Cathy Pilgrim: It's wonderful to see so many of you here tonight. My name is Cathy Pilgrim and I'm the Assistant Director-General of the Collection Branch here at the library. As we commence this evening, I'd like to acknowledge and pay my respects to the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which we live, work, and we come together tonight. And I also recognise the many First Nations communities that are represented in the collections that we are privileged to steward here at the National Library.

It's my pleasure to welcome you all this evening for what I'm sure will be a fascinating panel discussion with these wonderfully powerful, intelligent women. And I know that some of their mums might be watching on the livestream, so I'd like to say hello to their mums as well.

Here at the Library, it's our mission to collect today what will be important tomorrow. Though a very simple statement, this can be a complex task. One of our most important guiding principles is that we collect material that reflects Australia's diverse social, cultural, creative, and intellectual history. At present, we are focusing on collecting material to help current and future researchers to understand our place in the Asia-Pacific region.

In July 2023, we commenced a two-year project to collect the stories of the Indian diaspora in Australia. Over the past 18 months, our curatorial team has been building relationships with communities to collect materials that give representational coverage of the Indian diaspora experience in Australia, both South Asian and Australian. Collecting across the various migration eras, religions, languages, as well as culture, gender, age, and occupation.

As we are now moving into the final six months of this focus project, we continue to record oral history interviews and photograph community events being held around Australia. We invite individuals and organisations to deposit their personal papers and newsletters, and we're collecting publications and archiving websites relating to the activities of Indian communities in Australia. Tonight we are looking forward to hearing some of the voices and stories of the Indian diaspora community and those who have contributed to the book, 'Growing Up Indian in Australia'.

In their discussion, the panel will explore the issues faced by Australian women with Indian heritage, inquiring into the roles and expectations of women in India and how these play out in the Australian context. So to introduce our panel tonight, Aarti Betigeri is a journalist, writer and editor from Melbourne, currently living here in Canberra. She's a former television and radio news presenter and producer with SBS and the ABC and a former foreign correspondent based in India. Currently, she works as a journalist and advisor focusing on international relations. And Aarti is the editor of 'Growing Up Indian in Australia'.

Sharon Verghis is the senior research and content manager and journalist whose work has appeared in The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Good Weekend, Time Magazine, the Guardian, SBS and many others. She recently completed a law degree and is of Malaysian Indian background.

Dr Rachael Jacobs lectures in creativity and arts education at Western Sydney University. She conducts research into racial justice, education and language development through the arts. As a community artist, Rachael has facilitated projects in community settings all over Australia, mostly working in migrant and refugee communities. Rachael also is a community activist, an aerial artist, South Asian choreographer, and also runs her own intercultural dance company. She's a fellow of the Centre for Western Sydney and a mentor to racial justice organisation, Democracy in Colour.

Zoya Patel, in the middle there, is an author and editor based in Canberra. Zoya has published two books, 'No Country Woman' and 'Once A Stranger'. Zoya is currently completing a master of fine arts with New York University. She writes regularly for The Guardian and The Age and co-hosts the Margin Notes podcast. Zoya was a judge of the 2020 Stella Prize, and in 2021 was the chair of the Stella Prize judging panel.

Facilitating the discussion this evening is Meera Ashar. Meera is an associate professor of history at the School of Culture, History & Language at the Australian National University. She's a historian of ideas and her work makes critical contributions to history and South Asian studies and to debates on the enduring effects of colonialism, the post-colonial state, democracy and nationalism. Meera has scripted an award-winning documentary film and is working on a book of short stories. She reads and writes in several South Asian languages and in a couple of European ones too.

So please do join me in welcoming our panel tonight. Welcome.

Meera Ashar: Thank you so much, Cathy. That was a very, very generous introduction and welcome to all my fellow panellists and good evening to all of you and welcome again this evening. My name is Meera Ashar, and though I am not part of this collection, I was honoured to be at its Canberra launch and I was delighted to read all the various contributions available in this book. And with each reading, I felt I agreed with the experiences, none of them my own because I was introduced to the vagaries of Australian life as an adult. But as a parent to an Australian Indian child, I could identify with a lot of what was being said, a lot of the experiences that were being shared in the book and indeed in the conversation that we are about to embark on this evening.

So let's jump right into it. One of the oft-quoted ways in which women or a woman is described or spoken of idiomatically in one of the traditional idioms, and you will often hear this in Bollywood films, is as Paraya Dhan. And I translate that literally as the wealth of another or the wealth of a stranger. So without really reading too much into this piti idiom, we can still get a sense of how tenuous and destabilising a sense of belonging is that is written into the very lives of Indian women in their own cultural milieu.

So now what happens to this experience when they live in a different cultural context, in a different nation, in a different world as it were? Is that sense of belonging further destabilised? Is there a new sense of belonging that is forged? Does the tradition play a burdening role of fulfilling a role of Indian womanhood? Or does it offer a roadmap, or an anchor as it were to find one's way into a new tradition?

So some of these are questions that we are going to talk about in different ways this evening. And so I'll start by asking these wonderful, powerful women who all have very, very different experiences of their own heritage that we conveniently call Indian, but remembering again that being Indian is also such a heterogeneous experience of what it means to them to be an Australian Indian woman. This confluence of identities of Australian Indian, in your case, and Malaysian, Fijian, what does it mean to bring all those identities to bear upon your experience? Should we start with you?

Rachael Jacobs: Oh, thank you so much for that beautiful introduction and beautiful framing. Hello everyone. I'd like to begin by adding my acknowledgement and that we're here on Ngunnawal and others land where sovereignty was never ceded. I live on Gadigal country and wherever we are, always was, always would be Aboriginal land. And that's where I want to start with talking about the Indian Australian experience is that wherever we are in this identity is framed by colonialism in one sense or another, either being part of the colonial project in our family histories in India or here being part of the colonial project and our relationship with First Nations people.

So I think that that absolutely defines the way that we walk the world and the way that we experience this world and the way that we contribute to our current or our new home or anything like that. And the intersectionality of gender being laid upon that and our relationship with our sisters and our mothers, our aunties and all the women who've come to help define our experience that both allows us to stand alongside them but also stand in defiance of a lot of traditions that have tried to define us. And I'm just really looking forward to hearing what my sisters have to say about that experience as well.

Meera Ashar: Thank you. Zoya, do you want to jump in?

Zoya Patel: Yeah. I think both of you have done such a great job of capturing the ways in which there's multitudes and there's so much variety and diversity and what it means to be Indian, let alone Indian Australian. But I think it's telling that my memoir, No Country Woman, was the subtitle that the publisher put on it, which I did not choose, was that it's a memoir of not belonging. And I was like, "Yeah," because it is an entire book about how hard it is to forge an identity growing up in Australia as an Indian, but then also for me with the added complication of being Fijian Indian.

Because as I write about in the book, I felt as though there were three places that I didn't belong. And it didn't occur to me until I was writing the book, and probably until after the book was published and people would talk to me about their experience of reading it, then the place of belonging was actually in my family, which I think is one of the core defining experiences of being an immigrant regardless of where you're from. The only people who really understand your specific experience are your own family because they're the only ones who've gone through that exact same thing.

And I think something I struggled with growing up was knowing and being friends with other Indian Australians and having that opportunity. I grew up here in Canberra, so we had a wonderful multicultural community and there were lots of other Indian girls at my school, but I didn't relate to their experiences because they were from different parts of India, different religious backgrounds. There's a lot of unfortunate prejudice within the Indian diaspora, particularly about people like my family who are from other colonial projects. 

If you're from Fiji and you're Indian, you have this constant interplay between what it is to be a real Indian and what that actually means. And so finding a sense of belonging has actually been a case of accepting the differences and seeking the similarities, which is why I think a collection like this is so incredible because you can actually just see so many points of resonance amongst a group of people who probably have felt a sense of not belonging for a really long time.

Aarti Betigeri: Thank you, Meera, for that wonderful introduction. And I too would like to pay my respects to the traditional custodians of this land that is doubly important given the context of today's discussion, Growing up as Indian in Australia. There are ancient links between Indigenous Australians and those in the subcontinent. In particular, the one that I want to talk about is the tradition of storytelling, oral storytelling. That is how Indigenous Australians pass down traditions, culture, norms, law. And also, there is a very rich tradition of storytelling in the Indian culture. So I just wanted to make that connection. 

