The desperate search for 'Indianness'

This week will end in the annual ritual commemorating the day when representatives of about 12 per cent of the population of the subcontinent decided to frame the Constitution in the name of the 100 per cent. Thus the Republic of India was born. In this auspicious week, one may ask with some trepidation, what is India? What kind of a question is that, one may also ask. One can show the territorial limits of the Union of India in some map, point to it and say, there it is. That kind of an answer, oddly, makes Cyril Radcliffe the father of the nation.  So let us shift gears to a different question. What makes India and ‘Indianness’?

Technically speaking, the transfer of power by the British to certain sections of the subcontinental elite, the Partition and the Constitution framed in the name of the people make the Union of India. Such legal definitions would sadden lovers of a transcendental ‘Indianness’ that is apparently millennia old and permeates through Ganga, Yamuna, Bollywood and Mohenjodaro. More recently, the fervor with which one cheers for a group of male players contracted by a private entity and sponsored by a New-York headquartered company has become a marker of ‘Indianness’ or lack thereof.

The real state of affairs of a human being cannot be ascertained by the perfume one dabs on oneself. It is to be found in the original smell of the armpits, that the perfume is designed to hide.

The continuous tutelage in ‘Indianness’ that was explicit in mass media earlier (remember Sai Paranjpe’s Ek Chiriya style cartoons with a cute and sly message continuously aired during turbulent times when some chiriyas wanted to fly away?) has now become a monolithic cultural norm, with decades of preferential promotion of a language and a forced monolithic identity finally paying off. With enough rokra and enough a good, strong dandaa, orderly and docile queues can be created.

When a Tamilian goes to New Delhi vis-à-vis Beijing, I assume that Beijing feels more alien. That is something undeniable. I am not including the rootless cosmopolitan class of the browns who feel at home at any place that has a coffee chain outlet. I am talking of the earth, not of the shifting crust. However, I am not sure that even this grade of alienation holds true for the Naga tribal — whose saas-bahu diet is not imported from Hindustan but from Korea. Korea, thus, is not equally far from all the loci of ‘Indianness’ — real or imagined. Even the Tamilian’s supposed closeness to New Delhi, is a project in progress. The non-alienation is less than it was 60 years ago. This is because of a common, constructed mould that has been used to shape ‘citizens of a republic’ out of human beings. That cultural continuity needs to be continuously manufactured even while proclaiming its transcendental pre-existence as a matter-of-fact. The shape of this mould represents what the ‘core’ of this ‘Indianness’ is. Hence, more and more will come to speak a predictable ‘core’ language — the margin will have to know more to be counted equally. And there is the indignity of one-ness.

While cultural barriers are bad, one-sided cultural ‘flows’ are worse. For the Union of India’s diversity to thrive, one does not need a ‘unity-in-diversity’ producing system but a diversity preserving system. This is produced by the political manifestations of stake, dignity and agency.

Look at the many colours around you us. Let’s not colour it all in two or three shades. Let us think rainbows — fantastic rainbows that man-made flags try to wrap themselves around.

The author is a brain scientist at MIT @gargac