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The United States

In 1790, a Madras resident visited Salem, Massachusetts along with a sea captain, marking the first recorded entry of a South Asian into North America. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as European colonial domination in South Asia grew and the new American polity developed, almost one thousand South Asians arrived on American shores. Along with occasional magicians, circus entertainers, and religious mendicants, some eminent public figures vis-ited America, including Swami Vivekenanda, a nineteenth-century religious reformer who visited Chicago to address the World Parliament of Religions in 1893. Most Indians who arrived in the nineteenth century did not settle perma-nently. Popular history mentions a group of Indian slaves who found their way to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, but their definitive story has yet to be written (Rangaswamy 2000: 15–72). As the twentieth century progressed, South Asians in America began to acquire a larger political purpose and started to assimilate into U.S. society. Punjab was largely spared the system of indentured labor that sent work-ers across the British Empire. But a small group of Punjabi farmers endured a fate similar to that of their counterparts across the African and West Indian outposts of the empire. Attracted by promises of work and wealth by Cana-dian company representatives touring India to seek cheap labor, many farmers immigrated to present-day western North America. The first port of entry was British Columbia; the American coastal regions in Washington, Oregon, and California then followed. These migratory Indians sought work in lumber mills and railroads. A few thousand emigrated in the first two decades of the twen-tieth century, forming a visible population of South Asians on the west coast. Like their contemporary Chinese laborers, they fought the bitter anti-Asian

Pa r T o n e

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laws that prevented them from owning land and, at times, gaining citizenship (Lal 1999: 42–48; Jensen 1988: 24–56). When work in mills and railroads often proved impossible, many immigrants sought to farm their own land; after much travail, they managed to do so successfully. In addition to these farmers, students and political activists set up the Ghadr (revolution) Party, based in San Francisco around 1910. Famous anticolonialists such as Har Dayal and Taraknath Das published a newspaper and organized the South Asian community of California to oppose British colonialism. The party’s constituency included several thousand students and politically minded individuals in Canada and the United States. Among them were Punjabi labor-ers who had arrived a few years earlier. With links to Germany, India, and the United Kingdom, the Ghadr Party formed a significant chapter in the history of Indian nationalist resistance to colonial rule. As World War I began, American and British forces crushed any hope for Ghadr to stay afloat, and the party more or less disintegrated by the end of the war.1

The population of South Asians in the United States remained steady, between 2,000 and 3,000 until 1965, as it was limited by the effects of the Immi-gration Act of 1917. From the early 1920s, a string of applications for citizenship by Indians set in motion the American practice of defining “whiteness” as a criterion for citizenship. In the early 1900s, a few Indians, including Taraknath Das, did acquire citizenship, while others did not. By 1922, sixty-nine Indians had applied for and received American citizenship. That year, Bhagat Singh Thind, a veteran of World War I, applied for citizenship but was denied because the courts deemed him “nonwhite” to the common man, even though he had argued by scientific rationale that he was of caste-Hindu, and therefore, Aryan, stock. This set off a trend of denaturalization, and forty-three Indians were stripped of their citizenship. In 1924, the Asiatic Exclusion Act was formed to restrict the entry of Asians into the United States and to prevent Asians from acquiring citizenship (Jensen 1988: 246–269; Lal 1999: 42–48). By the 1940s, a few thousand Indians were living, working, and (in some cases) owning property in the United States. The country officially did not sup-port British colonization in India, and President Franklin Roosevelt did not publicly support Winston’s Churchill’s dogged insistence on retaining India during World War II. Americans began to enter India during World War II. In 1943, thousands of American troops descended upon India to help defend the Allies from Japanese aggression on the eastern front, as Burma had been recently conquered by the Japanese. Inspired by the 1941 Atlantic Charter that promoted the right of self-government to all peoples, Indian activists lobbied the U.S. government to change its laws. After the war, in 1946, naturalization and citizenship were granted to Indians, albeit with quotas. About 7,000 Indians entered the United States between 1948 and 1965. Their numbers grew slowly in

