Narration as Disruption: Yoni ki Baat, Shailja Patel’s Migritude, and Caste Discrimination in Silicon Valley

Abstract

In his decades-long work on mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn’s reminder that “wherever you go, there you are” can have unfortunate manifestations.  In September 2023, California became the first state in the U.S. to pass a bill banning caste discrimination.  So much for new beginnings in new worlds.  Working at a University in the heart of Silicon Valley, I can say that this importation of divisions within an immigrant community was invisible to those who were not suffering its injustice.  One could say, though, that the South Asian community, perhaps like other “model” Asian immigrant communities, has been easily overlooked.  A minor example, perhaps, would be the relative silence regarding Kamala Harris’s South Asian heritage during the recent U.S. political campaign.  My essay will take the occasion to discuss push-back against this invisibility in such organizations as Yoni ki Baat, and such memoirs as Patel’s Migritude (2010), and one might note for starters that the felt-need in these communities is apparently strongest among women.    One also recognizes that these particular publications are a pastische of poetry, history, tales, etc., but presented principally as events, as encounters with a new audience and a potential new community.  As Patel writes, Migritude “unfurls the voices of women living in the bootprint of Empire,” and as the editors of Yoni ki Baat put it, “the inequalities carried over from South Asia are barely shifting now, as we see more open discourse around gender, religion, and caste.”  In the context of this panel, my essay hopes to open into a discussion of those present, whose own experiences need to be heard.