Gori Girl

This is Part Three of a continuing series on my Indian wedding adventure. If you’re new to Gori Girl, try checking out Part One and Part Two.

Lunchtime! Tomorrow the real wedding pictures start, but today was super hectic, so you’ll be getting the pictures from the lunch before the big night, and the story of bridal preparation and nerves.

After our pre-lunch siesta, everyone returned to the community center where the wedding ceremony would be held for lunch. All I can say is yum – the caterers were very, very good!

In this guest post, NeoKalypso of Doings & Undoings writes about her understanding of “Indian-ness.”

“You are too prejudiced. You do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear, and that which is outside your daily life is not of account to you. Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are? That some people see things that others cannot? … There are always mysteries in life.” – Abraham Van Helsing, metaphysician and scientist from Bram Stoker’s Dracula

I knew my Indian boyfriend was pretty down with his culture, but after meeting his brother-in-law I just looked at R amusedly and said, “Wow. He’s sooo Indian.” R knew exactly what I meant, smiled and said, “Oh, he totally is. You should see him in India. He’s absolutely in his element.”

Later I will unpack this exchange for Gori Girl readers. But first, some background. I’m a white American woman and my R is from a very traditional, South Indian (Telugu) family. Of the Indian families I have had the pleasure of knowing, I feel at liberty to say R’s is the “most hardcore” (i.e. traditional) I’ve known. For example, out of his 200 family members, only one ventured outside of Telugu culture to marry…a Gujarati. R’s little niece and nephew speak Telugu. His mom, pop, sister, brother-in-law, and their kids have often lived in the same house, sharing family responsibilities (which is very common for more traditional families). It has worked well for them.

In my internet browsing I’ve found a couple of sites that might be of interest to yah’ll.

First, of there’s a pretty active forum at Indiebride.com (which is a good resource in-and-of-itself), called Intermarriage, where people pretty much just discuss intercultural relationships. Different races, different religions, different nationalities – it looks like it pretty much all is represented there. The archives are massive too.

Then there’s a livejournal community, called Masala Couples, which focuses on intercultural relationships where one partner is South Indian. Again, the community looks pretty active, and there’s a lot of history to browse. And everyone is super-duper friendly.

Enjoy!

There’s been some talk in the comments about the word gori, which, given the blog name, is probably a term you’ll hear thrown around here from time to time. So I thought I’d explain what it means, some of the connotations it can carry, and why I chose it for the name of this blog – as well as my pen name.

What does gori mean?

The following was derived from Aditya’s lengthy comments on the etymology of the word gori – be thankful that I’m sparing you all of the tangential diatribes that developed during our conversation.

Gori is a Hindi adjective that literally means “fair” or “light-complexioned”. The i at the end of the word is a feminine conjugation, so gori is often used as a noun, with the subject being understood without explicit reference. In this slightly looser interpretation of the word, gori can mean “pale female”, “fair woman”, or even “white girl”. The masculine version of gori is gora, which can be translated as white man. Since I’m awfully pale-skinned, at least in the winter, gori can be rightly used as an adjective to describe me, or as a noun in reference me.

Part one of this Indian wedding story can be found here.

The wedding ceremony took place in the evening, so Aditya and I were pretty free to do what we’d like the morning of the big day. His family had been planning the event all along – all we did was show up – so if there had there been any last minute catering disasters, for instance they were primed to take care of them. I was still a little jetlagged when I rolled out of bed, but figuring out how to operate the bucket-based showering system woke me up.

When I emerged dripping from the bathroom, Maa politely inquired whether I’d like to wear a sari, a salvar kameez, or whatever clothes I’d brought with me from the US. Now, as I’d never been to India before (and my inlaws refuse to purchase the high priced imported Indian clothes in the US), this was going to be my first time wearing Indian clothes. I decided to go all out, and start with a sari.