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the 1950s, and California’s Dilip Singh Saund become the first Indian American Congressman in 1956. The 1965 Immigration Reform Act signed by President Lyndon Johnson ush-ered in a new era of middle-class professional migration and settlement. An official preference for professional and formally educated South Asians allowed large numbers of migrants with capital and personal connections, and skills to succeed in American work life (such as English-language proficiency) to settle and flourish in America. Since the 1960s, doctors, businessmen, lawyers, com-puter professionals, and other such groups have become a familiar part of the U.S. social landscape. Second- and third-generation South Asian Americans appear on television, write for newspapers, and occupy visible locations in contemporary American society. Unlike the earlier Punjabi laborers or anticolonial revolutionaries, this wave of migrants encountered an America defined by pluralist multicultural-ism in a world of nation-states, and they arrived as Indians, Pakistanis, or Ban-gladeshis. Also unlike the earlier migrants, they came with professional qualifi-cations and skills to succeed in a global capitalist world. This America, officially a liberal democracy welcoming its newest members, is a state defined by the immigrant experience, where immigrants come to stay, not just to work. This is the America of Merchant on Venice, Chaos Theory, and Sakina’s Restaurant. As with most locations in the diaspora, community cultural organizations throughout the United States have imported troupes to fill their leisure time with performances involving music, dance, and dance-drama. Occasionally these imports include contemporary theatre groups from South Asia. In recent years, the use of high-profile performers from South Asia has burgeoned into an industry, as the NRI (Non Resident Indian) market for such performances has grown immensely. But an indigenous dramatic literature and tradition of theatrical produc-tion by South Asians resident in the United States has developed quite slowly. The early history of South Asians there includes performances in Punjabi and Hindustani for the groups’ own consumption, as was true for other South Asian diasporic units. In the early to mid-twentieth century, with only a few thousand South Asians in the country, there were very few recorded theatre performances. However, with the wave of migration that began in the 1960s, a professional presence in New York City has slowly emerged. For example, the organization Salaam Theatre has sponsored staged readings and numerous events relating to South Asian performance in New York. There is also a general South Asian performing arts environment in New York. Mainstream theatres now include the occasional blockbuster, such as the 2003–2004 Broadway musical Bombay Dreams, which showcased South Asian characters. Outside of New York, companies have sprouted in recent years, such as

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Chicago’s Rasaka Theatre, Boston’s South Asian American Theatre (SAATh), and a range of community groups in San Francisco’s Bay Area, Washington, D.C., and Houston. Additionally, professional theatres with global orientations, such as Chicago’s Silk Road Theatre, Minneapolis’s Pangea World Theatre (led by Dipankar Mukherjee and Meena Natarajan, Indian theatre artists), or the University of Massachusetts—Amherst’s New World Theatre, occasionally fea-ture plays with South Asian themes or characters. Yet rarely have these theatres featured South Asian diasporic material. Chicago’s Silk Road Theatre Project and their highly successful 2007 production of Shishir Kurup’s Merchant on Venice is a rare exception. Playwrights across the country, such as Anuvab Pal, Rehana Mirza, John Mathew, Nandita Shenoy, Sujata Bhatt, Bina Sharif, and Rajiv Joseph, as well as productions of South Asian playwrights in South Asian spaces, like Mahesh Dattani in Boston’s SAATh or Toronto’s Rasikarts, have cre-ated an emergent South Asian North American theatre community without a clear institutional infrastructure supporting their work. Unlike in the United Kingdom, where funds, organizations, and even oppor-tunities to train in South Asian theatre techniques exist, the work of Shishir Kurup, Anuvab Pal, and Aasif Mandvi represent decades of theatre work in the different North American environment. Kurup, with a long career of playwrit-ing, acting, and directing, represents a first in South Asian American dramatic literature, as he adapts Western classics from a South Asian diasporic perspec-tive. This contrasts with the British experience, where such adaptations have been appearing for more than twenty years. Aasif Mandvi’s Sakina’s Restaurant showcases the one-man show, whereas Anuvab Pal’s Chaos Theory connects South Asia, America, and the contemporary postcolonial condition. Anuvab Pal’s Chaos Theory explores the postcolonial condition of South Asian scholars from the vantage point of America. As perhaps the first South Asian American theatrical critique of postcolonial South Asia, Pal sends up both the America and the South Asia often encountered in college classrooms. Pal presents a love story between two South Asian academics who meet as budding humanists quoting Shakespeare, Keats, Russell, and the great minds of Western thought in 1960s Delhi University. The play then takes the audience through a humorous, politically charged, and romantic journey through graduate school, teaching at elite institutions like Harvard and Columbia, Marxist performance artists in 1970’s Cambridge, and teaching young Americans about South Asia in the present day. Pal shows us two sides of the contemporary South Asian aca-demic: Sunita, the wide-eyed, passionate subalternist, and Mukesh, the Anglo-phile Macaulay-loving scholar of Elizabethan literature. Both are parts of the colonial modern condition, including the lingering, often intangible hangover of colonialism, which is artfully explored in this play. Diaspora forms the context of Chaos Theory—academic careers in the West

