#Bangladeshi literature

[kaladinstormblessed09]

Himu was the ultimate fuckboy. I love him so much. Growing up reading himu really messed me up lmao

Some days I call Rupa from a pay phone and say, “Rupa, will you put on a blue saree real quick and stand on your belcony? I really wanna see you. Just stand there for a while. I will walk by the street next to your flat.” I know Rupa doesn’t believe me. Yet she puts on a saree real nicely. Ties up her hair in a bun. Just touches the kohl on her waterline and stands on her belcony. She waits. I never go. I can’t be like other guys. I have to be extraordinary. I walk all day long. The road never ends. The road without a destination isn’t supposed to end anyways. “eyes like peacock” Humayun Ahmed

[qalbofnight]

In Bengali they say:

Aamaay bhaashaaili re

Aamaay doobaaili re

Okool dauriaar boojhi kool naai re

Chaahe aandhi aaye re

Chaahe megha chhaaye re

Hamen tu us paar leke jaana maajhi re

Kool naai kinaar naai

Naai ko dauriaar paari

Shaabdhaane chaalaaiyo maajhi

Aamaar bhaanga tori re

Translation:

You have set me adrift

You are causing me to drown

The river seems endless as if there were no shore

Even if a storm comes, or clouds cover the sky, please carry us to the other shore dear boatsman

No border, no shore

The river has no limits

Steer it most cautiously, boatman

This boat of mine with a broken rim

https://youtu.be/FnDmg-cBVsA?si=VRC47PAAE-b4o1BV

[diwaani-hu]

hi. I've been surfing through the #bangladesh tag and what I realised is:

1. people are in denial.

2. people are being forced into denial.

3. large masses are finding it shameful to speak up on atrocities faced be minorities, particularly when the group happens to be hindu.

4. not everyone has the right to live with dignity afterall (reference to hindu girls being r@ped/gangr@ped in Bangladesh in the light of "we'll protect your mandirs and homes")

speechless हूं, but I guess that's the price you pay for being the 'tolerant one' out of all.

speak up y'all, people are dying and in fear that any moment could be their last.

go through all the slides of this post if you care.

[rinwreck]

Grief cannot be measured in a weighing scale.

It is regretted in the moments that are lost;

The faces forgotten and the memories missed.

It is loss in a mother's hollow eyes and sudden outbursts of her cries

It is measured by how many pieces a family is broken into.

It is measured in cups of tears and mirrors sticky with a knuckle's blood

'Grief stricken' loosely translates to mad;

It is a slow descend into insanity where you lose purpose; sense of direction,

When grief is as loud and large as this,

How do you measure it?

The loss, the yearning, the reality that you won't ever have this again?

Where do you keep this knowledge?

When you can't make them understand because you cannot measure it?

How can you share it when you cannot divide it from yourself?

It is your skin your mind and the blood coursing through you.

Grief is unimaginable

You think you could handle it, or perhaps you know you couldn't

But when it comes- it's unprecedented all the same

No matter how you prepare

Grief changes shape.

[wolfythoughts]

Book Review: Hani and Ishu's Guide to Fake Dating by Adiba Jaigirdar

In this Bangladeshi-Irish YA romance, Hani needs to convince her two best friends that she’s really bisexual. She lies and tells them she’s dating academically focused and acerbic Ishu who agrees to fake date in exchange for help being elected Head Girl. Summary:Everyone likes Humaira “Hani” Khan—she’s easy going and one of the most popular girls at school. But when she comes out to her friends…

[desdasiwrites]

— Priyanka Taslim, The Love Match

[ragab-abrar-labib]

লেখকঃ খলনায়িকা

[papenathys]

Do you have any recs for books about muslim queer people? especially graphic novels?

I have some fiction recommendations, as I don't usually read too much non-fiction:

[ NOTE: Yes, I am aware that all the gay books listed below are depressing as fuck while the sapphic books are fluff or romance. Take it up with the authors. ]

MLM Muslim Books

Darius The Great is Not Okay by Adib Khorram: an Iranian-American boy with clinical depression makes a best friend for life, reconnects with his grandparents, and repairs his relationship with his father on a trip to Yazd.

