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……
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 