To come to the question, how do we negotiate the identity and bring those together of being an Indian woman and being an Australian woman? For me, it's about being the custodian of a very rich, ancient complex culture and taking pride in that legacy, but at the same time, knowing that there is a responsibility to uphold that but reformulate it in a way that is accessible, essentially accessible and takes into account the current context. And when I think about how to do that, I look to historical figures. And there aren't that many because women are unfortunately written out of Indian history to a very large extent.

But of the ones I know about, I'm going to pick a few. One is Lakshmibai Rani. She was a major figure. She was the Rani of Jhansi, a place in northern India. I hope I've got her name correct. And she was a leading figure. She was a Joan of Arc during the 1857, what the British called the Uprising, but a lot of Indians increasingly call the First War of Independence. She led troops and I think she even had a little baby on her saddle, so she was a pretty important figure. Another one is Indira Naidoo. Of course, not Indira Naidoo. Indira Gandhi.

Sharon Verghis: She's great.

Aarti Betigeri: Indira Gandhi. Indira Naidoo is fantastic. Indira Gandhi, she was the ruler of India at a very, very tumultuous time in history, and she paid the ultimate price for that. There's a lot that can be said about her both positive and negative, but I'd really like to focus on the positive, which is that she was steely, she was very, very duty-bound, and she is someone that we can all look to when we're looking for role models. I also look to the tradition of Indian women environmentalists.

I'm thinking specifically about the Chipko movement In the 1970s. They were the original tree huggers. If you don't know, look them up, Chipko. They literally all joined hands and formed rings around trees so that loggers couldn't come in and chop them down.

And then still in the ecological environmental theme, Vandana Shiva. She's an enormous figure, very, very committed to food security and ecological causes. And she's someone that I look up to and I've had the pleasure of meeting a couple of times as well.

But I look at the women in history and in India, and I think they're people who I really wish we knew more about here in Australia because they have a lot to teach us. I'd also like to include my own grandmother in that list, Bakul [unclear]. She is not someone who's in the history books, but she devoted her life to uplifting Hindu women, in particular in Maharashtra. Thank you.

Sharon Verghis: So many interesting viewpoints and approaches. I'm almost intimidated to actually bring my experience to the fray. But I think I come from it probably in a slightly different way in the sense that I still, at my grand old age, am negotiating and interrogating identity. It's never felt fluid to me. It's never felt fixed. There are compass points, north, south, east and west where I think, "Here I am, I've arrived. This is my identity."
[unclear] Indian and Australia is all about negotiating that pathway and that journey, that uncertainty. Bringing it more from a personal point of view, I think there's multiple. There's displacement and difference for me in terms of filters. I was raised Catholic, so there's one displacement again from the majority Hindu religion, if you associate Indians with Hinduism by and large, so growing up Catholic.

My parents, my mum's family, who were South Indian Malayalis living in Tamil Nadu, but there were inter-caste issues. My grandmother, an Anglo-Indian, married a high-caste Brahmin, but he converted to Catholicism and there was all kinds of ruptures and disruptions. I hope I'm getting the story right, Mom, if you're listening. My mum's in Canada probably listening, going, "No, that's not what happened." But that's the family story.

My mother married my father. They met in medical school and he was born in India, but he left India. So there's a cultural displacement at the age of six to come to Malaysia. And my mother and father met, they married, they moved to Malaysia and they had the four of us, four girls. From there, we moved to Australia when I was a teenager. So when you think about the levels of difference, I can't say I have a mother India. It feels so displaced and so different to me. So I felt for many years coming to Australia, moving to one of the whitest suburbs in Australia, Cronulla. If you don't know this, the Cronulla... And as a journalist, I covered the aftermath of the Cronulla riots as well. So it was interesting. I grew up in a very, very white school, very, very white neighbourhood. So I felt very displaced in that sense. 

But for many, many years, my identity felt Malaysian, not Indian. My Indianness came from my mum making beautiful curries or watching her tie a sari, but I never really felt personally Indian. And for me writing this book, the biggest treasure I have taken away from it, it has brought me back to my Indian heritage. I don't feel like I'm an imposter anymore. I felt like I've met some amazing women. I've heard some really great stories, and it's made me realise that identity is fluid and it's okay to never ever reach a point where you feel you've reached home. It's okay to be a magpie. And I take my richness from my Malaysian heritage, from my Australian heritage and from my Indian heritage.

Meera Ashar: Absolutely. And that is, in some sense, both the beauty and the tenuousness of identity. But I want to take from where you stopped of talking of the Indian heritage that you look to your mother to. And in some sense, women are always seen as the upholders or the safeguards of heritage. And this is whether it be in India or it be especially in other post-colonial nations or in a diasporic context, the burden of continuing tradition falls upon women.
And you are all daughters of Indian mothers and some of you are mums yourself. So I was wondering, knowing that there are some interesting stereotypes of Indian mothers and tradition, if you want to reflect or jump in on talking about or confirming or disabusing that stereotype of Indian mums, and especially in relation to tradition.

Aarti Betigeri: I think we should caveat this. As we've said, a lot of our mothers are watching this, so everything that we say is filtered.

Sharon Verghis: With self-censorship.

Aarti Betigeri: There's going to be a lot of self-censorship.

Rachael Jacobs: Maybe we'll ask. Shirley, you can switch off now before we go on? Actually, I'm really interested to hear from some of the mums first as well. I'm not a mum myself.

Aarti Betigeri: Well, you've got the oldest kids.

Sharon Verghis: I have biracial twins. My lovely husband, Peter, is in the audience tonight. And my children have the whitest names possible. They are Jack and Matilda. They have got Indian middle names, Kiran and Simran. But they absolutely... Because then this is the whole thing about cultural displacement and it's a separate story and it's a separate loss that I'm trying to cultivate their Indian heritage and their pride in their own Indianness as well.

But in terms of Indian mothers, they call me a tiger mother. So that's more of that Asian Malaysian thing. But it's similar. Indian mums, tiger mums, same difference. And I texted my son today and I said, "Do you see me as an Indian mum?" And he goes, "Yeah, I see definitely good and bad."

And I think for me, I was raised by an Indian mum and was a tiger mum but she'll say she wasn't. But I had the rotan, the little stick Malaysian thing for learning my times tables when, she denies it. But she did, literally drilling a 12 times table into my brains. A real respect for authority, almost a deference and almost a fear of challenging authority because there was that very much a guru student thing, which I've actually had to struggle with in Australia.

Absolutely aspirational drive. I think a lot of Indian mothers have this and you want the best, all mothers have that. So I don't want to say it's an Indian thing, but maybe Indian mothers express it in a perhaps more flamboyant and perhaps a bit more of a special way. An obsession with food overfeeding your children. I get that from my mum. I do that to my children, like stuffing food down. So I think some of the stereotypes are very much there. Academics, yeah, jump in anyway. But the stereotypes are true and some not so true.

Meera Ashar: See, I didn't have that. Growing up in India with an Indian mum, I didn't have the tiger mum. I didn't have the mum-

Sharon Verghis: Really?

Meera Ashar: ... who cooked or fed. So yeah, I find this, I'm wondering if this is sort of more a diasporic experience.

Zoya Patel: I think it probably would be, and I say this as someone who didn't... I don't think either of my parents are kind of stereotypical. And I mean, look, my dad's in the audience, full disclosure, but he also co-wrote the piece that's in the anthology with me. And I think I have two things I'd like to say, but I also have one thing to say to what you were talking about with your children's names.

So I'm a relatively new mum. I have a little baby, and I didn't realise my partner's also white Australian. I didn't realise until I was pregnant how much it mattered to me that my child had a really clear connection to his Indian heritage in his name. That was something that I eventually had to concede because we just could not land on a name that we both agreed with.