Guapa by Saleem Haddad: Rasa, a gay man working as a translator and living in an unnamed Arab country, tries to carve out a life for himself in the midst of political and social upheaval, in this novel set over 24 hours.

God in Pink by Hasan Namir: set in war-torn Iraq in 2003 and follows a young gay Iraqi man struggling to find a balance between his sexuality, religion, and culture by seeking guidance from a sheikh.

The Carpet Weaver by Nemat Sadat: a tragic love story between two gay youths in 1970s Afghanistan, who must keep their relationship a secret due to the fears of societal ostracisation, violence and even the impending threat of a war.

WLW Muslim Books

The Henna Wars by Adiba Jaigirdar: Nishat, a young Bangladeshi-Irish lesbian has to fight against racism, homophobia and cultural appropriation when she starts a henna business at her Catholic school, and falls for a rival classmate.

Bright Lines by Tanaïs: a vibrant debut novel set in Brooklyn and Bangladesh, which follows three young women and a diasporic Bengali family struggling to make peace with secrets and their past.

The Love and Lies of Rukhsana Ali by Sabina Khan: a young Bengali-American girl's conservative Muslim parents forcibly send her off to Bangladesh for marriage, after they catch her kissing her girlfriend; once there, she finds solace and strength through reading her grandmother’s old diary.

Hani and Ishu's Guide to Fake Dating by Adiba Jaigirdar: a grumpy-sunshine fake dating romance between two young Bengali-Irish sapphic girls, one Muslim and one Hindu, each having her own troubled relationships with friends, religion and family.

The Quilt and Other Stories by Ismat Chughtai: a collection that includes the titular erotic lesbian love story between a Begum and her maidservant, their sexual trysts unknowingly observed by an innocent little girl– this story revolutionized Indian queer literature and lesbian history.

Radiant Fugitives by Nawaaz Ahmed: a Muslim-Indian lesbian political activist working in the early days of Obama's presidency, attempts to reconnect with her mother and sister, years after her father abandoned her because of her sexuality.

Roses in the Mouth of a Lion by Bushra Rehman: Razia, a Pakistani American, grows up across cultures in 1980s New York, confronting stereotypes, dealing with American society, practicing her Muslim faith, and falling in love with a female classmate.

Tell me How You Really Feel by Aminah Mae Safi: a YA enemies-to-lovers romantic comedy about a popular Persian-Indian Muslim cheerleader and a Jewish wannabe director who end up working together on a project, despite their mutual hatred.

Soft on Soft by Em Ali: a very fluffy and low-angst romance between two plus size women- a Persian makeup artist/beauty influencer with anxiety and a Black actress.

MEMOIRS

My Life as A Unicorn by Amrou Al-Kadhi: from a god-fearing British-Iraqi Muslim boy enraptured with their mother, to a vocal, queer drag queen estranged from their family, this is a memoir about the author's fight to be true to themself.

Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H: a nonbinary butch Muslim author's powerful, religious memoir spanning from her childhood, to their arrival in the United States for college through early-adult life in New York City, describing how she found queer affirmation in the Quran and Islam.

A Dutiful Boy by Mohsin Zaidi: a poignant coming of age memoir by a British-Muslim gay author, about growing up queer in a conservative household, amidst poverty-stricken east London.

We Have Always Been Here by Samra Habib: a memoir about feminism and LGBTQ community by a nonbinary queer Ahmadi Muslim author, whose family sought asylum in Canada after fleeing Pakistan's political turmoil.

In Sensorium (Notes for My People) by Tanaïs: this memoir interlaces memories of childhood in the South, Midwest US and New York with a universe of memories and scent—inspired by the author's own perfume maker background– while offering an alternate history of South Asia from a Bangladeshi Muslim femme perspective.

I have not read some of these, and am not Muslim, so I cannot testify to their "correctness" of Islamic representation. Unfortunately I do not have any graphic novels that deal with queerness and Islam. Perhaps my followers can help.

