South Asian in the Mid-South: Migrations of Literacies 9780822963783, 2015029539

Citation preview

South Asian in the

Mid-South

Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture David Bartholomae and Jean Ferguson Carr, Editors

South Asian in the Mid-South Migrations of Literacies

Iswari P. Pandey

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2015, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pandey, Iswari P, author. South Asian in the Mid-South: Migrations of Literacies / Iswari P. Pandey. pages cm. — (Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8229-6378-3 (paperback : acid-free paper) 1. Linguistic minorities—South America. 2. South Asians—Migrations. 3. South Asians—South America—Social life and customs. 4. Literacy—South America. 5. Language and culture—South America. 6. Sociolinguistics— South America. I. Title. P40.5.L562S63 2015 306.44—dc23 2015029539

To My Father who introduced me to the world of reading and writing and the many things they could do.

Contents

Acknowledgments  ix In Place of a Preface: Cautions, Considerations   xi Chapter 1. Departures and Returns: Literacy Practices across Borders  1 Chapter 2. En Route: Reconsidering Sites and Subjects or Research in Motion  41 Chapter 3. Genes and Jeans: Sanskrit South Asia in the US Mid-South, and Back Again   75 Chapter 4. Detours and Diversions: (Re)Writing Gender Roles   112 Chapter 5. Arrivals, Interrogations, Responses: “Islamic Ways of Life” or the Literacy Practices of an “Other” Nation   147 Chapter 6. Between Departures and Returns: Literacies of Migrations, Migrations of Literacies   186 Appendix: Initial Interview Script   209 Notes  213 References  225 Index  243

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Acknowledgments

In the decade or so that has elapsed between the formal inauguration and publication of this work, I have realized how research is truly a collaborative project. This study has been possible only because of the generosity of a large number of people. First and foremost, I am eternally indebted to the study participants, who welcomed me openly into their private and not-so-private habits of reading, writing, and teaching, as well as reading and discussion group events, (cross-)cultural presentations, and community planning meetings. If there is anything valuable in this work, it is owing to their generosity. They have taught me invaluable lessons about life, learning, and working with others in an interdependent world. I am also grateful to many teachers, friends, and colleagues who helped me plan, design, write, and revise this project in its current form. At Louisville, Bronwyn Williams was a patient listener and supportive guide through the planning and completion of the major part of the research reported here. Carol Mattingly read the early draft and gave me some really useful suggestions. Beth Willey and Karen Kopelson asked useful questions, as did Mary Brydon-Miller. Ali Miaan provided crucial information and

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contacts that helped me with my early research and interpretation. I also benefited from conversations with Dale Billingsley, Beth Boehm, Mark Bousquet, Brian Huot, Susan Ryan, and Pam Takayoshi, as well as with Chris Carter, Mark Crane, Jo Ann Griffin, Dan Keller, Anne Marie Pederson, and Carolyn Skinner, among others. I am in their debt. At Syracuse, Eileen Schell read my draft and provided constructive feedback. I am grateful to her for her support and encouragement. I remember, with fondness and gratitude, many conversations I have had with Patrick Berry, Tej Bhatia, Margaret Himley, and Tony Scott on the research reported here and elsewhere. Ann Gold and Tazim Kassam each directed me to an important resource while I was finalizing the draft. On one or another issue discussed in this book, I have also benefited from discussions with Suresh Canagarajah, Ellen Cushman, Christiane Donahue, Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, LuMing Mao, Paul Matsuda, Christine Tardy, Xiaoye You, Morris Young, and others at conferences and meetings. I am thankful to them all. Deborah Brandt’s work first inspired my research reported here, and her advice and questions have been productive to my own thinking about literacy and culture. I also had the pleasure of joining her graduate seminar at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, to discuss my work. Cindy (Cynthia) Selfe was another inspiring voice during my research. I am thankful to these amazing teachers and scholars for their time and generosity. I would be amiss if I did not acknowledge the role of my colleagues and students at many institutions in Nepal, India, and the United States in my development as a researcher and teacher. Although they are too many to name here individually, I appreciate their generosity and support. THANK YOU. Josh Shanholtzer at the University of Pittsburgh Press deserves special thanks for his patience and for shepherding the manuscript through the unusually long peer review process with one of the reviewers. I also thank the external reviewers for their constructive feedback. Last but not the least, Manas, Melissa, and Aruna deserve special mention for keeping my spirits up.

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Acknowledgments

In Place of a Preface Cautions, Considerations

As I compose these prefatory remarks, memorials are being held across the United States to mark the thirteenth anniversary of the September 11 (2001) attacks. In these thirteen years, much has been reported about what the day signifies, and how it has changed the United States and the rest of the world. In a response essay discussing what the events have meant for educators in the United States, Jennifer Bay observes, “While we teach our students argument and vehemently defend its importance, argument fails. The events of September 11, 2001, were not arguments; they were statements. They were events; they were not arguments. For all of our conviction about arguments and the ability of arguments to accomplish understanding and mediation, they often fail to enact change. What we see all around us in contemporary culture is less the use of argument and more a pervasive enactment of the statement” (2002, 694). Bay’s assertion makes sense: when wars and vengeance determine the course of history, it is difficult to imagine the significance of arguments to develop understanding, establish common ground, and build consensus or enact change. Her observation also echoes that of many other educators concerning their responsibility in the current climate characterized by unending

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wars and transborder flows of information, labor, refugees, and disease. However, it is important to recognize that Bay is also speaking from a certain cultural-institutional and epistemological location. Her major concern is what the event means for those of “us” who are in the business of literacy learning and instruction in a primarily Greco-Roman, Anglo-American tradition. For people like Sameer, a US citizen born to South Asian parents and whose story figures prominently in this study, however, 9/11 became, in his own words, “a sentence” rather than a statement.1 It was a sentence that a majority of recent immigrants, especially of Islamic faith, had to live through although they had “nothing to do with the crimes” of that day.2 How does such a politico-cultural backdrop shape the literate lives and politics of South Asian immigrants in a post-9/11 United States? What arguments do these immigrants develop and deploy in response to such a “sentence” and the general condition brought about by migrations across borders, accompanied by other recent changes in global economy and information technologies? More generally, how have these immigrants responded to the rhetorical exigency created by globalization, immigration, relocation, and new communications technologies? In this book, I seek to address these questions by exploring the ways in which South Asian immigrants carried (or needed to carry), created, taught, negotiated, and used different literacies both within and across communities of different faith traditions in a Mid-Southern US city that will be known by its pseudonym, Kingsville. Literacies are not just a set of technical skills but cultural practices ranging from reading and writing to other ways of using symbols and interacting with, and being in, the world, as recent scholarship has stressed. Scholars have studied how literacies are acquired, used, and valued in a variety of settings, and how the values of certain literacies or their practices shift over time. However, the usual approach in those studies is to look at literacy acts or practices as shaped by or characteristic of a given institutional or discursive context. As a result, the practices we study are often projected as bounded by that context, community, or setting, whether intended thus or not, even as the actual practices may

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In Place of a Preface

defy such a codification. Sometimes such an emphasis may be the consequence of one’s desire to zero in on certain practices in a given space. Or it may be just a problem of language use, as when one characterizes a given iteration of literacy practice as “local” to contrast it with a version of the “global.” In any case, such studies may lead us to tune out how similarly identified meaning-making practices are carried out across spaces, and how literacies themselves are in motion, constantly reinvented and refigured in response to unfolding exigencies. In short, we fail to notice the migrations of literacies across spaces and contexts, or, as instances of such processes, how literate practices are re-created and recirculated in the process of relocation and socialization across spaces.3 This book, then, revolves around this question: how do literacies travel? How are symbolic resources invented and reinvented, circulated and recirculated, within and across communities and vast geocultural boundaries? The study primarily looks into South Asian immigrants’ (re-)creation and (re)circulation of “native” identified languages and cultures by attending to various contexts of those practices and demonstrates the multidimensional migrations of literacies. In so doing, this book also illustrates how the creation, sustenance, and re-presentation of nativeidentified languages and cultures actually constitute real work, which I will call “word work” to align with and articulate some of my research participants’ experience of their labor of love—their work of building and rebuilding culture and identity through literacy acts and practices. Word work here is not the same as teaching and learning vocabulary, as this phrase may sometimes indicate, nor is it limited to work with words in print or speech alone. It is rather the use of language(s), writ large, in any mode or media as well as its strategic use in a given cultural ecology or network and is closer to Toni Morrison’s use of the term (“wordwork”) in her Nobel lecture. Word work also carries a clear rhetorical overtone: it changes according to the audience, the occasion, and the creator or enactor of that work, which is to say that it is in flux and constantly on the move.4 To account for the mobility of literacies, we need to understand why, under what conditions, and with whom they travel.

Cautions, Considerations

xiii

To stress the mobile nature of literacies, I use the trope of travel as an organizing metaphor of this book, also evident in the chapter titles. Literacies for the South Asians in this study are what these immigrants do between their points of departures and returns, literally and metaphorically. The trope is, in fact, an attempt to capture the research participants’ understanding of identity and life’s purpose—both as individuals and as a culture or community—and their reinvention of certain symbolic practices to construct their heritage. They often called such practices “roots” of their identity and strove to “preserve” that identity while “fitting in” in the new places they now thought of as home. To clarify, they defined cultural heritage and identity in terms of a continuous flow, sometimes even using the metaphor of a river. Their cultural practices demonstrate that such a history and identity are not a given but to be re-created and sustained through specific sets of cultural practices or word work. Moreover, most of them used the metaphor of a journey not only to describe their life as immigrants but also (and especially) to highlight the value of learning, transfer, and reinvention of their knowledge and identity in response to unfolding exigencies. It is, therefore, only by looking through an analytical framework of migration and word work that we can begin to understand their cultural practices and the use of those practices to create and sustain their identity (or route and reroute their roots) and, in the process, appreciate the migrantness of literacies. I understand the risk that the focus on cross-border movements may entail: it can be used (or seen as an attempt) to eschew attention to location or its attendant complexities, but the migrations of bodies and literacies here are occasioned by a complex web of local-global and internal-external forces. The mobile bodies not only leave their footprints behind but also carry deep impressions of their “roots” that they work to (re)define and (re)enact in relation to internal and external pressures in their new homes (although these “roots” are in play in their putatively originary home, too). My hope here is to demonstrate how the very idea of locale in itself is in motion, as demonstrated by the work (the word work) of South Asian immigrants to contextu-

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In Place of a Preface

alize and recontextualize languages and cultures presented in this study. This is one of the themes that should be consistently evident throughout the book. Therefore, without further ado, I would like to invite my readers to consider getting onboard and into some ways of making meaning along the way, for the presentation here will occasionally veer off the more or less predictable contours of academic prose.5 With apologies to St. Augustine, let it be a travel to the worlds mediated through a book.6 There is an inherent irony in this invitation. Mobile bodies carry and modify their “own” ways—and adopt different ways—of making meaning, as they adapt to new cultural, political, and professional contexts. Their literacies, as practices and processes, are far from settled, and this is precisely what a book may be ill-equipped to show. My hope is that paying attention to the literate lives at the interstices of cultures and nations will not only show how “imagined communities” are formed and transformed across vast distances of geography, history, and culture, but it will also lay bare those constructs as fluid, hybrid, and interstitial. A note to my readers with regard to the language and style of the book may be in order here. I have no illusion that this book is for a scholarly audience with interest in literacy studies, cross-cultural communication, globalization, South Asian American studies, and transnational cultures irrespective of their disciplinary training. However, I have tried to keep the language and style in some parts here closer to what some of the study participants considered “normal.” That means, for example, initiating the discussion by announcing where I come from, as in chapter 1, instead of a topic sentence directly leading to my major claims and beginning each chapter with a series of quotations, primarily from the research participants. While it is not entirely unusual in standardized academic writing to begin a chapter or a book with a quotation or two to introduce the major claim, I use more than one to announce each chapter here to alert my readers to different threads that the section is going to weave together. Although this practice is not that radical either, my choice is guided by the preferred practice of some of my key research participants, who started their discussions or lectures with popular and well-

Cautions, Considerations

xv

regarded aphorisms while addressing the audience from their own discourse communities. Their audiences knew those proverbs well, so the speaker achieved persuasive force without having to explain or interpret the quotations. I choose a middle path here for obvious reasons by engaging them only sparsely, so I cannot claim the same degree of persuasive effect. I also provide different kinds of details pertaining to literacy in chapter 1 before joining in on the scholarly conversations about literacy and culture.7 Among other things, in the early part of that chapter, I try to emulate Brinda’s approach to what she sometimes casually called “work with words.” In one of the many productive sessions midway through the project, Brinda, a Hindu school teacher on the weekends and a physician during the week, argued that illustrative details trumped telling. In her own words, “If you have the patience and the right attitude, you will get more out of illustrations than just a few short statements. I know the value of accurate and precise kinds of information. I am in the medical field, so I know its value . . . life is on the line, right, if something goes wrong? But you’ve got to understand that you should use descriptions and details . . . in their contexts. To tell the truth, that gives a truer picture of life. Short statements are incomplete and often exaggerate or mislead.” Fortunately, for me, I am in no rush to save lives. In fact, I am in the business of crafting descriptions and can even afford a little digression here and there if that helps re-create the context of meaning-making, especially if Brinda and a few others who populate this work think that such details and quieter reflections facilitate a better understanding of as amorphous a subject as literacy and culture at a time of profound change. In the interest of time and space, and owing to my own academic training, I will, however, be making “short statements” as well, not the kind of statements that Bay (2002) referred to metaphorically but the kind to which Brinda refers as a code for the convention of making explicit claims in academic writing. Indeed, a lot of them. It will, of course, be up to the readers to judge the completeness of those statements. After all, this is nothing but a word work.

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In Place of a Preface

South Asian in the

Mid-South

Chapter 1

Departures and Returns Literacy Practices across Borders It’s by reading, writing, and teaching that we [South Asian immigrants] make sure we maintain our identity and culture . . . and also [maintain] good contact with other cultures with power. . . . We can speak to them with our own voice and identity.

—Brinda, Kingsville I feel like I am going back to my parents’ country and culture to help my own community and country here [the United States]. Doing the discussion groups and presentations, my recent undertaking like since two years ago, [has been] very good and interesting. It is like I am going away and coming back in . . . and doing these things constantly. I am American and my community is not terror-causing. I need to do [these activities] to educate our people, police, church people, and others.

—Sameer, Kingsville Teaching and talking about scriptures means you are doing multiple roles. You remember the stories from your grandmother, understand the books, their meaning, our history and roots . . . sometimes discuss with other people, tell stories and meanings. You are taking stories and meanings from place to place and context to context and work in the details for meaning.

—Shilpa, Kingsville Writing and power never work separately, however complex the laws, the system, or the links of their collusion may be. . . . Writing does not come to power. It is there beforehand, it partakes of and is made of it.

—Jacques Derrida (1979, 50)

Jacques Derrida’s words above remind me of the strange power of the written word that I witnessed as a child growing up in the mid-hills of western Nepal.1 As soon as I acquired the basic alphabetic literacy in vernacular Nepali, I was reading and writing letters for my neighbors, mostly women, whose husbands or sons were working in the cities of Nepal or neighboring India and, sometimes, overseas. Although I do not remember feeling particularly powerful, I certainly remember the eyes looking up to me in anticipation of having their letters penned or read aloud. The letters were theirs in that they were addressed to or posted

1

in their names, but their meanings came to being only through somebody else like me. Writing also defined the economic, political, and religious relationships of these villagers, although not everyone could read or write. Perhaps this made reading and writing all the more important as it defined and redefined family and community relations in multiple ways. In a sense, these acts were similar to the work of Brinda, Sameer, and Shilpa (above) for community identity and cross-cultural communication in the early years of the twenty-first century. If the letters in my native village mediated individual and family desires and obligations, the work of recent South Asian immigrants in Kingsville of the US Mid-South, the primary site of the present study, re-created particular kinds of literacies to re-mediate their identities across cultural and political spaces, to form and transform their communities, and to speak to the dominant culture and its institutions in the United States. As I will show in the rest of the book, in both cases, the acts of reading and writing negotiated identity, meaning, and power, locally and beyond. The written word was a key catalyst in the complex network of relations, but it was also constantly on the move as different stakeholders sought to write themselves into the motion of evolving power dynamics. In addition to reading and writing letters that often circulated transnationally, I witnessed a more complex, and apparently intransigent, life of the written word in my native village. In those days, villagers came to my father, only one of a few adults in the region familiar with legalese, when they were carrying out a transaction, such as the sale or purchase of land, a home, or even cattle. He wrote their first rajinama (literally, document of consent and similar to a title deed) for land purchase and tamasuk (literally, transaction or agreement) to record monetary transactions. A tamasuk almost always followed real estate deals and, occasionally, cattle purchases, and in it the borrower or buyer promised to pay a sum of money within a given period of time, with interest. When the deal involved land of a high value, these people would also go to the mukhiya and jimmuwal (government-designated local tax contractors) and then the district land registration office. But those agents charged hefty fees and were often

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Departures and Returns

known to be unscrupulous. The villagers, therefore, had reasons to come to people like my father, often to have the extra security of a document before going to these officials and the government registration office when necessary for tax purposes. The nearest land registration office was at the district headquarters, Tamghas (Gulmi), which was almost a day’s walk from my village of Wami. The prospect of missing a couple of days’ work for these subsistence farmers was only exceeded by their repulsion with the often corrupt and overbearing government officials. Therefore, people went to them only when the transaction involved relatively valuable properties like their homes or paddy fields. My father, himself a farmer and a teacher at a locally run school for some time, did not charge any fees but accepted small presents of fruits and vegetables, and occasionally money, when given. I watched in awe when the people involved stamped their thumbs, printed with a mixture of mustard oil and soot, several places on the rice-paper documents. Writing sealed the fate of these villagers in more than one way. I saw some till the farms of others to pay off loans—or simply pay off the ever-accumulating interest on the principal—that their parents or grandparents had supposedly borrowed. These small farmers and peasants often resigned themselves to their luck, saying that it was all “written” for them. Their understanding of writing was generally twofold. For the more fatalistic, it indicated a preordained fact. Others understood it as scripted, and often questionable, even characterizing it as word play or word work, although it was hard to mount any consequential challenge because the debt was recorded “in writing”! They worked for a few days of crunch time (ranging from a couple of days to a week or even weeks) during planting and harvesting seasons at the sahu’s (lender’s). In some parts of western Nepal, similar papers and practices developed into a form of bonded labor that was still in use by the end of the twentieth century.2 The shopkeepers at the local marketplace also kept record books, since they often sold on credit, and buyers paid when they had extra grain, cattle, or animal products (such as milk and purified butter) to sell or had a family member send remittances from the cities or foreign countries. It

Literacy Practices across Borders

3

was in absence of either of these options that they would pay the credit by working on the sahu’s farm.3 The function of writing in my village demonstrated in clear terms how power and writing functioned together and, as would become clear later, challenged that power as well. The wicked power of “paper” was driven home to me once again in 2003, when I met Jay in Kingsville, USA. Jay had applied to the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) to adjust his status to that of a lawful permanent resident. He had been working as a sushi/grill chef at a Japanese restaurant in the city for about two years. The business owner had sponsored his application, and it was filed through an immigration attorney’s office. To prove to the authorities that Jay really had the skill and experience to fill a skilled laborer quota, he needed to produce a certificate of experience from previous employers outside the United States. Jay had worked in a restaurant of a four star hotel in Nepal before relocating to the United States, but his certificate stated only that he was a “chef of Japanese cuisines” and did not mention the specifics. His attorney now forwarded him the letter from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) with his own, asking: “Can we get another letter? I realize we already submitted the letter from [name] Resort Hotel.4 We need to submit it soon, so could you get one from the same place with details of your work and experience? INS has asked for evidence that shows two years of training or relevant experience.” Although the INS became the USCIS in 2003, assuming a more expanded role, the attorney still used the older name, INS, in his letter and included the correspondence from the USCIS, which could not have been blunter: Pursuant to Title 8, Federal Regulations, . . . we are notifying you of our intent to deny this application. . . . This letter refers to the I-140 application (Immigration Petition for Alien Worker), filed on. . . . The Service is notifying you of our intent to deny this application for the following reason(s).— Initial evidence states: (A) General. Any requirements of training or experience for skilled workers, professionals, or other work-

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Departures and Returns

ers must be supported by letters from trainers or employers, giving the name, address, and title of the trainer or employer, and a description of the training received or the experience of the alien.

Jay understood that the USCIS needed a letter detailing his training or experience. What baffled him was that a copy of the same paper had secured him labor certification, in his own words, “from the same government.” While the USCIS and the Department of Labor that issues labor certification are different agencies of the same government, Jay believed that the evidence acceptable to one should satisfy the other as well. But his anxiety had other more serious causes. The hotel where he had worked had closed down since he left for the United States. The Nepalese economy, generally supported by a strong tourism industry, was badly hit on account of an ongoing conflict, which intensified in the aftermath of the royal massacre of 2001. Jay had a hard choice to make. He needed either to forge a new certificate from the hotel that was now nonexistent or to give up his job and pursuit of a green card (lawful permanent resident status) in the United States. Jay’s case highlighted for me not only the materiality of “paper” and its power over him but also its lie.5 Written words dictated the lives of people. It made little difference whether it was the mukhiyas of my native village or the immigration officials of a powerful nation who controlled the meaning and scope of those words. The lie of the law was, however, also countered by Jay’s existence, at least the one his records showed it to be. Interestingly, his “paper-made” existence mocked the authoritative strictures in ways that subversive narratives and protest literature in my native village resisted the power structure entrenched through the written word. Jay’s important papers were “made up,” as he would tell me nonchalantly, including his citizenship and passport from Nepal. Along with thousands of other ethnic Nepali-speaking Bhutanese, he was evicted from Bhutan in the early 1990s. Unlike other exiles who lived in the temporary refugee camps of eastern Nepal, he and his parents had contact with their distant relatives in Nepal, who helped Jay and his father find work at a restaurant. The same relation also helped Jay secure a Nepalese citizenship

Literacy Practices across Borders

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“paper” before leaving for the United States on a Nepalese passport. Now in the United States, he needed to have at least one more paper “made” if he wanted to keep his hope of a green card alive. With input from his attorney, Jay prepared a draft, describing his responsibilities as a chef in detail and tracked down his former supervisor, who still had the stationery of the now nonoperational restaurant. A new experience letter arrived within a few days to satisfy the legal requirements for the time being. I mention Jay’s case and incidents from my village not simply to suggest that power and writing have come to be inextricably tied together. While that is the case, it is important to note that power does not always flow unidirectionally or from a single source but is also constantly contested, (re)appropriated, and (re)negotiated through the strategic use of word work or other, similar resources. These examples indicated how individuals wrote themselves into the dynamics of being. If there was one lesson in these incidents, it was that literacy was a resource open to manifold uses with real, material consequences. Control of the written word in my native village often coincided with similar control over other things, such as landholding and social status. Possession of literacy did not guarantee but either corresponded with or facilitated the process of acquiring those possessions. It was also a crucial marker in a complex network of caste, class, race, and gender. The mukhiyas and jimmuwals were Kshetriya, the caste of the kings and warriors; most other literate individuals were Brahmins. And men were the ones who had the wherewithal to read and write, although not all men could. Class and family lineage played a big part among these men. Only a few women, across caste and class lines, could read or write. Still, when these power relations were challenged, it was through the strategic use of the word—oral or written. As I grew up, I also witnessed tamasuk chyatne events organized to tear up or burn old tamasuks, symbolizing freedom from often dubious debt and bondage, and effective circulation of protest literature opposing (absolute) monarchy and the feudal structure of the Nepalese economy and society. The activists engaged in these kinds of transformative politics were either teachers in the sparse

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Departures and Returns

government schools or full-time political activists, some of whom had even abandoned their college careers to protest “bourgeois education” and embraced the politics of resistance full-time. In any case, symbolic resources were mobilized both to perpetuate and to challenge the established mores and values. The acts of writing or ripping up “papers” displayed the battle over what those artifacts signified. For example, if having a written record of debt allowed the creditor much power over the “other party,” shredding such papers terminated that relationship. Papers also carried much historical and cultural capital. One clan patriarch, for instance, claimed to possess a “paper” from an eighteenth-century prince authorizing his bau-baje (forefathers) to “cultivate the land” in that region. Members of a competing community questioned it, arguing instead that their own ancestors had settled in the area first. In each case, it was the claim to “paper” that was deployed to trump all counterclaims. And in each case, the paper came from someplace else, as did the ancestors. Minority and marginalized groups often questioned the authenticity or even the existence of such papers. During my college days, when I collaborated with a member of one dominant group to write the history of the place, we got to see one ancientlooking paper, but its contents were hard to decipher because of age. A big hole appeared where the date might have been, although the rice-paper document was generally well maintained. Daily cultural and economic lives revolved around other papers that were written, rewritten, and occasionally shredded. Symbolic resources were constantly mobilized for a variety of purposes. It was apparent that symbols were more than just some signs. Creating, keeping, and interpreting those resources, especially in codified forms, not only carried a huge social and cultural capital but also determined the fate of many. Cementing and cemented by the given network of culture, economy, and politics, writing authorized history or what some people called their “roots,” determined their present status and, as in Jay’s case in Kingsville, indicated potential futures. The complex politico-cultural life of such symbols became even more evident to me when I began observing the constant in-

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vention and reinvention of similar resources among some South Asian immigrants in the US Mid-South. The letters that I read and wrote for my villagers crossed nations and even continents, and they primarily communicated private messages within a given cultural and generic framework. Jay’s experiment with preparing and securing documents was not all that different. In both instances, they defined individual identity and relationships to the family, community, or nation-state in interesting ways. The work of immigrants like Brinda, Sameer, and Shilpa, with whose sayings I opened this chapter, did some of that, but their work involved so much more. They were creating and circulating texts, practices, and values in ways that defied any neat convention for doing so. Texts travel pretty easily, and they did before globalization began to intensify in the second half of the twentieth century. Among the immigrants with whom I was working, however, texts were not just being carried from one place to another; values were being reinscribed as a result of the interpretation and teaching of those texts, as was the role of various stakeholders such as the keepers and interpreters of those texts. Not only did the texts and people migrate, but so did literacies themselves. As a result, it was not just relocating of languages and religions that made these immigrants’ literate practices unique. It was the re-creating of their practices and values, as well as the ways they used those practices to (re)write themselves into mobile yet authentic speaking subjects. Their acts did not project their culture and identity as self-sufficient and static; nor did their use of native identified languages mean a complete break with the mainstream culture of the US host society. Constantly (re)invented and (re)circulated, their literacy practices in the self-identified cultural domain constituted a complex terrain in which individual and community identities were (re)fashioned and fought over, both within their communities and without. There was certainly the issue of immigration, but contrary to one’s expectations, the migration was far from one way in this case. As I would soon learn, it worked both ways. These (re)inventions were heavily invested with individual and community desires. But those desires arose from different sources,

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some related to cultural identity and history and others attempts at reinscribing those very histories and identities and at reimagining individual roles. At the Hindu school of Kingsville, the goal was to teach, in Brinda’s words, “ancient Vedic heritage” or sanatana dharma (eternal religion) and to make it relevant to the younger generation of the South-Asian American immigrants.6 These reinvocations and reappropriations, as will become clear in the course of this book, constituted the territory in which divergent ideas of normative subjectivities were imagined and contested. Teachers like Brinda, for example, saw an opportunity in their work to counter the male control of the sacred word in nonthreatening ways and what counted as appropriate cultural behavior for women, although their action was sometimes perceived as driven by ulterior motives. Muslim immigrants had different incentives altogether in the aftermath of the September 11 (2001) tragedy and its representation in the mainstream media. Facing public derision and workplace discrimination, as well as increased mass surveillance, they felt the need to be extra vigilant for their own safety, as well as to educate the majoritarian community to promote better cross-cultural understanding. Some, including those who had previously had no interest in religion, even felt the need to form their own reading and discussion groups to educate themselves and others about the Islamic way of life. In either case, religion seemed to provide cultural solace even to those who otherwise professed secular values. Reading, writing, and teaching were then about cultural identity, generally through the prism of religions, although the goals were more than religious. Similarly, the use of words or “papers” turned those resources into something more than what they appeared to be. Although different groups of immigrants to the United States have maintained native language and literacy practices, especially among the first and second generations, South Asian immigrants’ use of these resources at the turn of the new millennium shed new light on the mobility and inventiveness to which these resources lend themselves. Not only do these immigrants’ practices contravene the traditional idea of one-way importation of native

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practices for use in the adopted land, but they also sometimes blur the distinction between native and adoptive lands, complicating those very categories—the native land and the New World. As I show in this book, culturally authorized symbolic practices are objects for constant (re)invention, (re)circulation, and (re) adoption across multiple borders. It would, however, be naïve to conclude that immigrants’ present location and the particular spaces they inhabit do not affect the way they re-create meaning for their identity and culture. This book is about the ways these immigrants use reading and writing, broadly speaking, to construct and validate their identities in everyday life in the US MidSouth. It is certainly not about all South Asians or each of their practices but about certain kinds of cultural practices among the South Asians living in and around the Kingsville metro area whose organized community life was relatively visible. Similarly, it is not an entirely new claim to suggest that literacy or, rather, literacies are embedded in cultural and economic systems, nor that they move with people and their changing needs and aspirations. An increasing body of scholarship in literacy and cultural studies makes similar claims, as do the anecdotal evidences from my native village with which I open this chapter. What is often less recognized, however, is that literacies themselves are never fixed but are on the move. And they migrate not only in the sense that knowledges and skills transfer and travel. They almost always travel and often transfer not as neatly moving units but as complex sets of practices and values open to multiple adaptations and negotiations. The crucial point here is that they also move multidirectionally, with meanings, values, and understandings constantly shifting even as some of the core categories may appear the same. Equally important, while the historical and cultural associations that some literacies invoke may present a static picture of a culture—the consequence of many studies—on closer scrutiny, the changing contexts and functions of symbol uses reveal a profound fluidity if we pay attention to actual practices, on which more below. In keeping with the preferred practices of most of the study participants, let me begin with some illustrations.

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“Two Wor[l]ds”: Reading and Writing, Teaching and Learning Snapshot 1

On a cold morning following the winter break of 2004, Brinda and Shilpa decide to combine their two different classes, usually held separately, at the Hindu school of Kingsville. As the first order of the day, Brinda announces that she will speak “two words” about the class that Sunday. The announcement is in order because it is unusual to merge classes, and it is perhaps also prompted by the presence of a stranger. Although I have met Brinda and Shilpa before, it is my first visit to the school. Brinda begins by explaining that there were not enough students to justify two separate classes. Besides, both the classes were going to review the materials covered during the fall. No sooner has she explained these reasons for the merger than she starts talking about the significance of learning Sanskrit language and “ancient Indian heritage” for the present, pointing at times to the philosophical discourses celebrated in the ancient texts and their relevance to individual rights and responsibility, democracy, cosmopolitanism, and the environment today. She points out that one of her goals—and that of the Hindu school—is to highlight “the positive things that Indian culture had in its ancient past that are either not in practice today or not known to the modern generation.” Like some patrons, Brinda also often refers to the Hindu school as Sunday school. Perhaps the patrons and teachers do not care about the Christian connotation of Sunday schools, or more likely, they want to portray it as just another “normal” weekly school rather than one of a different kind, especially in the aftermath of the terror scare of September 11, 2001, a fact that becomes clear from later interaction with other members of the temple and, even more tellingly, when I talk with another group of immigrants—Muslim South Asians. The written documents, as I soon discover, always call it the Hindu school. By the time Brinda concluded her “two words,” she had already spoken for over ten minutes, and I had lost count of the number of words. If nothing else, there was a lesson in literacy and rhetoric

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here for me. “Two words” was simply an idiomatic expression for a relatively brief presentation. Brinda certainly did not forget to stress a couple of words (reading and writing) that were key to her talk. She linked them to the pedagogical processes of circulation: teaching and learning. I was also struck by the mobilizing power of the images of ancient India’s democratic past constructed through a set of curricular and pedagogical goals and practices. At the same time, the “two words” in fact connoted two worlds, as she discussed during her presentation, and what circulated between them. They also implicated two kinds of people involved in the process—men and women—and the subtle contest over the meaning of that process. Even more, her talk displayed two kinds of activities and goals: the educational one in which Brinda and her colleagues as well as their students were involved, and its research and representation, the one I was (and am) engaged in. If her preface was provoked by my presence, at least to the extent of its length, it was as much about the school as it was about me. In my meeting with her after the class, Brinda wondered what I thought of that lecture. Additional research into the reading materials at the Hindu school and Hindu literature traced the root of the idiomatic expression of “two words” to a rather famous summative couplet characterizing the major teachings of Veda Vyasa, who is credited with compiling the Puránas and organizing the Vedas, the key texts in ancient Hindu intellectual and spiritual traditions.7 According to the couplet, on completing the eighteen Puránas, Vyasa summed up their essence in two words: “Paropakára punyáya, pápáya parapidanam”: Doing good to others is punya, and causing hurt to others is papa. In fact, the two words, however one configures them (paropakára punyáya, pápáya parapidanam, or punyáya and pápáya as the key words), gain meaning only in relation to the other two and have generated a long line of commentaries. It was, therefore, only to be expected that Brinda would take about a quarter of an hour to explicate her “two words” that had over two thousand years of history. The reading materials at her school contained a large number of mantras like this one collected from different texts, and the instructional objectives in-

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cluded helping the children understand and apply their teachings in practice. The role of reading and writing, as well as their teaching and learning in (trans)forming culture and identity, is well documented. These practices, almost always represented as literacy, or literacies, are supposed to contribute to cultural reproduction, take advantage of social and economic opportunities, and facilitate modernization and development. As Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (1990), Henry Giroux (1984), and others have argued, schools are a primary site of cultural reproduction, where competing ideologies and discourses are at play. Seen from that vantage point, what I was finding here at the Hindu school was perhaps not too different. One could well say that these immigrants were reconstructing their cultural history and values through language and cultural practices from their “homeland” for their children’s consumption. Men’s involvement in the management and priestly activities of the temple and women’s involvement in teaching—actually all seven teachers were women at this time—could be seen as simply reproducing native patriarchy, only bolstered by contact with the dominant US culture (read patriarchy), where school teaching is primarily feminized. However, there was so much going on here that to brush off the teaching-learning as simply another instance of “false consciousness” would only prove my learned arrogance, against which scholars like Ellen Cushman (1998) have cautioned us. As Cushman, in her ethnographic study of an inner-city community, asserts, “Social theories that characterize systematic forms of oppression . . . can mistake accommodation for quiescence, placation for false consciousness, silence for submission, subtlety for passivity.” In their attempt at uncovering the larger systemic forces underlying social relations, those theories/theorists often overlook the strategic use of resistance evident in people’s “most common language practices” (1998, 4). Although structural forces cannot be ignored, looking at how individuals and communities manage to make meaning under unfavorable systems offers telling examples of the power of everyday language practices. A close look at the Hindu temple and school demonstrates that the

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planning and execution of educational and social activities in the name of community involve issues of agency and contest over the meanings and objects of those activities. These activities shape and are shaped by who the individual actors are and what they do. The tropes of a common and democratic heritage of an imagined community, apparent in Brinda’s talk described above and in the curricular philosophy of the Hindu school, certainly indicate a rhetorical savvy, but the reimaginings that those tropes facilitate do not always mean the same thing. For women teachers, for example, instead of simply reproducing an imagined past or perpetuating the status quo, teaching and interpreting the religious texts actually create a space from which they can challenge the gendered social hierarchy and assert their agency. At the Hindu school, the goals and uses of these “cultural” literacies were also manifold: not only were the students expected to be familiar with their “rich history and culture,” but they were also expected to use that “knowledge and experience,” in the words of Shilpa, to “improve their opportunities” in life. These teachers’ conception of opportunities was expansive and included everything from adapting to—and making the best of—the host society’s embrace of multicultural ethos to “fitting in with others” in the immigrant community, as well as in their parents’ countries of origin and in-between. The Hindu school also functioned as one specific site for what Brinda called “work with words” (word work), where teachers, students, and parents (re)fashioned their communities as they planned various activities to present to their own community members on special occasions (in addition to regular school teaching) or to different institutions of the host society on behalf of the community. At places like local schools, churches, and occasionally at regional and state fairs, they organized programs to “represent our culture, Hinduism, or just another kind of diversity,” as Shilpa would put it. Furthermore, the curriculum would find its way back to South Asia, where parents could use it to teach their own children who attended English medium schools. It is, therefore, only by paying attention to the exigencies, processes, and consequences of these practices that one

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can begin to appreciate the dynamics of literacy in the (trans) formation of culture and community in a changing world. Snapshot 2 In another month, I am with Sameer, a US citizen born to Pakistani parents in Indiana. On this Saturday afternoon, Sameer is preparing for a presentation about the Islamic way of life, a topic he was not terribly interested in, let alone in being an emissary for, until a year or two ago. “But it has changed,” he says, showing me the notes he has prepared for the next day’s talk to be given at a church. He plans to discuss what Islam says about peace and the “value of human life.” His goal is to “stress that what happened on 9/11 does not represent our way of life or the teaching of the Qur’an.” Sameer has already spoken at another church a few months ago. The experience there was “not very good,” he remembers, but he still wants to go to this one. A firm believer in the “power of communication,” Sameer is convinced that there is “so much to learn from one another.” He has seen “enough of hatred, this bigotry.” In the next presentation, he wants to “focus on the commonalities of faiths.” He says he is collecting appropriate quotations from the holy texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the three religions that will be pertinent to the target audience’s understanding of his talk. The words do the work, he thinks, and he hopes to establish that no faith tradition should be judged on the basis of the actions or statements of an extremist fringe. In fact, he plans to stress that “all Abrahamic religions [Judaism, Christianity, and Islam] have a common character” of monotheism and “a common history,” as they trace their origins to Abraham. He is frustrated that, despite so many commonalities between “our faiths, there is so much division and hatred,” and he is committed to changing it “in whatever small ways possible.” In fact, his inspiration comes from the Qur’an, which he has taken to reading, in which Allah explicitly instructs us to learn from one another, even justifying the existence of different cultures for this purpose—“so you may know one another” (Qur’an 49:13).

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In actively engaging in what some called training in Islamic (religious) sensibilities, Sameer hoped to “educate a few souls” and promote a better cross-cultural understanding, and he was not alone in that effort. There was Aziz, for example, Sameer’s father’s friend and a radiology professor at the local university, and Abdul, an attorney with the county government. All three were involved at one point or another in the same act of giving presentations about Islamic ways of life at churches and for law enforcement agencies in the aftermath of 9/11. Like Brinda and her colleagues at the Hindu temple, these Muslim men were all professionals, who were interested in encouraging interfaith, intercultural dialogue, and learning. An engineer by profession, Sameer speaks for the rest when he states his belief in the innate goodness of people: “Had I no faith in people’s goodness at heart, why would I do all this in my spare time? It won’t get me any raise.” Although these Muslim men’s activism had been occasioned by their desire and need to speak for their communities and cultures, the very act of speaking thus involved questions of authenticity, about who could take on the speaking roles, and what such roles and representations would entail. In this way, the cultural work and presentation included formative issues of what cultures and communities meant and illustrated another instance of word work in practice. That work was crucial in constructing the history and cultural practices of fellow Muslims. It also involved the work of reconstructing Islam, already a religion that had spread to South Asia from the Arab countries, as a nonthreatening and peaceful religion in the United States, where there was and is an increased anxiety about it especially after 9/11. It must be apparent by now that the South Asian immigrants who populate this study see literacy as imbued in culture. They define culture mostly through the lens of religion and engage with specific kinds of texts, practices, and values for what they also call cultural education. One could notice the rhetorical exigencies of those practices as being different, especially between groups such as Sameer’s and Brinda’s, just as some of those specific practices were embedded in different discursive ecologies. What made the Hindu and Muslim South Asians’ literacy work common, however,

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was that they deployed the available symbolic resources, such as their native identified cultural practices and ancestral languages, to re-create common roots with other émigrés and to speak for the land they or their parents had left behind and the values they happened to inherit. I say “happened” because people like Sameer did not initially choose to identify with their parents’ country of origin or inherited culture. However, once they began to do so (even though it was under some duress) they found their relations both authentic and authenticated by constant engagement with those entities. By paying attention to how these literacies form, (re)affirm, and (trans)form their communities and cultures, we can appreciate the intriguing power of word work for these immigrants. Even from a more formalistic point of view, the fact that Sanskrit and Arabic function as more than merely ancestral languages and are both the object and, with some limitations, the medium of study make these phenomena unique. At the same time, these immigrant practices push us to move away from considering literacy’s landscape as limited to merely a physical space and instead focus on the migrantness of literacies themselves. Similarly, this book also argues that in order to capture that migrantness we need to adopt an approach that is fluid and transnational, one that also places the researcher in motion. “Two Words” about Literacy and the Present Work: Departures and Returns The meaning and significance of literacy together with the question of how it should be represented—as literacy or as literacies the plural—are highly contested. Literacy has been traditionally defined strictly as the ability to read and write and in opposition to orality. Although this view also posits literacy as the precondition for progress from oral traditions to “civilization” (Goody and Watt 1968; Havelock 1971, 1986; Olson 1972, 1977; Ong 1982), other works treat literacy as an array of events and practices related to reading and writing (and their corollary, teaching and learning), as well as other kinds of symbol uses. This second type of scholarship, also known as the New Literacy Studies, examines literacy as context-specific (hence also literacies) and spotlights

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its intersections with cultural, economic, and political milieu, considering as legitimate multiple forms and uses of language and other symbolic systems. While the official government or corporate approaches to literacy tend to focus on skills, often to be measured by standardized assessment tools, we come across multiple social and cultural uses of language or other means of communication in an increasingly documentary and mediated world in our everyday life.8 Scholars have long demystified the old concept of value-neutral literacy by considering how it (including what counts as “official” literacy) is socially situated and how particular literacy events, in which “writing is integral to the nature of participants’ interactions and their interpretive processes” (Heath 1982, 93), are a product of time and space. Such events are the observable parts of literacy practices, “the general cultural ways of utilizing written language” that “also involve values, attitudes, feelings, and social relationships” (Barton and Hamilton 1998, 6). Foundational works such as Scribner and Cole’s The Psychology of Literacy, Shirley Brice Heath’s Ways with Words, and Brian Street’s Literacy in Theory and Practice set the stage for what has come to be known as the social-practice view of literacy, which proposes literacy “not as an issue of measurement or of skills but as social practices that vary from one context to another” (Street 2009, 21) and are ideologically saturated.9 Subsequent studies have explored literacies as practiced in diverse social or professional settings and locales. It is against this backdrop that “literacies,” the plural, is used in the current study to reflect the multiple uses and contexts of participants’ practices —although “literacy,” the singular, also finds its use when it is referred to as a resource or pursuit, the latter à la Deborah Brandt (2001, 5–9). Unlike the usual presentation of situated literacies as relatively stable or bounded by the visible and invisible borders of a community, language, culture, or nation, this study demonstrates a different picture of literacies: practices that are constantly in motion and that complicate, cross, and unsettle those borders. As the opening vignettes of this chapter indicate, this is a book about literacy practices as they are (re)produced and (re)circulated at a number of key cultural sites, such as a Hindu temple

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and its school, a mosque, a women’s reading group, and a Muslim men’s reading group formed soon after 9/11, as well as away from those sites and for an array of purposes. With this inquiry, I call attention to the symbolic practices of a population perceived and presented contradictorily in the sociological composition of the United States—high-achieving “model” minority/immigrants as well as perpetual outsiders, even potential terrorists—and to the complex forms and functions of immigrant literacies. I explore the contexts of those literacies’ production and consumption and uncover immigrants’ imagined and actualized relationships between themselves as individual subjects and their ethnic communities, on one hand, and those communities and the host society or the larger world, on the other. The broader context of this study is marked by an ever-increasing “global flow” of labor and capital, constant travel and relocation, newer technologies of transport and communication, an unprecedented surge in non-European immigration to the United States (US Census Bureau 2002, 2007), and increased security and suspicions about “foreigners” in a post-9/11 world.10 This study, then, contributes to a better understanding of the ways in which these phenomena shape and are shaped by immigrants’ everyday literacy practices, for they enact complex cultural relationships that cut across both geopolitical borders and cultural-rhetorical conventions. By describing how immigrants deploy different symbolic practices to reposition their identity and citizenship, the study demonstrates how literacies are (re)invented and (re)produced as much as how they embed and reflect the conflicting concerns of multiple discursive systems. The present study responds to calls by scholars such as Deborah Brandt and Katie Clinton (2002), Michel de Certeau (1984), Harvey Graff (1987), Luis Moll (2000), Brian Street (2001, 2004, 2009), and others for a culturally situated study of literacy practices in actual use and to extend research in literacy and writing studies beyond the academy (Gere 1994; Lunsford 2006). Criticizing the abstract understanding of literacy as “a technique or a set of techniques, a foundation in skills that can be developed, lost, or stagnate” at best and “meaningless” at worst, Graff high-

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lights the significance of understanding literacy in “precise, historically specific materials and cultural contexts” (1987, 4). Street (2001) makes an important observation regarding the methodological approaches to understanding literacies in communities. It is inadequate, Street adds, and even “meaningless just to ask people about literacy”; we should instead “start talking to people, listening to them, and linking their immediate experience out to other things that they do as well” (2001, 11), so we understand the contexts in which literacies in question are used. Street argues that research has an important function “to make visible the complexity of local, everyday, community literacy practices and challenging dominant stereotypes and myopia” (2009, 22). Similarly, Anne Gere stresses the need to uncouple writing and schooling in order to consider the experiences of writers invisible to the academy, calling such an undertaking the “extra curriculum” of composition (1994, 79–80). It is, then, by attending to the actual uses of symbolic resources that we understand these processes. Moll calls for ethnographic research in multilingual communities to explore the “funds of knowledge,” the intellectual and social capital held and shared by community members and the “dynamic, processual, or practice interpretations . . . [of] how people live culturally (2000, 256). In the same vein, in her Carnegie essay on the doctorate, Andrea Lunsford emphasizes the need for research that engages communities outside the academy. Although my study is not part of any formal outreach program of the kind that Lunsford (2006) cites, I take inspiration from her assertion that such research would “engage” literacy in a variety of situations, “almost certainly double back around,” and promote “the practice of collaboration, of shared knowledge production, of responsibility (and what Bakhtin calls response-ability), and of merging [multiple] literacy practices.” It is my hope that by highlighting the (re-)creation of immigrant literacies as responses to emerging exigencies, this study can address such points while moving the discussion past a simple indication of what Wendy Hesford has called the “global turn” (2006, 787). Jan Blommaert (2010), Suresh Canagarajah (2013a, 2013b), Rebecca Dingo (2012), Rebecca Leonard (2013), Alastair

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Pennycook (2007), and Kate Vieira (2010) have proposed examining the transnational dimensions of literacy and its circulation more explicitly. This study builds on and complements them by attending to the migrantness of literacies; their place in forming and transforming cultures and communities; their functions in intra-, inter-, and cross-cultural communication and understanding; their translingual creations and uses; and their transnational circulation. Moreover, I develop an analytical framework of literacies in motion and word work as related concepts in order to spotlight the process in which community literacies are created and operationalized in a transnational context. Immigrant literacy practices here fully assume transcultural and transnational dimensions, again not in any finite or stable forms but as practices in the making, as they circulate across multiple borders of language, culture, community, ethnicity, religion, and nation-state. Studying literacy practices, especially in nonmajoritarian communities outside US academia, almost always requires paying attention to the issues of language relations and the worlds they create and respond to. Although language difference has been an important component in literacy studies since the early days, it is mostly the sociolinguists and applied linguists who have given it a fuller treatment. But scholars of writing have also recently highlighted the value of language relations, articulating them as multilingual or translingual practices (as illustrated through instances of code switching and/or code meshing) in both oral and written communication. In two edited collections (Canagarajah 2013b; Horner, Lu, and Matsuda 2010), contributors discuss various facets of today’s multilingual societies as well as the impact of these realities on different genres, media, and modes of communications. They also highlight the need to develop a translingual disposition in our approach to teaching writing. Canagarajah’s monograph (2013a) and several essays in the edited collections mentioned above draw our attention to issues of language contact and code meshing, especially in the context of writing in English. Although that is a welcome move, we still have few examples of sustained language mixing in educational and community contexts in actual use and analyses of their functions. The translingual

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practices in the context of instruction and inter- and intracommunity communications discussed in this book provide unique details and important issues to consider in this emerging area of inquiry. As Canagarajah rightly notes, neither code switching nor code meshing is new, but the orientation to these issues in writing studies is. The immigrant participants’ translingual practices here push us to consider literacies on the move as the object of inquiry: even as immigrant subjects shuttle between cultures or communities, they also keep forming and re-forming those cultures and communities. Taking note of this process means spotlighting literacies in motion or their migrantness and the work involved in that process. Migrantness of Literacies/Literacies in Motion and “Word Work” Conceptualizing literacies in motion is not only difficult but also tricky. A single-minded focus on literacy’s migrantness risks renewing the old universalist paradigm, also characterized as the autonomous model (Street 1984, 2001), that treated literacy as a skill set outside of its political contexts and granted it sweeping powers. In this view, literacy facilitated the transition of the Western world to civilization, democracy, Enlightenment, and modernity. This “literacy hypothesis” also assumes the superiority of literate societies as well as that of the literate Western mind and culture over their non-Western counterparts. This view supports the civilizing rhetoric of colonial missions, the precursor to contemporary modernity in the non-Western world (Mignolo 1995; Baca 2008). The assumption was based on limited literature from ancient times and speculations about distant cultures and practices. Perhaps out of boundless enthusiasm about literacy as much as ethnocentrism, the early theorists imagined that literacy had the power to grace its possessers with superior abilities wherever it traveled. Understandably, this hypothesis ignores the complex uses and functions of literacies—both verbal and nonverbal—in a complex and constantly changing world. It also overlooks the complex reality of creating and sustaining literacies for cultural and community identity across spaces, requiring a different ap-

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proach to account for the multiple uses and functions of literacies, as well as their migrations. The foundational field research mentioned earlier (especially Heath 1982; Scribner and Cole 1981; Street 1984) collected evidence from contexts as different as Liberia, Iran, and the United States that showed literacy to be imbricated in social and political structures. The proliferation of ethnographic research in this area, generally identified as New Literacy Studies (Gee 1992, 1996; Street 1993, 2003), has established literacy events and practices as the objects of inquiry as opposed to the autonomous model, which espoused a narrow alphabetic vision of literacy with limitless power. Although the later studies provide a much-needed corrective to the grand narratives about literacy as a contextneutral (albeit transformative) force, the emphasis on the local has perhaps swung too far. Brandt and Clinton wonder if this line of scholarship, in its emphasis on the particular, has encouraged a tendency toward “exaggerating the power of local contexts to set or reveal the forms and meanings that literacy takes” (2002, 338). Since “Literacy in use . . . serves multiple interests, incorporating individual agents and their locales into larger enterprises that play out away from the immediate scene,” Brandt and Clinton argue, literacy research needed to use “more complicated analytical frames” to capture that interplay (2002, 347–48). Collins and Blot echo a similar sentiment: despite contributing to a better understanding of the pluralities of practices in different localities, the later studies have not often accounted “for general tendencies that hold across diverse case studies” and, to that extent, have not moved past the “universalist/particularist impasse” (2003, 5). If the early studies that espoused the deficit or divide theories upheld a universalist paradigm at the cost of the particular, the later works, by emphasizing locally situated practices, did not pay enough attention to global forces. Such a situation has Street (2003) suspecting that the field may have reached an “impasse.” John Duffy speculates, “New Literacy Studies may have arrived at a crossroads of sorts; may have reached the limits of its explanatory powers. The problem is that while culturally based approaches have provided insights into the socially situated nature of reading

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and writing, these same approaches too often fail to delineate the historical relationships that have shaped the very practices being described. Consequently, literacy practices may end up being represented as though they were self-generating, a product of unique cultural characteristics rather than an outcome of historical and often violent contacts between peoples of unequal power” (2007, 9). Duffy further argues that the “current crisis” can be resolved by adopting a model that traces “ethnographic, historical, and theoretical dimensions of literacy development” (2007, 10). His Writing from These Roots enacts this model by examining the development of literacy among the Hmong people relocated in a US midwestern town following the end of the Vietnam War. These immigrants’ use of writing in both Hmong and English provides interesting instances of cross-cultural use of language for community and civic purposes. Duffy’s research thus advances literacy as both social and deeply rhetorical as he examines the Hmong members’ use of writing to define their identity and to counter racist representation of their community in the local media. Literacy’s history and use in a refugee community are underlined by identity and travel, especially as members use it to locate themselves in the cultural politics of an overtly racialized US town. A different dimension of literacy’s travel is highlighted by Jan Blommaert (2008), who analyzes two sets of written documents by Congolese writers representing, in his words, “grassroots” literacy. The texts—Julien’s life histories and Tshibumba’s handwritten history of the Congo—are “mobile” as they are intended for external (European, in this case) audiences but lose voice when they travel to unfamiliar contexts saturated with “elite” literacy regimes. In what he calls an ethnography of the text, Blommaert reflects on the problem of reading autobiographical and historical writings, especially when he cannot interact with the writers and the texts do not meet the genre and other conventions of an “elite” literacy regime in the metropolitan centers of a globalizing world. Pointing out the theoretical and methodological challenges revolving around his “ethnographic interpretation of texts” produced in entirely different sociocultural environments, Blommaert makes a case for restoring voice “to those whose voices

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are distorted or silenced . . . as a consequence of the inequality of globalization and literacy regimes and the ways in which we work and live within stable sets of norms with respect to meaning, truth and voice” (2008, 199). Duffy’s and Blommaert’s works highlight two important points about the literacies of migrations. If Duffy highlights the history and development (as well as the use) of literacy in the life of people caught in the vortex of war, refugee status, and relocation, Blommaert explores the fate and function of the migrations of “grassroots” writing. Duffy and Blommaert also anticipate further research into the creation and circulation of language and cultural practices under different conditions for purposes similar to what Juan Guerra (2004) calls “transcultural repositioning.” Although their works prepare us to examine the migrations of literacies in relation to issues of agency and cross-cultural communication in a robust way, I do not want to suggest that literacy was always seen as either universal or local before them. Among others, Deborah Brandt (2001) and Harvey Graff (1987), in their rigorous examination of the relationship between literacy and its socioeconomic context, have traced how literacy (or what counts as literacy) moves vis-à-vis economic changes over time. Building on what Graff calls the legacies of literacy, Brandt recognizes literacy, especially some form of its economy, as a continuous movement that develops and continues “to circulate in resilient and convoluted ways, mixing with newer incentives and values. The intrinsic tenacity of literacy to preserve—best of all, to preserve itself—kept older traditions around, piling up at the scenes of literacy learning, circulating latently, sometimes even carried in on the force of new practices or the appearance of new sponsors” (2001, 192). Brandt’s research focuses on how literacy changes over time and what it does to people and vice versa. In fact, it was this realization that made her uncomfortable using literacy practice to describe the way literacy emerged both as a powerful force and resource in the life histories of her eighty participants where, as she notes, “literacy appears less settled than the term practice might imply” (emphasis in original, 2001, 9). The current study approaches practice not as a recurrent sequence of skills or

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a common activity, as is the common view of practice since the 1980s, but as an instance of word work to create, maintain, or understand social relations. What I take from Brandt’s assertion is literacy’s tenacity to move constantly, but the research participants’ creation and uses in this study show that it is not only literacy but also practices that keep changing. This understanding was anticipated by Barton and Hamilton when they argued that “literacy practices change” and “cannot wholly be contained in observable activities and tasks” (1998, 7). This study goes one step further to show that literacy practices, whose rhetorical nature is evident primarily in their creation, circulation, and uses, are fluid as they are constantly adapted to manage social relations at both the individual and the community levels in both local and translocal contexts. Although literacy’s movement or its tendency to preserve itself even as it evolves alongside economic changes is not the same as the migrantness of literacies as emphasized here, there is a common element to both these perspectives: literacy does not operate autonomously; that is, it defines and is defined by the cultural, economic, and political systems of which it becomes a part. I submit that literacy’s creation and use in immigrant communities demonstrates how it remains unsettled and unsettling—always open to migrations. Moreover, exploring the contexts of creation, circulation, and use across spaces helps us see how literacies necessarily remain unsettled as well as entangled with issues of agency and identity/citizenship. Clearly, such an approach seems like a precondition for understanding the particular and general, the local and not so local aspects of community practices, or, to borrow from Brandt and Clinton (2002), for grasping the “transcontextualized and transcontextualizing potentials of literacy.” Literacies in motion also need to be understood as word work, lest the migrantness be considered independent of contexts, creators, and users. In community settings, literacies are in motion only so long as there are people prepared to put in the effort required to take them to places and make them work. It is in this orientation that the present work departs from the scholarship considered above, and to fully appreciate what it means we

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also need to reconceptualize such community-sponsored literacy practices as serious work. A large body of scholarship deals, at least partly, with this kind of work in many communities.11 Even so, we have not done enough to appreciate these men’s and women’s work of contextualizing and recontextualizing words or other symbols as work in literacy studies. As indicated earlier, two of the most engaged community members featured in this book clearly called their community activities “work with words,” and considering community-sponsored literacies as word work writ large highlights their work and that of their colleagues. This conception of word work is akin to how Toni Morrison describes doing language or “word-work” as the quintessentially human act: “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”12 Although Morrison considers language more broadly here, her treatment of it as a decidedly human endeavor and her appeal to keep it dignified clearly resonate with the ways in which community members make it work. Their selfavowed responsibility of preserving their linguistic and cultural heritage is generative, dedicated to making meaning and securing identity. Whereas Morrison’s interest in doing language is to distinguish human life, “the way in which we are like no other life,” these immigrants’ practices present an opportunity to understand community literacies as word work in their transnational social context. Brandt’s concept of literacy sponsorship (2001) also provides a basis for theorizing community literacy in the direction of word work. As Brandt notes, while economic sponsorship determines access to the financially beneficial forms of literacy generally, it often leaves behind the financially or socially disadvantaged. As a result, community practices survive solely on the strengths of respective communities’ initiatives, especially when the state’s economic and political interests do not align with those practices, a reality that is nowhere clearer than among the marginalized groups in any country. This point applies to such groups’ access to the literacy forms valued by the state and its financial system. For example, according to Brandt, the “steady rise in literacy and education rates among African Americans in the first half of the

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twentieth century,” despite the lack of “broad-based economic and political subsidy and the presence of so much social hostility” (2001, 107), was made possible by their “sponsorships networks” consisting of “core cultural institutions” such as the church, the press, the civil rights movement, and individual efforts of dedicated teachers. As a result, issues of literacy in African American communities have a more direct civic and political overtone than in general. The literacies that the state and corporate forces sponsor have a huge influence on people’s lives and education, and they also provide institutional backing for those literacies, at least for people who can access them. Workers get paid, and learners often aspire to acquire skills and access to networks that will be financially rewarding. But it requires a different kind of commitment and resources to promote and sustain cultural forms and attendant literacies that are not directly linked with the economic system of their contexts of use. The distinction between the state- or corporate-sponsored and community-sponsored literacies helps us account for the different kinds of labor and motivation required to create and sustain respective knowledge systems. The work that goes on in informal community spaces is hardly an investment in the same financial terms that formal education or training usually is. The immigrant participants in this study all volunteer their time, energy, and resources in the name of their culture and community. Granted, it would be naïve to romanticize their work as absolutely altruistic, but they are certainly not engaged in any of these activities (community building, teaching, presenting at community and law enforcement organizations, etc.) for professional advancement or financial gain. Their conception of self as located in a certain cultural and community space and of responsibility to the identity thus derived motivates them to undertake this work. Their ideas about culture and community may seem static on the surface, but it would also be a mistake to consider them as such. Different members relate to their culture and communities differently. In fact, they create and deploy different interpretive frames for the making (or unmaking) and remaking of these entities (communities and cultures). Their word work is shaped by and

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helps us account for such factors as gender, religion, class, and nationality. Literacy work in the community, therefore, is not “work” in its economic sense of return but cultural capital that yields value in the form of recognition and status, as the engaged community members assert. These immigrants’ word work involves real work in terms of time, energy, and resources. Unlike the rather superficial connotation that word work may often have (as when it is used to mean vocabulary lessons), the work here is not limited to lexical skills but captures all aspects of language use from conception to articulation, including delivery in print, speech, or other modes such as audiovisual presentations. These literacies carry the characteristics of migrantness not simply because they are created or used by immigrants; a certain movement is inherent in literacy, and immigrant subjects work to “make do” with the repertoires and resources they develop and can access. Word work in communities, especially in emerging and marginalized communities that do not have access to the networks of power, is thus a kind of affective labor. It is so primarily because community members engage in it to gain authenticity as culturally identified and recognized subjects as well as to help their compatriots do the same and to (re)produce their communities and cultures. The term “affective labor” comes from Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, who use it to describe the role that reciprocity, empathy, and affect play in shaping human behavior and action generally. However, in a capitalist economy, they assert that it is also a form of immaterial labor. As Hardt argues, “although affective labor has never been entirely outside of capitalist production, the processes of economic postmodernization . . . have positioned affective labor in a role that is not only directly productive of capital but at the very pinnacle of the hierarchy of the laboring forms” (1999, 90). My use of the term here is inspired by its use in feminist scholarship, where such laboring practices produce collective subjectivities and society (Ruddick 1989). The immigrants in this study use their labor of love to produce their community, culture, and identity. Thinking of their work as affective labor in this sense allows us to see how they use word

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work to form and transform their subjectivity and present literacies as essentially migrant. Clearly, their work closely enmeshes literacy with the real world issues of identity and power, demonstrating the intertwining of the word and the world, to borrow from Freire and Macedo, while the curricular and institutional constraints of formal literacy may often only reify these relationships by presenting academic qualifications to be traded in the marketplace. In fact, the kinds of literacies that the immigrants in the current study created and used—with no constraints of a state-mandated curriculum or standardized tests—functioned as an “Other space” (Foucault 1986). It was in such a space that they sought to forge and harness connections among languages, cultural histories, life experiences, and identities even while contesting their meanings and thus keeping these constructs in play. In fact, deploying stories from the cultural repertoires traditionally identified with spaces far and wide and using them as proofs for common humanity or appeal to justice and action within the community (and without) enacts a civic potential of literacy while keeping us alert to its play or movement.13 In this way, immigrants’ transcultural and transnational engagements create what Homi Bhabha (1996) calls “spaces in between” and Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) calls “borderland.” The third space here not only disrupts nation-state-based literacy and citizenship (or the conventional framework that equates state-based citizenship with a given form of literacy), but the new space also becomes more than in-between. It is a space where unitary notions of culture are subverted and transformed. While immigrants (re) invent “authentic” selves by (re-)creating literacies along ethnic or religio-cultural/linguistic lines to solidify affiliation with people identifying with their native roots, they also claim membership in the adopted society by using the language of multiculturalism. The in-between space they inhabit is a tense one, caught between the centripetal (read: assimilationist) pulls of the host nation and the centrifugal forces from the nations and communities imagined transnationally. A range of meaning making activities such as reading, writing, community work, and other cultural exchanges are the means that these immigrants use to balance

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these tendentious calls. Such work facilitates these immigrants’ sense of identity, community, intragroup solidarity, and cross-cultural exchanges, demonstrating the full range of the uses—and play—of word work. The migrantness of literacies, both literally and figuratively, and word work were the most prominent themes across interviews with community members. The observation notes from multiple key sites reiterated the same issues. Immigrant community leaders often related these issues to their identity even though their idea of citizenship was anchored in a particular lived experience of cultural past (and present). These concepts function as a loose analytical framework to describe how diverse groups of South Asian immigrants create and circulate culturally identified literacies; how they authenticate and appropriate or use them and what the immediate local and transnational contexts of the creation and dissemination of those particular literacies are. Unlike many other studies that revolve around English, this work also involves complex questions of ancestral languages—in addition to, in lieu of, and in association with English—and cultures, cultural citizenship, and the issues of belonging, loyalty, and nation in the age of globalization. Looking at the migrantness, word work, and identity or citizenship as essentially interconnected also helps us examine the internal and external factors responsible for these activities, especially the ways in which individual and group identities are formed, affirmed, and transformed. At the same time, I also occasionally pause as the researcher and writer to explore the role of my literacy histories, interpretive habits, and positionality in the interpretive exercise in which I am engaged when doing so seems to aid in the sense-making business. As I think and rethink, I realize that this study is as much about my own learning as it is about others—my reading and writing, alone and with others and in settings as varied as the research universities of the United States and a remote village of my native Nepal, where only about a third of the population was literate when I learned to read. I recognize that the present project has roots in my own literacy histories and travels across cultures as much as in my experiences with and meditations on literacy, writing, rheto-

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ric, immigration and globalization, and postcolonial studies. My relocation from the mid-hills to the plains and valleys of Nepal for college and to the United States for graduate studies and university teaching—in addition to India for short-term research trips— have engaged me most intimately in multiple cultural contacts and the stated and unstated grammars governing and emerging from such encounters.14 In the course of these travels, most scholarship I read in rhetoric and composition, education, and cultural and/or postcolonial studies raised and tackled cross-cultural literacy issues mostly from a single disciplinary perspective. Scholars in English and literacy studies often wondered about the reading and writing habits of foreign, immigrant, or traditionally underrepresented students in college (writing) classes. Postcolonial critics usually discussed the politics and ambivalences in the representations of power in literary and cultural artifacts, as well as the moments of dissonance inherent in cross-cultural encounters. Scholars in immigration and education examined the performance of immigrant children in school and, occasionally, college settings. Most research in communication and contrastive, intercultural rhetoric proposed the existence of deep-rooted cultural modes of communication that constituted different rhetorical and communicative priorities. These are only incomplete impressions, but I draw on some of these disciplinary and theoretical insights in this work to highlight the relationships, resources, and tensions that immigrant literacy practices and values generate in both the ethnic community and the dominant culture. More often than not, class, gender, religion, race/caste/ ethnicity and, increasingly, access to new communications technologies shape and are shaped by those practices, practices that are simultaneously local and transnational and that, if only inevitably, betray the immigrants’ desire to claim membership in the host society while carving out an authentic ethnic identity within it. Whereas international migration figures as a constitutive element in the rhetoric of globalization, these immigrants’ practices complicate the simplistic flat-world rhetoric by pointing us to multiple borders created and bridged by their literate practices. After all, the scene of literacy exists in a networked but uneven world,

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and community members re-create or respond to it as befits the occasion and their location in that network. Methods in Madness In the general idioms of methodological scholarship, this study combines some versions of extended interview, (participant) observation, life history, and textual analysis. It may be useful to describe here, in brief, the trajectory of the project’s evolution, since it has gone through multiple methodological and conceptual incarnations. When I began my research in 2004, I wanted to conduct about a dozen case studies that could be completed within a year or so. I was looking at Deborah Brandt’s Literacy in American Lives and other works as samples to replicate, if such an approach might ever be used in a qualitative study, on a much smaller scale, with recent South Asian immigrants. I wanted to study what kinds of literacies these immigrants brought to the United States, and how those literacies faded, were retained, or expanded and to what effect and purpose. I assumed that the participants would be conversant in more than one language—as was the case with every South Asian immigrant I knew—and engaged in a range of literate activities. I would interview selected participants representing different walks of life, then analyze their experiences and relevant literacy artifacts in a transnational context. To begin, I formulated questions to guide my inquiry: What are the literate practices and values of recent South Asian immigrants? How do they use languages and for what purposes? What kinds of texts do they read and write and for what purposes? What modifications, if any, are these immigrants making in their literate practices (reading, writing, communicating, etc.) as a result of their contact with new culture(s)/society(-ies)? What changes do they think they have affected in the literate practices and values of others? How do race/caste/ethnicity, gender, religion, national origin, or other identity categories account for their present and past literacy practices? How do language and literacy practices and values relate to immigrant identities? What linguistic, cultural, and rhetorical forms do immigrant literacy practices take? What technologies enable (or hinder) those literacy practices?

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What forms of literate behaviors are emerging and fading in the daily practices of these immigrants? As I asked these questions, one of my initial goals was to investigate how immigrants use literacies to balance the dynamics of living in a new society against the desires and memories of a geo-cultural space they have left behind. Since I knew that immigrants engaged in different literacy practices to negotiate memories, desires, and goals, I was interested in how different literacies were created, sponsored, sustained, learned, and practiced—and to what effect. As I proceeded with the project—interviewing participants and participating in a couple of literacy activities sponsored by immigrant participants or affiliated institutions—I learned to see these questions as not separate but interrelated in complex ways. A specific use or form of language was always already connected to the user’s conception of self and of audience and the relationship between these entities in a given rhetorical context. I interviewed ten participants in less than a month. The interviews were audio-taped. I used a set of prompts for the interviews and encouraged participants to lead the conversations. (See the appendix for the interview script.) The inquiry involved recalling acquisition and uses of literacies in a multitude of settings. I sought to understand my participants’ literacy practices and values as well as to find out if there were any specific issues they would like to address in addition to, or in lieu of, the ones I had already identified for the study. As soon as the first set of interviews was over, I transcribed more than twenty hours of tapes, reviewed my notes, and kept a journal about everything that struck me as significant. I then reread and looked for patterns in those transcripts and memos, paying special attention to the repetition of themes (words, images and symbols, topics) and the emerging narrative threads. Among others, I was following Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin’s (1998) recommendations and quickly noted three major threads. First, the narrative of a Bangladeshi and two Indian immigrants in the business sector substantiated a rags-to-riches narrative, addressing the role of business literacy in their upward mobility; second, one Pakistani, one Sri Lankan, and two Indians who had

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come over as students or trainees, found employment, married, had children and “success”; and third, one Bangladeshi, one Bhutanese, one Indian, and one Pakistani who came as immigrants under the annual Diversity Visa program or sponsorship under the Family Reunion Act (i.e., neither as students nor skilled professionals) struggled the most to straddle the two worlds. They lacked the prized skills of medical or technical professionals and began at middle age with entry-level work at restaurants, motels, or gas stations while learning American English. Of these three kinds of narratives, the first two were simply a variation of each other. In that sense, I had captured only two patterns. The kinds of reading and writing in which these people engaged demonstrated their abilities to negotiate multiple worlds and needs. I was in touch with most of these participants to have my “theoretical schemes” reviewed, as Strauss and Corbin recommended (1998, 159), and I had plans for follow-up interviews to which all the participants had agreed. Although the project did not encounter any significant initial hurdles, I grew skeptical of the value of my work. It seemed pretty limited in scope and significance, although it was also generative in the sense that the work that followed owed a good deal to my dissatisfaction. In addition to accounts of reading and writing practices, these interviewees revealed valuable information about sites of cultural work—temples, masjids, Hindu and Islamic schools, language clubs, and immigrants’ community organizations. I wanted to visit those sites and meet more people, and I ended up doing that in the months and years that followed. Although I met and interviewed some of the early participants multiple times, my work acquired a different dimension. The second phase of the study meant expanding on my original pool of participants, as well as the range of issues and sites. Within a year, I had visited different sites of immigrant cultural work, participated in some major literacy events, and interviewed sixty-eight participants. About one-third of the respondents put up with two to three extended interviews, while many answered my follow-up queries by email. The interviews were usually long and meandering, lasting more than an hour. They were conduct-

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ed in English with the occasional use of Hindi, Nepali, or Sanskrit, the last limited to a few words and phrases or recitals of verse. A majority of these interviews took place at the site of cultural work (temple, school, mosque, other meeting places), and most of them were recorded. Although some conversations were one-on-one, there were times when other members joined in, especially when the discussions involved group work, such as curricular planning. These series of interactions revealed complex stories representing the uses of literacy within these groups of men and women. What started off as a few case studies evolved into a participant-observation study of certain sites like the Hindu school classes, temple discourses, reading groups, and “cultural presentations.” I was doing more of what the anthropologist George Marcus calls “multi-sited ethnography,” “an exercise in mapping terrain” whose goal is “not holistic representation, an ethnographic portrayal of the world system as a totality” but the study of a “cultural formation in the world system” in which both the cultural formation and the system in which such a formation takes place are open to inquiry (1998, 99). With my focus on the shifting practices of people caught in the global movement of labor and capital, looking at multiple (yet interrelated) sites—with their bases in different value/world systems—was inevitable. Even as my research was yielding some answers to my initial questions, the answers generated their own sets of questions. For example, if symbolic practices formed and transformed subjectivities, how were those practices deployed when notions and conditions of citizenship and individual identity, traditionally understood as anchored to a relatively stable location, change under the weight of globalization? Under which conditions do South Asian immigrants construct their speaking subjects and positionality? What kind of relationship exists between immigrants’ literacy practices and sense of identity? What rhetoric of citizenship and nation is evident in their literacy practices? Similarly, how do these immigrants “talk back,” if they do, to the discourses that define and categorize them in various ways, as immigrants, aliens, outsiders, “foreigners within” (Lowe 1996), or simply as the embodiment of an emerging global order? If these immigrants represent

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an emerging order, then what forms and functions of literacies accompany their arrival, settlement, and resulting sociocultural compositions and relations? Given that research involving marginalized or minoritized communities is often limited to describing the difference, almost always according to the normative criteria of the dominant order, what could we in literacy, writing, and rhetoric learn from these immigrants’ literacy practices? As my participants invented and manipulated multiple literacies to manage an “in-between-life” (Appadurai 1996; Bhabha 1990, 1994) and to reposition their identities and citizenship (Sassen 2003), casting a wide research net at multiple sites was simply a precondition if I wanted to capture the larger social, global, and cultural imaginaries of which my participants’ everyday practices were part. As a result, I focused more on cultural imaginings and geography than on actual political geography in my analysis, except when the interaction between them seemed important. As Marcus would suggest, while I would not attempt a generalized monograph on a community or communities, I attempt to show how communities come to exist by exploring the various systems that produce those communities in the first place. This shift requires calling attention to the multiple contexts invoked by or embedded in the literacy practices of my participants. It does not, however, take me out of the picture. In this phase, I became more aware of my own role in the study. The various shifts and turns that my discussions took with different participants did not only originate with the person I was interviewing. More often than not, the responses or what some would call “data” resulted from who I was or who I was perceived to be. In the tradition of qualitative research, especially ethnographic research, I might be constructed as an emic one, “a new figure,” who could provide “new angles of vision and depths of understanding” (Clifford 1986, 9). Although emic status could also generate concern about self-reflexivity and anxiety about the veracity of knowledge claims, my experience suggested a more complex picture. Even as some in the academic realm would consider me “one of them,” the immigrants with whom I was working saw me differently. Their identification ranged from “one-of-ours-

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away-from-us” and “outsider” to “potential enemy” and, with time and work, kept changing. In the third and final phase of my research, I reexamined my earlier work and constructed a more systematic analytical framework. I interviewed four additional participants in 2008–2009 and, with additional input from Brinda and Sameer, rewrote my material. In 2010, I was even afforded an opportunity to interview Goma, Brinda’s cousin in India who used the Hindu school curriculum that Brinda’s team had designed in Kingsville to teach her own children. Having Goma’s voice in the study brought the project full circle. Not only did it complement the stories from Kingsville, but it also provided additional grounds to complicate the conventional trope in (immigrant) literacy studies that stresses the one-way borrowing of “native” literacies by the adopted home. More important, the transnational circulation and uses highlighted the migrant nature of literacies. At the same time, they required conscious “work” to exist outside the formal gateways of literacy learning but increased in value because of their intertwining with identity. The participants who populate this study represent different occupations, linguistic communities, and faith traditions, but most of them primarily identify themselves in relation to their location in South Asia—not necessarily as South Asians but either as members of a certain ethnic, religious, or national community in South Asia or as people from that region. Although the place where they lived at the time of this research was (and is) important, the current location serves only as a node in a complex web of transnational exchanges. I introduce study participants when their stories become relevant in the book. It is true that not everyone gets equal treatment here. In my analysis, I shuttle between theory and personal narratives, observation notes and history. This is to indicate the complexity of any creation of meaning, as well as its intentionality and interpretation. Organization It is important to study how literacies shape and are shaped by people’s conception of self and their place in the world around

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them. As people move and lives change, literacies themselves are on the move, and they can be studied only in relation to the contexts and consequences of their creation and circulation. The key vignettes that open this chapter highlight the role of reading and writing as sources of power and powerlessness in Nepal, where I grew up, and in the United States. South Asian immigrants’ word work is a means of negotiating identity and power. Conceiving of literacies, especially those sponsored by and for communities, as work is crucial to understanding their creation, use, and functions in their contexts. From here, the book is organized around tropes of travel and migration. Chapter 2 constructs and complicates the routes that methodological tropes in qualitative studies create, revealing the inadequacies of neatly mapping out a geographical location for a project like the current one. Observations and interviews took place primarily in Kingsville, in the US Mid-South, but the actions and conversations themselves expanded across continents. In relation to scholarly discussions regarding research design and fieldwork, the chapter introduces readers to the contexts of this study as complex and constantly evolving, simultaneously including and excluding the researcher. Chapter 3 examines one instance of the migration of literacies; in this case, the word work of (re-)creating Sanskrit (via English) to teach South Asian “culture” at the Hindu school of Kingsville in a curriculum that then circulates back to the putative point of origin (India) for use. After contextualizing the reinvention of this classical South Asian language against rising Hindutwa politics in South Asia, particularly in India, and the polyglot South Asian population in the United States, I explore the shifting uses and functions of this practice. While the ancient language certainly brings multilingual constituents together, it also generates complex questions of (trans)national memories and nationhood and is embedded in the materiality of multilingual realities. The South Asian understanding of alphabet-based literacy draws on the Sanskrit notion of letters as imperishable, serving as a metaphor for the revival of this classical language, but it also highlights the politically shifting nature of the (re-)creation and (re)

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circulation of literacies, which cross languages as well as geocultural boundaries. The process of re-creating culture and community also works differently for different genders. Chapter 4 problematizes the journey of a community by pausing to reexamine gender ideologies that the women teachers at the Hindu school reproduced, reappropriated, and challenged from within the norming structure of their community. Describing the women’s work for the community and their reading group and analyzing the contexts and purposes of the group’s formation, the chapter shows how these women use reading, talking, and teaching to form and transform a patriarchal community. In chapter 5, a Muslim men’s discussion group formed soon after 9/11 and their “talks” or cultural presentations on Islamic way of life to “American” audiences reveal a different type of cross-cultural interaction: a way to talk back to the dominant culture and its institutions, to address not only local concerns but also global audiences. The literacy practices and work of a Muslim woman teacher and reading group founder, in contrast, highlights the tensions that arise while imagining a South Asian Muslim community. Islam—as a marker of culture and an “other” nation in the post-9/11 United States—is constantly (re)constituted through divergent literacy practices and values of different stakeholders. In conclusion, the literacy work, practices, and values of South Asian immigrants engage and challenge discourses about globalization and international migration. These immigrants’ literacy practices neither support a flat-world thesis of a “global village” (McLuhan 1964) nor merely reproduce (Bourdieu 1997) native cultural values. They create a hybridized cultural space and respond to immediate local as well as transnational contexts. Far from being apolitical, this space is a dynamic site where inbetween worlds are created, contested, and transgressed. Of note is the use of word work to define and project identities—both cultural and individual—as relational and not oppositional. These practices, therefore, have important implications for designing, researching, and teaching literacies in a changing world.

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Chapter 2

En Route Reconsidering Sites and Subjects or Research in Motion I am both indigenous and one of the newcomers.

—Albert Wendt, “Pacific Maps” We first came to North Carolina in 1983. We lived in six different states before moving to . . . [Kingsville] in 2002.

—Rita My grandfather had a big farm and business in Uganda. I mostly lived with him and my father there since the age of eight until fourteen. I went to Bombay for high school . . . [and there] lived with my grandmother. Then I studied in London for a few years. I worked in London and also Uganda. I came to West Virginia in 1985 and worked there for a few years before moving . . . [to Kingsville]. It is my twelfth year here.

—Pranav

It has been a customary practice in qualitative studies to situate one’s research geo-culturally. A conventional ethnography might begin with an exoticized description of the place where the researcher arrives, acclimatizes, befriends the natives, and observes their rituals and routines. In the words of Ralph Cintron the “classic ethnographer, like a god or balloonist descending from the clouds” would begin “his or her account with an overview of the exotic reality” (1997, 16). Such a practice, in the words of Michael Burawoy, “made a fetish out of the confinement of fieldwork, the enclosure of the village, the isolation of the tribe” (2000, 1). While the researcher travels a great distance to “find” the subjects and conduct the research, the researched simply live in a bounded community. The researcher and the researched thus would have distinctly marked positions culturally and epistemologically. As James Clifford (1988) and Arjun Appadurai (1988) have pointed out, in classical anthropology, the native is located in a homogenous, atemporal space and conflated with a passive and ahistorical landscape. In this situation,

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the researcher is an individual seeker, and an enlightened one at that, whereas the person researched is just the data source. This tradition continues with minor variation even in research involving communities right next to the university campuses. Relative convenience and the development of a tradition seem to have lent such an approach the traction it has secured in many disciplines. Stipulating a site as a fixed setting is not only reassuring; doing so also enables the fantasies of an interpretive closure. It is this methodological enterprise that risks presenting a constructed reality as a replacement for the complexities of lived moments. It also always requires every work with an ethnographic feel to announce at the outset the representational burden of the seemingly scientific narrative. I begin this chapter with reference to the issue of the ethnographic scene in qualitative studies, since it occupies an intriguing place in inquiries such as the present one. Apparently, the setting both contains and is contained by the study. Its value thus cannot be ignored, not simply because no study can be conceived of in geo-culturally neutral terms but also and, interestingly, owing to a certain tradition of re-presenting such a location. As James Clifford puts it, the goal of ethnographic realism has been to give the reader a sense of “you are there, because I was there” (1983, 118). The researcher as a lonely and heroic adventurer brings back the “news” about the researched subjects who “inhabit” a given place. However, the practice of re-presenting a setting as containing the study works to hide the all-important work of the researcher in constructing that scene discursively (Cintron 1997) and everything else that signifies. Just as this practice is bound up with the complex motives and issues of subjectivity, it has its epistemological consequences: researchers inquire and write about—not for—the researched. Scholars return to their academic pedestals with interpretations of the community or culture they study. The researcher assumes authority by claiming “to represent a world as only one who has known it first-hand can” (Marcus and Cushman 1982, 29). Publishing that research produces a form of authority that takes on a life of its own. Clearly, the act of writing research is both privileged and privileging and establishes the continued

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authority of the researcher/scholar, a reminder of the kind of writing I saw growing up. Such a methodological culture has been critiqued in recent years for its problematic treatment of research participants as mere information sources, conception of “other” communities as homogenous entities frozen in time and place, and absence of critical self-reflexivity on the part of the researcher. In addition to misrepresenting the fundamentally dynamic aspects of any human or community lives, such a methodological understanding would be hopelessly inadequate to study the lives and practices of people who are on the move. For example, if we pay attention to the moves of Rita and Pranav, with whose excerpts I open this chapter, that should dispel any notion of a geographically bounded community or a fixed setting. Not that the study would be any fairer in treating the setting that way even if it chronicled their lives in the place of their birth; it would still demand a more complex understanding of the dynamic interaction between the place and its people, not as people rooted in a putatively static place but as constantly inventing and reinventing the place and themselves, no matter how long they have been inhabiting a given place. In the case of the current study, however, Rita and Pranav not only moved but kept moving, which highlights the issue of place and movement in ways that might be less visible otherwise. When I met them in Kingsville, their current physical location seemed to be only one of the many factors that shaped their conception of self-identity. Rita and her family had lived in six different states before moving to Kingsville, where she and her sons had decided to stay even as her (now former) husband moved to another state with a new job. Pranav’s upbringing, training, and work were even wider in that they covered four continents—Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. While he lived in different places, he continued to seek out other people of Indian origin and remained close to his “roots” even as he also created and maintained various networks of relationships with his colleagues from the medical profession and others, including fellow farmers in rural West Virginia before moving to Kingsville.

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Rita’s and Pranav’s experiences also tell us that the role of place in qualitative studies is both more and less important than it has been made out to be. More important because the place is a site in flux; rather than being out there for the researcher to arrive and describe, it is constantly formed and transformed by those who live within and without. It is also less important, because the symbolic practices in which the inhabitants engage are not bounded within the given borders; in fact, both their originary and future trails transcend those borders.1 At the same time, the same place has different meanings for different people, complicating the translation of the lived particularities into a scholarly language. It does not mean that there is no such a thing as a setting or a scene, nor that such things do not matter at all. What it means is that the setting is primarily an issue of representation. There is no a priori setting, context, or history. It is the one that is produced here and now, and in the case of those locales that scholarly texts construct and reconstruct, they are refigured through a researcher’s methodological and theoretical prism. As contemporary anthropology, especially after Clifford and Marcus’s work, acknowledges, the field site includes not just a geographical location but the actual site of (re)writing, although it is harder to find such a recognition actually enacted (Marcus 1986, 266; James, Hockey, and Dawson 1997). Moreover, the lives and literacies of participants in this study demonstrate that representing difference and alterity is not the only challenge facing researchers. Nor is it simply a question of taking into account the ways place shapes the production of subjectivity. More than anything else, one must pay attention to the ways subjectivity and location produce each other through a complex interplay of symbolic practices. Kingsville played a role in the lives and literacies of the immigrants who constitute the bulk of this study, but those practices—and the consequences, as well as materials and motives for those practices—came from an array of forces and sources. It is in this sense that this study is as much about Kingsville’s cultural scene, however minuscule in its form, as it is not about Kingsville. As is evident in the stories of participants already mentioned, this city forms only one node in the complex web of rela-

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tions that these immigrants (re)produce and respond to through their literacy practice. Rita and Pranav, for example, have lived and worked outside Kingsville far longer than in this city where they (like most others) still consider themselves and are viewed as outsiders. A few of the participants are planning on leaving the city. Even more poignant may be the case of Sameer, who is every bit as American as anybody else, yet whose work in the cultural domain primarily consists of representing an “other” culture—the Islamic way of life—to the dominant cultural and legal institutions. The often predictable relationship assumed between subjects and setting is unstable, even illusory. The immediate and practical question, as one proceeds to describe the literacy and cultural practices of people like Rita, Pranav, and Sameer, is: does one begin with a fine-tuned description of the city where they currently live? Looked at from another vantage point, the question might change substantially: when the inquiry spotlights practices that travel and yet are meant to connect distances, what happens to the locatability of the site(s), the local ground of collective life that a qualitative study supposedly explores? These questions need to be engaged but not without first gauging their implications. True, the peripatetic life of the immigrant subjects generates serious questions about research sites, especially how such locales are characterized in scholarly works. But discussing these questions only in light of immigrants might also eclipse a fundamental condition of human life and literacies. In fact, if we pay close attention to how cultures and communities are made and unmade, especially throughout history, we notice constant dislocation and relocation, processes that have only gained added significance in contemporary times. Therefore, the locatability of the sites should be viewed within broader historical and trans-spatial perspectives. Looking Back As I offer a critique of conventional “field” research and name my own site of study, I want to return briefly to my native village, since my previous description may project an image of a largely

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quiet corner in the remote hills of Nepal. It does not help that historically Nepal has been notorious for shunning the outside world. But the village was not self-contained as the popular or academic narratives would have one believe.2 People traveled, often to neighboring countries in the region (India, Pakistan, Tibet) for trade and employment; since the early nineteenth century, they have also gone elsewhere, most often to different parts of the British Empire.3 The Anglo-Nepal treaty of 1816 allowed Britain to recruit Nepalese youths into its military services. Everyone was on the move, so to speak, some relocating from one village to the next while others traveled more extensively. Naturally, different literacy skills and practices accompanied those travels. I grew up hearing stories about the preparations that my grandfather had to go through before his several years of service and trade in Burma (Myanmar). I also witnessed some of my school friends, especially from certain ethnic backgrounds sought after by the British and Indian armed forces, complete the eighth-grade level (upgraded to tenth later) expressly to qualify for recruitment into those services. Furthermore, teachers and traders from other parts of Nepal or India came to the village, and occasionally foreign tourists, who were then (and still are) called amrikane (localized iteration of American) if they looked white, also visited the region. The foreign travelers often had a book or two characterizing rural Nepal as a landscape from the distant past that defied change. In fact, if there was one concept underlying all literature about visiting Nepal (from within or outside Nepal—publications from National Geographic, Lonely Planet, etc.), it was that of “traveling back in time.” In reality, the trope masked much that was happening in those putatively still places. The region offered the experience of traveling back in time only insofar as it meant an absence of automobiles and factories. In many ways, my village was like the Egyptian village in Amitabh Ghosh’s “The Imam and the Indian”: “When I first came to that quiet corner of the Nile Delta I had expected to find on that most ancient and most settled of soils a settled and restful people. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The men of the village had all the busy restless-

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ness of airline passengers in a transit lounge. Many of them had worked and traveled in the sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf, others had been in Libya and Jordan and Syria, some had been to the Yemen as soldiers, others to Saudi Arabia as pilgrims, a few had visited Europe: some of them had passports so thick they opened out like ink-blackened concertinas” (quoted in Clifford 1997, 1). Like these Egyptians, my villagers and their ancestors had been constantly on the move. They had migrated from place to place in search of better opportunities or to avoid violence. Accounts of their early movements and settlements could be traced to certain points in history although they often varied depending on the tellers or their sources and the contexts in which those narratives were refigured. For example, each of the three dominant groups claimed to have settled in the village first and had an originary tale (or tales) remembered through specific rituals of pitri puja (ancestor worship) and bhumi puja (worship of the earth) in addition to a rhetoric of early ownership of the land. They brought other groups of migrants to “grow” the village or complete the settlement, although those other groups—often minorities or people marginalized in terms of their caste and/ or class standing—had their own stories of relocation. In short, everybody knew where they or their ancestors came from, and some “knew” more than others! Migrations and knowledge making went hand in hand. I reroute Ghosh via Clifford here because the issue of subjectsetting relationship that Clifford championed has an important bearing on this study. In one of his major works, Routes (1997), Clifford uses Ghosh’s semi-autobiographical story to challenge classical anthropologists’ methods and to theorize the tropes of roots and routes. As Clifford rightly notes, “Since the generations of Malinowski and Mead, professional ethnography has been based on intensive dwelling” (1997, 2), often at the cost of movement. He points out that “villages, inhabited by natives, are bounded sites” that serve “as habitable, mappable centers for the community and, by extension, the culture” (1997, 21). The field also becomes “a home away from home” for the researcher, who enjoys “an expe-

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rience of dwelling which includes work and growth, the development of personal and ‘cultural’ competence” (1997, 22). This privileging of dwelling (roots) over migration (routes) demonstrates, however, not simply the ethnographers’ predilections but also the deep ambivalence toward (im)migrants in different societies. Although travel may be valorized when it entails valued resources such as education and money, the travelers themselves are often viewed with suspicion, sometimes even within their own communities upon return. The new knowledge and capital threaten existing power relations, or so it was perceived in my native village even in the case of “local” people on their return. Aba ke garla? (What will he/she do now?) was an oft-heard question that suggested both anxiety and wonderment at whatever was “earned” (capital or the use value of knowledge) and its potential consequences. The newcomers—that is, migrants— were often admired for their capital and/or skills, although not always respected, and the ones lacking those resources were stigmatized as rootless. They would earn full membership by dint of sustained participation in social and communal activities over the years, especially if the family earned these resources along the way. In some ways, then, these villagers were like Clifford’s classic ethnographers who understood dwelling “to be the local ground of collective life, travel a supplement,” since roots were supposed to “always precede routes” (1997, 3). But these villagers were different in that they did not make any knowledge claims about other communities, at least explicitly. Researchers have historically demonstrated a profound ignorance of other people’s journeys, yet they are the ones who authorize their words through writing. The written word—although not always trusted—wins the day, whether it is in the modern academy or my native village. By weaving together methodological arguments with personal observations and experiences, I wish to drive home two points. First, movement is a fundamental fact of human life, reconfigured through rhetorics of origin, relocation, and resettlement. Movement is also tied to a certain understanding of literacy, and yet both travel and literacies are viewed with ambivalence across spaces for a variety of politico-cultural reasons. Whether it is in

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my native village in the remote hills of Nepal or the immigrant colony of the United States, attitudes toward (im)migrants and what they bring with them are mixed. Second, this predisposition seems to apply just as well to the ethnographers as it does to a large number of other people, the difference being that traditionally researchers erased travel from consideration even as they themselves were traveling. Nor did they consider their subjects’ travels to be of primary significance. Of critical importance to these practices are competing assumptions about culture and location, as well as who needed to account for those assumptions and to what extent. In addition to the theorists already cited (Appadurai, Clifford, Marcus, etc.), scholars as different as Homi Bhabha (1994), John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi (2009), Michael Burawoy et al. (2000), Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1997), Liisa Malkki (1992), and June Nash (2007) have, in their own ways, addressed the issues of dwelling or fixity in field research in a changing world by linking those issues to power and researcher’s location. Interested in the formation and transformation of culture, these revisionary works dislodge the fossilized notion of any “pure” culture at a time of increased cross-cultural contact. One important implication of these works would be that qualitative studies should explore the actual processes in which location and subjectivity are produced and reproduced without losing sight of the researcher’s positionality. In fact, in their influential work, Writing Culture, Clifford and Marcus urged ethnographers to examine their own interpretive systems rather than explore distant cultures, arguing that the process of cultural representation is historically contingent and contestable. Many anthropologists since the 1980s have heeded their advice. At the same time, some researchers have also pointed out that the increased attention to texts and systems of making meaning might unwittingly have the effect of trivializing “everyday events happening in the world around us” (Nash 2007, 8). The real challenge, then, is how to understand and interpret what we study without losing sight of the complex interplay of text and context, as well as what happens because of the contact (including observation or interview) between actors

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(research participants/subjects) and interpreters (researchers/ scholars). In fact, the representational burden of place in qualitative studies is inbuilt. Most such works explore collective life around one or more constructs such as community, culture, faith, and nation, which are anchored to a location and supposedly lend themselves to easy generalizations. The problem of representing the location, then, rests on the ideology of reality as an a priori. But if we embrace the notion of a constituted reality, the issue could be articulated differently. The challenge would not be that of conforming to the convention of re-creating a static community and stabilizing it through writing. We would, instead, begin with the assumption that the community itself is a construct and subject to change. As Edward Said asserts, “the real issue is whether indeed there can be a true representation of anything, or whether any and all representations, because they are representations, are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambiance of the representer . . . we must be prepared to accept the fact that a representation is eo ipso implicated, embedded, interwoven with a great many other things besides the ‘truth,’ which is itself a representation” (1974, 272). If, as Said indicates, one regards any concept as primarily rhetorical, the burden of representing any community is really one of looking at how it is figured and refigured through a range of practices, without leaving out the meaning maker and the enterprise of assembling that meaning. For individuals whose symbolic practices form the basis of this project, communities and cultures are always in the making, not necessarily as something out of thin air but involving a careful consideration, selection, construction, and deployment of an array of resources for the here and now. As Brinda put it, “we bring our culture and history to life . . . by what we do. We also need to adapt and create [cultural practices] based on similar principles.” For her and her colleagues, one’s understanding of culture and history involves the negotiation of what is perceived to be there historically with what is necessary at a given time. These immigrants’ understanding of individual self as part of a construct

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larger than self and rooted in a certain history was both internal and external. Not only did they mostly consider themselves (and were considered) outsiders, they were often also asked to and were willing to speak for those larger forces, their cultures and communities. At least, the events and practices that drew my attention were mostly performed in the name of their community. When culture and communities are performed away from the location with which they are originally associated, the usual tropes of setting and context in qualitative studies demand extra scrutiny as they offer additional opportunities for studying literacies in motion. The present study benefits from this opportunity as it is invested in exploring literacies of migrations. Not only did all the research participants identify themselves as (im)migrants with roots in different places, some of them were also in the process of moving again—like Nathan, one of the founders of the Hindu school, who relocated to a different city while this study was being written. Only a few of the South Asians who feature in this study may still be in the same place a decade or so later, but one thing is clear. Even as they go to a new place, it is more than likely that they will continue to collaborate with people of similar backgrounds and interests and be identified in similar ways. In the meantime, their roles in Kingsville will be filled by those who are already in the city and those who will be arriving. This process demonstrates the phenomenon of constantly re-creating roots and routes rather than foregrounding uninhibited mobility. To move away from thinking of place as a given, one must understand it as a reference point for departures and arrivals, not as contrary acts but as interrelated and interdependent ones. Place or setting is what happens as a result of arrivals, contacts, and departures. This is not to suggest that a place and its histories or a people’s refiguration of culture and community have no place in the mix; it is simply to suggest that we need to look at how those constructs are formed, affirmed, and transformed by subjects to meet a variety of needs. Such an approach will help us appreciate how roots are figured and mobilized. In that sense, we have to reinterpret Clifford’s tropes of roots and routes.

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(Re)Locating Arrivals and Departures at Kingsville When Brinda arrived in Kingsville with her husband in the early 1980s, there were only “five South Asian families here: four Indian and one Pakistani.” She remembers the place as primarily a “white and black city” back then, with only “a few Chinese.” Brinda’s recollection is important here because it tells an important story for this study. Although she remembered only five South Asian families at the time of her arrival in the city, her description indicated their community identification rather than any numerical accuracy. In fact, she did not count a few other South Asians, such as Sam and his brother’s family, who were already in the city. Not that she was unaware of their existence, but she thought of them more as “American[ized] Indians.” Sam had come to help his brother manage his business, and neither brother took any special initiative on behalf of the community. The other families, on the contrary, were “culturally inclined,” as Brinda would put it, and interested in teaching their children Bengali and Sanskrit with some friends from nearby towns. They had already established what was then a “very small but active organization . . . India Community Foundation.” They were also the ones who carpooled with Brinda to go to Chicago to get Indian groceries once a month in those early days and organized language classes for their children. Brinda was again with them when discussions about a Hindu temple began a little later. Brinda’s other early memory of Kingsville is equally important here. When she and her husband told their first apartment owner that they were both physicians, he said, “you are the kings.” Brinda and her husband took it “as a compliment . . . sometimes even joked about the city and called it Kingsville.” Roshan, another physician of Pakistani origin had a similar story, and those memories provide the name for the city in this study. The reason I foreground anecdotal histories of the place here is to emphasize the meaning of place for the participants in ways that maps and statistical data may not always do. I also aim to highlight how memories function in shaping culture and commu-

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nity, because for people like Brinda, Pranav, or Sameer memories also go beyond the individual act of remembering into what could be considered collective cultural history. Third, I wish to align an understanding of the research site with the ways in which histories and presents are constituted simultaneously for community action. At the same time, this approach is also occasioned by the kind of “scattered lives” my study participants led in Kingsville and its adjoining areas, where they became invisible after gathering at the temple, mosque, school, or designated meeting places as both safe community spaces and social network systems. As for the presence of South Asians, Kingsville has seen a small but increasing number of these immigrants in recent decades. Some have come here to live and work directly from their native countries, but others have moved here from other states. Yet others—like Pranav, who went to Uganda with his father from colonial India before relocating to the United States—a few have traveled to the Mid-South via a second country in Africa, Europe, or the Caribbean. Most South Asians relocated to Kingsville either for education or employment, whereas others joined them because of contact with those who had arrived earlier. Charu, who migrated to Kingsville with her family in 2003 says, “We [would] not come here if our relative [was] not here.” When she won a Diversity Visa lottery in 2002, the only person in the United States that she knew who could write her a welcome letter, a requirement for securing an immigration visa in that category, was a relative from her husband’s side. That was the only reason for “coming here” for her family of four. For immigrants like her, it was the contact factor; whereas for others opportunities, often accompanied by prior contact or other means of expediency, brought them here. As Pranav asserts, “the main reason I moved here was that, when I worked in West Virginia for some years, I already had some friends working here. Then, my daughter decided to go to school here. Otherwise, there isn’t much. I mean, it’s like most other American cities that I could have gone to.” Pranav was certainly right that Kingsville shared much of the history of the rest of the United States.

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Arriving or living in a part of a nation-state with a common history is, however, not a guarantee that residents will come to experience a given locale the same way. While subject to the same history of colonization and segregation as the rest of the United States, Kingsville’s history and present are also different on account of a variety of factors, such as its location, its cultural and demographic mixes, and its economy and politics. Although it is one of the biggest cities in the state, the state itself is among the poorest in the country, a reversal of fate compared to its status as a prosperous place in the mid-nineteenth century. The city is said to have had continuous human settlement for at least twentyseven hundred years before the Anglo-American settlement in the second half of the eighteenth century. During the Civil War, Kingsville was firmly on the side of the Union, although the rest of the state, having officially declared neutrality, was known to be sympathetic to its southern neighbors. The city was also notorious for its intense participation in the slave trade before the Civil War because of its strategic location close to the Deep South, and Kingsville owed much of its growth in that period to the slave trade. The state and the city both appeared on the list of top ten most populous cities and states in the 1850 census, but with the shift in the economy, the city (and state) experienced a remarkable decline in the first half of the twentieth century. After the civil rights movement and school desegregation, the city began a major revitalization campaign.4 It was for these reasons that the state is very much considered a part of the US Mid-South, although the city is often also associated with the Midwest because of its checkered history and proximity to the Midwestern states.5 South Asian immigrants were, in the words of Rita, “fortunately late” in that they arrived in Kingsville after the major racially charged political issues were already resolved, at least legally. They would be subject to the consequences of those historical developments, but they did not have to live through the history itself. Although no official record was available documenting the first South Asian(s), or even the exact number of these immigrants and their status in Kingsville, most participants and city

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officials tracking immigrant population agreed that it was only after the Immigration Act of 1965 that South Asians started moving to Kingsville. Understandably, the early targets for South Asians were bigger cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles that were already home to other (South/Asian) immigrants and much more visible internationally. As that law’s target population, the first group of people to migrate in the late 1960s and 1970s were physicians and engineers, often followed by their relatives.6 With increasing demand for skilled labor in different parts of the country and South Asians’ desire to relocate to qualify for permanent residency, places like Kingsville began to see an upsurge in the number of previously under-represented immigrants. As Lavina Shankar and Rajini Srikanth have pointed out, the consequence was that South Asians “constituted one of the fastest-growing Asian American communities” by the 1980s (1998, 1). It was no accident that the first group of South Asian immigrants in Kingsville that I could enlist for this project arrived in the 1980s. In late 2004, when I began gathering general data on the South Asian immigrants in Kingsville, various sources, including immigrant organizations, estimated their number to be between five thousand and ten thousand. In late 2010, estimates ranged from ten thousand to twenty thousand. In addition to the normal rise in the number of immigrants, especially owing to Kingsville’s relatively stable economy as opposed to that of many other cities hit by the recession, the surge also accounted for the ongoing resettlement of a large number of Bhutanese refugees. Kingsville had already received approximately fifteen hundred of them, with about a thousand more expected to arrive by 2012. A large number of them were Hindus, and some of them had already started attending the temple occasionally. Unlike some other groups of immigrants who formed a distinct ethnic enclave, often unified by a common language, South Asians have historically been a “small and somewhat dispersed group” (Takaki 1998, 294). In Kingsville, too, they did not have a distinct ethnic neighborhood of their own but were dispersed across the city. If high-earning professionals like Brinda lived in

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upscale suburban neighborhoods, others lived in middle- and working-class neighborhoods in different parts of the city. Similarly, some students attending Kingsville’s urban research university, and occasionally other colleges and universities, actively participated in one or another of the many community organizations. By nature, they would soon move out of the city or the country on graduation. But even others would not stay put. For example, one of Rita’s sons was seriously considering taking a job in India. The wide range in the estimates reflected people’s mobility and indicated the difficulty of ascertaining the size of a group that was largely invisible in the larger demographic map, as well as the reach and power (or lack thereof) of the organizations that these immigrants were affiliated with. There were many such organizations, none of which could lay claim to absolute accuracy or exclusive membership, because they were based on faith, language, ethnicity, or nation-state and because of the complexities involved. One person might belong to multiple organizations, while many had no time for more than occasional participation in any. A third group, most often at lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, may not even have heard about these organizations. For example, whereas Jay was not aware of—and had no time and resources to join—any organization until after I met him, Brinda had been instrumental in establishing two institutions (a Bengali language club and the Hindu school), was active in the India Foundation, and frequently participated in the functions of other organizations on behalf of the “Hindu, Indian, or Bengali community . . . as and when appropriate.” My subsequent visits at sites of cultural and religious importance as well as interaction with people in the international section of the city government led me to modify those estimates continuously until I stopped worrying about the numbers altogether. What these interactions revealed, however, was that the numbers alone did not tell the whole story. Similarly, in addition to immigrants’ self-sponsored initiatives to help themselves and their causes, there was an apparatus in place to institutionalize the city government’s relationship with new groups of immigrants. The

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local government had a dedicated international branch (later renamed the Office for Globalization) with the dual mandate of coordinating assistance for recent immigrants and refugees and helping the business community to explore global markets. A first-generation Asian immigrant, appointed by the mayor, headed this branch, and immigrant organizations worked with his office. In that capacity, he also organized annual, international, and multicultural events in which South Asian groups regularly participated. The study participants who took part in organizing these events felt positively about the coordinating role of the city government. These South Asian immigrants represented multiple things for the city and for themselves. They added to the “color” of the city, as one of the newest groups of immigrants, validating the city authority’s multiculturalist profile that it highlighted in its attempt to attract businesses from other cities. These immigrants also used available opportunities to display their “authentic” identity as part of the social mosaic. For instance, they participated in many “cultural” events sponsored by the city and the state government or interfaith agencies, which allowed them to assert their difference as their inclusion was cast in terms of culture and nation (Indian, Pakistani, etc.) and sometimes religion (Hindu, Muslim, etc.) within the broader framework of multicultural rhetorics. In this way, they represented different culture “or nationalities, as appropriate,” in the words of Sameer, as when they participated in international food festivals and multicultural parades or exhibition of other cultural artifacts. Although representing other nations at international festivals further cast these immigrants as “foreign” and contravened any notion of their inclusion in the multicultural ethos of the city, the recent immigrants did not seem to mind it. They understood the irony but found these occasions to be useful, according to Rita, for spreading “positive message . . . [and] awareness about us, about who we really are.” These were, in the words of Sameer, “small occasions to tell them [the host society that] we are here, we are not evil, [and] we are here to contribute to this society.” The inclusion of South Asian immigrants to buttress the multiethnic profile of the city was curious, however. As the target

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population of the 1965 Immigration Act, these immigrants were also figured differently from other minority groups, in such a way that it generated a rhetoric of model minority. Although they had been the most undesirable of immigrants until then—in fact, the “1910 US immigration commission report stated that Indians were almost ‘universally regarded as the least desirable race of immigrants thus far admitted to the United States’” (Kumar 2000, xii)—the new policy brought about a reversal of fate for the South Asians qualifying for and desirous of immigration to the United States. As a result, Padma Rangaswamy notes, these immigrants went from being “pariahs to elite” within a short time (2000, 40). Vijay Prashad has reported that in the first decade after that bill’s passage, 83 percent of Indian immigrants to the United States were highly skilled professionals with about “20,000 scientists with PhDs, 40,000 engineers, and 25,000 doctors” (2000, 75). By the time Brinda and her husband arrived in Kingsville, their colleagues and neighbors were already aware of the highly skilled Indian immigrants, and Brinda adds, “they had some respect for us,” even though “there were also some concerns on the grounds of experience, language, lifestyle, etc. etc.” In popular discourse, therefore, the presence of South Asians bolstered a highly politicized rhetoric of a diverse Kingsville. A disclaimer may be necessary before continuing that line of argument here. Although it was “the success story of the post-1965 migrants of the Indian diaspora [that] makes them model minorities” (Bhatia 2007, 19), some other South Asians have also identified with that group, if only as a result of geographical and historical accident. In fact, Bangladesh and Pakistan were India before independence and partition. Other countries in the region share close ties with India, and their emigrants often work in solidarity with the Indian diaspora. The model minority myth, then, seems to automatically extend to these other peoples as well. The political function of the model-minority rhetoric that both the immigrants and the host society perpetuate has been duly noted. As Prashad (2000) argues, the dominant groups and media frame the professional success of state-selected immigrants as the fruits of hard work and use that euphemism to mock historically

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marginalized groups in the United States, such as African Americans and Native Americans, as unwilling to work hard enough. The socioeconomic background of these immigrants in their native countries is often overlooked, as is the selection process in such a representation. True, these immigrants wanted to succeed professionally, like anybody else, for obvious reasons of ensuring financial security for themselves and their children. But the racialized rhetoric of success and class-segregated neighborhoods certainly shaped a sense of place and identity for them in important ways. Pranav’s experience is telling: “We are different. If we have the opportunity, we excel. Our people work hard. . . . We have a proud history and civilization.” Pranav’s statement contains the typical dose of ethnocentrism found when most people speak for their groups, but it is not hard to read his language as a commentary not only on his compatriots but also on others. Similarly, although he had lived in India, Uganda, and England before moving to the United States, he had “never lived in a minority or poor neighborhood. Everyone wants to live in the best place they can, and it’s the same with me. It’s nothing against other people.” Again, it is not surprising that his choices and lifestyle were shaped by his class standing, but his understanding of the South Asian people as a distinct group was more in line with the myth of the model minority. More important, this sentiment was shared by many others, and such beliefs guided their family dynamics, parent-child relationships, and interaction with outside groups. In this sense, their place identification was unique. Although they were in Kingsville, they often articulated their sense of belonging to multiple locations, geographically and culturally, and defined—and were asked to define—their identity in those terms. As Sameer says, “Although I am an American by birth, I am often asked, ‘where are you from?’ Often they first compliment my English before asking [that question]. When I tell them I was born in America, the next question is, ‘how nice, but where are your parents from?’” Speaking of place identification and its value to mobile subjects, therefore, one must look in multiple directions, specifically the points of departures and arrivals, and the ways those points

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are (re)constructed. Or that is how the South Asian immigrants in this study seemed to understand their geopolitical location. For one, they maintained close ties to their “native homelands” in South Asia, sometimes even participating in discussions of national or local importance there (for example, by writing for national or diasporic audiences on important issues) or actively contributing to political campaigns and other programs for a social or economic cause in their native countries. In this way, even as they lived in Kingsville, they were, in the words of Brinda, “not just living in here, not limited to the [physical or cultural] boundaries” of the city, but simultaneously “living in many places. Many times I have woken up at midnight to follow parliamentary election results in India. It’s not like I’m not involved here. I was actively campaigning in the last election here, too. But I’m equally thinking of how things are going on in India.” At the same time, these immigrants adapted and invented a range of practices to make themselves, in the words of Aziz, “at home in the cultural and economic environment” of Kingsville. These ranged from learning “the accent” or “brushing up [on] English” to being “familiar with the laws and customs here.” But that is easier said than done. Besides, there are complex issues of belonging and memory to deal with. Being mobile subjects, according to Brinda, involves “careful shuttling between here and there, making your friends here and keeping your friends there. Being here and there at the same time and making friends with people, new people from here and there.” Being here and there was something they certainly did, as they went about forming communities along linguistic, religious, national, and regional lines even while calling “America our home,” as Brinda would put it. On top of the “little Bengali, Pasthun, or Punjabi communities . . . [they] also build larger communities,” according to Sameer, that become transnational—and fraught—alliances in important ways. For instance, they collaborated with fellow South Asian compatriots to plan cultural or religious programs, but when they needed to work on other issues, such as political campaigns in their native countries/states—or in local and national elections in the United States—the collaboration involved different partici-

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pants. In short, these immigrants constantly kept reinventing and then moving between communities and spaces. Although I have been using South Asia as an umbrella term of identification for the study participants here, not all would identify themselves that way. Most would (and would be required to) state other markers of identification first, such as their native country, religion, or immigration status in the United States. If not the primary means of identification, the term “South Asian” had some currency among them, nevertheless. In fact, beyond the lines of national and religious boundaries, it was the next expedient referent especially among immigrants from different nation-states in the region. The roots of this supranationally imagined geography, while resonating culturally and economically with history in a region that is marked by remarkable heterogeneity, also go back to the Cold War era when the US government’s strategic concerns led to a policy that “identified the region as a collectivity, giving it a new habitation and a name” (Giri 2009, 138). The collectivity also became the object of an area studies: South Asian studies (Dirks 2004). The use of the generic label “South Asian” by the diasporic population of seven or eight countries thus points to a complex political dynamics of discursive circulation and transcultural adaptation. To cite further evidence, even what could be potentially the most expedient way of organizing South Asia in relation to the states in the region has been anything but conclusive. The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) was set up in 1985 with seven founding nations. Afghanistan joined the SAARC in 2005, following the US invasion and subsequent ousting of the Taliban from power. The 2005 SAARC summit also accorded observer status to China and Japan despite India’s displeasure, complicating the geopolitical equation in the region. The regional politics and increasing transregional interests of countries like China and the United States aside, the study participants here defined “South Asian” in relation to the core members, especially the founding seven member-states of the SAARC. Understandably, the bigger countries (India, Pakistan) have had a higher proportion of their population in the diaspora. In sum,

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the label “South Asian” has been a fraught yet useful term for the diasporic population from that particular region and hence for this study as well. While faith and native languages helped forge more immediate communities—as evidenced by the formation of religious institutions, schools, and language clubs—regional affiliation allowed these immigrants to collaborate across nation-state lines as South Asians. As Brinda explained, “it’s common for us to organize Bengali programs with my Bangladeshi friends. Once we even had a Pakistani girl dance an Indian item. The point is to do the performance as we do it in South Asia.” Apparently, these immigrants often represented themselves to the host society of Kingsville through cultural symbols from the Indian subcontinent. Given the complex history and circulation of those symbols (especially cultural/religious ones) across state borders in the region, those boundaries might matter very little at times, although at other times they determined institutions formed along nation-state lines (the Bangladeshi Society, India Foundation, Nepali Society, Pakistani Association, etc.). Among the most prominent cultural institutions sponsored by South Asian immigrants in Kingsville were a Hindu temple and school, two mosques or rather Islamic prayer centers (other mosques were attended and managed by primarily non–South Asian Americans), two Islamic schools, and an India Community Center, among others. There were also organizations set up along lines of language, religion, or immigrants’ native nation-state. Early research efforts led me to these sites, as outlined earlier, and later to additional organizations. Once aware of their existence and their value to a large number of these immigrants, I decided to keep the focus on these religious and cultural sites (especially a temple, a mosque, and a Hindu school) because these places helped sustain their cultural contacts and religious faith for a large number of South Asian immigrants. More important, they functioned as social networks, often providing important advice and education in native languages and cultures. Surprising as it may sound, some nonpracticing Hindus like Rabi and Ram, who identified themselves as agnostics more than Hindu, regular-

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ly attended festivities at the temple. Ram sent his daughter to its Hindu school, where she was also learning classical Indian dance. For the same reason, Andy drove to another city some two hours away every weekend to meet with fellow Buddhists from Sri Lanka, although she considered her interests to be more in culture and language than in religion. Since there were no more than eight people (two families and two students, of whom one family was Tamil Hindu and one student was Christian) from her country of origin in Kingsville at the time, these visits afforded her the opportunity to meet other Sri Lankan Buddhists. The two Islamic prayer centers in Kingsville were primarily managed and attended by South Asians, although one of them drew a sizable number of immigrants from the Middle East. It makes sense that South Asian Muslims are the largest mosque-attending group in North America.7 In any case, faith and literacy practices facilitated a certain identification and acceptance along geo-cultural lines. Every diasporic group has its own characteristics, the result of its unique contexts of dispersion, movement, and (re)settlement, and these immigrants carefully straddled multiple communities. As noted earlier, South Asian immigrants have come to Kingsville from different contexts and backgrounds or routes. Many of them (re-)create institutions and (re)invent myriad literacy practices to keep close to their homelands and to be at home in their new home. Their practices, as will be described throughout this book, reveal the value of understanding place as a point for departures and arrivals, a point where different narratives of roots are (re) figured and (re)routed. Reconsidering Roots and Routes The tropes of roots and routes come from Clifford, who has directed our attention to a fundamental issue in ethnographic research, but he also seems more interested in the metaphor of dwelling versus movement than in the potential fluidity in these terms and their deployment. The stories of my native villagers from Nepal and the practices of the South Asians in Kingsville unravel ways in which roots are subject to rhetorical reinvention. Here roots also became routes and were constantly in play whether

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projected as fluid or stable. As a result, the field site, if one can talk about such a thing with reference to this study, would include the geography to which the participants imagined they belonged and with which they interacted, including their native homelands and new homes. In fact, such an imagination involves a certain management of relations across spaces, relations that are imagined and enacted in the name of culture, community, faith, and/ or nation, among others. This type of relations also involves subjectivity and positionality imagined in relation to bodies and spaces and demands a particular way of managing the relationships, including with and by the researcher. The above discussion establishes that the setting-subject relationship is a tricky one in qualitative studies while making a case for understanding place as a point (re)connecting departures and arrivals. Such a formulation helps to highlight the way in which roots are constructed and mobilized for various ends. It also allows a researcher-scholar to play a more pronounced role in unraveling the roots and routes of transnational belonging. As I have noted earlier, a qualitative study is not just about the “other,” it is also about self. In fact, one implication of Writing Culture’s argument is that a field site lies in writing and that it involves a researcher’s positionality and conditions of interaction. Here I am not thinking of critical reflexivity as a means to depoliticize history/context or pigeonhole varied identities but as a unique way to engage personal, professional, and political issues and the ways they impinge on the process and product of research. Just as my research participants saw their sites as spaces where they could form communities and institutions to build relationships internally and externally, interculturally and cross-culturally, my own role in this study has had its own share indicating the extent to which positionality creates a setting of its own for the study. Negotiating my role in this study involved issues that directly shaped the process and presentation of this study. Therefore, the field site to me also meant building and maintaining relationships. With this note, it will make sense to describe below how my positionality set in motion different understandings of the study and its perceived goals.

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(Re)Locating the Researcher En Route The first time you wanted to come [to] talk with us about what we read and write and cultural matters . . . I said “yes” because I didn’t know who you really were. I didn’t want to get in trouble. [You could be conducting] research or intelligence matters about what’s going on. There were concerns like monitoring reading and writing by government agencies. . . .

—Ahmed Your research sounds interesting. As an international student, you can do it well, and it’s not hard to understand why you wouldn’t. People maybe worried about the amount of self-reflexivity in it, though; my honest advice.

—Professor Right Learning to read is learning that you are being written to, and learning to write is learning that your words are being read.

—Brandt (1990, 5)

Renato Rosaldo (1989) suggests the need to live ethnographically to overcome the distance between the researcher and the researched. In his own case, it was only after going through the traumatic loss of his own wife that, Rosaldo intimates, he was able to understand the intensity of the headhunting Ilongots’ rage. As a South Asian attending a state-supported university in the United States, I embarked on the current project with some sense of identification with potential participants in terms of their geo-cultural backgrounds. As Professor Right (see the second epigraph above) reminded me in the early phase of my work, I was not the only one to think that way, although for different reasons. If, for example, I considered this identification in terms of possibility, even responsibility, he had some anxieties about the validity of my eventual claim to knowledge. Moreover, I was active with some immigrant groups. Among others, a meeting of Nepali immigrants had just elected me its founding president, although I was technically not an immigrant. From the time of planning my research to the drafting of this report, my legal status in the United States is that of a “nonresident legal alien.” I was working with other members of this newly founded organization to draft its constitution, register it as a nonprofit entity with the state, organize get-togethers, and anything else needed. I was also in touch with some other South Asian student and immigrant

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groups. These associations had me work with some international students and recent immigrants on an eclectic array of activities, from interpreting legal and other documents and writing letters (to the municipal government, landlords, and other agencies) to simply talking about what to do while signing a lease or moving into a new apartment or selecting a doctor or a school for children. These experiences led me to hope that I was almost living ethnographically (Rosaldo) and would be able to provide an emic perspective on immigrant literacy practices with no serious glitches along the way. However, the very first interviewee forced me to rethink my assumptions. A businessman in his fifties, Ryan made it clear that in his eyes I represented a state institution and all that comes with it more than the peripheral space I thought I occupied. Nor did he seem to accept the nearly mirror-image proximity between him and myself that Professor Right’s remark implied. Ryan had come to the United States in 1972 with his businessman brother and started his own business soon afterward. With some college education in commerce in Bombay (currently Mumbai, India), an astute business sense, and proficiency in four languages including English, he had his own way of interpreting my position and interests. I had contacted him through a friend of mine. Ryan said he was happy to be invited to participate, signed the consent form, and led me into his office. As the star-spangled flag and some US politicians, including the state governor’s pictures, peered at me, Ryan took pains to describe how he loved the English language and the United States more than his native Gujarati and India. He read and wrote exclusively in English and had little contact with “fellow-Indians who want to be both Indians and Americans.” He asked, “How can you live in two worlds? You have to make your choice. . . . I have made mine. I am an American.” A few weeks later, however, I was surprised to see him at the Hindu temple some 12 miles away from his business. Nor was that the only time I saw him there. His presence there contradicted his declaration of severing all ties with India and other immigrants who liked to be both Indian and American. One way to understand his responses during the first inter-

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view would be in relation to his perception of my role. Even as I considered both of us fellow travelers, he perhaps wanted me to understand that he was farther along! Better yet, my presence was an occasion for him to stress his attempts at Americanizing and perhaps mitigate anxieties about being accepted by the mainstream culture as easily as he had embraced it. He was perhaps overemphasizing his Americanization by declaring his loyalty to the English language and business culture. I was somebody who could also validate his Americanization by listening to him and by turning his assertion into research material and eventually knowledge. But then, he could also have been questioning the premises of my study at that early stage. I had told him that my primary interest was in the literacies that immigrants brought from their former homes and learned in their new place as they went about their personal and professional lives. He was perhaps making a point that people like him knew how to adapt to different situations and audiences. Asked to elaborate on his early response in my second interview, he simply laughed off the point, only adding, “it’s a matter of priorities. I go to the temple for my granddaughter. She likes it there.” Although he did not want to discuss the issue further, his answer was complete with the word “priority” that indicated the value of negotiating competing claims of belonging. It would also mean that my identification with his positionality could only be partially correct, if at all. Although the initial interview was a wakeup call, my institutional location was not the only issue needing constant (re)negotiation. Even as I began with a sense of identification with my potential participants—and my discourse (academic) community generally reaffirmed that affinity—we were overlooking other complex issues that unraveled during the study. Most prominent among those issues had to do with class, gender, and (perceived) faith. For example, at my second meeting with Abdul, an Islamic prayer leader (assistant imam) at a local masjid, he wondered why I would be interested in Islamic cultural practices. I had already explained my purpose during our first meeting and promptly repeated it, but it was soon clear to me that it was not the answer he was waiting to hear. An immigrant from northern India (Aligarh)

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and familiar with the Hindu-Muslim conflicts, he was aware that bearers of my last name were (and are) Hindus. Another Muslim participant, Aziz, who frequently writes on cultural issues and is very active in the local Muslim community, told me in the first meeting more about his knowledge of Hinduism than about his profession or culture. We had to schedule a second meeting to get to other questions, the most crucial one for me being how he, as a radiology professor, negotiated his Islamic and scientific literacy and identity issues. While my last name with its “Indian look” raised flags for Muslim sensibilities, at the Hindu temple, the main priest wondered why I would talk to people—sometimes for hours at the corner or the meeting halls and classrooms—and often leave without offering respect to even one of the multitude of deities in the spacious hall of shrines. Similarly, my maleness had its mark all over the study. At the Hindu school, one patron confided that Brinda was “over the top” in her interpretation of Hindu scriptural texts, “although a good teacher otherwise.” It was soon clear that Bis’s real source of anxiety was the marital status of two teachers, Brinda and Rita: “Having two divorcee teachers might send a wrong message.” This patron who had hardly anything substantial to say about their teaching thought that he could automatically claim my support for his attack just because I happened to be a fellow South Asian male. Although I told him I did not think so and avoided him afterward, I wonder if that meant anything to him. Thinking back, it is apparent that I did not request another interview from Bis for this very reason, but I might have missed an opportunity to understand if there were other issues behind his dislike of the two teachers’ marital status. Even though their status as single mothers appeared to have been noted by most parents of the school, Brinda and Rita revealed it to me only on their second interviews. I was also hesitant to ask too much about this topic, because even as I definitely wanted to know how family situation impinged on their literacy practices, I did not want to hurt them. In our later meetings, Brinda talked about her marital status quite frankly, mostly when no other people were present. In contrast, even though Rita’s accounts revealed that her spiritual involvement in-

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creased along with her marital problems, she avoided the topic whenever possible. My gendered location, coupled with a perceived faith, made it even harder to contact and enlist the participation of Muslim women. Or that is what I assumed initially about the low number of Muslim women participants, as opposed to the number of Muslim men or Hindu women and men with whom I was already interacting. I was able to interview four Muslim women. One case stood out that led me to form that impression, although in hindsight the case perhaps applied more generally than particularly to the group under discussion. When I expressed my frustration at being unable to enlist more Muslim women in my study, an Indian friend of mine introduced me to Ismail, a Pakistani-American medical doctor whose wife was a teacher and board member at one of the Islamic schools in Kingsville. Armed with the phone number he gave me, I contacted his wife the following morning. “I’ll call you back after I ask my husband,” I was told. “Your husband gave me the number and permission. I look forward to talking with you,” I replied. But she never called back. This was not the first time such a thing had happened. Two other potential participants were also supposed to contact me after consulting their husbands. Before I could despair about the status of these women in their marital relationships, I happened to run into Ismail the following month. He was curious to know if I had been able to interview his wife. When I replied in the negative, he was a little surprised: “I told her the same evening that you were looking for some participants. I told her to talk with you. Okay, I’ll remind her again.” But the call never came. This conversation made me rethink my assumptions about her and other immigrant women whom I had approached for an interview but had been told to wait until their husbands had been consulted. These women were most likely appropriating their traditional subordinate role to avoid unnecessary contacts and any obligation to reveal their literacy habits and practices. While my gender and perceived religion sometimes defined my relationship with my participants, my ambiguous positioning in terms of citizenship (coupled with faith) further complicated

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the matter. To many in the institutional setup of the university or the disciplinary context of literacy and writing studies, as illustrated by Professor Right’s comments, I was one of “them.” Another professor commiserated with the large amount of work I was doing, especially as it involved a large number of participants, and kindly reassured me, “it won’t be too difficult since you will be writing about your own people for the most part.” To them, mine was a case of insider ethnography or something like that. As John Aguilar (1981) notes, such studies are not always accorded the same status as those conducted among “others.” But, well, how much did I know about my “own people”? Despite my having traveled from the same source region (South Asia) as my study participants, their understanding of my role was much more complex. In light of the anti-immigrant rhetoric post-9/11, the two undocumented immigrants (other than Jay) I contacted had reasons to be suspicious of my real motives and identity.8 Even for some naturalized citizens, I could be a potential undercover agent keen on “busting” ethnic religious groups (especially Muslims). After all, reports about secret surveillance of Muslim sites without court orders by federal agencies appeared regularly when I was contacting my potential participants (some of them for additional information).9 Ahmed, for one, later told me that when I first contacted him by getting his phone number from a Pakistani-American organization, he was not sure about my real intentions. His family had left Pakistan for the East Coast in the late 1980s, then settled in the Mid-South a few years later. They had also made “a small donation” to some charities in Pakistan in the late 1990s and had heard that various investigations were going on, some including international money transfers. “I knew we hadn’t done anything against the law, so I had no hesitation whatsoever. But then, could I have helped myself by saying a no?” asked Ahmed, later, when he concluded that I was perhaps no more than a student or in his own words “student brother on the same boat as us.” By embracing the researcher’s role as being on the “same boat” with the immigrant-subjects, I am not ignoring the privilege that comes with research and writing. Even as I was and could contin-

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ue to be identified with the study participants, I also occupy a very different position, especially as someone writing this book, which clearly puts me between my study participants and my audience. The most important lesson here pertains to my shifting location while planning, executing, and re-presenting the research. At the same time, although I have labored to point out how the researcher is as much a traveler as the traveling subjects, I also need to point out the politics of travel. In much of the post-Renaissance, Europe-led era of “modernity,” travel is a fraught trope and has come to be identified with European exploration and colonization. As bell hooks cautions, “holding on to the concept of ‘travel’ as we know it is also a way to hold on to imperialism” (1995, 43). Indeed much knowledge has been claimed on the back of European travelers’ memoirs. By claiming travel as a fundamental aspect of human life and literacy, this project does not simply hold on to the same concept of “travel as we know it.” In fact, linking life and literacy to movement is to undo the trope of travel as we know it and to point out the rhetorical nature of the enterprise. Sure, one could make much out of the seemingly oppositional function of travel in which my participants are involved: these subjects are moving back into the center of global powers as opposed to the Europeans traveling to map and control the margins from those centers. Doing so would be to turn a blind eye to the macro forces responsible for the migrations that these subjects enact. Therefore, I simply attempt to understand how individuals create and circulate symbols to reassert their agency—their mesodiscursive space—and the ways in which the researcher and the study participants are constantly in motion to make, and make sense of, that space. The Coda Locating a setting for a diverse group of participants was like mapping different nodes of minority relationships, and my own ambiguous position added to the complexity. Despite my being a foreign student formally accorded “alien” status and hence an already othered affiliation with the majoritarian culture, I still represented the American institution of higher learning and its

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research apparatus in the eyes of many participants. I was located in the institution of power (the university) and wanted to produce knowledge about individuals and communities who organized their practices on their own and saw themselves as lying outside that power structure. Although I also saw myself as one of “them,” at least initially, for a variety of geo-cultural and practical reasons, the ensuing interactions with my participants revealed that I was and was not like them. Certainly, my early sense of identification helped me decide on the project. I should also not downplay the multiple ways in which my geo-cultural and linguistic facility afforded me access to multiple sites and sources that helped me with the study. Thinking back on the ways I was perceived and to the extent that those perceptions shaped the ensuing interactions, however, there were just as many occasions for misunderstanding. My positionality shaped not only the choice of the research topic but also the production of this report. As Wendy Bishop argues, “Who we are affects what we write. Our reports are full of ourselves and others” (1999, 142). While I have tried to treat the participants and their lives respectfully and to interpret their literacy lives correctly, I am also aware of my dependence on the words and artifacts they shared with me. I do not claim to have any direct access to their subjectivities nor to any truth-inducing methods. I say this not as a disclaimer but as a recognition of all claims concerning knowledge production, which is “made up” (Geertz 1995). After all, “all research is interpretive, guided by a set of beliefs and feelings about the world and how it should be understood and studied” (Denzin and Lincoln 2013, 13). I have tried to create a contextually grounded description of my participants’ literate practices and to capture, however partially, the many layers those realities are embedded in. However, I accept responsibility for constructing those layers and realities that seemed to be significant in relation to participants’ responses, their literacy and cultural artifacts, and other historical and cultural interpretations available to me. While addressing my role in the study, I should also mention how I worked with concepts of collaboration, multivocality, and self-reflexivity. After all, in literacy studies, rhetoric and compo-

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sition, and other social sciences, these are very important tropes. Thomas Newkirk (1996) and others discuss the need for intervention, especially when such research involves teaching-learning, and when timely involvement may improve the activities under observation instead of being the object of ridicule—usually to an unsuspecting participant’s consternation—in the final analysis. Scholars like Ellen Cushman (1996) and Katrina Powell and Pamela Takayoshi (2003) discuss the need for respectful reciprocity in such studies. I asked my participants if there were things I could do for them. I must admit I would not have been able to do much, given my time constraints and other responsibilities. Luckily, those who agreed to participate were happy to talk about their experiences, sometimes even wanting to stretch the conversations for hours. When Brinda had talked for about an hour, for example, and I wanted to part by scheduling another time for the interview, she was so immersed in it that she rescheduled her other engagements to continue the interview with me. She even said that I could use her real name, but I decided not to, following my IRB-approved proposal and for uniformity. For people like Brinda, discussing their literacy practices in cultural contexts—which they often did in terms of their struggles and achievements—was also a moment to reflect on their own past, present, and future. Sharing those stories with a willing audience had a certain value. In Brinda’s own words, “It is something we don’t always do. Sitting with you and talking with you now makes me forget so many things. I share some pain, some happiness, and I feel so good now. Frankly, I had not done it and didn’t know what I was missing.” Like Brinda, some others also mentioned that they loved reliving their memories. Although I had the good fortune to be working with many participants on things such as interpreting and writing different texts and artifacts—and learning from that experience—I feel that it would be an act of self-aggrandizement to list them here except when such interventions seem to have a direct bearing on the issues under discussion. Reciprocity, multivocality, and self-reflexivity are certainly valuable, but I am afraid that sometimes sociological discussion on the theme of reciprocity paints a false picture of parity between

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the researcher and the researched. So long as the researcher is the one who sets out on a project with a goal in mind, nothing counts as complete reciprocity. I have tried different techniques, including coauthoring, for such a relationship in the past, which has also awakened me to its limitations firsthand.10 Even selfreflexivity today is not as innocent a formula, for it has a higher ‘“exchange value’ in the academy than the ‘use value’ of a more straightforward discourse for other audiences” who may find “self-reflexive passages . . . irrelevant or, worse, self-indulgent” (Cintron 2002, 937). In the pages that follow, I resort to it with moderation, which is to admit that I try to balance these two values. As for multivocality, I represent the participants’ voices when they seem to directly engage an issue of concern. Admittedly, the choice is mine. The only substantive way to show my regard for my participants is to accord their lives and practices the dignity and integrity they deserve and maintain that in the research work and report. This is another way of saying that if I want to acknowledge my evolving understanding of other people’s ways of doing things, I should also account for my own moves from one position to another, epistemologically and culturally and in between those spaces. If I am looking at other people’s meaning-making process en route to their futures, I need to acknowledge the process by which I do so and relocate to different spaces and domains.

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Chapter 3

Genes and Jeans Sanskrit South Asia in the US Mid-South, and Back Again In the journey of life, we carry the ancient wisdom to guide [us] . . . and apply it wherever we are. The truth is imperishable, the written word, the values through the ages. This is very important for our identity with so many changes happening around us. Some part will always remain with us, [some] part will change in the course of the journey. . . . Migrating from place to place is very short . . . compared to the long journey. We are all in it.

—Shanker It [Sanskrit education] helps us to connect to our own culture . . . and you can imagine and know common history; for example, Indo-European languages [come from] the same source; I mean, English [and] Sanskrit are different but somewhat related, like people, too. But Sanskrit and Hindi are more alike. We move and we carry our customs, languages, etc., with us.

—Krish I am an American, but I am also an Indian. Everything I do is to make sure that I don’t lose one or the other. I am kind but I can’t melt (chuckles).

—Sagar

Shanker, a Hindu priest at the Kingsville temple, situates migration within the metaphor of the journey of life. In fact, his very understanding of migration is shaped by the Hindu view of the virtually eternal transmigration of the soul from one body to the other that for him serves to indicate the ongoing negotiations between immigrants’ history and present.1 In fact, maintaining their cultural identity while “fitting in” in their new home is a common challenge that immigrants face in their life’s journey. As Krish and Sagar indicate, South Asian immigrants in Kingsville (re-)create, (re)mix, and develop a range of language and literacy practices to straddle—and move between—the different worlds they inhabit, the host society of the US Mid-South and the native nations imagined transnationally. Many have their children learn Sanskrit, a classical South Asian language of scriptures and epic

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poems from which many modern languages are derived, with the hope of “connecting” the younger generation to their native culture, while those of Islamic faith teach their children Qur’anic prayers for the same reason. Like many other immigrants in the United States who use religion to organize their own emigrant community (Warner 1998, 3), most South Asians in Kingsville employ the language of their faith to define their culture and organize their community. However, unlike many other “new immigrants,” who could participate in the religious institutions already in place, Hindu and Muslim South Asians had to create organizations where none existed.2 They created those institutions ostensibly to keep their faith traditions alive, but practicing and teaching native identified languages and cultures has been the major goal of these institutions, at least for the immigrants populating this study. In fact, for many, religion as such is less important than culture, a broader category inclusive of a range of competing practices. At the same time, even as replication of native languages and cultures has been a hallmark of first-generation immigrants (Singh 1996; Foner 2005), those like Brinda (introduced in Preface) and Krish are not just working to reproduce their native languages but are reviving one that is not their native language, not even the one they learned as a second, foreign, or academic language. Brinda and Krish, for example, grew up speaking Bengali and Tamil, respectively, in their native India. Brinda grew up in an environment where Sanskrit was associated with the older generation; her grandparents read Sanskrit texts and recited “many kinds of prayers in Sanskrit every morning and evening.” But there were “no Sanskrit lessons” for her. Instead, and as expected of her upper-middle-class family, she went to a private, English medium school, and Sanskrit was limited to “a few prayers, etc.” It was only after medical school, marriage, immigration, and the birth of her son that she began to think about learning Sanskrit. She taught herself the language “over a couple of years” so she could teach it to her children and, later, to other South Asian children at the Hindu school that she helped establish in Kingsville. Krish grew up in southern India, speaking Tamil, which was also the medium of instruction at the

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public school he attended. After an engineering degree and a job on the US West Coast, he moved to Kingsville with a new employer. His only exposure to Sanskrit was in the form of the holy prayers recited at temples and village rituals in his native town. He now calls himself “a nonpracticing Hindu engineer” and has his daughter take Sanskrit lessons at the Hindu school for “cultural reasons.” Brinda and Krish represent a large number of South Asians who send their children to the Hindu school of Kingsville for an education in the cultural heritage of South Asia. In the words of Brinda and Krish, these South Asian immigrants’ literacy initiatives have four broad goals: to (1) teach “native cultural heritage to our people, especially the younger generation”; (2) “connect to others from the Indian subcontinent”; (3) understand and “appreciate one’s culture and identity”; and (4) to “relate to the mainstream society and other cultures . . . authentically as people with [our] own history and culture in this country of diversity.” In this way, they hope to form and affirm the community with a shared history and language, but these immigrants also have a different goal for re-creating and teaching native literacies. At the same time, they hope to fill in a perceived gap in the “social and cultural education” in US academic institutions, on one hand, and complement the rhetoric of US multiculturalism, on the other, especially as they couch their identity and activities in the language of US diversity (“people with [their] own history and culture in this country of diversity”). While some members of this South Asian community see a strong connection between the rise in such a “cultural orientation” among themselves in the United States and a renewed interest in Sanskrit education currently in Hindu South Asia, others relate it to Anglo-US culture by historically tracing Sanskrit and English to their common ancestry of the Indo-European language family. The languages and literacies (re-)created and (re)mobilized by these “new” immigrants thus involve many layers of migrations and are enmeshed in economic, political, and technological realities and a desire to renegotiate those realities. These practices also demonstrate that immigrants are more actively asserting and defining themselves and their relationship to the host cultures than is often assumed.

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In this sense, their literacy practices demonstrate the complex dynamics of travel and relocation, both literally and symbolically. As Kurien has summed up, the sociological wisdom is that native language and literacy practices are often used for managing the “transition from immigrant to ethnics” (1998, 37). In a way, South Asians like Brinda and Krish may be seen doing just that: creating and using religiously inflected literacies as a resource to define their identity and manage their “transition” to ethnic identity. Although that may be true to a certain extent, especially for some immigrants who felt more settled in the United States than connected to their South Asian state of origin (as Ryan described earlier), it was not always or only the case for most of the immigrants populating the current project. They used these resources to manage difference within the community as much as without, and in relation to their positionality more broadly. They were not simply looking at the host society in terms of fitting in as the most important part of their existence; they wished to connect to the native societies and the rest of the world in light of “possible opportunities elsewhere.” These opportunities included the option of “going back to India, if it offers better opportunities for our kids,” as Sagar suggested. This chapter discusses how these South Asian immigrants create and connect different “language worlds” and epistemic systems, especially through the gateway of a Hindu temple and its school that facilitates the imagining of those worlds. A close look at these practices and processes also demonstrates migration as being more than unidirectional, indicating how the “flow” of symbolic resources is accelerated, especially when accompanied by favorable economic and technological resources. Their practices show a deep appreciation for the power and possibilities afforded by akshar (literally alphabet or syllable, or even vaak, the eternal word and meaning that does not perish) and provides a fresh way of looking at the uses of literate activities writ large.3 But first I discuss the role of the Hindu temple and its school in forming—and managing the difference within and without—the South Asian communities and in creating an ecology for related literacies that Brinda and Krish liked to describe with a metaphor of shrines within shrines. As Brinda put it, “each

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language and tradition is valuable . . . [and] respected like all these different shrines in our temple.” Shrines within a Shrine Snapshot 1 February 2005. It’s a Sunday morning, and I have an appointment to interview Ananda, a board member of the Hindu temple and school. From my previous meeting with him, he knows that I am from Nepal, and he has confided in me his desire to visit the Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu (Nepal), one of Hinduism’s four or five major pilgrimage sites. I follow him into what he calls “the hall of gods.” I had seen multiple gods and their families in different temples in South Asia, but this is the first time for me to see so many different deities in one place. Ananda offers his prayers to Ganesha and makes a respectful gesture to the rest of the deities by nodding in their direction. I follow his suit in nodding while the priest looks quizzically at me. This is the first time I have seen this priest and will interview him later. For now, I smile and follow Ananda, who takes me to a room behind the hall for the interview. This is the room where I will help count money from the donation boxes in a week and a little later again. A portrait of the goddess of wealth, Laxmi, peers at us as we talk mostly about the Hindu school and Sanskrit education today. Among other things, Ananda tells me about the joy and occasional awkwardness of having to explain the role and value of different gods and goddesses in the temple and, more generally, in the Hindu system, but he justifies their significance by using the language of diversity: “we have here gods from different places [that] we have been worshipping for ages. But they are all different incarnations of the same divinity, so we have them. . . . diversity of gods and our traditions, but they are also united; that’s a cool thing, no?” The Hindu temple located in Kingsville’s eastside suburb attempts to embody South Asian diversity within the Hindu symbol system. The temple’s classic Hindu architecture consists of an inner sanctum, also known as garbha griha (womb chamber), meant to house one or a number of associated deities. Because this is also a temple drawing followers of divergent gods and goddesses

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(corresponding with related denominations or traditions), multiple garbha chambers with different gods and goddesses spread across the center of a large congregation hall. Visitors walk around the sanctums of these gods and goddesses, worshipped across India and other parts of the Hindu world, paying homage as they pass by. Depending on the Hindu calendar and their worship traditions, these visitors often offer a special prayer, with or without the assistance of a priest, to a given god or goddess while offering respect to other deities. The shrines within shrines function as significant linguistic and place-of-origin nodes in that different shrines command varying levels of attention based on the native region and the (regional) language of the visitors. While some common gods like Krishna and Ganesha may receive special worship and hymns in a large number of languages, in addition to the main prayers in Sanskrit, some other gods like Mahavir, the last Tirthankara (prophet) of Jain, may receive special prayers in far fewer languages despite a nod by almost all visitors. As Partha, a patron, puts it, “certainly there may be moments like different people offering prayers in different languages; sometimes people find too many gods here and worship only those that they have been doing all their life and give only, say, respect to others. . . . Some are recognized more easily. They have special verses sung in their own languages in different parts [of South Asia] and they do so here.” He reminds me that “there are hundreds of languages spoken in South Asia, and about two dozen by a large number of people.” As Partha notes, a number of specific hymns may be sung in different languages (Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Telegu, for example), even different variants within those languages, but most hymns and verses may be common, irrespective of these members’ place of origin, primary languages or accents. The common language in those hymns is Sanskrit, although one would hear English much more in the temple premises (including the Hindu school) except when reciting the given shlokas themselves.4 Sanskrit and English also seem to be typically valued in that order, although the frequency of use is in exactly reverse order. English is used more often than any other language as a lin-

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gua franca between the priest and devotees, devotees from across different language communities, and between the temple authorities and outside visitors as well as between teachers and students at the school. The linguistic prominence of English is also obvious in the names of gods carved in English graphics below each shrine or statue. As Ananda states, “we sometimes joke that even our gods now understand English. English is needed to communicate [between] different [language] speakers, but Sanskrit is the most respected one language.” English is thus the language of present reality and Sanskrit the language of the past that gives this community its cultural anchor. Despite their simultaneous uses on this complex, they are representative of two different value systems. Sanskrit represents the space, the temple, although it is contaminated by English as it was—and is—by other languages in South Asia. The Hindu temple, the place of worship for Hindus in the region, was conceived as not only a religious site but also a cultural and educational one, according to many early promoters. Partha, one of the founding members, believed that such a proposition enlisted a larger number of supporters and donors early on than it otherwise would have. For people like Brinda, who were already organizing language classes in their homes, this was a perfect opportunity to have a place that offered multiple possibilities for the community, including what they needed most at the time—a permanent place for literacy instruction. The early promoters included her husband and their friends when the temple was incorporated in 1985. Within four years, they were able to raise enough funds to have a temple building constructed. It was mostly a structure for a large hall of about 3,000 square feet that would serve both as a large meeting hall and a temporary residence for the deities. Volunteers organized and performed regular prayer services and other functions until a full-time priest was hired from India in early 1991. Soon the building was expanded, with an adjoining hall and additional rooms to serve as offices, community spaces, and, of course, classrooms. The main hall was then exclusively an abode of the deities, with some space around for devotees to offer prayers. The shrines represented different traditions and language systems, but they operated on a complementary framework, “not

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competitive,” as Brinda emphasized. Together, they represented what she and others considered the South Asian heritage that Sanskrit represented and was learned and taught in the Hindu school classrooms, next to the hall of gods and goddesses. The Hindu School The Hindu school, sometimes also called Sunday school, was not too different from the rest of the temple premises. The same people flowed in and out of it. If adults offered prayers in Sanskrit (often mixed with other regional languages) around the shrines, students learned some of the same prayers in the school. The shrines represented the multilingual and multicultural reality of the temple patrons at present, and the school made sure that the practice would continue into the future while reconstructing a past for its significance. The school’s heart clearly lay in the teaching and learning of Sanskrit, with classes held every other Sunday, although it was also a site for many other cultural and pedagogical activities. For example, Hindi (language) classes ran on every other Sunday but for a much shorter time than the regular Hindu school, along with other language lessons offered on and off throughout the year. Additional Vedic shloka recitals were held on some Fridays, and yoga practice took place three mornings a week, occasionally with extra lessons arranged at other times of the day. Religious discourses were a regular happening, with gurus from other cities in the United States or from India. Although the Hindu school had its own curriculum and modus operandi, it was sometimes, at least as a special lexicon, also applied to mean almost all of those things. Snapshot 2 September 2005. It’s the first Sunday of the month and classes are in full swing at this school. The teacher, Rita, whom I met last week for an interview, invited me to this class, which has upper-level elementary and middle-school children. Today’s class begins with two prayers collectively sung. One deals with peace and another with the welfare of all living beings. Next, Rita asks questions from a lesson taught previously, which was about an incident in the epic

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Ramayana: “Why did Ram decide to go to the forest, and why did Sita and Laxman follow him?” I see several hands go up before Rita points to one who had raised it first and motions him to proceed with his response. He provides a few details from the story before summing up almost aphoristically: “Ram did it to observe pitridharma [duty to parents], and both Sita and Laxman followed him to observe their dharmas [duties to spouse and sibling, respectively].” “You have a clear understanding of the teaching of the Ramayana,” says Rita, emphasizing that one has to observe one’s dharma to your parents, spouse, and siblings “no matter how hard it may be at times.” Rita, then, ties the responses to a play about Rama that some of these kids had staged at the spring festival. Next, she asks the significance of the story of the epic Ramayana that they have been working on for quite some time. She also elaborates on student responses particularly focusing on a few key events in the epic, such as Rama’s decision to go to the forest following his parents’ command and the killing of Ravana. She goes back to the response of the first student earlier to elaborate on the significance of being respectful to one’s parents and the significance of Ram’s victory over Ravana as the triumph of good over evil. Next, she gets a student to stand up and recite a shloka aloud. The student has already memorized the shloka as have a few others. Rita commends them for their ability to recite by memory and encourages others to follow their example. The few parents sitting at the back of the room applaud. Then, the class goes over two more shlokas, reciting them out aloud and discussing their meanings in English. Before dismissing the class, Rita instructs them to memorize a few verses about goddess Durga and to read a lesson on the goddess who will be worshipped in a festival in the following weeks. Although the verses are in Sanskrit, the interpretations are done in English, as are the questions and answers. Rita has told me before class that she and other teachers are also trying to use as many Sanskrit words as possible during discussions so that students may develop a higher proficiency in the target language (Sanskrit). I notice that except when reciting actual verses, the few other Sanskrit words appear mostly within the English syntactical structure.

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Rita’s class above was a fairly typical one at the Hindu school. Students read and listened to stories from Sanskrit epics and other ancient tales; they memorized key Sanskrit shlokas and recited them in class from memory; teachers interpreted the stories and verses and asked students to explain them in their own words and to “put them in perspective,” which meant, according to Rita, “understanding how those lessons applied to modern context.” Together, they also put together performances on some special occasions, based on key texts such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The teachers followed a standard, graded curriculum. Like Rita’s, all classes started with a shared prayer or two following a peace invocation (reproduced below), all recited aloud as a group, with eyes closed and both palms clasped by the chest. The first prayer was always the Shanti Mantra (peace prayer), which was the first to appear in the syllabi and course packets for every age group, beginning with three- to five-year-olds. These students first read the prayer in English—that is, in English alphabets. The course packet contained all verses in English graphemes and looked like the Shanti Mantra below. Shanti Mantra—Om Sahana Vavatu Om Sahana Vavatu Sahanau Bhunaktu Sahaveeryam Karavavahai Tejas Vinavati Tamastuma vidhwishavahai Om Shanti Shanti Shantihi Sanskrit to English Word Meaning Saha—both; nau—us; avatu—may he protect; bhunaktu—may he nourish; viryam karavavahai—may we acquire the capacity; tejasvi—be brilliant; nau—for us; adhitam—what is studied; astu— let it be; ma vidvisavahai—may we not argue with each other. Translation May He protect both of us. May He nourish both of us. May we both acquire the capacity [to study and understand the scriptures]. May our study be brilliant. May we not argue with each other. Om peace, peace, peace.

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Brief Explanation At the beginning of a class, the teacher and students generally recite this peace invocation together. Both seek the Lord’s blessings for study that is free of obstacles, such as poor memory or the inability to concentrate or poor health. They also seek blessings for a conducive relationship, without which communication of any subject matter is difficult. Therefore, this prayer is important for both the teacher and the student. 5

As with the sample text above, students read Sanskrit first in English.6 Evidently, they learned to put together the English graphemes for producing a Sanskrit sound, with the help of teachers and parents. A set of prescribed verses was included in the course packet and was distributed at the time of registration. As in the Shanti mantra, all the verses were in English graphemes, and the text was followed by word meaning (in English), as well as English translation and explanation. Because of this kind of a uniquely bilingual approach, students were expected to have a metalinguistic awareness of switching between what some called “language worlds” and managing that transition smoothly. Rita and Brinda thought it required hard work on the part of both teachers and students to manage that switch. English was an interesting conduit sometimes, especially by virtue of its being the main language of use at school and work (as well as the Hindu school), but it also—as would be expected—complicated that movement. As Roshan, who attended the school for several years and was about to enter college in 2006, shared: Like, sometimes I am doing homework for school, and then it’s time to do the homework for Sunday [Hindu school], it feels different. You know, all of a sudden you are reading and repeating and, you know, memorizing, and thinking about, you know, different stories. It kind of sometimes feels a little funny, thinking about it. You got to move your tongue differently, you know, and make sure you get it right with the shtotras (hymns) and all that . . . I kind of like it, but it’s sometimes hard, you know, like they [English and Sanskrit] are very different. But my grandma, you know, she was there to help me.

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As Roshan attested, these students worked to shuttle between different “language worlds” or what Rita explained as “languages that carry and show different worlds.” To her and to Roshan, Sanskrit and English were not simply two languages, they also represented different worlds of belonging and values. As Rita asserted, “one is what you need to succeed in the modern world. The other is our own, our history, you see, it’s like past and present.” As the Hindu school helped the students negotiate a past identified and configured as their own, they were also supported well at home in their translingual adventure. Their parents were all multilingual, and at least one parent of almost all the students had a professional career and knew English. In some cases, there was a grandparent in the mix, à la Roshan, whose grandmother was available to help him with Sanskrit even as his parents had “a very busy schedule and . . . [knew] little Sanskrit.” The teachers were all professionals, too, and most of them used more English than any other language. Because nobody was “perfect in Sanskrit,” Rita thought it made sense to start out in English and then go to “the real Sanskrit. It’s especially helpful for students because during the pre-K and kindergarten years they are simply learning the basics of English alphabets. They need that to do well here [in Kingsville, the United States] in their regular school.” Rather than introducing the students to a new script, they liked to “use that knowledge of theirs to build something very important here. We help them recite shlokas by looking at the English Romans. Slowly, we introduce the script of the other language [Sanskrit].” They wanted to familiarize the students with the Devanagari script of Sanskrit “after they have a foothold in English.” Brinda reiterated the same point in pedagogical terms in these words: “We work backwards to [teach] Sanskrit. The idea is to make them [students] able to pronounce Sanskrit words and, then, by their high school year [help them] read and write real Sanskrit also.” To readers familiar only with the English language, this move may sound counterintuitive, even counterproductive. But Rita and her colleagues believed it would not be the case here, since “you pronounce the way you write [in Sanskrit]. There is a real match between how you write the al-

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phabets and say them. . . . In English, they are so different. You spell in one way and pronounce the words differently.” The availability of graphemic-phonemic correlation in Sanskrit, as in many other South Asian languages such as Hindi, supported their curricular plan. In practical terms, the real focus from the beginning was on creating a pro-Sanskrit and pro-Hindu ecology in which learning the curriculum would become much easier. The ongoing exercises of memorizing and correctly reciting Sanskrit verses, the sounds of interesting stories and interpretations, often in combination with audio(-visual) aids in an environment where differently accented variants of English were spoken along with other polyglot sounds were all parts of this evolving ecology. The school was organized into four classes, each named after, according to Ananda, “a quintessential Hindu virtue”: Sathya (truthfulness)—pre-K–kindergarten; Vinaya (humility/good conduct)—grades 1, 2, and 3; Karuna (Compassion)—grades 4, 5, and 6; and Dharma (duty/righteousness)—grades 7 and above. Students’ placement was generally based on their grade level in regular schools. Before naming the classes and reorganizing them in the current block of four, there used to be only three, divided by age group (3–7, 8–11, 12 and above). In both the iterations, each group had a separate syllabus and course materials that were occasionally revised, but the class schedule was almost identical. The first twenty minutes or so went to greetings, invocation, and shlokas, usually meant to recapitulate the lessons covered before and recitation of verses meant for memorization. The next twenty minutes or so were for new lessons. The rest of the hour was spent reciting shlokas, singing bhajans (hymns) and for arthi prasad (lighting a ritual lamp and eating prasada after offering it to the gods). The lessons were reinforced through an ongoing system of assessment. Students needed to memorize important verses included in the course packet for their age group, orally answer questions that teased out textual details of the tales taught, and occasionally do multiple choice or subjective essay questions. Those who performed well were recognized and the others encouraged to “learn from them.” While regular attendance was always expected, the school also started honoring students with

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high attendance from 2009 to discourage truancy as the number of students rose. The Hindu school had an all-volunteer roster of seven women teachers through much of 2004–2008. They had started with five (including a male teacher at one point) and added an eighth teacher in 2007, but one attribute made them all alike. All of them had full-time jobs during the weekdays and were mostly selftaught in Sanskrit with a varying degree of expertise in it. They had the “same regard for it,” according to Rita, as they believed that “it is very important to learn Sanskrit to understand our culture truly.” Other teachers and most parents also shared in the respect accorded to Sanskrit and its value to understanding Hindu culture and life. In the words of Brinda, We emphasize the value of Sanskrit for several reasons. One, it is the main language of worship for all Hindus no matter what their everyday language or where they live. . . . Second, Sanskrit is the mother language of many South Asian languages, and if you recognize Sanskrit alphabets, read and write them, you can also know or find it easy to do the same in many other languages. For example, Hindi has the same script as Sanskrit and many words are borrowed from this mother language also. We [teachers] are learning it and teaching it at the same time for that reason.

Brinda’s explanation sums up her colleagues’ and most parents’ view of Sanskrit. By calling it the “mother language” the community also makes a case for its preservation and promotion, since following the same logic, it would mean, in the words of Ananda and Brinda, “preserving our culture and identity.” They also hoped that the students would one day be proficient in South Asian cultural heritage by ultimately “mastering Sanskrit.” In this way, the “language world” of Sanskrit came to be the “authentic” culture for these immigrants. But how did these immigrants come to identify Sanskrit with their culture and identity even though none spoke or used it as their primary language? Not only would this case go against the academic or popular wisdom about immigrant literacies, the

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question also assumed added significance given the literacy background and professional careers of the parents and teachers at the Hindu school. Not a single one of them had attended a Sanskrit school, nor did Sanskrit figure anywhere in the future career goals of the students.7 The temple priest had certainly had some training in Sanskrit, especially in conducting karmakanda (religious rituals), and was hired specifically for the purpose of nitya puja (regular worship and recitation) at the temple. However, he was not the one who created the Hindu school curriculum, nor did he have a major say in its execution. The parents—whether career men and women in high income brackets (such as medical doctors and computer programmers) or ordinary wage workers— were also unequivocal about their desire to see their children excel in English and regular K–12 schools. Most of them spoke one or more language in use in South Asia at home, but it was not Sanskrit. For some of the parents and their children, English was also one of the first languages, if not the first or primary one. Neither the students nor the teachers really believed that they would one day be proficient in Sanskrit the way they would (or wanted to) be in English. Most interesting of all, the medium of instruction was primarily English; as evident in the Shanti Mantra document reproduced earlier, even the Sanskrit verses were rendered in English graphemes, followed by their meaning and contextual details, all in English. The question, then, is what literacy was (and is) allowed through Sanskrit that would not be available in and through any other language? Neither the traditional accounts of literacy cast in the teleology of civilizational discourse nor those that frame literacy as merely functional skills would adequately account for the (re)creation and (re)circulation of the literacies such as the one presented here (or the Muslim men’s discussion group discussed later). Even an approach limited to a site as the container of a given set of cultural practices would not fully capture the kind of literacies in circulation here. After all, the literacies and attendant values were identified with spaces away from the location of current practice. So what explains the choice of a Sanskrit education as the authentic cultural identity for these immigrants?

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One potential explanation—the one that was already indicated through the metaphor of shrines within shrines in the Hindu temple and that might jump out at you—would be that it was all dictated by the linguistic and cultural plurality of South Asia and its émigrés. The ethnic and linguistic diversity even within the Hindu-identified Indian diaspora is such that no one living language—including Hindi, one of India’s official languages— would be acceptable for all within that community, let alone those from other parts of South Asia. As Brinda explained, “I would love to teach in Hindi or Bengali, but I know so many of our kids don’t know them. Some know Tamil and English, others know Marathi and English, or Telegu and English, and the list goes on and on.” Include in that mix some Hindus or Hindu-identified émigrés from other parts of South Asia and those who have arrived in Kingsville via Africa or the Caribbean, where their ancestors came for work or business or were brought in as indentured laborers during the British Raj. Understandably, all these immigrants and their children spoke different languages. Some read and wrote in English only, although they might speak one or two other languages as well. Therefore, Sanskrit, which the Hindu temple patrons considered to be the “source language” of other South Asian languages, became the language of choice. Or so it would seem. In fact, Sanskrit functioned less as a target language and more as the subject and object of cultural identity. Not many were able to read Sanskrit texts in the Devanagari script even after attending the school for some years. For example, Rajesh, a teacher’s son, knew the Sanskrit alphabets (and a large number of verses by heart) but had yet to read Sanskrit fluently. He certainly valued what he learned at the Hindu school, but it was not his proficiency in Sanskrit per se that he valued the most. Similarly, Suyog, who attended the Hindu school since his middle school and was preparing to join a prestigious college on the East Coast in the fall of 2006, said, “Well, it did help me a lot. . . . I mean, I can, maybe, read a few words in original Sanskrit writing, but I understand some of it and some similar words in Hindi or whatever other Indian languages. What I like most is [that] I now know a lot more

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about India, Indian culture, history, religion, stories, and such.” While both parents and students affirmed that the Hindu school taught them the proper method of reciting prayers and liked it, according to Rajesh, the “more important thing was learning about the cultural heritage of South Asia.” His observation was shared by many other current students and parents. Vikram, for example, considered himself close to being an agnostic but attended annual Depawali and similar other functions at the temple and sent his twin daughters to Sunday classes. For him, the temple was a platform to get to know, and introduce his children to, “other Indians and Indian culture.” For people like him, culture came through religion even though they did not participate, in Vikram’s words, in “regular customary Hindu rituals.” Similarly, a majority of literacy documents in use were mostly in English and identical to the extract reproduced above for the elementary level. A few prayers in Devanagari script were in circulation among the teachers and some students, but they did not enter the course packet in that form. Even more interesting, and ironic, was the fact that the high-school-level texts were primarily in English: English translations of well-known texts like the abridged versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Other texts included (auto)biographies of religious gurus (Swami Vivekananda was among the most popular of these), histories, and descriptions of festivals and other cultural events. These were translated into, if not originally written in, English. As among the junior-level teachers and students, a few texts in regional Indian languages were also circulated occasionally among the speakers of that language, but their reach was limited. Students were often asked to write and explain the assigned texts in English. For example, if they memorized a shloka (like the Shanti mantra), they would be asked to explain its meaning in English. Similarly, the journals and essays that they wrote were in English. Almost all the “cultural performances”—such as dramatization of important incidents from the ancient epics or morality tales, organized on special occasions such as Devi puja (Goddess worship) and Deepawali during the fall or Ram Navami (celebration of Lord Ram’s victory) in the spring—were also primarily in English. Ex-

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ceptions included classical and folk dances accompanied by lyrics in Sanskrit or (occasionally) one of the major regional languages of South Asia, but even in those instances, the emcees almost always introduced and interpreted the songs in English for the audience. A similar practice was evident, and for apparent reasons of audience, when the community performed for external audiences, such as during the multicultural or interfaith programs on behalf of the Hindu temple, Hindu school, or local chapter of the India Foundation. The primacy of English in the major literacy documents, cultural shows staged for (or about) the community, and actual interactions among the participants suggested that the primary objective of the Hindu school was “teaching Indian” or “South Asian culture” rather than Sanskrit as a language.8 Although the pragmatic value of Sanskrit as the central one amid many competing languages at the Hindu school was evident, that was not the only or even the major reason for its instruction. English could very well do the job if it were merely a question of finding a common language. In fact, English was already liberally in use, including for the teaching and learning of Sanskrit itself. A more reasonable account of the creation and teaching-learning of the literacies at the Hindu school, therefore, would connect these activities to the immigrants’ goals and desires vis-à-vis contemporary contexts in their native lands and adopted home. Such an approach would not ignore the tactical value of Sanskrit as a common language but see it as more than a language. In this sense, it was a resource that immigrants could identify as historically theirs that would pose no threat to any one language in use. Sanskrit was literally labeled as the source language of many other languages in actual use and was revered by all. Since Sanskrit was identified as something that preceded the present-day differences, it became a heritage marker rather than just a language, and thus a unifier of all who identified with the dominant South Asian faith and cultural tradition. As Shanker claims, “Sanskrit, . . . pure South Asian language and heritage, [is the repository of its] intellectual and spiritual package.” Thus envisioned, the language evoked a cultural memory that the im-

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migrants who identified with a Hindu cultural past, and in some cases even otherwise, considered as part of their distant history. In the words of Shanker, again, “our past . . . identity comes to us through Sanskrit texts and their wisdom.” Therefore, as Brinda asserted, “by learning Sanskrit we can get a glimpse of that ancient wisdom . . . and also apply it to a modern day context and problems.” For both Shanker and Brinda, Sanskrit education was the best way to understand “our true identity” and “not stray from . . . our responsibilities.” For Rita, the immigrants could “remain true to your real self by learning about the history and culture that made you.” For these immigrants, learning and teaching Sanskrit in Kingsville were an attempt at (re-)creating a “true” South Asian culture and history and at reaffirming continued loyalty to it. In fact, the goals of the school were more clearly articulated in a brochure about a youth group that some parents put together with the help of the Hindu school teachers. Ananda remembered that the group was modeled after the YMCA but in a “very Indian way because, actually, we even didn’t need that model, I mean, we could have done the same even without thinking of the Y.” The mission of the group was “to honor and encourage understanding of our ancient traditions while making a difference in our Indian and American community.” The program started in 2005 with students and parents who could support “their wards with community activism.” It took off with ten students and four parent advisors and had thirty students before the end of the year. The goals were listed as follows: have a sense of identity, belonging to—family, temple, community, country, and mankind; wear jeans but do not forget your genes; have pride in you while making a difference in one’ s lifetime; build relationships between the youth in our community and the cause we care about.

These goals aligned with those of the Hindu school generally, but the youth group’s were more explicitly connected to these immigrants’ conception of self-identity. The humorous reference to genes was perhaps not purely accidental and represented the community’s difficult relationship with race. Although the tem-

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ple members often spoke of being “neither black nor white,” the reference to “genes” and “blood” often in association with “our tradition” or similar phrases indicated a curious articulation of a racialized identity. The youth group raised funds through an annual saree sale (about five thousand dollars a year in 2005–2007 and almost double the amount in the five years since) and undertook temple clean-up twice a month. Its members sponsored a cancer walk and volunteered for an India Day celebration, where they also raised money by selling soft drinks to purchase and distribute mosquito nets in India. Once a month, the youths also volunteered at the local Ronald McDonald’s House. The youth members were high-school students with strong ties to the temple. These were youths who “cared about the community [and] did well at [the Hindu] school,” according to Partha. They knew the “shlokas; culture was like in their blood [and they were] perfect ambassadors for the community.” They were equally conversant with the “culture and life in India like when they went there,” primarily because of their “schooling here.” One major function of the Hindu school thus was to create a transnational community built on regionalist sensibilities. The many activities—curricular or cultural—at and around the school helped the immigrants imagine a community that was both like but more than a national community. According to Benedict Anderson, individual members feel the need of creating a unified construct of fellow citizens with the same mental map of the community because they cannot all know one another. Not only is the nation “an imagined political community,” it is also “imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (1991, 6). It is imagined since nobody knows all of his or her fellow members, and although sovereign—or because it is imagined as such—the nation also “has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations” (1991, 7). Historically, changing religious and economic relationships shaped—and were shaped by—print capitalism which led to “the possibility of a new form of imagined community” (1991, 46). In short, such a community is exclusionary and is imagined as a territorially bounded entity. Anderson’s idea of the nation as an imagined community has been critiqued as

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a totalizing one that fails to take into account the dynamics of the anticolonial nationalisms (Chatterjee 1991). South Asian immigrants’ imagining of their community provides an interesting insight into the idea of the community at another level. As a diaspora, they were no longer within the territory of a nation-state, but they still held on to native identified languages and literacy practices, so they could envision enacting the same practices with other members at the same time. For the teachers, students, and temple patrons of Indian descent, Sanskrit lent itself readily to the creation of identification with an ancient and “pure” India. Its use in combination with English in the United States indicated the practitioners’ Hindu American identity. As Sagar articulates in the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter, the identity that his compatriots envisioned for themselves embraced the old and the new, not necessarily as two opposites or asynchronous components, as was assumed for some earlier immigrants, but as interdependent entities that are simultaneous and intertwined. In this way, when South Asian immigrants organized their community around Sanskrit, they did not imagine their nation in a strictly territorial sense. They defined their relationship to the community through an ancient language that both represented their faith tradition and embodied an imagined historical memory. For an overwhelming majority of the Hindu school constituency, faith and history were connected to the nation-state of India and thus facilitated such an imagining, albeit they also refigured the nation by expanding it on both temporal and spatial terms. The organizational principles for “our cultural heritage” or “our community” were rooted in, according to Brinda and many others, the “history and religious tradition of India,” albeit “not limited to India,” and included the “whole Subcontinent” and beyond where “people of our inclination” resided. After all, according to Shanker, “the modern states are not important. . . . at the time great granthas [treatises] were made . . . [that formed] our tradition and wisdom, that was all earth . . . [as] it is today.” Articulations such as these both transcended modern state borders and made room for other South Asian (non-Indian) émigrés. Needless to say, predating the modern history of the na-

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tion-states allowed for re-membering a time and space that immigrants with different nation-state affiliations could easily identify with. The office bearers of the temple authority always made a point of stressing that the facilities were open to all. Teachers like Brinda and Rita elaborated that by this they meant “Indians and everyone from that part of the world with the [same] cultural sensitivities,” which basically meant persons who followed or sympathized with Hinduism. People like Rishi, a Nepali immigrant, and Rohan, a Sri Lankan, concurred. The statement was not just a gesture toward inclusion. In fact, a few of these people liked to identify themselves as South Asians “when appropriate,” according to Brinda and Krish, rather than “ just Indian.” One could certainly wonder, in the words of B. P. Giri, whether such identification “makes a diasporic subject feel part of something bigger and better than its constituent parts” (2009, 139). Brinda and some of her colleagues might agree with Giri and validate Anderson’s definition of the nation, only mapping it onto a more expansive space. However, there may be another side to this story. As Giri also asks whether these immigrants’ embrace of a regional identity rather than native nation-state affiliation was driven by an ulterior motive: “Or is it the case that members of these diasporas do not want to associate themselves exclusively with their homeland states, particularly when nation-state affiliation makes them feel guilty by association of fratricidal wars that feed repeatedly on religious and ethnic exclusion and particularities?” (2009, 139). Giri is right to ask the question, especially since almost all members of the South Asian diaspora abhor the violence and other ailments in their native region and often dislike having to explain, as Brinda puts it, “things that you are not part of or don’t like.” She and others at the Hindu school, however, explained the violence and exclusionary politics “back home” as an aberration from the “real values” exhorted in the ancient texts, the sources of the shlokas and other reading materials for the Hindu school. The teachers made special efforts to emphasize the liberal impulses in Hinduism to define the “true values” that constituted South Asian culture. They often quoted ancient texts that preached planetary humanism and cosmopolitanism in support of their position, as 96

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in Brinda’s “Two Words” lecture discussed earlier.9 At the same time, regional affiliation was, according to Partha, “only occasionally meaningful” since it was not the term of choice for all and did not subsume nation-state affiliation even for those who embraced it. After all, there were people like Raghav, an Indian medical doctor living in Kingsville since 1998, who considered the reference to South Asia an affront to India: “This makes sense geographically, yes, but India in spiritual [terms] means the same thing. People may try to put India in the shadow kind of thing by [using] South Asia.” Even Brinda and others’ use of South Asia as a location marker of their “originary home” was done only “as appropriate,” not in place of India. Thus the use of Sanskrit to invoke South Asian identity should be taken with a grain of salt. The regional affiliation did not always go beyond a national imagining but reimagined it in broader spatial and historical terms. Immigrants like Raghav substantiate what Appadurai observed: that diasporic communities formed by the phenomenon of transnationalism, and “safe from the depredations of their home states . . . become doubly loyal to their nations of origin” (1996, 172). In this way, the immigrants’ imagining of a regional, rather than a national, community did not resolve the tension between national and regional identity. In fact, hardly anyone related to his or her compatriots on the basis of a regional affiliation. Even Brinda and Shanker admitted to the limited value of this category. In Brinda’s words, “it makes little sense to call another Bengali or North Indian South Asian . . . we are Indians or Bengalis, Hindus or doctors and engineers and, well, all of them.” South Asia, then, was only a tactically convenient construct figured through a set of texts and values—like Sanskrit in many ways, the difference being that Sanskrit was much older. For that matter, South Asia also seemed to cover the imagined territory of Sanskrit and Hinduism. It did not subsume nation-states but facilitated more expansive relations across time and space. As a consequence, people from different locations (including different native nation-states) would easily identify with a space and community thus imagined and its heritage. Needless to say, the Hindu school was a critical gateway to this process. In this way, the Hindu school literacies went beyond reflectSanskrit South Asian in the US Mid -South, and Back Again

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ing a people’s native language or literacy, as earlier immigrants had done, to indicate a new form of sociality and social formation that members could relate to in multiple ways. In this sense, cultural formations that have been traditionally restricted to welldefined political and geographical boundaries (cf. Anderson) have transgressed national borders. Although that observation is not entirely new, the kind of social space produced, such as the one around the Hindu school in Kingsville for persons of Hindu orientation, was unique in many ways. This was a space that re-membered diasporic citizens to their imagined community. The imagining, however, was not supposed to be homogenous, because it made it possible to create and relate to that community in multiple ways. For example, persons of Indian descent like Dinesh would “think about an India larger than what it is today” as the ideal “community of our people,” whereas non-Indians, although a small minority, had other, non-nation-based ways of relating to the imagined community of fellow Hindus or persons of Hindu cultural background. Such an imagining also left room for other subcommunities such as those of Bengali or Hindi speakers. Within these imagined communities, people occupied different locations in terms of class, caste, gender, and roles depending on whether, in the words of Ananda, “you could define your culture” or “you followed what was told to you was your culture.” These immigrants’ action in the name of the community forefronted their desire for agency in ways that made their location evident. Irrespective of the ways in which immigrants related to their communities, therefore, their work at the Hindu school highlighted their positionality and self-defined roles. The primary stakeholders at the school chose their roles in ways that allowed them to assert their agency as, for example, teachers and interpreters of culture or community organizers. Their decisions were also informed by their own sense of positionality and its politics in the diasporic world. Shilpa, one of the teachers, asserted, “If I were in India, I don’t think I would be teaching this kind of school. I don’t think these parents would care about it [Sanskrit]. Here everybody wants to have the best of American education, you know, and that’s a good thing. [Along] with the English language, we also want

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our kids to be connected to Indian history and culture.” Shilpa’s account here not only explains her role as a Sanskrit teacher as a consequence of a particular diasporic reality, it also highlights her rationale for it. What she does not explain is why she felt the need to teach Sanskrit and not something else instead. Rakesh, a temple patron, provides that explanation: “loneliness is there, when you know you are living and working here and still feel that you belong to another place. Same thing with those questions [where are you from?].” As a retired government officer from India who came to Kingsville in his sixties to live with his sons, Rakesh perhaps had the time and the experience of dislocation that he felt “would be healed by Sanskrit.” People like Shilpa did not discount that explanation but emphasized the value of Sanskrit in more pragmatic (common source language of many South Asian languages) and multiculturalist (one among many others) rhetoric. Clearly, the experience of displacement and alienation reinforced by the questions about one’s originary home (where are you from?) pushes these immigrants to (re)invent and (re)circulate literacies to create a home away from home. This home, as Appadurai would agree, is far more native than the native home would ever be in reality, as it has shorn off any conflicts as anomalies in its diasporic imagination. For, as Partha reminds us, “we are caught in a time capsule. India is changing, but the India we think is the one we think it was when we left.” Despite such an awareness, one of the main functions of Sanskrit literacy at the Hindu school is to (re)imagine an originary native community. As Anannya Bhattacharjee (1999) argues, the realization of being defined by difference as the other (in lieu of being the unidentified bourgeois self able to name the Other in their native home) creates pressures on an immigrant community to create a space for itself in a country where it forms a minority. Sanskrit in this case allows multilingual Hindus to come together to create an inclusive and unified identity. Such a strategy not only puts aside differences, although only momentarily, but also helps uncover and elevate liberal impulses in the historical and religious records at par with the discourse of American multiculturalism. As noted earlier, the reproduction of native language and lit-

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eracy practices has been a common practice of the first generation immigrants in North America. As Singh notes, however, immigrants today are “privileged . . . to have many significant new models of assimilation and hybridization beyond the ‘melting pot’ metaphor.” According to him, immigrants can now imagine their relationship to the adopted country in different ways, as indicated by “such phrases as mosaic, descent and consent, kaleidoscope, salad bowl, double consciousness, and multiculturalism” that afford the new immigrants “spaces for self-definition” (1996, 93). More important, the actual geo-cultural and technological settings in which these phrases circulate have changed, reinvigorating the American Dream rhetoric of opportunity and freedom and providing the immigrants more options today than at any time in history (Waters 1990). This argument certainly necessitates a different look at the way recent immigrants desire and negotiate their identity in the United States. Just as these immigrants can participate in neoliberalist consumer culture even before their arrival in the United States (e.g., Grewal 2005), they can also re-create native language and literacy practices in their new home in ways that were unthinkable in previous centuries. New developments in communication and transport technologies enable cultural practices and exchanges across borders, and language and literacy practices are the sites in which their transnationality is thus reproduced. The Sanskrit literacy that the Hindu school sponsors sits well with the popular multiculturalist discourse in the United States, since it adds to the multiethnic mosaic, as the saying goes, and affords its users pan-Hindu imaginaries both inside and outside the physical boundaries of the United States. Immigrants’ native language and literacy practices, as well as their relationship to the native nation-state, are not immune from the political fortune of that state. The popularity of Sanskrit literacy at the Hindu temples of the South Asian diaspora in the 1990s was not simply a consequence of the rise in the numeric strength of immigrants in the United States or their rising economic and cultural fortunes—although these factors have certainly played a part (Kurien 2004, 2007). In fact, the rise in the numerical strength and visibility of Hindu Indians in Kingsville

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has mirrored the growth of the Indian economy on the world stage (at least in the ways economic growth is measured) generally and a particular kind of politics in India. When the Hindu temple was being expanded in 1998 and the Hindu school was about to begin, India also witnessed the ascendancy of Hindu nationalists to its central government. While there was no direct cause-and-effect relationship between these developments—one within a small minoritized community in the US Mid-South and the other at the central seat of power in India—there was an important psychosocial factor at play. As one of the founding members of the temple (Partha) noted, there was a certain sense of “pride in being a Hindu now.” To him, political developments in India certainly helped the “donation and other things for the temple’s expansion” as well as “community consolidation.” He was also mindful of the economic and military rise of India, its place as a major human resource supplier, especially to the information technology and health-care sectors of the West, as well as the rising influence of Indian immigrants in the United States: “We are coming of age. India is getting richer and powerful. . . . We also have politicians in different quarters, top business leaders, educators, etc. here [in the United States].” The role of new technologies was also apparent in helping people like Partha stay connected to the “native issues any time.” Unlike earlier periods of print capitalism, which had severely limited and time-consuming means of communication and travel, these immigrants could connect to the native nation virtually any time they wanted. Even Shanker, who identified himself as “the least techno-savvy Indian” used the Internet to check out the “news about India and Indian community” and for email or Skype. While the Hindu temple and school facilitated the formation and imagining of a community, the affiliation found a certain level of dignity in India’s postliberalization economy and politics. Kavir, for example, who came to the United States in 1981 from Uganda and London, reaffirmed the newly found confidence in Indian immigrants: “it is very different to be an NRI [non-resident Indian] today from then [1980s].” The rise of India as a major economy, a huge market and source of cheap labor, also provided

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options for the educated and mobile Indian diaspora that earlier immigrants would hardly have had. Kumar, a second-generation immigrant who was completing a bachelor’s degree in information technology and business management in 2005 and volunteered at the temple on weekends, had difficulty choosing between job offers in the United States and India: “I have a job offer, a very good job, in India. I haven’t decided [on] it yet. . . . If I get admission to a good [graduate] program here, I will do a Master’s. . . . but ultimately my current plan is to work anywhere, may be prefer[ably in] India.” Kumar postponed his plan for graduate studies to take a job with a New Delhi company. Had it not been for “the Hindu school and all the programs there,” he “would not have considered going to work in India.” Historicizing Sanskrit instruction transnationally against individual and community desires provides a context even as it risks casting the messy and conflictual process of literacy creation as predictable and determined by history. Unlike official literacy instruction that follows certain guidelines approved by the state (which is not to say it is any easier or consensual), immigrants’ community literacies are socially created, communally circulated, and culturally validated. When Brinda and Partha were working to put together the Hindu school curriculum in 1999, they consulted leading temple patrons and other (East) Indian American figures at different Hindu temples and institutes, such as the Arsha Vidya Gurukulam Institute of Vedanta and Sanskrit in Pennsylvania. Some proposed using books in original Devanagari script and have them shipped over from India. But other members were concerned that subjecting young learners to a completely unfamiliar reading and writing system without enough groundwork might turn them off forever. A decision was made that the reading materials would be in English at least until students were prepared to read the Sanskrit texts in the original, but it also generated a new anxiety. Partha remembers worrying, “How could that be our culture and heritage? These kids were learning English already. That was the concern. Now some parents were very concerned: why would we need Sunday school to teach English?”

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The cultural anxiety was taken care of when they finally decided to use authentic Sanskrit shlokas and ancient tales as the primary material for the school. They would use English to represent the sounds and meanings, so students would learn to pronounce appropriate words. The inclusion of English interpretation and explanation in the course packet would teach the meanings and contexts of use, but the students would still be assessed on their ability to recite the shlokas properly. Ultimately, the students would be motivated to try the original Sanskrit. Brinda recalls lobbying for the kind of curriculum that exists today and that her cousin and her friends in India would find useful to teach their own children attending English-language schools there. Transnational Circulation In the existing body of scholarship on literacy studies generally and immigrant studies in particular, it is not hard to see immigrant literacies represented as moving unidirectionally—from one community’s “homeland” to its adopted home or from home to school (Carger 1996; Guerra 1998; Tywoniak and Garcia 2000; Vasquez, Pease-Alvarez, and Shannon 1994; Valdes 1996; Cairney and Munsie 1992; Delgado-Gaitan 1990; Orellana 2001; and Conchas 2001), and for good reason.10 Given the growing number of people migrating from the so-called Third World to the metropolitan centers of the First World, it is not hard to understand the value of those studies. There are multiple levels of cross-pollination happening in the language uses in those instances, too, although their examination lies beyond the scope of this study. The practices of the South Asian immigrants in Kingsville demonstrate that it is not just people who are/were on the move; literacies were, too, and not just one way. The Hindu school curriculum and study packets that Brinda and others developed found their way back to India to teach Indian culture, spotlighting the twoway circulation of literacies, in lieu of the one-way importation of native literacies to the adopted land as traditional wisdom had it. Snapshot 3 When Brinda visited India in 1997, she brought a large number

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of books, posters, and temple replicas to Kingsville and made a special arrangement with a New Delhi book distributor specializing in Hinduism. The distributor would email her a full description of each new book published about Hinduism in English and mail it to her as soon as she asked for it. She left behind “a small amount of money as a security deposit,” but the value of the books she received within the first six months far exceeded that amount. Her friends also ordered their favorite books through her, and she would clear the account every six months or so. The next year, when she told the distributor that she was working with a group to develop a Hindu school curriculum, he also sent her a long list of contacts in the United States who had created similar programs. In fact, her group was already in touch with some of these contacts in different states, from California to Pennsylvania, who provided Brinda’s group with their curriculum and sought feedback in return. Brinda also sent her syllabus to her cousin in Calcutta to teach her children during breaks from their English-language schools. “To tell the truth,” Brinda thought, “she realized the need of such an education by learning about what we were doing in America. In my own case, I learned much about our heritage from my grandparents but never paid attention when they wanted me to learn Sanskrit. My parents, and grandparents also, mostly wanted me to do excellent in school, go to college, and be successful. . . . Now here I am practicing medicine [and] also learning and teaching Sanskrit and the wisdom of ancient India.” Brinda is delighted her cousin is doing the same in India. The above snapshot highlights not only the movement of physical objects such as books that accompany, precede, or follow the mobile bodies but also their symbolic function and value. The books about Sanskrit and Hinduism represented India or South Asia for Brinda and her colleagues. Traditional wisdom would have it that “native” literacies travel from the homeland to the new place, as Brinda’s bringing of books and other artifacts from India shows here. But Brinda and her colleagues also did something that interested their relatives with similar predispositions in their homeland. The explanation involves the changes that are taking place “over there” by dint of globalization. Goma, Brinda’s

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cousin who worked as a bank manager in Calcutta, had an interesting explanation: In a globalizing world it matters less where you live. What matters is what you do and believe. Look we are here in Calcutta but our kids go to English school. They must know English, be fluent in it. They know Bengali also but English is there in school. At home it’s both English and Bengali. Then we realized, wouldn’t it be cool to try some of our NRI friends’ approach to teach their children . . . Sanskrit? Look, here we are and don’t seem to value what is right here, but we realized our kids may grow up without knowing much about our history and culture, the ancient history. When we grew up it was a different time. Now it is more English and that is certainly necessary. But our kids may not get our own kind of education. Then I learned about [Kingsville’s] program. She kindly sent me their packets and it was so helpful. I got my girls to memorize the shlokas easily. Stories, they already knew some . . . and we added more. . . . It wasn’t hard. Our kids knew English already, so it was easy to follow their method. . . . We didn’t have to do anything. It may sound like a shame but it comes as a package!

Like the South Asians in Kingsville, Goma identifies Sanskrit shlokas and stories with India. Since time and place are changing under the weight of globalization, Goma notes that the local history and culture might slip away only to be replaced by English unless people work to preserve their own heritage. Therefore, not only did she use the Hindu school materials to teach her own children, she also shared them with her friends with similar interests. Her friends “use these shlokas packets because it is easy. You just copy them, no?” Even for pedagogical reasons, the shlokas in English made it easy to read and recite for the students attending English-language schools. It would, however, not be the first choice, useful only because of the circumstances: “Sanskrit would be good. But we don’t have the time to spend [on it]. My daughters are now also learning a little bit of Sanskrit, [but] they can’t give much time to it. They must do well in their school. . . . It [Sanskrit] is good and necessary for us, [but] English is the future.”

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Goma’s choice to use the course packets from the Hindu school that Brinda sent substantiates the same kind of argument that members of the Hindu school also made. For them, as for Goma, it matters less where one is physically than which community one imagines oneself belonging to. Goma’s insistence that geographical location matters less than one’s beliefs and practices resonates well with the members of the Hindu school, for whom refiguring the roots was crucial to their identity. After all, according to Brinda, they “can’t ignore [the fact that] we live in America [where] . . . you can’t just step in a place and hear those Sanskrit sounds, that kind of atmosphere.” That, however, does not take away the imperative to imagine a community of practitioners engaged in similar practices. Kabita, who moved to Kingsville in 2002 and was not directly involved in the Hindu school, is acutely aware of the same reality: “Although we live and work in this country, we are not considered American. Even our children who are born and go to school here, work here [are not seen as belonging]. I am saying it not as a complaint. It’s all right. We are from our own place. We have our own and other part of identity. We are the same in India or America. It does not make a big difference [where we are]. . . . After all, we carry the same values and follow the same tradition.” Kabita’s assertion establishes that her community’s identity draws from its association with South Asia as well as embraces it. The desire to belong to multiple spaces simultaneously is strengthened by the specific forms of literacies that are recirculated and practiced transnationally. As somebody who writes occasionally for a magazine for Indian Americans, Kabita’s statement partly explains her own writing and the literacies circulated through the Hindu school. For her, all dispersed people of South Asian ancestry share a common history and have common interests in the United States. This was a view that Brinda and her colleagues tried to produce and teach at the Hindu school, as did her cousin in India. In addition to an articulation of identity, Sanskrit and Hindu identified literacies seemed to assuage some members’ fears of “unruly children.” Both Goma and Brinda were wary of “uncon-

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trollable individualism . . . and lack of respect for elders among the English educated.” It is not hard to understand the association of English with the Western tradition of individualism and the “idea of a self-made man,” which, according to Brinda, is only partly true. However, Hindu school teachers like Brinda see their literacies as part of a solution to the problems caused by or not resolved by the North American educational and social system. “Here we want kids to follow dharma, not blind faith but respect for parents and teachers and work. No discipline problem.” The Hindu school parents and teachers made it a point to mention that their children had excellent grades at their school and had “no, whatsoever no, discipline problem.” “Part of the credit,” according to Partha, “goes to the [Hindu] school,” because they taught “the value of respect to each and everyone.” Even Goma hoped to make her children “humble and respectful” by teaching them Sanskrit. The transnational circulation of Hindu identified literacies, generally and in particular the kinds taught at the Hindu school, should also be understood against the backdrop of the discursive exchanges between South Asia and Euro-America. The South Asian immigrants found the history of such exchanges reassuring and mentioned it with pride to justify the value of Sanskrit literacies. Historically, the Indic Orient held a deep fascination for the mystically inclined in Europe and the United States, especially after the English translations of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-gita became available. Such figures as Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1802–1882), and other New England Transcendentalists were inspired by these texts (Williamson 2010, 25). Vivekananda’s lectures at the World Parliament of Religions in 1893 and his four-year speaking tour occurred in a receptive cultural context that was sustained by the arrival and teachings of other gurus in the years ahead. Among the most notable was the speech of Pramhansa Yogananda to the International Congress of Religious Liberals in Boston in 1920. “For the next several years he lectured on the East Coast and in 1924 traveled throughout the United States, lecturing to audiences of thousands” (2010, 27). Although labor and race issues

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were complicated and not in favor of Indians, these events and the South Asians’ attempt at proving themselves Caucasians helped create an environment that was less hostile to Hindus than it otherwise could have been, or at least that is how many members of the Hindu school felt.11 Similarly, the nearly universal inclusion of some kind of yoga in school and health clubs in North America attested to the popular influence of Hindu practices that these immigrants could point to as legitimizing their own work. In fact, many members of the Hindu school were widely read in the Western valorization of the Indic Orient and found it useful in their project. Brinda and Rita often quoted the German scholar Max Müller extolling the virtues of Hindu epics.12 Many considered Sanskrit the most scientific of all languages and the reservoir of knowledge that the West has been discovering only since the Renaissance. The references to brahmashtra (in the epic Mahabharata and other texts) that could unmistakably annihilate the targeted world was mentioned as the inspiration for nuclear weapons. They also pointed out many other references such as different kinds of biman (aircraft) in the classical epics as the inspiration for modern airplanes and rockets and thus projected ancient Hindu wisdom as a precursor to modern science and technology. Bidur, who worked as a scientist in a national laboratory before taking a teaching job at a university in Kingsville, said, “In the West they started talking about artificial intelligence and space travel only in the last century, but if you look at the puranas (Hindu legends), they were imagined and discussed at least a few thousand years ago.” Such instances of glorification indicated the community’s need for positive reinforcement (against the condition of dislocation) and justified the work of the school. The pantheistic orientation of Hinduism allowed some members to claim a moral high ground on environmental issues, while the pluralistic traditions within Hinduism allowed others to imagine and interpret other religious figures and faith traditions as parts of the same system. A few school members like Srini thought of Christ as another form of Krishna, the Hindu god, and this practice was not just an exception. Even as different religions are

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configured and practiced as autonomous and thus exclusionary systems, Lola Williamson discusses some syncretic attempts of religious teachers like Bede Griffiths (also known as Dayananda) who “established a Hindu-Christian ashram in Tamil Nadu” of India (2010, 4). Such references provided useful ways for those who were well read to engage audiences from different religious backgrounds. Even more useful were the quotations from famous scientists and writers like Albert Einstein, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau extolling the virtues of Indian intellectual and spiritual traditions. Community organizers like Brinda discuss their way of life not only as Hindu but also as sanatana dharma (eternal religion or way of life), as all-encompassing. Among other passages, they cite Lord Krishna’s teaching in the Bhagavad Gita, “Whosoever worship Me through whatsoever path, I verily accept and bless them in that way. Men everywhere follow My path” (IV.xi). They sometimes also compare it to the teachings of other religions, especially Christianity with its sayings, as in John 3:16, “who so ever believeth in me shall not perish but will have ever lasting life.” These are diametrically opposite messages: one is all-inclusive while the other is exclusive.13 Krish noted that they used such references carefully when presenting at churches or public schools in Kingsville. “We listen to Krishna and can’t compare other faiths in bad light, but we make note of Krishna. We talk about yoga as an example of how they can use it in schools without abandoning their religion or converting. It is there for anyone to learn and benefit.” Krish was referring to the recent inclusion of yoga in a physical education class at a public school in Kingsville (and increasingly across the United States) and some parents’ resentment of a “foreign religion” making its way into the school. Teachers and parents at the Hindu school celebrated the syncretic feature of Hinduism, especially as articulated in selected Sanskrit shlokas and ancient texts. The use of some Sanskrit across different languages and traditions helped everyone to gather around Sanskrit and to imagine their communities to their liking.

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Thus Flows the Ganges This chapter has so far demonstrated how the teaching and learning of Sanskrit meant more than work in a language. The practice helped the community imagine itself as a coherent group with a history that had direct relevance to the issues of authentic cultural identity at present. The tactical value of a heritage language (more or less) aside, the special class standing of the community leaders (mostly doctors, engineers, lawyers, businessmen/women, and other professionals), and their cultural and religious backgrounds made it possible for them to invest the time, energy, and resources in a community that further validated their class and social standing among themselves and others. The fascination of the West with Eastern traditions and Sanskrit’s lending itself to that tradition certainly helped in these immigrants’ construction of a dharma, often compared to the eternal flow of the River Ganges. The (re-)creation, (re)circulation, and (re)appropriation were, however, motivated by the realities of displacement and relocation as well as the pressures of globalization (or rather homogenization, as Goma noted above). How else would we explain the Hindu school curriculum developed and taught in the US Mid-South finding its way back to affluent Indian families in India whose children go to English schools but need Sanskrit to stay connected to their roots? Sanskrit instruction in Kingsville constituted a hybridized site that drew on native identified cultural repertoires but also looked to the adopted society for its affirmation and utility. I have mentioned that different teachers and parents saw the value of Sanskrit in instilling “native values of respect and dharma” (Brinda) among the students. These were among the “lessons” that these immigrants saw as “lacking in American schools, public or private,” as Rita pointed out. By reaffirming these values, the community sought to carve out a niche for itself by conforming to the rhetoric of a model minority while “fitting into” the American multicultural mosaic as a distinct group of people. The range of literacies they sponsored and taught included both religious and cultural performances

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(dances, philanthropy, community work), although they were also often labeled as “cultural.” As a whole, these Hindu-identified literacies represented a native culture, internally and externally (i.e., to other communities), and constantly reproduced a community that was transnational and diverse yet coherent enough to be projected as one. However, the reproduction of common beliefs and practices thus imagined among Hindu-identified South Asians across spaces belied deep ambivalences and tensions within the community. The next chapter explores some such instances that crystallized around the very community that was meant to—and apparently did bring—everyone together.

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Chapter 4

Detours and Diversions (Re)Writing Gender Roles We are the mothers, and so we’ve got to preserve our culture. If we don’t, who will? If men don’t, let them do what they like.

—Rita They thought I betrayed my eastern [Indian] cultural values by divorcing. But I did what I thought was right . . . [as] with bringing up my kids. . . . But my work at the Hindu school has made things different now.

—Brinda These women are doing a commendable job, but sometimes they also do unnecessary things like talking about politics and such things like relationships. . . . Those things are diversions, no? . . . I mean, it may help sometimes but the main focus should be teaching religion, culture, Sanskrit, like that. Children come to learn those things . . . our culture, our values, our tradition.

—Chinta Education becomes a central terrain where power and politics operate out of the lived culture of individuals and groups situated in asymmetrical social and political spaces.

—Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003, 195) I don’t read such small stuff as letters, I read men and nations.

—Sojourner Truth

As demonstrated earlier, a large number of South Asians in Kingsville used Hindu-identified literacies, sponsored at the Hindu school, to form and imagine their communities. The stakeholders—the Hindu temple priests, management board, teachers, as well as students and parents—all were invested in the community that, to a certain extent, they saw and spoke of as embodying some core values for every member to live by. The guiding principles included the dharma or duty to one’s family (parents, children, siblings, and spouse), ancestral tradition, community service, and, generally, the Hindu way of life, sometimes also called the sanatana dharma. The Hindu school was supposed to transmit those values to the younger generation, so their children

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did “not forget genes” even in “ jeans.” However, such a representation of the community also belied a subtle contest to define those values and what they meant for different members of the community. After all, diasporic communities are not too different from other communities that comprise a stratified mass of members along various lines of difference. Sociologists point out class, caste/race, and gender and sexuality as being the most prominent markers of difference. As elsewhere, these markers created interesting power dynamics at the Hindu school, too, but nothing was as pronounced as the issue of gender. Even though the management board had a majority of men, the teaching faculty roster comprised exclusively women. That was only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. As Brinda and Rita in the epigraphs above indicate, the literacy work of the women teachers involved a complex negotiation of interpreting and teaching what constituted the core values even while challenging some of them from within the patriarchal, norming structure of the community that they were forming and transforming through these very acts. People like Chinta thought that some of the teachers deviated from their teaching responsibility when these teachers commented on “politics and such things like relationships,” even when Rita thought those commentaries were meant for providing a context to “understand the ancient texts and apply them to today’s world.” In this chapter, therefore, I focus on the work of these South Asian women teachers in Kingsville to examine how literacies within the immigrant community are gendered and imbricated in the structures of power. In a way, this chapter illustrates the way literacy education becomes a contested site, as Mohanty (2003) states, and how women’s attempts at exercising agency and authority in defining culture and heritage involves larger issues of gender roles, citizenship, and history, as proclaimed by Sojourner Truth. In particular, I explore how these women use literacy, specifically religious literacy, as an authority to (re)define their identity, culture, and community. Patrons like Chinta considered their activism as distractive and even diversionary. In the context of the priest’s characterization of the Hindu heritage as a continuous flow like the river Ganges, Chinta’s anxiety highlights the

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tensions within the community. Interestingly, teachers like Brinda and Rita justify their interventions in similar terms—although in pursuit of diagonally opposed goals. For them, their work provides a necessary corrective. In Rita’s words, “it’s better to take a detour rather than go down the hole,” because “who knows, the occasional stops and the like [short detours] can help us fix the main roads, no?” By interpreting the sacred texts and combining them with the secular—and by taking charge of teaching those texts—these women attempted to reorganize the community from within its norming apparatus. One could draw analogies between their work and that of their counterparts in various historical and cultural contexts, such as the nineteenth-century temperance women in the United States (Mattingly 1998) or contemporary Middle Eastern Muslim women reinterpreting the Qur’an (Barazangi 2004). Read against the backdrop of globalization, international migration, and their ethnic minority status in the United States, however, the South Asian American women’s interventions assume a unique role. Not only do their literacy practices rhetorically negotiate individual agency vis-à-vis their community and the ethnic national imaginary, they also respond to the host society’s perceived anxieties about immigrants in general and the stereotypes about South Asian Hindu women in particular. At the same time, their literacy practices, especially their Hindu school instruction, utilize their community’s “funds of knowledge” (Moll et al. 1992) to complement the official literacy taught in US schools. Discussions of literacy and gender often revolve around questions of whether men and women read and write differently, whether they read and write different kinds of texts, and whether—and how—gender affects the way children socialize and acquire literacies. As important as these questions may be, however, studies addressing these issues alone often ignore the larger and emerging contexts, which shape and are shaped by literacy practices. With the rise of New Literacy Studies, research has focused on the acquisition and uses of literacy in relation to structures of power and authority. Brian Street, for example, argues that not only are literacies important markers of class and gender identi-

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ties, but they also involve values as well as family and community relationships (1993, 12). The relationship between gender and literacy is complex, as Besnier (1995, 180) argues, because men and women may read or write differently or for different purposes— notwithstanding the problematic nature of these premises—and because literacies, especially their creation and uses, reflect and shape the community and its cultural values, in particular when these values are (re)defined and (trans)formed. The import of the South Asian American women’s work may be grasped, therefore, only through a perspective that defines immigrant identity and culture not as givens but as discursive practices continually produced and reproduced transnationally. Such an approach would highlight the transformative potential of these women’s literacy practices and demonstrate how their (re) production of South Asian culture in the adopted home goes beyond the sociological theory of educational reproduction (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990), as noted in chapter 1. For these women’s work redefines the politico-cultural status quo even as it reproduces it. By actively participating in the established structure of power relations, they use their role to open up the boundaries of those structures. This is made possible by their assumption of roles as the “protectors” of their culture and community. In fact, these women’s understanding of culture is already gendered. The teachers considered themselves “more responsible” for the continuity of “tradition . . . culture and values” than their male counterparts in their family and community, which, according to Rita, “include[d] the Hindu school.” According to her, “men may know a thing or two about culture, but it’s the mothers and grandmothers who teach lessons about values to children. They instill values in children. Kill women and your culture is pretty much gone.” Although Rita’s assertion assigns the responsibility of teaching children (especially cultural values) to women—and may legitimize the traditional ascription of private sphere to women and public sphere to men in India (Chatterjee 1989)—it would be wrong to consider it as a simplistic adoption of a patriarchal ideology. These teachers’ literacy instruction enacts a complex, even ambivalent, relationship with their commu-

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nity. Although their acts further authenticate their membership and give them agency, their teaching philosophy, indeed much of their literacy value system, is gendered and culturally inspired. Rita articulates this in the clearest terms when she says, “I read it somewhere that it is the mother who instills the ideals in the kids and . . . make[s] sure that they grow into [a] complete and responsible person. No, fathers should help, too, but you can’t force anyone unless it comes from within.” Like Rita, her colleagues also see themselves in the role of promoting and sustaining their native culture in the United States in ways that do not always replicate the same practice from their native countries in South Asia, where teaching is, while changing, still a male profession. An excerpt from a conversation with Rita may be revealing: Iswari: In India as in much of South Asia, it is very common to find male teachers. Sanskrit and religious matters are especially male preserves, but I see a role reversal here. Has it always been so here? What is responsible for this? After all, there are male members also, but why don’t they volunteer as teachers? Rita: Well, they [men] get all busier here. The professions are also getting diverse, so that could be it, too, no? Iswari: Sure. But you also have a profession, like other teachers here—all of whom seem to be career women—and no less busy, I guess, than the professional men. Is there anything else, too, here? Rita: Well, . . . many males are professionally good in their field, but they know nothing outside the field. They haven’t spent a lot of time with their grandmothers and don’t know our cultural mythologies. They don’t feel comfortable teaching. Plus it requires a different kind of commitment and sensitivity. They will come, greet, leave their kids, and go away. They may have professionally successful lives but spiritually or even emotionally not quite so fulfilling. . . . it is, you know, our choice. This is the right thing to do for our community and children. . . . We are the mothers, and so we’ve got to preserve our culture. If we don’t, who will?

The conversation above reveals several things at once, of which

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the most important are views about the profession (teaching) and cultural ideology regarding gender roles in the family and community. Diversification of the profession may be one of the reasons for role changes in the diaspora, as Rita points out, that explain why there were only women teachers except for a brief span of time when there was one male teacher. Similarly, the teachers (and parents) justify their work in pedagogical terms. In Shilpa’s words, “as mothers we can relate to kids more than males, I think.” One could also add the influence of the host society, the United States, where teaching has long been feminized. But the most compelling factor behind the existence of women-only teachers at the Hindu school seems to be the teachers’ own motivations deriving from their gendered and culturally defined sense of responsibility, the responsibility of mothers “to preserve our culture.” Even Simon, a male patron who regularly volunteers in the temple and whose children attend the school, uses the same metaphor to explain why all the teachers are women: “It’s not planned or anything. We had one male teacher in the past. But as mothers, they [women teachers] relate to kids very well. They know the stories; they know the tradition; . . . they carry on the culture, religion, I mean, its essence in the home and family.” The women teachers concur, as Rita does above, regarding the cultural role of women as knowers and keepers of tradition. Even as their teaching is culturally sanctioned and normalized, the Hindu school teachers occasionally encounter various forms of resistance. As Chinta expresses in the epigraph above, these women’s teaching was sometimes considered a diversion from actual learning or the cultural journey of its community, especially when discussions challenged some of the “core” values. According to Chinta, the lectures sometimes “went way too far,” which meant discussing politically or culturally sensitive topics, such as caste and gender discrimination that to him provided opportunities to deviate from the commonly held views of one’s dharma. Examples of such diversions included questioning Ram’s decision to abandon his wife, Sita, after he heard public criticism for bringing back a spouse taken away by somebody else. As noted previously, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata were among the most import-

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ant stories taught with particular focus on key events and their meanings. In one particular class, for example, when Ram is followed to the forest by his wife, Sita, and brother, Laxman, the act was interpreted as the appropriate spousal and sibling dharma. Ram had followed the pitridharma by following his father’s order to go to the forest for a certain period of time. Toward the end of the same story, Ram abandons Sita when somebody is reported to have criticized him for taking her in after she was kidnapped by Ravana during their stay in the forest. When this particular incident was brought up in a different class later, Brinda offered two interpretations. “Maybe it was supposed to happen that way. Sita had to go back to the earth she came from, and it was the best excuse for that to happen. But in a second thought, was it the right thing? Would it be good for somebody to do like that today? No, definitely not.” She added that even if it felt “okay in the overall story, that particular incident” did not sound right. “But then there are changes in the stories happening,” she asserted. She went on to state that “women are not treated well some times, and we should not be afraid to say that because that’s how you learn. Don’t do it now. Same thing with caste and creed.” Through such comments, Brinda not only critiqued some of the foundational stories of the community but also pointed out the role of interpretation in understanding those stories. By stating that “changes in the stories [are] happening,” she suggested that the tales handed down through generations are the product of ongoing retelling and interpretations and reflect the concerns of those who tell them. While such pronouncements may sound not too novel, given the context and the community where some members would follow those stories literally, Brinda’s teaching was not ordinary. To assert the role of interpretive power in the formation of a faith-based community within the setting of one would not easily go unnoticed. For example, Chinta happened to be sitting at the back of the class when Brinda discussed the incident mentioned above, and while he did not say anything at the moment, he took issue with the commentary. He “talked with friends also,” and they agreed that “the comments were not necessary.” Chinta thought “what happened in the past happened.

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It was a different time. There is no point in picking them. We should only learn the positive things.” For him, then, inconvenient topics should be off-limits. In fact, even the teachers seemed to think that it would help to focus on the positive threads in “our history and culture,” the parts that “inspire good behavior and positive thinking,” according to Rita. They just differed in how those parts would be selected and interpreted. If teachers like Brinda and Rita were to offer the traditional interpretation of the ancient tales, and occasionally point out problematic areas in them, or sometimes even question some assumptions gently, people like Chinta would be comfortable without the last, although he considered his community value-based and “as open and liberal as any other.” As for Brinda, “nobody goes out of the way to comment on someone’s marriage or divorce or some addiction or what not, but when we are discussing holy books and relevant topics come up, it is just bad to not apply it to the present-day situation and what you would do.” Chinta’s discomfort also had other reasons. Two of the teachers, Brinda and Rita, challenged the traditional notion of family values by divorcing their husbands. Their status as divorcees with children contributed to the more conservative members’ resentment of their work and leadership role in the community. Incidentally, they were by far the most vocal and widely read of the teachers—or at least it seemed that way and everybody, including the two themselves, thought that way—and felt confident commenting on “all issues, whether family, community, or political topics, as and when appropriate.” Being conversant in Sanskrit and spiritual authority provided them with the ethos to continue teaching and assuming leadership roles in the community although “there are still people unhappy about this thing [divorcee status].” Brinda was happy to note that the attitude toward divorce was “changing slowly [although] it still affect[ed]” her work. Although Brinda and Rita’s marital status drew extra attention to their work, even forcing them to “work extra hard to prove our strength,” in Rita’s words, it also made the other teachers less visible. In fact, other teachers also negotiated gender ideologies in complex ways through their work at the school. To demonstrate

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how their work involves complex cultural politics, I now turn to, briefly, the life histories of these teachers, before discussing the functions of their literacy work at the school. Literate Lives All seven women teachers—Brinda, Mona, Rani, Rita, Shilpa, Sweta, and Yema—were first-generation South Asian immigrants and working women. Like a majority of women immigrants who come from relatively privileged backgrounds in South Asia and with an elite, often Western, education, they arrived in the United States with their husbands in their twenties or early thirties. Except for Shilpa’s, their men were “special skills” immigrants under the 1965 US Immigration and Naturalization Act. While Mona’s, Rani’s, and Yema’s husbands were already working in the United States at the time of their marriage, Brinda’s and Rita’s found US employment after marriage. Sweta’s found a job in Canada immediately after their wedding, but she joined him in California two years later when he worked for an Indian information technology (IT) consulting firm. Not all came as trailing spouses, however. Shilpa came to the United States as a graduate student, with a research assistantship to pursue graduate studies in chemical engineering, and her husband was the trailing spouse. What made all these women alike was their middle- to upper-middle-class family background in India; their status as married (or formerly married) women with children; their college education in India and additional training in the United States followed by full-time work; their multilingual backgrounds, role in creating and/or teaching Sanskrit at the Hindu school, and regular use of multiple literacies to negotiate individual and community identities. These women’s work enacts a social and political conception of literacy—or rather “multiliteracies,” to borrow a term from the New London Group (1996)—in that they actively use and teach different literacies as goal-driven social practices. From being wives and mothers to community activists and teachers to career women, they juggle multiple roles in multiple settings, each of which requires a tacit knowledge of its own literacy and rhetorical conventions. Shilpa, for example, is a practicing

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trial lawyer with a law degree and a PhD in chemical engineering, an active social worker and community organizer, a teacher at the Hindu school, and the mother of two children, aged two and seven in 2005. Her literacy acts, as they cut through different disciplinary and discourse systems, are also the means by which she navigates those systems and settings successfully. She has a rhetorical understanding of her practice: “It’s about learning to do the right thing and talk the right language.” Self-identified as a “cultural person,” she reads and writes primarily for her work as a lawyer and teacher. Although she reads—and occasionally writes—in Tamil, her native language in India, and Sanskrit for her Hindu school teaching, her primary literacy acts are mediated in English. Her work requires extensive reading and analysis: “I need to read my cases; and, you know, all of it has to be very careful reading, because you are building a case. It also means you need to do a good amount of research. Initially it was a heck of a lot of reading because I was learning about the laws here, from basic issues like DUI to constitutional issues and to environmental pollution. But I like to concentrate on my specialty area, which is environment. . . . I don’t shy away from other cases, though.” Shilpa finds her training in science, first in India and later in the United States, useful in her legal profession, but the transition was not easy. In her own words, “in science you have it either black or white . . . law lies in the gray, the many possibilities and motives, . . . where you test cases against existing legal provisions. But broadly speaking, there are some similar procedures that I think we follow in both the fields, . . . like identify the issue, apply it to the rule, analyze it, and [work out a] conclusion. Analysis is common to law and science, but approaches differ. Law is less objective.” That has meant a careful “treading as you move in and out of one or the other system, law or science or community work . . . [that are] sometimes related but work differently.” Participating in different disciplinary discourses, however, is not entirely new to her: “I am used to this moving around . . . it’s like you keep going in and out of different systems of knowing, talking, and doing things, and like that.” Her inter- and transdisciplinary moves from science to law were reminiscent of her other moves across diverse settings,

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cultures, and languages. She even held a term as president of the India Community Foundation during which she organized concerts to aid the victims of the 2005 tsunami in India, co-organized and participated in a state-level multicultural festival, and, among other things, regularly wrote—and still writes—for the temple newsletter. Her literacy acts were thus predicated on sociocultural and professional needs, as were those of her colleagues. Like Shilpa’s, her colleagues’ lives and literacies need careful negotiation on multiple fronts. Mona works as an accountant at a local insurance company and is “primarily responsible for household chores” in the home in which she lives with her two children and her parents. On top of English, she reads and writes in Gujarati and Hindi and “enjoys reading and interpreting [Hindu] scriptures in Sanskrit.” Rani worked as an IT engineer in India before joining her husband in Kingsville, where she found a related job. Her work “at a small company” was “not fully satisfying,” but she liked her friends and the “Indian community.” Her husband was an engineer with the city government of Kingsville. The “most satisfying part” of her life in the city was “working at the [Hindu] temple and teaching.” Yema worked as a registered nurse for several years, first at a hospital and then in a clinic run by a group of Indian doctors in Chicago, but retired as her husband’s business grew. Her family moved to Kingsville because it was the central location to manage the family business of motels and gas stations spread across four states. In addition to helping with her family business, she was active in the community, often organizing community outreach programs with other community groups. Brinda’s and Rita’s circumstances differed from their colleagues’ in that they were both in the medical profession and were divorced after about twenty years of marriage. Brinda ran a solo practice as a family physician while taking care of one schoolage daughter and one college-age son. Widely read in the social sciences and deeply interested in spiritual issues, she was the coordinator of a South Asian women’s reading group as well as that of a “Hindi and Bengali language club” for children. Rita, a veterinarian who was relocated to six different states in twelve years with her pathologist husband, had been raising her two sons as a

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single mother since 2002. “Finally I said, I cannot move any more; it was taking a toll on our kids’ education. My ex-husband is in Maryland now; see, it took a toll on my marriage also. There are issues, but my kids are doing fine.” Like Brinda’s, Rita’s literacy acts center not only on her career and Hindu school teaching but also on her children’s studies. These women’s current literacy practices—running through different linguistic, cultural, and professional settings as they do—are shaped by social and political contingencies such as immigration, acculturation, and shifting identities. Their literacy practices, those in the ethno-national domain in particular, partly stem from their desire to reimagine their community in the adopted society, which, unlike their native bourgeoisie, recognizes them only as the Other (Bhattacharjee 1999). In addition to their experience of being othered, the teachers were also aware of their gendered status within the ethnic community above and beyond their minority status as South Asians in the United States. It is within this context that they turn the politics of nostalgia into productive rhetorical means to define their own identity and community. Shilpa speaks for all when she says, “Who would guess I would be teaching Sanskrit in English to immigrant children in the United States, I mean, if you saw me going to a science college in India or getting a doctorate in science and graduating with a law degree here in the United States ?” One may speculate that their awareness of double victimization may account for community activism, especially with regard to literacy instruction at the Hindu school. However, it would be a mistake to consider the women’s work only or mainly in terms of victimization, since they do not see themselves as victims but as women with agency. Shilpa, for example, explains, “our work at the temple is our own choice.” She and her colleagues also were led to “the path of exploration and teaching because of certain circumstances.” Her journey in that direction began with the onset of her motherhood. “When I had my first baby, I began to wonder, what is he going to be like? . . . I thought about the need of doing something to connect him to my culture, that is my husband’s and mine, I mean, our ancestors’ language and heritage. What could be a better gift to him than

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an education in that culture and heritage? The Sunday school was just opened and soon afterwards expanded. I joined it a few months later.” The teaching opportunity gave Shilpa another occasion to rejuvenate her knowledge of Sanskrit and ancient Indian culture. By reading a range of syllabi in other Hindu schools as well as English and Tamil translations of various sacred texts, she soon devised a syllabus for nine- to twelve-year-olds. Others like Mona, Rani, and Rita had similar beginnings. Brinda started teaching as soon as the Hindu school was formally inaugurated from a Hindi and Bengali Club, which she had started earlier. Rita joined the school when it expanded in 2002. Although all the teachers have been involved in community activities and teaching at the Hindu school, Brinda has had the most extensive experience working in, indeed organizing, the community. She was involved in building the Hindu temple and in opening the school, as well as in devising the school curriculum with other team members. All of them volunteer as teachers for their “own satisfaction,” in Shilpa’s words, and can always “balance time for our cultural and educational causes” and for “professional ones.” Community Literacies and Gendered Politics, or Word Work in Other Words The goals for these women’s teaching at the Hindu school are closely aligned with those of the school: “help students discover our culture and Vedic heritage” and “expose them [South Asian Hindu children] to our cultural practices.”1 This result was not unexpected, since some of these teachers were directly responsible for creating the curriculum. They were particularly interested in helping “kids to connect to their roots” and “to develop into whole persons,” according to Shilpa. All the stakeholders of the Hindu school (including the teachers themselves) thought of the teachers as both teachers and mothers. In fact, it was hard to distinguish one role from the other; they were mothers and considered good teachers, but they were also called guruma, which in Sanskrit and cognate languages referred to both teacher and mother, not as two separate entities but as one. As mothers, the teachers were also considered to be the knowers and keepers of culture.

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The image of the mother and its conflation with the roles of protector and sustainer of culture, as both the teachers and parents saw it, created an interpretive tension, a tension that also characterized the various contact zones—within and without the community—these women negotiated daily. The role gave them the authority to define culture and tradition (because they knew it) but also limited the scope of that authority by conventionally relegating mothers to the domestic side in the binary of private-public spheres. As a consequence, it conformed to images of South Asian women as submissive and docile, characteristics that are often used to define and limit the boundaries of their identity formation while the figure of the mother as a protector of culture also afforded them an active role in the public space of their community. The South Asian immigrant women’s literacy work was thus fraught with the cultural politics of gender that valorized women as the source of cosmic shakti (power) and simultaneously subjugated them by making that power tangential to men’s exploits celebrated in legends and myths. The ambivalent role of woman-as-mother—one who defines and preserves culture but is also restricted to the private sphere of home—clearly manifests this paradox. Historically, the image of the bharatiya nari (Indian woman or woman of the Indian Subcontinent) is based on the idealized figure of the mythical Hindu-Aryan woman, also eulogized as the adarsha nari (ideal woman), who is seen as carrying the true Indian culture forward into future generations.2 This figuration of mother/woman as a metaphor for the purity and sanctity of the spirit of Indian past is based on the “myth of the Vedic golden age” (Sangari and Vaid 1989, 7), a myth revived during India’s independence struggle and occasioned by translations of the Vedic texts. Feminist historiographers like Uma Chakravarty (1989) have traced the origin of this construction of Indian womanhood to a nineteenth-century bourgeois invention that reconstructed a particular brand of sanctimonious Indian past. This history also portrayed the “Aryan” Indian woman as an epitome of Indian sanctity who, by virtue of being limited to the private sphere of home, would not be corrupted by Western in-

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fluence. Therefore, so the assumption ran, the genuine bharatiya nari would be content with her position as the bastion of Hindu culture and not seek independence like the Western woman. Historians have located a profound influence of such thinking on the formation of nationalist movement in India. Partha Chatterjee (1989), for example, argues that the Indian Nationalist movement used the separation of social space into inner/outer, “ghar and bahir, the home and the world,” to resolve the “women’s question” as well as to reconcile the material progress of the West with the so-called inner spirituality of Indianness. In this ideological schema, inner, “essential” Indianness would be maintained in people’s attitudes and beliefs and in the domain of “home,” where women would guard the “superior” Indian spirituality while the society embraced material progress through the technical innovations of Western modernity. As a result, the home sphere would be protected from “Western” influences, and women would be responsible for protecting Indian sanctity. Such a dichotomization of the inner-outer sphere also handily explained why the colonization of India’s public/outer sphere had failed to penetrate the essential identity of the spiritual East (Chatterjee 1989). In this way, Indian nationalist ideology produced a “new woman” who was educated and cultured but still subjugated to the patriarchy. The elevation of woman as the protector of Indian cultural sanctity still limited her to the private sphere. Even as women were allowed to participate in the public sphere in more recent history, it was meant to make them better wives and mothers or enable them to support the family financially in a changing economy. One way of understanding the life and literacy practices of South Asian immigrant women like the Hindu school teachers would be to see them as interpellated by the dominant Hindu patriarchal ideology. After all, a major part of their current literacy life—reading, writing, and teaching—revolves around their religion, whose authority has been used to marginalize and disempower women. They study and teach, thus internalizing and promoting, what they call “Eastern values,” which they define from the lens of Hinduism. Their literacy activism, so the argument would have it, reproduces the bharatiya nari as devi (goddess)

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without shakti as Anannya Bhattacharjee (1999) and others have pointed out. However, such an assessment would not account for the ways in which the women participants in this study used the opportunity to create and teach given literacies to assert individual agency and, in the process, to reform the community and simultaneously enter into dialogue, albeit indirectly, with the official literacy instruction in US schools. Nor would it explain their attempts to subvert hegemonic relationships by creating a space and claiming an active role within the structure. In some ways, these women’s literacy work reminds us of the nineteenth-century temperance women, who, while seen as “conservative and complicit in their own oppression,” were also the “strong” and “sensible women who recognized the real circumstances of their existence and strove, pragmatically, to improve life for themselves and for others” (Mattingly 1998, 1). Like the temperance women who appropriated a “progressive message” (1998, 2) in a conventionally acceptable rhetoric of patriarchy, these immigrant women also adopted the culturally appropriate discursive repertoire to educate their community. Their reading, writing, teaching, and participation in civic activities portray them as selfless Indian women committed to their culture and community while helping them transform what it means to be South Asian women in the United States. However, these women’s struggle is also different from that of the temperance women, for they are struggling not only against oppression within their community but also against the dominant culture. It means that we need to examine the uses and consequences of their literacy practices in more than one way in order to understand the complex dialectics operating between the individual practices and the patriarchal assumptions circulating within the community. For neither Hindu women teachers nor Muslim women’s literacy practices substantiate the stereotypes of “domestic” South Asian women unproblematically. Although they do not completely break away from their tradition, neither are they content with their traditional roles. In fact, Brinda and Rita challenged the myth of the South Asian adarsha nari in their personal lives as well as in their inter-

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pretation and teaching of culture and heritage. Their lives and community practices as divorced mothers and career women is as antithetical to the image of the adarsha nari as it is to the stereotype of husband-worshipping South Asian woman in the United States. Their colleagues and reading group members join them in reinterpreting their religious canon and redefining gender roles. While they are cognizant of the cultural and political situation in their native country—and sometimes even intervene by raising funds for specific literacy or disaster relief programs there—they are deeply invested in their own and their children’s present and future in the United States. Such realities require that we reconfigure what culture and community mean in today’s technology-rich, mass-mediated context of increased globalization and transnational migration. No strict view of culture as a subset of static relationships and values can explain individual or cultural identity when, as Arjun Appadurai (1996) maintains, identity and culture are continually produced and reproduced on account of various flows of labor, capital, images, and people. Although populist globalists such as Thomas Friedman (2005) consider cultural difference and locality as a given, group identity (culturalism) today is mobilized in a way that involves “a contestation of values about difference, as distinct from the consequences of difference for wealth, security, or power” (Appadurai 1996, 14). Culture in its purest form is to be found in the dialogic contestation of culture within culture. That means culture, cultural difference, and locality no longer remain static but are subject to reproduction, here and now. It is in this sense that the immigrants’ reproduction of culture in general and the women teachers’ reproduction of their native culture through their literacy practices, including Sunday school instruction, goes beyond the classical theory of educational reproduction. The implication of this reconceptualization of culture and identity would be that the ethnic nationhoods that immigrants re-create in the diaspora are not mere reimaginations of older nations—similarly perceived in terms of race and gender. Instead, they stand in opposition to the adopted state that minoritizes and/or others them. While anxiety about the loss of self propels the creation of

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a self-identified nation, immigrant ethnic identities and nationhoods constitute, as Frederick Jameson (1998) maintains, ways of opposing the hegemonic order while being within it. The South Asian women’s literacy work does not merely reimagine their cultural landscape in a static fashion but transforms it while engaging the host society and its official literacy instruction in strategic ways. Before I discuss how they initiate dialogue with the host society later, I would like to present how their literacy acts re-create their own ethnic community. Brinda believes that “change happens when you do things differently.” Her belief seems to undergird much of these teachers’ visions for the school, for transformation does not appear anywhere on the agenda. They simply do. As Shilpa says, “it is being active, culturally, . . . and gaining your authority and respect in the community. As mothers we also understand our roles well. Our students and parents also do the same.” In this case, the figure of the mother is no longer restricted to the domestic sphere; it is used to project an ethos in the public sphere of the ethnic community. Such a role complicates the private-public binary: the South Asian woman in the diaspora is no longer restricted to the domestic sphere, but she is also expected to carry over some of the “duties” of the domestic sphere into the public space. The increased participation of women in the public sphere comes with a price and is haunted by the imagined role of the idealized “Indian woman” as the protector and transmitter of native cultural values. Brinda’s description below serves to highlight the tension. Although she had invested profusely in the building of the temple and its activities from the beginning, when I got divorced people had a hard time accepting it. Time will heal that. Some would say, “Don’t go to her son’s birthday party because she is divorced” . . . and would also not want to involve me in temple activities. My worst experience was . . . one day, a woman signaled the priest that he should skip me while distributing tirtha [sweetened holy water], and he sat down without giving me. Now he says “bahen [sister] let me do a puja for you at your home,” but I don’t [invite him]. . . . I go to the temple because of

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god and my relationship with him, not priest. No middle man. I’m very polite to them, but no.

Brinda’s ostracism for deviating from the image of a husbandworshipping Indian woman strengthened her resolve to fight back in a way that would put her on a higher moral pedestal than her critics. She read the Gita and other Hindu spiritual texts more closely than before and organized a reading group by reaching out to other women with similar interests. In addition to her native Bengali, English, and Hindi, she mastered Sanskrit and honed her interpretive skills of religious texts. When the last and only male teacher left the Sunday school in 2002, she stepped in to teach the students aged thirteen and above. Her mastery of religious texts, public speaking skills, and community activism helped her battle the stigma attached to a divorced, single woman. Still, I know some people may not like the fact that I am a divorcee, but nobody can discriminate or anything like that. So much so that when there is an outside group coming to visit the temple, there is a phone call, “Would you like to come? Such and such group is coming to visit the temple. Could you show them around? You will be able to explain this.” They recognize my linguistic ability, my ability to communicate and explain without any personal prejudice and ability to relate to them because of my knowledge of different cultures and religions. Even the men who resented me come to listen when I am giving a talk on the Geeta to my senior students. I am also often asked to give speeches on behalf of the Indian community, culture, temple, and the like . . . I am also used to just stand up and speak when I need to.

Her knowledge of her community and her public speaking abilities, combined with her stable financial status, helped Brinda quickly regain her ethos in the eyes of her community. But that is not the only thing she is interested in. Moreover, Brinda and Rita are interested in contesting the formulaic misogynous assumptions underlying traditional interpretations of Hindu religious texts. In Brinda’s words, “I also go there [temple] because, you know, there is a perception that

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whatever the priest says is right, and that’s not the case. I am interested to discuss philosophical concepts to challenge them. If you look at ancient texts, women have a real voice and even god is ardhanariswar (half-man and half-woman). So we need to change our perception of what is religiously sanctioned about man and woman.” As a self-proclaimed “fighter” with a prominent role in the community, Brinda was “able to generate responses quickly.” Her husband’s position as a prominent community member also may have had something to do with the public perception of her role in the community. When she was still married, they made it, in her own words, “like a power couple”: he was a physician and even chaired the Hindu temple’s board of directors in its early phase. Their visibility in the community made their divorce a “community affair,” and Brinda was thankful that “it did not hurt the temple and school so much” because she knew that “in many other cities family and community feuds have caused community breakups.” Although Rita had a similar story, not everyone knew it because, first, they moved to Kingsville much later than Brinda, and, second, her husband was not involved in the community. According to Rita, “he was just there sometime but didn’t bother about doing anything.” Besides, their relationship was already deteriorating by this time. “He moved to Maryland . . . [with] a new job soon, and that was the end of it all.” While she is less visible in the community than Brinda or some other members, it does not mean that she is less committed to the cause of using Hindu identified literacies to “promote a better understanding of women and everybody else.” Brinda’s and Rita’s active reading, interpretation, teaching, and vigilance have had positive impacts in the lives and learning of others also. “When [Brinda] started teaching Gita,” Ananda, a male patron and temple administrator, said, “people were a little curious. Not that women had not done it before; . . . some have certainly done that. But she was doing it and also inviting parents and other members, those who come to listen to occasional guru pravachan by visiting spiritual leaders in her class.” The result was an increased recognition that “women can interpret such a great work as well as men,” according to Rita. “When we did so, it be-

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came apparent that we focused on certain elements that don’t often get enough emphasis, . . . and I knew that when some parents said it.” In Rita’s experience thus, their literacy work is not only “preserving culture” but also “actually correcting it and making it more even and in tune with time and heritage; . . . correcting the wrong assumptions that have come down through wrong hands.” Clearly, these teachers appropriate the rhetoric of “pure” culture to contest the male-dominated interpretation of religious texts and to challenge the way they are othered within the community. With such a commitment to transforming the community from within and by controlling the traditionally male preserve of Sanskrit teaching, these women’s literacy practices re-create their community, for it is through the acts of communication and interpretation that social worlds are created. In this sense, their work has opened a dialogue on their culture by contesting its formation, and it gives these educators, who otherwise are othered, active agency. As Paulo Freire puts it, “if it is in speaking their word that people, by naming the world, transform it, dialogue imposes itself as the way by which they achieve significance as human beings” (1970, 88). Insofar as naming the world is the first step toward transforming it, these women are doing just that by challenging the dominant cultural practice. Their literacy practices demonstrate a complex relationship with their community and the idealized image of a bharatiya nari in the diaspora. Enacting the modest role of Hindu school teachers, they are also redefining their identity for themselves and their community. While these teachers’ literacy instruction at the Hindu school maintains a cultural dialogue in the public sphere of the community, two of these teachers are also active members in a South Asian women’s reading group aimed at “supporting one another.” Brinda initially organized the group of seven core members (five Indian, one Bangladeshi, and one Pakistani). With its genesis going back to Brinda’s personal struggle in the mid-1990s, the group membership shrank in the immediate aftermath of her divorce in 1998 and resurged in 2003 to fizzle out again in 2004, when two active members moved out of town and, according to Shilpa, “because of the pressure of work and families.” The once-a-month

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meetings of three to four hours centered on the designated books and similar reading material, other relevant news items, “sometimes films also,” as well as “personal and family issues.” Since 2005, the group has met only when one of them wants to discuss a specific issue or book. Brinda does not usually miss the meetings, often held at her house. Rita and Shilpa attend only occasionally, as Shilpa puts it, “mostly because of a tight schedule.” For Rita, now “it’s more like a support group and less a reading club, but we do discuss some books and issues also.” These women’s attempts at controlling their own literacies— reading, discussing, and teaching at their discretion—resembled, in important ways, the women’s literacy activities that Anne Gere (1997) describes in her study of reading clubs at the turn of the twentieth century. Like the nineteenth-century club women, the South Asian women were interested in defining their place within the culture, but they did so by intervening in the traditionally male sphere of religious and philosophical discourse. The spiritual-philosophical texts they read and taught reflected their class and cultural backgrounds; however, these women’s appropriation of those texts “outline[d],” to borrow from Gere, “the terms of their own representation” (1997, 6). In effect, they contested the popular interpretations and applied them to their instruction at the Hindu school. According to Brinda, the texts most discussed in the meetings included the ones that were also taught at the school: the “Ramayana, Mahabharata, Gita, Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, etc. etc.” In that light, the meetings also served as special preparation classes for teaching, but the list included many other things, including the “Bible and Qur’an” as well as nonfiction: “history and culture books and films.” These gatherings, according to Brinda, “always help you to see who you are, who you want to be, and what it means to be who you are.” Although “we mostly read old books, we talk about their relevance today . . . their symbolic . . . hidden meanings, and how to understand and apply them” to modern concepts of individual and national identity. Mona, who attended only a limited number of these meetings, found them to be productive not only in helping her teach at the school but also in reconceptualizing her own identity.

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I have always struggled with the stories of Ramayana and Mahabharata and women in there. I love the stories, but I also get confused about their relationships to men. In the group, we read a chapter from one of the texts which said something like “deities are most pleased wherever women are respected” and we also talked about the symbolic meaning of those men and women characters from the puranas. . . . You see, so much depends on how you interpret a single story. What does it mean to me, and what [do] I do? Why didn’t we hear some parts of those stories and only others? . . . You see, the stories have layers of meanings, and we can focus on and interpret the parts that are relevant and useful to us.

For Mona and other members, thus, the reading group became a site not only for reading and discussing religious texts but also a platform for developing new lines of interpretation. Highlighting the hitherto unrecognized stories or subplots, these women also challenge the male canon of religious texts. Although this happened in the relatively more solitary context of a small reading group, these women also took the knowledge formulated and tested here to the social setting of their teaching at the Hindu school. When they teach, “we make sure that we put the well-known stories beside the less known,” in Brinda’s words, “because we want our students to realize that male and women are just the two sides of the same coin, I mean equal.” The less well-known stories often dealt with women in ancient South Asia more as bidushis (intellectuals) or rulers and political strategists than as gods’ or kings’ consorts as the majority of popular tales have them. “There is also a tendency to blame women for the wars in Ramayana and Mahabharata,” Brinda adds, “but that’s just an accusation by men to blame women for their mistakes.” In their teaching, therefore, she makes “sure that they understand the stories in proper context.” Transforming their gendered roles and those represented in myths and legends circulating in their culture, has meant, for these South Asian women, transforming their community. At the heart of their activism is a conservative rhetorical performance in a posture less formal but more effective than that of the priests or other schoolteachers. As a matter of fact, their literacy instruction

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is a direct community intervention: their classrooms consist of not only children but also their parents. They teach what counts as culture, community, and values in a socially interactive setting, and in the process, they define a South Asia that is remote in time and place yet a part of their daily lives. Their use of Sanskrit, albeit via the English language, and ancient religious texts creates an aura of bygone days and lends them credibility. By bringing the implications of those texts to bear on the lives and issues of the community and its members, they turn the mythical past into a usable resource to reimagine their community. One should not forget the difficult balancing act that these teachers perform. Brinda remembers a man who questioned her interpretation of a section of the Gita immediately after her divorce: “When we were discussing the Gita, and I made a remark about women’s place in ancient South Asia as more respectful than during the Middle Ages and later . . . one of the parents in the audience said something like, ‘you say that because you are in a difficult family situation.’” Brinda quoted the text, the ultimate authority, in which Lord Krishna extols the superior role of women in sustaining life, effectively rendering him toothless. Although Brinda and her colleagues know that reading and interpretation are always already interested projects, textual evidence provides the most surefire authority. Similarly, although their narratives of the ancient Indian Subcontinent as the seat of learning and women-friendly civilization are comparable to a similar image of the Greco-Roman period assumed, problematically, by many Eurocentrists, such a reimagination comes in handy when dealing with protests that carry misogynous undercurrents. These women’s literacies are inextricably tied to their identity. Although their active professional life in the United States gives them a modern identity, and a Western one at that, their consumption and production of spiritual-cultural texts and language within the ethnic community also guarantees their South Asian identity. According to Brinda, straddling the two worlds brings them the “best of both the worlds” or at least, for Mona, it helps them understand and negotiate the demanding and often conflicting ideologies of South Asian women projected and idealized

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differently in their ethnic community and in mainstream American culture. This does not always happen to be the case for all South Asian immigrants. For example, Azi, a Bangladeshi (American) housewife, had only a limited English proficiency; so did her husband, who worked two jobs to support the family. Unlike Brinda’s and Rita’s (or their fellow Bangladesh American Noor’s) children, Azi’s four did not read and write in their native language (Bengali), and they struggled with English, with the result that the “best of both the worlds” might remain ever elusive to them. Class wields enormous influence on how individuals and groups use literacy gateways and sponsorships to (re)produce their culture and identity. However, when it comes to their relationship to the larger American culture as individuals and as a group, the South Asian women are united in their general identification as “women of color.” As Mona says, “it was the first time in my life I ever heard that kind of thing about me . . . it is like you are not a human being but this thing of color.” As the general category of identification for nonwhite women, “women of color” is fraught with problems for a number of reasons. Accepting such an identification, according to Grace Poore, does not only co-opt the dominant culture’s politicized language of identity but also “overlook[s] misappropriation of the struggle for language of identity by communities of color” (1998, 21). Therefore, part of the goal of these women’s literacy activism is, according to Mona, to “get out of the box” created for them by the dominant culture, through linguistic violence and misappropriation. When Brinda says, “we don’t want to be anything, we want to be ourselves, bash, that’s all,” she enunciates an identity politics that resists fictive categories of racial and ethnic identity. For Shilpa, increased literacy and activism within and without the immigrant community can redress the objectification of identity at the hand of the dominant culture. Even as the Hindu school teaching helps the community retain what many consider as their essential culture and heritage, these teachers also see their work at the intersection of American school education and South Asian cultural and spiritual values. Rita explains:

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To be frank, I think, nobody would value this [Hindu] school if we only talked about India and South Asia, Hinduism and Buddhism, yoga and Bharatnatyam (a classical dance), etc., etc. . . . It would be good but not enough. . . . After all, our kids are growing up here. It is here they will have to survive. So how far can they go with that? They are not going to be priests, are they? No. That means, we should sensitize them about where we come from, inculcate in them values and respect for culture and heritage, but also help them how to use that in their life . . . how it applies to their life, . . . and how it can benefit them.

Clearly, Rita and her colleagues hope to expose their students to what Luis Moll and others (Moll et al. 1992; Moll 2000) call “funds of knowledge”—the cultural, social, and intellectual capital shared by community members—and to utilize those resources to keep them “connected to their roots.” The goal is fraught with the language of free-market globalization, where religious education becomes another economic sign and is expected to bring “benefit” to its possessor. Its utility value is immense in the contemporary educational setting, where schools and colleges do not always seem to build on the native cultural and linguistic literacies that “diverse” children bring with them to class. The institutional goals of literacy teaching in schools with high-stakes testing often produces a classroom atmosphere where students’ native literacies can hardly be examined, promoted, or utilized. Rita and her colleagues, therefore, consider themselves responsible for helping these students examine their school literacies culturally, and vice versa. All the teachers make it a point to emphasize connections between what students can expect to learn at school and how their “cultural education helps them with that.” Rita claims that their teaching positively influences “kids’ learning in their school” and, as evidence, keeps a regularly updated grade sheet of her students. Rita thinks, “it starts with attitude change and respect to learning. But we also get them to use our cultural knowledge in their school work. Like Vedic math or environment and why we consider trees as divine.” Such an awareness gives the students “an edge when they are competing here or elsewhere.”

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These teachers’ literacy work thus also attempts to break down the binaries often made of school versus home and immigrant versus native literacies. As Rita claims above, their teaching complements the goals of a North American general education to make it more global and competitive at the same time as it melds a specific but widespread lapse they encounter in US culture as a whole. They justify their teaching by citing the model-minority label attached to Asian students in the US school system. The dominant assumption is that Asian students excel in science and mathematics and ignore their potential in language arts. Brinda argues, One problem I’m noticing is that our kids are not expected to do well in language arts like writing, communication, creativity, and the like . . . I think they are equally important. They [immigrant children] already know several languages. We work to make sure that they move [transition] from one language to another smoothly. . . . Teachers could push them a little more in English . . . to develop their experience with their [non-English] language and culture and make their English writing better. Our kids get generally what everybody gets, but the expectation is to exceed in math and science. They always want the South Asian and Asian . . . to do excellent in them [science and mathematics] like it comes to our kids automatically . . . they hardly note how much we work for that. . . . they also push our kids away from art and philosophy, writing and management. I see a huge problem there. Can’t our kids also be artists and CEOs?