There were points in the conversation where I was like, to my partner, "I think you're racist. Why do you hate these names so much?" It was our only real fight that we ever had where he was like, "I can't believe you're saying this to me." And he had to say things like, because I was pregnant as well, "I don't think it's unfair for me as a father to want to have a say in my child's name," and I'd be like, "Wow," this again pregnant. But I really struggled with that, because I want him to feel no sense of questioning that he is as Indian as he wants to be and as anyone else is. And that's just an inherent part of who he is.

I see in my niece and my nephew, who are older obviously, but have a similar experience that there's sometimes a hesitancy in claiming that Indian heritage because they don't look as Indian, they don't speak Hindi, they don't have those really close childhood experiences. It's something that I worry about quite a lot as a parent. I'm really grateful that, segueing to mothers, that my mother and my father spend a lot of time with my kid and my mom's babysitting him right now and she speaks to him in Hindi all the time-

Sharon Verghis: That's great.

Zoya Patel: ... and that's really important to me because I want him to have that access. But my mom was not a stereotypical Indian mom at all. In fact, you know that meme, that's like Indian children have four career options and it's like doctor, engineer, lawyer or disappointment to their parents. My parents actually never put that kind of pressure on us. We had to go to uni, that was a thing. But we were always told, mum always said, "I just want you to be good people." And that was really the thing. And they've celebrated everything that we've done. And somehow despite that non-traditional parenting, they ended up with a lawyer, a pharmacist, a commerce business guy in my brother, and then I guess me as a writer.

But I think it is a diaspora thing. And I've always felt that the reason why the experience that you have when you're growing up Indian in a different country and in a different culture is often more strict or feels more kind of restricted and protected than say, counterparts who are living in India, or in my case, even in Fiji, sometimes I'd look at my cousins and be like, that doesn't look as restricted as this. They're allowed to go after school with their friends to X, Y, Z, and why aren't we?

But I think that protectiveness comes from two aspects. And part of why I wrote the essay with my dad in this collection is because I've always been really preoccupied with trying to understand that disconnect that exists between our parents' generation and our generation if you have grown up in the country that they have migrated to.
I think it's a desire to, the exact desire that I was speaking about, of wanting to keep your culture for your children and make sure that they have that cultural connection. Because even though as a child I would get really angry when dad would force us to speak Hindi at the dinner table and I'd be like, "Well, I won't talk at all then." Now I'm like, I was just saying to him the other day, my grandmother was visiting, she's about to turn 95, she doesn't speak English. So I was trying so hard to speak in Hindi for her and it was all coming back to me and I was like, "Wow, it really matters to me now that I can speak Hindi." So I think there was a foresight in that kind of protectiveness. 

Then the other side I think is just fear. You'd sacrifice so much to come to a different country. There's a lot in that country and the cultural norms that are directly contradictory to things that you believe in and that you grow up with. So you're trying to protect your children while also making sure that they get the most out of where they are. And I think that's where the tiger mom comes from is this desire to reap all of the benefits and then shield your children from all of the potential dangers that you don't know yourself because you haven't lived in that country.

So yeah, I've always thought that the biggest cultural conflict for me is actually intergenerational and not so much between me and Australian culture. I don't know if anyone else resonates with that.

Aarti Betigeri: I find this concept of tiger mum, the label tiger mum, really interesting because in Asia they just call them mums. There's no concept of tiger mums there. I suppose I'm a bit of a tiger mum. I mean, I force my daughter to... I force her to learn French and I force her to do various after school activities.

Sharon Verghis: Did you use the rotan, though?

Aarti Betigeri: No, I haven't, but I'm going to try this.

Sharon Verghis: You've going to try it.

Aarti Betigeri: Actually, you've given me an idea. My mum, I suppose, was a bit of a stereotypical mum. She was very educated. She had worked as a teacher, but my dad had a very demanding job with long hours. So she stayed home and raised three daughters in an alien country with no family support. When I think about her, I think about sacrifice, I think about what she gave up to do that for us. She wasn't really doing it for herself. She was quite open with her frustration at her position. She wanted to go out and use her brain, but just didn't have the opportunity to do that.

I think a lot about a book I once read by Meera Syal, the British Indian comedian, and it's one of her lesser known books, but I really loved it when I was younger. And it raises this idea of this Sita complex. Sita, of course being the Indian goddess who walked on fire to prove her purity. And embedded in that is the idea of suffering for Indian women to prove yourself, to prove your purity, to prove your worth, you have to suffer. I'm not saying that my mum suffered necessarily, but certainly sacrifice was a big theme in our early life.

Rachael Jacobs: Yeah. That's something that I really feel, I wonder if my mom's life has sort of been defined by that suffering or that sacrifice that everything was for somebody else first. Was it for the children or for my dad and caring for him later in life and now for the grandchildren and things like that. I keep saying, "When's time for you?" And she's like, "Oh, the indulgence of that statement, Rachael, that you would take time for you is..." And she's like, "That must be a you generation thing," or something like that.

But I think that for my mum, it would've been very conflicting. I do see her as quite a traditional Indian woman bringing us up with many, many of the stereotypes. Yet at the same time, I could see the struggle that she had and my parents had, my parents were the first wave of migrants to come after the White Australia Policy was abandoned.
So we were the first wave of non-white children to go through primary school and things like that. It always felt like the first, and it would've been very conflicting for them to think, if I don't adapt to this new environment, I will lose them. And so there were small things that they did. My mum took me to the doctor to go on the pill. That would've been harrowing for her the way I was brought up. Our relationship with sex and things like that. But she would've said, "if I don't dip my toe into my children's world, they might go and I might never get them back".

I think whatever they had to contend with, our parents are all still here with us in some sense of another, either sitting there or we sort of now take them with us wherever we go. Maybe it's a desire to tell our stories to them or to make them feel proud of us or just to give them a window into our life to see what we're doing. From that, there was always some conflict. But coming out the other side, I think there is this closeness.

Sharon Verghis: One thing I have to say, and it's interesting when you're talking about the Sita complex and it's well known about the sacrifice in this trials' purity. My mum sacrificed a lot. There were four girls, she was a general practitioner, a doctor back in Malaysia. My father was a surgeon. And when they immigrated over here, my mum effectively lost her medical career because she had to resit her final exams. And with four daughters, two of them were doing the HSC. I remember those memories of her sitting up and studying and studying around the clock and trying to manage the house and trying to put down roots in a new country. That was suffering and that was sacrifice.

What I took from that though is she went on to write her own second chapter of Sita maybe. She went on to... she eventually didn't end up working as a GP, but she forged an amazing career. She got a Masters in Toxicology. She had a second life career in her forties and fifties, and she took that time for herself. She actually said, "You know what? No, I'm going to do it." So that was the most amazing thing and that's something I hope to role model for my own daughters instead of sacrifice constantly. She just went, "You know what? I'm going to be selfish. I'm going to..." Not selfish, sorry mum. But really just putting herself out there and studying.

When I decided to study law again in my forties, she was my role model. She was my anti-Sita in many ways. She was like I said, if she can damn do it, I can do it. And I hope to provide that role model for my daughters as well.

Aarti Betigeri: It's fantastic. You're also showing them that life continues-

Sharon Verghis: Life continues, yeah.

Aarti Betigeri: Life keeps going. It doesn't start and end with-

Sharon Verghis: I come from a long line of strong women, my grandmothers, my mothers from both sides. So I think it's important to do that.

Meera Ashar: I think for some reason that's seen as a departure from tradition.

Sharon Verghis: I know.

Meera Ashar: But I want to step back a little bit and think about, we've been talking about culture and heritage and tradition, and we all roughly think we know what that means. But when we start thinking about it can be so many different things. And I wanted to share a little story about a midwife working in the UK, a British midwife in the 1950s and 60s.

She wrote about how in the fifties and sixties, women, labouring mothers, who came to the hospital, were asked to lay on the bed in a position that was convenient for the doctor to come and birth the child. She found South Asian women just disappeared. Then they would be found somewhere in the corner squatting, getting ready for birth, and then she would tell them, "Oh no, come back. Get on the bed. The doctor will come."