[urlocalbone]

Reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake” was a riveting, almost delicate business for me. At several times I felt so attacked by the author that I was tempted to put the book down, yet the fragile personas of the characters drew me on past the pages.

It is a book from my Australian school’s English novel list. And so is “Wuthering Heights” or “Jane Eyre”. I read those with equitable interest, overanalysing every sentence, theme and character. I read background books, tried Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, Emily Brontë’s poems, Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”, all about the Brontë sisters’ household. I stormed through shelves in my university library, took refuge to the bedroom for reading up to late hours; I worked in a fever dream. The sheer excitement of navigating my way past great pieces of literature felt rewarding in itself. It was a foreign experience; as I had learned, along with my Bangladeshi peers, to read what was on the syllabus, without questioning what was within.

It all felt great, until I hit home.

All the above mentioned are written by individuals with whom I do not share my skin tone, my food habits or my accent. Therefore I “explore” them but not find myself within. Like an impartial observer, I rate this or that.

But Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Gogol” would not let me do that. His parents are Bengali, just like me. He is an American-Indian, just like I have a hyphen between my nationality too: Australian-Bangladeshi. And he is frivolous, which with great pains I will admit being too. His faults feel mine. Or at least, he annoys me, gets under my skin.

The novel opens with his birth and early childhood. He grows up indifferent to his ethnicity, preferring English, beef and high school parties over embracing Bengali, white rice and being involved in the culture he has a rightful share in. His family gives in too. I find myself enraged at their conduct, feeling grateful I came to Australia at a ripe age of sixteen- I am incapable of deserting my roots now. Then again, I discover that I have the same mentality as a middle-aged desi aunty, how shameful is that! Shouldn’t I be open-minded, and accept that Gogol has to cope with the country he was born in, rather than the one he has no attachment to?

Gogol’s mental stigma about his name is another side to his character that appears immature to me. He hates sharing a name with a Russian author, whom he finds demented than inspiring. He never sets to find out why his father Ashoke named him after his favourite Nikolai Gogol. It is a story he seeks out too late, a few weeks before Ashoke’s sudden death. He changes to “Nikhil”, even though he mentally admits no one, except he himself, has ever pestered him for the name he was born with.

Even though it isn’t directly pronounced, Gogol (now Nikhil) always tries to break free of Bengali “norms” and his parents’ expectations, unapologetically. This is reflected in his numerous love affairs with various women. But his attention is always fleeting. He’d rather be on holiday with his girlfriend’s “elegant” parents than his own. How does he fail to notice, as I do as a reader, that he indeed seeks out the idea of “settling down” in his partners in a very Bengali way, but miserably fails every time?

Something about his romantic life scares me. Will I, as a hyphenated Bengali girl, experience the same troubles as him? Will complying with my tradition feel unnatural to me some day too? As I read past Moushumi’s Parisian cigarettes and the descriptions of fine wine, do I not feel tempted? To go ahead, break the “rules” and enjoy “life”, as they say it?

And the lonesome, tired corner of my soul says that thousands of kids have broken the rules, there are no more to be newly broken. Do they really enjoy life like a one-night-stand? I highly doubt so.

As my mother’s words ring in my ears, “Love, keep your romantic life simple, so you’ll get time to do great things in life itself!”

Yet, I feel bitter as Gogol does not utter a single word of regret as the novel comes to an end. It is almost as if I am his mother, waiting to box his ears and set him right. But he wouldn’t admit that he was wrong, all his life.

[bongboyblog]

International Mother Language Day:History and Significance

For the people of Bengal as well as language advocates and linguists worldwide, International Mother Language Day is a day of enormous importance. Every year on February 21st, the day is commemorated to encourage multilingualism and linguistic diversity, as well as to remember the sacrifices made by language activists in Bangladesh during the Bengali Language Movement.

In the early 1950s, a political and social movement called the Bengali Language Movement emerged in East Pakistan (modern-day Bangladesh). It was a demonstration against Pakistan’s 1948 declaration of Urdu as its sole national language. The majority of East Pakistanis who spoke Bengali believed that the action was discriminatory and infringed their rights to their language and culture. They pushed for the inclusion of Bengali as one of Pakistan’s official languages.

