I am a writer, international student, and traveler from South India. I am a lover of food, motorcycles, and books. I am a life-long learner who is adventurous and open to trying new things. I have over 200 books in my room right now.
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Sree.
Writer, international student, and traveller from Southern India. I love food and books. I currently have 200 books in my dorm room! Hit me up if you have something to say or talk about.
For most of my life, I have only eaten, never cooked.
As a child, I was fed fried anchovies coated in chilli powder, turmeric, salt, and pepper. Tiny crisps of flavour burst in my mouth, tucked into the centre of a rice ball rolled by my mother’s hand. Steel containers full of fried and preserved jackfruit, mango, banana, and cassava root lined our kitchen shelves, ready for me to snack on when I returned from school. It took a colossal amount of effort to maintain my food habits.
My mother spent a sizeable part of her life alternating between two kitchens: one with the gas cooking range for the curries and the other for the wood-burning stove for rice and desserts made in uruli, ornate bronze and copper pans for special occasions. A hypochondriac, the thought of disposable plastic coming in contact with food vexed her. She unpacked anything that came in plastic packets and transferred them to steel or ceramic containers. To this day, she refuses to refrigerate cooked food. My mother makes all her dishes from scratch multiple times a day, after picking the freshest of choices from the greengrocer. My father could never purchase the right kind of vegetables and grains: “Do you not see how yellow these lentils are? It has clearly been bleached and dyed,” she would say.
She wanted her child to live a long, healthy life and compromised nothing when it came to feeding me. Meanwhile, I ran around the house demanding fried fish and Parle-G (Parley- G) biscuits to dip in tea.
But as I grew into adolescence and encountered restaurant food and the world of packaged crisps, my tastes changed. My mother’s food made did not buzz in my mouth with the intense combination of sweet and spicy like the chilli-garlic Hakka noodles I bought from the mall’s food court. Gourmet Lays, which PepsiCo created to target the Indian palette, obsessed me as they hung from storefronts with gold embossed letters on their inflated packets.
One day, after gorging on fried rice and butter paneer at a restaurant after school, I refused the supper my mother made me. I had not bothered to tell her I would be eating out. The salted rice, the ash gourd curry and the Rasam she had laid out on the dining table looked so unappetising that I went straight to bed after telling her: “Ash gourd tastes like nothing, Amma. And the curry looks white. That is so weird. Tasty things don’t look like that. Tasty things look colourful.”She did not reply.I noticed the disappointment in her eyes, but I chose to overlook it.
Also called winter melons, ash gourds thrive in the humid heat of Kerala. The vines snake around most of our backyard and produce melon-shaped fruits with a fuzzy ash-coloured exterior. They found their way into Keralite cuisine because they grow in abundance and are a nutritious addition to the dining table. It tastes like a cross between cucumber and melon; very mild and watery. The ash gourd, combined with the freshly grated and ground coconut flakes, enfeebles the spices in the curries which are made with them. Since the flavour of any dish is a combination of taste, colour and smell of the dish, and the curry lacks colour and has an unremarkable smell, it takes longer for younger people to appreciate the nuances of ash gourd curries.
Like most,I was only asked to eat, to consume and to contribute nothing to the intricate processes that went into making the food. As a male child growing up in a patriarchal society, I never thought about the conveniences that were offered to me. I was completely removed from the laborious and intricate processes of producing an endless array of curries and perfectly fragrant rice.
It was in high school that I tasted the labour of cuisine for the first time. I have seen my mother travail in the kitchen through the corner of my eyes. She would stand with her hands on her waist, staring elsewhere as she stirred the contents of the saucepan. She sang sometimes. The songs of her childhood found a release as she disembowelled fresh-caught sardines. She hated cooking fish. The stench and the labour it took to rake the scales off them were exasperating. But she made everything seem effortless. But her actions seemed so effortless. She spread the dosa batter into perfect circles on the iron griddle within three turns of her wrists. The dosas came out crisp, as thin as fingernails.
One day, I told her that I wanted to attend college in Delhi, or even move abroad. “Really? And who is going to make your food for you? We can’t afford for you to be eating out every day. I am telling you; you will starve. You don’t even know how to cook rice,” my mother said.
Her comment was unnerving. Cooking took place in my home every day, but it was something I knew little about. I realised I had to get involved in it at some point in my life as an essential part of survival. The next day, I poured coconut oil into a wok for the first time in my life. My hands were shaking. I was planning on making a conceited spiced onion curry with roti because my mother said it was one of the easiest things she made. She stood on the other side of the kitchen and said something to the effect of: “Less is more.” But her recipe-less cooking methods were incomprehensible to me. She never measured the salt or the asafoetida or the amount of neatly sliced vegetables she added to the dish. She left me to decide on the amounts of ingredients I was supposed to add to the curry. I was supposed to wait for the oil to heat up, but I did not know how long that would take. The onions I put in sizzled and burned immediately. Frustrated, I put in garam masala, in hopes that it would mask the pungency of the burned onions. The delicate powder burned in the heat and filled the room with a nose-piercing odour. I looked apologetically at my mother. It had taken me about half an hour to slice the onions, my eyes burning, my knife slipping dangerously close to my fingers. They burned in a matter of seconds. My smug approach to the skills needed to craft a good curry burned with them.