As medical knowledge began to consider women's bodies a little bit, this became good practise. And she writes of how excited she was to go to India in the late nineties and learn and share as a senior midwife. And what she found when she went to India was here were all these women on the hospital bed being prepped for the doctor to help them birth the child. And she said, "But why are they not standing or kneeling or squatting?" And she was told, "Oh no, you Western women, you might think that is, but our women, they're very traditional. They would prefer a medically sterilised birth." 

So the idea of tradition not only changes, sometimes does a whole 180. So thanks to colonialism, thanks to rise of right-wing nationalism, what have you. And it's not just in these small practises of giving birth, but in larger things of are Indian women prudish about sex, can we talk about it? Is it something that's not talked about land of Kama Sutra and so on.

So what is tradition and how do you negotiate this idea of tradition in your own lives? How do you define it? How do you... See, do you find it a burden? Do you find it empowering?

Rachael Jacobs: That story I think is so illustrative. Thank you so much for sharing it. Because it speaks to me of the word tradition being code for owning women's bodies in some sense. Of having ownership over them or controlling women and things like that. So another example is if people in my family are ever embarrassed or things like that about me wearing revealing clothing or anything like that, what does that say of the centuries of women who went before me who wore a sari in many, many different ways, one of which was without the choli, what is it?

Aarti Betigeri: It was the British who introduced it.

Rachael Jacobs: That's exactly right. Before that being bare-chested and draping and things like that. So if you are having a go at me from my revealing clothing of which I have much of that, but what does it say about the traditions that brought us here? And similarly, when the diaspora becomes all coy around talking about trans issues, what does that say about the centuries of gender fluidity that were embedded into this culture. Not so much now my family has definitely abandoned it, but the obsession with whiteness and the, "Oh, Rachael it's summer, you've grown so dark." Okay, there's nothing wrong with darkness or having this dark skin or whatever. And what does it say about the literal billions of women who have stunning and have dark skin as sort of denying? So it is absolutely wrapped in colonialism, but again, it's about the ownership. It's the judgement of women's bodies.

Aarti Betigeri: But also patriarchy. Dark is about the patriarchy because the way that the colour of your skin was always communicated to was, "Oh, you're really dark. You're not going to find a good husband." And if you read Matrimonials, it's a joke, but it's true. They will often say, "Fair skin, wheatish complexion." And my sister's a few shades, darker skin tone than I. And the accepted wisdom in our family was, "Oh, you are going to find a better husband than these two," which is not true at all.

Oh my God, I just was... That's what I said. I mean there is absolutely no link. What I should have said was, there's no link between the quality of your marriage or the quality of your husband and the colour of your skin, exact tone of your skin. I should be very clear about that, Jason, if you're watching.

But the fact that these two things are related somehow is absolutely baffling to me because there is no relationship. You can have a fantastic life if it was not, and be dark skinned, if it was not for the people around you telling you that your life was worse intrinsically because you had this trick of birth, this trick of fate where your skin tone was a few shades darker than others. It makes me very, very angry.

Sharon Verghis: I could write a whole book about colour and colorism and in fact, I wrote a story, it was probably my most read story I've written for lots of masters around the world. But this was a small piece that I wrote for SBS online, and it was about the birth of my children. As they say, they're biracial and they were born in New York, and I just remember when they popped out, the nurses were going, "Oh my God, there's one white twin and one brown twin." Because my son was like my husband was blonde and grey eyed. And I was like, "Who is this person that I have just produced?" And my daughter was a mini me. She came out with thick, dark hair. And when you have twins of different shades and different colours, it is really interesting to see the way the world treats them.
I wrote a whole story about, what is race, what is colour? How do we define colour? Because both my son and my daughter are half Indian and half Australian, but the world treats them differently. And particularly when they were growing up, there were power issues, there were dynamic issues. It just made me think about the power of colour to define your identity. It's really interesting.
As they've grown older, they've converged, my daughter's gotten fairer, my son's gotten darker. So it's fascinating to see the point of difference. But yeah, it's and interesting one.

Zoya Patel:
I think it's really interesting how at the outset of this conversation, I thought we would all have such wildly different experiences that we would really just illustrate that the idea of Indian as a category is such a intangible one because there is such a variety, but some of these core experiences are very similar. 

I remember being in India as a teenager, and I had really bad skin when I was a teenager, and strangers told my mom that she should get me fair and lovely cream. And I remember being like, and I remember relatives saying to us, to me and my sisters lined up, one of my sisters has much fairer skin than me and my other sister. And they would literally say, "Well, she's obviously the prettiest of you three." And we used to, all three of us would get really angry because we had a lot of solidarity with each other amidst all the fighting and hair pulling and stuff. But in general, a lot of solidarity with each other. And we hated that kind of differentiation. But that was that and our weight were the things that people, Indian relatives would just comment on. And it was considered really normal.

And what's really fascinating is watching our generation trying to undo all of that. My sister has three daughters and she is on a mission that they should never feel like their bodies are up for discussion, that their appearance is up for discussion, that they're valued on the way that they look. It's really challenging because some of it is ingrained and you have to really, I don't know what.

Aarti Betigeri: De-programme.

Zoya Patel: Yeah, de-programme. Exactly. I was like de-colonised, but not but about patriarchy and culture. But yes, basically de-programme all of those thoughts. I feel like riffing off what you were saying, tradition is sometimes synonymous with conservatism or conservative ideologies.

Something that I find when I think about tradition in terms of my upbringing or my family is because we were raised in Australia and most of our relatives who did migrate out of Fiji were in New Zealand. So we didn't even have a particularly large Indian community around us. Sometimes there are things that I thought were traditions or Indian things that we did because of Indian that I later found out were just peculiarities of my family. So I remember saying to someone with complete confidence, I was like, I don't know where I got the, I literally was like, "Oh yeah, no, Indians don't really eat mushrooms." And I was like, "No, it's not a thing." And everyone was like, "No, it really is in different..." Because my mum just doesn't like mushrooms. So we never ate mushrooms growing up.

Meera Ashar: You know that might be an Indian thing because I have heard that from so many Indians, mushrooms is so-

Zoya Patel: So many little things like that that I was like, oh, but Indians do X, Y, Z. There are still, like sometimes my siblings and I will be talking about something or my partner who he's white and he'll do something and I'll be like, "That's such a white person thing." And then I'll be like, "Is the opposite an Indian thing or am I just equating?" Because so much of what you are told is that your race really defines you. And so I didn't have the freedom of thinking that my peers did of saying, "Oh no, I'm just different from you because that's a choice or a preference or my individual personality." I was always like, "It must be my Indianness. It must be because I'm Indian."

I was constantly trying to fit in. So anything that was different, I just put into this category of Indian. And so it been an interesting project as an adult peeling back those layers. Looking at my kid, I think about this all the time because he is really fair skinned. 

This other peculiar thing happens when you have a biracial child where people feel like it's okay to comment on their skin colour and talk to you about their skin colour and say. The number of people, including strangers who I don't know, who've been like, "He doesn't look like your son at all." And I've been like, "Well, I birthed him. That's an odd thing to say." "Oh, he has such a lovely complexion." And I'm like, "Just say what you want to say."

I think that's a really interesting thing that I'm curious about navigating. I may well be emailing you for advice at some point saying, how do I talk to my son about his skin colour? Because I do think it's going to be a really confusing experience for him as he grows up because it is.

And I think we fetishize mixed race people. I think there's just a lot of stuff to unpack there that I think is going to be a real challenge as a parent, I never had to kind of think about that until now.

Sharon Verghis: It's difficult too... Sorry.

Aarti Betigeri: Oh, no, you go.

Sharon Verghis: My daughter, when she was born, she had spiral curly hair, really beautiful head of curls. And she still has spiral curls, but she straightens it. And I call it the white girl hair straightener.

Zoya Patel: I have spiral curly hair.

Sharon Verghis: See? And see, that's the thing. And the more I'm saying, wear it natural, wear it out. And she says she just absolutely... It has to be dead straight. And to me it's a loss. It's a sense of her not embracing her sort of her Indian, or her ethnic side of things. But it's interesting, you're talking about how identity becomes all. Identity becomes a symbol for everything that you are. My daughter went for a job at McDonald's and she didn't get it and she was so cocky. She goes, "Everyone gets a job at McDonald's, that's easy-peasy." And she came back looking really depressed and she didn't get the job. And her then best friend said, "It's probably because you're half Indian." So it's her being also perceived as something not as a person who just didn't get the job at McDonald's because maybe she had crap interviewing skills.

