Like Yasmin, Sardar blames the policy of multiculturalism for his travails. He argues for a post-multicultural society where he can cease to exist as a noticeable ‘other’ and become an inconspicuous part of white monochromatic Britain. He dreams of a United Kingdom of pluralistic identities, but wants to, ironically, erase his own identity because it is a permanent reason for the perennial question: Where are you from? Since multiculturalism puts permanent labels of difference on individuals and communities, he wants it scrapped. The policy, however flawed, becomes the punching bag for a malaise that has no remedy. And, since in his inner recesses he knows that no policy change can really create a milieu where people stop asking where you are from, he moves to the next step, which is to deny the centrality of his identity, splitting it into an infinite number of particles, so that none comes into focus and each is innocuous enough to escape attention. ‘So I am a Muslim, a British citizen of Pakistani origins, a man, a writer, a critic, a broadcaster, an information scientist, a historian of science, a university professor, a scholar of Islam, a rationalist, a sceptic, a traditionalist and a partial vegetarian. All of these collective identities belong to me and each one is important in a particular context.’11
It is a sleight of hand that convinces no one, but has powerful supporters, the most important of them being the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. In his well-intentioned book Identity and Violence Sen is haunted by the fact that identity can kill. Perhaps his childhood memories of the Hindu–Muslim riots in Dhaka when, as a child of eleven he saw Kader Mian, an ordinary Muslim, stagger through the gate into his garden bleeding from a fatal knife wound, has moulded his passionate belief that religion must never become the sole recognizing aspect of any individual. His motivation is transparent: to minimize religious strife and to help build societies which value harmony and brotherhood and eliminate hate. But although the goal is unquestionably desirable, he marshals in its support a series of assumptions that require rigorous interrogation. Averse to the exclusionist defining role of religion, he swings to the other extreme by arguing that there is no centrality to identity at all, and all human beings are—or will potentially be—only an aggregation of affiliations and associations. ‘In our normal lives, we see ourselves as members of a variety of groups—we belong to all of them,’ he writes. ‘A person’s citizenship, residence, geographic origin, gender, class, politics, profession, employment, food habits, sports interests, taste in music, social commitments, etc., make us members of a variety of groups. Each of these collectivities, to all of which this person simultaneously belongs, gives her a particular identity. None of them can be taken to be the person’s only identity or singular membership category.’12
The problem with such a thesis is that it equates interests or pursuits or preoccupations, which are a contingent aspect of everyday life, with the primeval, enduring and unalterable attributes of identity that we are born with and cannot forsake. For instance, the role of religion in a person’s life cannot be equated with his interest in sports; nor can an individual’s colour have the same importance as her current ‘taste in music’; nor can common social commitments erode linguistic loyalties. It is true that ‘affiliations’ or ‘interests’ can help to build bridges between different communities. But it is quite another thing to argue that because such bridges are possible or desirable there is no singularity to identity, and we can all become mirror images of each other. History is, indeed, witness to the violence and persecution perpetrated in the name of religion. And yet, the answer to that is not to devalue the role of religion but to find within it, and beyond it, ways to promote religious harmony. Mahatma Gandhi did not renounce religion in order to preach religious harmony. He remained a Hindu, and proudly so, but dipped into the teachings of other faiths to preach and practise his message of love and harmony. Sen cites the persecution of the Jews as an example of what an exclusive sense of identity can do. But the response to that persecution could never be that the Jews should have tried to be less Jewish and become a variety of other things. In fact, only by staunchly clinging on to who they were, and asserting their right to remain so, could they hope to persuade or prevail upon others to respect them. Undoubtedly, ‘the assertion of human commonality’—a phrase Sen uses with high-minded abandon—could play a role in invoking that respect in others, but it could never be a substitute for the importance of Jews remaining Jews, fully convinced that their inalienable and overt Jewishness was a worthy cause unto itself, and did not need to be dissolved in a welter of other affiliations.