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and the culture of peddling ethnicity, a process known all too well to the South Asian diasporic academic community. Sprinkled with literary references and sensibilities, Chaos Theory also includes pretense, romance, and love. Sunita and Mukesh, in a messy, nontraditional way, form each other’s constant in the chaos of life in the currently identity-infused world of the U.S. academy. Two major themes elevate this piece into a sophisticated commentary on the South Asian diaspora: the postcolonial condition of South Asians as well as the ways in which lovers relate to each other over the course of a lifetime. Pal has sought to create a story about “what colonialism produces. [On] one side, we have extremists who disavow any identity, and then on the other, we have the English-loving fops, the Roger Mazumdars, wearing cravats going to Christmas dinner.”2 He seeks to uncover the ways that colonialism finds its way into how people think, relate, and form relationships with themselves and with others, to “engage a sliver of what’s left behind.”3

Pal describes his play as operating on two levels. On one level, his story con-cerns pure relationship. Here he writes about all sorts of people, among them “bakers, fishmongers, tailors . . . given that they are academics, this is just one thread, so they have their classical music and quotation games.”4 The work also, on another level, is a love story about people who miss each other but are always there for each other. Even though they are academics, they could be anyone. The story of these academics follows a banal trajectory; as Pal states, “conven-tional wisdom says they would fall in love and marry . . . but they never actually do. [The play is about] what happens in the meantime, in the interstices, what happens when they should be falling in love. They are two particles that will never connect, A and B, who share a lifetime together but never connect, each other’s constant in chaos.”5 At the other end, there is a politics to this type of love. It is about the colonial modern. Making the colonial modern come alive via theatre is the main thrust of Pal’s endeavor. Giving dramatic shape to this condition through two opposing poles of the critical spectrum, putting them in love gives the colonial modern a pal-pable feeling much stronger than that which one might find in dense postcolo-nial theory.6 Pal’s sense of the colonial modern comes from the wedge between Sunita and Mukesh, an unresolved colonial hangover that informs so much of South Asian lives today, in the diaspora and in the United States:

We, Indians, in particular, [are a] product of Mughal-Aryan-British history . . . [and] the end product—is unresolved. All of it is usable, in the mod-ern context, in a cosmopolitan cesspool, whether we are bankers, lawyers, academics, we are bringing who we are into the daily conversation. For Mukesh, being who we are, we have to ignore all of that. If there is a ficti-tious scene, where somebody asks him who Sharukh Khan is, he would

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deny it, but he can’t escape his identity. He does know. Sunita would chuckle at Mukesh—these two kinds of Indians co-exist throughout the world.7

Mukesh’s resistance to the concept of a mythical India wrapped in mysticism and Sunita’s workhorse peddling of India form how Pal sees South Asians con-fronting modernity. Mukesh thinks “there is no difference between himself and Harold Bloom. The fact is, he can’t be Simon Schwama, nor can he be the head of a Renaissance Literature department.”8 The question Pal asks, through Mukesh, concerns how much you can avoid the ways in which people ethni-cize you. “Can you choose how important your ethnicity is or isn’t? Maybe you can. Hopefully he speaks for the segment of people who can’t run away from that.”9

