Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  The vast internal migrations also give rise to overcrowded living conditions in urban conglomerations, especially in the sprawling shanty towns and slums with their permanent air of transience. On the one hand, it is undeniable that urban slums, however awful they seem to middleclass sensibilities, represent to the poor a hope of escaping from deadening economic deprivation and the relatively rigid, caste-based discrimination and inequities of rural society. On the other, there is lack of cultural norms in dealing with relative strangers whose behavioural clues cannot be easily deciphered, so different from the ritualized predictability of interactions in the communities left behind in villages or small towns, which compel the person to be constantly on guard. One is in a state of permanent psychic mobilization and heightened nervous arousal.

  In addition, the rapid obsolescence of traditional roles and skills as modernization picks up pace seriously dents the self-esteem—when it does not shatter it completely—of those who are confronted with simultaneous loss of earning power, social status, and identity as particular kinds of workers. For the affected and their families, especially children, there is a collapse of confidence in the stability of the established order and of the world. What looms instead is the spectre of a future which is not only opaque but represents an overwhelming threat to any sense of purpose.

  The feelings of loss are not limited to the migration from geographical regions and cultural homes or to the disappearance of traditional work identities. They also extend to the loss of ancestral ideals and values. For instance, compared to what many believe was a traditionally healthy eroticism, modernity, with its popular cinema, television, fashions, the commingling of sexes in schools, colleges, and at work, is sexually decadent. ‘People have lost their brahmacharya (celibacy), their character is destroyed and every one has become an addict of bad habits. If you cannot control your libido, you cannot be pure.’6 Once the enlightenment values of universal equality, liberty, and fraternity, of the preeminence of reason and moral autonomy of the individual were formulated through the political revolutions in the non-Western world, they became a universal heritage, inevitably triumphant when in conflict with the norms and values of the local culture. In spite of. the disillusionment of some postmodern Western intellectuals with the enlightenment mentality, its values continue to constitute what has been generally regarded as the most dynamic and transformative ideology in human history, closing any option of going back to pre-moderm conceptions.7 Yet the enlightenment has a dark side, too. The modernization project is riddled with its own inequities, repressions, and unfratemal conflicts. There is thus bound to be a palpable grief for the values of a lost—and retrospectively idealized—world, when in the brave new one progress often turns out to be glaring inequality, rationality becomes selfishness and the pursuit of self-interest and individualism comes to mean unbridled greed.

  Secret Wounds

  Whereas loss and helplessness constitute one stream of feelings accompanying the modernization process, another stream consists of feelings of humiliation and radically lowered self-worth. One source of humiliation lies in the homogenizing and hegemonizing impact of modernization and globalization, both of which are no respecters of cultural pluralities and diversities. The imperatives of economic development, which see many local cultural values and attitudes as outmoded or just plain irrelevant, are a source of humiliation to all those who have not embraced or identified with the modernization project in its totality.

  For the masses, there are other occasions for blows to their self-esteem such as the increase in the complexity and incidence of bureaucratic structures, with their attendant dehumanization, which has been a corollary of development. The cumulative effect of daily blows to an individual’s feelings of self-worth, received in a succession of bureaucratic and other impersonal encounters, cannot be underestimated.

  For the elites of the non-Western world, there is an additional humiliation in their greater consciousness of the defeat of their civilizations in the colonial encounter with the West. This defeat is not merely an abstraction or a historical memory but one which is confirmed by the peripheral role of their countries in the international economic and political order of the postcolonial world. Their consciousness of being second-class citizens in the global order is reinforced by their many encounters with their more self-confident Western colleagues in the various international forums. An example of the role played by loss and sensed humiliation is seen in the case of those Indians, economically an elite group, who have migrated to the United States and are frequently exposed to indifference or condescension toward their cultural tradition. When they have not abjured their cultural identity altogether in what I would consider an ‘identification with the aggressor’ they have turned back to embrace their culture identity as Hindus, Muslims, or Sikhs with a revivalist fervour which is far in excess of their counterparts in the home country. Of course, migration itself plays a significant role in the revival of ethnic identity. Global migration, tourism, and communications confront people in a society with a foreignness of others which is unprecedented in their experience. All over the world our encounters with strangers are on a larger scale, over longer periods of time, with the strangers possessing a higher degree of strangeness, than has ever been the case before. Observation such as ‘They think like that’ ‘They believe this’ ‘Their customs are like that’ inevitably lead to questions which may not have been self-consciously addressed before; ‘What do we [however that “we” is defined] think?’ ‘What do we believe?’ ‘What are our customs?’ In bringing together people in close proximity, the processes of globalization paradoxically increase the self-consciousness which separates and differentiates.