It was done so blatantly and I've never gotten over that story, and my daughter was quite crushed and I said, "Don't ever internalise that. You didn't get the job at McDonald's because you have crap audition skills and you didn't laugh at the manager's jokes and you didn't role play properly, not because you're half Indian." So it's an interesting one to bring up.

Rachael Jacobs: I do wonder how much of that is put on us and all migrants and all people of colour or racial minorities is that if you do something, say something, [unclear], oh, it must be her culture. It must be her... It's like, no, Rachel's just having an off day, that's just. Or something like that, or "maybe that's part of their culture that they don't do that", it reduces people to a culture. It also presumes that white people don't have a culture which is kind of extractive in itself. So I often wonder if that thinking is put on.

Zoya Patel: I do think you can use that to your advantage though. Because I remember-

Rachael Jacobs: Tell me how.

Zoya Patel: This is one of my favourite stories. I used to work at a cinema and at a certain point we had this new manager come in and she was like, "No more facial piercings. All of you take your facial piercings out." And this is like 2009 or whatever, so everyone had a facial piercing. And one of the people that I worked with, her name was Natasha Singh, and she had a nose ring and I had a nose ring and this one guy had a nose ring and so she went in and said, "Well, this is actually part of my culture so I'm not going to take this off." And they were like, "Okay, well Natasha can keep her nose ring." And I was like, "Oh, me too." And I got my nose ring because I wanted to be punk or something, but I got it when I was 14 and my parents were stoked because by this point both of my sisters already had their noses pierced and it was considered a beautiful thing to have as an Indian girl. But I was like, yeah, culture. And then my friend, Miles who had the nose ring and he was a white guy, went in and said, "I can't believe you're telling me that I don't have culture." And so in the end, we all got to keep our nose rings.

I remember similarly another teenager coming to me when I was in school and I had my nose ring and asking me if I would give her permission to get her nose pierced, which is this really interesting cultural appropriation thing before we were talking about cultural appropriation because she was like, "I know that it's important to your culture and I would like a nose ring, is that okay?" And I remember being like, "I don't know." And I had to go look up what relevance a nose ring had to Indian culture because I didn't know. And I was like, "Ah, yes, actually it does, it is considered auspicious if you have it on the left side." I was like, "So if you want to do the right thing, you should get your right side pierced." And she did.

But I guess I say that to say sometimes we have to remember that culture is a human construct and the way that we... It's created and it's reinforced by human behaviour and activity and the power and the weight that we give it. And I think when we're constantly being defined externally by this idea of what is cultural to us because we exist in this cultural paradigm and I think Australian culture is often treated as though it has this absence of culture.

Whereas when I've lived overseas, I don't know if anyone else has experienced this, I'm constantly going on about Australian things and being like, well, in Australia we walk on the left side or in Australia we don't push in in lines. It's funny what becomes culture when you're in a different culture. And I think that's been a real eye-opener for me as someone who's felt really defined externally by people's ideas about my culture.

Meera Ashar: So whether it has culture or not, the one thing Australia is not is a republic and India is, well not a republic yet, and India is, and all of you daughters and granddaughters of those who would have been part of an experience of becoming a republic and not just becoming a republic overnight but through a long and very interesting anti-colonial struggle. I was wondering if you wanted to reflect on how you locate yourself as a political subject or a citizen of Australia as daughters, granddaughters of people who were part of a very long, complex, decolonial, and ecolonial struggle?

Aarti Betigeri: My family on both sides were, I can't remember the word for them, anyway there's an Indian word for them, but they were on both sides actively involved in the struggle to push the British out and that has persisted. They are now actively involved in trying to promulgate a new sense of what a decolonial Indian identity is. It's something that I've actually written about, I won't go into it now because I really don't want to go into politics. But yeah, I find that really interesting. But I think of myself purely as an Australian, I feel very invested in local politics here, as do you.

Zoya Patel: Yeah.

Aarti Betigeri: And yeah, it's really in the Australian context that I locate myself

Sharon Verghis: And same here. I think just going back to my original points about how identities fluid, and I started off as Malaysian, then I became Australian and then Indian. If I were to look at myself now I consider myself Australian, 100%. Well, okay, say 90% and that 10% is the fluidity. Sort of like you some days I feel a little bit more Malaysian, a bit more Indian, but I centre myself in Australian culture, I consider myself Australian, I'm a proud Australian. I still feel a little bit of an outsider looking in, but I think that gives me strength and gives me a way of looking at things. Politically, I do consider myself very much invested in Australian politics. I campaigned for the referendum, actually the original Republican referendum when I was a journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald, I came to Canberra for the voice referendum, each time failing, so I think that third time, lucky, hopefully, but very much invested in this country. It's justices, it's injustices, it's storytelling.

Aarti Betigeri: So I just want to add some more because I've recently wrote about this and it's very fresh in my mind, but there are six Australian parliamentarians right now of South Asian heritage. Four of them are women, that is absolutely astounding. That has just happened now, in the 47th parliament. Up till now, there was minimal, maybe like an Anglo-Indian here or there, but very, very little Indian representation and we're seeing more and more of it. We're seeing it in state parliaments as well. And we are seeing it in the candidates that are presenting themselves. Now, granted many of them are in. Most of them are in unwinnable seats. Many of them, particularly women are not that invested in politics, personally, but just the fact that they're willing to step up and get involved in the Australian system is absolutely remarkable.

Like my family growing up, I can't imagine my parents or any of their friends feeling like they had enough confidence or enough of a stake in this country to put themselves forward because they would've felt like they didn't really belong there. But now, I'm so happy to see a lot of Indians feeling that sense of ownership. And in fact, one of my interviewees was a young Indian woman, not even a citizen, she's always been very into politics. She said Indians are obsessed with politics, so it's not unreasonable that we'd want to come here and become part of the political system. And now she's actually seeking citizenship with the sole purpose of getting involved in politics. She's actually got the next four or five years mapped out, hats off to her. I'm really happy to see that.

Meera Ashar: Rachel, you've actually been involved actively in politics?

Rachael Jacobs: Yes.

Meera Ashar: So how do you find-

Rachael Jacobs: I have run for parliament a few times. At the last election I ran against some guy called Anthony Albanese. Okay, we came second.

Meera Ashar: Yeah. Close second.

Rachael Jacobs: Yeah, close. It wasn't that close.

Meera Ashar: Pretty close.

Rachael Jacobs:

But yeah, maybe next time. Yeah, politics I think has been really interesting to go to the starting point of your conversation, when we talk about the height of the independence movement, the stories is that life expectancy in India was 27 and the literacy rate was 18%. My parents were eight years old at the time. And so when I think about what they have lived through, what they have come through, and my dad in particular did tell stories of having this new country that they were building together and the kind of pride that he had in taking back what was theirs and working in government and working in systems and things like that. It was really incredible. My parents are very politically conservative and they are monarchists, in the Australian context. And this has always really puzzled me, I was like, you threw off the shackles of colonialism and yet here we are, and I'm having to explain to you why we should have a head of state that is from this country and for me, preferably a First Nations person.

So it's always been a real conundrum is that I come from a family with very conservative politics, yet I turned out to be very progressive. And I do think that while my family was conservative, the value that was instilled is that anything is possible is that if you fight, you can win as a collective is that there is light at the. You don't have to accept the world as is given to you, as was presented to them back in the 1930s, that you actually do have the power to undo that and to question and to build that better world.

Meera Ashar: Absolutely. Zoya, did you want to jump in?

Zoya Patel: Yeah, I have also always considered myself Australian or identified as Australian. And I think when I was younger I really carried a lot of. There was a real chip on my shoulder about that, I am Australian and I particularly in contradiction to my parents saying, "But you're also Fijian Indian." And I'd be like, "Nah, just Australian." I really tried to push that, and I think it took me a long time to understand where that difference came from, because I always thought it was that they didn't want us to be Australian. And I was like, well, why would you bring us here now? I recognise that that's not what it is at all, as a real understanding and a recognition of the fact that we're Australian and a real love for this country that my family has always had and really instilled.