Sunita, by contrast, remains as an idealist who initially had no plans to sell her ethnicity; she was someone who sought “new interpretations, new ideas . . . a universal forum for exchange, without identity, without baggage, a cosmo-politan conveyor belt” of knowledge and ideas.10 Over the course of her career she comes to the same endpoint as Mukesh, but is caught inside the identity machine because she specializes in South Asia, and ends up “depressed, frus-trated with academia, with having to sell one’s ethnicity to get bigger grants.”11 She, unlike Mukesh, takes action and decides to leave the identity maelstrom of academia and return to teach in India. Mukesh, as Pal describes him, is a tragic, drunken character who is rejected by American academia. Both Sunita and Mukesh, given the way identity politics works, are rejected. Whereas Mukesh chooses to maintain his alcohol-infused, self-deprecating lifestyle, Sunita chooses to leave to chart a new path. Pal also shows the colonial modern taking shape in this play through his dramaturgical sense of reality. Because his work is set in America for an Ameri-can audience, it can’t be a play about silences, gaps, and infidelities, all the char-acteristics of a colonial modern condition. When we think of real people and their choices, according to Pal, “they can’t be products of resolved histories,” since neatly understood, nicely resolved histories generally inform modern Euro-American drama.12 Postcolonial Indians’ history, their sense of the pres-ent and of what they should/should not be in the present, comes from a compli-cated sense of colonialism, racialism, and political struggle, and does not pro-duce characters and personalities with straightforward politics. Pal brings this to America, particularly in the character of Mukesh. As Pal says, “In the U.S. context, Mukesh is not completely understood as the American academy has an idea of India. On the other side, he doesn’t fulfill that idea, and he’s not an Englishman. This is an identity baggage he doesn’t [or can’t] resolve.”13 The play is an examination of what happens to a man with his qualities. As we see, this man’s life is filled with tragedy, with comedy, and with love. But Pal’s tragedy

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of modern man, unlike the tragic characters of Miller, Wilson, or Shepard, has more than a sense of personal disillusionment or alienation—his tragedy con-stitutes the condition of being colonially modern. Pal manages to show that unresolvable colonial modern in all of its complex-ity. This colonial modern strikes at the moment an Indian knows that English is his key to a higher-paying job, when he realizes that in the diaspora, he needs to have a separate identity from the masses of South Asians “stuck” in their vernaculars. This is where Sunita and Mukesh participate in and indulge in this colonial modernity. They both think they have sobered from this hangover, as it were, but yet they are making and reshaping it in their own ways. Sunita and her constructs of teaching and South Asia; Mukesh and his running away from himself constitute their very specific modernity. When Mukesh derides the South Asian taxi driver dancing around to Bollywood music, we can sense that Mukesh secretly loves the film Umrao Jaan, Lata Mangeskhar, and Bhangra. By the end of the play Amit’s Gotham Holkar character, his Marxism, Mukesh and his pretentious love of Elizabethan literature, and the quoting games between Sunita and Mukesh are the real constants. As the critique has often been made, the liberal-colonial agenda of civilizing Indians via reform, representative government, civic–public culture—all these cover something much larger, such as economic exploitation and racism. In Pal’s piece we find the pretense of everyday coping strategies with the colonial modern—Sunita’s subalternism, and her disillusionment with it, Mukesh’s romanticism, Amit’s karlmarxwillreturn.com are all strategies South Asians use to cope with their colonial modernity. For the first time, we see an exploration of such strategies on the American stage. As opposed to a focus on the intellectual and the witty entanglements of colonial modernity, Sakina’s Restaurant, Aasif Mandvi’s 1998 one-man show, explores a feature common in the American culture: the family-owned restau-rant. Produced and published in the late 1990s after years of workshop perfor-mances, Sakina’s Restaurant belongs to the generation before films like Monsoon Wedding, novels like The Namesake, and plays like Bombay Dreams flooded the American South Asian community. As a one-man piece exploring working-class American South Asian life from the 1980s, the play was constructed over five years of intense development. The show began with Mandvi performing his own characters, first from his living room, then at the Duplex Cabaret Space in Greenwich Village, and finally in Wynn Handman’s acting studio. From there, in 1998, the show traveled to the American Place Theatre in New York City, to huge critical and popular acclaim. Among other locations, including univer-sities and community organizations, the show has appeared in Chicago, Los Angeles, and London. Mandvi acknowledges that he never had any intention of analyzing or

