Deepa Majumdar
Since the tragic death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, America has been up in flames protesting racism. Never since the Civil Rights movement have so many people chorused in unison for a common cause. We may dispute the ethics and style of protest. But no person of conscience can dispute the moral worth of this particular cause. Ignoring the dying man’s pleas, “I can’t breathe,” Derek Chauvin, a white police officer knelt on Floyd’s neck for at least eight minutes – his sadistic action symbolizing the entire tragic history of the African American – a history of the white man pressing his knee upon the neck of the black man.
While racism and xenophobia are easy to spot, the two are not always easy to tell apart. Xenophobia, or hatred for the outsider can be a subset, expression, or species of the genus, racism. This implies that while xenophobia can take racist forms, not all forms of racism need be xenophobic. Thus white-on-black racism within America is not literally xenophobic – in that it does not persecute the outsider or foreigner, but its own black citizens. Nuances of a metaphoric xenophobia may flavor this type of racism. Seeking to convert the black insider into an outsider, racism ends up making the white racist a moral outsider – someone society as a whole rejects as abhorrent. Thus Chauvin’s deracinating act of violence threw him outside the pale of respectable society. Notwithstanding all such metaphoric xenophobia, domestic racism in America is not literally xenophobic. Very likely this is because American individuality weakens the scope for identity politics. Yet this is not to say xenophobia does not exist in America. A separate prejudice, it expresses itself as dire racism against brown and black-skinned immigrants (legal or otherwise). Under Mr. Trump’s hostile policies, one saw this type of xenophobia in the tendency to scapegoat undocumented immigrants from Latin America.
The risk of xenophobia is inherent in all identity politics. By contouring and defining its native group, an identity thereby also defines the outsider – with the “us” and “them” mutually exclusive forever! But defining the outsider need not translate into prejudice. Although all identities come with the potential for xenophobia, not all actualize this noxious prejudice. Xenophobia occurs when the outsider is not only defined, but also reviled. Xenophobia often morphs from mere prejudice to scape-goating the outsider, who is blamed for all ills of the native group. When it expresses itself in physiological terms, expressing a toxic fleshly aesthetics that aims at power, xenophobia becomes racist!
As old as the hills, xenophobia, which has always existed in perhaps all civilizations, can be both secular and religious. Thus, to Plato and Aristotle, non-Greeks were barbarians. To the Chinese, foreigners were foreign devils. To the ancient Hindu, the non-Vedic person was a Mleccha. To the Jew, the non-Jewish were gentiles. To the European Christian, non-Christians were heathens or pagans. To the Muslim, non-Muslims are infidels. Finally, the twentieth-century is littered with the killing fields of genocides forged by xenophobia born of identity politics. Signifying yet another form of xenophobia, the Khasi term Dkhar – which, in practice, can be secular, religious, or both – takes its place of ignominy among all these pejorative terms. Like barbarian, foreign devil, Mleccha, gentile, heathen, pagan, and infidel– Dkhar rings a death knell upon our common humanity and human rights, by identifying the vast majority of human beings (who are non-Khasi) as foreigners to be hated. Except of course, Dkhar is usually aimed at mainland Indians who are in Meghalaya for employment and other purposes! While this term may not have been originally intended as pejorative, it has, by now, acquired its own noxious fumes of xenophobia.
Yet, crucial to the fate of any identity is its share of universality,without which it withers away in the abyss of narcissism. In order for an identity group to thrive and survive, it must ventilate itself with the fresh air of universality. Minority groups therefore serve essentially as windows letting in the fresh air of universality to mitigate the narcissism inherent in the identity that defines the majority group. In the context of Meghalaya one might say, the presence of the mainland Indian Dkhar thwarts the danger of Khasis drowning in the narcissism of their own identity. In short, the Dkhar infuses into Khasi society, the necessary ventilator of otherness.
