Born in Canada and raised in the U.S., Srishti Prabha went all in on Indian culture. “I almost felt that I wasn’t American,” says the Kathak dancer and former Managing Editor of India Currents. As an adult, they say “I can also adopt parts of the American culture that I feel are very thoughtful and insightful, like being non-binary.”
We Belong is a visual series highlighting different experiences of South Asian and Indian identity. This series was produced by India Currents in collaboration with CatchLight as part of the CatchLight Local CA Visual Desk. Photographs and interviews by CatchLight Fellow Sree Sripathy.
Portraits were made in Sacramento, Calif. on Feb. 02, 2023 and the interview took place on May 24, 2023 via Zoom. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Where were you born and raised?
I was born in Canada, in Montreal, and I came to California when I was three. I grew up in the South Bay and San Jose. Both my parents grew up in India. My parents had an arranged marriage. An ad was [in the newspaper] for my dad. My mom’s dad [saw that] and sent her image and her biodata to my dad’s father, who then selected my mom for my dad.
My dad had been in the U.S. for a few years. He was living in California (and) came back (to India), met her (once). They got engaged that day, and the next time, they got married. My mom was living in India and (she) could not get a visa to the United States at that point. Because she was pregnant with me, they looked for an alternative solution? And that’s why I was born in Canada. We lived there for three years.
Where are your parents from?
They’re both Bihari. My Nani is from Bodh Gaya. That’s where the Bodhi tree is under which the Buddha would have found enlightenment. My dad’s family is also from Bodh Gaya but now the family (lives) in Delhi. So they’re more modern. They’re all city people.
Do you connect with Indian culture through your parents?
One hundred percent. My mom and my dad are both very artistic. I learned everything from them. They forced me to learn Hindi when I was young, so I can read, write and speak it fluently. They put me in Kathak, they put me in Indian classical singing, they gave me options and ways to pursue my culture, but they sought it too. My mom’s a singer and a dancer. My dad’s a poet. He’s also a playwright. There were a lot of ways where I was influenced by that.
They were part of this Bihari community, Bihari Samaj. I saw India Currents (the magazine) on my table growing up, and I wrote about that when I was working at India Currents. It was my friend, a reliable source of comfort. India Currents would (always) show up at my house.
There were so many ways for me to connect to my South Asian identity through others, elders in the community, or through the arts, through the language, or going back and forth to India. My whole family is in India still, so we would go every other year to India and that also kept me very connected to the culture. I’m a huge Bollywood fan. I love it.
When you go back to India, do you feel Indian? Do you feel American?
My brother and I both grew up in the same household. I was three years older. There’s two ways to go about being South Asian in this country, right? One is you fully embrace it. “F___ everybody else. I’m gonna be South Asian,” I said [to myself]. I love everything about it. I love the food. I didn’t even listen to American music until I was in high school. I listened to only Hindi music.
You can ask my parents. It was kind of concerning because I was so out of the American culture. But there were so many Indians and South Asians in the Bay Area, that I never felt that it was an issue. But my brother took a very different approach. He rejected the culture, didn’t like the food, didn’t speak the language. He learned tabla but gave it up (for) guitar. We went different ways with the culture even though we grew up in the same household with the same values.
I really do think it’s a personal thing, how you want to interact with the culture. I think because of that I almost felt I wasn’t American. When I went to college in Boston, I adopted more American cultural traditions. Going to India? I’m not from India so I would try to assimilate because my Hindi is pretty fluent and I sound like an Indian person. People (in India) didn’t know if I was from India or not. I could just fly under the radar. To this day, I can still do that.
But my cousins know that I’m not from there. So they’ll make fun of how I say certain things, my accent. I think I was so connected to my Indian culture that I almost did the opposite. I assimilated to being Indian, as opposed to assimilating to being [American]. I don’t know if that’s the right or wrong approach but ultimately, I feel very connected to my culture. But now as an adult, I can also adopt parts of the American culture that I feel are very thoughtful and insightful, like being non-binary, which is not a very easy thing to communicate in India.
How do you connect to your identity as a South Asian?
Kathak is the most obvious way that represents me and who I am. It’s a dance that has been handed down from generation to generation. You’re dancing pieces of work that were handed down from your ancestors. I’m embodying my people, despite living in another country – sometimes more so than the people living in that country (India).
My cousin and I are almost the same age. When she was living in Delhi, she was doing ballet, hip hop and modern jazz. And I was out here (the Bay Area) doing Kathak. I’m trying to cling to my South Asian heritage while they’re trying to modernize.
One of the biggest things you get from Indian classical dance, Kathak for me specifically, is that not only is it the dance of my ancestors, but there is this idea of dedication to the practice of the art form.
I will never say to you that I fully know Kathak. I am a consistent lifelong learner of Kathak. (Even though) I’ve been doing it since I was three and I’m 31 right now, I will tell you I know very little about Kathak. There’s always so much more to learn.
