Becoming Indian

From the Spring 2024 Magazine: A novelist considers how his sense of national identity has changed. [VIEW IN BROWSER]( [ESSAY]( [Becoming Indian]( By Amitava Kumar Tara Anand Illustration for Foreign Policy This article is part of FP's new Spring 2024 Magazine, "[The India Issue](," released last week. [Subscribe]( to unlock every essay in the magazine.   I was born and grew up in India, and I’m trying to remember when I became Indian. In the summer of 1986, a police constable on a bicycle came to my home in the city of Patna to conduct an inquiry. This visit was in response to my application for a passport. Two weeks later, my passport was ready. I was 23 years old, preparing to come to the United States to attend a graduate program in literature. Did I first become Indian when I acquired my passport? If so, it would be paradoxical that I became Indian at the very moment I was most eager to get away from India. But there must have been earlier occasions. I was 8 when Bangladesh was liberated with the help of the Indian Army in December 1971. I had a vague sense that the Indian armed forces, and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, had beaten the Pakistanis and that they had also outfoxed the rotund man with thick glasses in newspaper photographs, Henry Kissinger. Maybe it was then that I adopted my nascent national identity? When I was a little older, my father’s job took us to Bokaro, a city in eastern India where the Russians had helped build a steel factory. One day, I met the Russian engineers and their families at an event where they were giving out gifts, including pins with Vladimir Lenin’s head on them. This first real encounter with foreigners, maybe this was the day when I thought of myself as Indian? I’m forgetting something. From my early childhood, my family would travel from our ancestral village in Champaran to a nearby town across the border in Nepal. This was in pre-liberalization India, when markets were closed to foreign products. In Nepal, we could buy Chinese and Japanese products. For our trip back, women hid new chiffon sarees under their garments. In my pockets, I would have anything from a new transistor radio to a sleek camera or just a pack of peppermint-flavored Wrigley’s gum. My first typewriter, a red portable Brother, was bought during one of these trips not long after I had entered college. Passports were not required during these visits to Nepal. The cycle rickshaws we hired trundled past the customs crossing without rigorous checks. But what I want to say is that the knowledge that I was breaking the law (smuggling!) weighed on me more than the issue of national difference. Now that I think about it, a sense of a self and the idea of this self also inhabiting a particular place, a place as large as a country, only came to me when I saw the outlines of a national literature, that is, when I had grasped the notion of a body of literature that told our stories. In other words, sometime during my late teens I became Indian because I had acquired a complex language—a gift given by writers who had come before me—that described the people and places around me. [CONTINUE READING](   Unlock the magazine for less. [Save up to 50% on annual plans.](   [Explore the Full Issue]( [The New Idea of India]( Narendra Modi’s reign is producing a less liberal but more assured nation. By Ravi Agrawal [Photos from “2024: Notes From a Generation” show young people in the cities of Jaipur, Mumbai, New Delhi, and Ranchi were taken between January 2020 and December 2023. ]( [Meet India’s Generation Z]( The people who will shape the country’s next decades came of age during the Modi era. By Snigdha Poonam [Modi’s Messenger to the World]( How the diplomat-turned-politician S. Jaishankar became the chief executor of India’s assertive foreign policy. By Rishi Iyengar [Is India Really the Next China?]( The case for its economic ascent is strong, but government policies still stand in the way. By Josh Felman, Arvind Subramanian [The New Idea of India]( Narendra Modi’s reign is producing a less liberal but more assured nation. By Ravi Agrawal [Meet India’s Generation Z]( The people who will shape the country’s next decades came of age during the Modi era. By Snigdha Poonam [Modi’s Messenger to the World]( How the diplomat-turned-politician S. Jaishankar became the chief executor of India’s assertive foreign policy. By Rishi Iyengar [Is India Really the Next China?]( The case for its economic ascent is strong, but government policies still stand in the way. By Josh Felman, Arvind Subramanian [Subscribe to Foreign Policy]( [The world, at your fingertips]( [Keeping up with global moments has never been more essential. Save up to 50% when you join our community of readers today.]( [SUBSCRIBE NOW](   [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( [LinkedIn]( Want to receive FP newsletters? [Manage]( your FP newsletter preferences. [MANAGE YOUR EMAIL PREFERENCES]( | [VIEW OUR PRIVACY POLICY]( | [UNSUBSCRIBE]( Reach the [right online audience]( with us. [Foreign Policy]( is a division of Graham Holdings Company. All contents © 2023 Graham Digital Holding Company LLC. All rights reserved. Foreign Policy, 655 15th St NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC, 20005.