Perceptions of Otherness

About ten years ago, I was walking with a school-friend along a narrow lane in the city of my birth (a less circuitous way of putting this last phrase would simply be to say ‘my home-city’, but for the fact that the word ‘home’ has always had ominous connotations for me) when I blurted out, ‘This must be a Muslim area.’ To his question, ‘What makes you think so?’, I replied instantaneously, ‘I don’t think so, I feel so’. A few weeks later, I was on the North-East Express bound for Delhi when it got delayed for several hours at the rail-junction of Mugalsarai in the United Provinces (now, of course, called Uttar Pradesh; but I prefer the British term since it helps to further the illusion of unity). I was walking up and down the noisy platform for several hours when this brief conversation suddenly flashed across my mind, and I began to ponder over it. By the time the train moved into Delhi, I had begun to understand something of why I had felt that the locality had to be a ‘Muslim’ one. One of my mother’s closest friends was a Muslim lady who used to live in a highly congested part of the city criss-crossed with noisy long-winding alleys, and when I was in junior school, my mother often took me to her house which was itself rather dimly-lit (dimly-lit, that is, from the ‘normal’ perspective; given my ‘abnormalcy’, of course, I prefer to live in precisely such rooms). Unknown to myself, I had grown up with the perception that congested, shabby and dimly-lit areas are ‘Muslim’ ones, such that these socio-economic markers had become for me the identifying characteristics of a ‘Muslim’ zone. (This many years before I came across the word ‘ghetto’ or read about the Jewish ghettos in Europe.)

I was then in my second year of college at Delhi, and began, in an introspective turn, to turn my inner gaze onto whatever perceptions of otherness I might be harbouring within myself. I became acutely conscious of the various types of markers, socio-religious, socio-economic, and/or socio-cultural that are available as labels to ‘cut out’ the social world (what in technical terms is called the ‘social ontology’), or freeze its intractable messiness, into (ostensibly) neat (and usually binary) categories. To carry on with the ‘Muslim’ case, for example, during my time in the UK, quite often Muslim men passing me by on the street would greet me as ‘Brother!’, and this presumably because of my long beard. I would immediately return the greeting, though I would, at the same time, feel uneasy about the ‘reason’ why I had been marked out as ‘Muslim’. For these Muslim Brothers, keeping a long beard is apparently a distinctive (and supposedly decisive) mark of being a ‘Muslim’. (I suppose that my paternal grandmother, who is, for all practical purposes, an Islamophobe, would be horrified that her grandson has been perceived, and welcomed, as one of the Enemy.) Not only this, I always get into a spot of trouble at international airports : because of my ‘looks’ (an American friend at Cambridge once told me that I look somewhat like a starving Afghan refugee) and, in particular, my beard, I am subject to a special scrutiny, and on one occasion an intense interrogation was conducted at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi regarding why I was ‘re-entering’ India. (The passport official on that occasion should thank her stars that I saved her, and her ‘superiors’, a lot of trouble by forcefully keeping to myself the barrage of ironical replies I could have thrown at her. I really wanted to ask her if she would have put this question to Indira Gandhi herself when she was returning from Somerville College, Oxford.)

There are, of course, various types of historical ‘reasons’ for this perception of Muslims as the ‘others’, and this is not quite the place to rehearse them. Suffice it to say that the notion of Muslims as the descendants of marauders and invaders has descended (no pun intended) so deep into, or, to invert the spatial metaphor, ascended so high in, some forms of the ‘Hindu psyche’ that even Hindus who do not even know precisely where the Turks, the Huns, the Scythians or the Mughals came from are unanimous in their perception of Muslims as cherishing, deep under their skins, barbaric, ravenous and rapacious intentions. (As for myself, I would rather regard my presently-living paternal grandmother as a far more hostile and belligerent being than a Muslim friend simply because the latter’s remote ancestor six centuries ago happened to wield a sword in his hands.) Then, of course, there is the stock socio-cultural marker of food : the Muslims are the paradigmatic beef-eaters. The first time that I realised that Hindus do not eat beef was, in fact, as late (or as early?) as my tenth class in school when one of my aunts (who, perplexingly enough, is otherwise, to all intents and purposes, on quite friendly terms with the Muslim lady I referred to above) asked me not to date, or, to put it in less Americanised and more orthodox ‘Indian’ vocabulary, not to marry, a Muslim girl. On asking her the ‘reason’ for this interdict (for at that time, all girls somehow looked the same to me, and I was intrigued by the implication that it was possible, according to my aunt at least, to identify some of them as ‘Muslim’), I was told that Muslims are the ones who eat beef. For some reason, this spurred me on to find out more about Islam, and I was amazed to discover that what from an internal (what social anthropologists call emic) perspective is almost inconsequential to the self-understanding of Muslims themselves (for I myself soon encountered some Muslim friends who found beef tasteless) had been highlighted, from the external Hindu (etic in social anthropological terms) one, as the identifying marker of a ‘Muslim’. I began to ask practically every Hindu I knew precisely who s/he thought a Muslim was, and my irritation began to mount when I began to receive ad nauseam the same reply in the manner of an old gramophone record that had got stuck on one groove : ‘a beef-eater’. As moronic, I began to think, as ‘defining’ a Hindu as ‘a cow-worshipper’ : I would put down myself as ‘Hindu’ on a census report (even though I would actually prefer the Government of India not to ‘report’ my existence at all), but I can state in unequivocal terms that I am no worshipper of cows; indeed, to put the point bluntly, I have believed for a long time now that cows are some of the most superfluous entities on this planet and that instead of starving themselves to death on the Indian roads, in their attempt perhaps to emulate a Hindu ascetic, they should rather fill the bellies of emaciated men and women starving in the slums and elsewhere.

