THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA IN THE UNITED STATES

The migration of a large number of farmers from Punjab between the 1890s and the 1900s to work for lumber mills and railroads first formed “a visible population of South Asians in the [American] west coast.”Footnote ⁹ Yet their population did not exceed a meagre three thousand until 1965. It is the spate of migration – following the signing of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act – of aspiring South Asian academics, doctors, lawyers, business officials and technocrats that basically accounts for the buildup of the modern, postcolonial South Asian diasporic community in America.Footnote ¹⁰ They were mostly “at home in diaspora,”Footnote ¹¹ embodying the “quintessential … late capitalist migration ‘success story’.”Footnote ¹² The pattern of migration did not remain unchanged. Alongside the educated migrants, a considerable number of working-class South Asians migrated to the US, lured by the American Dream, and took up odd jobs, often without success. The migration to the US of the children of indentured South Asian laborers in the British colonies across African and Caribbean locations further added to the heterogeneity of the South Asian diaspora in America. Many South Asian immigrants have been naturalized; some are on extended visas from their countries of origin, while still others are waiting for green cards. Second-generation South Asian Americans regard America as their home and have more easily blended with the mainstream. They celebrate their cultural heritage only symbolically. These US-born South Asians are considered “a part” of Asian America and yet, on the other hand, “apart,”Footnote ¹³ as East and Southeast Asia have long meant to the US the whole of Asia due to their much longer presence on American soil and America's long engagements with large parts of the regions as both “savior” and “nemesis.”Footnote ¹⁴ South Asian Americans, who hardly ever participated in race-related movements of the country, have increasingly demanded their strategic inclusion in Asian America because they view it as the only way “to speak and be heard” and to end living on what Naheed Islam calls the “margins of marginality.”Footnote ¹⁵

A section of South Asians are thinking of returning to the old country, given the current recession in the US job market and the racial profiling of “brown folks” since 9/11, but the return will never be easy for them – due both to the challenge of adapting to the home they left behind years ago and to the promise “America” still evokes in the South Asian imaginary. With continued immigration from South Asia, matched by a significant participation of second-generation South Asians in American society and politics, the whole gamut of the contemporary South Asian American experience in fact means less a question of “choosing between two conflicting cultures”Footnote ¹⁶ than one of inhabiting a space of seeming contradictions and strange connections – such as assimilation and identity, acceptance and rejection (or transgression), alienation and allegiance, failure and success, collectivity and individuality. Privileges of residence may still be contingent, though, on the ethnicity, gender and class of the diasporic subject. And this implies a complex relationship not only between the diasporic/ethnic community and mainstream society, but also between sub-ethnicities of the diaspora itself. The constant interaction and transaction between the past and the present and the homeland and the hostland, the transformation of “origins” and the questioning of received notions of cultural identity are what characterize the South Asian American diaspora today, constantly pushing its borders of meaning and producing an equally complex idea of contemporary America.

SOUTH ASIAN AMERICAN THEATER

Cultural forms of the South Asian diaspora are relatively new in the United States, when compared with their counterparts in other countries such as the United Kingdom. The different history of South Asian migration to the US does account for this, yet the theater of the new diaspora has suffered under special circumstances. Compared with “the success with which authors” of the South Asian diaspora “have practiced the genres of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry in English,” as Aparna Dharwadker maintains, “the marginality of theater to diasporic experience … suggests a complicated relation between genre, language, and location.”Footnote ¹⁷ While few South Asian playwrights would leave home, as most of them write plays in regional languages and basically focus on domestic issues, immigrant South Asian authors in the US have been inclined to choose other genres to avoid the complications that the very collaborative nature of theater entails.Footnote ¹⁸ Both Mrinalini Kamath and Sudipta Bhawmik lament the lack of funding and logistics as additional impediments to the growth of South Asian theater. There is also a lack of community support, of collaboration among South Asian artists, of opportunities for training and of access to mainstream venues – without which, as Kamath notes, it is difficult “to make South Asian theatre [a] norm rather than something exotic” that most of the middle-aged, middle-class, white American spectators of this subscriber-based theater are still interested in.

The history of South Asian theater in the United States until the early twentieth century is one of Sanskrit classics in (English) translation, produced on elaborate sets with an all-American cast in gorgeous South Asian costumes and aimed at presenting an “exotic,” “mysterious,” “spiritual” East. This cannot be truly called “South Asian American theater” because either the productions are not by South Asians resident in the US or the depiction of South Asian life stereotypes the “East.” Neither can visiting South Asian performances of more recent times be called “South Asian American” for obvious reasons, despite the fact that the nostalgic memory of “home” they conjure up intersects, in the minds of the audience, with the reality of their life as lived in America. Dharwadker observes that there cannot be “original” theater in the diaspora until it learns to disconnect itself from the old country and embraces the experience of residence in the new land with all its attendant problems.Footnote ¹⁹ Second-generation South Asian Americans have surely put on much of such “original” theater in recent times. Yet I would argue that the South Asian American experience is too vast and varied to be so categorized in terms of theater. “South Asian American theater” should mean today the plays written and put on by South Asian immigrants and/or their US-born descendants, mainly about their constantly changing and often disparate diasporic experience, obviously not leaving out “the experience of residence in the new land” but possibly also indexing “a homeland” instead of “representing a nation.”Footnote ²⁰ While Asian American theater continues to perform race and ethnicity, though often by acknowledging these days “the fluidity of culture itself,”Footnote ²¹ South Asian American theater deals more with language, religion, culture, family, gender and sexuality “within its own demography”Footnote ²² as well as beyond. South Asian plays dealing with Islam and race relations have become considerably popular with the mainstream audience post-9/11. There are again some playwrights of mixed ancestry or multicultural background (such as Rajiv Joseph and Shishir Kurup), whose refreshingly original works, while labeled “South Asian diasporic,” are markedly different from the majority of South Asian American/diaspora plays due to their broader social and political themes and experimental style.