Like I've probably seen more of this country than the average Canberran, we drove around to everywhere. The small towns that I have been to, the salt of the earth Aussies that I have spoken to. That my dad has spoken to really, and then probably relayed the stories back to me. But I think what I've realised is that if I were to move now at this age, which is not dissimilar to a bit older than how old my parents were when they moved here, I would still consider myself Australian, wherever I went. And where you spend your and how the culture that you grow up in is actually really foundational to who you are as a person. But now I'm recognising I guess as I get older, how important my Fijian Indian heritage, which is how I see it, is to me and who I am and understanding I guess your place in the world.

I think the politics thing is a really interesting thing. I wrote for the Guardian recently because the ACT election had the highest number of South Asian candidates ever this year. Yeah, I went through and I counted every. It took a long time but not that long because-

Aarti Betigeri: I did the same thing.

Zoya Patel: ... the Legislative Assembly hasn't actually been around for that long, turns out. But highest number and three times as many from when the first election that I could vote in. And all of them, pretty much were running in. I mean I couldn't vote for them anyway because they weren't in my seat, but the majority of them were running for parties that I don't agree with. That I don't politically align with. And I thought that was really interesting because I was like, I'm so excited to see this massive surge of representation in the candidates, I'm not going to vote for any of you, and I wouldn't if I could, but that's because actually we need to dismantle this idea that if you look a certain way, you're automatically represented by the other people who look that way.

We are all different. We are unique individuals and the point of having diversity and representation in leadership isn't about having one person who can talk about the brown people issues and one person who can talk about the women and having the person with disability to talk about disability issues. It's about having a rich diversity of ideas and experiences to funnel into every discussion that everyone should be invested in. And I was really surprised because I got emails from people being like, thank you so much. And I was like, is this a. And these were Indians who were reaching out to me. Do we feel like we have to be like I support. Just to be like, I want people to not be racist, so therefore I will support other Indians in high profile positions, even if personally speaking, I don't agree with what you're saying right now on X, Y, or Z topic.

I think there's still a lot of work to be done there around saying you don't just accept us on the basis of like, oh, I like curry and Bollywood and so we're accepted now, Mindy Kaling, she's great. It has to go beyond that to actually saying, "We appreciate and accept all multiculturalism on the basis that everybody makes Australia a better place."

Aarti Betigeri: Can I push you on that though?

Zoya Patel: Mm-hmm.

Aarti Betigeri: Suella Braverman.

Zoya Patel: I don't know who that is.

Aarti Betigeri: Priti Patel.

Zoya Patel: Yeah, exactly, terrible.

Aarti Betigeri: Suella Braverman is basically Priti Patel but worse.

Zoya Patel: Oh, okay.

Aarti Betigeri: Rishi Sunak.

Zoya Patel: But I obviously don't want conservatives in power, but I'm glad that conservatives of all colour exist.

Rachael Jacobs: But it's so interesting because people, you used to say, "Oh Rachel, you must be really pleased about Rishi Sunak." I was like, I can't think of anyone on this planet I have less in common with than that guy, a billionaire. Yeah, I've got more in common with the guy that cleans his office than him. And so while representation is not always liberation, and so I applaud every South Asian candidate because I know the barrage, the wall of racism that comes your way and to stand up under those circumstances for what you believe in, in this democracy it might be better than, it might be different to what I believe in, and that's fine. I applaud that, but it doesn't, I think you're absolutely right, it doesn't represent-

Meera Ashar: But it's important to see those brown faces there, even if they are not ones-

Rachael Jacobs: I would prefer not to see Rishi.

Meera Ashar: Oh, we all would. But it's important for them to be there to keep that idea of a multiculturalism alive. Just in terms of sheer representation, and I know we are all dying to sort of talk more about this, but I'm looking at the time and it's time for questions. Never get South Asians started on politics and I did that, so my apologies there, but we'll take questions now. Please wait for the roving microphone to come to you before you ask your question, but feel free to raise your hand, and we have about half an hour. Oh, there's the first question there.

Audience member 1: My first question is-

Meera Ashar: If you don't mind waiting for the microphone so people online can hear you as well, and so can our panellists, thank you.

Audience member 1: My first question is, who are you going to barrack for in the test match series coming?

Sharon Verghis: India.

Audience member 1: India?

Sharon Verghis: India.

Aarti Betigeri: India.

Meera Ashar: When my little boy who is sitting behind-

Audience member 1: When that happens, you're not a true Australian.

Meera Ashar: Is this a Tebbit test for.

Aarti Betigeri: I spent my formative years as a journalist fielding that exact question from my newsroom, so I can honestly say I've got a flag in each hand.

Rachael Jacobs: Could I channel-

Aarti Betigeri: But that's the very diplomatic answer.

Rachael Jacobs: Can I channel my father and say I go for whoever wins? No, I know, I'm actually always barracking for Australia, I really like the current team.

Sharon Verghis: I'll barrack for the All Blacks over the. Sorry. Yeah, I was just saying I barrack for the All Blacks over the Wallabies and I barrack for the Indian cricket team over the Australian cricket team. My husband's sitting here and he's threatened divorce over it. But when it comes to sport, I'm.

Zoya Patel: I don't watch cricket, so I'm not. 

Meera Ashar: That disqualifies you from being Indian heritage.

Zoya Patel: I shouldn't be, yeah.

Aarti Betigeri: Did anyone see the front page of the Herald Sun today?

Sharon Verghis: I try not to.

Aarti Betigeri: It was like doing the rounds on what my WhatsApp groups and LinkedIn, it was like half in Hindi, half in English, and with a bit of Punjabi thrown in as well. That was their kind of grand announcement of the kickoff of Australian cricket season, it was extraordinary, I've never seen anything like it in my life.

Meera Ashar: And there are Virat Kohli T-shirts available at Rebel Sports, it's quite-

Sharon Verghis: Really?

Meera Ashar: ... remarkable.

Sharon Verghis: Wow.

Meera Ashar: But when my little boy who was sitting there, when he was born, the midwife who came to check on us, she looked at this little boy, little tadpole and said, "Oh, he's Australian. He's going to cheer for the Australian team." And I think he's taken a similar view to you-

Rachael Jacobs: Whoever wins.

Meera Ashar: ... cheer for whoever wins.

Audience member 2: Hi, thank you. This has been a really fascinating discussion. My question's for Aarti. Do you feel that you cultivate within your daughter a sense of Indian culture? And if so, how does she respond to that or express that?

Aarti Betigeri: Everybody please meet one of my best friends, Sonia. So I have a daughter, she's very beautiful, she's biracial as with my co-panellists. And it has been a real journey to inculcate a sense of Indianness in her. Complicating that was the fact that she was born in India because I lived in India for about nine years and she was born there and lived the first year and a half of her life in India, and of course she can't remember any of it. She's very Australian, she does gymnastics, she does netball, she watches Bluey and every kind of cultural touchstone for her is very Australian, to the point where she actively rejects anything Indian. And I've tried really hard, took her to Bollywood dancing classes, hated it, ran out screaming, took it to [unclear], she actually really liked it, but she's kind of rejected it. So we've put it on hold for now, won't watch Bollywood films. I've put on Bride and Prejudice the other night and she was like, "Turn it off. I cannot bear this."

We'll go to India in a few months, so hopefully there'll be something there that gives you something that she. But I've done a few of these panels and we always talk about how do you kind of come to a place where you are comfortable in accepting your Indianness in a way that you can tolerate. And that's coming from a person who spent her entire childhood, me, rejecting my Indianness. And I really had to find that out for myself. For me it was in books, literature, the arts architecture. I hope my daughter will have that same internal personal realisation and find something that she loves about it.

