By Paramjit Bakhshi
At a lunch the other day, a lady was narrating the story of a recent marriage, between a Marwari boy and a Khasi girl. She highlighted the fact that this couple, with great mutual understanding had built two kitchens- a vegetarian kitchen for the boy, and a separate one for the girl, where non- veg food could be cooked. The question which came to my mind and which I asked was, “how do the couple kiss?” Everybody laughed because they thought I was being funny, yet nobody knew the answer. I was actually curious, and truly wondered, if the girl had to run to brush her teeth, every time they felt the urge to get intimate. My non imaginative mind could think of no other solution.
The story is illustrative of the barriers which limit interaction between communities. When two people belonging to different communities interact, they automatically define the boundaries of their interaction. Across communities, it is considered inappropriate, to question the norms that define the other person’s culture, because it often leads to conflict. Yet the fact remains that, it is people from outside our own communities, who can spot the quirks in our thinking more keenly. Left to ourselves we often defend our societal attitudes – irrational though they maybe- out of a mistaken sense of loyalty to our community. Thus we remain Marwaris, Punjabis, Khasis or Nagas but rarely ever become human. Our concerns are limited to our community, our state, our religion and national concerns remain the furthest from our minds. On a larger scale our nationality also restricts us, and even when we call ourselves Indian, Pakistani or English, we rarely rise to be what we all truly should be: human beings with concern for all other human beings.
Children born out of mixed marriages can be bridges across this divide, but as is evident from the couple of articles appearing in the ST, they are rarely permitted to be. No community truly accepts children born out of such unions. Some like Mukul Sangma have court cases filed against them, while others, such as some erstwhile student leaders, become overly rabid and communal in proving their allegiance to one half of their identity.
Yet the problem of identity is much larger than that concerning mixed unions, or their progeny. It begins when somebody asks you the question, “Where are you from”. A person like me has no answer to such a question; neither do many people, one knows and is friendly with. In my case my father came from West Punjab (and not as is often said West Pakistan, because Pakistan was not a country when he lived there), lived and worked across the country as an army officer, and settled post retirement at Dehra Dun – a place I visit but barely know. Having spent most of my life at Shillong, I am sure I would raise many an eyebrow, if I claimed to be from Shillong. Yet there are cases much worse than mine. Parents or grandparents of many such people came to Shillong, when Meghalaya was not even formed. When they came they had rights, which their children no longer enjoy. They can no longer buy land, or apply for jobs, or even fearlessly voice concerns about decisions concerning their lives. They belong to Shillong but unlike most “locals”, to borrow a phrase from the title of Mark Medoff’s play, are “children of a lesser God”. They have no umbrella of tradition to shelter under. Not only God, but it seems that the Indian Constitution too, works in mysterious ways, taking away rights of some people, in giving privileges to others.
Taiye Selasi, writer, in her brilliant TED talk titled “Don’t ask me where I am from, ask me where I am local” speaks for such people who like her , are “multi local” – people who feel at home in the town where they grew up, or the place they live in currently and even another city or two. She says it is not history which defines who we are, but our experiences. She mentions a significant meeting with Irish writer, Colum McCann who told her, “All experience is local, all identity is experience”. The experiences of all the people in any place being similar: whether they are of traffic jams or inflation, the lack of infrastructure or corruption, of curfews or of the glorious weather, how is it that some are considered more local than others? One cannot but concur with her when she says, “The question where are you from, or where are you really from, is often code for why are you really here.”
In this day and age of human mobility, where it is not just marriage but sometimes mere enchantment and disenchantment with a place, or often a job or opportunity, or social or national upheaval, which brings people to a place, or forces them to move elsewhere, it is disconcerting to see people who have merely lived in one place, appropriating the public voice which should belong to everyone. Democracy which we all purport to champion, is a system which is supposed to treat everyone equally, and one cannot claim the benefit of old tradition and modern democracy in the same breath. Nobody today parks a bullock cart and a car in the same garage. When we attempt to do so, even legislation such as the VAB, gets jammed in a legal quagmire.
The sad part is that even people who are educated, have travelled a lot, and are considered intelligent; still wear inflexible thinking hats. In fact, sometimes one thinks that the uneducated farmer is more progressive. What does a farmer do, when he finds the soil on his patch of land, becoming less fertile and the crop yields diminishing, year after year? Does he keep tilling the land mindlessly just because he is emotionally attached to it? Fortunately, though uneducated, he realises that his land requires fresh nutrients, and replenishes these from outside, by adding either chemical fertiliser or what is generally and distastefully referred to as ‘cow dung”. Both these are alien to his soil, and smell bad compared to the aroma of freshly dug earth, but do wonders for his yields. It is thus surprising to find educated people, emotionally tilling for solutions to modern problems, in the exhausted meadow of tradition and ignoring, workable solutions merely because, they lack the halo of custom.
Whether it is migration at the global level, or at the local level, one needs newer perspectives to look at the real issues. Today a lot of people are alarmed at the massive migration of Muslims, to what is predominantly a Christian Europe. However the same people were hardly distressed, when countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq were air bombed to kingdom come, and when American and European soldiers (migrants in uniform) armed with the latest weapons roamed and killed there with impunity. The former was invaded under the guise of punishing Osama Bin Laden, who was never caught there and the latter, for the fictitious WMDs. As one writes this, a hospital has been bombed in Afghanistan killing 22 people, which the Americans initially called “collateral damage”- a cleverly coined euphemism for civilian deaths, The mess created by the West, in these areas and in the Middle East as a whole, has now come home to roost. European leaders have been courageous in allowing this migration, in spite of the realisation that some terrorists, would have undoubtedly slipped in. To see democracy in action, one has to see Germany where one and a half million refugees, are supposed to settle. Both the protests and the counter protests on the issue are reflective of a healthy democracy.
It is in our own backyard that democracy has failed. Although keen to avail every democratic benefit, this society has been reluctant to restore well deserved rights or even a voice to minorities settled here for generations. In Europe, the Muslim migrants will soon have the same rights as their hosts, but here the rights taken away, are unlikely to be ever restored. It must be admitted though that a glimmer of hope is raised, by some courageous local voices over this issue, in this newspaper. Just as it needs to be admitted, in the case of the couple one began the story with, that the twin kitchen concept is a big step in the right direction. In any union the most private parts are not what they are thought to be. It is our minds and hearts which somehow remain the most closed and private, and opening them truly is where the challenge really lies. Without this just societal or marital cohabitation, is metaphorically, merely “sleeping with the enemy.”
The writer can be contacted at [email protected]