I don’t usually publish rough drafts — I like to pour over my pieces until the raw edges of the words are smoothed over by repetition or at least until I’m too lazy to work anymore.

But this — this is a rough draft I’ve been working on for a year.

I wrote the first words a few days after settling into college, but back then it was an essay about America, and essay about being in a new place, a new home — an essay about finding a new me.

Since then, I’ve typed and deleted. I’ve copied down quotes from textbooks, stories and articles — I’ve scrambled for pens and scraps of paper in the middle of the day when I felt I finally made a breakthrough. There are days when I don’t think about this, and there are nights when this was all I could think about, nights when I forgot I had readings to do or tests to study for.

Because this year, more than ever before, I’ve been trying to figure out being Indian.

But I’m getting ahead of myself — because first I’m going to tell a story.

The story starts with me sitting in Encina Hall by myself, waiting for a friend who was shooting a movie and needed extras. I was in the deserted main lobby, checking my emails instead of reading my texts which would’ve told me that my friends couldn’t get into the building which I’d entered about 10 minutes before it was locked for the night.

One of the emails was from an activist on campus that I’d interviewed for an article I’d recently written — and I realized that the article had probably been published by this morning. I went to Stanford Daily’s website and I indulged in my favourite past time — I looked myself up. And immediately I was surprised — the article had 12 comments. Which might not sound like much, but my articles usually have a grand total of two comments — one from my mother and one from my father, both of them telling me I’m wonderful.

I know the cardinal rule of the internet — I know you’re not supposed to read comments written by strangers. But to be honest, it didn’t even cross my mind to skip over them, or even to steel myself before reading them — I still entirely believed the comments would be from my parents, and the friends they forward my articles to.

Needless to say — I was wrong.

My article was about Rohith Vemula. I don’t know how to summarise what that means — do I call it a Dalit suicide? But there are so many who will jump in right then to say he was actually Vaddera — without caring to explain how that matters when the world treated him as a Dalit. There are others who will point out that it wasn’t suicide — it was murder. But then the question is, who killed Rohith?

It was my answer to this that someone called "India bashing" — because my answer talked about the caste system and the Hindu right, because I committed the crime of quoting the RSS website on their Hindutva mission while forgetting to mention that they provided relief after the Tsunami. And I didn't stop there — I also mention Gujarat and Modi but instead of the foolproof “development model”, I talked about the riots in 2002 which took about 1000 lives and displaced roughly 150,000 people.

I know it is petty to try to answer these comments — and I’m glad I didn’t join the discussion while it was taking place, but it wasn’t easy. Because I knew the “facts” they were talking about, and I had looked into them to see if they were true before. I even sat in that empty building and I typed my response to their accusations — lists of articles and sources I had to back up my facts and to prove that the narratives they were spouting had been discredited. But I didn’t post them — because even through my anger, I knew I was missing the mark. After 19 years in a household with siblings, I could sense when I would win an argument and when I was completely talking past someone.

And then I realized it didn’t matter to them that Rohith hadn’t even used the reservation they were bashing, or that Rohith’s was the latest of 9 suicides that happened at Hyderabad University in the past decade. What they were attacking wasn’t my research — they were concerned with my identity.

And that I couldn’t defend as easily. So what I did instead was this: I went outside, I called my sister, and in the middle of explaining what they had said, I started crying.

Which is immature and ridiculous and embarrassing — but I cried because I really did care about what happened to Rohith Vemula. And because I poured myself into that article and because I really meant every single word I wrote. I cried because I wrote my article because I want to do something, anything, in whatever capacity to make India what it could be and in response, people asked me who I was, and what right I had to say these things.

The words these commenters associated with me are almost too obvious to quote: liberal, elite, secular, urbanised, anglicized, western wannabe. They are all synonyms for the same accusation: I was a sell out, inauthentic, a hypocrite. In trying to be like the west, I had compromised India. I was out of touch with India. Not a real Indian. As one reader said, “I sincerely hope that you will not let the thought trouble you, that such selective, inaccurate and unresearched reporting of facts will present a distorted picture of your country to non-Indians.”

