and other disloyal defilers—into a new age, where the glory that has been lost can be recouped. The most extreme version of this, of course, is outright fascism.

The weaponization of nostalgia in service of a political agenda has significant implications not just for the country whose politics are shaped by it, but for the populations elsewhere in the world who have roots in that country. While much of the popular discourse about the global resurgence of right-wing nationalism—and by extension, about the politicized nostalgia that it engenders—has focused disproportionately on the emergence of such movements in Western countries, this phenomenon can be clearly observed across the Global South as well. Given that many of the non-Western societies where chauvinistic nationalism is on the rise have far-reaching diaspora populations—including, most notably, India, whose 18 million-strong diaspora is the largest in the world—it seems inevitable that the politicized nostalgia of the motherland and the immigrant nostalgia of the diaspora should, eventually, intersect.

It’s no secret that India’s Hindu nationalist government, led by Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), enjoys broad support in the diaspora, particularly in the United States—the BJP is by far the most popular party among Indian Americans, of whom nearly half (including a vast majority of Hindu Americans) hold favorable views of Modi. In September of 2019, when Modi appeared alongside then-President Donald Trump at a massive stadium rally in Houston, Texas, the stands were packed with more than 50,000 cheering Indians. And anyone who’s ever had an argument with a Modi-supporting aunty or uncle at a Desi gathering can attest to the fervent conviction of many in the diaspora—particularly among the older generations—that the BJP is the best thing to happen to India since Independence itself.

What drives this support? It seems to me that without understanding the power of immigrant nostalgia, it is impossible to fully understand the forces underlying what Benedict Anderson termed “long-distance nationalism”—the continued engagement of diasporic communities with nationalist politics in the mother country, years and even decades after crossing borders and oceans to seek out a new life. This phenomenon is closely linked to nostalgia—as sociologist Prema Kurien writes, “the personal, cultural, and social dislocation caused by migration often strengthens immigrant nostalgia for home, which feeds into nationalist romanticism.”

If nostalgia drives immigrants to idealize and romanticize the places they left behind, then it logically follows that they should be especially drawn to the weaponized nostalgia employed by mother-country nationalists, who place the homeland on a pedestal—in the Indian case, literally deifying it—while simultanously bemoaning its degeneration under the pernicious influence of alien forces. Flag-waving stories of national pride, transmitted to the other side of the world through Facebook shares and WhatsApp forwards, play upon the rose-tinted memories of the “if only” fantasy, while fearmongering about the menace of disloyal minorities and anti-national elements threatens the imagined stability of the “someday” fantasy.

Immigrant nostalgia, in other words, is not merely cultural in scope, nor is it a purely psychological phenomenon. It is also profoundly political, capable of being mobilized in service of any number of agendas. It is extraordinarily powerful—and therefore, if seized upon by those who seek to weaponize nostalgia for hateful and chauvinistic ends, it can be extraordinarily dangerous as well.

How should we navigate this politics of longing? Some may find it tempting, given the reactionary connotations of any ethos which places such a great emphasis on the past, to distance ourselves from nostalgia and dismiss any potential it may have to form the basis of a progressive project. But despite the many pitfalls of nostalgic seduction, I’m not convinced that abandoning nostalgia altogether is right way to go. As I have written elsewhere, regardless of whatever dangers may arise from allowing ourselves to be consumed by it too fully, the fact remains that the comfort that nostalgia offers us is both unique and universal. To simply cast it aside would be to cast aside the most secure refuge that any of us knows—and in the process, to sever the most powerful ties linking the diaspora to the mother country.

The challenge, then, is not to bypass nostalgia in the process of articulating a progressive diasporic politics, but to figure out how best to engage with it. Perhaps the answer may lie, at least in part, in the fact that immigrant nostalgia looks forward as well as backward. After all, the “someday” fantasy is as much about envisioning the future as the “if only” fantasy is about idealizing the past. Perhaps we can somehow capture this forward-facing nostalgia and orient it towards a future in which the mother country has been freed from the clutches of neocolonial exploitation, its marginalized communities are no longer subjected to age-old systems of oppression, and the forces of reactionary nationalism have been overcome.