To be fair to Sen, he does concede that there are fundamental constraints in making choices where identity is concerned. It is not easy for anyone to disown one’s religion, or bleach one’s colour, or eliminate accents from tongues, or blank out customs and beliefs that give meaning to our lives. Even if a person is willing to do so, it may not change the perception of others and the manner in which they continue to sense difference. But having accepted this, Sen trivializes his own pragmatism. The making of choices, he writes subsequently, ‘is not a remarkable fact. It is just the way every choice in any field is actually faced. Indeed, nothing can be more elementary and universal than the fact that choices of all kinds in every area are always made within particular limits …’13 Any person can exercise the choice to join a certain club, or patronize a particular restaurant, or apply for a specific job, or pursue an educational degree, or appreciate a popular film. These choices exist, Sen argues, like commodities in a mall. The only constraining factor is one’s budget! The truth, however, is that fundamental attributes of identity are not like commodities in a mall; they cannot be freely exchanged or bought off the shelf; some are not even saleable, and even if they are, not every counter is open to everyone. Of course, there could be overzealous shoppers who have been at the mall for a very long time. Sen cites the case of Cornelia Sorabji:
Cornelia Sorabji came to Britain from India in the 1880s, and her identities reflected the varieties of affiliations that she, like others, had. She was variously described by herself and others as an ‘Indian’ (she did eventually return to India and wrote an engaging book called India Calling), as being at home in England as well (homed in two countries, England and India), as a Parsee (‘I am Parsee by nationality’), as a Christian (full of admiration for ‘the early martyrs of the Christian Church’), as a sari-clad woman (‘always perfectly dressed in a richly coloured sari’, as the Manchester Guardian described her), as a lawyer and barrister-at-law (at Lincoln’s Inn), as a fighter for women’s education and for women’s rights (she specialized as a legal adviser to veiled women, ‘purdanaschins’), as a committed supporter of the British Raj (who even accused Mahatma Gandhi, not particularly fairly, of enrolling ‘babies as early as six and seven years of age’) always nostalgic about India (‘the green parquets at Bodh Gaya; the blue wood smoke of an Indian village’), as a firm believer in the asymmetry between women and men (she was proud to be seen as a ‘a modern woman’), as a teacher at an exclusively men’s college (‘at eighteen, in a Male College’), and as the first woman ever of any background to get the degree of bachelor of civil law at Oxford … Cornelia Sorabji’s choices must have been influenced by her social origins and background, but she made her own decisions and made her own choices and chose her own priorities.14
Unfortunately for Sen’s enthusiasm, and all of Cornelia Sorabji’s not unremarkable efforts, she remained for the British little more than a likeable, even talented, Parsi Indian. Just like all the king’s soldiers and all the king’s men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again, not all her academic degrees and activism and pronouncements and professions of allegiance could put together a different identity for her. She came to the UK as a Parsi Indian and left it as a Parsi Indian, although along the way she did her best to convince herself and others that she was something else.
Caricature is the consequence of not accepting who you are. There are many interests that one can acquire that provide a common meeting ground with other
people, but it is a mistake to believe that these in themselves can change your essential identity. The internationally renowned psychoanalyst and writer Sudhir Kakar, and his wife Katharina Kakar, who was a Fellow at the Centre of the Study of World Religions at Harvard University, are categorical on this point, and I would like to quote them fully:
Identity is not a role, or a succession of roles, with which it is often confused. It is not a garment that can be put on or taken off according to the weather outside; it is not ‘fluid’, but marked by a sense of continuity and sameness irrespective of where the person finds himself during the course of his life. A man’s identity—of which the culture that he has grown up in is a vital part—is what makes him recognize himself and be recognized by the people who constitute his world. It is not something he has chosen, but something that has seized him. It can hurt, be cursed or bemoaned but cannot be discarded, though it can always be concealed from others or, more tragic, from one’s own self.
