The idea that something or someone foreign can become Indian raises the question: what does it mean to be authentically Indian? For my teacher, the answer to that question is a loaded one.
I suspect she objects to the word ‘firangi’ less because of its derogatory associations than because it came to India with the Mughals. In her view, the more Hindi can be made to approximate the Sanskrit of pre-Muslim India, the more authentic it will be.
Yet this conflation of the authentically Indian with a supposedly original Indian culture (and, by implication, with Hinduism) disavows the extent to which the subcontinent has always been a land of migrants. In the words of former Indian Supreme Court judge Markandey Katju, ‘India is a country of mostly immigrants who came to the country over the past 10,000 years.’
Katju presumably has in mind the many waves of migration to the subcontinent through its northwest, which has added Turkic, Mongolian, Afghan, Greek, Persian, Arab,Armenian, and Jewish DNA to India’s exceptionally diverse genetic mix. As a result of migrations through the northeast, Chinese, Tibetan, Thai, and Burmese genes have also mingled with the local pool. And countless waves of maritime migration have brought peoples from all over the world – Yemeni, Syrian, African, Australoid, European – to the subcontinent.
All Indians, even Hindus like my teacher who insist on the purity of their Indianness, even tribal peoples who have made their homes in the forests of Chattisgarh or the hills of Arunachal Pradesh for millennia, ultimately have some foreign ancestry.
In the face of such diversity, however, what can it mean to be ‘authentically Indian’ other than to be a migrant to India or the descendant of one? How, as a consequence, might the history of firangis such as Roch and Simitt shed unexpected light on what it means to be ‘authentically Indian’? How might it allow us to recognize that the human history of the subcontinent – despite the weight of tradition, despite the vituperations of Hindutva, despite the rigidities of varna – is less one of pure origins than of multiple migrations, mixings, and adaptations?
What if the ‘authentically Indian’ were to name not a pure but an impure condition? Indeed, what does it even mean to be ‘authentically Indian’ when the very word ‘India’ is itself a firangi invention, derived from the Greek name for a river in what is now Pakistan – the Indus (Sindhu in Sanskrit)?
Many poor firangis such as Roch and Simitt passed as Indian, at least to outsiders. To do so, they needed to master local languages, wear local clothes, and learn local customs; they needed too to be absorbed into local social structures - political, professional, religious, familial — which bonded them closely to Indian masters, co-workers, friends, and lovers.
But what made these firangis most ‘authentically Indian,’ at least in the somewhat ironic sense I’m using the phrase here, was not their assimilation into indigenous cultures. They were not authentically Indian because they wrote verse Puranas in the Marathi ovi style, or had studied the philosophy and practice of Tamil siddha medicine, or waggled their heads and ate with their hands. Many of them did, but that is not the point.
What I’ve tried to recover in this book is not a purely indigenous ‘Indian-ness’ that the first firangis acquired as if it were simply one exotic commodity in the global supermarket of local cultures. Rather, the first firangis were most authentically Indian when what they created in India was simultaneously local and foreign. Becoming Indian, in the various cases I have examined, was — and still is — intimately connected to a process of Indian-Becoming. Which is to say: the ‘Indian’ is always becoming something new, and is constantly being renegotiated and transformed in a multitude of ways, because of unexpected conversations between local traditions and foreign elements.
As its very etymological history suggests, ‘India’ has never been a pure entity. Nor have Indians ever had a purely local origin. India and Indians are, linguistically and culturally as much as genetically, the outcomes of multiple border-crossings.
So much of what we regard as authentically Indian has been, and continues to be, born of transnational migrations and mixings: for instance, a beloved Marathi and Konkani epic poem written by an Englishman and embraced by twentieth-century Indian freedom fighters; a legendary Mughal throne incorporating Basque artisanal techniques that has become an enduring synonym for Indian power; the rubaiyat of a Jewish Armenian Sufi-cum-Yogi still revered by present-day Indian Muslims and Hindus.
In all these cases, the ‘authentically Indian’ is the handiwork of firangis who crossed borders and became something other than what they were. And in the process of becoming Indian, they also helped make India something other than what it was.
Excerpted with permission from The First Firangis: Remarkable Stories of Heroes, Healers, Charlatans, Courtesans & other Foreigners who Became Indian, Jonathan Gil Harris, Aleph Book Company.