The men around me went a long time in their lives without ever picking up elementary cooking skills. Yet, the cooks at restaurants and caterers at weddings and events were predominantly men. They were the pot-bellied stirrers of the giant pots with enough Sambar to feed all the hundreds who attended Kerala’s elaborate wedding ceremonies were all men. Their spatulas like oars. They stirred the sizzling oil as they spattered spice mixes into it to activate their aroma.
The society I lived in gendered the art and science of making food. Masculine food was about attaining a heightened delivery of flavour: fried and battered Chilli Gobi, Chicken 65, decadent Biryanis made in a hole dug into the earth. Feminine food was about balance, nutrition, and comfort. They are mostly unknown outside the domestic sphere. Think of the melange of vegetables unified by coconut flakes in an avial, or spinach or cabbage shredded and sautéed into a melt-in-your-mouth thoran, or a tamarind-infused fish curry…They fulfil the desires of more than just your senses. At least, it feels like it. But you would never buy them at a restaurant. People my age almost never express cravings for them. Those dishes simply existed in the sidelines of our minds, even though we ate them daily.
I never fully understood how important my mother’s food was for me until I lost access to it. As I found a new life as a student in the United States, I felt a hunger that I had never felt before. I felt hunger as more than an absence of physical nourishment. I felt it as an absence of culture and identity. For most of my life, I took the cuisine of my ancestors for granted. Even as they laboured in the spice plantations in Northern Kerala to supply the tea and cardamom for the Empire, they found time to incorporate foreign vegetables into their own food. Potatoes, tomatoes, and chilli peppers found their way into Kerala’s food from all the way in South America, transported by Portuguese colonial vessels. The same food sustained a booming population through artificially induced famine during my grandparent’s youth. The same cuisine fed the children of independence as they built their lives in a new nation recovering from the assaults of colonialism. India is often called a nation of amnesiacs. My parents never found time to tell me the details of colonial history, I am unsure how much they even knew. But the intricacies of Indian cuisine, where scores of spices are mixed and matched to create flavours that speak to every one of your tastebuds, have parallels in the history of the nation and forces of immigration, diplomacy, colonialism, and global trade.
The hunger I felt for my mother’s food was also a hunger to know and understand this history and its ramifications in the modern day. My ignorance on matters of cuisine reflected my ignorance of the history of my people. Above all, I had overlooked the resilience of women in their everyday lives.
Ø
Today, boxes of my mother’s best ground spices travel towards me every couple of months, packed in a DHL box postmarked for central Kentucky. On its way, it stops in Bengaluru, Frankfurt or Paris, before it is sorted in Erlanger near Cincinnati. They pass through multiple scans and customs inspections. Sometimes, the package arrives opened and combed through manually. The package and its contents must meet the myriad laws and specifications of global freight. The day the shipping company delivers the package, I call my mother to let her know I got it.
I video call her on WhatsApp, our primary medium of communication, every week. The first thing she asks me when she answers the phone is about the food I have eaten that week. She wants to know what I have cooked and how it tasted, whether I added turmeric into the curry or if the coriander powder she sent me came in handy. She talks about the easiest ways to cook potatoes as an accompaniment for roti and then the ways to make it most delicious. “Slice the onions as thinly as possible. Put spinach in your lentils, you need the vitamins for your eyes, and it elevates the texture,” she says. Never has she said out loud once that she loves me. It is through food that she expresses it all. Her love is palpable across oceans, for I can taste it every time I cook. One day, I hope to feed her with the same recipes she has handed down to me. I hope she will taste a version of the goodness that she has enkindled.
Sree.
Writer, international student, and traveller from Southern India. I love food and books. I currently have 200 books in my dorm room! Hit me up if you have something to say or talk about.
For all those who know a bit of history, the fact that the Pakistani by the name Ali Hassan is one of the closest things I have to India right now would sound like supreme irony. He is a fantastic musician with a forthright and daring sense of humour and sarcasm, yet he is upliftingly respectful at the same time.
I will have to admit that I find it very taxing to interact with any new people from the Indian Subcontinent these days. A socio-cultural rejection from the people from the Subcontinent would be too painful for me to handle, and I simply refuse to give consideration to the subtle and complicated political structures and cultural constructs that dictate the social interactions of Southeast Asians whose cultures are paradoxically as different as they are similar. Manoeuvering American culture is more, let’s say, black and white. It is a simpler and less monolithic entity, and I can always be detached from them if the need be. In simple terms, it is about choosing an oppressor that looks like you versus the one that doesn’t. Also, the inscrutable, often superficial politeness of the people here can be comforting sometimes, at least in the short run.
Given these circumstances, the 34-year-old Ali could be considered an unlikely friend for me. Still, our camaraderie developed over strong critical views and understanding of our own past circumstances in relation to the new one. He is a person capable of deeply understanding and expressing criticism of one’s own community and culture, which is a trait that I most admire in people because such people are not easy to come by. And needless to say, we are self-declared outcasts from several societies.
It is usual for us to talk loudly and in detail about the spectres of religious bigotry, the rising nationalism, and the histories of the places we come from, and profusely express our scepticism and dismay about the state of things back home and around the world- featuring everything from the Hindu nationalist R.S.S. to Radical Islam. However, these are also times that provide me with a clearer sense of how much of a product of my own culture I am, and, in a way, these merciless deconstructions bring me closer to my own cultural origins.