The cultural part of our personal identity, modern neuroscience tells us, is wired into our brains. The culture in which an infant grows up constitutes the software of the brain, much of which is already in place by the end of childhood. Not that the brain, a social and cultural organ as much as a biological one, does not keep changing with interactions with the environment in later life. Like the proverbial river one never steps into twice, one can never use the same brain twice. Even if our genetic endowment were to determine fifty per cent of our psyche and early childhood experiences another thirty per cent, there is still a remaining twenty per cent that changes through the rest of our lives. Yet, as the neurologist and philosopher Gerhard Roth observes, ‘Irrespective of its genetic endowment, a human baby growing up in Africa, Europe or Japan will become an African, a European or a Japanese. And once someone has grown up in a particular culture and, let us say, is twenty years old, he will never acquire a full understanding of other cultures since the brain has passed through the narrow bottleneck of culturalization.’ In other words, the possibilities of ‘fluid’ and changing identities in adulthood are rather limited and, moreover, rarely touch the deeper layers of the psyche. So, in a sense, we are Spanish or Korean—or Indian—much before we make the choice or identify this as an essential part of our identity.15
If identities are not ‘fluid’ and cannot be put on or taken off to suit the weather outside, co-option cannot be a limitless exercise. Societies must recognize the limits of assimilation; and while the society of ‘competing diversities’ that Sen values is a laudable goal, it can be built only if non-negotiable differences in identity are not mindlessly diluted. A commonality clustered around some cross-community affiliations and interests can cause irreparable harm to individuals and societies by glossing over differences in order to create the illusion of homogeneity. Diversity must not be trivialized and devalued in this manner. Real diversity allows divergences to exist and be recognized and respected. There are many intersections, especially in urban life, where people from different backgrounds have occasion to meet; equally, any person can develop hobbies and interests that are shared by others and help widen his social circle. But while some minor aspects of identity can be influenced through such interactions, there are as many substantive ones that cannot. This applies both to the white Christian majority in Britain as it does to the ethnic minorities. In fact, one of the tyrannies of Sen’s great antipathy to ‘singular identities’ is that no one can any more feel comfortable just being who he or she is. Like the replication of amoebas gone berserk, we must keep ‘multiplying’ our identities, until we all merge into a common sea of overlapping sameness.
A question can be asked, and indeed Sen does ask it: Are singular identities tenable any more in today’s globalized world? The Kakars argue very emphatically that they are. They give the example of India, where under the awning of Indianness, there are hundreds of diversities jostling against each other. But these are not multiple identities adrift from their original anchor. They are multiple expressions of a common identity, though they may appear bewilderingly unrelated to the less informed outsider. Over twenty major languages with their own scripts and hundreds of dialects resound in a seemingly maddening Tower of Babel, but Sanskrit is the basis of almost all of them. Similarly, hundreds of festivals are celebrated all across the land, but the same mythologies or beliefs or harvest rituals animate them. Their names are different—for instance, Pongal in the south, Lori or Baisakhi in the north and Bihu in Assam—but they fall on the same date and are celebrated for the same reasons. A person standing with his legs crossed and his hands clasped to the left as though holding a flute, is Krishna to any Indian without the need for any fatiguing explanations. Manipuris in the remote north-east dance the raas of Krishna, as do the Bharatanatyam exponents in the deep south. The Hindustani music of north India appears to be very different from the Carnatic music of the south, but most ragas are common to both, with only the names different. Many more examples can be given to show that people who have evolved in the same civilizational crucible for thousands of years acquire a distinctive similarity. One must never be so mesmerized by the surface multiplicity as to ignore or dismiss the underlying unity. Without that unity India would be a random collation of diversities; with that unity it is a civilization. In fact, it was a colonial argument that India was not a civilizational unity and that it was the British who forged her into a nation. Winston Churchill once famously said that to say that India is a nation is to say the equator is one.