The demonstrations started on February 21, 1952, when Dhaka University students and members of the general public demanded that Bengali be granted the same status as Urdu. In a violent response, the police opened fire on the demonstrators, killing several of them. In East Pakistan, the incident provoked a wave of protests and turmoil.

Together with language, cultural identity, and political independence were also important aspects of the Bengali Language Movement. Intellectuals, students, and political figures led the campaign, seeing language as a means of asserting their rights and seeking a greater say in the affairs of the country. Bengali was eventually recognised as one of Pakistan’s official languages in 1956 as a result of the struggle.

International Mother Language Day, which was established by the UN in 1999, honours the history of the Bengali Language Movement and the sacrifices made by its participants. The purpose of the day is to encourage linguistic and cultural diversity and to increase awareness of the value of mother tongues for social cohesion, education, and communication.

International Mother Language Day is a day of cultural celebration and national pride for the people of Bangladesh. Cultural activities, processions, and the laying of wreaths at the Shaheed Minar (Martyr’s Monument), which was erected in Dhaka in honour of the language martyrs who died on February 21, 1952, commemorate the day. The structure serves as a reminder of the significance of Bengali to Bangladeshis.

The Bengali language is an integral part of the cultural heritage of Bangladesh, as well as of the Indian subcontinent. With more than 250 million speakers, it is the sixth most widely spoken language in the world. Some of the greatest works of literature, poetry, and music in the area were written in Bengali, a language with a long literary history that dates back to the ninth century.

The language of Bengali has also changed over time as a result of the shifting demands and aspirations of its speakers. Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, English, and other Indian subcontinental languages have all had an impact on it. This has given the language a distinctive grammar and syntax, as well as a rich and varied vocabulary.

In conclusion, International Mother Language Day is an important day for language advocates and linguists around the world, as well as for the people of Bangladesh. This day honours the diversity of languages and cultures and the sacrifices made by the Bangladeshi language martyrs. Bengali language activists and those who support linguistic diversity continue to be inspired by the Bengali Language Movement, which was a pivotal time in the history of the Indian subcontinent.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

https://x.com/reihan/status/1796279232366100721

What the 'modern racism' thesis obscures

By: Reihan Salam

Published: May 30, 2024

Just about everyone agrees that racism is bad. But what counts as racism?

For over fifty years, social scientists have relied on “modern racism” scales to study intergroup attitudes. This is a rich, complex subject that I won’t be able to do justice to in a (long!) tweet. The short version is that as overt racism declined in the decades following the civil rights movement, scholars sought to understand how racial attitudes in particular were changing. The idea was that overt racism was being supplanted by symbolic racism, or racial resentment.

Think of a person—let’s call her “Karen”—who says that she is not at all prejudiced against Blacks, but who believes that the persistence of Black disadvantage is more a reflection of the choices made by particular Black individuals or Black families than of structural barriers. According to the modern racism framework, Karen would count as racially resentful. There is a rich literature that uses these modern racism scales to make sense of partisan political divides in the U.S., and at the risk of oversimplification, the upshot is that to be a racial liberal is to be lacking in racial resentment and to be a racial conservative is to be racially resentful. If this sounds to you a bit like saying that to be on the political right is to suffer from an egregious character flaw, well, I see where you’re coming from.

But what if racially resentful Karen said the exact same thing about Lithuanians, Bangladeshis, working-class white natives, Appalachians, or the left-handed as she did about Blacks when presented with the same vignette?

In that case, it’s not obvious that the language of racism—modern or otherwise—is especially helpful.

The Karen scenario I’ve laid out is roughly how so-called modern racism manifests itself in practice. As the political scientists Ryan Enos and Riley Carney have observed, “modern racism questions appear to measure attitudes toward any group, rather than African Americans alone.” Enos and Carney suggest that these scales are capturing two different phenomena: first, racial sympathy toward Blacks—understood as a belief that Black Americans have been uniquely damaged by the history of slavery and segregation, and that it is therefore wrong to evaluate them as we would members of other groups—and second, “just world belief,” or the belief that hard work generally pays off and people are largely responsible for their life outcomes, regardless of race.

