As I lay face down on the physiotherapist’s table having a gruelling low back massage, Max the young guy who is in charge of my ‘case’ asked ominously, ‘we were talking about India last time but what about caste?’ I had a sense of déjà vu as Lata Mani’s classic 1990 piece, ‘Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception’ flashed across my consciousness. For those of who are not acquainted with this wonderful piece, which changed my politics forever, Lata experienced something similar as a PhD student in Berkeley (1988) while on the chiropractor’s table as he conversationally asked her ‘and what is your thesis about’. Lata says she froze because it was not a topic that she could have a conversation casually about on the chiropractor’s table and especially not with this man in particular. Her topic Sati or widow immolation in colonial India was not one that a white, middle class professional in Berkeley could converse about outside of the binary tropes modern/ traditional and western/eastern. Which is what transpired. Having asked her how it was going, her muffled reply it’s complicated, he proceeded to pontificate on the differences between the west (good, liberal, modern) and the rest (traditional, bad, illiberal) and to congratulate her because she was westernised and had a liberal education here at Berkeley.
Fast forward to 2019, thirty-one years later and we are still framed by the same discourses when talking about the fatal encounter of west with the east. My encounter was different from Lata’s in some senses because the power relations between my interlocutor and me have changed. I am an older more experienced woman negotiating everyday life between a small town in Germany and that of Amsterdam and the bigger world of international development; a world citizen. The gap between Max and me is no longer that of all-knowing, white, liberal male and his dumb, female, eastern counterpart. By all counts Max having asked me all sorts of questions about my background has accepted me as ‘cool’, which translated literally means I have his respect. But there is no empathetic intelligent way of talking about what ‘caste’ is like in India today with a young man from a small town in Germany who is programmed by these tropes, and that too face down on the physiotherapist’s table.
I could have said I don’t want to talk about it but alas my ‘bhadra’ upbringing was in the way. It was rude said my conscience to put this young man off. So I began like Lata with – it’s complicated – and then searched for sentences in German that would steer the explanation clear of the tradition/modern dichotomies. I tried to steer it towards discrimination and the need for change, the fact that although the law does not allow it, discrimination persists nevertheless because of deep-rooted fissures in the community. And although I tried to steer away from the traditional/ modern trope in trying to come to grips with this complicated explanation, Max in trying to engage with it had to use the codes that he understands to help him decipher the complexity. So it was without my wanting it that urban/modern India somehow was less castetist and rural/ traditional India persisted in the practice of caste. So to be modern/ urban/ western would be the answer to the problem of caste; the superiority of the west was thereby confirmed. I didn’t even try to explain the historical processes through which caste was consolidated or that caste is ever present. Nor did I talk about the present resurgence of violence as a marker of caste. My time was up and it required far more fluency in the language than what I was capable of.
Lest one thinks that this only happens in the encounter between east and west I need to point out that this happens all the time in our encounters in the so-called east or south. The same tropes and dichotomies haunt our encounters as we try to separate out who is with us and who against. With devastating consequences, I want to add, in India today. Here the trope is reversed and reads as follows: Hindu/ traditional/ eastern/ authentic/ superior vs secular/ modern/ alien/ western/ bad. It allows for trolling, Muslim bashing; low caste lynching and murder; and the complete intolerance of pluralism.
It allows for justification of murder as I learned with horror some time ago. I was invited by my cousin, who like me migrates every year to Calcutta in winter (from Los Angeles), to have a family lunch where among others the new son-in-law of another cousin was present. I had not met this guy and didn’t know him well enough. Among the things we talked about between cousins who rarely meet was also the whole toxic atmosphere in the country and the attack against Muslims and Dalits. I cited Modi’s[i] record of overseeing the murder of hundreds of Muslims on his watch as the CM of Gujrat. The young man, the son-in-law, hitherto a somewhat colourless entity suddenly showed his colours. He jumped to justify the killings in Ahmedabad as a fitting answer to what had happened at Godhra by which he meant that Muslims had been responsible for setting fire to the train carrying Hindu pilgrims. My naïve response was to retort: is it possible that citizens can kill other citizens in retaliation? What about citizen’s rights, human rights and what about the duty of the state to protect rights? He felt no qualms in insinuating that rights exist only in my ‘westernised’ imagination. What he meant is that I was out of touch. End of conversation! And because I was ‘westernised’ my opinion did not count; killing Muslims was okay in authentic India. I somehow eat a mouthful, fled the gathering and suffered from acute indigestion the rest of the day. The sadness and anger that I felt has not yet left me.