THE PHYSICALITY OF CULTURAL CODING
The culinary arts and cuisine is cultural coding at its most physical dimension. The substances that your body derives its building blocks from originate in food. The stuff that one puts in one’s mouth and consumes becomes all that is one’s physical self. And food, in turn, is culture. And cuisine is the art by which your culture shapes and crafts your very physicality, all that you are in a physiological sense.
The loss of one’s food culture strikes you like a physical affliction; I feel like every time my stomach growls, it is a plea for red rice, bitter gourds, the unity in diversity of Sambhar, or the verdant burning freshness of coconut chutney. My body misses the sensation of vegetables that do not come in plastic wrappers, condiments, and flavouring substances that are not processed like it’s a war on nature, and desserts that are not condensed sugar. The fact that the cultural habits of my host nation are diametrically opposed to my own does not help at all.
The capitalist system is very quick to take advantage of this desperation and wastes no time in selling mediocre look-alikes of the Subcontinental cuisine all over the US. I have had to depend on these sources as well, for what they are (not) worth. This is where Ali came in like a saviour. After having to get to know each other over the summer, he invited me to one of his cookouts on a Sunday last Fall in Kettering residence hall. The rice and qorma he had made for us that day felt like the healing of a wound that was open for an unusually long time. I imagined my blood flowing through my veins uncluttered from the residues of a fat dominant diet. My tongue strived to rediscover its past self after having had unnaturally mild repasts forced on it. I felt like Marcel with his madeleine when my primal memories were reactivated.
It is also not surprising that I am not the only person who was captivated by Ali’s cooking, albeit for vastly different reasons. Visiting Ali on the third floor of Kettering is a Sunday evening ritual for a group of around ten to fifteen students of all colours and backgrounds who know about his culinary talents. I would always go there a few hours in advance with a couple of friends to keep Ali company as he cooks and would try to help him as much as we could, even though he seeks no help until the time we clean things up. On the way to his floor, the elevator shaft of the residence hall would be perfumed with the scent of Karachi’s spices, from cardamom and turmeric to black peppers and Garam Masala that is sautéed in olive oil, as its therapeutic aroma pervades multiple floors. Ali would take particular care to make sure that not a single pellet of rice sticks to another one as he crafts a Pulao that melts in your mouth. After everybody was done, I would scrape at the bottom of the pan of Dal Makhni with my hands to get a taste of the slightly burned lentils that could be a delicacy of their own. Needless to say, my gratitude to its maker is never-ending.
An Indian reading this back home might mentally smirk at my poverty. But the battles one has to go through to find one’s place in a multicultural setting is an essential truth of living in countries like America. The many grappling, the pushing and pulling of socio-cultural considerations are as visceral as they are intellectual, and sometimes one cannot help but submit to the physicality of things. However, for the sake of my own sanity, I would like to think of this situation as having the luxury of negotiating with my own culture, and combining elements of a variety of cultures to choose the best for myself.
Some part of my mind retains the memory of the cloying aroma of incense they burn at funerals, and I felt like I could smell it in the plane, triggered perhaps, by the floral perfume of some fellow passenger, chrysanthemums probably.
Since very young, I have associated the smell of incense with funerals; I remember it lingering in my mind as I commuted to them……
Some part of my mind retains the memory of the cloying aroma of incense they burn at funerals, and I felt like I could smell it in the plane, triggered perhaps, by the floral perfume of some fellow passenger, chrysanthemums probably.
Since very young, I have associated the smell of incense with funerals; I remember it lingering in my mind as I commuted to them, but I never expected it to pursue me all the way from Delhi, after just four months of living there, to my ancestral home, 3000 miles apart on an Air India 737, which was taking me to the funeral of my grandfather, the first person ever to pass away that I cared about. I guess, as you grow up, you have to get used to the people you love just dying.
It was a mostly empty flight, I was the only one in my row of seats, and I was glad it was so.
It was a surprisingly comfortable flight, too, as I could stretch my legs as much as I wanted, there were no seats in front of me, and my own seat seemed to recline farther than they usually do.
Fifteen thousand feet below me, the landscape began to change; the sandstone hue of Northern India turned into the luscious green undulations of the South. I could be flying over places I have been to before; perhaps I have climbed and stood on the cliff over there at some point of my life, I would think. The dramatic approach of the flight into the heart of familiarity, rendering it with a freshness that it lacked formerly.
As the plane got closer to Kochi, however, it did something unexpected, it veered off towards the west and started flying above the Arabian sea, taking a U-turn before landing on the runway. The view from above was breathtaking. The waves of the Indian Ocean breaking on the land along the seemingly endless coastline of Kerala. It seemed like a silvery liminal zone, a courtship between the land and the sea.
Ø
Hundreds of people had come to the funeral. My grandparents were one of the most important educators in the town that we lived in, one of the very first people who helped thousands of men and women out of illiteracy in a post-colonial nation younger than them.
It was drizzling, and people held umbrellas open as they gathered around the house, conversing in lowered voices, solemn and restrained.
The Israeli elections; that was the last thing we talked about before I went away to Delhi, the last time I spoke to grandfather. “It seems the nationalists are taking over,” he said, sighing. The year was 2018, the first time ever that right-wing powers could gain some footing in the legislative assemblies of his beloved socialist Kerala.
Ø
“Your mother is the most sensitive of my daughters.” My Grandmother used to tell me. Likewise, she could barely step out of the bedroom to be near the body of her father, where everyone was. The only time she left the room was when the rituals required her to. She stayed away from everything for most of the time, wrapping herself in blankets to stop herself from shivering, not from cold, but out of grief.
