Becoming Par/Desi(i) in U.S. Higher Education: Caste as Borderlands in Education

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Being/Becoming a Par/Desi (i): Making Sense of Higher Education as Borderlands

Proposal

In this paper, the presenters, who are from Nepal and India and are currently enrolled in a PhD program at a U.S. higher education institution, engage with their lived experiences as shaped by their transnational movements across national, institutional, and caste borderlands. Using Bhattacharya’s Par/Desi(i) framework (2019), they approach the ambiguity and fluidity of their identities through the shifts from being members of the Hindu majority in their home countries to becoming a minority in the U.S. They employ this framework to also critically engage with how caste is produced and reproduced to shape the “Hindu” identity in higher education systems in their home countries of Nepal and India.
The presenter from Nepal, who was born into a Brahmin family in Kathmandu, received education in prestigious institutions that shape and are shaped by caste hierarchies. The promise and limitations of education became further evident to the author as he started working with public schools in serving minoritized students. The author experienced how caste, despite being a powerful identity marker and social structure that was embedded in the economic, social, and cultural structures, was made and remade in relation to factors like socioeconomic and gender status, rural and urban residence, and access to education. Moving to the U.S. as an international student at a higher education institution, the author underwent a significant transition, being assigned new identities such as international student and person of color. While recognizing these challenges, this paper critically engages with the forms of cultural capital tied to being a high-caste Hindu in Nepal, which became both accessible and inaccessible for the presenter and his family in the U.S. context.
Similarly, the presenter from India examines how politics around caste shaped his identity, experiences, and access to and within the higher education system in India. Through mobilizing his lived experiences, he critically engages with the category of caste as shaping access to and participation in higher education and yet deeply intertwined with class, religion, region, and language, among others. As an undergraduate student at an elite higher education institution in India, he felt at home in the male Hindu-dominant culture but like a fish out of water navigating his caste, class, language, and sub-national identities, experiencing heightened consciousness about these aspects of his identity. While affirmative action policies help disadvantaged students access to higher education institutions, the dynamics within these elite spaces often marginalize students in overt and subtle ways, including being questioned on their merit (Dutt, 2019). Transitioning to U.S., this author discovered his caste, religion, and language identities being subsumed under broader categories like “international student,” “student of color” and “South Asian” at a US higher education institution. While empowering at times, as this liberated him from markers he was used to wearing as second skins, these identities persisted at other times, especially in South Asian circles within U.S. higher education institutions. He also faced challenges of adapting to dominant cultural norms in racialized and politically volatile times in the post-9/11 U.S.

Authors

• Bhushan Dahal, Florida State University

• Amogh Basavaraj, Florida State University