If anything it has got worse. In January this year my friends and I went to the Apeejay literary festival that was organised in Park Street in Kolkata. I didn’t have my car that day and so to travel to the centre from the South my friend who loves being driven in friends’ cars (we could have taken a taxi) invited one of his friends who I did not know to come along. I was told that he was a famous cancer specialist in the city. We went to this particular event because the authors and commentators of this book launch event were a special attraction in that they were all Indian Muslims and the theme was secular India. As we arrived at the event Dr. Farookh Abdullah was still speaking and the audience would not let him go. It was fascinating listening to him still hanging on to Indian secularism and Kashmiriyat. We then stayed to listen to the next speaker who had written a book of his experience of arriving in Ahmedabad as the army head sent to quell the riots in Ahmedabad city when Modi was the Chief Minister[ii]. We were so aghast by this presentation (more so because he kept repeating that he had written about facts and not about politics) that my friend and I kept talking about it till this strange doctor who had not exchanged a word with us suddenly piped up, yes but they should remember Godhra. He did not end there but went on later to argue that Hindus kill to shield their families and Muslims because….well they were Muslims and murderous. Faced with this utterly preposterous statement I mumbled, ‘I thought you were a man of science (being a doctor)’. But apparently it’s okay today to say anything -unreasonable as it may be – and be heard.
For those of you who are not from India please don’t give up and stop reading because you need to look around at the discursive encounters you are experiencing and recognise that these tropes of ‘othering’ are ubiquitous. They are everywhere today perhaps not in the same way as in say India. Some are just plain funny and others not but all of them are about power and politics, the power of discourse. Trump supporters dismiss his blatant and dangerous untruths as the conspiracy of the ‘fake news’ media in combination with the Washington, liberal elite. Similarly in Britain today Johnson garners support for Brexit by casting Parliament and Europe as the enemy of the people. In Uganda a kill the gays bill is in the offing uniting the ‘real’ Africans against the ‘westernised’ lobby of international agencies and their national representatives. And in all these cases what the powerful and moneyed seek to obscure is their own misdeeds. So the suffering majority is kept busy with this murderous game of ‘othering’ discourses while their life gets worse and more dangerous.
And for those of us feminists from the south, we are used to being dismissed as ‘out of touch’ westernised idealists. We have a new version of this ‘othering’ now and one that reconfirms the western/ modern/ good vs local/ traditional/ retrogressive trope in the guise of the gender experts in international development. It seems that the problem of gender inequality has to do with the ‘norms’ and traditions in developing countries; international development agents have to rescue women through the gender aware programmes they run in a new rendition of the colonial enterprise. All the while the injustice of international development and the sheer lack of redistributive politics remains hidden.
So my call to you is to use the medium that you are best at to defeat or at least to puncture these hegemonic discourses and to use your interactions politically to plant seeds of doubt and posit alternative discourses. We cannot defeat hegemonic discourses with more rationality and so-called facts because facts and evidence are somewhat elastic. One has to fearless enough to engage people’s hearts. As Toni Morrison wrote about the role of artists which applies to us all who think differently from what is becoming mainstream:
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal”.
October 2019
[ii] Ahmedabad city is the capital of the western Indian state of Gujarat where in 2002 there were major riots and a pogrom against Muslims when Narendra Modi was the Chief Minister of the state. The burning of a train in Godhra (also in Gujarat) on 27 February 2002, which caused the deaths of 58 Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya (pilgrim spot for Hindus), is cited as having instigated the violence.
Although the Supreme Court of India cleared Modi of complicity in 2012, reports by human rights organisations clearly showed that he condoned the violence and that the riots and subsequent pogrom against Muslims was engineered by the his political party with help from allied Hindu organisations. Besides the enormous cost in human lives these series of incidents fractured the syncretic nature of life in Ahmedabad and other cities where ancient Muslim pilgrim spots have co-existed alongside others.
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