Zoya Patel: Can I offer you some hope? When I was 11 and we were going to India for the first time, I so didn't want to go because it was this massive long trip, which by the way, I now realise how privileged I was that we were going on this eleven-week journey to Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and India, amazing trip. At the time though, I threatened to run away because I was like, I want to be in Australia, I want to do Australian things, I don't want to wear. I was really angry about having to wear [unclear] while we were with family and things like that. And that trip changed my entire life, I fell in love with India. I thought it was the most amazing place I've ever been and I still feel that way, I would love to go back. And it did completely change the way that I thought about things. So maybe this trip will be the thing.

Rachael Jacobs: Yeah.

Aarti Betigeri: Hope so.

Zoya Patel: Fingers crossed.

Rachael Jacobs: Wow.

Audience member 3: Hi, my name's Diane. I just wanted to say thank you so much for sharing your stories and they really do resonate and I think for me it's just so great to have someone articulate what I can't articulate myself. So just wanted to say thank you.

I hate to add on with another question about biracial kids, but it's in my head. I am biracial and I just had a question about what role, I guess mothers and fathers have to play in educating their kids about their privilege? Because just reflecting on the fact that I'm half white and half brown, I'm not half black or half brown. I'm fairer than my mother, and she has had a different experience with racism to me. What should I do about that privilege and how I operate in society?

Sharon Verghis: Could I answer that because it's something quite close to my heart? Our twins were born in New York and we lived near Central Park. And while my husband was at work, I had this Mountain Buggy pram. Right? With my son and my daughter, and I would be pushing the pram around and around Central Park because that was the only way that they'd actually fall asleep, and I was mistaken for their nanny. Right? And so it happens so many times. Was like, "So who do you work for?" And I'm like, "Work for myself and these are my children."

So in terms of the privilege, it's a really interesting question. Thank you for asking it. I tell them stories like that. I said, "You know what? They don't think I'm your mom. They think I'm your nanny." It makes them think about the way the world perceives them. And again, like I said, my son's fairer and my daughter used to be. As I said, they've converged. Telling them that, talking about those stories, there's this whole thing about white passing. I'm sure you've all heard that phrase, but if you pass enough to be white, you have that privilege. Right?

So for a long time, my son passed as he looks Greek and he's very fair skinned. He's very, very Southern European looking, and there is a privilege in that, but he doesn't know it. And I think it's on us as mothers, not to make him conscious of feel guilty or ashamed about it, but to actually interrogate that story, actually talk about it and say, "Okay, look, your skin's lighter than your sister's or you are fairer than me. The world has a way of actually treating people differently depending on their skin colours," and actually just talking about it rather than sweeping it under the mat, to make them not feel grateful, but make them go, "Right. This is something that the world does, that I have the tools and the weapons to be able to acknowledge it and to be able to tell a story about it," not sweeping it under the mat because I think we are so conscious about talking about colour.

It's something that no one likes to talk about, but I think it's our role as mothers to say, "Look, this is the world. It's not a bonus to be fairer, but it is what it is. And some people will treat you better if you're fairer." And just giving them the self-knowledge and the insight to deal with that is I think our role as mothers.

Zoya Patel: I think there's another way to think about that as well. I think everything you said is really true, but something that I've always thought about as someone who is full Indian is that I have privilege in comparison to my parents anyway. Right? They have accents. They're mild accents. They speak fluent English. They grew up in a country where English is a national language in Fiji, but people still treat them as if they're fresh off the boat or not from here. And sometimes I really feel it when I'm out in public with my parents and people talk to them in a way that makes me really angry because I don't get treated like that and my siblings don't get treated like that because we speak like this. And so there's already that set of privilege that exists anyway.

My mum wears a hijab. The way she cops it is unlike anyone else in our family. That woman suffers the most racism the most often, and it is egregious and in public and often loud and quite scary. And so I've always had privilege from them, but the flip side of that, I think when I think about my biracial son is that when you do have the privilege of having fairer skin, you also suffer the disadvantage of not being seen as really whatever your ethnicity is. And I've seen friends grapple with this. I've had mixed race friends who talk about this quite often where they don't feel like they can claim their heritage because they haven't suffered the outward racism, but they do suffer it from within the Indian community. That is something that you have to deal with. You're considered half.

And I think for every privilege, there's an equally difficult reckoning that you have to go through in trying to pull the seams of those two cultures together. So I would say to you specifically, please be kind to yourself. And the fact that you are talking about this at all shows that you are very well aware of all of the different intersections of power and privilege that are going on there. But certainly, when I think about my son, I want him to feel as though he has complete access to his cultural identity in whatever form that wants to take. And I'm never going to be telling him, "You have to be Indian in this way." But I am going to say to him, "How lucky are you that we get to go and spend time with your grandparents and your family and you get to hear everyone speak in Hindi," and the traditions that he has access to aren't going to be things that I can't push him to engage.

But what I can say is, "Hey, we're going over for Eid this weekend. Let's go to the mosque." It's a beautiful thing to be able to hear those prayers and there's nothing like it. And every year my family makes, h, I don't know what samai is actually called. Vermicelli? Vermicelli? Just like some vermicelli.

Sharon Verghis: Payasam.

Zoya Patel: I don't know. Anyway, the noodles that we make, the traditional dish, samai out of. And my parents still do that manually so that the grandchildren can have the experience that we had. It's things like that, I think that connect you to your culture. And then I think exactly what Sharon said, having the conversations and saying, "These are the challenges that your parents have faced and that your grandparents have faced and that you may well face as well," because it turns out racism is really insidious. I'm sure you've still experienced it. I'm certain that my son will experience it. No amount of white passing can fully eradicate that experience, and I think being empathetic to the fact that my son's going to have a completely different experience to me is something that I'm trying really hard to work through in my head because neither me nor his father know what his specific cultural identity is going to feel like in the world.

And he is got two really different families on either side. So the kind of code switching that you have to learn to do between those environments is also I think a challenge that he'll be navigating and that I'll be navigating alongside with him. It's so much easier when they're really little.

Meera Ashar: Oh, yes.

Zoya Patel: You can't speak or understand. So far, it's been pretty easy.

Sharon Verghis: Can I just quickly add? Sorry, I don't want to labour this point, but it's something that's so close to my heart. I think for me, if I were to do things again, I would have insisted as a child that I learned my native language, which is Malayalam, which is a dialect in South India. It's a very difficult language, which is very much like Tamil, but for some reason or other, I don't know what it is. I think this is this aspirational thing like, "We are going to not teach you your language." I don't think it was a conscious thing. I don't know what the story behind it, but I remember my father talking to his mother in Malayalam and it was the most beautiful melodic language, but my father never taught us a word and insisted that we only ever spoke English. I spoke English from the time I was born, and the loss of language has resonated with me and echoed through me.

I grieve the fact that I've lost my tie to language. I learnt Malay, which is the native language of Malaysia. I could speak it quite well. I'm losing that too. So all I'm left with is English, and that feels like a colonialism. It actually grieves me and it grieves me that I can't pass on my ancestral language, which I never had anyway, to my daughter or to my son. And because as I said, I'm not Hindu, I'm a Catholic. So I've got all the Catholic baggage. I don't know what Indian is to pass on. So when they were born, I gave them Indian middle names and they've rejected those names. They cringe when they see their Indian middle names on passports and go, "Mom, why did you call me Simran?" Sort of thing.

So there is a level of sadness there. I try when I can. I talked to them about the time I interviewed Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize winner. I tried to introduce them to artists. I flew to India to interview Shah Rukh Khan and they went, "Who?" And I said, "Imagine Tom Cruise. I interviewed Shah Rukh Khan, and we drove in his limo and we had paparazzi following." Anytime I have some kind of Indian popular culture story, I try to tell them this and I'm hoping that I'm planting seeds. I said, "Go and learn your language. Don't ever lose your language. Embrace your culture. Go to India." And like Aarti, and I've told you this before, never lose hope that they'll find their way home.

Meera Ashar: That's a question there. That's a question there, please.

Audience member 4: Hello. Thank you so much for that amazing talk. Very, very interesting to hear from all of you. And I really appreciated all the different perspectives that you brought. I have a very, very short anecdote. I promise I'm not going to do the thing where I'm like, "I don't have a question. It's really more of a comment," but bear with me. Please indulge me.

