When I speak English, I am regarded as an educated Indian. When I speak Hindi, Indians always know that I am Bihari. When I use constructions such as 'hence-it-would-not-be-wrong-to-conclude' or, unfortunately, words such as 'problematic', people might guess that I'm an academic. But there is no speech act, no distinctive utterance, accent or ideology that makes people nod in recognition of something that distinguishes me from my other identities, and say, "Ah, a Southasian."
And yet, I have presented myself as Southasian, and acted as a Southasian, and often anxiously worried that I wasn't enough Southasian. All this happened when I travelled outside India for the first time, to get a degree in the United States. In the early years, I never came across the word. Maybe I was moving in the wrong company, splitting my time almost equally between Biharis and Marxists. The former were just Biharis, but the latter were all internationalists. Not a trace of Southasianism among them.
But then came a period of several years when I wrote poetry and became a Southasian. I would go to literary festivals, and declaim poems about mistaken identity. A fair deal of ethnic culture would be on display at such events. A short documentary would be screened about Bharat Natyam, Faiz, Nusrat or even cricket in New Jersey, and the voiceover would offer a few lines of nostalgia and then bitter, sarcastic observations about the wilful blindness of the dominant culture in America or Canada. The word marginal would be used a lot. Samosas would be on sale. One would have to wait for people to tell you their names before one could guess, tentatively, whether they were from India or Pakistan – or any other place in Southasia … ("Bangladesh? Oh, I'm sorry! Dhaka?").
There was something quite exhilarating about the mixing that took place at, say, the Desh-Pardesh festival in Toronto. The Tamils and the Sinhalas might be funding their separate, warring armies back home, but their children were happy to be reading their poems together about arranged marriages, or oppressed mothers, or lesbian love, or how-I-love-to-lick-the-chutney-from-your-fingers-and-find-in-the-dark-forest-of-your-eyes-my-lost-roots or some such sensibility. We were all definitely, defiantly, Southasian.