Another indicator of perceptual difference among Indians seems to be that of ‘colour’ : while I take it that not many Indians, because of the centuries of colonial experience, will be frank enough to admit this, ‘colour’ does play a vital role in ordering, classifying and evaluating the objects that constitute their social ontology. One of my earliest memories is, in fact, one of my paternal aunts commenting to another one : ‘We went to see a girl for him [that is, a cousin]. She is very fair-skinned, unlike the other one who was dark.’ This, of course, is no isolated incident, as anyone who reads the Times Matrimonials will know : almost every girl in its columns is either ‘fair-skinned’ or has a ‘wheatish complexion’. (Though I wonder if, for the rice-belt of India at least, the last phrase should instead be ‘ricish complexion’. It was, in fact, in these matrimonials, which as I always say, should be renamed patrimonials, that I first encountered the word ‘complexion’. On asking a friend in my college what sort of a complexion she thought I had, I had to satisfy myself with the somewhat obscure reply : ‘I think you have many complexes, yes, but otherwise you are rather complexion-less.’ Perhaps I was not ‘mature’ enough to understand that remark.) Again, it is symptomatic that millions seem to buy a so-called beauty cream that sells itself as ‘Fair and Lovely’ : apparently, it is not possible for an Indian woman to be the latter without being the former. Now, the perceptions of white as related to purity, innocence and spotlessness, and of black as signifying impurity, maliciousness and offensiveness are, of course, rooted in the classical (post-Vedic) Sanskritic literature. Sattva, the guna representing the ‘saintly’ qualities is associated with the white colour, and tamas which stands for the ‘hellish’ attributes is connected with the black colour. One can go off into all sorts of tangents from here, but I shall indicate only one, without entering into an extensive discussion on the matter. The term varna has been hotly debated by various scholars, and, in particular, by Dalit writers who argue that it should be translated as ‘colour’ such that the classical Hindu varna-asrama system is to be regarded as a ‘racist’ one. (Hence the notorious ‘fair-skinned’ Aryan versus ‘dark-complexioned’ Dravidian debate.) Whether or not this claim is valid, it does at least underscore the prevalence of various typologies of colour-association in the mental architecture of classical, and arguably ‘modern’, Hindu thought. Here are two instances. Some months ago, when I was in the ‘city of my birth’, one of my uncles put this question to me : ‘Are the Negros thieves and scoundrels?’ It took me several moments to recover from this question. For one, it was, as it so happens, the first time that I had encountered the word ‘Negro’ outside a novel, a documentary or a movie. And, for another, I was struck to realise how the White perception of Blacks as inherently aggressive, mendacious and violent had been transferred, through the invisible links that facilitate such cultural transfers of social perceptions, to my uncle far away in a corner of India. Perhaps he was unaware that his perception of the ‘Negros’ as hostile beings was, in fact, a neat (neo-colonial) replication of the British perception (though one with several outstanding exceptions) of the ‘Indian natives’ as such. (I wonder sometimes how the Kenyans and the Nigerians who study in the University of Delhi and elsewhere in India are ‘received’ by their landlords and classmates. I will not be surprised if the latter fear that the Motherland is being polluted by the presence of these ‘Negros’.) Again, some weeks ago, a cousin of mine sent me a text message on my cell which was a ‘SMS joke’ beginning with the question : ‘What did God say when he [a pronoun that was sufficient in itself to raise my indignation] created the first Negro?’ Perhaps for my cousin, this was an ‘innocent’ joke, and I too swallowed my indignation and took it in that ‘spirit’. At the same time, however, this led to me reflect on how certain perceptions are, depending variously on your lived experiences, are no ‘laughing matter’.

It was no laughing matter, for example, for some of the ‘Russians’ (I am using the umbrella-term here for the sake of convenience) at Cambridge who had gone, out of curiosity, to a musical called ‘Stalin’ at the Cambridge Arts Theatre which was, in some ways at least, a rather hilarious enactment of some of Stalin’s foibles. For me, who have access to only second-hand reports from books and documentaries about the spectre and the terrors of Stalinism, the musical was in some ways an ‘innocent’ jibe at Stalin. (And indeed, I am not sure that I was able to grasp all the allusions that it threw at the audience.) For the ‘Russians’, on the other hand, the events parodied in it were too close to their memories, and hence too direct and too painful, and were perhaps reminiscent of atrocities committed on their own near ones in the not too recent past. In other words, though we all have certain perceptions of otherness --- for such is necessarily the case unless we believe in the lazy slogan, ‘We are all the same in absolutely every way’, a slogan which, at first sight, seems to be very ‘inclusive’ but can rapidly turn out to possess ‘totalitarian’ implications by seeking to flatten out all distinctiveness into one homogenous ‘lump’ --- the perceptions that are acceptable to us depend vitally on what I have referred to here as the content and the nature of our ‘lived experience.’