My aunts and most of the people there were praying, enunciating the ritualistic verses in undertones as the time for cremation approached. Gods, goddesses, demigods, and the five elements were invoked by the priest as was customary. Rice balls were placed around the precinct of the house to gather the crows and ravens, vital as they are to all things associated with death.
My mother would later tiptoe behind us as we walked bearing the body to the funeral pyre, but she rushed inside as soon as it started burning.
She would go to the riverbanks next year to invoke the spirits of the dead again; death is an ongoing process; the spirits needed consolation and invocations in the afterlife, at least as long as their children were alive on the face of the planet. For her, it was a chance to commune with her beloved father again, to be conversant with his spirits. “I will do this every year of my life until I die,” she would say, with indomitable devotion to grandfather’s memory.
I was sobbing as the pyre burned. I felt like I never completely understood how much I loved him until that moment. I have never appreciated the scale to which his presence had influenced our lives. The candies and toffees he used to bring us when we were younger- the Cadburies and the Britannias- the places he used to take us to see, the stories he used to tell. “He used to take care of all of his grandchildren when you were all babies,” my mother would say, revealing an image of his that I could never reconcile to his strict, distant demeanor later in life, “Even I could not put you to sleep the way he did, with all his tenderness and lullabies.” The grandfather I knew was a man who paid exceptional attention to orderliness, a pedantic perfectionist. The neatly folded clothes, his organized folders, well-ironed shirts, extremely cautious nature, a tinge of paranoia, and many other quirks of his dominated all my ideas of his person. Yet, I am sure the tenderness was as much a part of him as his sternness. I could see it in the excitement with which he would tell me tales about his childhood every time I went over to meet him, it was in his smile as he tried to interest me with all the things he read in the newspaper about all the strange happenings around the world.
The next day, we collected the mortal remains in an earthen urn and carried them to the Periyar’s banks, to be scattered in its waters, en route to the ocean. My Grandmother, who did not come with us, stood by the doorstep watching as we took the urn away.
That was the first time I saw her crying. She is Prometheus, she was born Untouchable, but she traveled across the country to get an education and brought back what she gained to her people while raising four daughters and never lost her determination to do good. I remember listening to the stories of the schools she used to teach at, on the peripheries of forests, villages often visited by tigers and panthers. She sat by me in her bed as I tried to console her; for the first time, our roles were reversed.
Then there was the sound of the urn breaking on the rocks of the Periyar. The ashes mixing in the gushing flow of water, all the way to the Arabian sea.
Later that day, we gathered around the table to eat rice, which we had to abstain from during the funeral rituals. My eldest cousin sat at my grandfather’s chair this time, with my aunts, three of my other cousins, and my grandmother seated around the dining table. We shared the rice among us, the red rice, of the red earth that would become our blood, the blood of kinship, borne from the simple act of sharing the same pot of rice, making sure the same tinge of red ran through all of our veins.
Notes:
The title of the article is a variation of Emily Dickinson’s Poem 390, the first stanza of which goes:
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, And Mourners to and fro Kept treading - treading - till it seemed That Sense was breaking through -
It is a sad truth that most revolutions and independence movements subside but simply by replacing one form of oppression by another. The pomp, songs, flags and vigor will all be soon appropriated by a new ruling class and symbols of liberation will later be held in sway over the proletariat as if they were imperial scepters.
People often ask me why I am so adamant about learning and professing the language of my oppressors, referring to English, and as a lower-caste person, I retain my position that I have always had more than one oppressor and the British were not the worst of them. I have always been of the opinion that Postcolonial school of thought is insufficient for understanding the state of things in India. Almost all of India’s problems are pre-colonial and have existed for 1000s of years and they were all swept aside by one crudely nationalistic anti-British narrative which was professed by an exclusively upper-caste Congress leadership who conveniently left behind 70% of India’s population, the Real people of India.
To this day, most of this 70% live like an invisible and voiceless class of people, at the receiving end of a form of feudalistic oppression, the likes of which could be found nowhere else in the world.
I was a part of the University of Delhi, an institution of eminence, the previous year. A quick look around the campuses presents the sheer dominance of Brahmin-Savarna classes in the composition of the student body and an utter paucity of representation from people outside of those brackets. The same applies to other prestigious spaces of higher learning, like the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). This is overlooking the fact that the faculty at these institutions would be almost entirely Brahmin.
The upper-caste hegemony is in no way restricted to the educational sector of India. The emphasize I placed on it is simply because of the fact that I am myself a student and it is these institutions that help mould the young minds who are the future of the nation and of course, the disparities in educational opportunities later manifest themselves as disparities in living standards.
But the worst part is when I had to hear educators and lecturers make statements like, “We as Brahmins, despite belonging to the privileged echelons, have done a lot to address the problems of inequality and improve the lives of lower-caste people.” The extravagant toxicity of this is tantamount to a white person going around the United States of America saying, “We as white people, have done a lot for the emancipation of slaves. Black people could not have done it without white people.”
It is unfortunate that such narratives are still tolerated and promoted all over the country. The idea that the oppressor and the liberator are the same people is abominable and is colonial in its essence, it has implications to the idea of a “Brahmin Burden” with parallels to the concept of a “White man’s burden”.
