Of Janissaries and Patriotism

In my wanderings through the world of expat bloggers from India, I came across some really unusual ones. These were blogs by State Department officials of Indian descent, i.e. children of immigrant Indian parents who now work as Foreign Service Officers. The State Department had posted them to India, either because of a request or because it was useful to have "ethnic"-looking people on the ground, whatever.

I don't want to link to these blogs because I disagree with many of the assumptions of the writers (and you know what I've said about being a critic who hides behind anonymity). But their entries did get me thinking about bigger questions about loyalty and patriotism. At first, these blogs made me wonder about the sentiments of these second-generation Indian Americans. Do they feel like the Janissaries of the old Ottoman Empire did? You know, the non-Turkish men who were taken as boys to Istanbul, the Imperial capital, reared in the ways of the Imperial elite, then sent off to rule in the name of the Sultan. Sometimes the Janissaries were sent back to the European provinces of their origin. Here, they often proved to be even more fanatically loyal to the idea of the Turkish Sultanate than the average Turk, often more cruel towards and contemptuous of their ethnic people than were the Turks.

Of course, the analogy is not totally accurate between the seventeenth-century devsirme (basically, Ottoman-sanctioned kidnapping) and the Indian-American foreign service experience of the present. After all, nobody forced the parents of these young people to emigrate to the United States (just as nobody held a gun to my head either all those years back when I went to get my student visa). But the sentiment of wanting to belong to their new culture must have been just as intense for these State Department officials as it was for the Janissaries of past centuries who were non-Turks growing up among hostile Turks, their only protector the Sultan himself. In the '70s and '80s, when these Indian-Americans were kids growing up in the 'burbs, when other kids were teasing them for their unfamiliar, unpronounceable names, the status of outsider must have been really hard to bear, (which explains why so many reject their parents' food, friends and families, and why some even change religion). Perhaps this then is the ultimate act of assimilation, serving your host country through government service.

But wait a minute! Before I condemn these people as subordinate imperialists ( or more accurately - "running dogs of imperialism" - ah, that phrase brings back memories of JNU), I remember I had a similar conversation eight years ago in Kolkatta. Participants were a senior family member, a friend from Europe who then lived in London, and two of us, younger family members. At some point during the evening, the conversation turned to living abroad and then to loyalty and citizenship. The younger family member, a non-resident Indian and the European friend were arguing that it was impossible for either one of them to renounce affection and loyalty to their native countries. The older family member, an old-fashioned army wife, was equally adamant that the day one changed one's citizenship, one's loyalties too must change.

"But you can't just switch loyalty on and off like that," the three of us younger people said.

"You can't be the citizen of a country and be working for the interests of another," said the retired army wife. "If you change your citizenship," she told us NRI family members, "you should be loyal to the United States and work for its interests only."

"Even if it goes to war with India?" we expostulated.

"You can't hold the passport of one country and have your loyalty to another country," the army wife repeated. To her, that was that.

"Impossible!" said U., the European friend. "I would hate it if Britain bombed my country. I would never be able to feel that Britain was in the right."

"Well, when you change your citizenship, your loyalties have to change," said the older family member, the army wife. "That's what citizenship means."

And, in a sense, she is right. Loyalty is not only a function of subjects wanting to blend into their ruler's system in order to gain acceptance. There is also a loyalty that comes with the acceptance of citizenship, loyalty that may or may not be expressed through national service either in the military or in the foreign service.

I may have some of the clearheaded virtues that come with an army upbringing. But, alas, I lack that simple commitment to patriotism, to the logic of citizenship and service that comes naturally to army officers and their wives, or to foreign service officers.