Nishant Upadhyay, author of Indians on Indian Lands: Intersections of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity, answers questions on their new book.
Q: Why did you decide to write this book?
The project started with the slow realization as a graduate student and activist that Canada is a colonial nation state and continues to occupy Indigenous lands. Many immigrant and racialized communities see Canada as a land of dreams, prosperity, and upward mobility. The Canadian settler state thrives on this façade and through its nation-making processes projects itself as a multicultural country welcoming of immigrants. The state obfuscates it’s past and ongoing colonial processes and limits engagements and relations between Indigenous and racialized and immigrant communities. Once I started learning about Indigenous histories of dispossession and my own positionality as a settler-immigrant, I wanted to explore how immigrants within the Canadian state become complicit in the colonial capitalist project. This led me to ask: what does it mean for Indians like me—specifically those who are dominant caste and class privileged, and who claim marginalization through histories of British colonialism in South Asia and Canadian racism—to be on colonized Indian lands? This question became the catalyst for the PhD dissertation and the book.
Q: What is the most interesting discovery you made while researching and writing your book?
I won’t call it a discovery, but while I was researching and interviewing diasporic Indians in Alberta and British Columbia the role of caste structures and violence (brahminical supremacy) became evidently visible to me. Until recently, South Asian diaspora studies had largely ignored the way caste plays a foundational role within South Asian diasporic communities in North America. Being on the field and talking to Indians about Indigenous peoples, I realized that many drew upon the framework of caste to talk about Indigenous peoples in Canada. This fundamentally changed the doctoral project and anti-brahminical and anti-caste critiques became pivotal to understanding diasporic settler complicities in Canada. While caste may not be an obvious factor in the analysis of settler colonialism, any comprehensive understanding of Indian diasporas is limited without unsettling brahminism.
Q: What myths do you hope your book will dispel or what do you hope your book will help readers unlearn?
The book seeks to dispel the following three myths: first, as I discussed in question 1, Canada is not a multicultural haven. Rather it is a settler colonial state that exists only through the past and ongoing colonization of Indigenous lands. Immigrant communities, especially privileged and upwardly mobile communities, invariably benefit from and participate in this colonization, even if they are marginalized in other ways.
Second, it seeks to disrupt the idea that diasporic Indian communities are homogenous and that caste/ism doesn’t exist in the diaspora. As I mentioned in the previous question, brahminism and caste structures are foundational to the formation of Indian diaspora in North America. Brahmin and dominant caste Indian Hindus have maintained their caste kinships and access to caste capital and mobility to position themselves as model minorities. Through their privileges and networks, they continue to marginalize caste oppressed and non-Hindu Indian communities. This has increasingly become visible through their participation in diasporic Hindu nationalism as well as anti-Dalit, anti-Muslim, anti-Indigenous, and anti-Black politics.
Third, decolonization and otherwise futures are possible! By looking at all the different ways Indigenous people have continued to resist the settler state for centuries and the ways many non-Indigenous organizers and activists forge relational solidarities with them, I have come to understand decolonization as an everyday practice. Fighting against my own academic pessimism, I have sought to make a case for decolonial intimacies and relationalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.
Q: Which part of the publishing process did you find the most interesting?
I think engaging with the peer review process was the most exciting and meaningful process of publishing. To be able to see my scholarship through the eyes of peer reviewers and to be able to strengthen the project through their productive feedback was really stimulating. Of course, the feedback that I have gotten from friends, colleagues, and mentors throughout the writing and publishing process has also been amazing. Often, we think of academic writing as an individual endeavor, but in reality, it is shaped by conversations with friends, scholars, students, activists, and community members.
Q: What is your advice to scholars/authors who want to take on a similar project?
This book barely scratches the surface to understand how diasporic Indians become complicit in settler colonialism. There are so many other aspects and factors to unpack and understand. For instance, we need to pay more granular attention to the local and to how different South Asian communities on the basis of their own histories and positionalities engage with the settler state and Indigenous nations in asymmetrical and myriad ways. Further, we need to understand more deeply how organizing works on the ground, and how activists forge decolonial intimacies, relationalities, and solidarities.
Q: What do you like to read/watch/or listen to for fun?
I love to listen to fiction audio books, especially stories that center queer and trans people of color or queer and trans stories for the global south. There is such an endless and exciting list of books to choose from!
Nishant Upadhyay is an assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.