Of Silk Saris and Mini-Skirts: South Asian Girls Walk the Tightrope of Culture

Naomi Brun is a freelance writer and a book reviewer for The Hamilton
Spectator.

Like so many other South Asian Canadians, Dr. Amita Handa is frequently
asked about her origins. The question “Where are you from?” implies
that a person cannot be brown and Canadian at the same time. Identity,
for Handa, has been a dilemma throughout her life: her British birth and
Canadian residency prevent her from being totally Indian, and her
ethnicity keeps her from full acceptance in Canada. In other words,
Handa is caught between cultures.

While doing research for her book, Handa learned that many South Asian
Canadians share similar struggles. In a land where former Indian doctors
now drive taxis, where their homelands are associated with poverty and
war, and where a 1995 Calgary Herald poll “found more people in favour
of Canada being an English-speaking culture than a multicultural
society,” brownness is a liability rather than an asset. At the same
time, however, Bollywood movies are gaining international recognition,
South Asian music is played in dance clubs across Canada, and even
Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen are wearing saris to photo shoots. Too much
brownness is backward, but a little bit is cool. The author writes that
“it is okay to be ethnic, but not too ethnic.”

For South Asian-Canadian girls, balancing white and brown cultures is
even trickier. The dominant Canadian culture encourages assimilation,
but their family culture wants them to remain traditional. Quite often,
their sexuality becomes the battlefield for this cultural war. South
Asian Canadian parents tend to define their own culture as pure and
Canadian culture as promiscuous, so their daughters must lie to them in
order to have a social life.

Of Silk Saris and Mini-Skirts is an informative take on the plight of
South Asian Canadian girls. A must-read for any professional dealing
with multiethnic youth, this work sheds light on a variety of problems
they face. It is, however, too academic in tone for the average reader,
and a less-scholarly version would find broad appeal among ethnic youth
themselves.