The aesthetic that South Asian American theater brings forth consists in changing the mainstream/traditional understanding of a diasporic consciousness that both encompasses a plural sense of nation, belonging, and ethnic and cultural identity in a transnational capitalist and global context and is, at the same time, not free of tension between those plural narratives and postionings. This aesthetic is different from the aesthetic of “Asian American” theater in several ways. While Chinese American playwrights like Frank Chin placed the Asian body onstage spewing anger and resistance and embodying an Asian American presence to counter earlier racist portrayals of the “Oriental” in mainstream American theater, South Asian American playwrights, thanks to a different history of their migrant experience, project the voice more of an “explainer” than of a protester. As most of them are yet to receive the recognition that Philip Kan Gotanda and David Henry Hwang have, their theater does not necessarily reflect much of the “at-home-ness” that is required for satirizing with equal ease both uncritical assimilation and racist stereotyping around the diasporic subject.Footnote ²³ Protests and self-assured satirization are by no means absent from contemporary South Asian American theater altogether, yet its aesthetic is largely poised between, or simultaneously accommodates, “assimilation and the preservation of a diasporic, liminal sensibility.”Footnote ²⁴ South Asian American theater has been significantly inclusive by exploring the shifting relationship between the subject's “origin” and current “location,” between South Asian and non-South Asian characters, and it is also increasingly seeking to “fit” into the broader category of Asian American theater for greater visibility. Yet it has maintained “a productive gap”Footnote ²⁵ between itself and Asian American theater with a view to hybridizing the latter from within and critiquing, by extension, the grand American narratives of nation, home, family and belonging. If South Asian diasporic theater brings onto the stage an “internationalization of the nation-space,”Footnote ²⁶ it does so not without problematizing the concept as much through the conflicts of belonging and allegiance as through the pain of exclusion and appropriation. Further, as it presents the interconnectedness of South Asian communities, so also it showcases how historic and political differences between nations back in the South Asian region affect their cohabitation as a diasporic community in the US. The transnational should in fact be as much a defining moment for the diasporic subject today as for the host country, because contemporary “America” exists in its diverse, transnational contexts.

In the staging of South Asian (American) diaspora, the South Asian woman, with her body/sexuality, becomes an important site of in-betweenness – of shame and self-exploration, proscription and transgression. She occupies a special space in the diasporic palimpsest of nation–home–family because she is a marginalized figure within the South Asian diaspora itself. The refusal by the organizers of the India Day Parade in New York, a 1990s event to celebrate India's Independence Day, to allow participation by SALGA (South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association) and SAKHI (an anti-domestic-violence group) points to the heteronormative and patriarchal imagining of the “Indian” nation as mother, with all her quintessential “femininity.” The loss suffered in the diaspora, the old home – for example – with all its familiarity, is attended – for the South Asian American woman – by a new possibility of free choice about her life and her body, although that choice cannot be unproblematic due to the host country's own exclusionary politics around nation, gender and sexuality. Her self-articulation, in her “contested diasporic space between cultures,” as much deconstructs her exotic image in the Euro-American imaginary as challenges the “native” sources of her bodily embarrassment.Footnote ²⁷

The plays I shall discuss here will demonstrate that South Asian American theater has come a long way, in the face of all odds, from white Americans playing South Asian characters in their own productions or South Asians playing “exotic” roles assigned to them in mainstream American theater. Thanks to the efforts of several talented playwrights, emergent and emerging, it speaks for itself today, and in plural voices, compelling readers/audiences to participate in the (re)construction of it. Radically different not only from early twentieth-century Euro-American theatrical representations of the South Asian body but also from Israel Horovitz's 1968 play The Indian Wants the Bronx,Footnote ²⁸ which centers on the figure of an Asian Indian as a mere victim of white racism, South Asian American theater today proliferates stories and images of the “world next door” that challenge the audience's frames of thinking by making them aware of their lack of knowledge of other cultures and repositioning South Asians as an addressable subject with differences within and outside the US nation-state. Most present-day South Asian American plays are written in English, although some – originally written in a variety of community languages – are performed with English supertitles at community venues. Regional and Asian American theater companies have of late started producing South Asian American plays as a part of their seasons, though the plays deserve much wider and more regular productions and support. The following three sections of the essay focus on the varied facets of the diasporic experience as staged by the plays under study. The plays have been treated as literary dramas, but with necessary attention to performance aspects that also lend them their distinctiveness as South Asian American/diaspora plays.