Can you talk more about your relationship with Kathak?
I’ve had a very turbulent relationship with dance. Dance has always been therapeutic. It is my way of keeping my mental health in check.
A lot of Kathak is stomping your feet, making a lot of noise, you know, vibrating to the sounds of the music. I lost my sense of purpose with dance during COVID. It was very hard to keep going, I had to ask my neighbors “Can I dance on my porch? It’ll be for an hour and a half and it will be all stomping. Is that okay?” We had an agreement with the first set [of people downstairs]. The second group of people who moved in didn’t know that I was doing this. I almost got evicted from my apartment because they were recording things and sending it to the property management. They never communicated to me that it was an issue because it was COVID.
I wrote a note to the people downstairs. I said “Can you please let me do that? It will take one hour a week. It will make noise. I’ll be on the porch. It’ll be from five to six. It’s very important to my mental health because I can’t get into a studio.” That was hard, because I was not connecting to the dance. I have loved Kathak for many years. I’ve had reasons to let it go at different points in time. But coming back to it, I wanted to keep persisting through the challenges because I know the benefit it brings to me.
We’re not in COVID anymore, but I moved to Sacramento and there is no real community out here. I didn’t know where to look for dance spaces initially. And I [thought to myself] if I can just try to keep dancing in my apartment. I live on the second floor, so I can’t fully dance. I can only do motions and sketch out ideas or recite something, but I can’t really dance. Then I found a studio space for $20 a week, but honestly, my salary cannot sustain it.
The way I think about dance really changes with where I am, and what space I’m in. And currently, I’m very, very frustrated. I don’t like dancing from home, especially for a dance that’s so physical, that’s so reliant on the noises from the feet. I’ve had ups and downs with mental health because of it, too. It’s not a perfect system. But, you know, consistently communicating with people who are passionate about the same thing is also super important. I think it has kept me connected in some ways, but I have lost some of the passion and drive I had for Kathak.
My posture got worse during COVID because I wasn’t able to interact with the dance in the right ways. That said, the internet kept us connected. It kept me going. If anything I learned a lot during COVID in terms of theoretical understanding of Kathak. A lot of people think of Kathak as just the actual dance but music theory is a huge portion of it. You’re thinking of your hands, your feet, the cycle of beats you’re on. You’re thinking about how quickly things are moving and they’re all moving at different rates. It takes time.
You’ve mentioned that you identify as gender neutral. How have you navigated that within the South Asian community?
A lot of this terminology did not exist when I was growing up. It’s hard for people to understand what it even means. It changes how they perceive me. They’ve all perceived me in one way for so long.
It’s been a few years since I’ve really come out and been very open about being nonbinary. I didn’t have the language before, but also Indian communities don’t understand it. And that’s true for classical dance. Even though I’ve tried to communicate this, the outfits that we wear do not feel representative of who I am. I know that some men are willing to wear female attire. But that’s the very classic remark I get – you’re doing both. There is this idea of doing male-female roles, like Ardhanareeshwara, the androgynous embodiment of all things. I connect with that so much.
That’s why I stick with Kathak because I can be anything. I can be a monkey, I can be a deer, I can be Krishna, I can be all these other characters. But the classic Krishna Radha roles do not feel right. Krishna is the mischievous one, right? Why can’t I be mischievous and be a woman?
I am consistently told, for example, “You’re going to [play this role], be masculine.” Why? Who knows if they were masculine or not? That said, I think also a lot of things are up to interpretation. So if I feel comfortable, I can kind of portray it in the ways that I want and that’s kind of where I find my comfort.
So right now with my teacher, I’m going over Govardhan Giri, which is the story of Krishna coming to this village that idolizes Indra. This is a fun piece for me because I could play with the idea of being arrogant or [saying] I have this other idea. My teacher gave that to me because she knew that this speaks more to my identity because I’ve been a little bit more vocal about not wanting to do Radha Krishna stories.
There is this element of being nonbinary in Kathak that speaks to me. But then there’s this element of assimilating and portraying in the way that other people want you to perceive things, which I have to fight back against. I don’t think I’ve fought it very well. I don’t have the same rebellious attitude I had in my early 20s. My job is demanding. It’s hard to muster up the courage to really speak your truth at times. But I do feel very strongly about this, that Kathak is a space where you can be who you want to be and I love that.
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This series was produced by India Currents in collaboration with CatchLight as part of the CatchLight Local CA Visual Desk. Contributors include Vandana Kumar, Meera Kymal, Mabel Jimenez, and Jenny Jacklin-Stratton. Learn more about CatchLight Local’s collaborative model for local visual journalism at https://www.catchlight.io/local
This series was made possible in part by funding provided by the State of California, administered by the California State Library in partnership with the California Department of Social Services and the California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs as part of the Stop the Hate program.