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A sense of self

The sixth Indian to win the Nobel prize, claimed the magazines and newspapers. No doubt some of us saw the irony; a nation that loses no time coveting its sons and daughters for no other reason than that they have independently become newsworthy. Worse still, a nation that embraces their fame not because the socio-economic mores of our land buttressed their successes, but instead they impeded them in a thousand ways. Amartya Sen's Nobel prize, for example, is the second such award -- the other being the one awarded to Mother Teresa -- given partly on account of a wretchedness that shapes the human condition in India, and our responses to it.

If we add Hargobind Khurana's publicly stated gripes over the disregard for his work that India showed, or Subrahmanyam Chandrasekhar's similar dilemma, the count might scale back even further. But it is not their struggles that I seek to highlight here; instead I draw your attention to the numbers themselves. For they tell their own stories -- of an India that is still searching for an identity based on the things all her sons and daughters can lay claim to.

The simple truth is that there have been only four Indians who have received the Nobel prize, including Amartya Sen, the others have been Rabindranath Tagore, Mother Teresa and Sir C V Raman. The way newspaper accounts contrive to arrive at 6 instead of 4 is quite simple, they add Khurana and Chandrasekhar to the list, on the claim that they were ethnic Indians, certainly born in India, never mind that they had renounced their citizenship by the time they actually won these awards, or that they might have been educated partly in an India that no longer is with us.

Even this exaggerated claim on the basis of ethnicity lacks merit, and is less than genuine, because by such reckoning, one should leave Mother Teresa off the list. Whatever her stirring contributions to India, her ethnicity, we can be sure, remained unaltered. In sum, there have either been 5 ethnic Indian winners, or 4 Indian citizens, the widely reported 6, as we shall see, is a perpetuation of our ongoing travesties.

Four, five, six, what's the difference, you might ask. So a few overeager reporters extended the frontiers of the nation's achievements by stretching the truth, and as long as everyone knows its a sham, why not simply move on and be done with it? The numbers themselves mean nothing one way or the other, and I won't argue the point. But they are revealing, and show up an underlying malaise in society which must be addressed. We mustn't move on, precisely because doing so would mean a continuation of the very fallacies that have plagued us for so many years.

The flaw in the reasoning by which the number six is contrived is straightforward -- it rests on the unspoken but loosely accepted premise that anyone can be Indian, as long as the majority of us agree that (s)he is. By this hazy yardstick, Indian citizens are Indian, those who take up Indian citizenship in preference to another they already hold are also Indian, even those who renounce Indian citizenship are Indian. People who have never worked in India can be Indian, even people who positively fled India are Indian. Members of the House of Lords can be Indian, too.

At the same time, we see that perfectly good Indians, some of them members of our own Houses, can be labeled Pakistanis or told to go to Bangladesh. Indianness, after all, is not supposed to be their birthright, like yours or mine. For them, the same badges must be earned, and not merely by dint of their patriotism, but by their ability to convince us that in our perception, they ought to be one with us.

Why do these divisions exist? Mostly because no one has ever seen fit to develop alternatives. By and large, the way we organise ourselves in society is of our own volitions, political parties merely give voice to those groupings which represent sizable vote-banks. For ourselves, the choices are much simpler -- we look at our neighbours, our peers, our friends, enemies, and whoever else we might pass by, and break the world into two simple groups, one of people who are part of our society and another of those who are excluded for some reason or the other.

It isn't only in political matters that these groupings come into play. Some people will not allow lower castes in their homes or places of work, some neighbourhoods are totally Christian or Muslim. Some schools won't teach you Vande Mataram, some people won't sing the Saraswati Vandana. Every one of these clearly violates even the most rudimentary requirements of social organisation, and yet we look beyond these without batting an eyelid.

Corruption, we claim, is the problem. Social decay, money-laundering, mafias, we look everywhere for the root of our social evils and even appear to find them from time to time. And yet we disregard the fundamental tenet that is so clearly lacking -- our society is wracked the way it is because we have not properly identified who belongs in it and who does not. And unless we can harness the power latent in properly identifying the groups to which we belong, we will not pass this hurdle.

The biggest problem with assigning nativity based on our perceptions is that it is easily misguided. By identifying separate groups, we created separate laws for ourselves, and we now find that these laws can be used to keep us at each others' throats. While we extended our hand of inclusion to Brown sahebs around the world, we were glibly goaded into thinking that some of our citizens don't have the same rights that we do. These hazy definitions have built a society where togetherness is not defined by the laws of the land, but instead by our fragmented prejudices.

Even when we recognise our biases, we find our idea of our society is so limited that we are unable to contemplate the solutions. With such social rigor mortis firmly established, we regularly look for groups we can blame instead. And all because our groups are not of honest intellectual positions or differences in policy matters. Instead they are of birth, caste, religion, language, whatever else that permits the social order already prevalent around us to remain unaltered. So we fight casteism with caste, religious intolerance with communal groupings, and so on.

If we must move on to build India together, we must first decide that we belong together. Unfortunately, that opinion stems not from inculcating ideas in school or on television -- instead, we must be able to see for ourselves that it is true. The events that move us usually do so because even when they happen to someone else, we see the possibility that it could be us instead. Leading our lives in a fractured society, we never imagine the realities that those unlike us experience. The separateness of our small sub-societies is a powerful obstacle to that observation and the imaginations it permits. Somehow, we have to get around it.

Building a cohesive society is not a matter of counting our friends and excluding our enemies. It hinges instead on rules that we all agree to abide by, enshrining into them the premise that we extend to each other the full freedom and protection of the institutions we build to safeguard our interests. If we are ever to be a society of one people, we must first agree who we are. For it is from this fundamental agreement that everything else flows.

Ashwin Mahesh