Marlon Meyer
Northwest Asia Weekly
sital calantri
Sital Kalantry was a little girl when her parents sent her back to India to live with her grandmother. That summer, her grandmother told her she was going to “marry her to a rich man” so she wouldn’t have to worry about anything but her family.
Calantree cried all the way back to New York, terrified of seeing an alternate universe that might have been her life if her parents hadn’t immigrated to America.
“My fate changed by moving to another country,” she said.
As she grew up and later in law school, she eventually found her calling, dedicating her life to ensuring that women and others who were disadvantaged in society had similar ways of escaping their destiny .
She has worked as a corporate attorney (7 years), taught at Cornell Law School (15 years), and now at Seattle University (SU) Law School, and her work covers distressing topics such as acid attack survivors. In an interview with women in prisons in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as Argentina, she was almost lightheartedly optimistic.
She uses her roots in Asian and American culture to fight for justice in both places and encourages others to do the same.
“I feel that as a bicultural person, I think I bring a unique approach to my academic work that allows me to work on comparative law through a different lens and to bring those insights into public advocacy work in the U.S. state ,”she says.
The backdrop for this quest is the journey between India and America that characterized her childhood and continued into adulthood.
“Almost every summer I was growing up, I was an anthropologist, a participant, living and learning a social norm that was very different from the world I lived in in New York,” she said.
When asked to speculate on a “counterfactual” – what her life would have been like if her parents hadn’t immigrated – she thought for a moment and then described a scenario similar to what her grandmother envisioned for her.
Although girls from some socioeconomic classes have had more opportunities than before in the past few decades, by the time she was growing up in India, she might never have gone to higher education, lived in a dormitory, or was able to marry The person she chooses.
But worst of all, she may not recognize the injustice around her.
In her 2020 commencement address to students at a prominent law school in India, she repeatedly advised them to learn to recognize the differences around them by engaging with those less fortunate.
She was blamed on a trip back to Maharashtra when she handed the plate directly to the waitress who was doing the dishes, as she did at her home in the US
Her grandmother rebuked her for not putting it on the floor so that her hand never touched the plate while the servant’s hand was on it.
In the speech, Calantrie spoke repeatedly about using the privilege of being born into wealth and caring parents — like those who send women to India’s expensive law schools — to fight and fight for justice.
teleport to another universe
Her first exposure to injustice was indirect, when her father left her mother—who was pregnant with her, in India—to look for work in the United States. Later, her mother left her in the care of her grandparents until she was 4 years old.
Arriving in the states — in Queens — she said it was “like being adopted” because she had never met her father and had no memory of her mother. Her mother left her when she was 4 months old.
Her first English word, which her parents taught her when she got home from preschool when she was pushed off a slide because she could only speak Hindi, was “he hit me, she hit me”.
Years later, when teaching contract law to her students at Seattle University, she described learning the vocabulary and analytical skills of law as akin to learning a new language.
“You’re thrown into a country where you don’t speak the language, and you know what you’re going to do in two months. It’s okay to be confused, but it’s a boot camp and you just change,” she would tell them .
She was admitted to the prestigious Bronx Science High School, where she won a scholarship.
When she asked her father about his early years, he recounted his hardships in India — not a typical immigrant story — to please her.
“The story he told me was wearing a shirt every day until it was torn and mended, working by candlelight, living in the house,” she said. Her father also received a scholarship.
She continued to return to India in the summer. On one, Air India left her passport at JFK when she was 8 when she was traveling alone.
So she arrived at the Indian Immigration Service without proof of identity. Immigration officials plan to detain her — essentially jail — until her uncle can post a bond for her 24 hours later to ensure she doesn’t disappear. Her uncle also used his connections as a reporter to get her free.
It’s yet another glimpse into the alternate universe she’s escaped – she’ll spend her later years trying to save others from putting up with it.
“Being teleported like a woman, and seeing the gender roles that my cousins and family play, and seeing how different life is, like Star Trek, you’re instantly teleported into a completely different environment. You’re being teleported Going back, that’s what made me want to work on closing the gap in gender equality,” she said.
When she was an undergraduate at Cornell, she began to embrace feminist theory and join women’s groups, and for the first time was able to truly express her opposition to Indian and American gender roles
She went on to the London School of Economics and finally to the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
With a loan to pay, and probably still in the shadow of her parents’ mentality of wanting her to prove herself financially, she entered corporate law.
She is involved in international development projects such as dam financing. But eventually, she realized she wasn’t happy with the commercial project.
She entered academia when she was a junior at Yale Law School when her former professor invited her to co-teach a legal clinic with him—she was able to work with students to represent people from marginalized communities.
As she continues to teach at Cornell, she leads students to India to study and advocate for horrific acid attack victims, to Argentina to study women in prisons, and to other parts of the world to study the plight of indigenous peoples.
invisible racism
She became a fighter for justice and individual rights. In her many papers, media interviews, book chapters, columns, and other publications, she has written about the “Consequences of Using Contextual Information” to support political and legal agendas.
Essentially, this means that actors want to advance their own particular ideology, taking (mis)information about societies and women in other countries and applying it to the United States to justify legal decisions.
In a paper published in the Cornell Law Review, she shows how U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and others took information out of context from China and India to justify opposition to abortion rights.
Proponents of this view equate eugenics with abortion. Women who choose abortion in the U.S. are eliminating certain segments of the population here, such as women or children with Down syndrome, so the practice amounts to eugenics, they say.
Kalantry argues that eugenics is about coercive behavior by governments or organizations that seek to redefine the makeup of society—it was never thought to be about individual behavior.
What’s more, she noted, Thomas and other judges used the fact that abortions in India and China lead to overrepresentation of men to argue that the same thing would happen in the United States if abortions were not stopped.
But the fundamental flaw in this way of thinking is that it equates the behavior of Asian people or governments wishing to have at least one boy with people of Asian descent.
Kalantry also believes that any attempt to help the community must start with listening to community members themselves. In her commencement address, she spoke about a Supreme Court case in India that led to the government banning cross-country surrogacy — where poor women have children from a paying couple.
But the judge did not speak to a surrogate mother when making the decision. Many later said they relied on the practice to pay for health care or food.
Solve real-life problems
At Seattle University, students and faculty are particularly concerned with social justice issues, she said in response to a question that asked her to compare her current program to Cornell Law School.
One of the topics she visited in her first law class involved human rights and big business.
In her class, she has her students play the role of an official hired by Amazon to identify human rights issues that may arise in part from the company’s actions.
She also hopes to establish a center in India to bring students from India to SU and from SU to India. The center will also address issues for immigrant communities here, such as Nepalese who may not have access to immigration services in English and Spanish only.
At Cornell, through the India Center, she was able to facilitate high-level dialogue, bringing in the U.S. ambassador to India and Supreme Court justices from India.
“It’s really at the stage of having a conversation with people who can support it,” she said.
“We want faculty to have the resources to use their academic knowledge to address real-life issues that affect people in India as well as the Asian American community in Seattle.”
Mahlon can reach info@nwasianweekly.com.