“There is a step beyond nostalgia,” Agrawal writes in her essay, “and that is creation.” In many ways, to be any sort of immigrant is to be engaged in a constant process of creation—the first generation must create home and community in an unfamiliar environment, while the second generation faces the Herculean task of creating an identity which balances the best of the two cultures between which they find themselves suspended. In the sense that reconciling nostalgia with progressive values means forging a new path forward for the diaspora, the task of navigating the politics of longing is essentially about creation—perhaps even the most urgent in a long list of creative acts that have come to define the immigrant experience.

no more mangoes is a blog by Pranay Somayajula, a London-based fiction writer and essayist. Click the button below to subscribe for free and receive new essays in your inbox:

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This piece was originally published on June 30, 2022 in Catapult.

Near the end of the fall semester of my freshman year, as my eyes watered and my back began to ache from hours spent hunched over a small desk in the university library, I decided to take a break from studying for finals one December afternoon and walk across the bridge over Rock Creek. I didn’t have a particular destination in mind, only the knowledge that I was likely to lose my mind altogether if I didn’t stretch my legs and seek out a change of scenery.

Just after the bridge, as the gray cement and lifeless asphalt of the West End gave way to Georgetown’s pleasant, brick-lined sidewalks, I came across a small bookstore, tucked between a yuppie-looking wine bar and a boarded-up café. A small bell chimed as I stepped inside and walked up to the fiction section, the narrow stairs creaking precariously under my feet. I ran my hand along the spines as I scanned the shelves, waiting for a title to catch my eye, before finally coming to rest on a small, cream-colored paperback: The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. I had heard of Lahiri before, and remembered seeing one of her short story collections on a shelf back at home, but I’d never actually read any of her books—although I knew of her reputation for being able to capture the immigrant experience, and in particular that uniquely diasporic feeling of interminable suspension between competing conceptions of “home,” with elegant simplicity. Intrigued, I took The Namesake off the shelf and thumbed through a few pages before bringing it back to the cashier downstairs. When I got back to campus I immediately headed to the library, found a comfortable armchair near a window, and began to read.

Near the beginning of the book, the Ganguli family—Indian immigrants from Calcutta—moves from the campus of an unnamed university to the suburbs of Cambridge, Massachusetts, seeking out homes on “ordinary roads where plastic wading pools and baseball bats are left out on the lawns,” and where “all of the houses are owned by Americans.” Ultimately, they settle on an unassuming house located at 67 Pemberton Road, surrounded by neighbors with names like Johnson and Merton and Hill. “This,” Lahiri writes, “is the small patch of America to which they lay claim.”

Like the Gangulis, my parents too came to America from India in pursuit of higher education. They completed their doctorates at the University of Minnesota, and they still lived in graduate-student housing on the university’s St. Paul campus when I was born in the fall of 2000. About a month after my birth, they moved to a quiet suburb about twenty minutes east of downtown St. Paul. After a brief stint here in a rented town house, my parents began, like the Gangulis, to seek out their own small patch of America to which they could lay claim. This turned out to be the two-story house with white vinyl siding and black shingles on the roof, located at the far end of a sleepy cul-de-sac, where I would spend the first fourteen and a half years of my life.

In just about every sense, my early childhood was more or less typical of an idyllic upbringing in the archetypal American suburb, with weekends spent learning to ride a bike in our cul-de-sac during the summer and sledding on our neighbor’s hill during the winter. Based on these trappings alone, it is not difficult to imagine that my name just as easily could have been Smith instead of Somayajula—that my skin, instead of tanning from brown to golden brown in the summers, could just as easily have burned from a pale peach to a painful red like that of the other children with whom I spent afternoons playing in the sun.

But, of course, this was not the case. From the outside, our house looked more or less like any other house on our street. Inside, however, it was filled with art and decor that my parents had brought from India. Every day around dinnertime, the aromas of lasagna and beef stroganoff that wafted through our neighbor’s open window caught and mingled in the space between our homes with the heady scent of haldi and garam masala that trickled out from our own kitchen.

On Sundays, while my neighbors packed into their minivans and drove off to church, I climbed into the back seat of my mother’s Subaru and drove to the home of yet another Indian family. When we arrived, we would be ushered into the living room or basement for a sort of roving Hindu Sunday school that we called Shlokalaya, during which the children of my town’s small but tight-knit Indian community—maybe ten or fifteen families in all—would gather to learn about our Hindu faith and culture.