RETHINKING HOME: MY ANCESTOR'S HOUSE AND BOOM

In “Transnational Homepages: Safety in Multiple Addresses,” the second chapter of The World Next Door, Rajini Srikanth writes that many authors, while living permanently in the United States, set their narratives outside the boundaries of the US nation-state and in countries as diverse as India, Pakistan, Nepal, and so on. Their works complicate ideas of home, “citizenship and allegiance,” simultaneously revealing “the interconnectedness of nations.”Footnote ²⁹ The plays under discussion in this section are both set in South Asia – Bina Sharif's My Ancestor's House (1997)Footnote ³⁰ in Pakistan and Mrinalini Kamath's Boom (2006)Footnote ³¹ in India (save the brief first scene that takes place in Manhattan). While Sharif's Pakistani immigrant protagonist apparently finds no “safety,” to appropriate Srikanth's terms, in any of her “addresses,” Kamath's America-born Asian Indian couple discover beyond initial confrontations between “American” and “Indian” the intercultural relationship between the two epithets. Sharif came to the United States decades ago to do a master's in public health, which she did, and pursue a theater career. Eventually she devoted herself entirely to playwriting and directing. She has won numerous awards from prestigious institutions like the Jerome Foundation and New York State Council of the Arts. Mrinalini Kamath is a noted second-generation Indian American playwright with close connections with India. An MFA in playwriting, she has had her plays performed around the US, the UK, Australia and India. Of the honors she has received, special mention may be made of the East West Players' Asian American Comedy Play Contest award. Sharif's and Kamath's plays problematize the notion of “home,” but in different ways, dramatizing a shift in perspective on the issues of migration and residence, alienation and assimilation.

Performed at the Theater for the New City, New York, in 1992 and later at the Asian American Writers' Workshop in New York in November 2000, My Ancestor's House tells the story of a disintegrating Pakistani family, centering around the migrant daughter's “homecoming” on account of her mother's serious illness. Not only Bindia in the US but also her siblings in their native country had always felt that they were in exile – of one kind or another. The play complicates the meanings of “diaspora” and “belonging,” eventually becoming a statement on the alienating aspects of both societies as well as on “the difficulty of just surviving.” My Ancestor's House is heavily autobiographical, evoking, in Sharif's own words, “very complex and powerful memories of my childhood and the good days gone forever.”Footnote ³² Sharif wrote it for her sister, Deedi, who died when the playwright was very young and becomes the central character of the play. The real-life Deedi was punished for taking “a rebellious step … by choosing a husband for herself.”Footnote ³³ Bindia's migration is an escape of sorts from unjust domestic obligations and oppressive social customs. On arrival in the US she nevertheless disintegrates emotionally and encounters “the horrifying loneliness,” poverty, racism and disillusionment which come, Sharif adds, “with the pursuit of freedom in the West.”Footnote ³⁴ Bindia survived in the new land, having made a niche for herself, yet missing her old home.

This typical immigrant narrative is matched by the saddening story of the native country/home that Bindia is currently visiting. As Bindia's sister Roona complains, religion and their men have weakened the soul of Pakistani women, who suffer the absence of freedom, the evil of dowry and gross neglect in their daily lives. Deedi's death from depression is a fictive reconstruction of such gruesome realities. Set in July 1984, My Ancestor's House is directly reminiscent of “the unholy alliance,” in Zia-ul-Haque's Pakistan, between “postmodern capitalism, patriarchy, and fundamentalism.”Footnote ³⁵ Fawzia Afzal-Khan connects “‘Islamic’ crimes against women” “to global politics and economics, such as the infiltration into Pakistani society of the Taliban movement from neighboring Afghanistan which was a creation of U. S. imperialism to keep the armament and drug trade flourishing for the benefit of consumer capitalism.”Footnote ³⁶ The real-life story of a young woman named Saima, dragged by her father to court for choosing to marry someone against his permission, is a case in point. The father cited the Islamic injunction of wali in his favor, and Saima, being a Muslim woman, was a soft target of the “Islamization” policies that were indirectly supported by the West with a view to rooting out the communist “menace” in Afghanistan.Footnote ³⁷ The little protests Roona makes while recounting her suffering and the support she lends Bindia, who is constantly criticized by Nazo and their brother Sahid for her “apathy” towards home, signal the emergence of the women's movement in Pakistan.

Sahid's disillusionment with his military career ferrets out another picture of “exile” within one's own geopolitical borders. He feels like “an immigrant in … uniform … in an exiled land” that is “[s]omeone else's colony …, someone else's country” (279). This again alludes to Zia-ul-Haque's unlawful, undemocratic military regime, during which large sections of ordinary Pakistanis, and also sensitive men in uniform, felt alienated from their own land. They did not like the idea of “Islamizing” Pakistan or serving the interests of the West (read: the US) to help Zia retain his position as the head of state. However, the General eventually secured his place as an all-powerful president through the controversial referendum of 1984 and the historic Eighth Amendment of the Constitution in 1985. The alternative or parallel history of exile and alienation that Sharif's play implicitly pits against Bindia's diasporic experience in America speaks of and for the Pakistani populace who felt no less dislocated and therefore outside home (read: Pakistan) despite being within their own country.Footnote ³⁸ Bindia lost her old home when she migrated. She longed for it, yet on her short return she does not find it any more. She returns, to her home in the US – a home and yet not a home again.

