Diwali, or Why I'm a Skeptic of All the Celebranding

Last week was the Hindu festival, Diwali, a date that in my 16 years in the US has largely been unremarkable, unnoticed, and uneventful. There are no firecrackers, no diyas lit in the houses around the neighborhood, no new clothes, and certainly no indulgent consumption of mithai and delicious eating. I always feel a twinge of sadness that I am not part of a larger Indian community. Driving past a gurudwara on Saturday, I felt a sadness in seeing the revelry of people with sparklers celebrating. It is not that I live in some impossibly white space with no brown people; it is just that I don’t have a large family here and without that connection, I’m less connected to a desi community. So usually, Diwali comes and goes. I’ll allow myself the indulgence of not turning the lights off for a day, but mostly, its business as usual. No new clothes. No mithai. Certainly no one besides my parents calling to wish me a happy Diwali.

This year was a little different. All over Face book people were wishing each other a happy Diwali. The secularists were chanting, “Diwali Mubarak”—it seemed that everyone with an advanced degree knew what Diwali was and were happily spreading good luck and cheer. Certainly, this legibility did not come from nowhere. When the first president of the United States that so many of us love (self included) spreads a Diwali message of good cheer, accurately exhorting all to enjoy mithai (sweets) its hard not to enter into this feel-good multiculturalism when Indians (I should say Hindus, by and large) are suddenly on the map in a very obvious way.

Having consumed my share of “Haterade” (a wonderful new term introduced to my lexicon by my friend Julie) I was one of the few who could not jump on the “Diwali is us” celebration. I certainly could not jump on the “Obama is so gracious and awesome because he recognizes our holiday” bandwagon, mostly because I think it’s a tad disingenuous to celebrate brown Indians in America, while ordering secret drone attacks on brown desis in Pakistan. I’ve just finished writing a book, which will be soon released, in which I express my discomfort with multiculturalism that is about sharing food and other innocuous aspects of culture. To me, this Diwali legibility is another version of the “Indo Chic” that made India cool and legible in the 1990s. Suddenly all the sartorial and cosmetic choices of Indian women that had long been mocked—those dots on the forehead, those funny outfits—were cool because Madonna, and later Gwen Stefani said so. I can’t help but feel this love of Diwali is a version of the same cultural logic whereby our new icon of cosmopolitanism recognizes Diwali and so everyone follows suit. It can’t be too long before it starts getting marketed as Hanukkah has been for Jewish communities. I can’t wait for the Hallmark card to hit shelves. It feels to me a little like when ethnic communities ‘get’ their own Barbie—is it good to be recognized, or is it problematic to be recognized within the framework of an always already fixed idea of multiculturalism?

Part of me is happy not to have to explain what Diwali is—“it’s the festival of lights, it celebrates when Rama returned with Sita having conquered Ravana. Its just like Christmas for Hindus.” And part of me is like, really? We’re celebrating this festival that celebrates Ram? The same dude who rejected his wife because she had been defiled by a man who tried to rape her? Really? We’re celebrating the return to ascendancy of the royal family? But like all good secular multiculturalists, I ignore the mytho-religious dimensions and say, its celebrated by all faiths (even though I don’t know if this is true).

My own celebration was a little quieter. M and I went to “Cuisine of India,” one of my favorite Indian restaurants in Columbus and enjoyed their buffet. I loved the quiet of it, and I loved the beautiful arrangement of mithai. gajjar halwa, burfi, rock sugar, jalebi, boondi ladoo, pyaasa and other delectables that skip my mind. We did listen to the Obama message, but we also watched Ohio State get clobbered by Purdue in football. To me it was also important to tell Michael why I wanted to call it “Deepavali.” See, I’m South Indian and we don’t’ say “Diwali”. In fact, in Malaysia, where I was born, and where there is a robust but maltreated Indian diaspora, they also say Deepavali. It’s a legacy of the influence of Tamil culture. I was more interested in using the day as an opportunity to think about the persistent hegemony of the Hindi language. See, even with inclusions, we create new orthodoxies, new exclusions.

Celebrations in our family are a little quieter than in most. We don’t do much in terms of observing holidays but last Saturday we used it as an opportunity to spend some time together, support a local business and learn a little more about each other. And hopefully, with the passing of another Deepavali comes the occasion to think a little more about how we can think of Indians outside of a framework of lights, sweets and revelrous excess.