If there is one thing that irritates Tom Alter more than anything else, it is asking him why he chose to become an Indian. “I did not choose,” he patiently explained. “India chose me. It is my birthright. America was never mine, it was given to me.”
The gora actor who for years has spoken accented Hindi as the gora sahib on silver screen, because the roles demanded it, is now more comfortable with the niche he has carved out in cinema and theatre, where the whiteness of his skin does not slot him anymore.
It is not easy getting in touch with Alter, who does not believe in mobile phones and checks his email intermittently. But when he came to know the topic of the interview, he fixed an appointment with alacrity. We met on a later autumn night at Shri Ram Centre in Delhi, where he was the sutradhar (narrator) in a play on K.L. Saigal. Alter had just had a surgery on his arm, and was in tremendous pain. But the stage lights were the painkiller he needed. Dressed in an intricately embroidered chikan kurta, Alter transported the audience to a morning in early twentieth century Moradabad, as he described the colour of jalebis and the fragrance of nihari. The crystalline quality of his diction made Urdu sound even richer than it is.
The Alters come from a family of American missionaries who settled in India. “We went through the same pains of partition as my grandparents decided to stay back in Pakistan,” he said. The Alters, however, kept their American passports, except Tom, who famously went to the consulate, then in Breach Candy, in Mumbai and handed it over. “They were all surprised, I wasn’t. You see, I was born in India after 1950. The Constitution says all those born in India after January 26, 1950 are automatically Indians. So I was Indian, it was only a technicality that I had an American passport because my parents were American.” Why didn’t his siblings and cousins, who also reside here, do the same? “They were born before 1950, it wasn’t their birthright, it was mine,” he said.
Doesn’t an American passport give better perks, one could not help asking, but he insisted, “It wasn’t mine.”
Alter has never felt he is gone native or is a gora babu. His best memory is going for the first show of his first film, Charas, with yaar dost at Yamuna Talkies in Haryana. “My dream had come true, I was an actor.”
India’s variety and richness is a source of continuous fascination for him. “Ye mulk kamaal ka hai, yahan har tarah ke log abaad hain [This is a great country, all kinds of people live here].” He, however, has a lot to say of his countrymen. “We are too worried about who is prime minister. But instead of blaming Nehru and abusing Modi and Manmohan, we should ask what we are doing for this country. We still throw fruit peels from a moving car and blame the sarkar. Gandhi was right, we need freedom from ourselves, not from the British.”
My dream for India: “I have two dreams, both of which unfortunately will not come true. I want India and Pakistan to become one again. And while that happens, I want us to stop hating each other.”