I suspect she objects to the word ‘firangi’ less because of its derogatory associations than because it came to India with the Mughals. In her view, the more Hindi can be made to approximate the Sanskrit of pre-Muslim India, the more authentic it will be.
Yet this conflation of the authentically Indian with a supposedly original Indian culture (and, by implication, with Hinduism) disavows the extent to which the subcontinent has always been a land of migrants. In the words of former Indian Supreme Court judge Markandey Katju, ‘India is a country of mostly immigrants who came to the country over the past 10,000 years.’
Katju presumably has in mind the many waves of migration to the subcontinent through its northwest, which has added Turkic, Mongolian, Afghan, Greek, Persian, Arab,Armenian, and Jewish DNA to India’s exceptionally diverse genetic mix. As a result of migrations through the northeast, Chinese, Tibetan, Thai, and Burmese genes have also mingled with the local pool. And countless waves of maritime migration have brought peoples from all over the world – Yemeni, Syrian, African, Australoid, European – to the subcontinent.
All Indians, even Hindus like my teacher who insist on the purity of their Indianness, even tribal peoples who have made their homes in the forests of Chattisgarh or the hills of Arunachal Pradesh for millennia, ultimately have some foreign ancestry.
In the face of such diversity, however, what can it mean to be ‘authentically Indian’ other than to be a migrant to India or the descendant of one? How, as a consequence, might the history of firangis such as Roch and Simitt shed unexpected light on what it means to be ‘authentically Indian’? How might it allow us to recognize that the human history of the subcontinent – despite the weight of tradition, despite the vituperations of Hindutva, despite the rigidities of varna – is less one of pure origins than of multiple migrations, mixings, and adaptations?
What if the ‘authentically Indian’ were to name not a pure but an impure condition? Indeed, what does it even mean to be ‘authentically Indian’ when the very word ‘India’ is itself a firangi invention, derived from the Greek name for a river in what is now Pakistan – the Indus (Sindhu in Sanskrit)?
Many poor firangis such as Roch and Simitt passed as Indian, at least to outsiders. To do so, they needed to master local languages, wear local clothes, and learn local customs; they needed too to be absorbed into local social structures - political, professional, religious, familial — which bonded them closely to Indian masters, co-workers, friends, and lovers.
But what made these firangis most ‘authentically Indian,’ at least in the somewhat ironic sense I’m using the phrase here, was not their assimilation into indigenous cultures. They were not authentically Indian because they wrote verse Puranas in the Marathi ovi style, or had studied the philosophy and practice of Tamil siddha medicine, or waggled their heads and ate with their hands. Many of them did, but that is not the point.
What I’ve tried to recover in this book is not a purely indigenous ‘Indian-ness’ that the first firangis acquired as if it were simply one exotic commodity in the global supermarket of local cultures. Rather, the first firangis were most authentically Indian when what they created in India was simultaneously local and foreign. Becoming Indian, in the various cases I have examined, was — and still is — intimately connected to a process of Indian-Becoming. Which is to say: the ‘Indian’ is always becoming something new, and is constantly being renegotiated and transformed in a multitude of ways, because of unexpected conversations between local traditions and foreign elements.
As its very etymological history suggests, ‘India’ has never been a pure entity. Nor have Indians ever had a purely local origin. India and Indians are, linguistically and culturally as much as genetically, the outcomes of multiple border-crossings.
So much of what we regard as authentically Indian has been, and continues to be, born of transnational migrations and mixings: for instance, a beloved Marathi and Konkani epic poem written by an Englishman and embraced by twentieth-century Indian freedom fighters; a legendary Mughal throne incorporating Basque artisanal techniques that has become an enduring synonym for Indian power; the rubaiyat of a Jewish Armenian Sufi-cum-Yogi still revered by present-day Indian Muslims and Hindus.
In all these cases, the ‘authentically Indian’ is the handiwork of firangis who crossed borders and became something other than what they were. And in the process of becoming Indian, they also helped make India something other than what it was.
Excerpted with permission from The First Firangis: Remarkable Stories of Heroes, Healers, Charlatans, Courtesans & other Foreigners who Became Indian, Jonathan Gil Harris, Aleph Book Company.
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