Until a few years ago it had never occurred that there are other countries that struggle with racism. From news footage I of course knew of “ethnic cleansing” and from history I knew antisemitism and xenophobia as abstract concepts. but until a friend of mine lived for a year in a foreign country, and returned with stories of how the citizens thought about and treated people from the countries next-door (and who’s cultural differences I couldn’t name with a gun pointed to my head) I had never thought really hard about how and why racism exists as an Idea that can get lodged in the consciousness of a country.

In the run up to the “Commonwealth Games” scheduled for the second half of next month here in Delhi, there have been a number of editorials in the dailys on how playing host to a large multi-sport competition will make India look to the rest of the world: a lot of put your best face forward, and tackle corruption while the spotlight is on, sort of stuff. One magazine decided that it would handle things from a different angle. M, local competition to GQ-India and FHM, decided to present a series of essays and photos that discussed the zeitgeist of a striving for modernity yet exasperating republic.

Below the author tackles both his current predicament of feeling like a foreigner in what should be his homeland; but also touches on a not-so-uniquely-Indian problem of how to cobble together a national Identity.

Including the Excluded

By Pradip Phanjoubahm

Are you an Indian? Where was the last time I heard this thrown at me? Difficult to remember, for there have been too many occasions. Not too infrequently and painfully, this is also the experience of most others from the Northeast when they travel abroad, or to the so-called ‘mainland’ India. Mainland? Well, North—east India is almost an island, connected to the rest of the country by just a twenty—and-something kilometer ‘Siliguri Corridor’, or the ‘chicken’s neck’ as this narrow strip of land is more popularly known. Indeed, for most in the North—east, the existential question ‘Who am l?’ has to be renegotiated the day he or she crosses this corridor.

I am reminded of a classic story. Some years ago, one of our reporters was invited to Bangkok for a three—day workshop on climate reporting. He reached the hotel a day in advance, and with religious punctuality, arrived at the conference hall for the opening session, The meeting, however, did not begin for long after he completed the registration formalities. The organizers, it seemed, were waiting for another participant. When he inquired, one of them apologetic calmly told him that they were waiting for an Indian participant to reach the venue.

Ten minutes later, when the Indian man (or woman) still did not turn up, our reporter began to have a nagging suspicion that they could be waiting for somebody who may already be at the venue. He was not wrong. When he asked the organizers how many Indians were participating at the conference in the first place, it turned out there was only one. A look of surprise, a recheck of the attendance register and a hearty laugh later, the meet began. This happened in Bangkok, and therefore evoked nothing more than a hearty laugh. Had a similar thing happened in New Delhi, which is not an impossibility, the hurt and alienation caused would understandably have been much deeper.

The much talked about ghettoization of communities from the Northeast in New Delhi and other Indian metropolises is indeed not just a matter of the northeasterner preferring the security of a Northeast ghetto, but equally one of his or her being pushed into it. For many middle-class young men and women in Manipur, especially among the Hindu Meites who have grown up amidst a devout Vaishnav culture, the question ‘Who am I?’ normally begins troubling them at the college-going age - the time when their parents send them away in pursuit of higher studies to the better political and academic climes of other Indian states. Till then, most would have had no problem in believing themselves to be Indians, by definition as well as culture, without having ever felt the need to reflect on what it means to be an Indian.

They would hence cheer for the India an hockey and football teams without reservation. Cricket is a little alien, although its fan following is on the rise thanks to television and the game’s new packaging. They would celebrate Holi and Durga Puja and other Hindu festivals, and also know that they share these faiths with a lot of others in other parts of India, establishing, in this way, a sense of a loose national community. Unlike other ethnic groups in the region, a good majority of whom are Christians, their sense of a letdown when they discover there is more to the Indian identity then they believed, is peculiar. Needless to say, many end up embittered.

