Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity
Page 28
Sen struck me as someone not in any doubt about his principal identity. His Indian passport was much more than just a document for him, and although he could have acquired another one for convenience, he did not do so for reasons he could not clearly rationalize (‘I just could not bring myself to relinquish it’). And, given his grounding in Sanskrit and Bengali, he is today, even if this may embarrass him, a very good symbol of that fealty. The centrality of his own Indianness has never been in question for this eloquent critic of singular identities. In fact, I left with the distinct impression that he is the one person who should be greatly worried about the new malaise of cultural rootlessness that is afflicting large swathes of the world. Of all people, he would be the unhappiest if one consequence—already visible—of the ever-expanding universe of ‘cosmopolitan’ multiple interactions and affiliations is that people become everything to everyone but are ignorant about—or, worse—indifferent to their roots.
Because those roots matter and cannot—and should not—be hidden, Yasmin Alibhai Brown and Ziauddin Sardar must stop resenting the question ‘Where are you from?’ The first revolution is to accept who you are, and to respect the difference that goes with it. That difference must be celebrated, because it will not go away, and the attempt to banish it only creates its own neurosis. In order to subscribe to similar values—and these are identifiable—people must be allowed to be different, otherwise the deliberate erosion of their difference will also erode their inclination to be similar. No one should be required to ‘mongrelize’ himself in order to acquire the ‘pedigree’ to be assimilated. Undeniably, the pressures to conform are always high, and co-option often occurs incipiently. George Szirtes, an immigrant from Hungary in the UK, writes: ‘We grew less strange by the month. The days grew short as did our affections. Soon we were anybody.’18 The danger is when we become ‘anybody’, then we conform but don’t really belong, for we have devalued what was our own in order to expediently grasp what is somebody else’s. The argument that being yourself will necessarily lead to xenophobia or chauvinism is an exaggerated threat invoked by those who resent your difference. On the contrary, a mature acknowledgement of your difference, in which you rejoice, can enable you to bring the best practices of your tradition to promote civilized interaction.
Of course, racism will remain. In fact, according to the British Ministry of Justice, the UK witnessed a 28 per cent increase in racially motivated crimes in the five years leading to 2008, most of them fuelled by the new Islamophobia unleashed after 9/11 and 7/7. People whose identities are clearly different create antibodies in societies, and the attempt to moderate this hostility and, if possible, eliminate it must be a continuing struggle. But the way to counter racism cannot be to deny your difference. That effort will always fail because your separateness is a very visible fact for the outsider to your culture. Even if you choose to you cannot become invisible. Dawn Butler, only the third black woman to have become a member of the House of Commons, recalls how former Tory minister David Amory once asked her: ‘What are you doing here? This is for members only.’ When she said that she was a member, he turned and said to his white colleague: ‘They’re letting anybody in nowadays.’ There is also the more recent episode of Shilpa Shetty on Celebrity Big Brother. The Indian actress was constantly mimicked for her accent and called ‘dog’ and ‘Paki’ by Jade Goody, who went on to add for good measure: ‘She makes me feel sick. She makes my skin crawl.’ When Shilpa cooked chicken, the model Danielle Lloyd refused it, saying, ‘How do Indians eat with their fingers? One doesn’t know where their fingers have been.’ Keith Vaz, an MP of Indian origin, moved an ‘early day motion’ in the House of Commons against this kind of racist behaviour. Channel 4 was flooded too by protests, both by Asian and British viewers. But the fact that white participants in one of the most widely watched television programmes could be so blatantly racist speaks about a tendency that cannot be dismissed as just the bad breeding of a few B-grade celebrities.
Even so, the fact that difference in identities can cause friction does not necessarily mean that a dramatic clash of civilizations, as predicted by Samuel Huntington, is inevitable. Such a clash will occur only if people perceive these differences to be always adversarial or irreconcilable. That, however, should not be the case in any civilized interaction, because contrary to what some people believe, societies value, in their own long-term self-interest, the virtues of coexistence and harmony. Besides, Huntington represents one extreme, wherein a clash is the inescapable consequence of difference. The answer to him is not to argue the other extreme, that there is no difference at all. The sensible thing is to find the middle ground, which provides an authentic foundation for a meaningful and mutually enriching interaction.