For instance, one my greatest passions is watching World War II movies and documentaries (especially ones relating to the so-called Jewish Question), and I have, over the last eight years, absorbed such a voluminous amount of material relating to the Holocaust that today whenever I see the Hindu Swastika in a home, a hotel sign-board, a text-book, a taxi, an auto, or a T-shirt, a shiver of horror runs through my spine even though I am aware of its distinctive significance within the highly specific context of the Hindu socio-religious order. I am even more horrified when I see, every now and then, a young college-boy or college-girl sporting, apparently in the attempt to be ‘cool’, a T-shirt with the slanted, that is, the one slanted slightly towards the right, (Nazi) Swastika. What is even more ironic is that some of these students are from the North-Eastern part of India, and are what in the mainstream sociological literature are referred to (rather glibly) as the ‘tribals’. (Which itself is another perception of difference, this one between the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘margins.’ For who has delineated these ‘margins’? And where precisely is this ‘mainstream’?) As the ‘marginalized’ peoples of India, for such is often their self-understanding, surely they should be the last ones to brandish a symbol that stood for the marginalization, to the point of annihilation, of almost a third of European Jewry.

That leads me on to register another signifier of otherness : the rather mysterious category of the ‘tribal’. I do not remember precisely when but at some ‘point in time’ I did become vaguely aware that almost all the maid-servants who were employed in the house (note again that I do not say ‘home’; English is such a beautiful language which it comes to these subtleties) were ‘tribals’. (Now, of course, it is a bit clearer to me today than it was earlier why this was so : to put it concisely, ‘tribal labour’ is cheaper and more readily available than ‘mainstream labour’.) They all had, in the truly immortal words of one of my paternal aunts, the ‘tribal cut’, which, when translated into anthropological jargon, would read as : ‘possessing Mongoloid or Tibeto-Burman features’. I was rather intrigued that in the social perception of those in the ‘mainstream’, the tribals were supposed to simultaneously harbour contradictory features : on the one hand, they were supposed to be docile, shy, coy, quiet, pliant and pliable, but, on the other, they were also feared as dark, sinister, irascible, petulant, and hostile beings. Thus, as for the maid-servants, they were, on the one hand, praised (and prized) as hard-working, dutiful, respectful and obedient, but were also, on the other, viewed rather suspiciously as irresponsible, unreliable, vicious and resentful. Much later I was to realise that there are significant parallels between the perceptions of the Whites concerning the Blacks, of the colonial masters regarding the natives, and of the ‘mainstream’ relating to the ‘tribals’ : in each of these cases, the former re-present the latter as possessing contradictory characteristics, such that the Whites, the colonialists and the ‘mainstream’ respectively believe the Blacks, the natives and the ‘tribals’ respectively to be simultaneously docile and timid, on the one hand, and hostile and aggressive, on the other. Not that, I guess, many in the ‘mainstream’, especially the ‘educated’ ones among them, would be willing to admit their perception of the ‘tribals’ as people with split identities. Nevertheless, this ‘tribalism’ continues to be one of the most significant signifiers of difference, as exemplified in the delightfully precise remark of one of these aunts as to why she did not like the girl that one of her relations was ‘dating’ : ‘Everything is OK with her. But, then, she has the tribal cut.’

Some months ago, I went to visit my mother’s Muslim friend. The old house was gone, and two floors had been raised over it. The dimly-lit room too had disappeared, and all the rooms were now bright, well-lit, and freshly painted. Her (only) daughter had married a Hindu in the meantime. Had that not, to put it mildly, raised some eyebrows? In return, I was offered a most intriguing story about her ‘roots’ : one of her ancestors had been a disciple of the Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti at Ajmere. ‘We believe’, she went on to say, ‘that all these categories that we apply pertain only to the flesh, to the masks we wear, to these fragile structures that we carry around ourselves. But deep down, we are all the same.’ I would not quite phrase the matter in these precise terms (for, as I have noted above, the argument that we are ‘all ultimately the same’ has been used to justify totalitarian regimes which have denied, and suppressed, alterity and heterogeneity); I would rather say that there are no inherent marks or attributes that allow us to evaluate human beings in terms of the categories of ‘superior’ or ‘inferior’. Nevertheless, after a long time in my life, I felt, even if for a short while, that I not just in a building with four walls (a ‘house’), but also breathing an atmosphere that was neither hostile to genuine difference nor inhospitable to the search for a common humanity (a ‘home’) even in the midst of our seemingly radical dissimilarities.

Then, of course, after dinner at her place, I walked out into the streets of the city of my birth : the city whose roads are apparently filled with Muslims, Muslim girls, Negros and people with the ‘tribal cut’.