You will note that the framing question is not “who am I?” but rather “how does (national) allegiance work and what does it allow?” This framing question is put through biographical details only as a rhetorical device, one that I hoped would bring readers of this blog into the piece. For the more metaphysical question “Who am I?”, I turn to a combination of Yoga and Zen Buddhism to create my own answers. But maybe those texts are not Indian enough.

I am certainly open to critique, especially in the service of overcoming my own mediocrity. In this spirit, I would ask you to point out how raising questions about nationalism and human rights––the projects I am interested in and partly think through above––qualify as navel gazing?

Best,

Shashi

I understand your thoughts on of the dynamics and how it process is to be distinguished from the practice. My thinking was on what are the basic attributes you would set yourself to define the distinction ? That’s why I drifted into Hegel.
My contention was that your practice , not the process is limited by the attributes you cant measure to define . In the above instance time and space: so in your immersion you are limited. In your case, you can only seek to immerse in Indian or American identities or the synthesis of the two. This means, extending your own example- An American can call you Indian(may be wrongly) he wouldn’t venture to call you Chinese, an identity which you cannot immerse yourself. Ergo the practice, which reflects the dynamic process is confounded by constraints eluding a common understanding or even communication which opens up the debate on the term cosmopolitan sensibility?

Thanks anyway.

i thought you felt comfortable in multi-lingual states?

Thank you for an interesting response. You are absolutely right to note that immersion is a dynamic process, not a prescribed event, that is attempting to negotiate an even more dynamic process that can loosely be called ‘globalization’. For the sake of my post, however, I was thinking of immersion as a *practice* that is intimately linked to the practice of critique. Although practice and process have correlations, they are not identical. Practices, at least as I post it them here and in the post, are attempts to negotiate, understand and make interventions in the larger processes. In so doing, practices have to be as dynamic as the things they are trying to make sense of.

Equally dynamic are our modes of self-identification. Again, it is only for this post and as a thought experiment that I have limited myself to thinking my Indian-American-ness. These are far from the only two layers of my (or anyone’s) identity and, perhaps even more importantly, they are not fixed quantities or qualities. I may be able to posit a moment, e.g. one where I experience prejudice because a ‘white’ person identifies me as Indian, and think through its various logics. Doing so, however, will eventually call attention to the impossibility of isolating that moment in itself, lest I slip into some transhistorical critique wherein the prejudicial agent stands in for all ‘white’ people existing through all time. Similarly, ‘Indian’ and ‘American’ are never stable but rather, as you point out, ongoing processes; they could also be performative practices.

Moreover, Indian and American are not dialectically related. (My understanding of Hegel is impressionistic at best, so bare with me). These two nodes, which are not the only two available, are not constitutively dependent on each other by a negative relation. That is, dialectic thought would require that X be defined as being not Y. Being Indian, however, cannot be defined as not being American. Although Indian-American are in tension with each other, I’m not sure it can properly be called a dialectical tension. Moreover, I reject the possibility of sublating these identities, especially not into an easy hybridity.

Thus if immersion is arguably, an extent of dynamic order reflecting the image of a more dynamic order, to what significance would it amount to, constrained by time and space, quintessential attributes which led to the need for immersion in the first place? For instance, the two layers of your identity of Indian-American is shaped by time and space, which have at a given point only one value in infinity. This limits you in your cognition to seek to immerse only in those two layers, Indian and American.

This sounds so much like Hegel. I have no definitive position or answers at this moment. This is just thinking aloud. I am curious about your response

Regards
sunil

Your questions point to the central problems facing everyone who is trying to cultivate a global perspective. I’m not sure there is an answer but maybe I can offer some thoughts.

The first thing to say is that even those experiences and lives we live first hand are not entirely our own. That is, the language and implicit theory of the world we operate with on a day-to-day basis is not born cleanly out of the soul, but neither is it simply received knowledge from a “culture.” I would argue that our everyday consciousness is something like a ongoing war between our mental faculties (including memories) and the onslaught of information coming in (including ‘cultural values’). Extending this thought, although too simplistically, our own nations are not entirely our own.

Although I foreground my own vexed relationship with both India and America, I don’t think anyone has a simple relationship with their nationality. Certainly, and my gloss on Anderson points to this, we cannot know everyone and everything that happens within a set of territorial boundaries. We can all attest to the long and arduous process of education that has brought us to our current level of understanding; however, we all also know that we don’t know a lot, especially about an incredibly complicated nation-state like India.

Second order information, then, isn’t quite so second order; it may even be constitutive of how we understand our lives. However, I would rather think of reading (or research generally) as one tool amongst many, which like all tools has certain abilities and inabilities. Another tool may be traveling, but as Said’s study of Orientalism taught us long ago, travelers never experience a place on their own; they always see through the eyes of those who came and wrote before.

That said, I am currently working on a project that is trying to think through our bodily reactions in foreign places. Despite all the critical sensitivities (second order) immersion can cultivate, I may still experience tension, nervousness, nausea etc when I actually have to be there. This is a physical knowledge and it can provide insights otherwise unavailable. I am dealing with this issue in the context of the Rwandan genocide and the texts I am using highlight the need for this kind of physical knowledge. Unfortunately, that brings us back to the question we began with: If physical, bodily knowledge is necessary to “really know,” then how do we who have no ability to be there intervene politically, especially in something as atrocious as a genocide?

My question is, how is one to avoid looking through anything at all except through the lens of what is lived (and therefore familiar)?

Related question: How much is a secondhand immersion worth? Reading, for instance, or discourse, or interpretations by others of something you might not be able to experience firsthand?