Many people subscribe to the idea that your personal life is nobody’s business but your own – as long as you aren’t maiming others, anyways. While I generally agree with the sentiment this idea expresses, I also think it’s important to realize that, like it or not, your actions affect a wide swath of people. In fact, at the margin, your actions affect the entire world.

Let’s all pause for a moment to ponder that grandiose thought while breaking out into The Circle of Life.

Everyone back? Good. I brought up this topic because being in an intercultural relationships has a tendency to disrupt the “social equilibrium,” if you will, of the people around you. In almost every country and region an intercultural relationship is the exception, not the norm. So while being in any relationship might affect those close to you – my dad still hasn’t gotten over the fact that I’m no longer his little girl – intercultural relationships are both a regular ol’ relationship and something of a challenge to the status quo. As if romantic relationships weren’t tough enough on their own!

In this post I’m focusing on how intercultural relationships, in particular, affect those around us. I’ll start out by laying out a (non-comprehensive) list of the type of people who can be affected by your intercultural marriage or relationship, continue with how these effects ripple out through the social web of life, and then finish up with how much you should really care about it all. This post developed as I thought about how parents can react to their children’s intercultural relationships – I’ll be applying the principles and theory I develop here to that post, which will be the next “serious” one.

I’ve mentioned previously that Aditya and I recently had our Hindu wedding ceremony in India, and I’ve been meaning to write a post or two (or a hundred) about my experiences in India. And then a reader mentioned that she liked the pictures of the wedding that are sprinkled around the GoriGirl site, and would be interested in seeing more of them. So I thought I’d combine these two ideas and post a couple of pictures each day, working through the story chronologically. We’ll start off with our arrival in Calcutta (also known as Kolkata – but I’ll go with my inlaw’s usage), where the wedding took place.

Few things fill me with as much dread as meeting my partner’s parents.

First off, I’m socially awkward by nature – at least when meeting new people. I never know how to make small talk, or when good eye contact crosses the line into weird staring, or if my posture and facial expressions are saying “possibly mentally deranged” rather than “cool and confident “.

Then there’s the fact that I’m meeting the parents. While I’m not exactly a “people pleaser”, I do think it’s important to have a good rapport with the parents of your significant other, at least if he or she is close to them (and Aditya is). If the relationship continues then they’re going to be a part of your life forever, and well, family matters, you know? And first impressions matter too.

Finally, with Aditya’s parents I had the whole “different culture” thing to worry about too. All of the social rules and interpersonal cues – which I only have a passing knowledge of, anyways – go swishing out the window when you’re faced with a new culture. Not only could I completely mess up, I could completely mess up and not even know what I did wrong.

Despite this, my initial meetings with Aditya’s parents – first Maa, then Baba – ended up going quite well. While this may be more due to their innate awesomeness than any actions of mine, I hope my story can help out some of you who are struggling with the same sort of worries I had had. Next post I’ll be focusing on some of the more “theoretical” aspects of meeting the parents, which will greatly extend some of the points I bring up here, so be sure to tune in for that too.

So, we still lack internet at the new place, which means the lovely post sitting in Word on my laptop won’t be available to you guys until I can get to campus tomorrow morning. You’d think I’d remember things like this *before* I left for home, but you’d be so wrong. I blame lingering moving amnesia. (This mini post is coming to you via Aditya’s iPhone.) In an attempt to ward off any wrath (or disappointment), I offer up the following two articles on intercultural marriages with Indian partners:

The United Colors of Desi: More and More South Asians Are Marrying Outside Their Race
An article profiling several white-Desi couples. Also includes some gorgeous pictures of happy couples.

Nothing can prepare you
An article written by a male Canadian about his relationship with an Indian woman.

For the sixth year running, Aditya and I have moved our junk to a new home. Yes, you read that right: we’ve moved (together or both individually) every year for the past six years. It’s not that I like moving; it’s just a combination of being a student, having an urge to see the world, and a peculiar, magical moving amnesia that makes me forget every year how traumatic moving really is. I’ll spare you the gory details, but beyond the typical panicked late night packing, this move has included our utilities being shut off at the new house, at least three separate lockouts, sleeping on hardwood floors, and a hail storm.