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politicizing the South Asian community, as he “had no statement about immi-grants or South Asians in America, [because] all [he] wanted to do was write characters from [his] ethnic background that were real and that had never before been seen on the American Stage.”14 Whether he realized it or not, Mandvi certainly did create a lively document of South Asian diasporics and their experience in America. As he himself acknowledges, in the Broadway run of the show, the characters he created “transcended his family, his experience of them . . . they were reflections of a community, there was a level of recognition in the audience that he had never experienced.”15

Through the narrator of Azgi, a young man migrating to India to work in a restaurant, Mandvi shares the story of several familiar personages in the com-munity: the big, talkative restaurant owner, Hakim; his wife, Farrida, a former dancer who has given up her home and culture to come to the United States; their daughter Sakina, a young girl acculturated in America but dealing with her family’s pressures; and her younger brother, happy with his game boys and quite uninterested in India. All the while Azgi weaves in out of the action, often with anecdotes and parables. Sakina’s Restaurant represents the South Asian diaspora in the United States before South Asians started to appear on Broadway and in novels accessible to the wider public. The play shows the community in a phase where racism, ignorance, and the problems of being a minority formed its major points of social departure. The characters are Mandvi’s “friends, family, children, his voice.”16 They began to appear in the performing arts at a point when South Asian characters on stage acquired a reality beyond taxi drivers, terrorists, and convenience store workers. These people do work in a restaurant, they do have accents, they do often speak in their vernaculars, and they are wildly protec-tive of the culture they left behind. But, with Mandvi’s play, we gain a dignified, sympathetic, funny, and endearing picture of them. Mandvi shows how the youth of this culture, the Sakinas and Samirs, are not necessarily caught between two cultures, but rather are creating their own type of culture, their own type of language and discourse within their families and their societies. One issue concerns the particular type of racism both felt by South Asians in America as well as the racism generated by South Asians living in the American context. Hakim comments on how quickly one will become an Indian again if one “steal[s] one of their good ole boys.” He also demon-strates the racism that Sakina encounters with her friends. This racism emerges out of malice and hatred, as Sakina finds that girls call her “nigger”; she also confronts plain, rather innocent ignorance when her friend calls her “Iranian.” The playwright presents tense issues in a way that does not judge and does not only report—he injects a level of sympathy for everyone involved. Also, Samir, the young boy raised on video games and American culture, develops distaste

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for India at a young age; his feelings reflect familiar Western stereotypes about India: India smells, it is dirty, it is a place where he just doesn’t want to be. Mandvi has documented, for perhaps the first time, South Asian life in America through performance. The Sakinas, Samirs, Mr. Hakim and Farridas, and Azgis of America now don’t seem as “Other” as they may have twenty years ago. Now, after Mandvi’s play, they may simply exist as a teenager, a young boy, or a restaurateur and his wife, without having to be termed “immigrants” or “foreigners.” They may just be called Americans. The final American piece represents a thoroughly different part of the South Asian diasporic theatrical spectrum, via adaptations of Western classics. Like British Jatinder Verma in his 2001: A Ramayana Odyssey, Shishir Kurup engages with European classic literature in his adaptation of Shakespeare’s Mer-chant of Venice. Unlike Verma, Kurup places the story’s protagonists directly in early twentieth-first-century southern California. Kurup’s performance text veers from the Shakespearean original but retains the vitality of language as his piece includes verse like Shakespeare’s. Particular lines are transposed in their entirety,17 and the storyline does remain intact. But the ending and Shake-speare’s presentation of Elizabethan-era antisemitism, encounter a South Asian American coloration as these latter two characteristics transform Kurup’s piece into a distinctively South Asian diasporic version of Shakespeare’s story. Though the storyline remains intact, several areas pointedly transpose the Elizabethan context into a South Asian American one. South Asian Ameri-can references detail characters that had already been sketched by Shakespeare and also shape many of the archetypes of South Asian American society. These archetypes include the majoritarian Hindu community and their power, as represented in Devendra; the wealthy, palace-inhabiting girls looking for hus-bands in Pushpa; the marginalized within the South Asian space in Murali; and the careful, conservative, marginalized immigrant in Sharuk. This attempt by Kurup to showcase the internal diversities, contradictions, and conflicts of South Asian America through Shakespearean characters and conflicts, allows for contemporary South Asian American culture to appear on stage in a com-prehensive fashion. From the first scene on, Yogandanda and Sivananda (Salerio and Salarino) demonstrate the different types of South Asians who have come to the United States; they make reference to NRI struggles compared with Indian politics, referring to the 1998 nuclear tests, as Sivananda states in Act I, scene i: “And since those clowns back home have burst the bombs / They’ve made it harder on us NRIs / See, they don’t give a damn as long as they / Can rabble rouse and keep the status quo. / It’s how they stay in office over there / And over here.” Also Murali, as the Prince of Morocco character, a dark-skinned South Indian, and Toori, another South Indian, show marginalized South Asian spaces.