Although Brinda wants to push the students to explore different possibilities for college or career, not everyone agrees. After all, the myth of the model minority is not a purely Anglo-American invention. As Shilpa suggests, the immigrant community is as responsible as the rest for the stereotype of mathematical-minded Asians: “We do that all the time. Most came here in that special professional class [following the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act], and they want their kids to do best in the same field [as their parents] like there are no other fields, so kids sometimes revolt. One of the things we do as teachers is to provide them some

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support that other things like culture and language also matter.” As the myth of the model minority continues with the narratives spun by the likes of Dinesh D’Souza, who conveniently overlook the fact that the professional class of Asian Americans consists of state-selected elites, and the South Asian continues to carry the karma of being used to denigrate historically disfranchised groups like the African Americans (Prashad 2000), a larger sample of the South Asian population is also gradually entering the United States thanks to family reunion acts of the Immigration and Naturalization Services and the Diversity Visa program. Even then, the diasporic South Asian communities themselves usually try hard to erase the existence of those who do not conform to the model minority myth and treat them as the Other of the ideal Indian community living in the United States (Bhattacharjee 1999). Cognizant of their own individual priorities and distinct linguistic and cultural backgrounds in their country of birth, these teachers, however, are more aware of the differences among themselves as well as between students and parents. As a result, according to Shilpa, they “also advise students on their learning and potentials and help our parents realize that medical doctor and computer engineer are not the only things to be.” The Hindu school educators also enact what Gere calls “symmetrical literacy” (1997, 24) in that they emphasize reading, writing, and performance in their teaching. Their work conceptualizes literacy in its consumption as much as in production mode as they emphasize participation rather than passive reception. They contextualize their teaching of ancient texts against the issues of their concern and have students respond to them in creative ways. For example, when Brinda taught the story of the eighteen-year war of the Mahabharata, she asked her students to compare it to the Iraq War, especially with regard to the moral and ethical dilemmas that the war presented to its stakeholders and the ways power was used to construct a moral rationale in both instances. Similarly, as mentioned earlier, when Rita taught an episode from the Ramayana in which “God-incarnate” Rama abandons his wife, Sita, giving in to the public criticism that he brought his abducted wife back from the demon-king Ravana, she had her class break

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into two groups for a debate. At issue was the symbolic meaning and its relevance to contemporary society, with discussion prompts such as what options Sita had during her abduction and abandonment that encouraged a critique of patriarchal bourgeoisie. While demonstrating a Bakhtinian understanding of language as contested social practice with material consequences, these attempts also created space for a robust critique of power relations and marked a progressive commitment to cultural change. For, as Freire (1970) maintains, such dialogues with an emphasis on the relationship between words and their material consequences help build critical consciousness and initiate cultural change. These women clearly embraced a political view of literacy, and their own double marginalization helped them see how literacy was related to power. Occupying a liminal space as they do between the dominant American culture that sees them as “domestic” South Asian women and the immigrant community that traditionally divides the private and the public sphere along gender lines, these women found their position helpful to see through and to critique the unequal power relationships in both the settings. Brinda, while critical of the immigrant community that “still needs to come of age,” sees duplicity and hypocrisy in the representation of so-called American culture (in the singular) in the mass media and popular imagination and in what it means for a multicultural society and education: Brinda: America seems like it is in shock with all these different people and cultures coming in, whereas in India we have always had that historically. The Moguls came in; before them Jews came in, the Parsis came in, we’ve had a lot of different people and took difference as granted. People can follow their own little whatever it is, and it wouldn’t be considered antinational. Iswari: Have you had anybody suggest that to you, anybody you know, or with regard to your cultural or religious practices? Brinda: Not directly to me but when I listen to the radio and TV, it is always there, especially most recently. Even on NPR, they often talk about “what’s going to happen to our culture?” But which culture? They don’t mention. The Native Americans have

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had their own culture; Christianity was pretty much forced on them; we know what happened to African culture when millions were pretty much kidnapped from their homes, enslaved, and sold, so when they are talking about culture, what culture are you talking about? The Western European culture? Within them too there are sects and hierarchies. They talk about multiculturalism favorably so long as it doesn’t threaten their own little box of prejudices. . . . We got to do something since we live here and our kids learn and live here.

Brinda’s and her colleagues’ reimaginations of their native nation as ever tolerant social units certainly might be problematic when the systemic inequities dogging the native subalterns are invisible to these educators (as they are to the native bourgeoisie). The political ambivalence aside, Brinda and her colleagues’ literacy practices, especially in the domain of community, challenge the assimilatory impulse in the dominant culture of the host nation. Meanwhile, their knowledge of US culture and history and their own stake in its future leads them to conduct those practices as nonthreatening to the host society at the same time. They balance these contradictory roles by emphasizing what they consider South Asian in their reading, writing, and teaching within the ethnic domain and simultaneously by participating in public and professional lives of the host society. In addition to living in mixed neighborhoods and working in publicly visible positions, they also actively participate in the community work of the adopted society. For example, in addition to organizing a women’s reading and support group and teaching in the Hindu school, they also actively participated in the parent-teacher association (PTA) at their children’s schools, cultural and religious festivals at the local and state levels, and other similar projects in the mainstream community. Brinda and her colleagues were also often invited to speak by church and other groups, where they explained how their “culture” was similar to “American culture” in its emphasis on tolerance, cooperation, and co-existence. The South Asian community that formed around the temple and school thought of the immigrant community being on a par

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with any other community culturally, especially in its treatment of women or minorities. Given that various marginalized constituencies have to fight for their rights in different communities, they were not wrong. But the women’s work demonstrated a process in which the community was in motion as their work involved a deft negotiation of the available means. In fact, their work, it seemed, was ensuring that the liberal impulses of South Asian heritage were promoted and highlighted. Because they were working within a tradition that was not always as inclusive and that had reified notions of what counted as appropriate, the balancing act of being “modern” and retaining an authentic culture involved going back to the history of culture to (re)identify and (re)deploy the usable in the project of reimagining the community. Mona offers such an example to justify the artificiality of caste and gender discrimination. We see that in the Vedas and Upanishads, women are equal to men most of the times. Same thing with castes. Even in the Ramayana, Lord Rama takes food offered by an untouchable saying that caste is not real; it is your action and intention that matter. In fact, he says that you are not born into a caste; if you do good you are the most noble, whatever caste you may be called. On the other hand, you may be called Brahmin, but if your actions are not pure and altruistic, you are the meanest. So there is no reality of caste.

In their teaching, these women made sure that the liberal aspects of the Indian history came through, with especial emphasis on the fact that inequities and discrimination were the result of diverting from the true path of the quest for truth and meaningful life. In Shilpa’s words: “If our students, our children, do not act well with others in the community and outside the community, there is no point in our teaching. They should know their roots and also the modern context to be complete persons. Knowing our culture and heritage will help.” It is the “search for truth” and “meaning of life” that fueled and characterized “the discussions recorded in the hundreds and thousands of books, famous and little known today.” Teaching some lessons from them, accord-

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ing to Shilpa, would create a “good community where gender and other discriminations do not exist.” In this way, the all-women teachers re-created and deployed literacies to redefine their role in the community and contributed to their students’ literacy and social lives. However, their work also contained a paradox in that the overall structure of authority in which they worked did not always reflect the conversations taking place in the classroom. Males often occupied the top executive positions on the management board of the temple, while women continued to be responsible for more historically gendered duties such as publications, public relations, the treasury, and, of course, teaching (the last one being a mixed bag in more than one way). Although every instructor and even the management board members had their own explanations for the near exclusivity of women teachers in the school’s history of about a decade, most pointing to “coincidence,” it appeared to be coincidental only by some design. Why, one may ask, had there been only one male teacher in the recent past, who was also replaced by a woman, when women teachers were always replaced by those of the same sex? It was not because these women teachers had a lot of free time: they were all career women with children. A convergence of South Asian history that assigns women the responsibility to “preserve culture and heritage” and the feminization of teaching in the United States seems to be encouraging the phenomenon. Similar gender politics pervade the cultural and literacy work of Muslim South Asians. If the Hindu school teachers’ work provides a concrete example of literacy’s relationship with culture’s norming apparatus vis-à-vis gender, so do the literacy work of Muslim women such as Hena, who is like the women teachers at the Hindu school but also different on account of her Muslim faith and the relationships it engenders in the mainstream culture. Even so, she uses religious literacies to gain a voice in the community. Rhetorical Self-Fashioning These women’s work refashions their rhetorical agency and ethos to further solidify that agency. Their rhetorical self-fashioning is

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not unlike Krista Ratcliffe’s explication of ethos as “emerg[ing] as a result of rhetorical negotiations in which speakers and writers are active agents, albeit with discursive and cultural limitations, in the dance of bodies, tropes, and cultures” (2005, 126). Within the specific cultural and political constraints of their communities, these women are not only strategically deploying “the available means of persuasion” to create a respectable space for themselves but also working to form and transform those means and conditions of persuasion. In this way, these women mobilize their literacy activities to self-fashion their self and identity. Engaging in many activities such as reading, writing, curriculum design, teaching, talking, and navigating multilingual and multicultural domains of cultural and professional lives, they make a difference in their own lives and the life of their community. In sum, these women create and deploy their literacies in multipronged ways. They have to battle the crippling effects of the dominant culture’s reductionist portrayal and the paternal culture within the marginalized community to which they belong. The choice they have made to remain within the norming structure and appropriate it to their ends is certainly not the most radical move. But this is the choice they have made and their deployment of literacies to those ends substantiates multiple ways literacies are embedded in power relationships. In fact, Brinda and her colleagues’ work with Sanskrit instruction also reflected a resurging interest in Sanskrit among some educated women in India. Although Goma used Kingsville’s Hindu school curriculum to begin teaching her children Sanskrit in India, that decision tells only part of the story. Across Hindu India, educated women are also found studying Sanskrit to intervene in the local intellectual tradition and reconfigure it. In her study involving women Sanskrit scholars in the Indian state of Maharastra, for example, Laurie Patton (2002, 2007) found that these women, who also outnumbered their male counterparts by an overwhelming majority in the Sanskrit schools and departments of the state’s educational system, assumed larger cultural authority traditionally held by male members of the society.

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The issue of authority or power should also direct our attention to the focus on gender in this chapter. If it shapes and is shaped by a community’s value system, it can be rightly argued, why do we need a separate chapter for its discussion? Would it not be better to include gender in the general discussion—whatever or wherever that is—rather than treat it as a separate issue or category? These are important questions, but I worried that such an approach would have caused readers to miss the power dynamics in the present study. The decision was first influenced by Gayatri Spivak’s idea of strategic essentialism, “a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest” (1996, 214). But follow-up conversations with some of the participants, especially Brinda, sealed the deal. In Brinda’s words, “we are not at a stage where you can just sit back and wish everything were equal. You got to direct the torch where there are cracks, make them visible, and help them heal.” This chapter, then, tries to make the “cracks” visible. To Divert or Not to Divert By examining the literacy practices and work of South Asian women teachers in Kingsville’s Hindu school and a related reading group, I have described the way immigrant women form and transform their roles within their community. While working as teachers and interpreters of religious and cultural texts at the school and sharpening their interpretive and public speaking skills at their reading group, these women construct and engage literacies that constitute complex politico-cultural work. Their practices create and validate a discursive space to speak from, and they use that space to reinterpret and reform what amounted to a South Asian culture. To the extent that all culture is constituted through word work writ large, these women demonstrated that their revisionary work formed the main course and not a diversion from the sanatana dharma or the Hindu way of life. In fact, their motivation stems from their desire to purify the waters and aid in the “flow of the Ganges or the sanatana dharma,” according to Brinda, and not to change its course completely as some

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members feared. At the same time, their practices also complement and critique the literacies taught in US schools and the values that these schools and the dominant culture hold with regard to literacies, cultures, and identities. However, these women’s active participation in language/literacy instruction and cultural continuity seems both to liberate and to constrain their space. Their work is a double-edged sword: even as it brings them authority within the gendered community, it keeps them within a norming structure that has historically gendered—and still genders—its value systems discursively. Although some people saw these women’s work, especially when they challenged the conventional, patriarchal interpretations of some key moments in ancient epics and used them to comment on such important issues as relationship and responsibility, as distractions in the life of their community, the teachers themselves considered those moments valuable interventions in their cultural life. In this way, this chapter demonstrates the ways in which literacies function as resources to contest and construct cultural authority and individual agency as well as for intra- and intercultural communication and understanding. The next chapter furthers this discussion by highlighting the rhetorical nature of similar practices among another group of recent immigrants, the Muslim South Asians of Kingsville.

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Chapter 5

Arrivals, Interrogations, Responses “Islamic Ways of Life” or the Literacy Practices of an “Other” Nation O people! We created you from the same male and female, and made you distinct peoples and tribes so that you may know one another. The noblest among you in the sight of God is the most righteous.

—Qur’an 49:13 I never cared about religion except for, like, my parents are Muslims from Pakistan and the like, but you had to explain all kinds of things after the 9/11, so naturally I began to think [about] questions like, why, and who am I? . . . People always asked “where are you from?” but it was different [now]. They [the questions] are many, many more . . . and different. What do I do? What should I do? What should I know? What should I say? . . . There is so much ignorance about so many things, and more [so] about Islam. It changed my life. . . . I begin [paying] more attention to things I ignored till now, like listening to my parents and the imam, reading so much more, and then the interactions, presentations, and so on.

—Sameer People think, like, Muslims are not American. That’s so wrong. I am a proud, peaceful Muslim. I am also American the same way. I am ready to defend this country. Do you know how many Muslims have died for this country? I also need the freedom to worship my way.

—Ali There was always some suspicion about Islam there . . . but we were perceived very differently since 9/11.

—A ziz People think differently about us. We need to promote the right values within our communities and communicate better with others. Allah willing, it won’t matter what people say or do without thinking a whole lot. Truth will prevail ultimately.

—Hena

Earlier I demonstrated the ways in which immigrant language and literacy practices are organized around cultural traditions, and vice versa, as well as the tensions evoked by the re-creation of those traditions, mostly along gender lines, and the ways immi-

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grant women created and navigated complex worlds of cultural traditions and “modern” lives. These women used the native identified literacies to (re)define their culture and community and, in the process, created a space for themselves from which to speak with authority. At the same time, the women also saw their work as complementing the education of their children attending US schools. These discussions addressed how immigrants create and deploy a range of symbolic activities to respond to different exigencies within the community and without in their “ journey” for fuller and meaningful life. However, the exigencies and the ways in which immigrants respond to them are very much shaped by who they are and how they are perceived (by themselves and the host society) in their journey. Muslim South Asians, for example, found themselves in a precarious situation in the aftermath of September 11, 2011. Nineteen members of the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda hijacked and crashed four passenger jets in the New York City and Washington DC areas in suicide attacks on that day. Although most of the hijackers were Saudi Arabian (with the exception of an Egyptian, a Lebanese, and two Emiratis), their religion and the fact that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan provided shelter to the al-Qaeda leaders suddenly turned the spotlight on all Muslim immigrants in the United States. They became different kinds of South Asians from before, as Aziz asserts in the epigraph above, and found themselves having to defend their Islamic way of life. They were now more than the usual suspects. Born to Pakistani parents, Sameer found his life changed after the 9/11 events in profound ways. His faith and identity needed more explanation now than before, which may account for his community activism and cultural exchanges since, often in collaboration with similarly identified fellow Muslim Americans in his community. To educate themselves about their culture, not only did he and his friends form a discussion group, but some of them also offered—or were invited—to make presentations on “Islamic ways of life” to different community groups and law enforcement agencies in Kingsville. These Muslim immigrants’ literacy practices have particular significance given the history of complicated relationships be-

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tween Christianity and Islam exacerbated by the events of 9/11 and subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Although Muslims have been in the United States since the colonial period (Curtis 2009), they are often seen as non-Americans, outsiders, and even enemies to the West (Grewal 2013; Kumar 2012; Saunders 2012). Offering a comparative study of immigrant religions, Richard Alba, Albert J. Raboteau, and Josh DeWind (2009) make an important observation regarding Judaism and Islam in the United States, where each of those faiths constitutes a “minority monotheistic religion.” Although “Judaism became accepted as an American charter religion” by the mid-twentieth century, there is very little likelihood that Islam will be accepted as one any time soon (2009, 191). The events of 9/11, rising Islamophobia, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq turned American Muslims into the new pariah whose presence led to suspicion and interrogation, even government surveillance of their major cultural and religious activities. Not only did these events significantly change Muslim Americans’ perceptions of themselves and the world but also their world of reading, writing, and interacting with others, as well as the uses of these practices in their relationship with the host culture. Hate crimes and discrimination cases against Muslims have skyrocketed in these times (Bayoumi 2008).1 Although not adequately covered or addressed (Kumar 2012), these issues have received some attention. However, hardly any attention has been paid to the ways Muslim immigrants themselves have responded to the increasing anxiety about Islam and bigotry in post-9/11 America. As Ali says above, these Muslim immigrants do not define themselves simply as Muslims but as American Muslims. The questions about their cultural lives thus assume additional poignancy and significance. How do they maintain their cultural traditions while negotiating their American identity? What kinds of individual and community identities do their literacy practices constitute, and to what effect? How and where do their reading and writing practices fit into their larger goals of straddling these apparently conflicting worlds? These questions are all the more important since Muslim identities are projected in opposition to mainstream US/American identity, and the few studies on Muslim cultural

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and literacy practices in the United States often focus on Arab Americans. We can address these questions by exploring the ways in which Muslim immigrants define their identity and engage other cultures and communities on behalf of their own. In this chapter, therefore, I discuss a range of symbolic activities that some South Asian Muslim immigrants re-created and deployed to define their identities, to keep themselves abreast of the risks and opportunities in the aftermath of 9/11, to build bridges with the “mainstream” Christian communities, and to “orient” and instruct law enforcement agencies on Islamic sensibilities. Viewing these activities as word work in motion allows us a glimpse into the complex process of negotiating cultural identity and communicating it across borders. For that purpose, I first describe Kingsville’s Muslim cultural scene briefly below and the context in which a men’s reading group was formed soon after 9/11. After relating the context of the group’s formation, I analyze the process of their material selection, discussion and dissemination formats, and how some of those members use these activities to define their relationship to the “mainstream” culture of the United States. The discussion, then, segues into the “talks” or “cultural presentations on Islamic way of life” that leading figures of the community made to “American” audiences. These presentations were powerful literacy acts at more than one level. While they presented a common vision of a community, they would also manage to point out the vast cultural geography of Islam to demystify most of their audience’s conflation of Muslims with Arab identity. These talks, therefore, were wonderful performances of literacy in motion, as they connected a large swath of history and geography and established points of commonality between religions perceived to be diagonally opposed. I also connect this group’s activities to a community website and its founder/writer/publisher, whose writings and talks respond to local concerns even as they address global audiences in a post-9/11 world of an endless “war on terror.” Finally, the chapter discusses the issue of intragroup differences, especially in terms of gender, and how it impinges on the word work of a community member perceived and treated differently within her own com-

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munity. The case study of Hena, who grew up as an all-American girl and may remind one of Sarroub’s (2005) study of all-American Yemeni girls, also demonstrates the function of word work in her role as both insider and outsider in her own community. The range of activities here clearly highlights the cultural use of literacies in a broader communicative context, offering a powerful example of word work and its multiple migrations in a complex world. Before presenting the range and scope of these men and women’s word work, however, I consider it an ethical requirement to reflect on the limits of those attempts here. A Stranger among Strangers This chapter also differs from my earlier discussions because of the relationship that I had with the participants. My last name marked me as a non-Muslim, even giving some participants grounds to question my motive. Some participants even suspected me of being a secret informer for the security agencies during the early phase of research. After all, there were widespread reports of such incidents throughout the country at the time. In his case studies of Muslim men and women living in Brooklyn, New York, for example, Moustafa Bayoumi begins his preface with the story of Sade, who was upset because “he recently found out that his close friend of almost four years was an undercover police detective sent to spy on him, his friends, and his community. Even the guy’s name, Kamil Pasha, was fake, which particularly irked the twenty-four-year-old Palestinian American. After appearing as a surprise witness at a recent terrorism trial in Brooklyn, Pasha vanished. That’s when Sade discovered the truth” (2008, 1). Sameer and his friends had heard about similar cases in a large metropolitan region a few hours away from Kingsville and wondered if a similar operation was underway in their city as well. That I was also working with Hindu immigrants gave further cause of concern to some. On learning about my larger project, Amdan (who I found out was a cousin of an imam at Kingsville’s Islamic prayer center) joked during our first meeting at the center whether I was going to portray Muslim men as the “evil side of the Asian immigrants . . . like the opposite of model [immigrant] engineers and

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doctors and what not.” Similarly, my identity would sometimes obstruct my access in ways I was not aware of. When I went to see Aziz (professor and community leader) in his office after finalizing a time over the phone for the first time, I only had a chance to tell him about my interest in the role of reading and writing in one’s cultural life before he began relating his voracious reading habit, especially explaining how much he knew about the Bhagavad Gita and the Vedas. Along with science texts, he had a large number of religious texts on his bookshelves representing the world’s major faith traditions. After about an hour and a half, I left not knowing how many more meetings I would need to have before I could ask him some of my questions, including why he wanted to tell me all about the Hindu tradition when I wanted to hear about something else from him. I did have those opportunities later and realized that Aziz was first interested in establishing a rapport with me, a stranger, the bearer of whose last name tended to be Hindus in India, where he had grown up witnessing HinduMuslim violence in the years after the India-Pakistan partition. Similarly, although I set out to study South Asian immigrants’ literacy and cultural practices, my familiarity with the Hindu religious tradition showed in the way I first started out the study with Hindu men and women, from conducting early interviews with them to writing about them first in this book. Even the term “South Asian” did not always mean the same thing to these two groups of South Asians, since they related to each other differently in their countries of origin. Their regional and skin-color identification as well as common immigration experience certainly brought them together in the diaspora to a certain extent, but that was primarily in business or professional contexts. For example, medical professionals from both India and Pakistan in Kingsville had a close professional network and had recently added to their network two medical students from Bangladesh and Nepal (one each) who were completing their residency at two local hospitals. Similarly, a few small business owners (motel, restaurant, and laundry shop owners from India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan) often consulted one another and had good business relations. Yet, outside the business or professional network, they had hardly any

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other opportunity for interaction as South Asians. Instead, it was more likely that the Muslim immigrants from South Asia would interact with Muslim immigrants from other countries as fellow religious practitioners at the common prayer center or its activities, although there were (and are) differences among them, including their perception of their own place in the world of Islam. It was the same story with Hindus. It would be safe to say that each contact, network, or community had its own context and function. The Muslim Immigrants of Kingsville Kingsville has had two Islamic schools and two mosques known primarily as prayer centers led by South Asian imams. The other three mosques were said to have negligible, if any, participation by South Asians (and were attended primarily by African Americans or other Muslims, such as the Lebanese, who had settled in Kingsville a generation or two before the South Asian “wave” of the post-1965 immigration act began arriving). Although membership was not exclusive by region in these centers, one of them drew a larger number of Middle Eastern and North African émigrés, making them almost half the total membership. The other one drew primarily South Asian immigrants. The imams at both of the centers assert that the difference between South Asian and Arab Muslims is “meaningless here, because there are bigger problems,” although they also point to the occasional habit of some Arabs, in the words of Iqbal, “calling us less authentic.”2 The attendance and involvement was “determined more by where you live or what is near you and where your friends and relatives go,” according to Sameer. It also meant that one would have friends speaking the “same language” and “sharing many other things like memories of the place [i.e., native places].” Understandably, immigrants with similar language and regional backgrounds gather together, but these centers also keep drawing new members looking for fellowship and spiritual support. Besides helping the members meet their religious needs, these centers also facilitated their acclimatization to US society by providing critical information and resources as well as new networking opportunities. These practices demonstrate how, despite the phobia, Islam

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is becoming an American religion, as authors like Mucahit Bilici (2012) have also recently noted. While linguistic affiliation was very important, as was regional affiliation, these issues were understandably secondary to religious identification among recent Muslim immigrants, especially in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. These immigrants had to identify themselves as Muslims rather than as South Asians even though that identification sometimes looked more appealing. According to Sameer, again, “I think South Asian makes perfect sense to me. Sometime I try to use it but it feels a little awkward. One, it sounds good but non-Muslim. . . . When I said I am a South Asian one time, they said, ‘Do you do a lot of yoga?’ But when I say Pakistani or Muslim, there is no such confusion. Don’t get me wrong, yoga is beautiful.” In this way, conflation of South Asian with mostly Hindu or Buddhist, non-Muslim identities and the desire on the part of immigrants like Sameer to represent themselves more particularly complicate the use of a generic label like South Asian. Lest one thinks it is primarily the immigrants’ desire to choose how to be identified, Sameer knows that his identification is “not in [his] control. People decide what to call you. You better say what they want to hear and get it behind you.” This gave them the opportunity to “correct wrong information.” Controlling one’s stories was crucial to these men’s identity, and it influenced their socialization as well as relocation plans. Having moved to Kingsville from a smaller town in a neighboring state, Sameer had hoped “things would be easy here,” partly because it was “a bigger city [than the previous town] and a large number of Muslims” lived here. Although an exact number was hard to come by, estimates of Muslim immigrants in Kingsville ranged from four thousand to seven thousand. Most of them attended one of the two mosques in the city for Friday prayers and other special occasions. The second and third generations did not always do so. However, as Sameer’s epigraph suggests, after 9/11 he felt an extraordinary pressure to learn about his parents’ home country of Pakistan and their religion. His statement equally represents the experience of Ahmed and Firoj. Although born and raised a Muslim, Ahmed had “never felt [such a] need [as

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after 9/11] to explain it to others. I mean, there would be a few people curious sometimes, and there may be some others who had a certain view [on it], but now everyone thinks that.” Firoz had a similar story, only a bit more poignant: My girlfriend was introducing me to her stepmother and the mother says, “a Muslim?” and there I am. You can guess what I was thinking. But she wasn’t that bad, I guess. And she asks me why do they want to kill Americans? . . . Next day at work, damn same question. It was just a few days after 9/11, maybe two or three days only. . . . I was a regular kid. I worked hard. I did good in school . . . not as much as my parents wanted but still not bad. . . . [I] didn’t care much about this extra stuff like religion or what. These days I thought, Allah, I should educate myself. This engineer’s job was not enough.

Firoz had had enough, and his response was to educate himself and others as part of a group initiative because, in his own words, “this is a big problem, bigger than you.” 9/11 Arrives in Kingsville: The Muslim Men’s Literate Lives and Word Work Firoz’s realization of the “big problem”—that the problem of having to explain actions and events beyond one’s control calls for measures that are bigger than the individual—was shared by others as well. He would intimate his concerns to his friends in the community and discuss ways to help themselves. In particular, he approached Salman, who was by now friends with the imam Iqbal. Firoz also started reading his seminal writings about Islam “for the first time” after 9/11 and began “to be more conscious about the news.” He remembered as one important marker in his turn to Islam attending a community meeting at the local mosque in which Ahmed, a member of the Pakistani American organization in the city, was providing a briefing about safety. It had been a little over a year since September 11, and, having already invaded Afghanistan and overthrown the Taliban for providing shelter to al-Quaeda leaders, the US government was preparing to invade

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Iraq on what appeared to be a false charge of amassing “weapons of mass destruction.” As the war rhetoric ratcheted up, Muslim immigrants (and even non-Muslims such as the turban-wearing Sikhs, who because of their skin color or headdress were wrongly perceived to be Osama bin Laden followers) were subjected to an unprecedented number of hate crimes in the buildup to the invasion in March 2003 (Prashad 2012). In the meeting that Firoz attended, Ahmed was also distributing a safety resource guide outlining “best practices for mosque and community safety” prepared by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).3 It was after these events that Ahmed, Firoz, Sameer, and Salman started meeting regularly to discuss current issues, and their version of a reading club was born. As Ahmed says, “we felt a need to form a closer group of people to be in touch in case anyone was in trouble.” They also started an online group. “About five of us met once a week but the total number of members [who] signed up on the Yahoo discussion group was like sixteen,” according to Salman. The process in which the group came together was thus very organic. In the words of Firoz, “we didn’t have a plan like what we wanted to do. We were simply sharing our experiences and talking about [issues of our] concern and slowly and slowly we were growing closer, and there were things we had to be careful and things like that . . . we had a discussion group.” However, meetings and discussion here were nothing like casual chit-chats. Accounts of these meetings demonstrate the extent to which literacy practices can be dicey, on one hand, and rhetorically useful tools to navigate a difficult situation, on the other. While the members met to discuss current events, choose reading materials, and discuss them in relation to their positioning in the United States, they also did so vis-à-vis their religion and native lands in South Asia. Their literacy practices took on a distinctly rhetorical form of community identity (re)production when some of these members were invited to present on their culture by mainstream community groups and law enforcement agencies. These men mobilized their knowledge and cultural authority, gained through reading and discussions at group meetings, to reconstruct and reposition

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their individual and community identity here and now in relation to distant lands and values. In that sense, their reading and writing show word work not only as cultural but also as fluid rhetorical practices that respond to political contingencies. It was remarkable that the members of this discussion group were all second-generation South Asians. Except for Salman, they had little interest in Islam prior to 9/11 other than occasionally participating in their parents’ ritualistic observances. Ahmed, Firoz, and Sameer grew up in well-educated families and had at least one parent who held a professional job. Salman came from a less well-to-do family. His father worked in an ethnic grocery and convenience store, and his mother was a housewife. He described his family also as more religiously inclined than that of the other three. All four, however, shared a spiritual connection through the mosque that they now attended frequently. They were also college-educated and had full-time jobs. With the formation of the discussion group, they became more involved in community activities and occasionally talked about issues of concern with Aziz, a radiology/physics professor and prolific writer on Islamic cultural issues, and Azad, a county government prosecutor of Pakistani origin. The team of the four second-generation Muslim men who formed the discussion group in some ways mirrored a group of three prominent first-generation South Asian Muslims in their community. Aziz, Azad, and Iqbal (the imam) were well-known public figures among South Asian Muslims although they did not always work as a group. Aziz was from India; he had first entered the United States as a graduate student and settled down in Kingsville with a university teaching job after doctoral and postdoctoral work elsewhere. Azad had worked as an attorney in Pakistan for a short period of time before joining a law school in a large midwestern city in the United States. Because his relatives were already settled in Kingsville in the mid-1990s, he sought and found employment here in the late 1990s. Iqbal came to Kingsville to join his son’s family after his business collapsed in Pakistan. He was well versed in religious matters and became the imam at the local Muslim prayer center. It was with his arrival

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and work that the center became, in the words of Salman, “more like a mosque.” He also had a pretty good command of English, which helped him relate to the younger members of his community and the host society. Although Aziz, Azad, and (after 2003) Sameer were often invited by community groups and law enforcement agencies and, occasionally, the media to speak on behalf of the local Muslim community, Iqbal was the main contact person for the mosque; he also occasionally accompanied the others to their talks or presentations. Aziz frequently wrote—and still writes—on the cultural issues pertinent to the Muslim community and its relationship with the host culture. In 1988, he founded an international organization dedicated to research on Islamic culture and society as well as the scientific contributions of Islamic society. The major goal of the organization was to promote an understanding of Islam among its followers as well as others and to establish connections between Islam and modern science. As of the end of 2013, he had published over a hundred articles in his professional field; however, the articles about Islam account for most of his renown among South Asian, especially Muslim, fellow immigrants. He also receives many comments on his writing about Islam and related issues. Although professional and cultural domains may not always seem to cross paths, these Muslim men’s experience suggests otherwise. Their faith and “foreign” looks led to discrimination at times, as the CAIR has reported and some of Kingsville’s Muslims experienced, but these men also found a dynamically productive relationship between their cultural background and professional lives. While their professional status and training gave them authority to speak about a range of topics as knowledgeable persons, they also used their Islamic sensibilities to enrich their professional work. Aziz has thought about the exchange seriously and has a theory of “win-win.” He means that as a scientist, he writes “with a critical perspective even on cultural or religious issues” and people listen to him because of his status as a scientist and professor. At the same time, his experience as a member of a marginalized religion and his attention to another faith tradition, he thinks, makes him “extra vigilant to other people’s needs and interests”

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in his professional work. “Even in my research about radiation physics, I am always open to multiple perspectives and my colleagues enjoy having my perspective,” he states. On the cultural front, he regularly writes and publishes his “own articles and also [publishes with credit or provides links to] relevant ones by others, . . . sometimes published elsewhere” on his website. He has found a resurgence of interest in, as well as increased suspicion of, Islam post-9/11. Unlike the younger men (Firoz and Sameer, for example), he asserts that it “has not changed me . . . but it has changed some of the things I do; for example, I am now invited to make presentations about Islam to different groups like never before.” Although the younger men’s discussion group benefited from and acknowledged inspiration from Aziz (and to a lesser extent Azad), the older men did not seem to be aware of the ways in which the second-generation men were organizing their meetings. Aziz, for example, thought these “men hang out and do stuff. They are good kids. Will never harm anybody.” As an informal discussion forum, the younger men’s group functioned as a safe space in which they could discuss personal and cultural issues, as well as political and professional topics. According to Ahmed, in the first year, the group read the articles that Aziz wrote or provided a link to on his website as well as the “Qur’an in English with commentaries. [We also read about] other relevant issues.” With time, the group got closer and collected a wide variety of texts—which they used as literacy documents—such as newspaper/magazine articles, news reports, and radio or television talk shows concerning Muslims. They started keeping track of the frequency and overall appeal of those pieces. As soon as any member noticed one, he forwarded it to the online discussion group for everyone else to see and discuss.4 In most cases, according to Ahmed, “we would also have found an article or such things that would counter the wrong claims about Islam or Muslims and discuss it.” But “we did not publish anything in the media. We simply passed the info to others in our contact if they were interested. When one emailed, they also . . . [did] that with their comments. We didn’t need it [to publish a counterargument]. There was usually something out

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there about it . . . [on Aziz’s website], and that was [representative of] our perspective.” Sometimes the topics of online discussions also extended to the weekly meetings, especially when they were related to the designated reading. Sometimes, it was the other way around: the discussion and reading dealt with the topic itself. For example, when they first invited me to their meeting in June 2005, they were discussing the recent CAIR reports on the status of Muslims in the United States and what they could do to help the community stay vigilant. Many of their community members had experienced, in the words of Sameer, “all kinds of things like random comments and stares and workplace discrimination, warning . . . they even broke [vandalized] stuff and wrote all kinds of nasty things on the walls of our prayer center.” The meeting, held in a different member’s place each time, was at Salman’s house that day and began with the evening prayer. To provide a context for the discussion, Salman called attention to the anti-Muslim rhetoric by talking about the misrepresentation of Islam in the US media. In his words, “these reports I read don’t surprise me . . . because every time terrorism or war on terror are mentioned, the TV [networks] show images of Mosques and Muslims in prayers, [giving] the impression that they are all one and the same terrorists.” Ahmed added that anti-Muslim rhetoric pervaded radio and TV talk shows, as well as newspapers that demonize all Muslims. Firoz wondered if the media were not exaggerating the Muslim terrorists to justify US policies in the world, including Iraq. Mina, who was not a regular member but, as I was told, a “one-time” attendee, commented on Muslim women’s representation with an eternal veil and pointed out a recent news report about a girl who was singled out and subjected to profanity for wearing a scarf at her school. These observations were followed by discussions of reports they had read. Over four years had passed since the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and two years since the Iraq War, and there was a consistent surge in reports of hate crimes against Muslims (as recorded by the CAIR in 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005).5 Whereas the 2003 Report on the Status of Muslim Civil

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Rights in the United States pointed out a 15 percent increase in the number of hate crimes against Muslims, the 2004 report found a staggering 70 percent increase in discrimination claims over the previous year. A rise by 1,700 percent in anti-Muslim crimes over the previous year was reported immediately after 9/11. Local mosques that these participants attended also received threats of vandalism.6 Mina drew the group’s attention to a March 2003 event in which a congresswoman and congressman walked out of the Washington State House of Representatives to protest a Muslim cleric’s prayer to open the day’s session. In the words of Rep. Lois McMahan, “it’s an issue of patriotism” and “the Islamic religion is so . . . part and parcel with the attack on America.”7 Rep. McMahan later retracted her statement, but the profuse antiIslam rhetoric and hate crimes such as the ones published by the CAIR portray a grim reality that Muslim immigrants have to live through on a day-to-day basis. As Salman put it, it is more “the biases and outright hatred” following the events of 9/11 than the events themselves that “transformed my life.” Whereas Mina had brought a printed copy of the news about the Washington representative to the meeting, Salman had also kept some newspaper cuttings that he mentioned in my first interview with him.8 In this meeting, too, Salman reminded the group of a news report about the TV evangelist Pat Robertson’s comment, in which the founder of the Christian Coalition had told his television audience that Islam “is not a peaceful religion that wants to coexist” and that Muslim immigrants were “missionaries . . . to spread the doctrine of Islam.”9 These accusations reflected a barrage of other charges that called Islam “wicked and violent” and the like.10 Toward the end of the discussion, Mina worried what I thought of the meeting. Ahmed added, “we don’t just complain about what we don’t get here or the discrimination and hate issues. These problems are everywhere. We also talk about the opportunities that exist here, . . . [as well as] the rotten apples—those terrorists—who give Islam a bad name.” In fact, Sameer shared the news of his cousin getting a “really good job” with a big tech company, and there was news of a group of Pakistani American doctors running a health camp in some parts of Pakistan.

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The meeting lasted for about two and a half hours, a little longer than usual, according to Firoz. These members knew that they were misunderstood and mislabeled, and that the increased media spotlight on Muslims in recent days had solidified the mistrust rather than an increased understanding of their ways of life or diversity among them. The meetings like this one clearly indicated that such gatherings and discussions, online and offline, provided a “safe house” for these members and helped them, in the words of Sameer, “keep our sanity.” Salman added, “we are more against those terrorists than against anyone. We love America. Many of our people are here to escape tyranny.” These discussions allowed them to think through the complex issues of belonging without any fear of derision or persecution. Aside from functioning as a safe space for discussing issues of concern for the members’ personal and community well-being, the discussion group also afforded opportunities to strategize the community’s outreach activities to promote its standing in society and for cross-cultural understanding. As their own future was at stake with the level of tolerance and understanding in mainstream society, they needed to do everything possible at their end to achieve these goals. In the next meeting I had with the group, for example, the members were primarily discussing ways of utilizing opportunities to enhance the community’s image through collaboration with other groups and the media coverage such an effort would provide. The next week they were organizing a joint 9/11 memorial with other faith groups, primarily a network of Christian organizations, and were discussing a couple of readings from Aziz’s website in connection with the occasion (although the readings did not address the event). The preparations for the anniversary were complete, and these members emphasized the value of such work. Iqbal, who was not a member of the group, was the main figure working with the Christian organizers. Ahmed, who was helping Iqbal, thought that projects such as these would help mitigate the anxiety and suspicion that his community members were anti-American or complicit with the terrorists. “After all, who is going to care how many [of] our organizations condemn[ed] the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist

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[acts]?”11 One of the articles they read emphasized the value of being good, doing good, and sending out positive messages to the world. Firoz pointed out that they also needed to increase the number of Muslim participants in the 9/11 anniversary and stay closer to the main stage so that the TV news cameras would cover them. He was concerned that only the city newspaper, and no TV outlets, had published a report with a photograph including some Muslims on another Christian-Muslim event some time ago. Firoz commented that the news outlets were more interested in “psychopath bombers” and “Osama’s brothers” than the millions of others who were peace-loving yet forced to pass under the shadow of the few anomalies. Although the discussion group occasionally used more nuanced articles or commentaries to “have the Islamic perspective on things,” they always researched news reports involving Muslims in the United States and made a point of sharing them with the community when relevant. The value placed on reading about contemporary issues and staying tuned to current developments cannot be exaggerated in the lives of these immigrants. In the anti-Muslim atmosphere that developed after 2001, a mistaken identity or one person’s carelessness might literally cost his or her life. As Salman reminded me in one interview, even non-Muslims risked their lives if they did not conduct themselves carefully. He was referring to the news report of the killing of a Sikh, Balbir Singh, who because of his turban was mistakenly regarded as a follower of Osama bin Laden and killed in Arizona.12 Incidentally, a Sikh participant in this study, Pratap, also mentioned this incident and his own makeover in the aftermath. It was against such a backdrop that the Muslim men’s group needed to meet regularly, online or offline, to update itself on issues that mattered the most. The group members frequently checked out different local as well as national and international newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, and Newsweek, and when one of them found any report pertaining to US Muslims, they saved it or forwarded it to others on their contact list. The easy e-mail referral function or, lately, social networking (Facebook, Twitter) facilitated swift sharing of pertinent news

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online. As Salman states, “when I see something interesting I forward it to others and sometimes we run some discussions on the Web also, especially if it is a bad news in our area . . . and good news too—the same way—and sometimes about those faraway countries [that affect us] . . . and when we meet, these issues can be topics of our discussion. But mostly, if there is anything specifically good or bad then, yes, it is.” The group discussions always also covered topics of personal and community well-being. According to Firoz, “we talk about how our people are treated, well, I mean fairly or [with] discrimination in our work. And when we heard about one of our guys being fired for no reason, we took the issue to our association here . . . we also talked with a lawyer. Later, when that friend was asked to resign, he didn’t. He asked them why, and they said ‘we are going on loss, no profit.’ Our friend says, okay why you fire me then; I’m working twelve hours a day. Give me a letter, and I will go to a lawyer. And they didn’t fire him, you know. He called it quits soon when he found another job.” Although the group was fizzling out in late 2009, Ahmed felt that it had contributed significantly to the unity, understanding, and safety of the community: “we feel good because nobody had to die or face a real serious trouble around here . . . there was vile stuff scribbled on a mosque and glasses broken at another place sometimes ago, but the buildings were not burnt!” In this way, these immigrants tracked, collected, read or watched, and discussed reading and other materials among themselves to understand how they were perceived and presented in the mainstream culture. Ahmed also had a poignant memory of giving away the safety kit prepared by the CAIR, which talked about how to be safe and what activities to report: “one brother and his wife were so scared they avoided going out for a few months except [for] work and groceries.” Having described the nature and function of the Muslim men’s discussion group, it may now be germane to reflect further on what such reading and discussion practices mean. First of all, these Muslim men’s activities present reading, writing, speaking, and cross-cultural collaboration or exchanges as the means for defining cultural and community identities in a networked

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but perilous world. These identities are both fixed and fluid and in need of constant nourishment or reinforcement. While they emphasize the constructed nature of subjectivity by highlighting misrepresentations of ordinary Muslims in the media, especially in the post-9/11 environment, they also want to recover from the media’s hijacking a true Muslim self that is humane and peace-loving. These immigrants want to use their reading, writing, discussion, and community activism as opportunities to both recover this self and to define it. That they value symbolic practices to do so means, in the final analysis, that their underlying notion of identity is rhetorical. Moreover, the origin of the reading group under the exceptional cultural duress felt by these individuals means that these rhetorical acts also constitute their coping mechanism. In this sense, these literacy practices construct a rhetoric and defense of being. By considering literacy more expansively as the word work that constitutes one’s being for these men, it is possible to see how the act of reading, writing, and in-group conversation is directly tied to self-identity, culture, religion, and politics, and how such work can be literally a matter of life or death. Citing David Barton and Mary Hamilton’s work (1998, 7), John Duffy argues that the description of literacy as “the general cultural ways of utilizing written language which people draw upon in their lives” provides a basis to examine literacy practice as a rhetorical act (2004, 225). Although written language plays a crucial role in literacy’s rhetorical function, as both Barton and Hamilton (1998) and Duffy (2007) suggest, the Muslim immigrants’ experience suggests that we need to view symbolic acts more as cultural and community performance and as practices defining and managing social relations both at the individual and community level. Writing is only one part, not the central element, of literacy practice. The Muslim immigrants in this study, for example, integrate writing and speaking for community identity in such a way that an emphasis on the written word alone would fail to capture the significance of their word work. Aziz is very explicit: Reading and writing are important but if you can’t talk to people that’s not worth anything. Look, I have written and published

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many scholarly papers; some of them have been well cited also. But I get the most satisfaction when I can talk about those concepts to people outside the field in a layman’s language. . . . I write about cultural issues for my organization and its newsletter. We focus mostly on science and Islam . . . but in the recent times, it has been imperative to talk about other issues also. Now, if I just write and publish, not many people may read or understand the way I want. It gets me going. Then I talk to people in the community, the young people and others, that’s where I test some of my ideas, like what appeals and interests different people. My point is to connect deep spiritual issues to the interest and context of the time. . . . They invite me to other places to give them presentation about Islamic way of life. I get the most satisfaction there; I talk about how our religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam are similar . . . and there are only a few differences. The written word is valuable but it means nothing in itself. It all depends on how you understand it, interpret it, apply it. What do you do with it? What do you get out of it?

In the long extract above, Aziz touches on several things, but one thing stands out: that writing means little if one does not pay attention to the context and motives of its production and reception. As a published writer in his area of expertise as well as on cultural issues, he finds writing useful. He writes his presentations, too, but it is through the actual presentation that he finds the greatest satisfaction. His motto is “writing for communication” and writing “in and for real life,” which he values only in relation to its contribution to a better understanding of one another and the world. He finds writing to be a critical but not the only tool to practice what the Prophet told his disciples: “know one another.” Informed by such an ethical imperative on communication, Aziz believes that no writing or communication has any meaning unless it is matched by a corresponding action. His own writing often enacts this philosophy. For example, in an article about misrepresentation, he asked his readers to pay attention to the ways “people live their lives,” not to follow their words. In another article written to refute the idea that Islam advocates

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violence, even terrorist tactics, he begins with a basic definition of who a Muslim is: “[A] Muslim is one who submits to the will of Allah (The One God-Creator of the Universe). The Muslim practices the religion of Islam (submission to the will of Allah).” He then goes on to illustrate how nobody who submits to the creator of the universe could be pardoned for hurting other beings in the same universe. In this way, literacies as enacted by the discussion group became resources for understanding the men’s place in a less than hospitable environment and for (re)producing, (re)presenting, and (re)negotiating individual and community identities in distinct ways. In particular, the reading group came to be both an individual and community initiative at defining self-identity and a response to its distortion in the mainstream media. Similarly, some of the members of the community worked as the community’s ambassadors to the host culture in educating it about their lifestyle. While the reading and discussion group worked to define its members’ cultural and community identity for themselves and others, the members working on those ambassadorial roles also had the opportunity to mobilize their word work to build cross-cultural understanding. Aziz, Azad, Iqbal, and Sameer were often invited to educate local communities, law enforcement agencies, and schools on Islamic issues. Iqbal and Sameer found some people wanting to confront them rather than to listen on more than one occasion, which prompted them to study their audiences and prepare for their “talks” accordingly. Cultural Presentations These immigrants’ presentations on “Islamic ways of life” demonstrate perhaps the most important function of word work at defining community identity and building cross-cultural and political relations by a group that experiences outright demonization and hostility from the dominant culture. These presentations also challenge us to account for the creation of literacies, culture, and community as at once rhetorical, cross-cultural, and embodied. Similarly, these practices provide us important insights into the shifting nature of literacy, culture, rhetoric, and cross-cultural

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communication. The value of these insights can hardly be exaggerated at a time when an extremely limiting binary of choices tends to define difference. President George W. Bush’s famous post-9/11 speech calling on the world to decide whether “you are with us or the terrorists” epitomizes the dualistic rhetoric in wide circulation in public culture. Even civilizational discourses have lately been packaged in combat terms. For example, in his tellingly titled work, The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington (1993, 1998) argues that the world is neither coming together as proposed by globalist theorists nor can it be studied as a collection of states. In a tone that clearly exhibits anxiety about the increasingly multicultural social makeup of the Western world, he claims that the new global order can be understood as a clash between seven or eight major cultural civilizations. The source of conflict in the emerging world, he argues, will be neither ideological nor economic, but primarily cultural (1993, 22). Therefore, we can appreciate the value of these Muslim men’s presentations against the backdrop of an overtly divisive language of identity that has found added currency in the post-9/11 world. Furthermore, not only is the language of identity deployed in binary terms (West versus the rest or Christian versus Muslim), but even discourses of minority identity often reconstruct marginal subjects in oppositional terms. For example, Kwame Anthony Appiah has asserted that “identities are formed in antagonism” (2007, 106), and this is only a restatement of a long line of commentaries on the topic. Scholars of rhetoric may remember Kenneth Burke’s discussion of identity partly as a matter of “division.” Scholarship in identity formation often begins with the assumption that, as in a Saussurian sign system where a signifier acquires meaning only through its difference from others, identity construction of minority groups forms in opposition to the dominant group(s). In this way, while the rhetoric of identity performs an important function of pointing out its coming into being, at least discursively, it also tends to overemphasize opposition that, while apparently meaningful, may not always be the best or even a just approach, especially when it leads to the further stigmatization of an already marginalized community.