In reality, any form of meaningful change can materialize only if the call for change comes from the lowest rungs of the society. While looking at the success story of the region of Kerala, I have always ascribed its achievements in bringing about manumission to its downtrodden people in the scale that it could, to the fact that most of its reformers belonged to underclass communities.
But when it comes to the rest of the country, even today, most of the intellectuals who speak about or against caste inequalities would belong to upper-caste communities themselves. I cannot help but doubt if this could lead to any concrete realization or optimal upliftment of the lower-caste identity.
The Lower-Caste Identity.
I was in a moral conundrum as to whether or not I should utter the statement that I am “lower-caste and proud”. I have an urge to say this, but considering how unnatural and demeaning the entity of caste is, I question if there is anything to be proud of in belonging to any caste group whatsoever. On the other hand, I wonder if I am only able to make a choice about this because of the meagre privileges I can afford due to the fact that I was born in the state of Kerala, whose socialist liberal ethos has fostered a form of economic equality unattained by any other place in the country. Most others of similar social stature might not have this privilege and live overwhelmed by the wretchedness and ignominious shame of being born lower-caste.
While there is nothing to be proud of in belonging to any caste group, I am of strong conviction that no one has the right to claim themselves to be completely “casteless” in a nation where a part of the population is oppressed by it and the other part attaches their respective caste nomenclatures to their own names like ornaments, as if it defines their very personalities.
However, it is absolutely crucial that the shame associated with being born lower-caste is purged, so as to uplift the self-image of those people. In order to do so, the people of the nation has to cease projecting these communities as integrally “weak” and “vulnerable” entities and view them as the distinct cultural entities that they really are. It is always important to remember that each caste-community or ethnicity of India would have differences in the scale that any two races of the world would have. Their unique histories, heritage and both stories of oppression and resilience against oppression have to be heard, talked about and accepted as integrally Indian values and patrimony.
If the locus of India’s cultural and civilizational values does not shift from the Savarna-Brahmin echelons to that of the majority, each new section of society that overcomes caste hierarchies would sooner than later transfigure themselves into Neo-Brahmin entities, seeking upward social mobility through upper-caste emulation.
It is very common in Kerala for people of my parents’ age from middle-class backgrounds, to point to the thriving Christian and Muslim population of the province and make statements like, “Look at how devout they are, how often they go to churches and mosques, no wonder why they are so united and strong!” and associate all that is wrong with middle-class Hindu youth today with our impiety and the reluctance to attend services at temples.
To this, I always retort that it was never in the cultural DNA of middle-class (non-Upper caste) Keralites to be a part of any religious communion whatsoever, simply because of the fact that all of the non-Brahmin communities were marked Untouchables in Pre-Renaissance Kerala, that is, at least until the 1950s.
However, the Keralite reaction to the exclusion from religious rights was remarkable. It led to the revival and wider acceptance of the parallel systems of believes and worship, a set of Rebel Gods who were conceived in the imagination of the downtrodden people, deities who, like the devotees themselves, came from the lowest rungs of Hindu belief systems and folklores, gods that the underclass could actually relate to.
Those belief systems were unpretentious and Dionysian in its scale and unapologetically celebrated heathenness, profanity and even being openly sexual. But surprisingly, these entities later found space, albeit marginally, alongside temples and more conventional spaces of devotion, and even though they receive eye-rolls from the self-righteous bourgeoisie, the Rebel Gods are worshipped even today all over the state in many middle-class households.
If one looks close enough, similar cultures of resistance could be found all over the nation, although they are more than often sidelined and ignored as socially undesirable. Given that Hinduism as an organized entity, is an exclusively upper-caste religion and mainstream Hinduism in particular is almost completely synonymous with Brahminism, it is my opinion that, in order for the lower-castes to properly reclaim their rights and identities, they must first refuse to be enamored by upper-caste systems of worship and ritualism.
It is a rather sacrilegious opinion of mine that (reflecting on what William Blake said about John Milton*) the lower-castes were always the people of the “Devil’s party without knowing it.” In a world where children are taught to imagine demons like the BIPOC and angels like the fair Aryan people or in an Indian context, where, in popular representations, the Asuras are made in the image of archetypal South Indians or lower-caste people and the Devas (Gods) in the image of Indo-Iranian North Indians, it is time to discard the politically charged binaries that curtail the very scope of human perceptions. It is important to remember that the lines between the binaries of God vs Devil, Good vs Bad or Masculine vs Feminine, have all been defined and influenced by the historically dominant party. It is usual for the Gods to be hijacked by the people in power in order to give divine justification to their rule. In case of Hinduism, by the virtue of religious sanctions, the religion itself became almost synonymous with its caste hierarchies.
As long as the majority of the people of India feels the need to masquerade their cultural identities and appropriate upper-caste culture to feel like they belong in the general society, the culture of Anti-Brahminism, as propounded by leaders like Ambedkar and Periyar, will retain its significance.
India is an incredibly diverse country, but it is also one of the most racially intolerant, casteist and Islamophobic. In order to understand this paradox, one must look at the nation through the eyes of its minorities, the people who really make it special, but who are also at the receiving end of things.
The title is my rendition of George Orwell’s famous quote from Animal Farm (1945), “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
William Blake’s notorious comment on Paradise Lost (1608–1674) by John Milton: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when he wrote of Demons and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”
Your discomfort in reading this, is expected to be in direct ratio to your privileges. Enjoy!