Although we met in a different family’s home each week, the format of these afternoons was always the same. For an hour or so the students, who ranged in age from kindergarten to sixth grade, sat cross-legged on the floor. An aunty would patiently read out line after line of Sanskrit prayers, and we dutifully repeated the unfamiliar words back to her in halting unison. This was always my least favorite part of Shlokalaya—sitting with my back straight and legs crossed for more than a few minutes quickly grew uncomfortable even for my young body, and the heavily scented incense that invariably filled the room with its fragrant haze had an annoying tendency of aggravating my asthma. Besides, the lines that I spent an hour each Sunday memorizing and reciting meant nothing to me, beautiful though they were—I didn’t understand a word of Sanskrit.

At the time, I regarded Shlokalaya as a fairly boring way to spend the last precious hours of my weekend—although the mouthwatering array of snacks that was provided after each session certainly made it more bearable. Still, though I never would have admitted it at the time, I derived an undeniable comfort from the sense of community that I felt during those afternoons, gathered in one place with the only people I knew who looked like me.

I realize now that it was during these afternoons spent in incense-filled living rooms, plates of samosa and mithai balanced precariously in my lap, that I forged the first links binding me to my roots—roots from which I would have likely otherwise felt entirely alienated. To my parents, and to the parents of the other Indian children with whom I attended Shlokalaya, these afternoons must have served as a sort of insurance policy, a way of holding on to a cultural heritage that otherwise threatened to fade away into distant memory amid suburbia’s haze.

For decades, the suburbs have been equated in the American psyche with whiteness. Their very mention conjures up images of a white middle-class couple lounging on the patio of a picturesque clapboard home, smiling as their two children and golden retriever play in the yard. This association was only strengthened by the fact that Levittown, New York—often referred to as “America’s first suburb”—was originally restricted to white home buyers. This pattern was replicated across the country as exclusionary zoning policies boxed racial minorities out of America’s rapidly expanding suburbs—and, by extension, out of the American Dream of middle-class prosperity that they represent. In other words, the suburbs are equated with whiteness because they were designed to be.

In recent years, this pervasive association has provided the right wing with a new battleground in the culture war, as evidenced by Donald Trump’s attempts to court white support by playing into racialized narratives of suburbia under siege from rising crime and social unrest. For Trump and his fellow travelers on the nativist right—the voices of white resentment and paranoia—the suburbs mean one thing and one thing only: the promise and security of white America.

Like the rest of America, however, the suburbs are diversifying, driven in large part by immigrant families like my own. Between 2000 and 2013, the share of the total immigrant population living in the suburbs of America’s largest metropolitan areas rose from 56 to 61 percent, and during that same period, some 76 percent of the growth in America’s foreign-born population was concentrated in the suburbs.

This phenomenon has spawned a slew of explanations that have, for the most part, focused on the socioeconomic factors drawing immigrants to the suburbs. As one analysis in The Atlantic put it, “they’re drawn there for the same reasons the rest of us are—affordability, jobs, and schools.” These reasons are certainly salient, and for many—if not most—immigrants who seek out the suburbs, they are likely the deciding factors. But in my experience of suburban life, however, this lifestyle can take on another significance altogether for immigrant groups such as South Asians, whose history in this country for the most part extends back only a few decades to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. For these communities, suburban life enables us to engage with the culture of the mother country from the privacy of our own homes, without disturbing the facade of assimilation that many immigrants work so hard to build.

With its single-family zoning, car-centric lifestyle, and cultural association with an “American Dream” rooted in upward mobility and private-property ownership, the suburbs lend themselves naturally to an intensely atomized, quasi-misanthropic lifestyle, suitable perhaps for building cordial relationships with neighbors but certainly not for fostering any meaningful sense of community. This atomization is only exacerbated by suburbia’s strict demarcation between the public and the private, which also allows its inhabitants to project an external image of their lives that may not necessarily line up with the reality inside the home.

This dual existence can in fact serve a vital (if somewhat unexpected) purpose for immigrant families like mine, who face a constant pressure to assimilate into American culture while still holding on to their own. This pressure is especially strong for so-called model minorities such as Asian Americans, who are held up by many Americans as token examples of “good immigrants”—hardworking, law-abiding, and high-achieving—in contrast to the supposed rebelliousness, indolence, and inherent criminality of other racialized communities.

As part of this myth, communities like my own are sold the false promise that so long as we work hard, keep our heads down, and avoid stirring the pot, we too can achieve whiteness by proxy—enjoying all the privileges and protections of whiteness, despite the dark skin and foreign accents that would otherwise betray our status as perpetual outsiders. In both a literal and metaphorical sense, the suburbs represent the culmination of this proximity to whiteness. And for recent immigrants, who are told that the only way to be accepted as “true” Americans is to assimilate into American culture, suburban life can offer an enticing way to walk the fine line between cultural assimilation and preservation.