My Ancestor's House is a “memory play”: it is in the form of Bindia's painful recollection of her last visit to the old country, of events that further allude to a more remote past she had lived in Pakistan. Through a series of flashbacks the play relates her memories around the visit more or less chronologically. Yet there are nonconventional scenes that present Deedi as a dimly lit dream figure or have Begum (the mother) lying downstage, “seemingly watching the demise of her family” (264). Sharif's play begins at its end – with Deedi being laid in the grave to the azan recited in Arabic by Moazzan and her siblings. The audience is then taken back to a day that witnesses most of the events of the play, the most theatrical being the death of Deedi rather than that of the long-ailing mother. The music is played on the stage (tabla, sitar and harmonium are heard as the audience walk in), a reminder of the “lost good old days” (264). The costumes of thin cotton and linen of light colors brilliantly evoke the summer in Pakistan, while the grave scene with barefoot mourners in white clothes portrays a South Asian Muslim funeral in minute detail. The Epilogue in the form of a dirge sung by the dead Deedi adds a poignant edge to Bindia's memory and to the whole play.

Kamath's play, whose time of action is the last few days of the year 2000 and the first few days of 2001, is set against the backdrop of the economic boom in India between 1991 and 2001. India had to enter into a “structural loan adjustments” agreement with the International Monetary Fund in 1991 in order to get over a severe balance-of-payments crisis. The “adjustment” was that India had to shift from an age-old “centrally-planned development strategy” to a “market-based resource allocations” policy.Footnote ³⁹ A whole new package of economic reforms was adopted by the central government between 1991 and 1993, which soon yielded favorable results. This restored the confidence of foreign investors, including non-resident Indians around the world. The play shows that the old country, which the parents of the visiting Indian American couple had left years ago for opportunities in the United States, suddenly appears to their children to be a new land of success worth returning to and investing in. But the play is ultimately not about people engaged in trade and commerce, but about the meaning of “home” in the fast-changing global landscape that is characterized by a constant movement of people and capital. Boom was originally a one-act play that Kamath wrote as an assignment for her first year of graduate school while vacationing with her aunt at the latter's Bangalore apartment.

Set in India, except for the opening scene, Boom shows how US-born children of South Asian immigrant parents view themselves, especially when they visit the old country. The play explores the notion of “home” in multiple perspectives, provided by the varying relationship between “subject” and “location” in a globalized world, and how that impacts the seemingly inviolate category of nationality. It also becomes clear early in the play that the Indian diaspora in the US, let alone the broader South Asian American community, is not a homogeneous group with a singular notion of “home.” This explains why Ashok and Sheela, the traveling Indian American couple, have different, if not opposed, ideas of “root” and of their place in India and America. No wonder they also differ in their reactions to the realities they encounter in India. The frequently visiting Sheela has sustained an affinity with her relations in India and is much more comfortable with Indian foods, greetings, customs and traditions. Ashok is accommodating but finds adaptation difficult. Sheela is impressed at the pace of change in India, as superficially evidenced by huge constructions and urban women's modern lifestyle. Ashok draws up an opposite picture of contemporary India with its “awful road[s],” slums alongside posh structures and unhygienic living conditions, and even wants to photograph it all, supposedly for his American friends. Sheela sarcastically likens him to a stranded ugly white American tourist who would prefer to watch, given a choice, a movie about India's underbelly rather than one about “middle class India” (97). The only thing Ashok apparently likes about India is its economic boom during the 2000s.

This difference in attitude also explains how they view themselves in the US, vis-à-vis white Americans as well as Asian Indians, some of whom are fresh off the boat. Sheela calls her husband “a coconut” (58), a brown-skinned Indian with a blind allegiance to the “white” way. By contrast, she points to a racist America, recounting the embarrassments she had to endure in school. If Ashok and Sheela sound equally prejudiced in their perception about the homeland and the hostland, Ashok's otherwise adaptive parents reveal a further split in the South Asian American psyche – a split between an assimilationist exterior and a narrowly traditional private interior. They rejected the former girlfriend of their son for being white. The diasporic subject is no less constructed (read: stereotyped) by people outside the hostland and back in the old country. Sheela's cousins attempt an essentialist, purist definition of “Indian” and find all non-resident Indians (NRI's) to be fakes. Sheela eventually comes up with a transnational idea of “home” for the contemporary South Asian diaspora, though it applies more to the economically solvent. She will remain “settled” in the US but also henceforth visit India more frequently on vacations. Ashok also tries to find more things that he can like about India. The seven steps around the sacred fire that solemnizes Ranjita's Hindu marriage to Raja give Ashok a sense of cultural continuity that symbolically connects him, across time and space, with his ancestral home. The boom in India that had initially enticed Sheela to return to India and Ashok to invest in the Indian stock market later becomes a metaphor for an improved understanding of the relationship between “India(n)” and “America(n)” in broader perspectives. The play ultimately locates “home” in the crisscross of the two. Home does not imply here a plain “nostalgic desire for ‘roots,’ nor … for a ‘homeland’.” It is realized, as Joel Kuortti has noted, as “a construction of ‘multi-locationality within and across territorial, cultural and psychic boundaries.’ ”Footnote ⁴⁰

A reading of the one-act version of Boom was presented by the South Asian League of Artists in America (SALAAM) in 2001. The full-length version was first read at Phil Bosakowski Theatre, New York, as part of the Ma-Yi Theatre LabFest in June 2006 and then at the Theatre for the New City, New York, in October 2006. The readings were well received by audiences comprising both South and non-South Asian Americans. The play can be performed on a modest stage. With minimum changes in the set, the sitting room can quickly change into the bedroom, the house into the courtyard, and so on. The minor devices that evoke the pictures of “India” and “Indian America” through the juxtaposed perspectives of the visiting couple and their relations are noteworthy: the music coming from the elevator in Auntie's house that sounds like the Indian National Anthem on a synthesizer, strains of music in Sheela and Ashok's bedroom alternating between “Livin’ la Vida Loca” and Bollywood film tunes, the “it” in “shit” appearing covered with tape on Ranjita's T-shirt, Ashok dressed in boxer shorts, and the Indian English Auntie uses, as in “you just put in the coffee and water, push the button and fattah phut [instantly] it is ready” (29). The Hindu wedding ritual Ashok refers to takes place offstage, although the director has the liberty to have it onstage, depending on the availability of props for the occasion.

