Towards That Indian Identity

In 2012, the G u a r d i a n newspaper and the BBC ran a story about naked women from the Andamanese Jarawa tribe dancing before foreign tourists for food. While the outrage this triggered, both in India and Britain, soon died a quiet death, it brought into sharp focus, yet again, the age-old policy conundrum of whether a “hands off eyes on” tribal policy of protection and benevolent non-interference should, or even can be, an alternative to mainstream assimilation. Are Andaman’s Jarawa and North Sentinelese tribals, living in their distant forest ‘reserves’, not Indian citizens? If so, what happens to their voting rights, or again access to the public distribution system, healthcare, housing, education, economic opportunities and so on? Who are ‘we’ to decide that ‘they’, who live deprived, dispossessed and generally marginalized lives in their tribal ‘reservations’, should instead be given the ‘freedom’ to continue with their old ‘way of life’, something that a cynic could describe as being tantamount to the ‘right to die’. The alternative seems to be exemplified by the 2012 incident – the natives of the Jarawa Reserve, or at least some of them who could, danced naked during what the media called a ‘human safari’, for survival!

Cut to our mainland with its bewildering array of ‘special status’ States and burgeoning sub-national identities, the ‘Kashmiriyat’, the ‘Punjabiyat’ and the ‘Marathi Manoos’, again to name just a few. Here, assimilation into what is commonly referred to as the ‘national mainstream’ is often vigorously resisted, be it on grounds of language, religion, region, gender, age or caste, again not a comprehensive list I’m sure. To what may loosely be described as the ‘rest of us’, the prevailing perception oftentimes is that these are pressure groups with a focused aim of availing the benefits of being in the national mainstream, with constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of residence, movement, employment and enterprise throughout the territory of India, even while denying the ‘rest of us’, as referred to earlier, such liberties in equal measure. After more than seventy five years of being an independent republic, perhaps the time has come for us to explore the implications of being primarily ‘Indian’, without balking at the public unease that such an exercise seems to generate.

Let us begin with a basic question – does history afford us definitive examples of diverse populations fully, or even very substantially assimilating without at least some of the distinctive identities of the merging groups being lost in the amalgam? Surely, the very concepts of assimilation and clear distinctive identity are antithetical to each other and represent opposing currents. If we grant this premise, it follows with relentless logic that any effort to forge an assimilative national identity will bring in its wake the dilution, or even the disappearance, of some of the distinctive features of the diverse groups merging as one. Logical though such a conclusion may be, the liberal tradition has historically been in denial where the inevitability of loss of diversity is concerned. Rather, we have chosen a phrase that we hope serves to manage these opposites. We refer to our nation exhibiting ‘Unity In Diversity’, a veritable marriage of opposites!

Continuing with this marriage of opposites imagery for a little longer, let us now visualise what such a ‘marriage’ is likely to bring. Again, the commonsense answer that we would love to deny, even to our innermost selves, is that it is most likely to result in a struggle for dominance. Each party in this multipartner multifaceted union can be expected to try to reach an equilibrium in which its beliefs, values, interests and lifestyle, are secure and dominant. This is precisely what seems to underlie recurring instances of lingual, regional, gender or caste related strife. Our historical experience warns us that such strife is unending, a veritable ‘chakravyuh’ of circumstances from which, at first sight at least, there appears to be no way out.

Yet, perhaps, there may be a quiet and largely subsurface movement towards reconciliation and resolution of this quandary. To take one example from the arena of the languages, with our staggering 122 major languages and over 1300 distinct ‘mother tongues’, we find that there is a discernible demand for access to English, and hence ‘English Medium’ schools in many areas. This ‘political’ reality has prompted the powers that be in many States, even those vociferous in their abhorrence of English, to actively promote more of such schools, even some that are State run! Thus, traditional linguistic sparring notwithstanding, it seems that English, aptly perhaps our ‘link language’, provides a ‘neither yours nor mine yet ours’ compromise while we move forward towards common aspirations. Again, witness the strides made in the adoption of Hindi as a common language for general communication because of the acceptability of popular Hindi cinema nationwide. Available evidence strongly suggests that while Hindi road signs may have been blacked out during language agitations, the nonHindi speaking citizenry continued to watch Hindi films and listen to Hindi film songs, perhaps because they sought to attract and not impose!

Finally, expanding further on this ‘neither yours nor mine yet ours’ theme, inter-region, inter-faith and inter-caste marriages, despite the horror stories that sometimes emerge in this context, hold out cause for hope. We must remember here that the occasional mishaps reported, undeniably horrifying and outrageous though they may be, are far outnumbered by the unions with happy outcomes. Thus, while the purists and the politicians continue to bicker, we may well be witnessing a quiet revolution towards that ‘Indian’ identity, one characterised not by ‘Unity In Diversity’ but essentially by ‘Unity With Diversity’.

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY THE AUTHOR ARE PERSONAL

Anirban Mukhopadhaya, Retd. IAS officer