  The portraits of loss and helplessness may sometimes seem to be overdrawn. Human beings have a remarkable capacity for adaptation, for creating new gardens of love around them where old ones have withered. Yet before fresh psychological and social structures can emerge, there is a period—permanent for some—of apathy, chronic discontent, or rebellious rage at those who are held responsible for the loss of old social forms and ideals. Historical and social changes, working through the psychological mechanisms of loss of and humiliation, thus lead to the widespread feeling of being a victim rather than an active agent of events which are buffeting the individual and his or her group. Millions of people become patients in a broad sense, even if temporarily, patienthood being essentially a condition of inactivation. After all, patiens, as Erik Erikson has pointed out, denotes a state of being exposed to superior forces from within and without which cannot be overcome without energetic and redeeming help.8

  Cultural Identity and Cure

  The required energy and redemption to restore agens, than inner state of being which sanctions initiative and encourages purposeful activity in .the outer world, is most often sought through increasing, restoring, or constructing a sense of cultural identity. Cultural groups are not only a shelter for those mourning lost attachments but also vehicles for redressing narcissistic injuries, for righting what are perceived as contemporary or historical wrongs. The question of why such ‘primordial’ group identities as ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’ are generally preferred to identities based on class, profession, or other criteria cannot be discussed here. Perhaps the latter lack an encompassing worldview, are impoverished in their symbolic riches and devoid of that essential corpus of myths in which people have traditionally sought meaning, especially at a time when their world appears to have become meaningless.

  A core attraction and vital therapeutic action of self-consciously belonging to a cultural community lies in its claim to the possession of a future which, in a state of pate ins, is felt to be irretrievably lost. To outsiders, this future may appear to be a simplistic perspective on the world such as a promise of restoration of the perfect civil society of the ancestors, what the Hindus, for instance, call Ram Rajya. It may be the reproduction on earth of a paradise envisaged only in sacred texts. It may be the hedonistic enjoymen
t of more and more goods and services in a heaven presided over by a benign, supply-side God. The promise is of a future, not seen, but which ‘works’.

  The cultural group, which brings the ‘primordiality’ related to shared myths, memories, values and symbols to the fore, thus assumes a vital healing function. One of its most important aspects is to replace feelings of loss with those of love. This insight into the way groups work psychologically goes back to Freud, who postulated eros as the vital cohesive force in a group.9 He believed the ties of love among members of a group come into existence through their emotional bond with the leader. In more technical terms, members of a group put the same object, the leader, in place of their ego ideal and consequently identify with each other. This shared idealization gives rise to the love ties which are experienced in the feelings of loyalty, esprit de corps, and in the more intense moments of group life, in feelings of fusion and merger. Experientially, it is a reordering and opening up of the inner world of the individual to include members of the group who, in turn, open up to include the individual in their psychological space, a mutual affirmation which lies at the heart of love. In cultural groups, the shared ego ideal may not be the figure of a single leader but many historical and mythical figures from the group’s tradition, its ideals and values, and even its social and intellectual traditions.

  We are all aware of the profound effect the group can have on the consolidation of a person’s ‘sense of identity’ and in increasing the cohesiveness of the self. Even in individual psychotherapy, we often see that it is not unusual for patients in a state of self-fragmentation to achieve a firmer and more cohesive sense of self upon joining an organized group. The Nazis are not the only group who turned quasi-derelict individuals into efficiently functioning ones by providing them with the framework of a convincing world image and the use of new cultural symbols and group emblems such as shiny brown uniforms. As Ernest Wolf perceptively observes, ‘It seems a social identity can support a crumbling self the way a scaffolding can support a crumbling building.’10

  Psychology Versus Politics?

  Before I look at the construction of the new Hindu identity, I would like to address the objections to a psychological approach to the subject. There are many social scientists and political analysts who would locate the enhancement of ethnicity (cultural identity in my terms) in a particular group not in social-psychological processes but in the competition between elites for political power and economic resources. In fact, this has been the dominant explanation for the occurrence of Hindu-Muslim riots and is best exemplified in the work of Asghar Ali Engineer.11 This ‘instrumentalist’, as contrasted to the ‘primordialist’ view I advocate here, has been succinctly formulated by Paul Brass:

  In the process of transforming cultural forms, values and practices into political symbols, elites in competition with each other for control over the allegiance or territory of the ethnic group in question strive to enhance or break the solidarity of the group. Elites seeking to mobilize the ethnic group against its rivals or against the state strive to promote a congruence of a multiplicity of the group’s symbols, to argue that members of the group are different not in one respect only but in many and that all its cultural elements are reinforcing.12

  Cultural identity according to this view is not a fixed or given dimension of communities but a variable one which takes form in the process of political mobilization by the elite, a mobilization which anses from the broader political and economic environment. Brass questions the import of the primary dimensions of ethnicity in the subjective lives of individuals. Most people, he says, never think about their language at all. Millions, both in traditional and modem societies, have migrated to other countries out of choice (or necessity). And though many may have an emotional attachment to their place of birth or ancestral religion, many others have chosen to assimilate to their new societies and have lost all connection with their origins.