ALLEGIANCE, EXCLUSION AND NATIONALITY: RON AND BARRIERS

The two plays discussed in this section – Ron (2008)Footnote ⁴¹ by Indian American bilingual playwright Sudipta Bhawmik and Barriers (2003)Footnote ⁴² by half-Pakistani half-Filipina Rehana Mirza – define nationality for US citizens of South Asian origin in diametrically opposite ways. In Bhawmik's play, it is done through the ultimate allegiance of an Indian American soldier killed in the Iraq War; in Mirza's, it is ironically worked out through the demonization of (American) Muslims and the threat of exclusion that they confront everyday. The ghost of 9/11 hangs over both dramas, though. America continues to be a country of immigrants and therefore “a permanently unfinished country.” Yet “a strong sense of a single American nation” that has to be protected against the menace of migration also characterizes the US nationalist ideology.Footnote ⁴³ In Bhawmik's and Mirza's plays, the three South Asian nations seen impacting on the narrative of American nationality through their diasporas are India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Accommodation or exclusion of the diasporas is demonstrated through a complex interplay of religion, national origin and allegiance – none of which is individually or separately enough to guarantee, or jeopardize, its status in the American national consciousness.

Actor, director and playwright Sudipta Bhawmik had migrated to the United States decades ago, with a PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology and vast experience of acting in Bengali plays. He took to playwriting when he failed to connect his Indian immigrant experience with the homespun Bengali plays that he was still acting in. He wanted to write his own plays that would deal with diasporic issues directly. Most of his plays have been originally written in Bengali, put on at South Asian venues and later auto-translated into English, especially for his non-Bengali and non-Indian audiences (and readers). He wrote Ron during 2005 and 2006 when the Iraq War was at its peak. A contentious issue all over the world, the war formed the play's context, providing Bhawmik with an immediate opportunity to stage the intense conflict Indian immigrants often face between their allegiance to the adopted country and their personal beliefs and cultural identity. The Iraq War as the play's context also helped him dig up a still subtler layer of conflict in the minds of those immigrant Indian parents whose American-born children were fighting in Iraq and for the United States. In interviews they stressed their pride in the sacrifices made by their children, while deep inside they were bleeding.Footnote ⁴⁴ Their conflicts intensified further with the Indian government disapproving of the war in Iraq on the grounds that the action in Iraq lacked the specific sanction of the UN Security Council. Built around this tension, Ron was premiered in its original Bengali version at the George Street Playhouse, New Jersey, on 15 July 2006 as part of the South Asian Theatre Festival and next staged by Ethnomedia at Rabindra Sadan, Kolkata, on 26 July 2006 as part of the Ganakrishti Natyotsav (Theatre Festival). It was presented by Washington DC's drama troupe, Natya Bharati, in Hindi at JCC in Rockville, MD on 30 October 2010, and last performed in English by Pehchan in Tampa, Florida on 20 November 2010.

Ron is the story of an Indian American family, told by the son himself, who enlists in the US Army and dies during an operation in Iraq. Born and raised in the US, Ron regards America as his country that he must defend in crisis. But his difference of opinion with his immigrant father is indicative of an America deeply split over the issue. There are references in the play to demonstrations and protests by Americans themselves against continued US strikes on the Middle Eastern country even after no weapons of mass destruction were found there. Ron's military action is defined by some South Asian characters in the play as the duty of a soldier who does not think on the battlefield but follows or gives orders. But when it comes to his choice of career and his allegiance to the US, Ron defends himself as an American soldier along official lines that insist that America destroy the “axis of evil” to protect itself. Ron (his full Bengali given name Ronobir means “war hero”) believes in the fight for peace – a belief almost echoed by President Barack Obama in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, alluding to the deployment of more troops in Afghanistan. While researching his play, Bhawmik interviewed a US army physician of Indian descent then posted in Iraq, who had provided emergency medical care to wounded American soldiers and also once attended to the ailing Saddam Hussein after his capture. Major Sudip Bose, whose grand-uncle had fought for India's freedom, enlisted in the US Army not only for “gaining top notch trauma skills” or for “financial reasons,” but for “giving back something to [his] country,”Footnote ⁴⁵ namely the United States. Bhawmik was no less influenced by the story of Uday Singh, the first Indian in the US Army to have been killed in Iraq, in 2003. Honored as “America's soldier, India's son,” his body was flown back to India for cremation and the ashes were again taken back to Arlington National Cemetery where the US Army had wanted to bury his body. In accordance with these real-life stories, Ronobir's shows how Indian Americans might negotiate their identity when it came to saving their new home. This is more applicable to second-generation South Asian Americans who seldom had to integrate into the host society as they were born into it.