It has always shocked me — this accusation.That I didn’t care about India, that my love for it was somehow corrupted, that I was simply throwing it under the bus like some orientalist scholar. That I was a traitor for saying something negative about India.

And it scared me because I was afraid it was true.

Because this year, I finally found a name for people like me — those of us who grew up on Dickens and Austen while living in India. I found out this name in my Art History class.

The class — which looked at one painting and one poem every class — was taught by two professors. I took it for the Art History professor, Alexander Nemerov — I had heard his talk on Caravaggio during orientation and I didn’t need anymore convincing. But after the first class I had no favourites — our Professor of English, Nicholas Jenkins made it impossible.

Halfway through the quarter, we read a poem called Horatius, by Thomas Babington Macaulay. I will admit that I didn’t read the poem with any particular care that week, and I spent class mostly listening. But at one point, Professor Jenkins posed a question to the class about the author, but it looked so much like he expected me to know the answer that I felt the need to say no in response.

Macaulay was a poet but he was also a politician — and between 1834 and 1838, he served in India. He did a lot of interesting things in India and to India, but what Professor Jenkins was referring to was his impact on education — namely, his mission to make secondary education in India “useful” and therefore, obviously western. He wanted secondary education in India to be in English — not Sanskrit or Persian, his famous quote being, “A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”

I’m not a fan of Macaulay, but I also don’t want to mischaracterise him. When explaining why he made this move, several will quote him saying, “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, - a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.“ But he said this because he believed it was beyond the means of the British administration to educate the whole population of India — which is hard to challenge when we are still struggling to accomplish that task.

In any case, Macaulay's suggestions were adopted, and those “interpreters” he wanted are called Macaulay's’ children. To be one of Macaulay's’ children was to be of Indian descent but to adopt a western lifestyle — to take on the trappings of the colonizers. It was to be disloyal — but it also meant success in a world where the west had largely won.

I am one of Macaulay’s children — I am privileged and westernized and urban. I don’t need much evidence to prove that — because I wrote this draft in California, and I wrote it, like I’ve written almost everything in my life, in English. And until this year, I didn’t think twice about it calling this language mine — even though it’s been handed to me by white hands who came to “civilize” my country. And yet, it’s not those white hands that touched mine, who taught me how to hear this language sing — it was my teachers, my parents — it was their gift to me.

And what a gift it was — in India, simply the ability to speak English leads to an 800% increase in wages. That isn’t a coincidence, or a part of a modernising process — it was a deliberate project, and one under taken by colonialist.

I know that — and yet when I see an Indian mispronounce the V or W sound — when I trip over it myself — something inside me cringes before I can catch myself. I know that — and yet, when I speak my own mother tongue, I stammer. I still remember a fragment of a conversation with my mom — we were in the car and she was recounting one of her dreams. In the midst of telling me what the person in her dream had said, she said something in Telugu — and I had to interrupt her to ask if she dreamt in Telugu. Her answer was to ask me, obviously surprised, if I dreamt in English.

How can I counter their accusation that I’m not a real Indian when I know the baggage of racial shame I carry?

It’s a hard legacy we’ve been left with — it’s a difficult love. Because I do love India — not some abstract idea of it, but the place I was born, the place I grew up in, the place I carry with me wherever I go. It’s in my thoughts and the way my tongue moves over words. It’s the Indian sun that colored my skin before any other — it was the smell of winter mornings in Bangalore that I woke up to, it is the warm monsoon rain that lulled me to sleep.

Yes the tulips in Holland are beautiful and yes, the palm trees at Stanford are stunning, but nothing gives me joy like seeing Bangalore erupting into shards of yellow every March — nothing is like spotting the blur of golden bell trees while you pass by in your car, or the streets that stay coated in its yellow dust for weeks after the flowers have bloomed and fallen.