Without undermining the gravity of the Shoah, we might say that the Bengali has been to the Khasi and the Assamese, what the Jew was to the European Christian anti-Semite. If their malice against the Bengali did not reach the chilling mass proportions of Nazi murders of Jews, this is only because we Indians are too chaotic to be as organized and diabolically practical as the Nazi anti-Semite. Adding to this, we have the tragic inward xenophobia of the Bengali from Bengal, for whom, the diasporic Bengali – including those in other states in India – is a “Probashi Bangali”(Bengali living outside Bengal). A mere slur, this self-directed xenophobia can hardly be compared to the toxic hatred and violence in Assamese and Khasi xenophobia towards Bengali Hindus.
But of the two (Assamese and Khasi), Khasi xenophobia is more perplexing for me. I cannot understand why, given their xenophobia towards the mainland Indian Dkhar, they have embraced whole-heartedly, the white western Dkhar. Despite anti-colonialism, the independence movement, and the freedom of India – why have they welcomed western civilization in its modern decadent forms? Why have they overlooked the terrible worldliness of the modern west – especially that of the sensual culture of America – an impudent synthetic offspring of western civilization? Why have they raced to the west instead of resisting neo-colonial forms of cultural imperialism that corrode the spiritual foundations of all cultures?
In this context, two incidents of neo-colonial ignominy leap out of my memories of the Shillong-of-the-sixties. Yes, the beautiful Tricolor was already flying high and the country was independent. But servility before the white man had not abated. The first incident happened in perhaps Class Three in my convent school, where our only blonde child was a source of wonder and awe for my colonized classmates, who included Christians of “tribal” origin. The rest of us ‘Dkhars’ were so used to brown-on-brown racist xenophobia against our physical appearance that despite our youth, we already despised racism. The blonde child was not directly racist. But she knew she was “superior”! One day she plucked one hair off her head. To this day I blush at what happened next. My awestruck colonized classmates passed around her single strand of gold hair as if it were gold itself. Needless to say, this idolatrous adoration of a blonde Dkhar left us brown Dkhars (with self-respect) in a state of quiet disgust!
If this first incident demonstrated worship of the white Dkhar, the second demonstrated the opposite – racism towards the brown mainland Indian Dkhar. One day in the assembly hall of that same school, a venerable maestro of Hindustani classical music was on stage. The hall was filled with school girls of varying age groups – including many Christians of “tribal” origin. To my dying day I will never forget what happened next! As the hall filled with his sonorous disciplined voice, these girls burst into a chorus of derisive laughter at the sound of the complex, mathematically exact cadences of his khyal– a source of wonder in the western world. The hall therefore reverberated with two sounds – first, the voice of a maestro lost in his classical music, and second, derisive laughter from a hall full of young girls. That they did not invoke the universal inner ear to appreciate the subtle complex melodic structure of the musician’s ragas, was a sign of how hate-filled their hearts were. That he received derisive laughter instead of applause, signified the same! That they did not understand that white Dkhars sometimes travel all the way to India to learn this genre of ancient classical music, was proof that they were out of touch with historical reality – again a sign of a hate-filled heart.
My question therefore remains unanswered… In the immediate aftermath of independence, faced with a choice between two opposite civilizations – a decadent west that had lost its spiritual luster, and a not-yet-modern higher India, still shining with its unique historical lineage of unbroken mysticism – why did the Khasi people make the choices they did? Why did they react in such extremes – on the one hand unthinking acceptance of the cultural hegemony of a decadent west represented by the white Dkhar – and on the other – violent racist xenophobia against the brown mainland Indian Dkhar – especially the Bengali Hindu? Were they not aware that the land of brown Dkhars (mainland India), in its higher aspect, can be a source of wonder and salvation to the white Dkhar they imitated so assiduously?
The answer does not blow with the wind. It lies in the depths of the history of the Khasi people.
(The author teaches at Purdue University, Indiana, USA. Email: [email protected])