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For the Muslim men in this study, the language of difference was not simply meaningless; it was hurtful as it mostly meant recycling the Orientalist terms representing Muslims as “irrational freaks.” Aziz (and others) understood how difference worked and its value but that difference based on stereotypes would only be harmful. By tracking the regular news and popular media representation of Muslims, these men also knew that difference was more a matter of cultural product than anything else. As Firoz stated, “if you keep showing the same pictures of Muslims praying and then blowing up a building or [creating] violence, you always make people believe that it is the truth about all Muslims and ignore everything else.” These men’s goal, therefore, was to mitigate the effect of this antagonistic rhetoric on their audiences and instead explore common grounds with them, promote intercultural understanding, and develop “friendly” relations with the majoritarian society and its institutions. Cross-cultural presentations and dialogues in which they identified common histories and futures were part and parcel of such a project informed by more relational—rather than oppositional—terms of identity and affiliation with the dominant culture. The invitations—whether issued formally or informally— to give presentations always invoked the language of education (to “educate” or to “inform” at churches, schools, and community groups and to help “train” and/or “orient” when the invitation came from law enforcement agencies). Often it was Iqbal’s mosque that received those invitations, although there were also instances when one of these men was approached directly. Irrespective of the form or recipient of the offers, Iqbal often knew about all such cases, since he was informed by the others. In their presentations, each sought to achieve two goals. The first was to undermine the eternally oppositional rhetoric of identity and to reestablish a common history for Islam and Christianity. Even when they pointed out some differences between Islam and Christianity, they would mention how the differences were not as big as the commonalities. The second was to point out the diversity within Islam and to highlight how Islam in the United States is an American religion and culture. One major element stressed

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to achieve the second goal was that everybody embraced the US Constitution, because it provided the protection from tyranny from which many first-generation Muslim immigrants had fled. Such pronouncements were important, Iqbal thought, especially since some far-right politicians and pastors were spreading the propaganda that Muslims practiced sharia law or would not abide by the Constitution if they could avoid it. In this way, their presentations promoted a better understanding of one another by adopting a relational approach: they made a case for understanding the commonality between different cultures and faiths and, with a cultural or historical explanation, for appreciating difference where it existed. As Aziz states, There is too much ignorance and stereotypes that make Islam and Christianity look like opposites of each other. . . . [But] there are so many similarities between Islam and Christianity. For example, we follow the Old Testament, but to many people it is a big surprise. . . . value of love, compassion, support, charity, they are all there in both. Islam is [about] suicide bombing as Christianity is about Nazism. Suicide bombers are perverts like Hitler. You can’t take an exception and treat it as a rule. . . . Almost all the stuff for my presentations comes from my writings . . . which I publish online. I also refer interested people to the site. Some also write comments. Positive, critical, all kinds. As you can see, I update the page with links to important articles and other useful information for Muslims.

As mentioned earlier, Aziz plays an important role both in representing his community to other groups (as in cultural presentations) and in bringing the community together in more than one way. He writes and publishes regularly on current cultural and religious issues, provides guidance and mentorship to young Muslim scholar immigrants, conducts inquiry into the “scientific currents in Islamic faith” (a topic he follows with passion as it “lets me bring my faith and my profession together”), calls himself a community person for his work in the community (the reading group members attest to that), and works in an ambassadorial role to educate the host culture about “real Muslim culture and life.”

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Identifying the needs and interests of the audience is crucial for making the cross-cultural presentation productive. While speaking to law enforcement agencies, Aziz emphasizes religiously sensitive techniques for body searches, the proper etiquette for entering Muslim homes, and advice on outreach to the Islamic community. In churches and other places, he highlights the points of common interests and shared heritage. In both settings, a bit of “historical sensitivity” is important, so he presents Muslim culture not only as part of the Abrahamic religions but also as “part of the American story.” In his articles about Islamic history in the United States and “cultural” talks, he mentions that “Islam in this country is as old as Christianity.” Many early Muslims were “brought to the United States as slaves from West African countries.” He also does not forget to mention intercultural exchanges in various forms. One interesting fact he includes concerns the Melungeons who “are of Muslim ancestry. Abraham Lincoln’s mother and wife belonged to the Melungeons.”13 In Kingsville, too, Aziz stresses that early Muslim immigrants came with Christians. In his online article about Muslims in the city, he writes, “Muslims along with Christians came . . . from Lebanon at the beginning of this [twentieth] century. Many of the Muslims could not practice their faith. The children of Muslim Lebanese played and grew up in the company of the children of the Lebanese Christians and got married to them. As a result, they converted to Christianity.” Some of them “came back to Islam along with other people known as black Muslims.” For Aziz, therefore, a major goal of these “cultural presentations” was to educate the audience that “Islam is also an American religion.” While he highlights the contributions of Islamic culture to the advancement of modern medicine, mathematics, and science to counter the popular representation of Islamic culture as backward (as Brinda and her colleagues did with regard to Hindu culture), he also very much stresses the American history of the Islamic faith. He believes that with time and education, hostility and suspicion will “gradually disappear.” Like other members of his group, he thinks that “the media has a bigger role to play in this [education] to cover Muslim history and diversity

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more accurately” in order to change public perception of Islam for the better. Other members of the community—Azad, Iqbal, and Sameer—are also invited to give these presentations and use similar techniques, although their approaches vary according to their professional background or personal interest in the topic. Azad, for example, takes a more legal standpoint because of his background in law and is often invited to speak to law enforcement agencies throughout the state and, occasionally, in neighboring states in the Midwest. He was very happy to have played a role in being able to “correct some of the misunderstandings about Islam and the Muslim people” especially in the early years after 9/11. Among other efforts, he was in touch with a friend who was involved in the diversity training for Chicago’s law enforcement agencies initiated after 9/11 and encouraged officials in his county office to conduct a similar program.14 That was a time when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was widely reported to have used highly controversial books like Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind, a book published in 1983 that found currency in the aftermath of 9/11 and was revised and reissued in 2002. The book is a classic Orientalist text in that it makes broad generalizations about Islamic societies, erasing differences within and across different continents. As a matter of fact, the FBI was found to have used not only Patai’s book as recommended reading for its new recruits but also such controversial books as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and The Truth about Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion, by the anti-Muslim activist Robert Spencer (2005, 2006), as late as 2009.15 Azad thought he played a role in correcting some wrong perceptions and brought attention to the wide diversity within Muslim communities in the United States and abroad. Iqbal had spoken to law enforcement agencies only once and talked mostly to churches and schools. Sameer had never presented to law enforcement agencies but only to a “couple of churches and community groups.” All four—Azad, Aziz, Iqbal, and Sameer—found their audiences curious about whether American Muslims followed and wanted to impose Sharia law on all and whether there would be

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freedom to exercise free will under such a law for non-Muslims. Their responses indicated their knowledge of where these questions came from and the impossibility of Sharia coming to pass. Azad mentioned describing how he would be the first to oppose it even in the most unlikely instance of such a law. These men also emphasized the various interpretations of Sharia law, primarily in the religious domain, and that it was a code developed for a different time and place. “But American Muslims are committed to the separation of the church and state and uphold the Constitution,” Azad insists. At the same time, the speakers pointed to Islamic countries ranging from Turkey and Egypt to Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, where the interpretation and use of traditional Sharia are “as different as between apples and oranges.” Azad and Aziz also point to the nonlegalistic interpretation of the Qur’an, stressing the fact that such an approach perfectly fits into the US legal system. All four also emphasized six key points in their presentations.16 (1) Muslims believe in one God—the God of Abraham, Noah, Moses, and Jesus. (2) Practicing Muslims maintain a strong sense of moral, family, and social values and respect for these values. (3) The Arabic word “al-Qur’an” literally means “the recitation,” and the Qur’an means God’s message to humanity revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. (4) There are five pillars of Islam (testimony of faith, prayer, the giving of zakat [support of the needy], the observance of the Ramadan fast, and the pilgrimage to Mecca once in a lifetime for those able). (5) American Islam is different from that in other places, just as Islam is practiced differently in different parts of the world. (6) There are similarities between Islam and Christianity, and American Muslims are committed to peace and the US Constitution. Although Iqbal and Sameer recalled some hostile audiences who “were there to confront and blame” at an evangelical church soon after 9/11, all four mention more congenial crowds and hope that with ongoing dialogues and education, the situation “will improve. . . . [We] believe in the power of words,” asserts Iqbal. One may wonder, as Sameer says he did in the months and years immediately after 9/11, “why are you here if you see bigot-

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ry all over and don’t like it?” This is also a question that some of his fellow Muslims and those in the opposite (anti-Islam) camp have asked. Sameer answers it in a language that combines the reality of their citizenship rights and the rhetoric of the American dream: “our people are here because this is their home; like others they also want to try their luck here. . . . They have no other place to go. . . . Would all the Christians and Jews then go to Europe and Israel?” Like Sameer, other members of the community have confronted this question in one way or another. When faced with a similar sentiment, Iqbal reminds his audiences, including members of his congregation, of the economic and geopolitical realities on which their lives depend. Sameer admits, “There is no place without problems.” Noor, a Bangladeshi first-generation immigrant states, “we have to put up with stuff for greater opportunities. After all, it’s not going to matter what you say or think on some issues. Better stop worrying. All I say to my children and Bangladeshis and Muslims is this—work hard and make your best, do your best. There are opportunities here.” Aziz takes a more philosophical stance: “Not all times are the same. If you look at history, this is nothing, I mean there are always ups and downs. There are different groups and cultures in power . . . but things change with time, so patience is important. We need to focus on what is good, what is the best.” That is why Aziz and Noor want to focus on the positive. In fact, aside from occasional hints, they say they have never complained about anything, verbally or in writing, to any law enforcement agency or mass media outlet. Salman’s words sum up the rationale: “We know life is a struggle. We believe in God and [that the] final truth will win. We don’t like to complain . . . personally, I want to leave behind all the questionings and suspicious looks and everything. Move ahead, that is our goal . . . after all, we chose to come here. We can also make it better.” These immigrants, in the words of Aziz, have been “through enough [and can] overlook the short-term inconvenience for longterm good.” Such a long-term view may explain why Salman and his friends did not directly write or call in to challenge libelous articles or broadcasts. It was certainly not because they were unaware of the overtly anti-Muslim rhetoric permeating the national

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and local media. In fact, one of the discussion group’s goals was to promote knowledge of precisely this kind of public discourse and to prepare an answer for it. However, complaining about every instance of discrimination or bigotry would require a language of victimization; Aziz, Iqbal, and Sameer actively campaigned to encourage their community to be proactive in spreading the message of love. They also liked to describe “life’s inconveniences” using the metaphor of “struggle” and “ongoing journey,” and they saw themselves as willing participants in the struggle or as willing explorers. Ultimately, though, they hoped, in the words of Firoz, that “truth will prevail and more people will understand that not all Muslims are terrorists and why are those that take that path.” The key for that to happen, according to Aziz and Iqbal, was through more dialogue and education, inter- and cross-culturally. Such cross-cultural exchanges, most clearly demonstrated by the four men’s cultural presentations discussed above, help them control their stories and their identity. To claim their full agency, these men present themselves as community activists and responsible citizens, not as victims. Their refusal to deploy a rhetoric of victimization is sometimes interpreted in a different way. For example, a New York Times report (2005) published while I was conducting my second set of interviews concluded that anti-Muslim hate crimes or discrimination cases went unreported because often the victims were either illegally in the country or feared retaliation: “discrimination cases involving Muslims in the workplace, at school and in airports increased markedly after Sept. 11 but are most commonly brought by American-born Muslims because immigrants are reluctant to take legal action. . . . A fear of retaliation by employers or more extreme outcomes, like deportation, drives many Muslim immigrants to stay quiet.”17 However, participants in this study suggested that they refrained from seeking legal recourse not because they feared deportation—almost all of them were permanent residents or (naturalized) citizens already—but to “avoid unnecessary attention,” as Aziz put it. Syed, a Pakistani American, felt that he was often excluded from core meetings of his company, although he did the most work after decisions were made. But no one thought about filing any complaints. Aziz’s

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words summarize the rationale: “Well, I can’t speak for all, some will eventually speak up if their rights are blatantly abused. I know some who have. But most don’t, because they don’t want to draw too much attention.” They did not want to project the image of minority valetudinarians. They were also aware that a unit of the city’s administration was headed by a Muslim immigrant, and Azad himself worked as a prosecutor. In this way, their “culture of silence,” to use a Freirean phrase, was not necessarily because of a perceived loss of the means by which to critically respond to the dominant culture’s mischaracterization of them but a considered judgment, although it quietly supported the dominant order. Nor did it mean a complete acquiescence to distortions and attacks. The men certainly employed their literacy practices to define themselves, to decide what was in the best interest of the community, and to stay critically engaged with the issues of their interest. They also asserted their agency to educate others and build cross-cultural alliance. These decisions made by the Muslim immigrants in Kingsville also challenge some received wisdom regarding the politics of ethnic identity. Fredrik Barth (1969), for example, argues that a person’s maintenance of an ethnic identity depends on the perceived advantage of membership in the ethnic community and one’s ability to perform in his or her ethnic role. Recent immigrant literacy practices such as these Muslim men’s, however, suggest that membership in ethnic communities is more a recognition of “roots” and a coping mechanism to understand the dominant culture vis-à-vis one’s ethnic status than an attempt to secure putative benefits. These immigrants’ experiences indicate that political events, media presentation, and perceptions of the mainstream society in a given time generally shape the literacy practices and ethnic affiliation of a stigmatized community. The conflation of South Asian Muslims with mostly violent, irrational, and backward images in the mainstream media and culture forces these immigrants to engage in such cultural and political activities that they help us understand the civic functions of literacy practices more fully.

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The Elephant in the Room: Gender Again As in the case of Hindu South Asians, the broader cultural and literacy work among Muslims is gendered in multiple ways. First, as in the Hindu temple and school, teaching was largely feminized here, although with a difference. It should be noted that the Hindu South Asians did not have a full school but one that met only every other Sunday, whereas there were two Islamic schools in Kingsville at the time of the study. Still, like the Hindu temple and school, the management board mainly consisted of males, and the teaching faculty was primarily composed of women. However, if the Hindu school teachers (all women) each had a professional career and taught as volunteers, the Islamic school teachers taught as their primary form of employmen; in that sense, their work took place in a more formalized context. Yet, like the Hindu teachers, these women’s work involved balancing their roles as teachers in a patriarchal community with the need to create a space for their work and their agency in that community. To introduce the complex work of these women, I explore the case study of one such teacher, Hena. Born in San Francisco, California, in 1968 to a Pakistani father and Bangladeshi mother who had met in the course of their studies in the United States, Hena was partially brought up in Pakistan. She attended elementary school in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and returned to her birthplace for further education. Her father remarried, deserting her mother when Hena was in middle school. Her parents were “generally liberal,” and she started wearing hijab (a head scarf) only after she started college. She was then at a community college where she felt “kind of strange that nobody thinks you are one of them.” While studying for her master’s degree in teaching in 1992, she married a Bangladeshi graduate student who became an engineer and started working soon afterward. She had a son in 1994. Soon after her son’s birth, she discovered that her husband was already married in his native country and divorced him. She has been teaching on and off since 1993 but regularly at the Islamic school in Kingsville since

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2000, the year she moved to the city with her mother and brother, an electrical engineer, who had found employment there a year earlier. Her distant uncles, who have been “very good” to her family through thick and thin, were already in the city. Although Hena was like the Muslim men in her search for an authentic cultural and religious self in the face of alienation and displacement, she was also like the Hindu women in using faith and religious literacy to build ethos and reaffirm her gendered identity. She recounted growing up mostly with her nonpracticing Muslim parents. With adolescence came a kind of awareness. Some would call it crisis. I had friends but nobody really counted me in. My Pakistani friends thought I was more American than them and my Caucasian friends were good but they knew I was a Muslim girl. . . . I felt a kind of being nowhere. My mother was there but she was also kind of lonely and working. She was reading Qur’an. I was her only friend now. I also started reading and discussing it with her. But I fully embraced Islam, alhamdullilah [praise Allah] after my baby was born.

Although her use of the hijab at college was to be her first assertion of Islamic identity, her full identification with Islamic principles came after she began to have problems with her husband. He was married in Bangladesh before tying the knot with her, but she found out about his other wife only much later. She “kicked him out” and started raising her baby on her own. She also rationalized her husband’s betrayal in spiritual terms. “I was only wearing the hijab but did not follow Allah fully, so I thought He is the one who can guide me through.” Soon after her divorce, she also formed a halaqua (Islamic study circle) with a few women where they read about the “prophet Mohammed and Qu’ran” and the value of following those teachings to “lead a good life.” If the halaqua Hena formed in 1998 was in response to adversity in her personal life, the one she formed in Kingsville in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was different. Like the men’s group formed around the same time, it represented her group’s desire to engage contemporary cultural and political issues as they re-

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lated to Muslim Americans. However, it was also different in its focus, and it may reflect gendered values. The group Sameer and friends formed was more visible and discussed, in his words, “religion, politics, media, current news, what to do and not to do, everything.” Hena’s group, according to her, focused “more on religion than news or anything like that . . . things change but Allah is the one who does not.” Her group comprised eight members, including Hena’s mother, three Pakistanis, an Indian, an Afghan, and an Egyptian. Although I could not interview other members of the group, Hena’s description sums up its goals and activities: We think it doesn’t matter how much you know unless you know why you are here. Why am I in this world? What is my role in the greater scheme of things? It doesn’t mean we didn’t talk about other issues. We understood the 9/11; it was a terrorist attack, no doubt about it. But things have changed for the worse for us all after that. We have been going around having to defend ourselves and our faith and, you know, like what we wear and if we knew the terrorists. There was a time we even wouldn’t go out. We were sad as anybody else at the 9/11, we were shocked, but why people curse at us and call names? It’s better not to talk. We needed to know what to do, to console each other and help each other. So we got together and made this little group and met at different places every week. We were planning this group anyway and the attacks happened. So we don’t let anything distract us from Allah.

Hena’s description shows that the women’s discussion group, like the men’s, covered contemporary events, as well as Qur’anic teachings and other issues of personal and community concern, even as they focused less on those day-to-day issues. Although women prayed separately at the mosques and did not usually mix with men in public, their coming together in the halaqua also had a goal for their community. Hena argued, “we follow God and we respect men. But we cannot depend on anybody. If we want freedom we start it on our own first. We begin with the person, the person you are. . . . I also emphasize this at my school, with my colleagues and students . . . in a way they can understand.” Even as Hena stresses the importance of independence for her-

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self and other Muslim women, she knows her work entails more than opening up space within her patriarchal community, which will also require more than an individual attempt. That is where her halaqua meetings and school teaching come in. Without mentioning men or even any hint of patriarchy, she strategically focuses on women’s empowerment through Qur’anic teachings and discussions independent of an imam. She is “committed to women’s causes” but not in a Western, feminist sense. Her inspiration comes from the Qur’an and her belief that it is the male interpretations, not the “Prophet’s words or intentions,” that limit women’s roles in public life. As N. H. Barazangi has also pointed out, “Muslim male elites who wrongly attribute to the Qur’an the prevention of women from public participation caused women not to be empowered with Qur’anic tools of liberation” (2004, 22). Hena’s role as a founding member of the halaqua indicates her assertion of agency in public life contrary to the conservative Muslim and non-Muslim view of modern Muslim women as powerless. Although Hena knows “some Arabic,” her identity as a practicing Muslim woman, teacher, and halaqua foundermember shows that neither is there one Islamic prescription for women nor is knowledge of Arabic language and culture primary to being a Muslim (Barazangi 2004, 23). Although Hena’s work is like the women teachers’ at the Hindu school, especially Brinda’s, she has not met or worked with those Hindu women. She has not met with the Muslim men in the reading group other than Sameer, although she knows the community leaders Iqbal and Aziz. As a full-time teacher, she is accountable to her school board and parents for students’ performance in class and in standardized tests. This is how she would describe a typical work day: “I have been teaching fourth graders at this [Islamic] school. . . . Today [Friday] I first taught the oral recitation of Qur’an, then English, Mathematics, and other subjects, and at last dismissed the class with a moral story about the Prophet [Muhammad].” As a teacher, Hena was equally aware of the way schools such as hers are characterized in the mainstream media. She mentioned a few news reports and articles, which suggested that Islamic

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schools within the United States were teaching hatred toward the United States.18 In her own words, “Teaching one Islamic studies course should not be treated as anti-American. We talk about peace and freedom. We love America. Many of us are here for democracy, for freedom.” Hena saw the need for Islamic schools because there was “not much support for our children in other schools. She was referring to cases such as a 2005 CNN report from New York, where a Muslim student was forced to join an Islamic school after harrasment at her public school; some of her own students had also previously “experienced discomfort” at other schools.19 But she asks, “They can’t escape the society, can they? Some even seriously consider leaving the country. But that’s not easy.” Despite her assertion that the halaqua was more interested in spiritual issues than political ones, it was clear that the discussion circle’s understanding of spirituality was not totally bereft of politics. They were certainly not discussing partisan politics or politics in the short term, but the issues of power, agency, and representation deeply permeated those meetings and had been the driving factors behind the formation of the halaqua. In fact, Hena’s group was interested in a progressive interpretation of the Qur’an, and it informed her teaching as well. To give one example, her group discussed a few articles that discussed women’s position in Muslim societies from a progressive point of view, and she even managed to incorporate the ideas in her classes. The first article she had archived was about “Islam and Gender Violence” and opened as follows: The Qur’an warns about those men who oppress or ill-treat women: O you who believe! You are forbidden to inherit women against their will. Nor should you treat them with harshness, that you may take away part of the dowry you have given them—except when they have become guilty of open lewdness. On the contrary, live with them on a footing of kindness and equity. If you take a dislike to them, it may be that you dislike something and Allah will bring about through it a great deal of good. (4:19) Unlike other religions, which regard women as being fixated [on] inherent sin and wickedness and men as being possessed of inherent virtue and nobility, Islam regards men and women as

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being of the same essence created from a single soul. The Qur’an says: O mankind! Reverence your Guardian-Lord, who created you from a single person, created, of like nature, his mate, and from this pair scattered (like seeds) countless men and women. Reverence Allah, through Whom you demand your mutual (rights), and reverence the wombs (that bore you); for Allah ever watches over you. (4:1) The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said, “Women are the twin halves of men.” The Qur’an emphasizes the essential unity of men and women in a most beautiful simile: They (your wives) are your garment and you are a garment for them. (2:187)

Reading such “articles was very reassuring” as it gave Hena, in her own words, the “tools you needed to talk in your community . . . [and with] outsiders with better perspective.” It helped that the reading materials often profusely quoted and interpreted the Qur’an. Some men, she thought, may consider “women as only things like garments”; it was important to note, according to her, that “men are also garments.” Although Hena did not believe that the above article or any other that the group or she read provided any revolutionary thoughts that she “had not thought about,” reading and discussing them gave her important references and language that she found useful in her discussions in the community and while teaching. Hena had, therefore, started developing a repository of relevant writings by Islamic scholars on current topics and women’s position in Islamic societies. A few of the pieces were written or compiled by Aziz. Although Hena herself had decided to wear hijab, she was “very strongly against forcing it on others” and found one of Aziz’s articles useful in her discussions in the group and at school. In fact, she had a senior teacher at the school who had “a different opinion” on the issue, and it was important for her to gather as much evidence as possible in support of her position. Aziz’s “Is Hijab Compulsory?” did that. It quoted the Qur’an to argue that the head garment was for identification purposes in the early days, not a requirement then or today. Hena agreed that while it was not obligatory, the headwear had a symbolic function,

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and one that she herself had adopted. As the article states, One of the verses in the Qur’an protects a woman’s fundamental rights. Verse 59 of Surah Al Ahzaab reads: “O Prophet! tell thy wives and daughters and the believing women that they should cast their outer garments over their persons (when outside) so that they should be known (as such) and not be molested.” According to the Qur’an, the reason why the Muslim women should wear an outer garment when they are going out of their home is . . . [to] be recognized as “Believing” women and be differentiated from streetwalkers. . . . The purpose of this verse was not to confine women to their homes but to make it safe for them to go about their daily business without attracting unsavory attention. Older women who are past the prospect of marriage are not required to wear the “outer garment.” . . . The Qur’an does not suggest that women should be veiled or they should be kept apart from the world of men. On the contrary, the Qur’an is insistent on the full participation of women in society and in the religious practices. Morality of the self and cleanliness of conscience are far better than the morality of the purdah. No goodness can come from pretense. . . . How can Muslim men meet non-Muslim women who are not veiled and treat them respectfully, but not accord the same respectful treatment to Muslim women? . . . Muslim women remained in mixed company with men until the late sixth century (A.H.) or eleventh century (A.C.). They received guests, held meetings and went to wars with their brothers and husbands. . . . It is part of the growing feeling among Muslim men and women that they no longer wish to identify with the West, and that reaffirmation of their Muslim identity requires the kind of visible sign that adoption of conservative clothing implies.

Articles such as the above helped Hena to discuss women’s place in Islamic societies with historical and religious authority. Sometimes, they also explained her own choices, as in the case of her adoption of hijab. Hena believes that every community including her own needs to treat every member equally and that reading

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and writing are the most important means “to understand your place and your responsibility as Allah has assigned.” Her goal for teaching, in the face of all odds, is to teach students “love because love begets love.” Hena’s work is like Brinda’s and her friends’ at the Hindu school in many ways. They use available resources to assert their voices and to (trans)form their communities. As Lawrence Grossberg maintains, “What is important in history is what practices are available, how they are deployed or taken up and how they transform the world. It is not merely a question of what people . . . do in fact do, but of the possibilities available to them: of the means available for transforming reality as well as those actually taken up” (1992, 51). Hena believes that the halaqua can be an important platform to open space for necessary practice to further empower her and her friends and to transform their daily realities. Her group work and teaching confer on her the access and ethos for bringing about the changes she desires in her community. Hena already thinks that “discussing in a group like this and helping each other” has prepared her to be a more effective teacher, community member, and leader. Foreign “Evil” to Friends? I started this chapter with a discussion of how political exigencies create conditions for certain kinds of literacies to support selfaffirmation, reinforce positive perceptions of an otherwise stigmatized community within “mainstream” society, and promote cross-cultural understanding. A look at the changing dynamics of language and literacy practices of South Asian immigrants in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, events shows how external exigencies can (re)define the relationship between a minority community and the state or the “mainstream” society in a globalized social and cultural context. The immigrant community’s word work attempted to reshape that relationship (between immigrant/minority communities and the dominant culture) on friendlier terms by highlighting similarities between their faiths and cultural values while accentuating affiliation between the im-

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migrant and his/her land of origin (or the land of their parents’ origin), in general, and cultural tradition, in particular. In this way, these immigrants’ literate lives are inherently rhetorical as they are (re-)created in response to specific exigencies. They create and use certain kinds of reading, writing, discussions, and presentations to (re)construct a culturally meaningful identity and to reaffirm membership in a larger culture and community reconstituted through these very practices. These activities also authorize the practitioners to speak as members of their community or culture. In this way, people like Hena and Sameer engage in culturally identified (Islamic) literacies to reaffirm— even reclaim—their membership in their community. Through those very acts, they also constantly re-create their culture and identity in relation to internal values and external exchanges. Hena’s case demonstrates, however, that there is no one version or vision of these literacies, communities, or effects, since these edifices are products of cultural work and subject to (re)invention and transformation. That is the history of all cultures, one in which Hena and her compatriots believe. However, these Muslim members’ practices are not just any other practices. Performed on the fault lines of power, the internal discussions and external presentations performed in the name of the Muslim (South Asian) American community give rise to critical cultural processes even as they leave practitioners in a liminal state. They demonstrate how religion and culture—and the literacies that embody them— are in ongoing and constant movement through the word work of practitioners.

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Chapter 6

Between Departures and Returns Literacies of Migrations, Migrations of Literacies Why am I here [Hindu school]? I got here because my parents wanted me [to]. But I think it is valuable; like, if I go to India or even England; isn’t that possible? . . . It will help. I can live here or . . . work and live in India.

—Dinesh It’s a pity you are here like everyone, and we are supposed to defend our parents’ countries [of origin]? I am American, not un-American. . . . Much [of my] work these days is reading and talking about things that I was not even interested [in] when I was in school or college. . . . You could say I am returning to places that my parents came from. But is it going or returning? I don’t know. My new learning comes from different places.

—Sameer We know our cultures are also not perfect. People are different; I mean, their experience is different from person to person. You see they have different positions and roles. If you are powerful or have no power, that makes all the difference. Who decides? It is important . . . to work to change our culture and other cultures.

—Brinda My family got no visa. Also my work permit [is] to be canceled. The last letter says it.

—Jay

As earlier chapters have shown, immigrant communities are organized primarily around culture (with a focus on religion or language or both) and nationality and are also simultaneously transformed on account of internal dynamics (of gender, language, class, etc.) and external contacts. Unlike earlier immigrants, recent immigrants can take advantage of new information and communications technologies, as well as a more integrated financial system to stay connected to their former homes and make the movement more than one way. Participants like Brinda, Dinesh, and Sameer in this study broadly understood those technologies and processes as parts of globalization that facilitated their relo-

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cation and transnational contacts, both culturally and professionally. With the outsourcing of the services industry to South Asia (mostly India) and the decade-long war in Afghanistan following 9/11, South Asia and South Asians occupy a tricky place in the contemporary discussions about “global” cultures and economy, especially in the United States. And it works both ways: while US military men and women fight in Afghanistan and US businesses move to different parts of Asia to cut costs and expand their markets, consumerist desires and literacies in the neoliberal economy, as Inderpal Grewal (2005) has demonstrated, continue to produce international migration of middle-class South Asians to the West. In response to realities such as these, much has been said about the emergence of a borderless world and the decline of the nation-state (Urry 2000), as well as the transnational “flows” of culture, labor, and technology, ushering in a “global” era (Appadurai 1996; Clifford 1997; Hall and Gay 1996; Ong 1999; Sassen 2003). Arjun Appadurai offers useful terms or “-scapes”—ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finacescapes, and ideoscapes—to describe the world that has undergone what he calls, after Deleuze and Guattari, “deterritorialization.” These “-scapes” are constantly at play in the world today, but the most crucial among them are the ethnoscapes, the humans, “who make up the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest-workers and other groups and persons” and who “constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of and between nations to an unprecedented degree” (1996, 33). Carmen Luke and Allan Luke echo the same sentiment from the vantage point of globalization theories: “Population mobility is a . . . hallmark of globalization theories. Travel, displacement, and ‘border crossing’ are often cited as indicative aspects of globalization, with population movements across national borders in search of work and improved quality of life” (2000, 284). The recent immigrants populating this study also saw themselves as part of that process, which they negotiated with their English language and professional skills. At the same time, as this study has demonstrated, they also created and used a range of culturally identified languages and literacies to maintain

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their “roots” and, in the process, reconstructed their own culture and community. In this concluding chapter, I revisit how South Asian immigrants see the world around them and, in response, (re)invent and use literacies for navigating it. I claim that their literacy practices constitute word work, which takes on a form of affective labor, for forming and transforming their culture and community. Their language practices are constantly recontextualized and transcontextualized to link and relink multiple points of contact transnationally. As Brandt and Clinton (2002) have argued, even situated studies may sometimes give a false sense of the nature and function of literacies as if they were bounded in a given setting. Hesford and Schell also note the general tendency at work obscuring “the work of transnational forces” (2008, 466). It is against such a backdrop that these immigrants’ work brings to the fore how symbolic resources are (re)invented, mobilized, and (re)circulated across vast distances or are recontextualized and transcontextualized, and how they embed issues of class, gender, cultural identity, and citizenship. In this chapter, I summarize my observations and discuss what those practices can teach us about the uses and functions of literacies at a time of profound change. First, the lives and literacies of the participants in this study engage, complicate, and interrogate some of the foundational assumptions about globalization, especially as they pertain to the “flows” and “flat-world” hypotheses. For example, if Dinesh’s statement in the epigraph above is embedded in the popular globalist discourse that highlights the opportunities of cross-border movement, Sameer’s challenges and complicates any simplistic understanding of transnational movements and exchanges. With his education and training in the US school and college system, Dinesh could cross borders to live and work. Such a possibility was bolstered by the “informal” literacies he developed at the Hindu school, or, at least, that is how he believed life would turn out if he chose to relocate to India or to a place with a sizable Indian diaspora, such as certain parts of the United Kingdom. Sameer’s statement indicates the other side of the emerging—and contentious—world in which, despite the rhetoric of a “global village”

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(McLuhan and Fiore 1967) or “flat world” (Friedman 2005), borders have, in fact, grown all-pervasive and intransigent in recent times instead of disappearing.1 Sameer experiences borders as marked by a discourse that “divides people and cultures” as “either good or evil.” It is a rhetoric that perpetuates a discourse of eternal civilizational conflict (as in Huntington 1993, 1998) and represents Sameer’s culture as “a backward and terror-causing” one. In his cultural presentations, he would “not forget to raise this issue” and to address it as an ill effect of Islamophobia (see also Grewal 2013; Kumar 2012). He would then point out the flaws of using isolated events or fringe elements to characterize a whole culture or religion: “can you say that all Christians are Nazis because Hitler was? Are all white Christians terrorists because Timothy McVeigh was? No.” In the next epigraph above, Brinda also reminds us not to generalize cultures as homogenous entities but as contested spaces in which having (or not having) power “makes all the difference.” Equally important, according to her, is “to work to change” cultures to make them more just for everyone. Taken together, the first three opening epigraphs above indicate the complexities of the emerging world and the uses of literacies to act within it. The world in which these immigrants see and act are interconnected, even intimately, but those connections are also bracketed along lines of given cultural identifications. Meanwhile, at the time of writing this chapter, Jay’s case was on the verge of collapsing: although the letter from his former hotel supervisor had secured a work authorization for him, his petition for legal permanent resident (LPR) status was pending, and his application for his family to join him resulted in the rejection of the petition altogether because of some discrepancies in the wage-related papers and tax statements from the restaurant. It was ironic that while Jay’s case was going nowhere in the nine years since he first filed his application, 66,134 of his fellow Bhutanese refugees (also known as Lhotshampas) had begun their new life in the United States by mid-2013 as a result of a resettlement program that the US government initiated in collaboration with the United Nations Refugee Agency and other host nations in 2007. Of the approximately 120,000 Nepali-speaking Lhotsham-

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pas who were living in the refugee camps of eastern Nepal after being rendered stateless by the Bhutanese government’s ethnic cleansing policy, 100,000 were already referred for third-country settlement.2 Unsure that his petition would have any successful outcome, Jay wrote to his acquaintances in the refugee camps in Nepal and, through them, sent an appeal to the local referral officers. He was told that since his family was no longer in the refugee camp and had missed the registration deadline before 2007, he could not be listed now. Therefore, he continued to set aside a major portion of his wages to pay for an attorney to defend his case in the immigration court. In this way, the legalities of the state in the face of complex political and economic realities obstruct Jay and his family’s prospects for immigration despite his physical presence in the United States, while the fraught nature of religious and ethnic/racial identification of people like Sameer as “un-American” problematizes their legal citizenship.3 As these examples demonstrate, the transnational movement of people is more complex than implied in the “flow” metaphor. As the stories of Sameer and his compatriots indicate, despite their US citizenship, these immigrants have not fully “arrived.” That is, they are between the points of departure and destination. Such a situation is characterized as being in an in-between space and sometimes presented as not only bearable but also desirable. Indeed, such a view may be promoted by people like Dinesh, who hopes that his formal and informal literacies will maximize his opportunities. It is in aspirations like his that inhabiting the borderland or in-betweenness is sometimes romanticized and celebrated (as in Friedman 2005) although these are also dangerous conditions (see, for example, Anzaldúa 1987; Bhabha 1994, 1996; Grewal 2013). The stories of Hena and Sameer, among others, present the clearest examples of what it can be like to occupy such a fraught space. They often felt they were “boxed in,” as Hena stated, “you can’t run away from your bodies . . . and cultures.” The condition of occupying an in-between space and being boxed into such a space are two different things. South Asian immigrants and their literacies inhabit a space between their points of departure and arrival, and while this could be said about any

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nonwhite, non-English-speaking immigrant community, there are two points that deserve some discussion here. First, the river metaphor of the study participants to describe life as an ongoing journey may resonate with a lot of other people, and it could apply to our general human condition to a certain extent. Mikhail Bakhtin was perhaps referring to such an experience in describing a condition of “unfinalizability” in his discussion of Dostoevsky’s novels. According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky’s novels show an “internally unfinalizable something in man. . . . They all acutely sense their own inner unfinalizability, their capacity to outgrow, as it were, from within and to render untrue any externalizing and finalizing definition of them. As long as a person is alive, he lives by the fact that he is not yet finalized, that he has not yet uttered his ultimate word” (1984, 58–59, emphasis in the original). It is perhaps life’s condition for being that we remain in such an unfinalizable state, unable to utter the final word until it is utterly impossible to! This urge for life characterizes all literate engagements. However, South Asian immigrants present an interesting case in which their bodies and cultural identifications render their arrival questionable, even almost “unarrivable.” This is the second point: on one hand, there is acute anxiety among immigrants about losing their “authentic” culture and identity, so they work to preserve and promote them by sponsoring culturally identified literacies while, on the other hand, those very practices and values, along with their embodied presence, mark them as the perpetual outsiders. Second, native languages and literacies are inescapably tied to self-identity, especially for people occupying an in-between space. It is not an issue of choice as implied by nativist, English-only, or monolingual ideologies that ask immigrants to choose between native and English or American identity. All the participants in this study were cognizant of the value of English to function in the US society and, with the exception of a small fraction, proficient English users. However, they equally valued their native language and culture, if not always for the same reasons. Although the language-identity link is not new or remarkable, the invocation and use of “native” identified literacies is, especially for immigrants and their children. It is true that the work of Brin-

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da and her friends could fit with the received wisdom that firstgeneration immigrants are intimately tied to their native countries and cultures, but the involvement of individuals like Dinesh, Sameer, and others complicates that line of argument. Moreover, the work of Sameer and his colleagues, as well as Hena and her friends indicates a more complex picture of a simplistic narrative of assimilation by the second- or third-generation immigrants. What can be observed here is an embrace, across generational lines, of the “native” identity and commitment to the promotion of languages thus identified and the worlds they evoke and reconstruct (although not always under the same circumstances or for the same reasons). This view of identity is rooted in one’s faith and language (often subsumed under “culture”), and sometimes nation-state. The first-generation South Asian immigrants value this view of identity the most, and it is this value system that accounts for their investment of time, money, and other resources to (re-)create and (re)circulate their culturally identified literacies in their communities. Aziz, the scientist and Islamic scholar, explains, “we are what our culture and faith is.” For him, immigrant languages and cultures positively contribute to their sense of self. Similarly, in the words of Shanker, the Hindu temple priest, “your identity is your dharma like what you are and you do, . . . age-old wisdom, your traditions.” To these immigrants and their compatriots, their native language and cultural practices provide continuity to those traditions. Such practices, while accentuating their difference in the place of their current residence, also reconnect them to the users of similar languages or cultures across the world. In this way, transnational communities and identities are bracketed along ethnic, cultural, or religious lines. As Sameer, critiquing the disparate discussions on multiculturalism in the aftermath of 9/11, once wondered, “isn’t this a little weird [that] on the one hand you keep hearing all this about ‘you are your culture, all cultures are equal,’ whatever, but then also things like ‘all cultures are different,’ and, then, ‘some are backward and bad and evil’?” His own view was that “nobody should be superior or inferior. Being different does not make anyone less or more

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important.” In fact, it was such an awareness, reinvigorated by the “feeling of being stigmatized” in the post-9/11 context that gave him the impetus to identify strongly with his ancestral heritage and to teach across cultural boundaries. Defining identity as essentially and culturally unique has its share of risks. For one, it belies a fundamental aspect of cultural changes, accentuated by globalization. Such a tendency also leads to a kind of culturalism that, according to Samir Amin, a critic of Eurocentrism, is “based on the hypothesis that there are cultural invariants able to persist through and beyond possible transformations in economic, social, and political systems” (2009, 7) and perpetuates cultural stereotypes. The complex dynamics that shape the designing and teaching of culturally identified curricula in immigrant communities, however, substantiate the idea that cultures are not static. Such a view of culture as subject to change contradicts the idea of cultural heritage as determining one’s identity, but it need not. This is where the antiEurocentric, anti-Orientalist epistemological project needs to reconcile the general view of culture by taking into account the rhetorical situation of the present in which cultural identity is negotiated. Immigrants like Brinda and Sameer are certainly not impervious to the processes of cultural changes. Although they view roots as defining their identity, they are also cognizant of the fact that those roots are to be refigured or rerouted for the subjects to be relevant for here and now. They also recognize that cultural identities are not only maintained through a delicate balancing between the past (the given) and the present but also, in the words of Brinda, “not fully in control.” Brinda means that irrespective of whether immigrants want to be identified in terms of their cultural or native state–based affiliations, they are assigned those identity categories, as in legal forms, and are generally expected to self-identify in terms of some culturally generalized or generalizable labels. Any study that privileges historical determinism at the expense of the daily realities will fail to capture the messy process of subject formation and meaning making. To see how the balancing works, we can look at a few key moments from Sameer’s trial with it here. As he reflected on the

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responses to one of his early presentations at a local church, Sameer had a question: “how American can one Muslim be?” The question readily articulates the irony of his legal citizenship and was fueled by the questions he faced there. Readers familiar with US politics leading up to and following the election of President Barack Obama are too familiar with the uncomfortable fact that despite repeated assertion of his Christian faith, he is sometimes cast as a secret Muslim and thus not only un-American but also anti-American. Obama became the first US president who had to release his birth certificate publicly to counter claims that he was not born in the United States and thus ineligible to hold the office of the presidency. Familiar with such a reality, Sameer did not mind the questions since he “could also answer them directly.” Most of the questions, according to him, could be boiled down to one: “why do your guys want to hurt us?” He understood that those questions assumed a close affinity among all Muslims and resulted from ignorance, bigotry, or both. He thought he answered the questions adequately, distinguishing “different groups and ideas” as “between different Christian sects and ideologies.” But as the questions persisted in one presentation after another and pervaded the mass media, he was pushed to think about his citizenship as a Muslim man. He is certainly entitled to jus soli (citizenship by birth), for he was born and raised in the United States, so his question concerned what his membership in the nation-state means. More important, “for many people, it is not just the faith. It is also the looks. There is also language, accent . . . but you find Muslim, and it is like a deal breaker.” As Sameer notes, the embodied nature of the nonwhite immigrant subject is readily constructed as the other, and the issue of Muslim faith further complicates the matter. Sameer, however, likes the idea of the separation of church and state that helps him define his identity as an American Muslim. Like Azad and Aziz, he stresses that his community is essentially American, citing both the community’s respect for the US Constitution and the history of Muslim immigration, which began during the colonial period, and the development of the Muslim community in the United States as an American Muslim community.

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Similarly, although immigrants understood the role that their bodies and cultural backgrounds play in the construction of their identity, there was a subtle difference along generational lines in the perception and articulation of their subjectivity. Both Aziz and Shanker, for example, emphasized cultural roots as the basis of their identity, whereas people of the newer generation like Dinesh and Sameer considered their ancestral heritage as only one of many factors, not the mainstay, of who they were. In the words of Sameer, “the older people are worried that we may forget our traditions. . . . I know why they would be worried, but we are, I think, fine. Part of the thing is we have no choice. You see what I mean? You can’t get by without answering, ‘where are you from?’ . . . I think it helps to know more about our community and history because that way, at least, you know something.” The second-generation immigrants like Sameer thus stress the social construction of their ethnicities and their acute awareness of the audience’s role in such construction. For the older generation, their identity has a more or less fixed location geo-culturally. It is not to suggest that the first generation always sticks to a naturalistic or biological explanation of their identity; rather, people like Aziz and Shanker stress their ties to their native countries and cultures as the foundational points of their identity. They also maintain active contacts with the general happenings in those countries, sometimes even working to influence policies by actively lobbying and/or sponsoring events that interest them. Their children’s contact with the countries of parental origin has much to do with social and economic opportunities (as Dinesh states in the epigraph above), on one hand, and cultural resources, on the other. The cultural-historical association, however, may cut both ways, since it can be either an instrumental resource to which people like Brinda and Sameer can turn for self-affirmation or a burden when it leads to derision or discrimination. The younger generation’s understanding of its identity echoes what social scientists have recently called the availability or lack thereof of optional ethnicities for some people in the United States. Unlike white Americans, who may claim a certain ancestry (often ethnicized) or just be Caucasian, or what Lieberson

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(1985) called “un-hyphenated Whites,” nonwhite minorities do not have those options (Alba 1990). It is against these realities that (re)inventing and (re)circulating native-identified literacies becomes an obligation as well as a resource for a large number of South Asian immigrants. The practice of (re)inventing histories and cultures directly relates to the debate about identity or how much of it is predetermined. Despite invocations to the histories and geographies far and away, the practice actually also indicates that identity is not wholly predetermined but is instead an act— or, at least, that is what most of these immigrant practices show it to be. As documented in this study, my subjects enact identity by sponsoring a range of literacy activities within their communities and without. Word work and identity become parts of the same process for these immigrants. Third, the field of literacy studies has traditionally been preoccupied with a static notion of identity, with questions like how certain individuals or cultures act with (or without) literacy. Thinking about identity with South Asian immigrants, especially with regards to their word work to re-create, recast, and represent themselves within their community and without, helps us conceptualize identity as something one enacts or performs, not as something one possesses. To appreciate the word work is not to discount history or heritage but to shed light on the process of how roots are reconstructed here and now or how roots are rerouted. The same applies to literacies: they are not a static set of skills or even practices with fixed forms and functions but resources constantly reinvented and renegotiated that have real-life consequences. This is so primarily because literacy practices and identities are complementary. As Rita, one of the Hindu school teachers, puts it, if “you are one of us, you act or speak like us and know our stories, know our struggles.” Notwithstanding a typically narrow identification of community affiliation here (you must act and speak like us to be counted as one of us), Rita also believes that the “ways of being in a community” are contingent on language practices that are learned and taught. The intertwining of identity and literacies augments one’s affiliation with a given community far and wide. In fact, those “ways

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of being” authenticate one’s membership in the communities. Interestingly, a strategic use of these literacies comes in handy especially for people who find themselves othered within the community, for it can be used to create a space, sometimes even for alternative “ways of being.” For example, Brinda and Rita at the Hindu school and Hena in the Islamic community emphasize the value of religion, especially holy texts and the language and values of those texts in (re)building community affiliation and for asserting their membership within it. For Brinda, such an action works both within the community and without since it authenticates their “speaking role.” The process of gaining such authority may begin or be practiced in what literacy scholars call the “safe houses” of one’s own community, like Brinda’s reading group or Sameer’s discussion forum, then move outward. Brinda’s own life substantiates her claim to a certain extent: it was her expertise in Sanskrit and teaching that helped her fight the stigma of being a divorcee and single mother and begin working as a spokesperson for the same community that once ostracized her. Meanwhile, Sameer took on a distinctly noticeable Muslim identity through independent study and community organizing, which gave him the confidence and legitimacy to speak on behalf of his community to other non-Muslim groups and law enforcement agencies. These immigrants’ word work was, in a Freirean way, intertwined with the real world and its rhetorical exigency. They were often accompanied or preceded by events propelling them into a deep reflection of their belonging and self-identity. Sameer’s poem below, for example, nicely sums up the experience. Who Are You? Now here I am Born, raised, citizen But wait a minute “Where are you from?” With roots abroad How do I answer? Here and there, and where? My roots are there I am here, almost rootless?

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Can I flourish here? Depends on me, finally And education of others.