But I can’t deny that I’m here — here being California, in the U.S.

I can’t deny that I grew up on English books and music and movies and TV shows.

I can’t deny that even though I watched Hindi soap operas, I did it with the preemptive excuse of only keeping my mom company.

Because something about India, something about indianness, wasn’t cool. And this impression, it wasn’t a concrete idea — I’ve never thought about being Indian and what that means so much before. But even then, even when I was so young, I knew. I knew it wasn’t cool to go to school with oil in your hair (even though my grandmother did it), I knew it was not cool to wear kurtis when we went out casually (even though they’re so comfortable), I knew it was not cool to speak in a vernacular language (even though it was my own). I knew that there was hierarchy — English, Hindi, and then we’ll see.

But I didn’t grow up making these choices, living a double life. I grew up mostly not caring, until a searing moment of shame when somebody would laugh at how I pronounced a word. And then I got over it and continued — I never thought about why I loved Full House, why I was reading so many stories about girls with soft blue eyes and blonde hair.

Because I could ignore the skin so easily in these stories — because everything else sounded so much like my life: the music, the problems, the obsessions. Not because the stories were universal — but because I was fortunate to be born into a family that had the privilege of giving me a “western” world in India.

I call it a privilege because that’s what it was. Not in the sense that it was good, or superior to a more traditional, common, Indian upbringing — but that it gave me an upper hand in life. I don’t call it a privilege because I’m proud of it — I call it a privilege because for the longest time I told people everyone in India knows English, that we wear jeans and don’t know our castes, but that is a lie. Not everyone does those things, it is not obvious to everyone that they would someday study abroad or that as a girl, they could argue down their father. That upbringing was a privilege.

And even though I grew up with my parents always pointing to children on the street to remind me of how lucky I was, I never realised in any real sense that it was a privilege. Because when non Indians would ask me why me English is so good, or how I know so much about American culture, or what my caste was — the flash of anger I felt was so instantaneous, it almost made me blind to the shame behind the fierce pride it prompted.

In his Madison Garden speech, Modi told a story. He told a story of going to Taiwan, and in the midst of that pride, being told by an interpreter that India was the land of snakes and snake charmers, or black magic and whatever other undermining orientalist trope there is. He recounted replying, and he retells this part with glee and a certain sharpness — “Our ancestors used to play with snakes, we play with mouse.”

That reply was met with roaring applause and laughter — and despite how I feel about Modi, I know I would have cheered too. Because that feeling of being humiliated by this persistent idea of India, the India portrayed in the “hymn for the weekend” and romanticised incessantly by those who see India as an escape and not a home, is the one thing I will admit to having in common with Modi.

And that’s so uncomfortable to say. But I need to say it, because it’s true. Because there is an allure — albeit a dangerous, violent one — to Modi’s narrative of a resurgent India. There is something attractive about the narrative that says we discovered fission years ago, that we knew the exact distance to the sun.

There is an idea, often repeated by the RSS, that India was conquered because Indians were physically weak, a race that became subservient. That there is a softness, a softness of tolerance and complacency, that spread like mold, weakening the country and leaving it open to attacks and humiliation. Humiliation by conquest of others, humiliation that continued through orientalist narratives about the heathen Indians and humiliation that continued with British narrative about sanitation that brought shame to the most intimate parts of Indian life.

Humiliation and shame or at least some sense of falsity that continues to this day as we try to fit our brown bodies into western ideals of beauty, when we try to live the lives we see on American TV on Indian streets. Of course, these feelings of inadequacy in the face of inaccessibility don’t afflict everyone — some of us are lucky to be born into international schools and summers spent vacationing in Europe. And we get to be “cool” — we get to tout our music and accents as signs that this racial shame isn’t ours, that we’ve won a rigged game.

I don’t have any data to prove this, just personal experience. Because when I try to look at my personality, I can’t name anything that didn’t stem from an anglicized place. All my tastes and interests that I spent so many years curating so I could be what I considered “cool” — they’re all a product of the narrative that the west is best.

