By Navya Varma
“You’re a coconut, Navya.”
When I initially heard this term, many thoughts crossed my twelve-year-old mind. Was this a dig at my weight? My skin color, perhaps? I soon found out it wasn't just an insult directed at being Indian; instead, it was a critique of being “brown on the outside, white on the inside.” When I made the arduous and life-changing decision to be a VSCO girl, I hadn't anticipated the misconception from others that it was an attempt to isolate my Indian identity. As days went by, it felt as though the material possessions I had-- from hydro flasks to scrunchies to cosmetics to oversized shirts to accessories like my puka shell necklace-- all things associated with the VSCO craze took over people’s conceptions of me, rather than my love for Indian culture and heritage.
It was in April of 2020 that Netflix released a new show -- starring an Indian girl. To say this show was monumental for me is simply an understatement. I was used to seeing Indian kids on screen who were JUST academics and sidekicks to the much cooler white kids. However, this seemed to be the first time I got to watch a multi-faceted Indian-American girl. What was refreshing for me was that Devi Vishwakumar, a teenager in the Bay Area, navigated both her very American side and her Indian side. One particularly resonant scene in episode 4, during the Ganesh Puja, captured the prevalent dilemmas of this dual cultural identity when Devi exasperatedly complained, “Some old loser was telling me that I’m too Indian, and some other people think I’m not Indian enough!”
Like Devi, I had many experiences where I felt that, although I was brown, I wasn’t brown enough. While I have always been a learner, I felt no need to make being nerdy the center of my identity, something I felt was a pressure to do from not only Indians but also people of other cultures who had expectations of Indians to be nerdy or geeky, seen through characters such as Raj from “The Big Bang Theory” and Ravi from “Jessie.” On the other hand, some characters rejected all of their Indian heritage or made it the punchline and were even whitewashed, such as Kelly Kapoor from “Office”.
These expectations rub off on people, and even today I am met with the “I thought Indians were supposed to be smart” when I am unable to solve a math or computer science problem, completely disregarding the facets of my personality and my stronger capabilities in humanities.
Much like Devi, I often ended up resenting my Indian heritage, such as when she said while watching a Bollywood dance performance at the Ganesh Puja, “Can you imagine how dorky they would look doing this anywhere else?” Similarly, when my parents enrolled me in Indian Classical singing lessons and I had to adorn myself in traditional Indian attire, I became self-conscious, feeling foolish rather than pretty.
However, as I watched Devi grow throughout four years, I grew as well. Like Devi, I continued developing my love for learning, while still doing normal teenage things that have nothing to do with my culture. As I grow, I realize that being brown shouldn’t confine me in a bubble, but rather be a means of self-expression, another hue of my personality. As I grow out of my self-consciousness about being brown in a white world, I'm learning to appreciate the beauty of my cultural background, rather than shunning it as an embarrassment or a limitation. I am more intentional about what I am and how my identity places me, making small and big efforts every day to break out of the stereotypes both my culture and my surroundings place on me.
(Navya Varma is an Indian-American senior at Syosset High School with aspirations to pursue a degree in Political Science and Public Policy. Article submission coordinated by Krishiv Shah. Please visit www.thesouthasiantimes.info for more Kaleidoscope publications)