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When asked about this, Kurup acknowledged that he consciously attempted to show Pushpa’s opposition to dark skin, as an internalized South Asian expres-sion of racism, and Toori’s internalized Brahmanism (he recites the “dangers” of associating with lower castes and Muslims, akin to Gobbo’s fear of Jews). Kurup also consciously moved the first Murali scene next to the second scene,18 so the audience sees a direct connection to her being completely skin-color-racist in choosing a husband.19 Kavita’s lower-class and lower-caste sympathy with Murali’s plight further characterizes the conflicts of South Asian Americaniza-tion. As Kurup states, Murali “is still protesting too much, he has internalized the racism. He talks too much about it [and] of course he’s not going to change his prejudice. Kavita can’t stand Pushpa’s prejudices.”20

The racism internal to South Asian Americans lives as well as the racism experienced by South Asian Americans in Yogananda and Sivananda’s narra-tion of a crucial part of the story. Sharuk sends the police to get Noori and Armando, who flee, in this version, to Las Vegas. As Shylock was in a rage both when Lorenzo and Jessica fled in a gondola and when French and English ships collided, potentially hurting Antonio’s investments,21 in Kurup’s play, the police pursue who they think are Noori and Armando, but instead find Jitendra and Amitabha on their way to Carmel. In an incident of racialized violence, common to South Asians before and after 9–11, but thrown into public display in recent years, the police detain both Jitendra and Amitabha. Jitendra and Amitabha, a Sikh, are saved by Amitabha’s high-quality singing. Though the narration of this significant moment in the story’s development stays intact, a detour through American racism fleshes out a South Asian American perspective. In addition to these South Asian American references and characterizations, Kurup also introduces two important differences between his play and Shake-speare’s: the anti-Muslim ideology of the twenty-first century and the vulgar anti-semitic ideology of Shakespeare’s seventeenth century come to a different ending when a lower-class Hindu, Kavita, emerges with an epiphany about empathy and Sharuk is not condemned in the way Shylock is punished in Shakespeare’s. The most visible face of the South Asian diaspora in America includes the post-1965 middle-class migrants22 who often freeze their ideological worlds in time, and have little connection to the South Asian world after their migration. This frozen feeling applies to the world of “the Muslim” and how he/she is con-structed in modern South Asia. The role of the “Muslim,” as minority, as fanatic, as having questionable cultural and/or national credentials, has a long history in the South Asian sociocultural space.23 In Kurup’s play, a sketch of the Muslim presence in an American context emerges. The precarious role of the Muslim in contemporary South Asia, shot through with controversy from the nineteenth century, is transferred to the South Asian American stage through Kurup. Since the widespread rebellion against British rule in 1857 and the suspected Muslim

