The many faces of being Indian

Man In The Mirror

The many faces of being Indian

Rashmee Roshan Lall


Mizoram chief minister Lalthanhawlas now-denied public indictment of Indian racism might have been clearly from the heart, if slightly inaccurate. Indians are exclusivist , not racist, this long-serving Mizo leader might have said. That would have been a precise , if acerbic, comment on the mainlands belief his slant-eyed , high-cheekbone look is foreign to this soil.
Instead, Lalthanhawla was reported to have bared his breast to reveal a deep sense of injury mixed in with some of the very ignorance he abhors. I am a victim of racism , he reportedly said at a seminar on water in Singapore, supposedly adding that Indias racial composition is as follows: three races Dravidians, Aryans and we in the north-east . He has now denied saying any of this but might well have used the term Mongoloid and been done with it. He would then have been an equal opportunities offender , having managed to annoy everyone , his Congress party, the good people of Mongolia, the worthy Registrar-General of India who has conducted a racially-blind census since 1951 and the allegedly insular people of northern and southern India, so blind to the 24-carat Indianness of Sino-Tibetans and Paharis.
Denial or not, the words and their retraction is significant. It is now generally accepted that Dravidian and Indo-Aryan are subcontinental , ethno-linguistic subgroups. Race is no longer seen as a viable biological category and members of the same race may have very different underlying genetics. The British imperialists used Indo-Aryan and Dravidian as a means of racial classification because such theories were popular in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Till the 1960s, when the World Health Organisation stopped using mongoloid in the context of mental retardation, medical science continued to damn a whole country by incorrectly using the term to mean children with Downs Syndrome. But the perception persists and Mongolia, the worlds most sparsely populated independent country, and one of the more peaceable, continues to provide the popular adjective for people with distinctive flattened features and a possibly vacuous look.
So what does it mean for a man to look Indian Why should Lalthanhawla have been reported to say, in anguished tones, In India, people ask me if i am an Indian. When i go to south (India), people ask me such questions. They ask me if i am from Nepal or elsewhere. They forget that the north-east is part of India Lalthanhawla may have quailed at the likely fallout of his remarks but was emphatically right and paradoxically quite wrong.
In these turning times, bleached hair, coloured contact lenses and globalised fashion cloaks Everyman Everywhere in uniformity. Today, the urban Indian has melted into the pulsing planet and is virtually indistinguishable from the swarthy European abroad.
But the body art and mood music of the 21st century cannot disguise some basic Indian features. Heres that ultimate Brown Sahib, V S Naipauls dismayed comment on finding he looks unmistakably Indian. In 1949, after having some pictures of himself taken for his application to Oxford, Naipaul wrote to his sister : I never knew my face was fat. The picture said so. I looked at the Asiatic on the paper and thought that an Indian from India could look no more Indian than I did... I had hoped to send up a striking intellectual pose to the University people, but look what they have got.
What could he possibly have meant Being brown as a nut, for sure, but possibly large-eyed and flabby-cheeked too And with a perpetually open mouth, i.e. argumentative, as Amartya Sen pointed out in his eponymous, elegantly written philosophical essays on Indians fecund heterodoxy and fondness for speaking at length Sen wrote that ancient Indian epic poems set world records for length and so did Krishna Menon for the longest speech ever to be delivered at the UN nine hours.
But the north-easts lament has nothing to do with that nebulous concept the Indian mindset. It is about the visual insularity that makes north Indians brand phenotypically similar Arunachalis, Assamese, Garos , Khasis, Manipuris, Mizos, Nagas and Tripuris as chinkis , chapta and Chinese . If north Indians ran to the vocabulary of the British queens consort, Prince Phillip, they might call them slitty-eyed . That is exclusivism . But, the belittling of northeasterners goes back to the 19th century when the indigenous peoples of the area were seen to persist in what British officers described as a backward and childlike state.
Eleven years ago, Mani Ratnams Dil Se described the perils of an Indian journalist falling in love with a relatively foreign girl from the north-east , who sported dangerously free-wheeling ideas about Indian nationhood. That cinematic image said it all, much before Lalthanhawla. It is the lament of minorities everywhere as they struggle to resist representation and construct an oppositional gaze as African-American writer bell hooks (sic) described the visual discrimination of racial politics. Lalthanhawla and his flat-featured brothers and sisters from the north-east might agree with hooks complaint that African-Americans experience our collective crisis within the realm of the image .