This narrative that as a wounded civilization, it seems weak to believe. A narrative that feels like a betrayal. A narrative that says I won in a system that was designed on the distaste people felt for people like me. A narrative that makes my claims to patriotism, or any political values, hypocrisy.

How can I know that I’m not just a vehicle for the West’s cultural conquest of India? How do I know that what I say is not just my urge to align myself with what I see as “cool” — because I know that’s the liberal, urban, intellegentia.

How can I say anything about India when the India I grew up in, the one I saw through the blinders of my privilege, was so different from the realities of millions of people?

And yet, how can I not say something about this country — my country — when it breaks my heart? When it censors books, when it excuses hate speech, when it champions a man who oversaw massacres? How can I not speak up when it is India that made me — when it was an Indian classroom I took up a chair in, a Indian hospital I was born into, an Indian road that I learnt to drive on when I hit 18? How can I not say anything when India is where I will live my life and cast my vote and raise my family? How can I not say something when I love this place?

I hate this divide, this paradox of identity that I was saddled with. I don’t want it. I don’t want to feel this rage when I hear about how Rohith Vemula felt he had to kill himself, I don’t want to feel this shame when I realize we don’t eat from the same plate as our maid. I don’t want to consider that caste doesn’t matter to me the same way race doesn’t have to matter to a white person.

I don’t want to do these things because it feels more than hard — it feels impossible. And yet, this year I also came across something that gave me hope that it might not be.

I took computer science and to everybody’s surprise — not the least my own — I enjoyed it. And when people ask me why, the best explanation I can give is that it’s a lot like writing a philosophy paper or speaking a new language.

And the bulk of what CS was for me was debugging — the methodical combing through of everything you’ve said, all the claims you’ve made, and finding where you tripped up. Like Philosophy, it is thinking in slow motion, it is systematically justifying your claims. And then finding all the other places you tripped up in the same way — and all the implications of how you setup your project around that false assumption, based on that one mistake. And then combing through again — because you’ve probably made more than one of those mistakes.

It is painstaking and tedious and I can’t name a single time that I’ve solved all my bugs right off the bat. It takes patience. It takes a lot of breaks, and walks and conversations. It takes a lot of test runs, and wondering how something so wrong resulted from your simple intentions.

We inherited colonialisms forms of knowledge — and the prejudices embedded deep inside our secular, modernist narratives. We took those systems, created without the intention of including India and its contradictions, and tried to make it work anyway — because that was what we were left with after decades of colonial rule.

I believe that that is where the falseness, the facade, to Macaulay's children comes from — there is something off with Indian liberals trying to fit india in "western" ideas, models, theories. Theories have to be crafted around phenomenon — around the facts of what happened. And yet when we — and any number of post colonial states — don't fit into the theory we’ve been taught we ask — are arabs ready for democracy, are orientals capable of being civilised, whatever. We don't ask why we're taking this western, Eurocentric experience and calling that universal.

Consider secularism. We assume that it is a function that can work on any society — without pausing to consider what it was invented as. In my class “Religion and Power in South Asia” — which was responsible, more than anything for this draft — we discussed how secularism is defined as the separation between church and state — except what does that mean in India, with its temples and mosques and it’s lack of a powerful, hierarchical clergy?

But that doesn’t mean there is no space for secularism in India — because the idea goes deeper than the way it’s application was articulated. That simply means we need to be honest about where our ideas come from, what that means, and what has to change for it to stay relevant. We need to go through our systems of thinking, and be willing to find the perversions in it, and we need to address the paradoxes it creates. We do not have to reinvent the wheel, or claim we actually did invent it centuries ago — we only have to modify it to suit Indian terrain.

I need that honesty, even when it calls my ideals into question, so that I am not undercut by doubt when I make my next point — that there is also a falseness to the RSS narrative, and that of Indian chauvinism.