There is an extraordinary sense of freedom, even elation, when people give up the attempt to be someone else. Multiculturalism is a brave and effective policy to allow people to enjoy that freedom. But it can become a tyranny if it fossilizes minorities in rigid stereotypes. The onus to prevent that does not lie only with the majority community. It is also the responsibility of those who are the beneficiaries of a multicultural policy. The acceptance and celebration of difference cannot reduce itself to the right of minorities to remain cloistered in their own ghettos. The choice to be who you are cannot become a reason to block a constructive engagement with the mainstream and other groups. If that happens, multiculturalism will, as Jonathan Sacks says, become a reason for segregation, allowing ‘groups to live separately, with no incentive to integrate and every incentive not to’.19 For this very reason, the freedom to be who one is cannot only be the preserve of the minorities. The white mainstream in Britain, for example, should be entitled to it too. Their identity is also the culmination of centuries of lived experience, of distinct nurturing lifestyles, value systems and institutions. These must be allowed to find expression without the burden of always being politically correct, or feeling guilty or being reticent. Multiculturalism must give freedom to all its stakeholders, otherwise it will create resentments and tensions that militate against its very purpose.
Since it has become fashionable now to trash multiculturalism and to look ‘beyond’, it is important to understand what the angst is all about. If the argument is that multiculturalism has encouraged segregation and has become an obstacle to integration, the logical question to ask is whether complete integration is desirable or even feasible. When groups are different, and that difference is—for valid reasons—enduring, there must be limits to integration. It cannot be an absolute end in itself in response to minorities wanting to somehow be like the mainstream, or the mainstream wanting to assimilate the minorities in a roughshod manner. Some degree of integration can happen naturally over time, and through the shared spaces of everyday life; but multiculturalism cannot be expected to—and should not—create a homogeneous society. Of course, there is always scope to fine-tune policies, and to remove from them excesses that reward or promote mechanical segregation. Sometimes, as Lord Bhikhu Parekh gently pointed out, policy planners do go too far to accommodate unreasonable requests from immigrants, and that too needs to be corrected. And yet, for all its inadequacies, very, very careful thought must be given to the consequences of jettisoning the policy itself. The truth is that with or without the policy of multiculturalism, people will continue to be asked: Where do you come from? And nothing really can be done about that.
Perhaps the time has come to accept that there is often an element of extra-territoriality in the affiliations of different ethnic groups. According to a survey done by BBC in 2007, over a third of people of South Asian ethnic origin said that they hardly feel British; as many as 75 per cent felt that their culture was being diluted by the fact that they live in Britain; half of them thought that they were not treated as British by white Britons despite decades of stay in the UK. Sudhir Kakar argues that ‘an underlying sense of Indian identity continues to persist even into the third or fourth generation of the Indian diasporas of the world�
�and not only when they gather for a Diwali celebration or to watch a Bollywood movie’.20 Such a situation requires an enormous degree of tolerance in the majority community, and it is a tribute to the British government that more often than not such tolerance has been in evidence.
However, the fact of this duality—when citizens are nationals of one country but continue to be loyal to the country of their origin—also provides fodder to conservatives who consider such behaviour to be an act of disloyalty. The much-derided test devised by Lord Tebbit—which cricket team would an Indian or Pakistani British national cheer for if Britain was playing against the Indian or Pakistani team—is not entirely out of context, and we must be careful not to judge the British by yardsticks that we would not apply to ourselves. An element of utilitarianism—for lack of a better word—does influence the mentality of many immigrants, wherein they acquire a British citizenship for reasons of convenience or employment or business but preserve their emotional bonds with the country of their origin. Such primeval loyalties can be moderated in time; dual allegiances are possible wherein a ‘looking back’ to the country of origin is combined with an acceptance of the country of adoption, and an element of affection and pride infuses both. Kuku Oberoi, a very successful businessman who has lived happily in Thailand for forty years and has great respect for its people and culture, told me that he just could not bring himself to give up his Indian passport. He is heavily involved in public projects in Thailand and wants to give back to his country of adoption what it has given to him. ‘But how can I stand at an immigration counter and say that I am Thai?’ he asks me. ‘I look like an Indian and nothing can change that.’ Where the duality is benevolent and does not become tantamount to what some people consider ‘betrayal’, it can be accommodated. But when it crosses that point it needs to be recognized and not glossed over. Nation states cannot have citizens whose fealty is entirely utilitarian; tolerance for such behaviour will necessarily be low.
The issue of identity will continue to be pivotal in the years to come. The monolith state envisaged by the Treaty of Westphalia in Europe no longer exists. There are, by some estimates, as many as sixteen million Muslims in Europe, living remnants of former empires. Immigration policies can become more conservative, but the growing numbers of the ‘other’ already within national boundaries is sufficient reason for policymakers to think deeply about how to deal with them. In fact, in spite of their reservations, former colonial powers will continue to allow immigration because of the need for cheap labour and emigration patterns. According to UN statistics, Britain will need to allow 83,000 workers every year just to keep the working population at a constant. The task of management will then be doubly difficult because, unlike in the early years after the demise of colonialism, minorities are no longer willing to behave like supplicants or be condescended to or co-opted. They have acquired new muscle, through wealth and professional success, and are more conscious of the issues of racism and discrimination. For instance, it is useful to think about how mainstream Britain reacts to the taking away of jobs by the coloured through outsourcing. Are the British prepared for the new swagger of the migrants? Can they sustain their tolerance and magnanimity when those for whom it is intended are doing better on average than them?