Yet Ron problematizes the question of allegiance. The issue acquires a different dimension with the question whether the Iraq War is an excuse for bolstering US domination in the “Third World.” Visiting Indian journalist Surajit's postcolonial rhetoric unsettles the Mitras morally, reminding the audience of the predicament of many American troops of Asian origins deployed in the Vietnam War. Allegiance is further problematized through Bangladeshi Hindu Nando's tacit support to the Iraq War. Beneath all his newfound patriotism for America and his camaraderie with American troops fighting in Iraq is his race hatred for the whole Muslim tribe because Pakistani (read: Muslim) soldiers had massacred his family during the 1971 Bangladesh War. He mistakes all Iraqis for “bad Muslims.” The audience is also reminded that it was anything but religion per se that had caused the Bangladesh War. If the Iraq War is similarly not “a clash of civilizations” in the sense that “Islamic terror” is actually “non-Islamic,” then is it the outcome of a clash of mercenary interests? Ron does not answer these questions – no plays are in fact obliged to – but in raising such issues it brings out a complicated relationship between a diaspora's allegiance to the native country and its adoption of the new land with all its contradictions. Ron's father honors his son's self-sacrifice for a land Ron had always considered his own, although Animesh himself returns to Calcutta after the tragedy. Questions of right and wrong around the Iraq War remain unanswered, but the war is used in the play more as a trope to (re)examine the crucial issues of loyalty, belongingness and nationality in relation to the South Asian diaspora in the US today. Bhawmik's play, however, does not address the controversial issues of wartime ethics, conduct and racial discrimination in the army, over which many American soldiers of Asian ancestry had “found themselves front and center” during the Iraq War. His “war hero” is not a Taguba or a Watada undertaking the “double duty” of fighting for the (adopted) home(land) and protecting the basic principles of the US Constitution “without subscribing to a blind … patriotism.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Like Tennessee Williams's Tom Wingfield of The Glass Menagerie (1944), Ron is the narrator of, as well as a character in, the story. Bhawmik's play, however, is not a “memory play” the way Williams's is. The action progresses in a linear manner, interspersed with the narrator's commentary meant as guidelines for the audience. Ron talks from Baghdad, reporting the events on the battlefield, and at once provides us a window into what is happening at his US home during the last few hours of his life. He even relates events which occur after his death, to fashion the ending of the play. Ron creates its own aesthetic suitable to delineating the experience of a US-born South Asian soldier fighting in the Middle East for what he claims to be his homeland. Allusions in the play to the heroic characters of the Mahabharata in the contexts of war and its aftermath, a Hindu baby shower for Bidisha to welcome her child, and the reference to Rabindra Sangeet lend Ron the texture and ambience of a South Asian diaspora play. The play has always been well received by a mixed audience in the US, and also received rave reviews during its run in Kolkata.

What happens when people consider themselves an integral part of a society but are derided as an ethnic community and virtually threatened with exclusion? Does nationalism need the “story of migration, the diaspora of others, to establish the rootedness of the nation”?Footnote ⁴⁷ Addressing the fears and discontents of American Muslims post-9/11, Rehana Mirza's Barriers seeks to answer these questions. An MFA in Playwriting and winner of the 2010 Lark/IAAC Playwright Residency and John Golden Award, Mirza is the founder and artistic director of Desipina Productions, a South Asian and Asian American theater company that “embraces multiracial identities and fusion of lifestyles” and promotes “cross-pollinations of artistic, political and cultural dialogues.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Admittedly, Mirza wrote the play after she and her producer sister were threatened on the street as “foreigners” not long after the World Trade Center tragedy on 11 September 2001.Footnote ⁴⁹ First produced at Here in the South Village on 22 September 2002, Barriers had its West Coast premier at the Noh Space Theatre in San Francisco on 4–14 September 2003 through a joint effort by the Asian American Theatre Company and Desipina, and then traveled to Los Angeles for a weekend at Stages Theatre Center in Hollywood, 25–28 September 2003. Bruce Weber of the New York Times praised in his review of the play's South Village production “the pertinence and poignancy of its subject in the current context,” but was not happy with its “educational” tone.Footnote ⁵⁰

The play shows how, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, American Muslims were “targeted for suspicion, harassment and, too often, retributive anger.”Footnote ⁵¹ Muslim name, attire and way of life evoked “American” suspicion and scorn, often prodding mainstream Americans into drastic action out of paranoia. Religion had, for a long time, become an insignificant element in the discourses on diaspora, but it has of late returned to influence the formation of disaporic identities.Footnote ⁵² Besides, race crimes have recurred not only around difference in looks, but, in the case of South Asians, around seemingly identical looks as well. People have often had to declare that they were not “them” (read: Muslims). Even when one is not being directly accused, one may have to look extra gracious in order to avoid the “dagger eyes” of whites/Christians (no equation intended). This unfortunately continues even though the US takes pains to officially distinguish between Islam as a peaceful religion and the so-called “jihadis” who distort its meaning. No wonder Muslims across the US somewhat overstressed their “sense of relief” at the killing of Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the 9/11 terror strikes. “Many of our fellow Americans have stereotyped the entire Muslim community,” said an Orthodox Muslim leader and Islamic studies scholar at Yale soon after bin Laden's death, “as somehow being extensions of bin Laden,”Footnote ⁵³ as “Laden's ‘cousins’,” in the words of Shehry, a character in the play. The barriers erected since 9/11 outside the homes of “brown folks” have also invaded their families, as Mirza's play shows, and spoiled their relations with people from other racial/ethnic communities.

