By Deepa Majumdar
Decades have gone by since India won independence from the British Raj. While many of our current problems can be traced to the broad causative backdrop of colonialism and postcolonialism, surely not all of them. When one form of worldly power conquers another, the latter surfaces with its own share of historical debris. At this point in the history of India we must ask this question … who is the Ugly Indian? Not the anonymous group that has cleaned up Bangalore city with exemplary rectitude … nor the corrupt Indian and his petty scams … but the communal Indian willing to take the life of the “outsider” for fear of demographic extinction.
All identity politics lead to terrible travesties of self-knowledge, causing murder and mayhem in order to safeguard the identity. The problem begins with the very notion of the “I.” One characteristic of cold modernity is its power to reduce the “I” from the deep self to a peripheral, socially defined, historically bequeathed group identity. Such immanent, earthbound monikers are just that … they are monikers … or names, bequeathed from the outside. The gulf that separates a name from the one named, is the gulf that separates “identity” from “self.” Therefore, “identity” can never compare with the “self,” which rises like a wave, from the deep bowels of the soul.
Every “I” meets its fulfillment in a “we.” The more egoistic the “I” … the more superficial and collective it tends to be … they more it cleaves to clones of itself to form the “we” it needs to fulfill itself. Indeed, it is this miscarriage in self-knowledge that lies at the basis of many communal problems in the modern nation state of the Republic of India. Compared to cold modernity … where atomized individuals float around with loose, eroticized ties with one another, every human being reduced to the cinders of the self, each being, a cold consumer … the comfort of an “I” that draws itself from a “people” and its way of life from solid traditions … can hardly be denied. Thus it is understandable that the identity driven “I” (not the deep self) will seek to rest its head amidst the comfort of the long, historically bequeathed “we” that constitutes “the people.” All our existential terrors are mitigated when we stand upon the ground once owned by our ancestors and sing the songs they sang … eat the food they taught us to eat … wear the clothes they taught us to wear. Compared to the indifferent waves of the Invisible Hand, which clothes us in brand names and serves us processed food, making us strangers to one another, indeed, the “I” that belongs to the tribal “we” is very comforting.
And yet, every attachment to earthly name and forms … every miscarriage in self-knowledge … every refusal of the glorious universal Oversoul or divine Logos that binds all beings in a seamless whole … every such detour fills the heart with hatred towards the outsider … that being who does not fit into the “we.” After all, what is more just … and which is more urgent … the survival of the needy and the persecuted, or the preservation of a demographic identity? Which is the worse deed … entering India illegally because one is driven by hunger and fear, or making the children of illegal immigrants work in coal mines? Words like “encroachment” and “infiltration” are laden with the hatred that beclouds the soul when it is obsessed with setting up a barrier between “us” and “them.” Far more humane than the “we” drawn from a people is the “we” drawn from categories like race, class and gender. For these latter map across and connect different tribal groups. They force us to encounter our common humanity. We who are parents cannot help but feel compassion for the poor child of the illegal immigrant, forced by hunger to work in a coal mine. We who are women cannot help but feel compassion when the “alien” woman is raped. We who are poor, cannot help but feel the pangs of hunger in the belly of the destitute “outsider” … for we have no demographic identity to preserve.
As the world heads towards greater and greater utilitarian cosmopo-litanism, based on the global economy, the old, culturally fashioned “we” … in the form of the tribe, the clan, or the “people” … is perhaps heading towards obsolescence. Frightening as this may sound, it may be the reality to encounter in these times. India, which has withstood so many onslaughts in its long history, has perhaps never before encountered so worldly an intruder as global capitalism. The traditional means of forging a one out of the many, in the hallowed land mass of India, was always the profound experience of piety. If medieval Christianity forged Europe into a whole, with oblique rays of charity, then so did India … and for many more centuries perhaps. But because not every Indian is capable of piety … all the more in these consumerist times … we need a more plebeian means of unity. Yet, we could never imitate the European Union, nor the African Union. Formal militaristic alliances, or commercial ones could never forge India into a whole … but something else might. This “something else” is the Almighty Market. For with its encounter with global capitalism, India has been forced to encounter the Modern Market … a ubiquitous force, computerized, rational, ethical in its micro-foundations … and totally the converse of the raucous bazaar.
If piety forges us into a whole at the highest echelons of the Indian consciousness, perhaps the Market will forge us into a whole at the mundane level. The days of communal violence will be behind us when we are ruled by one solitary potentate … the mighty power of mammon. Far better to become indifferent consumers, driven by rational self-interest, and rooted in Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, than to kill desperate outsiders, stripping them of their humanity by reducing them to the level of vermin.