For my family, the exception to this rule came a few times a year, on the festival days when we invited the other Indian families from my suburb to join us in celebrating. On these occasions, we chose to ignore the imposed separation between public and private, allowing the culture that filled the inside of our home to spill over to the outside. When our guests arrived ready to spend the evening, they lined the cul-de-sac with their Honda Civics and Toyota Camrys, streaming up our driveway in their ornate silk saris and kurtas as they balanced trays heaped with food and thermoses full of chai. Our poor white neighbors, we used to joke—they must be so confused at all these brown people in strange clothes filling up their street.

On these evenings, we made no secret of the fact that we were here, unapologetically foreign, taking up as much space as we wanted amid the white oasis of our suburban neighborhood. Our gatherings were boisterous and often spilled out into the yard, lasting late into the night until the last Camry was cleared out from the driveway and the last guest had been chided into taking home just one extra plate of food. We took a certain unspoken pride in the knowledge that we were adding insult to injury for our next-door neighbors—ardent Trump supporters who, in the weeks before the 2016 election, had plastered their front yard with massive, hand-painted MAGA signs and who already had to deal with being sandwiched between two Indian families.

Growing up, I took pride in my family’s ability to exist simultaneously as Indians and as Americans. It seemed to me that we were able to prove our worth as upstanding citizens of this country while still holding on to our cultural heritage, maintaining a grasp on our culture within the privacy of our home while still projecting an external image of conformity. It wasn’t until I was older that I became aware of the painful illusions underlying this pride.

Every year at the beginning of the summer, our Shlokalaya group held what we called our Annual Day, when we rented out the shelter building of a local park and celebrated the completion of another successful year through a lively afternoon of performances, songs, and games. The summer after my freshman year of college, whichever uncle had been tasked with booking the park for Annual Day had apparently left things to the last minute, and the only available park was in a part of town that none of us were particularly familiar with—a neighborhood where the houses were older, the pickup trucks in the driveways bigger, and the American flags on the porches more abundant.

An hour or so into the program, a group of uncles, including my father, abruptly got up and left the room all at once before returning stony-faced a few minutes later. No one else in the room seemed to have paid much attention to the disturbance, captivated as they were by the children’s charming rendition of whatever myth they happened to be retelling. It was only after asking around in hushed tones that I pieced together what had happened—apparently, some white men in the parking lot had had their suspicions raised by our group of Indian families in traditional dress descending upon this suburban park and had called the police.

Fortunately for us, my father and the other uncles had been able to clear things up, explaining to the officers that we had in fact paid to rent the shelter and were entitled to make full use of it. Still, the knowledge that my father had worked his charm on the cops did little to soothe my nerves. Memories of the mass shooting just months before at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, still loomed large, and once I found out what had caused the commotion, it suddenly became all but impossible to ignore the fact that we were crowded inside a one-room building with a single exit. Nothing happened, but that didn’t stop me from being on edge for the rest of the afternoon. The damage had already been done—the pride and satisfaction of being able to express my culture in a majority-white community had fallen away, and my illusions of safety and acceptance had been shattered in a community space where, by any reasonable standard, I had every right to be.

For months, our group had met every Sunday without incident, celebrating our culture in the safety of our living rooms and basements without eliciting so much as a sideways glance. For all our jokes about intimidating the neighbors with a flood of Indians onto their street, our boisterous gatherings and late-night celebrations never caused any problems. It was only when we crossed the unseen line demarcating the boundary between public and private, moving our expressions of cultural pride out from the privacy of our own homes, that we became a threat in need of surveillance. Suddenly, we were no longer Americans gathering to celebrate in a park on a sunny summer afternoon. Now, we were suspicious outsiders, invading the oasis of suburbia with our unwanted presence.

All my life, I had prided myself on my community’s ability to toe the line between assimilation and preservation, our success in being accepted as “real” Americans without losing some part of ourselves in the process. As I sat in the park shelter that afternoon, that mirage dissolved. For the first time in my life, I saw the suburban delusion for what it was: a smokescreen of cultural agency that, when push came to shove, could be undone at the drop of a MAGA hat by anyone who deemed the dark-skinned foreigners in their neighborhood to be “suspicious.”