The word “terror” acquires unexpected dimensions in such changed perspectives. American Muslims, who have generally tried to assimilate into mainstream society, had to suffer doubly following the 9/11 terror attacks. They were as horrified as all other Americans, but they also had to suffer the hatred of the average non-Muslim American. Few cared to consider that a great many Muslim lives were also lost in the WTC attack. Significantly, Nabhil, the older son in the play, died in it, too. His father Khalil takes out a burnt piece of paper and holds it before his family: holes are seen burnt into the picture of Nabhil, into his eyes and mouth. The play leaves it to the audience to imagine the extent of the threat a living Muslim can face when even the dead cannot escape the public ire. The alleged assault on a fourteen-year-old Muslim boy at a high school and the principal's matter-of-fact dismissal of it as “only natural” in any school with a diverse constituency (2) only testifies to the grim reality. This is matched by the anonymous phone calls the Abbas family get throughout the play. Moreover, 9/11 is also the fateful day that ended school for Nabhil's brother, Shehry, who grew up in the US like any American kid but now despises the American educational system for teaching him indirectly to be scared of his ethnic identity (66).

Barriers builds on South Asian American Muslims’ fear of a recurrence of loss that they have already suffered. It is a loss of reputation and security. Fear in such a charged situation can easily change into paranoia, suggesting that paranoia is not one-sided. Shehry opposes his sister Sunima's marriage to Roger, a white American and therefore their “enemy.” Like many American Muslims, he is no longer willing to play the role of “model citizen”; he has lost faith in the professed American ideals of integration and assimilation. Barriers built outside thus occupy private spaces, too. Sunima herself even comes to doubt if their interracial, interreligious marriage will eventually be successful. Roger looks fairly liberal, but the play brilliantly reveals how prejudice lies hidden deep down in the human psyche and can surface at the smallest of excuses. The sight of an “Indian guy” visibly feeling uncomfortable in Roger's company infuriates the American because this rouses in him a sense of guilt for what he is not responsible for. Finally, Sunima overcomes her fear and unites with Roger. Outside the world of the play, however, America's paranoia about Muslims continued, causing “excesses of hysteria” that might explain the notorious history of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Shishir Kurup's Sharif Don't Like It buttresses this point further through dark humor and pun. A clown sitting before a makeup table, readying himself for a show, relives how he had to endure, as an American of Indian origin, the “sort of incarceration” that “alleged terror suspects” do. Barriers and Sharif pick on different dramatic situations, but both seem to suggest that multicultural America has ironically questioned in hours of security crisis the allegiance of the diasporic subject, “a ghost, a High-Plains Drifter,”Footnote ⁵⁴ and threatened it with exclusion in order to protect the nation against the non-nation.Footnote ⁵⁵

Dramaturgically, Barriers is impressively innovative. It has no “Broadway glitter,”Footnote ⁵⁶ even no elaborate set. The television set in the Abbas house is deftly used to achieve three objectives at a time: the news broadcast brings home the racial tension from outside, the fight between Naima and Shehry over the television remote control succinctly shows them inhabiting two cultural spheres, the mother's preference for Bollywood hits on an Indian channel suggests her seemingly total assimilation into South Asian culture. The use of soft light to evoke a dreamy past where Naima tells Nabhil a Chinese story is one of the most touching moments in the play, which at the same time serves as a link to the mother's own past with her mother, and by extension to her Chinese ancestry, which has been largely erased by her compulsive efforts to be an ideal “Pakistani” wife to Khalil. Shehry's deletion from his cell phone of Nabhil's last voice message sent from the World Trade Center, which is an attempt to come out of a traumatic past, sets a high standard in South Asian American theater aesthetic. Lastly, some people calling Naima a Japanese whore and others mistaking her for an Afghan woman are a sad commentary on Americans’ lack of knowledge of “the world next door.”Footnote ⁵⁷

SISTERS IN THE DIASPORA: SOUTH ASIAN VAGINA MONOLOGUES

This section focusses on another significant aspect of the South Asian American experience – female sexuality as “seen through the lens of diasporic culture” and by women of South Asian origin themselves.Footnote ⁵⁸ Formed in 1999, the South Asian Sisters Community created in 2003 a performance category called Yoni ki Baat (YKB) to articulate their hitherto unaddressed private experience. Modeled on Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues (1996), YKB is the group's solo exploration of their own bodies and sexualities, dreams and desires, maladies and sufferings, often by combining spoken word with dance and music. The yoni (the Sanskrit word for “vagina”) has long been “held sacred in Hindu mythology,”Footnote ⁵⁹ but not without an ambiguity about it. Hindu scriptures and ancient legal codes at once deify and circumscribe women. Those who live up to the feminine “ideal” are considered “divine”; those who deviate are “fallen.” In either case, Indian woman (no equation is intended between “Hindu” and “Indian”) is often denied the status of a normal human. Years of patriarchy and colonialism had hardly ever allowed the yoni to speak for itself. The YKB performance cycle helped South Asian sisters of all castes and creeds to express themselves more freely in the US than they might have done in the old country. This is not to relapse into the dangerous binary of the advanced, liberal, gender-neutral West and the backward, orthodox, androcentric “Third World,” because both worlds have their own share of positives and negatives. This is instead to suggest the greater possibility of questioning conventions and practices, oppressive to women, outside the old land, and to undertake a journey into the self in a new geopolitical, cultural context. The Yoni ki Baat monologue cycle has been a liberatory experience for both performers and audiences. The plays under discussion in this section are Helpline (2009)Footnote ⁶⁰ and On-Track (2010),Footnote ⁶¹ both written by Anita Chandwaney, a performer, playwright and director. She is a founding member of the Rasaka Theatre Company and a recipient of numerous awards, including a 3Arts fellowship, a Ragdale residency, and Chicago's Community Arts Assistance Grant for three years in a row. Produced as part of Rasaka's “Yoni ki Baat” series in 2009 and 2010 respectively, Helpline and On-Track received rave reviews in the Chicago Reader and EDGE Chicago. Both created “a transporting experience” on “an essentially bare stage” and “on no budget.”Footnote ⁶²

