Finding Ourselves

Seeking portraits of the South Asian diaspora.

By Sayuri Govender

To me, diaspora has always felt like this: Half your mind is in your current space, critical of the loud American culture that melts away your parents’ accent and replaces it with a dream. The other half is somewhere else, in a familiar yet unknown home, a technicolor past that doesn’t quite belong to you. Sometimes, in a quiet moment, you wish you were there. 

Over spring break, my sister and I visited my grandparents in Tampa. On the first night, struck by the decades of memories that filled their home, we asked to see the overfilled family photo books stacked on the bottom shelves of their prayer room. We flipped through hundreds of pictures of our mother and her brothers from when they were children in South Africa to when they were teenagers and adults in New York, where they lived after emigrating in the late ’80s. I kept seeing my face reflected in their smiles. 

My family’s history in India, South Africa, and the United States wraps me in a double diaspora. As one of the first born in this country, my Indian identity is complicated by the vastly different regions my family has called home. Since coming to Barnard, I have found myself hesitant to participate in South Asian affinity groups, a product of an inherited insecurity that “They don't see South Africans as Indian enough.” But what does “Indian enough” even mean? I place my Diwali diyas around my dorm room each fall, wear jhumkas to class almost every day, and share homemade Indian spices with my roommates. I proudly express Indian traditions in a refusal to be engulfed by American norms, slowly uncovering what my Indian identity means to me. Across the U.S., millions of South Asians share this struggle to carve a space for themselves. At Columbia’s Lenfest Center of the Arts, the recent exhibit “Looking for Ourselves: Gauri Gill’s The Americans, 2000–2007” spotlights some of these diverse South Asian American identities. 

Held from March 23 to April 7, Looking for Ourselves seeks to evoke the same sensation as looking through the family photo album for aspects of oneself. Through the lens of New Delhi–based photographer Gauri Gill, her photographs showcase undocumented South Asians running a motel, queer Desis hosting drag performances, American flags embracing Sikh USPS drivers. There were Halloween parties and pujas, weddings and funerals. Pain, love, luck, and loss. In fewer than 50 profound photographs, the South Asian diaspora is rendered as a spectrum.

Walking the rooms of the exhibit, I expected to feel more seen. Instead, I was struck by how unfamiliar the images felt to me—and how exciting that was. Gill uncovers a lineage of struggle, discrimination, and defeat. It is rare for these stories of the Asian American experience to be put on display, ones that disrupt the model minority myth and expose xenophobia, poverty, and racism. Still, I see remnants of my own family’s photographs, their sanguine faces mirrored back in Gill’s photographs. 

Illustration by Jaqueline Subkhanberdina

Looking for Ourselves and my own experiences imbue me with an overwhelming desire to understand the vastness of the South Asian American identity. With this same sentiment, students and faculty at Barnard are spearheading the development of the long-awaited Asian Diaspora and Asian American Studies Program. Aiming to bring in a specific course of study that addresses diasporic Asian identities, the ADAAS program promises to use postcolonial, transnational, queer, feminist, and other critical lenses to discuss the Asian diasporic heritage. ADAAS faculty and its student advisory board have recently submitted their proposal to Barnard’s administration, hoping for the curriculum to be implemented as soon as this coming fall semester. 

Kristen Santarin, BC ’24, a member of the ADAAS student advisory board, reflected on the significance of such a program. At elite and predominantly white institutions like Columbia, minority students actively seek cultural communities to stay afloat. Santarin and fellow advisory board members believe they should be able to find support in their academics as well. In her eyes, the ADAAS will provide students with interdisciplinary means to explore the historical and contemporary implications of their identity. Moreover, she sees the program as “a way to inform students about the way that they exist in the world.” Crucially, ADAAS centers a critical analysis of Asian diasporic identities at large, advancing traditional curricula in other ethnic studies majors at Columbia. ADAAS is not just a curriculum, but a “recognition of your existence on this campus,” she says.

Through the promise of new programming, and exhibitions like Looking for Ourselves, I find a burgeoning recognition of my own existence on this campus. In Gill’s photographs of South Asians across the U.S., I see familiarity and mystery at once. This visibility—whether in a photography exhibit at the Lenfest Center, in memories of my family’s early life in the U.S., or in an academic space that spotlights the Asian diaspora—is an empowering and electric force. It is what I have sought, what I have found, and what I hope to continue finding.