If this country promises immigrants the American Dream, then the suburbs promise a specific variation on that dream. At the same time as it offers all the external trappings of suburban life—and, by extension, the benefits of proximity to whiteness—the suburban dream also offers us a space, tucked away behind a white picket fence, to hold on to the cultural differences that, for better or for worse, set us apart. Chimeric though it may be, it is this particular version of the American Dream that so many of us pursue when we move into vinyl-sided houses with two-car garages at the far end of sleepy cul-de-sacs. These are the small patches of America to which we lay claim, and we do so—giving so much of ourselves in the process—in the misguided hope that maybe, if we follow the rules and play our cards right, America will one day in turn lay claim to us.

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On August 26, Pakistan declared a state of emergency over massive flooding which has affected over 30 million people, killed more than 1,200, and placed one-third of the country underwater.

Beyond the obvious humanitarian catastrophe, to me these floods also represent the direct and continued legacies of colonialism—not only i…

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75 years and one day ago, on the eve of India’s independence from British rule, the nation’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, stood in New Delhi’s Parliament House and delivered what is considered by many to be among the greatest speeches of the 20th century. “At the stroke of the midnight hour,” he announced, “India will awake to life and freedom.”

The speech’s title comes from its first sentence, in which Nehru famously proclaimed that “long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny.” In the weeks, months, and years that followed, however, the result of that tryst quickly revealed itself: not, as the world had hoped, the birth of a strong and healthy newborn nation, but rather a painful and bloody miscarriage. With independence came the territory’s partition into the two separate countries of India and Pakistan in a process that was hastily carried out by a British lawyer who, prior to being tasked with drawing the new borders, had never traveled east of Paris. What followed was an almost unfathomable orgy of violence, triggering one of the largest forced migrations in human history.

Much of the writing that has been produced over the years about the legacies of Partition has referred to the lasting “scars” of that great historical tragedy—the scars left in the hearts of people in the form of generational trauma, the scars left on the land itself in the form of the border. Referring to Partition’s as “scars”, however, misses the mark entirely. A scar is not a wound—it is the tissue that forms after a wound has healed, a visible reminder that the process of regeneration can never fully efface the damage that was done.

To refer to Partition’s legacies as “scars” is to wrongly assume that its wounds have since healed, that new tissue has formed to replace that which was slashed away three-quarters of a century ago. Such rhetorical distancing only papers over the fact that 75 years on, the border-shaped gashes that were cut by a white hand into the breast of my mother country still, stubbornly, refuse to heal. Left to seethe and fester, the infection that took hold at the moment of the wounding has since spread gangrenously to the furthest extremities of the nation’s body politic, poisoning the hearts and minds of millions with the same genocidal hatred that spurred Partition’s orgiastic carnage. All the homespun khadi cloth that the nation’s looms could ever possibly produce would not be enough to bandage a wound so vast and so septic.

As the horrors of Partition remind us—even 75 years later—a border is more than a line drawn on a map. It is a tear in the very fabric of humanity iself, capable of dissolving even the strongest bonds of community and brotherhood and replacing them with a blind, deadly hatred. It is, perhaps, the single most potent distillation of our species’ capacity for unspeakable violence.

It’s been 75 years, and the blood continues to flow. The scar tissue still has yet to form.

no more mangoes is a blog by Pranay Somayajula, a D.C.-based fiction writer and essayist. Click the button below to subscribe for free and receive new essays in your inbox:

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Before I was a writer, I was a plagiarist.

Looking back, this isn’t exactly shocking—I’ve been a reader ever since my infantile arms were strong enough to hold up a book on their own, and growing up as I did without many friends my age, the fairly solitary existence of my early childhood was made markedly less solitary …

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Anyone who has ever taken a freshman-level political science course has likely encountered the work of Benedict Anderson, the Anglo-Irish political philosopher whose 1983 book Imagined Communities famously argued that the “nation” as we understand it today is “an imagined political community…imagined because the mem…

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diaspora child:
the blood that runs through your veins
spills upon the ground 
still as red, even generations later
crushed petals from a thousand poppies 
you never chose to plant.

in the mehndi laced across your wrist
(you would rather not wear it)
some may see scars, some just a pattern
but not me
i see a story, told in a script without words
the story of a people, of a land we never knew 
and yet know all too well.

The lines you just read are an excerpt from a poem I wrote in the fall semester of my freshman year of college, to which I gave the shocking and entirely unexpected title of “diaspora child” and published in GW’s campus literary magazine.