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instigation of it, the “Muslim” has been constructed as “fanatic” and dangerous to British colonialism. Through major points in South Asian history, such as the Khilafat movement, a world-wide pan-Islamic movement to restore the caliph after World War I and through the ways of the Muslim League, a political orga-nization in colonial India, Muslims have often been constructed as “threatening” to the Indian colonial and nationalist space. From 1947 on, during the reign of the secular Indian nation-state, there have been no shortages of events that cast Islam, and Indian Muslims, as treacherous enemies to secularism and Indian nationalism. Among these have been Ayodhya in 1992, or, in the twenty-first century, Gujurat in 2002.24 During both of these moments of consuming com-munal conflict, a large part of the Hindu press portrayed Muslims as foreign, nonsecular, and non-Indian. Though Islam has a long, colorful, and detailed history in South Asia, the precarious role of the Muslim allows for powerful and salient dramatic conflict, which Kurup exploits in the way Sharuk, as the Indian Muslim Shylock, is treated by his Hindu counterparts. The Kurup version of “the Muslim” materializes first in the presentation of Armando and Noori, in rather different terms than Lorenzo and Jessica. In Shakespeare’s play, Lorenzo and Jessica are involved in an intense bout of anti-Semitism, whereas Armando and Noori are simply trying to break free of a harsh father. There is almost no typology of Islam as an evil enemy, as we see in Lorenzo and Jessica. Armando sees Noori as South Asian, not as Mus-lim, whereas the Jewishness of Jessica and her father Shylock is paramount. Additionally, Armando is not Hindu; nor does he have anything to do with the religious culture of South Asia, so it would make sense for him to see Noori as “desi”25 rather than belonging to a particular religion. Compare the closing monologues of Armando (II, iii, Kurup) with Lorenzo (II, iv, Shakespeare):

Armando: We’ll have ninitos brown and beautiful Who’ll speak the language of both east and west Of pre-Columbia y Indus Valley Of jalapeno y garam masala Of Fateh Ali Khan y Santana Of sub-commandante Marcos y Gandhi, Of brown-skinned love tanned by a sun that seems To shine with more intensity and passion Upon the lands whose latitudes we share (<X-REF>) Lorenzo: If e’er the Jew her father comes to heaven It will be for his gentle daughter’s sake:

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And never dare misfortune cross her foot, Unless she do it under this excuse, That she is issue to a faithless Jew (Act II, Scene iv)

Armando and Noori intend to celebrate their brownness and their Ameri-canness, whereas Jessica and Lorenzo clearly express antisemitism. In Kurup’s play, there is no equivalent to Act III, Scene v, where Launcelot launches into an utterly anti-Jewish diatribe, as he says that Jessica has no place in heaven because she is a Jew and that the Christian Lorenzo should not make her Chris-tian because the price of pork would rise. Similarly, Toori, Sharuk’s assistant, does not oppose Islam and Muslims the way Launcelot and Gobbo engage with their anti-Jewish ideologies. Toori is not conspiring to help Noori become Hindu, as Armando has nothing to do with Hinduism, because he is not South Asian. This story is situated in southern California in the twenty-first century, and it is removed from a black–white religious conflict. Kurup intended to expunge the ugly anti-Jewish nature from his story, and the nature of Hindu–Muslim relations does not have a contem-porary parallel.26

In order to appreciate the second major difference between the two texts, we must first investigate the precise variations between Shylock and Sharuk. Sharuk talks of the shared Hindu–Muslim culture, whereas Shylock is sepa-rate as a Jew, in a black and white world. Compare the identity-based politics of Sharuk’s speech with the corresponding “if you prick us, do we not bleed” speech of Shylock, both in Act III, Scene i:

Sharuk: Our skins share the same hue! Our families the same village! Our loyalties the same flag! The ghee that fries your dal is as clarified as that which cooks our lamb. Our rites of cleansing rival your own ritual ablutions. Our call to prayer is as much a wail for God’s attention as your bell-ringing pujas . . .

Shylock: I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the

same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian

is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poi-

son us,

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do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge . . . (Act III, Scene i)