One awkward fact for the partisans of the modern racism thesis is that it’s not just whites who appear to be racially resentful—for as long as modern racism scales have been around, many Black, Latin, and Asian respondents have expressed the belief that Blacks are more or less similar to other people, and that U.S. society (while imperfect) does generally allow people of any race or color to succeed by virtue of their own merits. That is, these scales have found that these Black, Latin, and Asian respondents are symbolic racists.

To draw on a recent piece by John Sides and Michael Tesler, the Obama-era electorate was less polarized about race—because nonwhite racial conservatives backed Democrats—and more polarized by race—for the same reason. And in a sense, this represented a kind of stolen valor for progressive anti-racists — they could operate under the illusion that they enjoyed the monolithic support of people of color, when in fact many of them supported Democrats despite their commitment to progressive anti-racism.

A decade ago, progressive intellectuals were thus confident that the demographic transformation of the American electorate would soon yield a progressive majority that would unite college-educated white liberals, Black Americans, and working-class immigrants and their descendants—a rainbow coalition that would vanquish a reactionary coalition composed of aging rural whites. Without giving it much thought, they assumed that this disconnect between partisanship and ideology among nonwhites would persist.

But of course that isn’t quite how things have panned out. In particular, the working-class Latin voters whom progressive intellectuals saw delivering lasting left-of-center majorities are in fact trending right.

This realization is already shaping the calculations of political professionals on the left. In April, the Washington Post reported that progressive activists were starting to have doubts about voter registration drives, long a mainstay of progressive political organizing. The reason? As an influential progressive data scientist put it in a confidential memo, “if we were to blindly register nonvoters and get them on the rolls, we would be distinctly aiding [Donald] Trump’s quest for a personal dictatorship.” He also warned that because so many younger nonvoters and non-Black people of color were trending right, the only safe bet was for progressive nonprofits to focus exclusively on registering Black voters.

And so the future of American politics won’t pit a multiethnic rainbow coalition on one side of the political-ideological divide against a monoracial white coalition on the other—ideological conflict, class conflict, and racial conflict won’t line up along neat lines of fracture.

This might strike you as a good and healthy development — that’s certainly how I see it —but for some on the left, this rainbow vs. reactionary vision of racial conflict had a powerful moral resonance. Progressive anti-racists envisioned a conflict between right and left as a struggle between oppressors and oppressed, between perpetrators of racial injustice and victims of racial injustice, bolstered, crucially, by righteous white allies.

As we approach the midpoint of this decade, what’s emerging instead is something entirely different—a clash between two multiethnic coalitions. The multiethnic coalition on the left, united by a particular vision for racial progress, is arrayed against a multiethnic coalition on the right, united by its opposition to that vision.

The conflict between anti-racists and anti-racialists is an ideological conflict about race, not a conflict in which white supremacists are subjugating marginalized racial others. While this conflict certainly has high stakes, it bears no moral resemblance to Bull Connor ordering the use of fire hoses and police dogs on civil rights protesters.

For all her professed racial progressivism, Katherine Maher, the chief executive of National Public Radio, is not the moral equivalent of Martin Luther King Jr. Chinese American parents fighting for race-blind admissions in the public schools of Fairfax County, Virginia, are not arch-segregationists. You can pretend otherwise—it may well be profitable to pretend otherwise, or comforting—but to do so is to blind yourself to the changing contours of American politics.

[motherlanguageday]

There are about 6,500 languages in the world.

There are about 6,500 languages in the world, and around 200 languages spoken in Manchester at any one time. UNESCO’s International Mother Language Day is a worldwide annual observance held on 21 February to promote awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and to promote multilingualism. It has been observed globally since 2000 and has important historical roots. In Bangladesh 21 February is the anniversary of the day when Bangladeshis fought for recognition for the Bangla language.

With many events taking place across the city, we have been very excited to welcome new organisations hosting IMLD celebrations this year! A special one for us too, as we launch a brand new exhibition with participants from 10 UNESCO Cities of Literature, on the theme of Threads.