Sudhir and Katharina Kakar have not the slightest doubt that Indians ‘share a family resemblance in the sense that there is a distinctive Indian stamp on certain universal experiences’.16 This family resemblance ‘begins to stand out in sharp relief only when it is compared to the profiles of peoples of other civilizations or cultural clusters. A man who is an “Amritsari” in Punjab, for instance, is a Punjabi in the rest of India but an Indian in Europe; in the latter case, the “outer circle” of his identity—his Indian-ness—becomes central to his self-definition and his recognition by others.’17 What is true about Indians is true for all well-defined ethnicities. Professor Kohl, an academic in Holland who has spent a lifetime studying India, told me once that the more he discovered India the more he realized how European he was. Why then do some people shy away from being recognized for who they are? Is it because they believe that such an assertion will invite rejection or reprisal? In that case, is the ploy of multiple identities the defence of a vulnerable minority? Is it the weapon of the aspiring; the ideological cover designed by those consigned to the margin? Those who are confident about their identity accept it as a badge of recognition, and are not afraid, like Sen, of ‘unique categorization’. After all, the quintessential Englishman, or the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant American, or the idiosyncratic white Frenchman, or the ‘pure-bred’ Prussian beer-loving German, harbour no debilitating doubts about their singular identity. For all their other interests and affiliations, they do not see that uniqueness dissolving in a host of theoretically infinite multiplicities. In fact, they see no contradiction between being themselves and having several outside associations which could be enriching and rewarding. Not everyone who is loyal to his religion or proud of being himself is a potential fundamentalist or terrorist. By presenting his arguments in such grossly oversimplified black-and-white terms, Sen does little to promote the goal of societal tolerance that is so dear to him.
In the context of multi-ethnic Britain, Sen worries that minorities that do not take refuge in multiple identities will be consigned to ‘secluded boxes’. The fact of the matter is that people, whether they accept it or not, do belong to different boxes; but that does not necessarily mean that they are secluded within them. As he himself argues, people make enlightened choices about the priority they want to give to their inherited traditions, and in what measure they are willing to accept those of others. And yet, the freedom to build bridges beyond your essential identity must be accompanied by the freedom and the courage
to be identified with it. It is true that rigid divisions can empower conservative spokespersons who dictate what ought to constitute your identity. But only those who are not in denial about who they are can effectively counter such an agenda. For instance, in India, if most Hindus, because they are educated and employed and members of clubs and watch films and appreciate music—all the affiliations and interactions that Sen gives so much importance to—were to say that their religion has little or no meaning for them and are ignorant about its tenets and eternal verities, they would seriously undermine their ability to counter the fundamentalists within Hinduism and could even strengthen their hold. And loyalty to your origins need not prevent an enlightened acceptance of the heritage and traditions of others. The message of tolerance and understanding comes best from those who are not ashamed or afraid of their origins.
Affiliations and interactions have an undeniable value in broadening the horizons of people; but they create multiple interests, not multiple identities. The error occurs when well-meaning theoreticians begin to substitute these interests for identities. Interests can be acquired; identities are what people are born with. Identities persist in spite of interests that influence them. This is true of Amartya Sen himself. I was once placed next to him at a sit-down dinner in his honour where the glitterati of Delhi was present in droves. Amartya had one of his arms in a sling (a pulled muscle, he said), but was otherwise in good form, enjoying his red wine and the adulation of the guests. He had read my critique in The Independent of his earlier book The Argumentative Indian, and I had the opportunity now to talk to him about my reservations on his views on identity. A person can, I told him, have more than one aspect to his personality, but to argue from that that any notion of a central or dominant identity is ephemeral is nothing short of relativist absurdity. I am originally from Varanasi, and have made Delhi my home, and speak and write English and have had to travel across the world, but none of this could ever diminish my essential identity as an Indian. Amartya had himself lived abroad for most of his life; he was married to a foreigner, and had perhaps more reason than most people to begin to believe that he was a ‘global citizen’. But to my surprise, I found that he was openly emotional about the fact that he had never given up his Indian passport, and was very proud of his childhood grounding in Sanskrit. He did not learn English properly, he confided in me, until he was in university. His first wife came from an Anglicized Bengali family. She knew all the English nursery rhymes that Indian children ‘learn to parrot’ when they enter school, but he was unfamiliar with them. The initial grounding in his mother tongue and in Sanskrit ensured that throughout his foreign sojourns his cultural compass was never disoriented. When I mentioned to him that Edward Said had written movingly about his existential dilemma, of not knowing where he belonged—to the Arab world where he was born or to America where he lived and taught for most of his life—Amartya’s response was immediate. Said, he told me, never learnt Arabic, and that accounted for his doubts about where he came from.
Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity Page 27