  Brass’s case for the relative insignificance of primordiality appears to be overstated. Cultural identity, like its individual counterpart, is an unconscious human acquirement which becomes consciously salient only when there is a perceived threat to its integrity. Identity, both individual and cultural, lives itself for the most part, unfettered and unworried by obsessive and excessive scrutiny. Everyday living incorporates a zone of indifference with regard to one’s culture, including one’s languge, ethnic origin, or religion. It is only when this zone of indifference is breached that the dimensions of ethnicity stand out in sharp relief and the individual becomes painfully or exhilaratingly aware of certain aspects of his cultural identity. The breaches in the zone of indifference, like the one which has taken place in the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri mosque, are not only made by momentous external events such as actual or threatened persecution, war, riots, and so on. Inner psychological changes at certain stages of the lifecycle may also cause these fateful incursions. Thus, for instance, youth is regarded as a period of life when issues of personal identity become crucial, when the conscious and unconscious preoccupation with the question ‘Who am I?’ reaches its peak. Many migrants, who have willingly chosen to thoroughly assimilate themselves into their new societies and appear to have lost all traces of their ethnie origins, are surprised to find that the issues of cultural identity have not disappeared. They have only skipped a generation as their sons and daughters, on the verge of adulthood, become preoccupied with their cultural roots as part of their quest for a personal identity.

  I do not mean to imply that the instrumentalist approach is without substance. It is also not a monopoly of professional social scientists but is shared by many people in other walks of life. In Indian towns and cities where there have been riots between Hindus and Muslims, I have normally found that ‘men of goodwill’ from both communities invariably attribute the riots to the machinations and manipulations of politicians pursuing political power or economic advantage rather than to any increase in primordial sentiments, a perspective which is also shared by people who are far removed from the conflict. The instrumentalist theory of ethnic mobilization thus becomes an ‘instigator’ theory of violent conflict among religious groups. In concentrating on the instigators, it underplays or downright denies that there are ‘instigatees’, too, whose participation is essential to transform animosity between religious groups into violence. The picture it holds up of evil politicians and innocent masses is certainly attractive since it permits us a disavowal of our own impulses toward violence and vicious ethnocentrism. We all have different zones of indifference beyond which our own ethnocentrism, in some form or the other, will become a salient part of our identity.

  The appeal of the instrumentalist or instigator theory, however, is not only that it allows us a projection of the unacceptable parts of ourselves onto “bad” politicians. Its allure is also due to a particular historical legacy of the literary elite in all major civilizations. This legacy devalues nonrational processes—what psychoanalysts call ‘fantasy’—which form the basis of the primordial approach. As has been pointed out by others in a different context, the culture of fantasy lacks all meaningful status in the realm of serious public discourse which is comprised of the discussion of ideas, not shared fantasies.13 Fantasy is regarded as primitive, primordial, before reason, it is unconscious as compared to conscious, mythic as compared to scientific, marked by the pleasures of connotation rather than the rigours of denotation. A sensitive, introspective discussion of socially shared fantasies (rather than ideas) as the moving force behind the ideals and ambitions of large groups and communities is generally not possible. Steeped in a long tradition of respect for the culture of ideas and their own professional role in its production and propagation, the scholarly elite of a society are not easily receptive to the culture of fantasy.

  I do not mean to imply that the political and psychological, the instrumental and the primordial, approaches should be viewed in either/or terms. Both the approaches are complementary to each othe
r. Whether it be the history of Hindu-Muslim relations, or the analysis of the causes of the riots between the two communities (economic-political versus social-psychological), or the explanation for the basis of emerging religious group identities (‘instrumental’ interests versus ‘primordial’ attachments), the arguments are invariably couched in a dualistic either/or mode. This, of course, is a testimony to the stronghold of the Aristotelian and Cartesian ways of thinking on modern minds. Like most shared habits, we do not recognize this kind of thinking as mere habit but take it as an unquestioned verity, as the way things ‘naturally’ are. Complementary thinking does not mean that ‘anything goes’, in a vulgar postmodernist sense. It has its own definitional constraints and boundaries; for instance, the more incompatible (not outlandish) the explanations for a phenomenon, the more complementary they will be. Complementarity is the belonging together of various possibilities of experiencing the same object differently. The wave and particle theories of light in physics, the primary and secondary processes in psychoanalysis, mythos and logos as modes of knowledge, are a few of the many examples of complementarity. Forms of complementary knowledge belong together in so far as they pertain to the same object; they exclude each other in that they cannot occur simultaneously. Complementarity is the acceptance of different possibilities and not their splitting and the exclusion of some. To describe a phenomenon complementarily is to reveal its wholeness, to understand its different aspects.14 None of these aspects is more true than others; each is irreplaceable. In brief, the logic underlying complementary thought is not of an either/or kind but of an ‘as well as’ variety. Thus, without the psychological perspective to complement the political-economic one, we will have only a partial and thus dangerously inadequate understanding of the reasons for the success of political formations based on religious mobilization.