The piece “Who Are You?” offers a profound meditation on the condition of feeling “almost rootless.” In fact, others—including Brinda, Aziz, Rita, Shilpa, and Dinesh—also composed poems or songs that reflected a similar predicament.4 This piece, which Sameer rated as his best, summed up the sentiments of others, too. Not written for publication (he has never published his poetry except in high school), the piece negotiates his memories of a cultural geography with which he is identified and the anxieties about “flourishing” in a place that is his home but that also others him with questions like “where are you from?” The piece was written soon after 9/11—the event that turned Muslims into a new racial group, a new scapegoat—and can be understood in relation to Sameer’s work across communities. It is also pretty straightforward in that he resolves the uncertainties with the assertion that by teaching others (and himself), he can be who he is and still “flourish.” Such “private” moments also shed light on the public performance of self. For instance, in his cultural presentations Sameer emphasizes that Islam does not signify race but religion and that it is “not too different from Christianity. . . . Muslims consider Jesus Christ as God’s messenger.” Similarly, Brinda emphasizes other commonalities between Christianity and Hinduism (such as the “value [of] giving and compassion”) when she speaks to school or other community groups. It is important to note that the emphasis shifts according to the audience and setting. In school courses and discussions within communities, the focus is on the shared heritage and what it means for individual responsibilities today, whereas the attention is directed to shared values and broader humanity when speaking across cultures. Points of cultural pride, such as historical achievements made by respective cultures in math, philosophy, or science inform both settings. I have already noted the issue of the knowledge-identity nexus and the dynamic relationship between them. Much has been said

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about how different language uses constitute different discourse communities, and how the value systems differ across such lines. Formal literacy teaching in schools and colleges is often predicated on the notion that students need a set of skills that are distinct from the epistemologies that students have already developed. These immigrants’ practices highlight how knowledge is culturally instituted, validated, and circulated. While these practices do not transcend the identity categories (and cannot do so as long as identification is also predicated on recognition and generalization), their work clearly names them and their materiality. Their cross-cultural work also involves identifying and highlighting the common history and humanity between groups and practices, and to that extent their work also unsettles the stratified labels of identity. And people do it differently. If Brinda and Sameer start at the margins of cultures, gaining culturally authenticated agency with their “word action,” then use the resulting ethos to promote inter- and cross-cultural understanding, the literacy narratives of people like Pranav and Rita, who relocated to different states and nation-states before “arriving” in Kingsville, highlight the act of constantly building and rebuilding communities as the condition of their being. Shuttling among several locations, they draw connections among experiences and memories. For Pranav, the “connections matter more than anything else.” Those connections are around cultural “roots” and locations as well as professions that explain his work with his colleagues in the medical field, South Asian expatriates in the domain of culturally identified communities in Africa, Europe, and the United States and the small farmers of the Appalachian Trail, where Pranav maintains a farm and cattle. For him, it is a “sense of your roots” and “openness to others” that has prepared him to adjust to the demands of multiple moves. Of greater interest are the practices of individuals who are marginalized within their communities and who appropriate the rhetorical powers of texts and their own positions to form and transform the norming structures that are increasingly transnational. Fourth, although religion and religious education generally have the same tendency as the nation-state to create and main-

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tain borders around their own identity, we cannot ignore the use of outward-looking and cosmopolitan strands to construct those cultures as forward-looking and on a par with other civilizations, as seen in the immigrants’ work discussed here. In particular, there was a common shloka that Brinda included in her teaching at the school as well as her public presentations and that even Aziz paraphrased in his discussion with me and to his audience at his presentations on the Islamic way of life (at churches and with law enforcement agencies). The shloka, which was featured in children’s additional reading materials at the Hindu school, read: Eka barnam yatha dugdham bhinna barnasu dhenushu Tathaiba dharma baichitryam tatwamekam param smritam. [Just as cows of different hues and types give the same whitecolored, life-nourishing milk, the essence of all religions is the same.]

Brinda and the Hindu school teachers made a great use of shlokas that emphasized universal humanity, and that line of argument served a great rhetorical purpose to establish rapport with her audiences when making presentations on behalf of her Hindu temple at local schools or community groups, such as churches or interfaith gatherings. A similar ethos informed the Muslim men’s presentations. Fifth, immigrants’ reading and writing practices not only show that these are ideologically saturated social practices, but they also serve as possible means of negotiating and understanding across borders. In the current climate, in which everything foreign is suspect and global competition a bogey, immigrant literacy practices provide a different kind of evidence, which points to the more beneficial aspects of transnational engagements. This possibility also questions the accuracy and utility of hypotheses such as the one famously epitomized by Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”—which Edward Said (2001) ridiculed as the “clash of ignorance” for its simplistic and biased division of the world into a handful of civilizations. Instead of treating everything outside the national border as suspect, we may actually benefit from appreciating how common histories and futures link those cultures or “ways of being” and by increasing such engagements. Living in an increasingly interdependent world, our responsibility is to investi-

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gate how the local and the not-local are intertwined and through teaching and research to lay bare the structures that produce the local and other edifices. This would mean, for example, examining how the ideas about academic or other kinds of writing themselves are situated and embed certain ideologies of language, citizenship, and the world. Sixth, treating immigrant literacy practices as transnational would also mean locating and advancing a discourse that goes beyond the nation and embracing the transnational as well as crossand transcultural reinventions, circulations, and cooptations as generative spaces and as objects of inquiry. In this sense, the full range of intra-, cross-, and transcultural communication along with their exigencies form connectivities of this transnational space. Unlike “global” rhetorics that highlight the free market, ignoring the ever-tightening nation-state borders and the intransigent multiple fault lines within those borders, immigrant language and literacy practices present a way of building and sustaining alliances that transcend state borders while responding to the specific needs of the local. In fact, different kinds of literacy practices that are rhetorically quite adept such as the ones based on popular culture (Williams 2002), informal literacy gateways like women’s reading clubs in the nineteenth-century United States (Gere 1997), or voting rights education among the African Americans (Kates 2006) demonstrate the rhetorically situated nature of literacy practices, as also highlighted by a few studies spotlighting their civic and rhetorical dimensions (Duffy 2004, 2007; Royster 2000). The contexts of the civic struggles as exemplified by the participants of this study are multiple and clearly both transcend and interrogate the geopolitical border of the nation-state. Therefore, as we reconceptualize literacies to include contexts of use and functions, not only do we need to expand our concepts of context to encompass the transnation, but we also need to pay attention to the re-creations and recirculations of symbolic practices. As we have seen in this study, given the unequal distribution of resources and opportunities, displacement is also desired, and the efforts at acquiring specific kinds of literacies (like the English language, technology use, or certain types of vocational

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education, for example) should be seen for what they are: rhetorical acts guided by specific goals. These goals are set in response to not only local exigencies but also transnational ones. For example, many of the immigrants’ education or training in their home countries were motivated by a desire to work in the United States. We also see a reverse trend beginning with the US economic slump at the beginning of the third millennium and economic growth in some immigrants’ home countries. As teachers and scholars, our challenge is to face up to and encourage our students to investigate those contexts not as something affecting a few in faraway places or a few “others” among us but also as constructs that affect us all. It is for our participation in the structure of the society and nation that the national and transnational, or “ours” and “theirs,” are validated and naturalized. Seventh, this study demonstrates that immigrant language practices lay bare the dynamic motion of literacies. By this statement, I mean that immigrant literacy practices illustrate how culture is not a coherent or homogenous system but a space where meanings are constructed and contested, and how the complex rhetorical situation of the local is negotiated with the translocal. In fact, these immigrants’ practices debunk the old notion of the one-way importation of “native” languages and literacies to the adoptive country by showing how they flow multidirectionally. At the same time, these practices place in question the dichotomy between “native” and “non-native” at different levels—language and nationality being the most prominent—and point to other issues that merit closer inquiry. These other issues involve the ways in which individual and group identity are perceived, learned, taught, and contested, making them important sites for scholars of literacy and culture studies. In short, these immigrants’ word work enacts literacies in motion and constructs an interdependent world that values cross-cultural understanding. To borrow from the New London Group, these immigrants’ work makes them “simultaneously members of . . . multiple and overlapping lifeworlds” (1996, 71), which they re-create and shuttle between by learning and deploying appropriate resources according to the occasion and location. This way

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of negotiating multilayered relationships provides a different model of transcultural and transnational relations distinct from the dominant forms of globalization (or assimilation within a nationstate) dictated by the financial, military, or political interests of the powers that be. Take Two: Word Work in Motion In this final section, I stress the migrantness of literacies and word work one more time, since this study calls for reconceptualizing languages and literacies in relation to the incessant movement to which humans are subject—be it locally or transnationally—and literacy’s inherent openness to adaptation and modification (as a resource) or constant state of being in motion. Whether in my native village of Nepal or in US immigrant communities, word work is integral to our stories about our being, our lives, our relationships, our work, and everything else that matters to us. It follows that we move on, and so do literacies in relation to unfolding exigencies, many of which may not be in our control. However, literacies do not move on their own. We as individuals and communities work to take them places and make them work. Embracing these facts will enrich our research, our curriculum, and our pedagogy. As globalization accelerates—especially through the spread of capital (and the capitalist financial system), information and communication technologies (ICTs), diseases, and people—the role and function of ancestral/heritage languages, cultures, cultural knowledge systems, and emerging technologies have received increased attention from literacy scholars. In response to the emerging critique of the “limits of the local” in literacy studies, Street (2003, 2004) emphasizes the need to study local/global dynamics by looking at the ways in which “distant” literacies are appropriated in relation to “previous communicative practices.” After examining the practices reported in this study, we can add that it is not enough to separate things by labeling them as global or distant and local, since it is often impossible to decide where the local ends and the global begins. In fact, that would be the wrong approach. These are imprecise terms that we use to denote how we view a certain event, object, or practice in relation to our

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location—the location of the researcher, as Street knows too well. We cannot use our relation to something as the ontological basis of that thing; it is more important to be alert to how that thing—a given literacy event or practice, for our purpose here—is simultaneously part of the local and the global or translocal. Jan Blommaert (2010), Suresh Canagarajah (2013), Rebecca Leonard (2013), Gale Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe (2000), the New London Group (1996), Ilana Snyder (2002), and M. Suarez-Orozco and D. B. Qin-Hilliard (2004), among others, have drawn our attention to the changing landscape of school and college classrooms as the sites of multiliteracies or global, traveling, and/or transnational literacies. Scholars have also spotlighted how class, language, locality, and citizenship affect access to literacy gateways (Blommaert 2008; Berry, Hawisher, and Selfe 2012; Selfe and Hawisher 2004). Immigrant literacy practices help us highlight other dimensions of literate lives, such as their mobility and inventiveness, as well as interdependence and intersections in a changing world. With these immigrants’ practices, we can rethink the goal of formal education in our societies. For example, if, as Bill Readings has argued, the modern university had a “national cultural mission” (1996, 3) from its originary moment, what happens to it and its mission, especially that of producing national citizens, when we have entered a so-called new global order, and when the university is increasingly transnational and corporatized? Similarly, if our job today as teacherscholars is to prepare global citizens instead of just the citizens of a nation-state, and a “politicized citizenry” after Dewey at that, what does it mean in terms of our own roles as educators and what we do? These are broad questions and invite further studies and meditations, but a few observations can be made here. Literacy and writing teachers are interested in constructing their syllabi and assignments in response to these questions and to changes in the lives of their students and theirs but are not always sure as to how or how far to go. Scholars have pointed out that the sites of inquiry into “the process and effects of globalization” for writers could be “authorship,” audience (the “globalized classroom”), and multiple modes of production, circulation, and reception of

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those texts (Himley 2003, 49) or specific use of language itself as through “code meshing” or translanguaging (Canagarajah 2006, 2011, 2013; Horner et al. 2011). Bruce Horner et al. have critiqued the monolingual approaches to literacy that “take as the norm a linguistically homogeneous situation: one where writers, speakers, and readers are expected to use Standard English or Edited American English—imagined ideally as uniform—to the exclusion of other languages and language variations” (2011, 304) and argued for a translingual orientation. Similarly, building on George Marcus’s ethnographic model of multisited research and its relevance to studies of writing, Christopher Keller (2004) has argued that we need to highlight students’ travels across various socially constructed identity locations if we are to understand something other than their “naturalized” identity as students. These new orientations to language relations and subjectivities are important, although they mostly concern the teaching and learning of literacies in more or less formal gateways to learning. These approaches can all benefit by looking at immigrant literacy practices and similar instances of connectivities, as these are the sites that more acutely negotiate complex questions of language, location, and citizenship. It is important to realize that changes in production relations today as a result of the “flow” of labor and culture, among other variables, are shaping our realities in more than one way. The immigrants in this study show that these relationships are not closed systems and that inquiries should not be limited to one or more sites or categories. We should rather embrace the new possibilities and challenges in terms of a stance toward refusing any neat categorizations. All issues and objects of knowledge should be treated as relational, local and transnational simultaneously, and in motion, not as objects or identities with fixed locations or positions. It is not enough to study literacy practices as means of negotiating different spaces. It is equally important to examine how literacies themselves change in the process and what that means to all the stakeholders involved. Similarly, the very concept of literacy is also often tied to one particular technology (alphabetic) of literacy. Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola (1999) have criticized the tendency to imagine our relationship

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with every communication technology as the one we have with print literacy. Building on Stuart Hall’s notion of articulation as a lens to understand relationships, they argue that literacy could be thought of “as a cloud of sometimes contradictory nexus points among different positions . . . [or] a process of situating and resituating different representations in social spaces” (1999, 367). It is by explicating the local grounding of practices and their translocal dimensions that we can begin untangling the many uses and consequences of literacy and challenge the hegemony of the culturally and technologically narrow (Western and print-based) conceptions. Finally, one way to productively engage ourselves as literacy scholars would be to open rhetorical spaces through collaboration with different communities and to constantly work with and against the elite position in which we are cast. As Min-Zhan Lu argues, the enlightened literate self should focus on ending oppression, grapple with our own privileges, approach histories more responsibly and respectfully, and affirm a yearning for individual agency (1999, 173). With Lu, then, it is fitting to conclude that if we really mean to learn from the strategic use of literacies by the othered members of immigrant communities, we should use the ethos and authority that our position gives us to transform the structures that (re)produce and legitimize the very elitism and authority from which and with which we speak. Looking Back, Looking Ahead I began this book with the story of my early exposure to writing, especially its use to manage local economic relations as well as translocal contacts. Jay’s story, especially his need of different “papers,” highlights the crucial role such papers play in one’s life in today’s documentary society, as it does the material costs and opportunities that certain generic and linguistic standards entail. The generative uses of symbolic resources by immigrants, individually and as a community, for forming, affirming, and transforming their communities and cross-cultural relations substantiate that the relationship between subjects and symbol use is crucial and yet fluid.

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In conclusion, immigrant literacy practices constitute word work and generate multiple relationships, resources, and tensions in both the immigrant communities and the dominant culture. More often than not, class, gender, religion, and race/caste/ethnicity shape and are shaped by those practices, practices that are simultaneously local and transnational and that, if only inevitably, betray the immigrants’ desire to claim membership in the host society while carving an authentic ethnic identity within it. These immigrants’ practices respond to, reinscribe, and challenge the rhetoric of globalization, especially as it pertains to discussions on the “flows” of capital, labor, and literacies, and inform theories and pedagogies of literacy, writing, and rhetoric. Overall, it is important to shift our gaze from stability to mobility; that is, from looking at symbolic uses and meaning-making systems as something limited in time and place to their (re)circulation and (re)appropriation. Similarly, it is important to explore the ways in which roots and histories are invented and mobilized across space and time, and what those practices mean for our practices as scholars and teachers. It is equally critical that we acknowledge the tension between capturing the fluid and dynamic aspect of lived lives and literacies, on one hand, and the act of writing about them, on the other, and how the researcher’s own positionality impinges on the research process and product. I hope I have taken a step in that direction in this book.

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Appendix: Initial Interview Script

Demographic information Name Date of birth Place of birth Gender Race/caste Place of rearing Type of household (childhood) Parents’ schooling and occupation Schools attended Where? Higher Education Degrees, dates of graduation Other training Past occupations in previous country

Immigration to the United States Context and motivations for immigration Timeline of major developments in life since immigration Occupations: Past Current Type of household (current)

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Language and culture First language, languages other than English, views and values Interviewees’ own sense of their facility with the English language Interviewees’ own sense of how others perceive their (a) communicative performance such as speech in different contexts (b) writing

Early literacy exposure Learning to read and write Direct and indirect instruction Places and occasions of reading/writing People and organizations associated with reading/writing Kinds of materials available for reading/writing Technologies and their role

Writing and reading at schools and colleges Kinds of reading/writing Memories of instruction (self, direct, peer) and evaluation Uses of assignments/ other school writing and reading Technologies available and their role Extracurricular writing and reading (organizations or activities that may have involved writing or reading; writing contests, pen pals, and so forth)

Self-initiated writing or reading Purposes for writing and reading at different stages Genres Audiences/uses Teaching/learning involved

Writing on the job Same questions as above in previous country Same questions as above in the United States Purposes for reading and writing overall

Values Relative importance of writing and reading (a) in their previous country (b) in the United States

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Motivations (a) in their previous country (b) in the United States Consequences (a) in their previous country (b) in the United States

Current uses of reading and writing In (a) English, (b) other languages Genre, audience, and purposes

Views on literacy and learning Views on literacy learning; value of literacy; views on literacy transfer/adaptation; additional language, literacy, professional classes/courses/training)

Resistance and/or alternative literacies Interviewees’ association with their ethnic, cultural, social, or religious networks Reading, writing, and language practices in these networks and resources they use (e.g., ethnic/language schools, publications, etc.) Interviewees’ view on native languages and literacies vs. those prized in the United States Interviewees’ views on perceived language/culture loss Their action to prevent their language/culture loss (esp. for their children) vs. desire to succeed in the United States; negotiation or two separate cultures and values?

Children’s education (when applicable) School, language proficiency, performance, out of school classes/ lessons, goals

Future plans Plans to learn/practice any new or additional languages or skills to learn? Professional future(s): Plans and possibilities

Appendix

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Notes

In Place of a Preface: Cautions, Considerations 1. Sameer is a pseudonym, as are all the names of research participants used to protect their privacy throughout the book. 2. Although none of the hijackers was South Asian, reports from different parts of the United States showed that “South and West Asians of all faiths became, along with Sikhs, targets of retaliation for 9/11” (Prashad 2012, 5). Among them, Muslims bore the brunt of the attacks. The immigrant participants of this study and their places of worship (both the Islamic prayer center and the Hindu temple) were also subjected to some form of retribution. The outer walls of the Islamic prayer center were defiled and needed vigilance soon after 9/11 and then again when the United States was preparing to attack Iraq in 2003. The Hindu temple also had some anti-immigrant profanities plastered on the entrance within days of 9/11. 3. I use “practice” not simply to mean a recurring sequence of related acts (as is the common practice) but to refer an array of activities to (re)define individual and community identity or to (re)shape social relations. In this sense, practice is more or less fluid as it is open to adaptations in response to changing conditions. For a more in-depth discussion, see chapter 1. 4. Although immigrants like Brinda and Sameer sometimes characterized their community involvement and teaching as “work with words,” word work may also evoke a rather satirical connotation. As I note later in the book,

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such an ironic overtone was sometimes apparent even in my native villagers’ stance on written documents, especially with reference to the power those documents wielded. They often had reasons to question the fairness or veracity (or both) of those types of papers, especially when such documents codified ancestral debt, but they did not always have the wherewithal to disregard them. They, therefore, sometimes called those documents “word work,” albeit informally, to register their disdain. It is the multivalent and generative potential that lends the phrase its utility in this book. Toni Morrison’s Nobel lecture is at http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1993/morrison -lecture.html. 5. Consider John Swales (1990), for example, who argues that the structure of academic writing, especially research papers, follows a standardized format consisting of a series of “moves”: establishing a territory, establishing a niche (esp. counterclaiming or indicating a gap), and occupying the niche. While I cannot (and will not) claim to break free from this convention, I try to take some occasional liberties. 6. The quote attributed to St. Augustine is “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” 7. Although these choices were guided by the observed literacy acts of my research participants, I also need to stress that these were simply acts in the given rhetorical situation (and thus open to adaptation and modification), not the essential or inherent cultural characteristics shaping every communicative act. As their reading and writing in professional lives demonstrated, the same individuals also often learned and followed the accepted literacy conventions of their chosen fields (e.g., engineering, law, natural sciences, management, mathematics, medical sciences, information technology, etc.), which in turn informed and were informed by what they did in the name of their communities. I cannot stress enough the communicative context of their work here, because considering their literacy practices as some “final” cultural truths or essential cultural traits simply defeats the purpose of their activities as much as that of this book.

Chapter 1. Departures and Returns: Literacy Practices across Borders 1. I was born and raised in the village of Wami, which lies on the western end of the district of Gulmi. The district headquarters, Tamghas, is about 375 kilometers away from Nepal’s capital city of Kathmandu by current road distance. There were no motorable roads in the district when I was growing up and until the late 1980s, when a dirt road began to connect Tamghas to the nation’s road network at least during the dry season. Gulmi is in the administrative zone of Lumbini and the Western Development Region (out of five such regions) and is, therefore, sometimes referred to as western Nepal. However, western Nepal may also refer to the districts in the Far Western and Mid-Western regions that lie further west and were (and still are) considered even less “developed” than

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the rest of the country. As of mid-2014, Nepal’s constituent assembly has been deliberating the restructuring of the new republic’s governance system, and these administrative units (and their names) may change as a result. 2. The practice of bonded labor in agriculture, also known as kamaiya pratha in western Nepal, was abolished by law only in 2002. (See International Dalit Solidarity Network, “Dalits and Bonded Labor in Nepal,” available at www.idsn .org). While unfair labor practices were not uncommon in the region where I grew up, my first encounter with kamaiya pratha in far western Nepal came through news reports. 3. Although the literacy rate was slowly increasing even in remote areas when I was growing up, the primary use of writing in my native village was reminiscent of Levi-Strauss’s words about the early use of writing and control: “When we consider the first use to which writing was put, it would seem quite clear that it was first and foremost connected with power; it was used for inventories, catalogues, censuses and instructions; in all instances, whether the aim was to keep a check on material possessions or human beings, it was the evidence of the power exercised by some men over other men and over worldly possessions” (quoted in Marshall 1993, 1). 4. As part of the US government’s post-9/11 effort to streamline homeland security, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) was created in 2003 and took over the main responsibilities of Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS). Whereas the INS was under the Department of Justice, in its expanded role USCIS was brought under the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. See USCISm, USCIS History (May 27, 2009), available at www .uscis.gov. 5. In Angels Town, Ralph Cintron offers a powerful analysis of the everyday documents such as passports and birth certificates. Explaining his choice of those documents, he states: “Because I am pursuing the rhetoric of these documents, I am attracted to those moments of language when the document, in its moment of most truth-telling, speaks a lie” (1997, 57). 6. Sanatana dharma is sometimes used in lieu of Hinduism, as the latter is considered to be a new and outsider’s (Persian) label to refer to the much older and nonsectarian religious tradition. Some teachers and parents used both these terms interchangeably at the Hindu school. The use of this label, however, has been contested, as both reform-minded and conservative groups sometimes use it to emphasize their own interpretation of the tradition. 7. Veda Vyasa is a key figure in Hindu literature. He is supposed to have organized the Vedas (meaning knowledge and wisdom) into four (Rig Veda, Yajur Veda, Sama Veda, and Atharva Veda), compiled the eighteen Puranas, which eulogize various deities, and composed the epic Mahabharata. Vyasa is also the grandfather to the Pandavas and Kauravas, the two warring factions, in the epic. The Vedas are among the most ancient Hindu scriptures, composed in early Sanskrit and containing hymns, philosophy, and guidance on ritual for

Notes to Pages 3–12

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the priests of the Vedic religion. They are supposed to have been directly revealed to seers and handed down through generations orally until they were put to writing. 8. The official definitions of literacy keep changing in response to economic and technological developments. In the United States, for example, according to the National Institute for Literacy (http://novel.nifl.gov/nifl/faqs.html): “The Workforce Investment Act of 1998 defines literacy as ‘an individual’s ability to read, write, speak in English, compute and solve problems at levels of proficiency necessary to function on the job, in the family of the individual and in society.’ This is a broader view of literacy than just an individual’s ability to read, the more traditional concept of literacy. As information and technology have become increasingly shaped our society [sic], the skills we need to function successfully have gone beyond reading, and literacy has come to include the skills listed in the current definition.” 9. Scribner and Cole define practice as “a recurrent, goal-directed sequence of activities using a particular technology and particular systems of knowledge.” They contrast this idea of practice with that of skills, which they define as “the coordinated sets of actions involved in applying this knowledge in particular settings.” Their research with the Vai people of Liberia shows “literacy as a set of socially organized practices which make use of a symbol system and a technology for producing and disseminating it. Literacy is not simply knowing how to read and write a particular script but applying this knowledge for specific purposes in specific contexts of use.” Therefore, Scribner and Cole note that letter writing among the Vai requires knowledge and skills different from those required for keeping a personal diary or a ledger of crop sales (although both these genres make use of the same technology) and thus constitutes different literacy practices (1981, 236). In keeping with the creation and circulation of different kinds of literacies or word work by the research participants in this study, I use “practice” to mean a range of activities to define and redefine social relations at both the individual and the community levels. This understanding is closer to Barton and Hamilton’s idea of practice as “cultural ways of utilizing literacy” and their recognition that “literacy practices change, and new ones are frequently acquired through processes of informal learning and sense making” (1998, 7). One major distinction here is that unlike previous studies theorizing literacy practice, this study draws on the actual process of creating and using literacies to (re)define individual and community identity, as well as the relations between them and between communities. 10. For the first time since 1930, the foreign-born population was estimated at 12.6 percent of the total in 2007 (US Census Bureau, 2007 American Community Survey, C05002: Place of Birth by Citizenship Status. Year of Entry by Citizenship Status, available at http://factfinder.census.gov). The US Census Bureau (2002) estimated the number of immigrants at 10 percent of the US population in 2001.

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11. Cushman, Banks, Duffy, Moss, Gere, and Royster, among many others, direct our attention to literacies as figured and practiced within different groups and communities. Cushman (2011) discusses the invention of a new writing system—the Cherokee syllabary—by Sequoyah for his community. Jacqueline Jones Royster (2000) illustrates the struggle of nineteenth-century elite African American women for empowerment against the double oppression of racism and patriarchy. These and similar studies across communities establish the use of literacy and the work around it for organizing community or helping members achieve their goals. 12. In her Nobel lecture, Toni Morrison describes the story of an old woman, “blind but wise,” who is asked by some young people to identify the status of a bird in their hands. The woman’s answer is “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.” Morrison reads the woman as a practiced writer and the bird as language to stress that it is our responsibility what we do with language: “Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” The lecture is at http://www.nobelprize .org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1993/morrison-lecture.html. 13. In a way, these immigrants’ word work is an enactment of rhetoric as narrative and calls attention to Walter Fisher’s work (1999), in which he theorizes the use of stories as proofs for reasoned action as a narrative model of rhetoric. Building on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, who characterized humans as storytelling animals, and of Kenneth Burke, who advanced the theory of persuasion through identification and consubstantiation and characterized humans as symbol-using animals, Fisher challenges the traditional view, the rational paradigm, that rational and good decisions proceed from sufficient information. He proposes a narrative paradigm that considers the reasons for deliberation and argumentation through the narratives one tells or the quality of stories. 14. I discuss and develop these issues more fully in relation to literacy technologies in Pandey 2006.

Chapter 2. En Route: Reconsidering Sites and Subjects or Research in Motion 1. In a sound critique of some of the recent research in literacy studies, Brandt and Clinton (2002) make a similar argument. 2. In any discussion of modern Nepal (school textbooks, history books, tourism literature, etc.), it is usual to begin with a statement about the country’s insularity from the rest of the world until 1951, when the Rana oligarchy ended and the nation began experimenting with a democratic polity. 3. A majority of families had somebody work elsewhere, at least for part of

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the year, and those individuals were known as Lahure, a term still in common use across Nepalese towns and villages for people who go abroad for work. It is believed that early travelers returned with fortunes from Lahore (in modern Pakistan), and everyone leaving the villages and towns for employment since became Lahure. 4. Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 against school segregation, Kingsville’s public schools continued to be segregated until the city and county school systems were merged in the mid-1970s as a result of another court order. The ongoing urban revitalization campaign of the city government reflected similar initiatives in other urban centers aimed at bringing businesses back to the city centers in the economic and political context of the postsegregation era as diversity and multiculturalism became the new buzz words. 5. Mid-South is informally understood as a region in the South. The Census Bureau places Kingsville in a state in the South, as do the ready (popular) cultural references. 6. Historians often divide South Asian migration to the United States into two waves. The first wave included the Sikh workers (“The Tide of Turbans”) and others as farm workers, primarily from India; the second wave of immigrants included highly skilled professionals, as envisioned by the 1965 law, and their relatives (Takaki 1998; Prashad 2000). 7. See, esp., Table 1 and 2 under Population Statistics, Council on AmericanIslamic Relations—CAIR (2002), http://www.cair-net.org/asp/population stats.asp. 8. Jay was introduced to me by a Nepali friend of mine well before I began the current study. He wanted me to interpret the correspondence from and the documents that his attorney had prepared to file with the USCIS for him. 9. As US News and World Report (December 12, 2005) reported, since 9/11 the federal government has conducted “a far-reaching, top secret program to monitor . . . over a hundred Muslim sites in the Washington, D.C., area, including mosques, homes, businesses, and warehouses, plus similar sites in at least five other cities,” and “in numerous cases, the monitoring required investigators to go onto the property under surveillance, although no search warrants or court orders were ever obtained.” See the full report by David E. Kaplan, “Nuclear Monitoring of Muslims Done without Search Warrants,” US News and World Report, http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/nest/051222nest .htm. In connection with a specific case in 2006, the New York Times reported that a “section of the Intelligence Division, the Terrorist Interdiction Unit, is devoted to using informers as ‘listening posts’ in Muslim communities. The detectives in the unit cultivate the informers, place them in various communities, oversee their work and collect and compile the information that they generate.” But the newspaper also noted that it could not verify if these operations by multiple units “bore fruit.” See William K. Rashbaum, “Trial Opens Window

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on Shadowing of Muslims,” New York Times (May 27, 2006), http://www.nytimes .com/2006/05/28/nyregion/28tactics.html?hp&ex=1148875200&en=. 10. For the research I co-authored with my participants, see Pandey et al. 2007. Although I began with the assumption that co-authoring a study on gaming and literacy with two gamers would be perfect collaboration and reciprocity, the participants were not as excited. Having a co-authored essay on that topic at the time was nowhere on their priority list. I discuss these ethical and methodological implications in Pandey 2007.

Chapter 3. Genes and Jeans: Sanskrit South Asia in the US MidSouth, and Back Again 1. Journey is a common metaphor for life in many Hindu texts. The Upanishads, for example, are known to use the metaphor of a chariot to represent the transience of the human body. See also The Bhagavad Gita. 2. Historians usually distinguish between the earlier immigrants, who mainly came from northern and western Europe, and the “new immigrants” (1880–1920), who came largely from southern and eastern Europe. Many of these newcomers were Catholic and Jewish, who came from the Balkans, Italy, Poland, Russia, and so on. Post-1965 immigrants are often called the new “new immigrants” to distinguish them from the earlier groups of European immigrants. See, e.g., Foner 2005. 3. See Taittiriya Brahmana, II.8.8.5 (Vach/speech: mother of the Vedas); and Panikkar 1977. ॐ Om/aum is an eternal akshar in the Vedant school. 4. Shlokas are literally songs or verses, often in the form of a couplet, and are supposed to codify prayers or eternal wisdom. 5. Reproduced from a course package titled Shlokas for 3–5 Year Olds (PreK–K), at the Hindu temple. 6. While most of the materials included such mantras, some reading material also efficiently summed up the intricate story of a complex nature. For example, an upper-level reading packet contained this verse that summarizes the epic Ramayana: Eka Shlokam Ramayanam Poorvam Rama-tapo-vanaadi-gamanam Hatva Mrugam Kaanchanam Vaidehee-haranam Jatayu-maranam Sugreeva-sambhashanam Balee-nigrahanam Samudra-taranam Lankapuri-daahanam Paschaat Raavana-kumbhakarna-hananam Etatdhi Ramayanam. English: Lord Rama went to the forest in order to fulfill the promise his father had given to one of his wives (Kaikeyi). In the forest, Seeta was attracted by the golden deer and Rama went after it. At that time, the wicked Ravana kidnapped Seeta. Jatayu tried to defend Seeta and save her, but was

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killed by Ravana. Lord Rama then befriended Sugriva and killed Vali, the unrighteous. He crossed the ocean and entered the city of Lanka. He then destroyed the city of Lanka, killed the wicked demons Ravana and Kumbhakarna and set Seeta free. This is the story contained in the Ramayana. (from Shlokas for 9–12 Year Olds) 7. Even the fathers of two students who reported ever having learned Sanskrit formally had attended Sanskrit school only for a short period of time, one during his middle-school years and another for early education (elementary level). Neither continued his Sanskrit education to a more advanced level of language proficiency. 8. It may be noted that the Hindu school teachers and managers were exclusively of Indian descent, as were an overwhelming majority of patrons and parents, and they had a tendency to conflate India with South Asia; their doing this in a religious setting may also be traced to the ancient history of the Subcontinent, when it was known as Bharata rajya, a prehistoric kingdom ruled by one Bharata, modern India’s namesake, and celebrated in legends. 9. Basudhaiva kutumbakam (all the inhabitants of the Earth are a family) was and is one of the oft-quoted Sanskrit shloka found in Hitopadesha 1.3.71 and Panchatantra 5.3.37. Some of the shlokas from these texts also found their way into the Hindu school course packets. 10. Most studies focused on immigrant populations examine immigrant students’ performances at school in relation to the school’s test criteria and students’ family values. For example, Guadalupe Valdés (1996) studied ten Mexican immigrant families, describing how such families go about the business of surviving and learning to succeed in a new world. His study shows that the struggling families are both rich and strong in family values and bring with them clear views of what constitutes success and failure. Other studies (Carger 1998; Guerra 1998; Tywoniak and Garcia 2000; Vasquez, Pease-Alvarez, and Shannon 1994) investigate the intersection of family and literacy. For the literacy development of bilingual children (with English as a second or foreign language), researchers have consistently recommended that families, especially those in which parents have limited English proficiency, receive assistance to navigate the cultural set-up and school system, and that teachers and school administrators must understand the parent community’s socioeconomic and historical dynamics (Cairney and Munsie 1992; Delgado-Gaitan 1990). All the essays in the Fall 2001 special issue of The Harvard Educational Review continue a similar line of inquiry. In it, M. M. Suarez-Orozco emphasizes the need to study immigrant education in a changing context; in their fine ethnographic studies, Orellana, Conchas, and Midobuche look at different Hispanic learners; V. Louie studies Chinese Americans; S. J. Lee describes Hmong students; and X. L. Rong and F. Brown examine the cases of African and Caribbean black learners in American schools.

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11. It may be relevant here to recall the infamous case, United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind. In 1923, the Supreme Court ruled that Indians were not white and hence not eligible for naturalization. Mr. Singh had claimed to be entitled to citizenship on the basis of his Caucasian roots, but “arguing that the definition of race had to be based on ‘the understanding of the common man,’” the court held that the term “white person” meant an immigrant from northern or western Europe. For the “practical purposes” of the statute, the term “race” must be applied to “a group of living persons now possessing in common the requisite characteristics” (Takaki 1998, 299). 12. Max Müller is perhaps the best-known early translator and interpreter of ancient Hindu treatises and Sanskrit intellectual tradition in the West. 13. This line of conversation during the interview had a particular resonance with my own life that I must mention here. As I grew up in a remote part of the world that was also globally connected, it was not just letters and messages from abroad that I saw (and read or wrote) in the village. My father had two big wooden boxes of books that included a copy of the Bible along with old scrolls of the Yajurveda (estimated to have been composed between 1400 and 1000 BC) wrapped in a special piece of cloth, as well as bound copies of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the two epics in both Nepali and Sanskrit verses. He even had a Nepali synopsis of the Bible—an abridged version of the New Testament in which Jesus Christ was called Yeshu Khrist in Nepali—that some English missionaries had distributed in the village around the time of my birth. My father kept these books in a special section of the house, not open to children, where he offered his post-ablution prayers every morning.

Chapter 4. Detours and Diversions: (Re)Writing Gender Roles 1. Parent’s Guide. The course packages compiled for different age groups were accompanied by separate parents’ guides so that they could help their children read and practice those shlokas at home. 2. Especially after India’s independence in 1947 and the subsequent IndiaPakistan partition, Bharat has been used to refer to India; however, the entire Subcontinent is also known as Bharat or Bharat barsha in ancient religious texts, and the same term is invoked in Hindu rituals throughout South Asia even today in reverence to a sage-king by that name (Bharat), who is supposed to have ruled the region in antiquity.

Chapter 5. Arrivals, Interrogations, Responses: “Islamic Ways of Life” or the Literacy Practices of an “Other” Nation 1. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (http://www.cair.com), among others, documents reported incidents of discrimination against Muslims in the United States. 2. Although the popular news and entertainment media often portray all Muslims as one and the same, Islam is practiced in different ways, like any liv-

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ing faith or culture. One major difference is between the Sunni and Shia sects, which split over the question of the Prophet Muhammad’s succession. Sunnis, who are in the majority, believe that the Prophet’s companions were the legitimate successors since no one was designated, whereas Shias (who live mostly in Iran and Iraq) believe that there was a legitimate, designated descendant (Ali, the fourth caliph). With the spread of Islam, variations in beliefs and practices have become evident from North Africa and the Middle East to South and Southeast Asia, not to mention Europe and North America. 3. The safety kit was also available for download during the course of this research from CAIR’s homepage, http://www.cair.com/ 4. According to Ahmed, this was an all-male group, although women, who rarely attended, were “also welcome.” When I attended the meetings, everybody agreed that Mina was the only woman so far to participate in the group. 5. See the annual civil rights reports by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR): 2002 Civil Rights Report: Stereotypes and Civil Liberties; 2003 Civil Rights Report: Guilt by Association; 2004 Civil Rights Report: Unpatriotic Acts; 2005 Civil Rights Report: Unequal Protection, http://www.cair.com/civil-rights /civil-rights-reports. 6. Muslim American Society, “Hate Crimes Linger Long after 9/11,” August 23, 2003, http://www.masnet.org/views.asp?id=397. 7. “Two Lawmakers Spurn Muslim Prayer: Republicans Step off House Floor; One Says, ‘It’s an Issue of Patriotism,” Seattle Post Intelligencer, March 4, 2003, http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/110881_prayer04.shtml. 8. Salman had a pretty large collection of pertinent news reports, including newspaper cuttings from some major national newspapers/magazines (including USA Today and the New York Times) and one popular local daily published in Kingsville. 9. Alan Cooperman, “Robertson Calls Islam a Religion of Violence, Mayhem,” Washington Post, February 22, 2002, http://www.commondreams.org /headlines02/0222–05.htm. 10. “Franklin Graham Reaffirms Criticism of Islam (Evil, Wicked!),” Associated Press (via ABC11TV.com), March 15, 2006, http://www.freerepublic.com /focus/f-news/1597090/posts. 11. Ahmed also alerted me to the large number of Muslim organizations that had condemned terrorist attacks although they hardly featured in the mainstream media. 12. “Sikh Immigrant Killed in Mesa, Arizona,” Rediff.com, September 2001, http://www.rediff.com/us/2001/sep/16ny2.htm; “Do Not Relate Turban with Terrorism,” 2004, http://www.realsikhism.com/turban. 13. Abraham Lincoln’s ancestry has received fresh attention from various media outlets, especially since the 2008 election of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth US president. See, e.g., “Who Was America’s First Black Presi-

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dent?” Salon, November 10, 2008, http://open.salon.com/blog/christopher_ hapka/2008/11/10/who_was_americas_first_black_president. 14. For one report on such an initiative in Chicago, see The Pluralism Project, “Diversity Training Series: Educating Chicago’s Law Enforcement on the City’s Many Religions,” 2006, http://pluralism.org/reports/view/48. 15. “FBI ‘Islam 101’ Guide Depicted Muslims as 7th-Century Simpletons,” Wired Magazine, July 27, 2011, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07 /fbi-islam-101-guide/. 16. For a list of common misconceptions about Islam and rebuttal from a Christian perspective, see Encountering the World of Islam, “Common Misconceptions about Muslims,” http://encounteringislam.org/misconceptions. 17. Andrea Elliott, “Immigrants Wary of Complaining of Bias, Advocates Say,” New York Times, April 30, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/30 /nyregion/30cases.html?ex=1152072000&en=824a26b6d5a21994&ei=5070. 18. Kenneth Adelman, “US Islamic Schools Teaching Homegrown Hate,” Fox News, February 27, 2002, http://www.foxnews.com/story /0,2933,46610,00.html; Valerie Strauss and Emily Wax. “Where Two Worlds Collide: Muslim Schools Face Tension of Islamic, U.S. Views,” Washington Post, February 25, 2002, A01, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles /A61834–2002Feb24.html. 19. CNN, “Muslim Parents Seek Cooperation from Schools,” September 5, 2005, http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/09/05/muslim.friendly .school.ap/index.html. The report states, “Noor Ennab, a fifth-grader who attends the private Muslim Al-Noor School in New York City, said she was driven out of her public school by post-September 11 harassment,” and lists similar other instances of discrimination experienced by Muslim students in US schools.

Chapter 6. Between Departures and Returns: Literacies of Migrations, Migrations of Literacies 1. Although the phrase “global village” comes from McLuhan, it is important to make a distinction between how he used it and the way some popular globalists (or flat-world proponents) such as Thomas Friedman often employ it. McLuhan writes, “Time has ceased, ‘space’ has vanished. We now live in a global village . . . a simultaneous happening” (McLuhan and Fiore 1967, 63). His observations have materialized more fully today to the extent that information travels around the world, especially the connected world. McLuhan was mostly discussing the emergence of a “global” consciousness owing to new (electronic) technologies or literacies, and although the expression “global village” is often used more simplistically to stand for the consequence of globalization today, it is important to note that he did not use it that way. 2. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), “Refugee Resettlement Referral from Nepal Reaches Six-Figure Mark,” April 26, 2013,

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http://www.unhcr.org/517a77df9.html. 3. Citing figures from the International Organization for Migration, a recent New York Times report states that 2014 was the deadliest year on record for migrants: “At least 4,868 people have perished while escaping conflict and hardship so far this year, over double the 2,400 deaths recorded last year, the Geneva-based organization reported.” The article also notes increased anti -immigrant sentiment in the West, where, ironically, aging societies need “migration as a source of labor” (Cumming-Bruce 2014). 4. Aziz, Brinda, and Shilpa have published essays on issues of culture and identity.

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INDEX

affective labor, 29, 188 Aguilar, J. L., 70 Alba, Richard, 149 Amin, Samir, 193 Anderson, Benedict, 94, 96, 98 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 30, 190 Appadurai, Arjun, 37, 41, 49, 97, 99, 128, 187 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 168 Baca, Damian, 22 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 20, 140, 191 Bangladesh, 58, 152; Bangladeshi, 34, 35, 62, 132, 174, 177, 178 American, 136 Banks, Adam, 217n11 Barazangi, N. H., 180 Barth, Fredrik, 176 Barton, David, 18, 26, 165, 216n9 Bay, Jennifer L., xi, xii, xvi Bayoumi, Moustafa, 149, 151 Bengali, 52, 56, 60, 62, 76, 80, 90, 97, 98, 105, 122, 124, 130, 136

Berry, Patrick W., 204 Besnier, N., 115 Bhabha, Homi K., 30, 37, 49, 190 Bhatia, Sunil, 58 Bhattacharjee, Anannya, 99, 123, 127, 139 Bhutan, 7; Bhutanese, 5, 55, 190 Bilici, Mucahit, 154 Bishop, Wendy, 72 Blommaert, Jan, 20, 24–25, 204 Borneman, John, 49 Bourdieu, Pierre, 13, 40; and Passeron, 40 Brandt, Deborah, 18, 25–27, 33, 65; and Clinton, 19, 23, 188, 217n1 Burawoy, Michael, 41, 49 Burke, Kenneth, 217n13 Canagarajah, A. Suresh, 20–22, 204– 5 Carger, C. L, 103, 220n10 Chakravarty, Uma, 125 Chatterjee, Partha, 95, 115, 126

243

Cintron, Ralph, 42, 74, 215n5 Clifford, James, 37, 41, 44, 47–49, 51, 63, 187 Collins and Blot, 23 Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), 156, 158, 160–61, 164, 218n7, 221n1, 222n3, 222n5 Curtis, Edward E. IV, 149 Cushman, Dick, 42 Cushman, Ellen, 13, 73, 217n11 de Certeau, Michel, 19 Delgado-Gaitan, C., 103, 220n10 Denzin and Lincoln, 72 Derrida, Jacques 1 Dingo, Rebecca, 20 Dirks, Nicholas B., 61 Duffy, John, 23, 24–25, 165, 201

Kumar, Amitava, 58 Kumar, Deepa, 149, 189 Kurien, Prema, 78, 100

Fisher, Walter, 217n13 Foner, Nancy, 76, 219n2 Freire, Paulo, 40, 132; and Macedo, 30 Friedman, Thomas, 128, 189–90 Foucault, Michel, 30 Gee, James P., 23 Geertz, Clifford, 72 Gere, Anne R., 19–20, 133, 139, 201 Giri, Bed P., 59, 94 Giroux, Henry A., 13 Goody, J., and I. Watt, 17 Graff, Harvey, 19, 25 Grewal, Inderpal, 100, 187 Grewal, Zareena, 149, 189–90 Guerra, Juan, 25, 103, 220n10 Heath, Shirley Brice, 18, 23 Hesford, Wendy, 20; and Schell, 193 hooks, bell, 71 Horner, Bruce, 21, 205 Huntington, Samuel P., 168, 189, 200

244

India, 1, 12, 32, 38–39, 46, 52–53, 56, 58–62, 66–67, 76, 78, 81–82, 90– 92, 94–95, 97–99, 101–6, 109–10, 115–16, 120–23, 137, 140, 144, 186–88, 218n6, 220n8, 221n2; India Day, 94; Indian, 11, 34–35, 43, 46, 52, 56–57, 58, 62–63, 66, 68, 75, 77, 90–93, 95–99, 101–3, 106, 108–10, 112, 120, 122, 124– 27, 130, 132, 139, 142, 144, 152, 157, 179, 188, 220n8, 221n11 India (Community) Foundation, 52, 56, 62, 92, 122 Indiana, 15

Leonard, Rebecca, 20, 204 literacy practice(s), xii–xiii, xv, 1, 9, 18–27, 32–34, 36–37, 40, 63, 66, 68–69, 73, 75, 78, 95, 100, 114–15, 123, 126–28, 132, 141, 145, 147– 50, 165, 176, 184, 188, 196, 201–3, 204–5, 207, 216n9 Lowe, Lisa, 36 Lu, Min-Zhan, 206 Lunsford, Andrea, 19, 20 Marcus, George, 36, 205 Mattingly, Carol, 114 McLuhan, Marshall, 40, 223n1 Mignolo, Walter, 22 migrantness of literacies, xiv, 17, 21– 22, 26, 29, 31, 219 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 112–13 Moll, Luis, 19, 137 Morrison, Toni, xiii, 27, 213n4, 217n12 motion, literacies in, 18, 21, 22, 26, 51, 202–3

Index

Nepal, 1, 3–6, 31–32, 39, 46, 63, 79, 152, 190, 203, 214n1, 215n2, 217n2; Nepali, 36, 65, 96, 189, 218n8, 221n13 New London Group, the, 120, 202, 204 Pakistan, 46, 58, 61, 70, 147, 154, 157, 161, 177–78; Pakistani, 34–35, 52, 57, 132, 148, 154, 177–78, 195; Pakistani American, 62, 70, 155, 161, 175 Patton, Laurie, 144 Pennycook, Alastair, 21 Prashad, Vijay, 58, 139, 156, 213n2, 218n6 Ratcliffe, Krista, 144 Readings, Bill, 204 Rosaldo, Renato, 65 Royster, Jacqueline Jones, 217n11

Said, Edward, 50, 200 Scribner and Cole, 18, 23, 216n9 Singh, A. 76, 100 Spencer, Robert, 172 Spivak, Gayatri C., 145 Street, Brian, 18–20, 22–23, 114, 203– 4 Sri Lanka, 63; Sri Lankan, 34, 63, 96 Suarez-Orozco, M. M., 219n10 Swales, John, 214n5 Takaki, Ronald, 55, 218n6, 221n11 Tibet, 46 Urry, John, 187 word work, xiii, xiv, xvi, 6, 14, 17, 21– 31, 39–40, 124, 145, 150–51, 155, 157, 165, 167, 184–85, 188, 196–97, 202–3, 207, 213n4, 216n9 “word-work” (Toni Morrison), xiii, 27

Index

245