Because this hyper aggressive narrative crafted by the RSS — of masculine strength, of reclaiming what has been stolen, looted, destroyed by the nefarious other, of rejecting as fake and pretentious any identity that has the murkiness of multitudes — comes as a reaction to the West as much as the liberal intelligentsia's Macaulayism.

There is a simultaneity to their response that I can never reduce to a few words, but it has layers of aiming to please the western gaze by succeeding on its material terms, and at the same time rejecting it to claim a Hindu supremacy disguised as pride.

And that is where their falseness comes from — because they aim to define themselves against everything western — and yet the fact is, the influence is present, globalisation is not deniable. They ask how English can be an Indians language — and I see their point. But I also ask how can English not be India’s language, when we have 125,226,449 english speakers?

I never understood people who could support Modi — who could somehow ignore his human rights record for his economic agenda. But even then, I learned to reconcile myself to that narrative because in a country like India, with its teeming masses of the young — all yearning for a better life — it makes sense why food on the table and financial security won him the election. How can someone think of anything as lofty as communal harmony when poverty gives survival the very relentless quality of violence?

But that doesn’t explain Modi’s diaspora supporters — those who can’t be explained away by their unthinking capitalism. But I finally understand that the violence that characterises Modi’s human rights abuses to me, is also symptomatic of the brand of pride he is selling — and it is that pride in India that so many people find so alluring about Modi. It is the Hindu nationalist emphasis on strength — the more palatable version than that of masculine strength fostered in khaki shorts, emboldened by genocidal rape during riots — that seems like the long needed answer to the challenges of being heathens, and uncivilized and backwards — accusations that came from colonizers, that came from missionaries, accusations that still ring in our ears and drop from our tongues. It is his dynamism and his unapologetic rhetoric — so at odds with what is seen as the liberal rhetoric, which is pandering to western ideals — that sells so well to an Indian out in a world dominated by the west.

But I reject the kind of pride that begins and ends in othering minorities and using them to assert strength. I also reject a Macaulayism that is out of touch, that is uncritical of where its origins lie, and what the ramifications of that are. Of a year of trying to figure out how to be Indian, I realise that too much of it has been about the west and this obsession with the western gaze — this obsession of measuring up or measuring against the west, is eating up India and Indian identity. We do not need to absolve this fictitious white man’s burden — we don’t need to continually prove that we don’t need saving. That is the colonizers problem — something they have to realize wasn’t ever needed, not just that it wasn’t their place to do any saving.

There is an idea that at the heart of a civilization lies something unchanging. I believe that there is something that unites a civilization — but it isn’t an unchanging spirit or core — I think it’s a memory. A memory that grows and weeps and laughs and lives, collecting the debris of life.

That memory molds us before we even begin to realise it exists— it teaches us how to be ashamed about our truths, it teaches us what is cool and it gives us templates on which to anchor our identities. In figuring out how to be Indian it gives us tales of victimhood and pride — and ways to react to both.

V.S Naipaul called India a “wounded civilization” — and I agree. In our memory is a wound — and we have tried to heal that wound — by demanding reparations, by calling for retribution, by redefining the game. And yet the wound persists, it throbs. It scabs over and then is scraped again — it is healed and then renewed. Over the multiplicity on India, of the array of ways we interact with each other and the wider world, it is expected that the wound will progress differently. But it is time we looked that history — and that pain and progress and humiliation and growth that it brought — without shrinking into positions of bravado or meekness.

For me, that is what being Indian is about. It is about finding my own roots — where they come from and searching for the assumptions hidden in them that teach me to hate what was simply different from the western canon. It is about being proud of India while not succumbing to the violence that can inspire that pride. It is about knowing that there is still space and time for me to grow into what I want kind of Indian I want to be.

It has been a year in being able to answer those who asked me who I was to talk about India. It has been a year in realising that there’s a difference between identifying someone’s background and using that as a slur. It has been a year in learning that integral to any identity is the ability to question what it means. And most of all, it has been a year in being able to say without a doubt that I have every right to talk about India — because I am Indian, and everything that that entails.