India is an incredibly diverse country, but it is also one of the most racially intolerant, casteist and Islamophobic. In order to understand this paradox, one must look at the nation through the eyes of its minorities, the people who really make it special, but who are also at the receiving end of things.
(The pictures and the text on this post tell parallel stories of India’s diverse communities.)
Theyyam, Northern Kerala. An art form whose performers obtain a divine stature while playing it but are Untouchables in real life. Credits: Adithyan T. S.
With #BlackLivesMatter movement sending ripples across the world and a pandemic that has brought the world to a standstill, 2020 might be the right time to reassess what our civilizations have become.
While I was impressed by the vehemence of the Americans as they stood by their underprivileged citizens, the manner in which my own country, India, treated its minorities started appalling me.
There is apathy in India, as millions of migrant laborers started walking 1000s of miles to get back to their homes after the unexpected coronavirus lock-down left them helpless. It was an exodus of a bleeding, exhausted and abandoned people.
I am afraid that this crisis was not a simple matter of poor management, it was rather a neglect of human life, a neglect born out of centuries of casteism, racism and Islamophobia that still dominate the Indian psyche.
In fact, India was recently ranked as one of the most racially intolerant nations in the world by a study published by the Washington Post and as an Indian, I will testify for its authenticity.
Kochi, a quaint city, is the cultural melting-pot of central Kerala. Photo Credits: Halo Highness.
I was born in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Despite the fact that it is the most literate and educated region in the whole country, the sort of subtle prejudices, biases and discrimination that I have faced, witnessed and observed myself while living there, have always disconcerted me while also making me worry about the larger picture in the country.
But what is really alarming is that all this, is in a nation with a demographic composition of thousands of unique ethnicities, languages, cultures, races and religions.
Rajasthan, Western India, is a state renown for its scintillating castles and palaces.Hawa Mahal, Jaipur. Photo Credits: Siddharth Meena
India is truly mindbogglingly diverse. But then, all I had heard of its fascinating ethnic minorities are stories told from the perspective of a tourist or a privileged person who was rich enough to access it. So, it was usually riddled with stereotypes and valued by their photo-worthiness.
It was clear to me that if I were to truly understand the paradox of this nation’s diversity, I need to look at things from the perspective of the minorities, the people from far corners of the country, the people who truly make the nation special.
It was with the hope of being with and getting to know at least some of India’s diverse communities, that I moved to India’s buzzing capital city, Delhi.
THE CHANGES
Delhi is the kind of a place that pops up in one’s head when one thinks of India, with its crowded narrow streets, the heat, the overwhelmingly huge population and the ever congesting living spaces of common people.
India’s capital city is also a good example of how essential Islamic culture is to whatever it is that we call Indian culture today. It has a thriving and vibrant Muslim community whose influence on the city’s lifestyle is remarkable.
A view of Old-Delhi from the top of Jama Masjid, the largest Mosque in India.
Also, the Mughal legacy has left an irresistible incarnadine on the cityscape of Delhi, on its minarets, mausoleums, tombs and uncountable ruins and forts dotted all over it. The Old-World charm of the Jama Masjid, the Chandni Chowk or the thoroughfares of Old Delhi is alluring and its appeal is unmatched by any other part of the city.
But when 3 months ago, a riot targeted at Muslims in north-west Delhi left 54 people dead and 100s scarred, it was a revelation of the nation’s capability for self-destruction.
And to complicate things even more, the nation has a Hindu nationalist government in power, a government of brash braggadocio and rhetorical strongmen, and under them, India is going through an identity crisis, one unlike any it has faced since independence in 1947.
A child who belongs to one of the Nomadic communities of the The Thar desert. Photo Credits: Siddharth Meena.
Under this new government, there have been unprecedented changes in the reality of the country in the last few years.
Even in Kerala, the only state where the ruling party could not win even a single seat, organizations aimed at Hindu consolidation have been mushrooming. And suddenly, the middle-class, most of whom, would not have been allowed into temples a few decades ago, started feeling less “Hindu” without the ritualistic appendages and validation of Aryan upper-caste authority.
In Delhi, caste and communal lines are deepening. What had been a vibrant city with influences of cultures from all over the country, it is becoming more of a battleground for a few dominant castes vying for socio-political superiority. Its prestigious educational institutions, some of the finest in the country, have been threatened, its students manhandled by police and tagged anti-national.
I must say that the entire time I stayed in Delhi, I got along only with the minority communities there or with people who, like myself, had come from different parts of the country. And as we became a minority within a minority, we got to witness and experience the communal polarization, the prospect of Aryan domination and also how deeply the society was affected by the universal bane of all societies: racism.
“THE WHITE SUPREMACIST” INDIA
Racism is something that is barely talked about in this country. India as a racist nation is perhaps inconceivable to most of its citizens which could partly be due to its colonial history, when we were at the receiving end of things. But that history is long gone and in the new India, it is high time for us to evaluate whether we have gone from being the victims to the perpetrators of racism.
Today, there is a broad “scale of desirability” when it comes to the races of India. And depending on where you are placed on that scale, you would either condescend to or look up to certain communities. The Aryan races of the North are at the very top of this scale. And in a way, they seem to be practicing a form of Neo-Brahminism on their darker skinned, more indigenous, Southern Indian counterparts who belong to the Dravidian race.