Immigrants too must introspect about who they wish to be in the countries of their adoption. The Indian and Chinese diaspora alone accounts for close to fifty million scattered globally. There are tensions relating to minorities in other parts of the world, such as Christians in Sudan, Egypt and other Muslim countries, Arabs in Israel, Indians in Malaysia, and, of course, the cocktail of ethnicities that constitute the former Yugoslavia. While the degree varies, the truth that emerges beyond a shadow of doubt is that the markers of identity and culture cannot be wished away. Bhikhu Parekh is spot on when he says: ‘Culture gives coherence to our lives, gives us the resources to make sense of the world, stabilizes our personality, and so on. Its values and ideals inspire us, act as our moral compass, and guide us through life; its arts, rituals, songs, stories and literature fill us with joy and add colour and beauty to our lives; and its moral and spiritual wisdom comforts and helps us cope with the inevitable tragedies of our life.’21 The challenge before immigrants is how to be themselves while negotiating the space that is their due in the countries of their adoption. It is often a razor’s edge that refuses to be blunted with time. Only recently, my friend Ravi Mirchandani, who has lived in Britain since the age of six and knows no other home, told me that his preference for Indian food, deeply rooted in the sounds, taste and smell of Indian cooking in his parents’ home, just refuses to leave him. On an extended eight-week world tour that took him to many unlikely destinations in Latin America and Asia, the only thing he missed was Indian food, and wherever he was he desperately looked around for an Indian restaurant. The interesting thing is that Ravi has hardly any contact any more with his country of origin, almost no relatives that he knows in India, and very few memories of his early years in Mumbai. India exists for him more as a concept; it has receded from his daily life, and yet some part of it sleeps on within him, causing him to return to its call. I am reminded, in this context, of a beautiful poem by my friend the eminent poet and lyricist Gulzar:
For some days now
My neighbour’s house has been silent
I no longer hear the radio
Nor clanging vessels
Hurled about in the courtyard at night
Abandoned, their dog
Wanders to my house to eat
But at night returns
To the doorstep of his home
To sleep22
It is the memories that linger that sustain the curious ‘stickiness’ of identity, the mystery of origins, and the nostalgia and anguish that go with it. V.S. Naipaul, who has spent a lifetime trying to disown or outgrow his small-island Indian-immigrant origins in Trinidad, is now willing to confess that his childhood memories of living in ‘a transplanted peasant India … gave me a base of feeling and cultural knowledge which even members of my family who came later didn’t have. This base of feeling has lasted all my life.’23 Yasmin Alibhai Brown expresses the same thought: ‘When you are wrenched from your homeland unexpectedly, you can never forget the sights, textures, the particular noises you left behind.’24 And the writer Miroslav Janic puts it even more powerfully: ‘No one who has lost his homeland can be calm again, anywhere, ever.’25 It is perhaps for this reason that Indians who have lived for decades in America or in the UK, and done extremely well for themselves, still tell me that their one wish is to die in India.
On a recent visit to Kabul I visited Bagh-e-Babur, where, in accordance with his wishes, the Mughal emperor Babur was buried. The tomb is at the top of a terraced garden surrounded by the stark, treeless mountains that circle the city. The garden was completely destroyed during the civil war of the 1990s. Rival factions commanded different mountain perches overlooking the garden, and the resting place of the first great Mughal was caught in the crossfire; the trees and flowers and pavilions and water channels around his resting place were destroyed and the grounds heavily mined. With the defeat of the Taliban, the Karzai government began an ambitious—and successful—restoration attempt, with Ritish Nanda, a young Indian conservationist, leading the team. As I strolled along the now restored garden, I could not but think how bare and stark the environment still was, and must have always been: barren mountains covered with snow for more than half the year, no great river in the valley, the vegetation sparse, the entire vista devoid of colour. Agra, where Babur died, was, to my mind, infinitely more appealing: the expanse of the river Yamuna, lush green forests, adequate rainfall, a moderate winter, fertile soil sustaining large wheat and rice crops, and in spring the yellow burst of sarson. And yet, for Babur, Kabul was home. He had lived and ruled there for twenty-two years. He had made his name and realized his dreams in India, but this harsh mountain city was where he wished to return. This was where he knew he belonged. In that c
ertainty, there could not be logical comparisons. It was a matter of emotion, of roots. His successors could become Indian, intermarrying locally and creating an amazingly syncretic culture with which they could identify. But for Babur, Kabul remained home. And so, even though he died in ‘exile’ in Agra, and was initially buried there, his wife and son, in accordance with his last wishes, brought his mortal remains to Kabul.