If you’re a white person, maybe you read those lines and thought to yourself, “Hey, that’s not half bad.” If, however, you are like me a second-generation South Asian American with a healthy disdain for the more masturbatory elements of our community’s penchant for self-expression, you probably read that excerpt and groaned, because you recognized it for what it is: the scourge on our community that is mango diaspora poetry.

I won’t go into too much detail about what exactly constitutes “mango diaspora poetry”—for insightful and nuanced analysis of this phenomenon, I’ll instead direct you to these essays by Kiran Misra and Urvi Kumbhat—but suffice it to say, if you’ve ever read an overwrought, self-indulgent poem about immigrant identity that mentions mangoes or the hands of the author’s grandmother (perhaps, though not exclusively, by Rupi Kaur, and most likely posted on Instagram), you’ve had the unique misfortune of encountering diaspora poetry at its absolute worst.

The defining characteristic of mango diaspora poetry is its “exploration” of South Asian trauma, culture, and identity, filtered through the lens of a second-generation immigrant, and almost always entirely devoid of any substantive politics. Even the infrequent poems within this genre that do engage with political critique rarely, if ever, extend their critique beyond “chai tea liberalism”, or the set of uncontroversial issues that privileged Desi kids often take up as their pet causes to prove their activist bona fides—think cultural appropriation, being told by classmates that the lunch you brought to school smelled weird, and, of course, the eponymous and incalculable trauma of white people referring to chai as “chai tea”.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with using poetry or any other literary medium to engage with themes of national identity, immigrant/diasporic existence, generational trauma, and so on—on the contrary, not only is engaging with these themes a valuable exercise, but doing so is in fact absolutely crucial to both understanding and asserting ourselves as members of a diaspora. The problem arises when we try and engage with these themes without appropriate critical or political analysis, using empty metaphors such as the ubiquitous mango to project a flattened narrative of “Desi” identity, rooted in caste and class privilege that all too often goes unaddressed. This problem is exacerbated further when such uncritical writing is widely disseminated and its authors held up as the voices of our community, reinforcing the monolithic image, so dominant in the American cultural imagination, of the South Asian community as a homogenized “model minority”.

When I wrote “diaspora child” in the fall of 2018, I was very much a self-styled Desi radical, convinced that my Indian pride, avowed commitment to socialism, and disdain for centrist politics made me the second coming of Bhagat Singh himself (although, to be entirely honest, I’m not even sure that I knew who Bhagat Singh was at the time). Clearly, however, I was still in the early stages of my political development, clinging naively to the false impression that being a racial minority meant that “brownness”, in the same sense as Blackness or Indigeneity, was a clearly-defined, marginalized political identity. I was only just beginning to wrap my head around the rise of Hindutva and its implications for vulnerable communities in my home country, and was still nowhere near beginning to wrestle with the difficult questions of caste that further complicate the notion of a single “Desi” identity.

That poem, along with two others that I penned around the same time, still lives in a password-protected folder in my Notes app. In the three and a half years since I wrote it, my relationship to and understanding of what it means to be part of the South Asian diaspora—specifically, what it means to claim Indian identity, and South Asian diasporic identity more broadly, as a class-privileged Hindu American from a Brahmin family—has evolved considerably, leaving me with an ever-expanding array of questions where I once thought I had all the answers.

Uncomfortable though it may be at times, I nevertheless remain convinced that this uncertainty is unequivocally a good thing—being uncertain about the nature of identity and feeling overwhelmed at its dizzying complexity is, after all, at the heart of the diasporic experience, especially for those of us who who constitute the second generation of our immigrant communities. It is precisely from this uncertainty that I believe we have the capacity to forge new diasporic identities and even new national identities altogether, shedding (though not ignoring) the divisive and oppressive aspects of our backgrounds and instead committing ourselves to the cause of collective liberation, bound together in love and community by our shared roots in a place located on the other side of the world.

As South Asian Americans, the art we produce—whether poetry, prose, music, or anything else—can and must be a reflection of that commitment. We have a responsibility to move beyond the hackneyed, liberalism-plagued tropes that for too long have defined our creative contributions, and instead envision ways to express ourselves and explore our identities without reinforcing harmful narratives of unqualified victimhood and nonexistent homogeneity.

No more mangoes. Let’s find another seed to plant.

no more mangoes is a blog by Pranay Somayajula, a D.C.-based fiction writer and essayist. If you liked this post, click the button below to subscribe for free and receive new posts in your inbox:

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