In an attempt to stay sane (and nourished) through this process, Aditya, an Indian friend, and I went to the mall near the new place this weekend for food and a bit of light goofing off between hauling boxes. And guess what? We’ve accidentally moved to the Desi suburbs. About every fourth group we saw wandering the mall was sub-Continental, and I’d guess that at least a third of the mall population was Asian. It’s like we’re back in California!

Tomorrow I’ll get a post up about the first few times I met Aditya’s parents, and I’ll be blogging regularly now that the worst of the moving trauma is over.

I can handle Hinglish – the Indian version of Spanglish – without a problem. I’ve got all that slang down. I’m comfortable with about any accent you can throw at me – a neeful thing indeed when your main social interactions are with a bunch of international grad students and professors who are more comfortable with equations than English. And you’d be surprised at how well I can parse together body language, tone, and the occasional English word in order to understand the conversation as a whole. Unfortunately, these skills, impressive though they might be, don’t cut it when what you really need to do is buckle down and learn a foreign language. This is something I suck at.

Yesterday I discussed all the great reasons you ought to be studying the native language of your partner. Today I’m focusing on why I haven’t yet achieved fluency in Aditya’s native language, Bengali, despite all those great reasons – and what I’m doing about it.

A reader in the comments asked for me to discuss how I’ve dealt with language issues in my intercultural marriage. From my side of things there haven’t been many issues, since Aditya speaks English very well. This has allowed me to be really lax (read: lazy) about learning his native language, Bengali, which I absolutely think I ought to do. While developing the post on our language issues, such as they are, I started to think about all the great reasons I should get off my butt and start studying Bengali. The personal post will be up tomorrow, but for now here are ten reasons in no particular order, along with a bit of explanation.

In case you didn’t catch it, there was a news article today in the New York Times on interracial people, entitled Who Are We? New Dialogue on Mixed Race. Since many intercultural marriages end up producing little beings which grow up to have some of the issues discussed in the article, I thought it might be of interest to you guys here. The article starts off with the obligatory mention of how Barack Obama has churned up discussion on the issue of mixed races, and then transitions into discussing how interracial issues in America have changed in recent years. It’s a good, comprehensive piece, and I particularly like the bits that cover how parents feel about their mixed-heritage children. If the topic interests you, try checking out some of the links on the Intercultural Relationship Resources page here on Gori Girl for something a bit meatier.

A reader, Veronica, sent in the following question a couple of days ago:

My boyfriend is from Gondia and I wanted to learn to cook some food from that area of India. What kind of Indian food do you cook for your husband?

Heh, well, I guess it’s confession time here on Gori Girl: I can’t remember the last time I cooked real Indian food. Maggi? Sure. Ginger tea? It’s been known to happen. TastyBite or other yummy precooked packaged Indian meals? We’ve got a pantry full of ‘em. And we’ve got a kabob takeout place on speed dial.

But I don’t ever cook a full meal of real Indian food. I mean, I have in the past, but it’s not a regular thing at all. There’s a simple enough explanation for this – I’ve just never learned how to cook Indian food. When I grew up in California I had a lot of Chinese and Taiwanese friends and neighbors, so I can make a fair number of Chinese dishes. I’ve managed to pick up a few things from my Mexican, Japanese, and Korean relatives (yup, it’s a rainbow of colors at family reunions). But until I met Aditya I wasn’t close friends with anyone who could cook Indian food. Of course, given his limited repertoire in the kitchen, I still didn’t know anyone who could cook (much) Indian food after I met him either.