When the National Library sent out the call to the Indian diaspora for stories, for ephemera, for interviews and that sort of thing, I sent it to a very, very close friend of mine who is Indian. She's been living in Australia, Australian citizen since she was six. And I said, "Oh, maybe share this with your networks. It looks like an amazing opportunity for the Library to get some really important stories about this very big part of Australia." She was like, "Yep, no worries, great." And she thought, "Yeah, I'll send it to some people." And then the next day, she came back to me and she said, "You know what? A lot of people don't think the Library deserves their stories."

Because this was just in the wake of the very racist problems around COVID, border closures, people not being able to come back from India, all that sort of thing. And the feeling was very much like, "Why do we share our special stories, our special histories with this big institution that is like a symbol of this Australia that doesn't want us or that has treated us so poorly?" Do you recognise those feelings and how do you navigate those feelings? How do you reconcile those feelings with the way that you interact with institutions like the Library, the university, ABC, SBS? Just curious to hear your thoughts on that.

Sharon Verghis: Oh, I've got lot's to say.

Meera Ashar: Rachel, do you want to go for it?

Rachael Jacobs: Thank you so much. That's so important because I absolutely do identify with everybody who said, "I won't," because while the Library's intention, no doubt would've been one of respect and things like that, if you are from a place that have had so much stolen from you, and then you live through what we all live through, it's easy to look like, "White Australia just extracts. It just takes and it just takes and takes. And how much more can I give?"
 

So an example of that is in my dance practise, I run a Bollywood dance school, Sydney Bollywood for all your Bollywood needs. That was the advert. Sorry, you probably don't allow advertising at the Library. So I now will not perform without being able to talk to contextualise my art form because of the taking, because of the taking on Harmony Day, of, "That's so lovely, your beautiful culture," because of the, "Can you bring some food? Will your mother cook for me?" Because of the continual, "We will appreciate that part of your culture, but still relegate you to the margins and still place a ceiling over you and still mock the accent and still make." It must be one of the most parodied cultures on earth. And that's not to discredit anybody else who goes through that as well, but I absolutely respect that. You want to guard your story, which is why, it's probably a good place to introduce the book, which is why when it's somebody like Aarti who's editing this and you know that your stories will be treated well, you know that they'll be faithfully represented, you have trust in that as an institution.

Aarti Betigeri: Thank you.

Sharon Verghis: Just to say this and I 100% believe that we need to own our stories. And this book, again, a huge plug, amazing book. Please go buy it. Ownership in curation of your own stories is so important and so much of Indian culture, however you define culture, Indian culture has been appropriated, the whole Bollywood, Simpsons, Apu, the whole thing is just cheapened Indian culture and everyone can put on a silly accent like Peter Sellers. To me, we need to reclaim and we need to value, and we need to show the wealth and the breadth of Indian culture in all its forms. Saying that, I'm a little bit controversial here. I was a journalist at The Australian, Weekend Australian for seven years, and when I first started at the paper, it's always been conservative. I started my career at the Sydney Morning Herald, so that was obviously quite centre left. I eventually moved to The Australian, centre right. I don't recognise the paper in its current state because I think it has actually moved quite in a way that I don't actually recognise. I work for the arts and culture section. As I tell everyone, we were the sheltered workshop part of the paper, and I still think it's the best mainstream arts and culture coverage in Australia. So I'm very, very proud. I don't apologise for having been a journalist for The Australian. The reason I say this as well is it's easy to talk to the converted. Right? If you stay in your silos and you only talk to the people who understand you, it's a hall of mirrors. I've always believed it takes courage and it takes bravery to actually go and share your stories among people who may not necessarily be the normal audiences for it, who may not understand. In fact, I actually think there's an imperative for us as Indian women to go out and talk to the unconverted, to stand there and talk to people who may not necessarily understand you. That's what storytelling's about. What's the point of telling stories to the people who already listen? We want to find the people who don't listen and try and share your stories and try to find points of difference.
This is why, I think to your point about sharing stories, I understand the sensitivity and the feeling of wanting to keep your stories close, but I salute the National Library of Australia for opening its doors and creating a repository of our stories. And I salute anyone, any institution, I don't care which side of politics, if they want to hear from Indian women, they want to hear from Indians, they want to hear about our stories, they've got them.

Aarti Betigeri: I really loved that comment because it does speak directly to the complexity of human emotions and the defensiveness with which we want to guard our stories. And I can totally relate. I felt like that in my past as well, but I want to talk about a piece of my work that I think I hope shifted things. And I'm not saying this to big myself up, but I just think it's about the power of words and the power of stories and storytelling. So a few years ago, I was commissioned to write. I write a lot about the Indian diaspora across, I'm a freelance journalist. So across all media. I write regularly for the Law Institute, The Interpreter. I just wrote something for the Saturday Paper and I was commissioned by Australian Foreign Affairs to write a long piece about the Indian diaspora in Australia. And it was at the start of the media and Australian society recognising that, "Oh, there are a lot of Indians around, aren't there? Oh, let's look at migration patterns."

It was right at the start. So I didn't really put much of myself in there. I went out and I interviewed other people and I interviewed a new migrant to Australia. And as I spoke to him, just a lot of things crystallised for me about the way that the migration system is set up. And I made the point that it's very extractive. So first, Indians will, coming to Australia, they sell their lands, they take out huge loans just to pay their passage and to pay the first, for the education, whatever it is, whatever the method is that they've used to come to Australia. Then when they're here, they work in low-income jobs at the same time as studying really hard. So again, they're feeding into the Australian economy. Then they go and they do these unpaid internships. Again, working for free. Then they finally, if they're lucky and they reach the promise land, they get to join the workforce in their chosen profession. Again, feeding into the Australian economy, but it's this enormous slog. It's full of uncertainty. It's extremely expensive.

So I made the point about how extractive it was by Australia, and I wrote the line. I said, "Australia has manipulated the programme so that at every point, it's benefiting financially." And then I wrote, "The House always wins," and that line just struck a chord with everyone who read it. And I didn't expect this, but I ended up doing a lot of media around that essay and everyone wanted to talk about that line. And Virginia Trioli, at one point, she said, "That's really provocative, isn't it?" And I was really taken aback, and it was live radio. So I did not know what to say, but I was like, "I didn't think it was provocative. I just thought it was the truth." And a few people made that same point. That was a very emotional point of the reading journey for them.

And I hope, I don't know, but I hope that people with policymaking power read that and that the emotiveness, the emotive quotient of that line maybe fed into how they frame policy and will frame policy in the future. So I just think that the way that we frame our stories can have an enormous impact in whatever the outcome is that we want. So maybe it's as much as we want to safeguard our stories and hold them back, maybe there's more power in actually sharing them, even if the modality of it doesn't quite agree with us.

Meera Ashar: I agree with the points that Rachel, you and Sharon and Aarti made about it being extractive, there being a lot of emotion. And I think stories that allow, or spaces that allow that emotion, that anger, that raw anger to find place are spaces that are welcome to have those stories. But very often, what happens is there is an obligation to have the good migrant stories, to send in recipes of what you make for Diwali or customs that you celebrate, and that's fine. That's one part of it, but of course, along with it are also stories of anger, of the experience of casual racism, of prejudice. And if there is space for those, then they're welcome to have them and they'll get the whole package.

Cathy Pilgrim: Thank you so very much. We have unfortunately run out of time tonight. It's been such an engaging conversation, and we'd like to thank you for sharing, for your generosity, for your wisdom, for your experience. So thank you so much. We are all richer for the experience that we've had tonight sharing with you. Thank you.

However, if you would like to continue the conversation, please do join us upstairs in the foyer. We have refreshments. We have copies of 'Growing up Indian in Australia' for sale in the bookshop, and I'm sure our panel would be happy to sign copies of those books for you as well.

If you enjoyed tonight's discussion, you might wish to come back on the 28th of November to hear from Helen Ennis and Alex Sloan, who will be discussing Helen's biography of the great Australian photographer, Max Dupain. But please do just join me one more time in thanking Aarti, Sharon, Zoya, Meera and Rachael for their amazing, incredible, and really fascinating discussion tonight. Thank you so much.