Helpline is a ten-minute poignant monologue in which a Chicago attorney of Indian origin recounts calling a Mumbai-based Indian helpdesk woman to fix a computer problem and eventually getting deeply involved in her personal story about facing a forced abortion. At one level, the play comments obliquely on the mushrooming of offshore call centers that serve American economic interests by exploiting the cheap labor of educated, smart middle-class young men and women of “Third World” countries. Arundhati Roy criticizes this “neocolonial” practice as “cultural abasement,”Footnote ⁶³ while the employees themselves regard it as an opportunity to cash in on and also feel proud of their great adaptability.Footnote ⁶⁴ At another level, Helpline brilliantly connects this economic and cultural hegemony of the West to the patriarchal underpinnings of “Third World” society. Savitri's client Lovina discovers that Susie (Savitri's “American” name) is pregnant but will have to lose her baby for its “wrong” sex. There are two disquieting issues here: violation of the law about prenatal sex choice in India and undesirability of the female child even in many urban Indian households. Several Indian plays have dealt with similar issues. Mahesh Dattani's Tara (1990) tells the story of a girl who eventually dies because her family preferred her brother's survival over hers when it came to separating them as conjoined twins. Dina Mehta's Getting Away with Murder (1990) locates in a young woman's traumatic past possible reasons for her present paranoia about giving birth to a girl child. Such fictional accounts are no less matched by real-life stories. The Statesman reveals that twelve million female fetuses were selectively aborted in India over the last three decades, and that wealthy and educated families are increasingly going in for abortion of the second girl child if the first-born too was a girl child.Footnote ⁶⁵ Fear of dowry and anxiety over the demand for the girl in the marriage market are two major reasons for the continued malady, while the centuries-old importance of the male child in the family and society also remains deeply entrenched in the psyche of educated Indians. Lovina's desire to help Savitri is also a desire to revisit, from her present privileged position, a part of herself which she had left behind in India years ago. The play underlines the need to redefine the relationship between women across “oceans and continents” through people like Lovina who embody both “worlds.” Yet her ultimate abandonment of the case makes it no less plain that her career is eventually more important to her than any such fleeting concern. Researchers at the University of California have recently found that, under family pressure to bear a male child, 89 percent of Indian immigrant women in the United States itself had their female fetuses aborted between 2004 and 2009.Footnote ⁶⁶ One cannot help wondering what new perspective this might have put on Lovina's sense of freedom and accomplishment as a second-generation Indian American.

On-Track is another ten-minute perfectly punctuated “Yoni ki Baat” monologue by Chandwaney, which may be read as a sequel to Helpline. An ambitious South Asian American girl with an enviable résumé now wants to round herself out with some international community service. Her consequent deep involvement with underprivileged, illiterate women languishing in a faraway Nepal adds a new dimension to the idea of “diaspora” itself. Devi goes to Nepal as a UN volunteer to educate those hapless people on the eve of the 2008 election. “In the five decades of its experiments with democracy,” as Nishchal Nath Pandey observes, “the country's political development has witnessed virtually all varieties of extremism.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The Maoist movement that began in 1996 and overthrew the monarchy in 2008 equally failed to correct the course for the country. The 2008 Nepal election, which was contested by the Maoists too, was expected finally to end the decades-old political turmoil in the country. The audience gets glimpses of pre-election atrocities as Devi narrates her Nepal experience to the Kathmandu Debriefing Committee. Girls are kidnapped and end up in brothels or are married off to men for money. Those joining the Maoist brigade get labeled “terrorists,” whereas “all they're trying to do is reclaim themselves, from the traffickers and the pimps and police and politicians, and everyone else who derives value from their yoni's [genitals]” (3). In retrospect, and outside the world of the play, we learn that even the meteoric rise of the Maoist chief to the position of the country's prime minister was not to last long due to his standoff with the Nepal army chief and subsequently with the President himself. Devi may appear to be overly idealistic and politically incorrect at times. She also sounds somewhat ignorant of the contradictions of her immediate society or of its failure to dispense justice to many of its own citizens. But a woman of her age and background is most likely to have her fervor and even her naivety. Proud of her Indian ancestry and equipped with the gift of the best American education, Devi is resolved to return to Nepal for another year to work for the women. She is no “First World” woman with a mere condescending attitude to “Third World” women or completely ignorant of their cultural and historical specificities. Devi's resolve to revisit Nepal, instead, speaks of a profound sense of solidarity and responsibility. Of the Nepali interpreter who was working for her but suddenly went missing she asks, “What if she were a U. S. citizen?” On-Track successfully brings together “South Asian” and “American” in such a way as to signal the beginning of a transformative relationship between them and expand the meaning of “South Asian diaspora.”