Photo from Kavitha Rajagopalan’s family album My father arrived in the US in 1971, to the same western North Carolina mountains where, in the 1960s, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had been born in student-led sit-ins to desegregate Greensboro lunch counters. The same year, the Supreme Court upheld a decision to desegregate North Carolina schools with busing, in spite of great local resistance. He arrived in a country, a state, that was still segregated, still straining against the change that had to come. Tamil Nadu, the homeland he left behind, was also going through upheaval in 1971. Reborn just three years earlier as the Land of the Tamils, casting off the name thrust upon it by its colonial rulers, Tamil Nadu was in the throes of an unfolding liberation movement as Dravidian nationalists fought against longstanding oppressive caste hierarchies. A Brahmin man with brown skin and tight curls leaving a…

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