Nowadays, I mostly limit myself to adding Indian spices to change the taste of some of the dishes I already cook. Turmeric powder gets tossed into the stirfry, or garam masala is added to the sausage stew after it’s done. Actually, it’s a bit of a hazard for our friends who dine at our house without knowing this habit of mine – they’ll bite into the chicken pot pie, only to discover there’s a bunch of chicken curry masala in the sauce.

While this response might be a superficial answer to Veronica’s question (no Indian food is cooked for poor Aditya), it isn’t a particularly helpful answer for people looking to make some familiar food for their partners. This question actually comes at a particularly good time, as I’ve been thinking about trying my hand at real Indian cooking. So – how can you learn to cook Indian (or other, new-to-you) food? Let’s go through the difference resources available:

Read through to see a video with excited schoolchildren…

Possibly the best thing about being in an intercultural relationship, at least for the curious mind, is the in-depth, nitty-gritty exposure you get to a different group’s culture. Be prepared for the flood of new customs, food, clothes, vocabulary, entertainment and so forth that’ll be coming your way. The only thing I can compare it to is living in a foreign country with a roommate or family from that country – of course, then you’re still in an intercultural relationship, just not a romantic one.

While a number of problems can arise from having two or more cultures operating in the same house, today’s focus is on the unadulterated good things that come from sharing a culture. The things that will remain perfect in my mind forever. Even if Aditya were to run off the squirrel that hangs out near the bedroom window (they were eying each other this morning) and break my heart, or declare a hatred for IKEA (and break my heart), I will appreciate our time together because of these three things:

Every so often you’ll be seeing an in-depth review from Gori Girl about an intercultural relationship resource that might be useful to you. Shorter reviews can be found on the comprehensive list of resources on the page “Intercultural Relationship Resources.”

Boy, I love me some good, high fiber intercultural friendship! Aditya informs me it’s particularly tasty with warmed whole milk. His insistence that cold cereal is best eaten with whole milk that is not in its natural state of refrigerated coldness (oh, the horrors***) is one of many indicators that we might just be in an intercultural relationship. (I suppose his Indian passport, brown skin, and Hindu faith also belong on the list of indicators, although, frankly, I notice the milk-warming thing just as often.)

Seriously, though – where is the line between just doing things a little differently, and being from two different cultures?

Here on Gori Girl, we’re pretty open about the definition of an intercultural relationship (henceforth ICR). Since culture is a broad, nebulous thing, finding someone of a different culture to be in a relationship with isn’t that hard to do. “Relationship”, by the way, is also a broad, nebulous concept, but we’re not going to get into that. If you think you’re in a relationship, be it hetro, homo, platonic, “it’s complicated” on facebook, or whatever else, then you are, as far as I’m concerned. One concept at a time, and today’s focus is on the intercultural part of ICR.

Someone gave me a pair of swastikas as a wedding gift.

They were quite beautiful: delicate, pure gold swastika earrings, with subtle etchings along the front and edges. I wish I had taken a picture of them – and of my husband’s face when he opened the gift. I still don’t know who the giver was, but I suspect it was an older Auntie with superb taste and very few NRI relatives.

During their travels in India, my uncle and mom really enjoyed eating with their hands, as you can see from the photo above. This is the traditional way of eating in India… but not all Indians are perfectly traditional. If you look closely at my husband, Aditya, pictured on the right, you’ll notice he has a fork on his plate, since he doesn’t care to eat rice with his hands. I, too, have a fork – you can just see it spearing some delicious chicken in the far right of the photo. I’m using a fork because when I try to eat rice with my hands, I end up with some on my lap, down my blouse, and somehow in my hair – it’s just not pretty.

The photo of my family chowing down demonstrates the two main things you need to know about eating Indian food: it’s traditionally done with your hands (mostly the right hand actually – more on that in a bit) AND it’s okay to not be traditional. If you’re uncomfortable eating with your hands, then don’t. No one will look down on you, or think less of you if you ask for silverware.

However, for those of you interested adventuring outside of Western-style table manners, I have a few hard-learned tips and tricks to help you chow down politely.