Shaanba Arambam comes from the Manipur state of North-East India. He is an under-graduate student at the prestigious University of Delhi. Living outside his home region, he has had very mixed experiences like rest of the diaspora.
“In order to be called an Indian, we, the people of North-East, should never feel the need to masquerade or give up our cultures and identity.”
Shaanba Arambam, Manipur, India.
“On one hand, it is demeaning that the mainlanders exoticize or indulge us in their sympathies. On the other hand, there have been instances when our people were spat upon, assaulted and belittled with racial slurs. I feel that the same air of superiority is evident in both cases.” He shares.
The racism became particularly pronounced during the pandemic. After the virus arrived in India, it was not long before reports emerged of the North-Easterners being called “Coronavirus”. Similar incidents took place even in the highly ranked colleges in Delhi and elsewhere.
“I cannot deny that we feel alienated from the rest of the country, both physically, due to the mountainous and sequestered nature of the North-Eastern topography, and culturally due to the fact that the mainland Indians assume that they have the final authority on what being an Indian should be like.” Shaanba adds.
“In a country as diverse as India, this ought to never be the case. No one should have the right to question the food habits, the lifestyle and the values of another culture. Instead of trying to culturally emasculate every region that looks and feels different, the rest of India should try to recognize them for the unique contributions they make to the nation’s social wealth.”
However, Shaanba feels that the worst is over. The North-East is no longer overwhelmed by military conflicts and separatist movements that used to be the norm once. But the region has a long way to go before they gain an equal footing with the rest of the country.
But in the land of Untouchability, with its residues still ingrained in people’s minds, equality could be a privilege of the few. The racism that Indians refuse to acknowledge is compounded and complimented by the Casteism that most Indians privately celebrate.
It would be no exaggeration if I were to say that as an Indian, everything from your social status and values, to your aspirations, to your occupation and even your sexuality could be dictated by the almighty social force of caste and by extension, your race.
Even today, the servants at your home or the people who do the menial or hard physical labor would mostly, if not always, belong to a darker skinned lower-caste community. Those people are still forced to take up their traditionally assigned roles that their ancestors undertook.
Moreover, the nation’s caste based endogamy effectively makes sure that these divisions would remain alive for centuries to come.
The Vendor Cart is a symbol of India’s micro-commerce. They could be found everywhere in the country, selling anything from groceries, to trinkets to local delicacies. Photo Credit: Adithyan T. S.
By the virtue of its social structures, India might have become an exploitative Capitalist machine and the addition of the caste system to its foundations, constructively ensures that the perpetually oppressed will remain oppressed forever. As the nation moves on in its break-neck speed of development, the socioeconomic inequality makes sure that the lower-castes would have to remain to clean up after everyone else.
I believe that in order to properly address the question of castes, one must first acknowledge the politics in the larger racial composition of India.
There is an overarching racial divide between the Indo-Aryan races of the North and the Dravidian races of Southern India even today. The former is considered to be the more desirable one and assumes an air of superiority over the latter, by the virtue of the whiter tone of their skin, which is after all, the universal indicator of racial worth.
There is something supremely ironic about the fact that an entire sub-continent of colored people discriminate against each other on the basis of their perceived shades of “fairness”. It is even comical in a certain way. But the manner in which it affects the lives of its inhabitants is no laughing matter.
Everything from a person’s physical desirability to their social stature could be measured and judged by the color of their skin. In Bollywood or any other Indian film industry today, there is an almost complete absence of dark-skinned actors except for playing nefarious roles. In fact, Indian film industries have a culture of bringing in African actors to play particularly fiendish characters who would be ultimately defeated by a fairer skinned hero.
Moreover, the people belonging to the lower-caste communities are much more likelier to have a darker complexion than their higher-caste counterparts, which gives the society the opportunity to socially stratify someone the moment they see them.
A Fisherman. They are suppliers for South India’s favorite seafood based cuisine, but are looked down upon by the general society, like most handlers of meat and fish products are, just because they don’t fit in the top of the caste pyramid. Photo Credits: Halo Highness.
The racism in the North-South divide later conflates with the caste system and their delicate blend cascades down into the society. The perfect example of this cascading effect could be observed in the treatment of Africans in India.
The small African community in India, along with the international students from the African continent, face some of the nastiest forms of discrimination anywhere in the world.
In Delhi, there have been instances when they were assaulted and even murdered in and around Noida and the National Capital Region, they are viewed as drug-dealers and debauchees, African women are subject to daily instances of lewd and salacious behavior from strange men and there are chances you would not even make a friend in the country during your time here.
Meanwhile, there is almost no meaningful discourse on racism in the country. When asked about it during a discussion in Aljazeera news channel, Tarun Vijay, a former member of the parliament, denied racism exists in India by saying: “If we were racist, why would the entire South — you know the Tamils, you know Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra — why do we live with them? We have blacks, black people around us…”
His statement reveals how potent the racial biases that separate the nation’s two regions really are. If that came from a parliamentarian, how could anything different be expected from the larger populace? It also tells us how the standards of “Indianness” are always determined by the North-Indians. They tend to assume the power to dictate what makes someone Indian and what does not.
Moreover, they retain a deliberate ignorance or a complete disregard for anything related to South India. For them, the entire South is simply Madras and all south Indians “Madrassis”, which is ironically the very names the British used to call South India and its people during the colonial rule.
