By Swar Thounaojam
Technically, I should be brown because I have an Indian passport. Academically, my indigenous feminism falls under women of colour/ brown feminism. The problem is I am not entirely happy with either and cringe at being called brown or a woman of colour. Why? Because mainstream brown feminist discussions happening in this country (which I regularly participate in) make me and my experiences invisible with a very helpful “Darling, we face the same shit.”
Really?
It begins with a face. Nina Davuluri wins Miss America. There is a white racist backlash. Many of you nice brown Indian feminists respond along these glib lines: she would be too dark, too dusky to win Miss India or too Indian to ever be Miss India. Maybe it is a self-reflexive thing to do. Or maybe it is a cop-out. You attack this country’s obsession with fairness but it is all cosily done with the unchallenged assumption that the face of Nina Davuluri is the representative Indian face (especially in showbiz). Or the face of Priyanka Chopra. A face that can become Mary Kom’s with some make-up. So where do you want me to keep this face now?
A selfie inspired by Lisa Cheung’s I want to be More Chinese
It begins with a colour. Is this country just about being brown? Why is Indian feminism sparring with white privilege from a brown vantage only? I don’t identify myself as brown or desi due to historical, political and cultural differences. I am an indigenous feminist and I have never found an expression of my story in this country’s brown politics. In the same way you don’t find yours in white politics. So will our alliance happen only in The Peripheral Centre: Voices from the Northeast by Zubaan Books, the Oxford Anthology of Writings from North-East India and some well-meaning publications?
It begins with a body. The body of a dog woman from the ‘dog-eating region’. Bestial Gross Ferocious*. Perhaps everyone is somebody’s dog**.
Grooming | 1994 | from Paula Rego’s Dog Women series
It begins with putting us in our place with Oppression Olympics. Fuck you nasty tribals/indigenous whatevs. How can you accuse us brown junta of racism, rape, AFSPA, army brutality, air bombings, combing operations, massacre blah blah when your stupid ethnocentric gun-toting, petrol bomb hurling rebels hurt us? We are going to call you reverse racists like good old Tehelka and use News Laundry to remind you that your messy identity politics has killed us dominant browns and you should really stop whining about your land and culture if you don’t want to be treated as outsiders once you are out of your neck of the woods. We are going to pit one oppressed against another oppressed and silence the less privileged.
Swar Thounaojam (@liklasa) is a playwright, theatre director and performer based in Bangalore.
*adjectives stolen from Paula Rego’s description of her dog women
**line stolen from John McEwen’s chapter on Paula Rego’s Dog Women in his monograph Paula Rego.