Undergraduate / "I was born and raised as a bahun' - Commonapp Personal Essay [9]

Okay this essay is long... and i want to know if it really makes any sense... Any comments are welcome...

Talk about kangaroos and the first thing that pops up in many people's heads will be, not surprisingly, Australia. Growing up as an ethnic minority however, my life has been somewhat analogous to that of an Australian kangaroo brought up with a Guinean mob. Being raised in a place that was territorially and socio-culturally different from my own ethnic roots, I had become confused about where I actually belonged, what place I represented. What was I? Was I an Australian kangaroo or had I grown up becoming a Guinean one?

I was born and raised as a bahun (colloquial term for hill Brahmin) in the madhesi (people native to the Nepali plains) dominated community of Biratnagar, Eastern Nepal. For me, adjusting to the city was not the issue, considering the fact that our bahun family had been living there for generations. And over the years, we had basically turned madhesis ourselves: my grandfather still preferred maithili (language native to the madhesis) to Nepali and thakuwas (a madhesi dish) was an important part of every ritual in our family. For me, the problem was that no matter how similar I or my family was to the madhesi people, I could never identify myself as being one of them. After all, my surname was "Koirala"; a bahun identity was something that I had inherited on birth. I was not my friend Bibek Karna or my neighbor Pankaj Mishra: their surnames had allowed them to associate themselves with the madhesi community quite easily-even though both of their families had just recently migrated from India.

Just having a bahun surname, however, was not the only reason I felt being out of place in Biratnagar. Stuart Hall, a renowned cultural theorist and sociologist, argues that "a sense of place is a way of indicating that places are infused with meaning and feeling. All places are interpreted from particular social positions and for particular social reasons." People interact with you keeping in mind the place you "appear" to represent. Every place has a particular meaning: it is defined by something that has a strong association to it. The madhesi community was what defined Biratnagar, and in fact, the whole of south eastern Nepal. And a madhesi identity was what made you belong to this society. By birth, I had inherited the identity of a pahadey (people native to the Nepali hills). I "appeared" to people as a pahadey, and no matter how hard I tried to associate myself to the madhesi commune, I was always looked upon as an outsider. I could never get away arguing with madhesi rickshaw walas (rickshaw runners) whilst Bibek or Pankaj easily could. Kangarooically speaking, just having grown up with a New Guinean mob didn't mean I could be a part of it.

So when I migrated to Kathmandu for my higher studies, I had this feeling that I would fit right into the society; after all, the place was a pahadey majority, and it also "territorially" was my ethnic root. Not surprisingly, fine-tuning to the society was not a problem: I already "appeared" a pahadey, and this inherited identity combined with my not-so-shy-but-in-fact-nosy nature allowed me to make new friends quite easily. Kathmandu is a very welcoming city, and as newcomers it's not that I or my family had any sort of difficulty being a part of this new society. In fact, the two years I have spent here as a high school student have been the best learning years of my life. It was also true however, that growing up around madhesi people had made me acquire a "madhesi" identity. Although not considered as being one in Biratnagar, "madhesi" was what I had become for my new friends. In reality, the fact that I was perceived as not being part of this community-be it through nicknames my new friends gave me (madhesi, Biratnagariya) or the fact that our circle of closed ones in the city was more madhesi than pahadey-made me feel odd. I never felt like a "pahadey" belonging to Kathmandu, but merely someone "from outside the valley".

Having been part of two ethnically different societies, I realized that I was not at all willing to relate myself to just one. Through this reluctance, I have come to decide that I have acquired myself a mixed identity. This was something I realized when after two years at Kathmandu, I went as part of an educational relief camp to Sunsari (25 kilometers away from Biratnagar). Initially, when people at Sunsari judged me on what I "appear" to be and saw no difference between me (who actually grew up with them) and my pahadey friends, I felt frustrated. Gradually though-through how I spoke or how I interacted-madhesi people somehow perceived me as one of them, as a madhesi. Through this, it was easy for me to interacting with the people there. Furthermore, my pahadey friends had also perceived me as one of them, and through me, had found a way of interacting with this new society.

All this time, I was wrong in thinking that belonging to one definite place would secure me an identity. I have come to realize that a person's identity is not defined by what place he comes from; quite on the contrary, it is defined by the different places, and more accurately, the different cultures he has come across. As Elizabeth Brewster puts it in one of her poems, "People are made of places", and how easily we can relate ourselves to these places and the people there is what I believe to be something that truly defines us.