India’s Secret
The Siddis
BY MARTHA CHANDRAN-DICKERSON
eritage months are
susceptible to
skepticism and scrutiny
as they’re often perfunctory and performative nods to the heritage of historically tyrannized communities. Heritage months attempt to “compress’ cultural “history into a single month” which is a subtle and sinister form of “segregation,” according to acclaimed author Alice Walker. She however concedes that despite their limitations, they proffer an opportunity to delve deeper into our vast and pyramided pasts, “shorn of the myths too many have spun about us.”
Myths such as the notion that May is the only month we should give an eff about Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, or the myth that the Asian-American and Pacific Islander community is a simple and/or singular entity. Uh no. Rather than myopically glancing at a monolithic, monochromatic swath of the world’s population we can pry open our eyes to peer into a countless continuity of communities, into ultra-specific communities, and lucidly elude “the danger of the single story.”
And we can peer into communities not vilely and voyeuristically but in an ardent attempt to decenter the dominant narratives, narratives that deny South Asians their Asianness, or narratives that focus only on one particular type of South Asian, one that is fairer in hue and loftier in caste, or singular in religion. Narratives that visibilize the invisibilized such as the subjugated and siloed Siddis of India.
H
PHOTOGRAPHY BY NEELIMA VALLANGI