You can join in the conversation by tagging us on social media @MCRCityofLit and using the hashtag #MotherLanguageDay.

[fuckyeahilike]

9 Aug 2023

Scientific misconduct has enjoyed some limelight lately. The president of Stanford, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, resigned last month after a series of investigations exposed serious problems in his research; an independent review of Tessier-Lavigne’s work found no evidence that he falsified data himself but concluded that his research failed standards “of scientific rigor and process” and that he failed to correct the record on multiple occasions.

And in June it was revealed that a scholar at Harvard Business School, Francesca Gino, was accused of having falsified research about – wait for it – honesty.

Of course, scientific misconduct does not happen only at Stanford and Harvard. Of the nearly 5,500 retractions we catalogued in 2022, and the thousands of cases we have reported on since launching our watchdog website Retraction Watch in 2010, the vast majority involve researchers at institutions without anywhere near Stanford and Harvard’s pedigrees.

The number of retractions each year reflects about a tenth of a percent of the papers published in a given year – in other words, one in 1,000. Yet the figure has grown significantly from about 40 retractions in 2000, far outpacing growth in the annual volume of papers published.

Retractions have risen sharply in recent years for two main reasons: first, sleuthing, largely by volunteers who comb academic literature for anomalies, and, second, major publishers’ (belated) recognition that their business models have made them susceptible to paper mills – scientific chop shops that sell everything from authorships to entire manuscripts to researchers who need to publish lest they perish.

These researchers are required – sometimes in stark terms – to publish papers in order to earn and keep jobs or to be promoted. The governments of some countries have even offered cash bonuses for publishing in certain journals. Any surprise, then, that some scientists cheat?

And these are not merely academic matters. Particularly when it comes to medical research, fakery hurts real people. Take the example of Joachim Boldt – the German anesthesiologist who, with 186 retractions, now sits atop the Retraction Watch leader board of scientists with the most pulled papers.

A specialist in critical care medicine, Boldt studied a blood substitute that was used in hospitals across Europe. His results, which were published between around 1990 and 2009 and widely cited, suggested that the product – used to help keep blood pressure and the delivery of oxygen to cells adequate – was saving lives. After his fraud came to light and researchers reanalyzed all of the available data while leaving Boldt’s results out, it turned out the opposite was true: the substitute was “associated with a significant increased risk of mortality and acute kidney injury”.

The truth, however, is that the number of retractions in 2022 – 5,500 – is almost definitely a vast undercount of how much misconduct and fraud exists. We estimate that at least 100,000 retractions should occur every year; some scientists and science journalists think the number should be even higher. (To be sure, not every retraction is the result of misconduct; about one in five involve cases of honest error.)

The lengths to which scientists go to fight allegations of fraud is part of the reason the rate of retraction is lower than it should be. They punish whistleblowing underlings, sometimes by blaming them for their misdeeds. They sue critics. Although they rarely prevail in court, the threat of such suits, and the cost of defending against them, exerts a chilling effect on those who would come forward. In one particularly grisly and tragic case in 2006, a Bangladeshi academic had a whistleblower murdered. The academic was hanged 17 years later.

Journals and publishers also fail to do their part, finding ways to ignore criticism of what they have published, leaving fatally flawed work unflagged. They let foxes guard the henhouse, by limiting critics to brief letters to the editor that must be approved by the authors of the work being criticized. Other times, they delay corrections and retractions for years, or never get to them at all.

Some of Boldt’s papers were only retracted this year – more than a decade after his fraud was incontrovertible. Journals are invariably more interested in protecting their reputations and the reputations of their authors than in correcting the record. Following evidence and testimony by Retraction Watch, the British House of Commons’s science, innovation and technology select committee was concerned enough that it said in a report earlier this year that corrections and retractions should take no longer than two months.

Universities hardly have an incentive to air their dirty laundry, but in the vast majority of cases they are left to investigate their own. Indeed, that is the law of the land in the United States, where scientists and universities have done their best to steadily erode the power of the US government’s Office of Research Integrity, which oversees – but does not perform – investigations into allegations of misconduct in federally funded research. University lawyers tell those in the know to say nothing, a form of academic omertà that lets fraudsters slip through many cracks.