Just to give a sense of Manipur’s demographic profile, the Meiteis are one of three major ethnic groups of the state; They are predominantly Hindus, although seven percent of them are Muslims and an unspecified percentage follows the original pre-Hindu animistic faith of Sanamahi, now given new life by a strong revivalist movement in the 1960s and ’7os. (The percentage of Sanamahi followers will be known after the current Indian census exercise, which has allowed them to enter ‘Sanamahi’ as their religion, although today, it must be said, this faith has become somewhat an extension of Hinduism. The fact that Hinduism is not a structured religion has helped in this.) The other two major groups are the Nagas and Kukis, who are today almost a hundred percent Christian. (This followed the proselytizing path opened

115 years ago by the pioneering and revered American Baptist missionary William Pettigrew.) Their sense of aleinatiation to the idea of India is (or at least was) a substantially different equation. politic secular, is culturally still predominantly the land of the Hindus, or Hindustani. In modern times, Hindu nationalist political parties.,by trying to give this cultural identity a political use, have only accentuated this belief.

Not so much In Mipur, but a good majority of the Nagas in Nagaland, for instance, would even today say they are not Indians. But then there would have to be finer distinction made here. The ‘Indian’ that the Nagers in Nagaland say they are not Las an imagined ethnic category and not a citizenship status. So when a Nagger says he is not an Indian, more than citizenship, he means he is not a non-mongoloid, Dravldo—Aryan, generally dark-skinned plainsman, which he believes is the ethnic profile of an Indian. In Manipur, there is a separate category for the plainsman Indian - Mayan. A Meitei, Kuki or Naga from Manipur hence wll say he is not a Mayang (obviously), but wall have less trouble calling himself an Indian, for Indian here signifies citizenship. This is also true of th other Northeastern states. In Mizoram, the word for Mayang is Val, In Meghalaya it is Dkhar etc. So am I, a Meitei from the Indian state of Manipur, an Indian? On the face of it, yes. I am a citizen of the secular republic called India. I fulfill all the obligations of being an Indian citizen and, in turn, enjoy all the benefits (although with some hiccups such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, AFSPA—1958) the Indian state guarantees its citizens. But the trouble is, being an Indian does not end here.

In fact, it only begins at this point. Quite to the contrary of what the republican Constitution of India says, ‘lndianmesn’ is often quite intuitively also projected as the state of belonging to a civilizational, historical and cultural stream. By this definition, to be Indian is a primordial state of being: Anybody can become an Indian citizen, but he cannot become an Indian, he has to be born as one. The case of the wide opposition some years ago amongst a good section of Indians to Sonia Gandhi emerging as a Prime Ministerial candidate is just one alibi. Quite ironically, even former Lok Sabha Speaker Puma Sangria, from Meghalaya, was one of the staunchest campaigners against this possibility, and he had even resigned from the Congress party on this count. This was, perhaps, a demonstration of the psychological phenomenon of self-hate that Frantz Fanon explained in Wretched of the Earth, in which the oppressed identifies his own degradation in others in a similar predicament, and despises that image.

This 5ooo-year-old historical mainstream of Indian culture is what the Northeast has never belonged to. The image oft Indian man projected both abroad as well as in the country has little of the northeast, which is why our reporter in Bangkok and other overseas travelers from the region are called upon to apologetically qualify their claims of being Indians every time they hold out their Indian passports. This may be just another unfortunate fact that the North-east man has to get used to and not be too sensitive about, but he cannot also prevent the hardening of the deep sense that he is a different Indian, The North—east has always belonged to historical stream that have flowed separately, and if there has been a forced confluence it is thanks to British colonialism. which yoked them together for its own ends. Under such circumstances, and especially when the boundary between ‘Indianness’ and ‘Hinduness’ is sought to be thinned down through political overtones such as ‘Hindutva’, the North-east finds itself recoiling.

This fact of the northeast being distant from the ‘mainstream’ is evident in the familiar appeal to it, to ’join the mainstream’. The question is, how about widening the Indian mainstream so that Northeasters do not have to leave their streams to join the ‘mainstream’? They can then remain in their old streams and still be part oft ‘mainstream’. To be a proud Indian, politically and culturally, then would only mean to be proud of what you actually are. And to this there would be no dispute, there would be no resistance, for then there would be nothing to resist. Nation building would then not involve either leaving any stream or joining another ‘mainstream’. In one stroke, the excluded would have automatically become included.

(The author is editor of Impala Free Press)

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