This lop-sided power structure became more problematic when the Aryans started questioning the food habits, sartorial choices and lifestyles of other communities across India. It became dangerous, when religion was brought into the mix. Today, as the ruling party endeavors to create a unified Hindu identity through legislations like the beef ban and a culture of upper-caste emulation, India is witnessing the promotion of Aryan culture as the standard of not just the national identity, but the identity of Hindu religion itself, in order to consolidate most Hindus under a common Aryan-Hindu identification, with very little appreciation for the nuances between various ethnicities.
AN ANTI-MUSLIM INDIA
However, I strongly believe that it is impossible for India to ever truly become a “Hindu nation” as the ruling party envisions. The differences between the component castes and ethnicities of the Hindu religion are too vast and the community itself is too divided for this to be possible.
But what the party can do, is to create an Anti-Muslim India, because unfortunately, an inherited skepticism of the Islamic religion is something that most non-Muslim Indians share. I suppose, it has always been there, and is now being harnessed and exacerbated by the ruling party for creating their version of India and they expect all Hindus to either accept or watch in silence, as they culturally, socially and politically debilitate the nation’s Muslims.
I am hopeful that this wont be the future of the country, but one can never rule out its possibility. During the time I have lived in India, I have personally known people whose mindset towards Muslims ranges from baseless suspicion (“why should they have too much religious education? what are they being taught there in Madrassas?”) to outright hatred (“Uncontrollably rising Muslim population is the Judgemental Flood that Hindu and Christian mythologies are predicting.”).
While the latter is a minority, the former thoughts are shared and perpetrated by an alarmingly large and increasing chunk of population, irrespective of their education levels or age. This is despite the fact that every non-Muslim Indian would be personally in good terms with individual Muslims.
I shall say no more about the Muslim experience in India except for giving you the testimonial of Asma Khanam who hails from Old Delhi:
“Modern India, with its new government now in 2020, is becoming a toxic place for Indian Muslims. People of our community get mob lynched almost daily and it is becoming the normal. The discrimination seems to be increasing everyday, the situation getting worse every second. Given that the majority of the Muslims in India are illiterate, poor, underprivileged and persecuted second class citizens, there is no way out, it is all a shout in the void.
Having a father who is an epitome of how they identify a Muslim, knowing he is gonna go for work and worrying if he is going to come back or if he is getting discriminated against is heart-wrenching.
I love my country, its diversity, the cultures and traditions it breeds, the places, the climate and the people around me who make me feel like an unapologetic Indian Muslim. But when it comes to the living situation, things change; it is becoming difficult to understand that even a small number of people hate me for the sole reason that my beliefs are different from theirs.
“I feel like I grew up in a different India, but am living in a different one.”
Asma Khanam, Old Delhi, India.
Living in a country like India, people always have something to learn from you, and you have so much to explore out of even your own culture. People are most of the time, curious about your traditions, particularly during the festive seasons, because, being a minority, you are usually one of a kind in your social group.
Muslim cuisine in Delhi, usually called the Mughlai food, is a delicacy which people from different communities enjoy. An extended timeline of Muslim emperors, have built many mosques, shrines, and tombs all over India, like the Jama Masjid, Fatehpur Sikri, and the UNESCO World Heritage Site, Humayun’s Tomb, which have all contributed a unique flavor to the larger heritage of the country.
Monuments like this one, built by Nabobs (local rulers) , dot the map of North and Western India. Photo Credits: Siddharth Meena.
However, the people who actually encourage, appreciate and benefit from this diversity and have intercultural exchanges are only a minuscule part of the population.
Urdu is the mother tongue of most Muslims in India, but the language is dying. Many Urdu professors and enthusiasts believe that the teaching and learning of the language is getting difficult in India with time, due to dwindling resources. It is a beautiful language that has to be protected at all costs.
But, with the rising culture of intolerance and intensifying hatred, openly professing our identity has become a crime. My father is an Indian businessman and in his entire experience, the business has never gotten this bad. Now, the discriminatory behavior is obvious and showcased openly.
Being targeted by the mainstream media, the government, the fascists and everything else that comes with them, losing friends over politics or discovering the hatred buried in them, the way history that has nothing to do with you is dug up and blaming you for it are all torturously depressing.”
India is a nation with an immense potential, but without scope for meaningful inter-cultural exchanges or if underlying social biases are not acknowledged and resolved, what could be its greatest asset could also turn into a self-destructive force.
It is absolutely essential that we foster a generation free of the prejudices that riddle the psyche of the previous one. Photo Credits: Adithyan T. S.
India’s diversity has to cease being something that only a privileged few can access and experience. Otherwise, its various communities would have to face discrimination for being different and be exoticized as something foreign or, given the Indian obsession for hierarchizing oneself, even become persecuted entities who would forever be looked down upon by more privileged sections of the society, in order to feel better about themselves.
It is time for Indians to demystify the very idea of India and see the nation for what it has truly become. But instead, if the nation retains its complacency and neutrality to the plight of its minorities, the ideals of “unity in diversity” that were preached to us since we were young, might turn into the ghost of what the nation could have become.
Also by me:
ALL UNEQUAL ANIMALS
“The Brahmin Burden”
It is a sad truth that most revolutions and independence movements subside but simply by replacing one form of oppression by another. The pomp, songs, flags and vigor will all be soon appropriated by a new ruling class and symbols of liberation will later be held in sway over the proletariat as if they were imperial scepters….
the ROGUE MUSE 