The Stanford case – as Theo Baker, the student journalist who broke it open, has described – epitomizes all of these factors. Despite having been flagged on a site called PubPeer starting in 2014, the problems in Tessier-Lavigne’s papers would have remained virtually unknown, and might have never been corrected at all, were it not for Baker’s investigation. (Ivan Oransky, the co-author of this op-ed, is a volunteer member of the PubPeer Foundation’s board of directors.)

One of the main reasons scientists feel pressure to cut corners or fudge data is because funding rates are so low. The US National Institutes of Health last year approved about 20% of applications for new grants. And that’s a marked increase from recent years.

Funding to detect and sanction fraud should be a reasonable fraction of the dollars being spent – instead of mere millions in a sea of tens of billions. Until publishing papers is decoupled from earning funding and employment, however, it’s difficult to imagine how much will change.

[reinedescauchemars]

on reading british literature

when your ancestors were colonized, there is much that is lost, much to mourn and grieve, but also much that is just missing: some things will never be known, some of our past deliberately erased with no outlines left

there is pain in knowing that out there, sanskrit texts tell us how two men should fuck when they want to fuck properly, but that my modern-day fellow indians who fuck like our ancestors did, like we know they did, can't marry in india, and the diaspora doesn't like us much either. the conservatives in power say that homosexuality isn't indian, keeping those colonial-era rules alive

my bangladeshi friend let me and another adorn his nails with polish. he forgot to remove it and went home to his family with it on, his father freaked out, afraid his son was gay: it's one thing for others to be gay, but for him, a queer son would be too much. too much, so my friend stays quiet, knowing who he is and knowing what he can't explore lest his father find out

i read once about a british south asian woman who talked about reading jane austen and in those regency romances, she saw glimpses of a life like hers, a culture fixated on marriage, a culture that accords less to woman, a culture with dowries and a culture with dances at which you're scouting out prospective partners, and i think about my mother and her love of those same works. assimilate, society whispered, become a proper brit and you'll belong, read dickens, read austen, read the works of empire. this is you now, this your cultural past. but the immigrants still keep the traditions, add new ones into the mix, and in those works of britishness, they see their own lives

dev patel once said he sees dickens in india and in the uk and in the us, that those stories are timeless ones with aspects transcending culture. even in works they wanted use to assimilate us, we see ourselves, unassimilated, or partially assimilated, or living two lives, trying to fit in in a world where you are othered. to watch him act out david copperfield, i think i understood what it means to be part of this diaspora. to be british south asian, to read those texts where almost every character is white, to relate, you look a bit deeper. the pressures of the past become the pressures of the present. you are in the kitchen, talking to your mother about guys you know, your friends, and she says he sounds like a nice person, and you wonder, does she want me to marry him?, even when you think there is no other motive to that praise, because you know she wants you to marry and marry well. after all, that's what she did

you are born in america to a mother born in india, a mother who wants you to have a proper education, who starts you on jane austen at the tender age of ten, you having read dickens a few years earlier. you are precocious and clever, and the language of centuries ago does not intimidate you. when you're older, you watch all those adaptations and historical shows, you love them and you find yourself looking for more. jane austen, that legend of romance, wrote northanger abbey because she thought gothic romances made women silly, so you pick up ann radcliffe's the mysteries of udolpho in a bookshop while traveling. you watch sherlock with one of your best friends, the one you talk literature to late at night when you're trying to get some reading done but don't want to do it. you read and read and read, devouring the western canon as you go

it is a lesson that no time in history, no society, would be better for you to live in than in this moment, where we have progressed so far and still have so much further to go. there aren't people like you in those books that you've read, and you accept that, because that's the reality of that society. you want to be seen for who you are and see people like you, but you don't want to be imagined in places where people like you were never allowed

you read these products of their time anyhow, acknowledging their limits, acknowledging that the world in these books was not meant for people who came from your family's homeland, and yet acknowledging that they still resonate across the centuries, across the change. the more things change, the more they stay the same. society hasn't changed as much as we think it has; this exported culture shapes the culture we carry within us