Sharuk is crying for the shared culture of Hindus and Muslims in South Asia. This veers from Shylock’s assertion of his own dignity in a world where that is denied on absolutist terms. In contemporary South Asia, Hindus and Muslims are intertwined to such a degree that they cannot be understood apart from each other. As Sharuk says, their lives are shared but inhabit a misunderstood sameness complicated by nation, religious bigotry, and violence. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, Jews had to assert their sameness, as Shylock had to argue. Kurup aimed to maintain the sameness that informs the culture and rhetoric of so many different types of South Asian Americans and their life choices. For Kurup, it was important that Shylock mentioned the same flag, and that they share “two same flags, Indian and American. (This is not out of Pakistan–India rivalry or enmity). Maybe he chose not to become a citizen, and maybe (laugh-ingly) I needed a device to potentially get him deported in the final scene, but it is important that he is an Indian Muslim, not from Pakistan. He is speaking as a minority, and his argument is that the health of a society depends on the health of their minorities.”27 Actually, sameness, in Kurup’s reading, “is what ultimately underpins Shakespeare’s speech,”28 this commonality is what Sharuk is arguing for, though in a different context than Shylock’s. This sameness is what informs Kurup’s ending, which is marked by a series of intense epiphanies marking a resolution to the actions, but not necessarily a resolution to the characters’ conflicts. Unlike Shakespeare’s story, everyone, at different points, in different ways, “finds grace,” in Kurup’s words. Before “grace” is bestowed upon any of the characters, Sharuk emerges as more resourceful than Shylock, as he holds a cauterizing machine that can procure a pound of flesh without spilling any blood. This renders Pushpa’s argument, unlike Portia’s, meaningless. But, just before he is able to accomplish his task, he undergoes a complete change of heart. After Kavita’s “Tat Avam Asi” speech, when the court is trying to deal with Sharuk, Devendra expresses his love for Jitendra, and also begs the court to have mercy upon Sharuk and give Sharuk at least his principal. The most striking difference is Kavita’s “Tat Avam Asi” speech and the complete change of heart evidenced by the majority community of Hindus in the court-room. This isn’t a conscious decision, as the mood seems confused as to what exactly happens when Kavita’s appeal to empathy for the Other is acknowledged by SABU and Sharuk simply leaves. Kurup attempted to translate a Shakespear-ean, early modern version of mercy, into a modern version of empathy. This modern version of empathy is realized in Kavita’s “Tat Avam Asi” speech, which radically changes the spirit of the ending without changing the

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actions that led to that ending. When discussing the ending, Kurup mentioned that “Pushpa’s speech in the end, is not about mercy, it’s about empathy . . . in a modern society, unlike in a theocratic or monarchic state, we think of mercy as something as barbaric, and outdated. Implicitly it says that there is someone above handing down mercy, like a king, or a god. Instead she is just making her plea.”29 Kavita’s lower-class status and the marginal location of Sharuk all play into Kurup’s display of an empathy that transcends difference, that realizes the unity of human beings in times of crisis. In the first professional production of Merchant at Chicago’s Silk Road The-atre Project, the many points of originality and diasporic complexity garnered nearly unanimously positive reviews from the press. Called a “polycultural deconstruction”30 of the original, the play’s various elements of intensely lay-ered and detailed South Asian American conflicts and characterizations, the “huge musical parody of Bollywood gestalt”31 demonstrated an appreciation for the South Asian diasporic in the most vaunted of theatrical forms, Shakespeare. One critic even declared that the problems of ethics, morality, and diversity unresolved by Shakespeare’s story were solved by Kurup’s inventive and original change to the ending.32 However, the actual novelty of its South Asian-ness was recognized as a liability for the play’s longevity and ability to command wide audiences. A few Chicago critics noted the fact that the show was not seen ear-lier in a “mainstream” theatre, was probably due to the fact that it was a “risky, rambunctious show set in the U.S. South Asian community and thus out of the mainstream,”33 and one commented on how it would act as miraculous outreach to the Indian population of Queens and the “Muslims of Brooklyn.”34 These two notwithstanding, all reviewers commended Kurup for appropriating Shake-speare in a manner faithful to the core conflicts of the story, but with full appre-ciation for an aesthetic that includes the diasporic experience as a constituent element. Many company members for the production not only repeated the critical praise of Kurup’s uncannily precise dialectical interplay between Shake-speare and South Asian America, but found some unprecedented milestones in the representation of issues like racism by South Asian Americans toward others (as embodied by Pushpa), something never seen before in dramatic literature.35 Merchant has the goal of fixating on that particular South Asian Ameri-can diasporic vantage point, “of trying to find the sound of the South Asian diaspora, from homegrown all-American to FOB (fresh off the boat).”36 From the complicated prejudices, ideologies, and histories of this particular, Kurup is also journeying into the universal, an area that Shakespeare himself is often credited with clarifying. Kurup, through the structure of Shakespeare’s story, as well as through empathy for the Other, charts a new aesthetic voice in which neither the particularity of South Asian America nor the grandiose nature of Shakespearean conflict is sacrificed.