of words and peace 

I wrote an article which came out in Magazine called Outlook about a couple of weeks ago . . . I am going to look back at that article and use that as a starting point for what I have to say. In that article I spoke about something which happened to me in America, where I was between late August and December. I was teaching in New York and had gone to Penn State University to give a talk. On my way back to NY on a Greyhound bus, I sat next to a man deliberately, because I saw he was an Indian and as we do in countries that are not our own, we sort of gravitate towards people who look like us. So I found myself sitting next to him. He gave me the impression of not having noticed me at all, but he had very much noticed me and in about a minute before I said anything he said, " Where are you from?" I said I was from India. I noticed that his response wasn't one of immediate happiness or recognition. There was a kind of pause. And then he said, "I am from India as well" and then, "I am Muslim". Which was evident from the name. He was from Hyderabad. We had a conversation and I am just going to tell you a little bit about this conversation. He told me he had left Hyderabad several years ago and then gone to the Middle East and from there I think eight years ago come to America, and he was working in Chicago and he was on his way now to NY, and he began to tell me, without me having prompted him to, about the history of discrimination that he faced when he was growing up in Hyderabad. He told me for instance how during the 1971 war which created Bangladesh, the war with Pakistan, he would be singled out in class by his teachers and told that it was people like him who were responsible for this war. And he told me the process by which he was gradually alienated from the school he was going to and the system he belonged to. I don't know how singular his experience was but I was convinced by the truth of what he was saying of how he had often been victimised or even misguided by his teachers. Some of whom discouraged him from taking up Science and Mathematics, though he was good at the subjects. Then he gave me instances of discrimination from Hindus even after he had moved to the US. And how some of his friends had faced discrimination; how some of them have been denied jobs by Hindu interviewers or people from their own community or own part of India. He had two grown up children in their teens and I asked him: "I suppose you have no intention of going back?" He said, " No, I have every intention of going back because that is my country and I want to go back and fight." Which I took to be a extremely positive response because many of us, even the most liberal of us and those of us who think a lot about our country, undercut our commitment and at the same time want to escape our country and wanting to fight. Because we have lots of things to fight for actually. And this is just one of them. He said he would go back and fight but he rued the fact that there was no Muslim leadership in the country.

Now at about this time I began to remember what my own experience in Britain had been like. I had visited England very early on as a child in 1973 and then kept going on back as a student, then as a doctoral student. And through the seventies on repeated visits I discovered a particular kind of England which was at that time economically rather badly off and also very racially divided, much more racially divided let us say than India was communally divided at that point of time. The National Front was a very active organization. It's now called the British National Party. At that time it was a purely fascist organization, the National Front, and it made life hell for the minorities. And many of you would have heard of relatives at that time getting beaten up or even killed. Indians getting killed. Asians, Blacks getting killed by members of the National Front. Skinheads. And I myself had some experiences of racial discrimination when I used to visit Britain at the time. By the early 80's, this began to palpably decrease.

I want to talk a little about words and language today. Because the way we react to the world, the way we think about the world, is very much dependent on and couched in the words and the language we inhabit. And that time a new word was being bandied about, used and made current and pushed as part of the programme in England and the word was 'multiculturalism'. I really hadn't heard that word very frequently in the early 70's but by the early 80's it was a word that was on posters. It was a word that was everywhere. That multiculturalism began to work.

But part of it was the initiative that the minorities took in that country. You know minorities are always called foreigners. Whatever the historical antecedents in the country they inhabit. So the Jews were called foreigners in Nazi Germany. And they're always suspected of disloyalty. Just as the Jews were suspected of being one of the reasons for the debacle in the First World War. And it's felt that their loyalties are somehow outside the country. Now this is very familiar to the rhetoric which we now hear. Similarly at that time, the kind of rant and rhetoric going on which multiculturalism was used as a word and a concept to counter was the idea of foreigners-the idea of you, and West Indians or Indians or Pakistanis or whatever, being foreigners. Of course the word was never used of White Canadians or Australians. But you are foreigners, go back home. And a vast incursion of these people, of say Gujaraties-after they were kicked out of Uganda-had made their way into Britain. And if anything, the fight they had to fight for themselves was a much harder one because they were far more recent, the migrancy was far more recent. And I remember this was what the minorities did without leadership and this is what I told my companion in the Greyhound bus, that the Asian minority or the Black minority or the West Indian minority in England had no real leadership. You know we can't think of a Martin Luther King in England. We can't think of a Gandhi or a great leader and yet, through a variety of reasons among which was a solidarity among the minorities and the white liberals, multiculturalism advanced in Britain further than in other European countries. I have to say that. It's never going to be a perfect and flawless society. And there is much to work towards. And yet multiculturalism was advanced over there partly because the minorities were articulate and they snatched the initiative on what defined Britishness from the people who were throwing it at them. So this is what I began to hear. That my home is Leicester or my home is Bradford. When they heard 'Go home' the response was 'My home is Leicester.' It's a small semantic piece of jugglery, but it is an irrefutable argument as long as you are in a Democratic society, which grants you certain rights. So you are exploiting those rights which are granted to you legitimately as a citizen and you are drawing the attention of the vast majority of people around you to what it is that defines national identity, in this case Britishness. I think, and this is what I said in my article, I think something similar needs to be done by the Muslims in this country. And that is to snatch the initiative on the definition of Indianess and to exploit their rights, the democratic rights given to them by the Constitution. Every few days, every few weeks, every few months, we hear our Prime Minster or L. K. Advani saying to the Muslims, you know you have a place in our country as well. Now, it is not for the Prime Minister of the country to give a minority or any member of that country a place or decide whether that person has a place in that country or not. The place that every member, every citizen of this country has in it is already granted to him or her by the Constitution.

The same rights that the Prime Minster has, also belongs to the most anonymous and beleaguered person of the minority out on the streets. So this is something that needs to be rearticulated I think, because things have so much to do with perception and language. This is something that needs to be constantly rearticulated and people need to be reminded that is for not a single person, government or a party to grant rights that the constitution already grants.

This is why I want to draw attention to words and to language. Secular, liberal, because what the BJP is now working on is words- 'pseudosecuralists', 'hinduvata'-all these are BJP newspeak. Hindutva is a construct, we're not very sure what it means. Everyday it has a new meaning. One day it means some sort of pure Hinduism, pride in Hindu identity. The next day it means pride in Indian identity. It becomes cultural nationalism. Yet another day it is supposed to encompass Muslim identity, Christian identity, because apparently Hinduism is a sort of alltolerating religion. It is this juggling with the meaning of Hindutva which is very confusing . . . So, I think by becoming aware of words, aware of what they mean, we become aware of history. I am just going to read out a couple of sentences written by Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian theorist, literary, critical theorist: "The word is the most sensitive index of social change and what is more, of changes still in the process of growth-still without definitive shape. The word has the capacity to register all transitory delicate momentary phases of social change." This is the importance of thinking about what words mean today and how they are appropriated by others.

There's a poster over there saying we are all one and the word underneath is Indians. Again, what does Indian mean? I'm not going to offer any answers but I am saying peace is hard work, you know. It's not just by being passive or non-violent or not doing the wrong thing or even talking amongst ourselves that we achieve peace. This fascism is going to succeed more and more. Peace is actually a lot of hard work and it's been seen in every country. And Britain for me is a very good example that has tried to achieve peace and even today is trying to achieve peace by knowledge, intelligence, cunning, skill, hard work. That's all.

 Link to article by Amit Chaudhuri in Outlook Magazine,|Jan 27,2003: