The Middle Way: On being an Indian in Britian today Ranjit Sondhi CBE Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies Dinner, Leicester Stage Hotel, 18 November 2005
In his book entitled Being Indian, the much acclaimed Indian writer, foreign diplomat and social critic, Pavan Verma, gives a penetrating, at time unrelenting, but very entertaining analysis of why he thinks Indians have a unique ability to absorb, and be absorbed into, different cultures resulting in a whole range of synthetic cultures and in-between identities. Verma’s book is copiously illustrated with examples of how Indians have synthesised different ways of life.
I shall give you some: Raja Rammohan Roy, one of the founding fathers of modern India maintained two houses, ‘one in which everything was Western except Roy, and another in which everything was Indian except Roy; talented Bollywood producers are very adept at copying Hollywood originals, and composers routinely copy popular Western melodies; in architecture, the mixing of styles, Verma observes, results in somewhat bizarre constructions like Panjabi Baroque, Chandni Chowk Chippendale, Bania Gothic, Tamil Tiffany. More seriously though, Pavan Verma draws upon sources as diverse as ancient Sanskrit treatises and Bollywood lyrics to create a vivid and compelling portrait of the Indian psyche and a fascinating insight into the Indian ability to reconcile apparently profoundly contradictory life styles and behaviour.
For example he talks about how Indians have during the course of history maintained a reputation for non-violence even at a time of escalating violence, how they have preserved a sense of ‘other-wordliness’ while single-mindedly pursuing material wealth, how they still have a reputation for being saturated with tradition while becoming extremely adept at aping the West. Varma observes amusingly that in the land that gave the world the Kama Sutra, kissing is still forbidden in Indian films. So how can so many contrasting social, cultural, religious trends co-exist? Anyone interested in looking at the future of multi-cultural societies must surely benefit from studying how Indian society has evolved over several thousand years and how Indians have dealt with contradictions. Once we get away from the many misconceptions and myths projected about Indians by foreigners and by Indians themselves we might have much to learn from the richness, complexity and multi-stranded nature of Indian civilisation as it has evolved over several thousand years...
I would like first to trace what has happened to Western identities particularly since the post-War period. It is now universally accepted that the modern age has given rise to a decisive form of individualism. The individual has been torn free from his/her stable moorings in traditions and structures. Those who hold that modern identities have been let loose argue that we are not simply estranged from others but also dislocated in themselves. The social scientist, Stuart Hall argues that this dislocation has resulted from five great influences in social thinking during the second half of the twentieth century.
The first of these was the way in which Marxist thought
was first rediscovered and reworked in the sixties in the light of the argument that individuals could not be in any sense the agents of history. There was no universal essence of man, no free will, and that he was entirely determined, not by cultural tradition or by divine grace, but by social and economic relations. His identity was not internally generated but externally imposed. His destiny was determined not by himself but by larger processes over which he had no control.
The second of the great dislocation was Freud’s discovery
of the unconscious. Our identities, our sexuality, and the structure of our desires, are formed by the psychic processes of the unconscious, not by reason. Now, like Marxist thought, Freudian thought also plays havoc with the notion of man as an all-knowing rational subject in complete control of himself. Freud says that we learn about ourselves gradually, and the feelings that our ‘self’ is divided, or is somehow incomplete, remain with us for life. Thus identity is something that is formed through unconscious processes over time, rather than being innate in consciousness at birth, and that the process is never finished. So identity arises not so much from the fullness of an identity which is already inside us, but from a lack of wholeness which is filled from outside us by the ways we imagine ourselves to be seen by others.
The third great dislocation arises from the work of the linguist Saussure.
He argued that we are not in any absolute sense the authors of the statements we make. We can only use the rules and meanings of a language constructed by others. Language was there before us. It is a social, not an individual system. To speak a language is not so much to express our own innermost thoughts but also to activate the vast range of meanings already embedded in our language and our cultural system. Our identity is structured like language which in turn is fixed by our cultural system. And like language, identity is not entirely in our control. No matter how much we try to fix our identity, it is constantly sliding away from us, just as we cannot close down the meaning of what we say.
The fourth major dislocation of identity is to do with the work of the philosopher Focault.
He tried to show how our lives are controlled by what he calls disciplinary power. This power arises out of the regulation and government of whole populations and of individuals. The control centres of this power are the workshops, the schools, the hospitals, the prisons, the barracks. The aim is to bring the individuals’ physical health, sexual practices, family and work life under stricter discipline and control, to turn the human being into a docile body. The interesting and paradoxical aspect of such control is that collective institutions bear down upon people to further individualise and isolate them.
The fifth great dislocation occurs through the impact of identity politics like feminism
which appealed to the specific social identity of its followers. Such movements questioned opened up whole new areas of debate around the family, housework, domestic division of labour, and child-rearing, and the individuals place in relation to these issues.
The result of all these developments has been to transform the idea of fixed and stable identities of the past into open, contradictory, unfinished, fragmented identities of the present. Now what is happening to the rest of this society is also, up to a point, also happening to its constituent parts. On the one hand, new generations of British Indians will be subject to all the pressures and processes that they will experience by virtue of being Indian, but they will also be subject to the great dislocating forces of post-modern Britain on the other. It is almost as if they experience the demands of pre-modern and post-modern cultural and social systems simultaneously.
I would like to believe that, by and large, they manage these conflicting pressures with skill and agility. Their in-between lives, their hyphenated identities, their positioning between tradition and modernity, presents them with a unique challenge to reconcile tensions, and they by and large rise to the challenge with ingenuity and imagination, as they lay claim to their own unique place in the vast cultural spectrum of present day Britain.
Let me offer you my possible solution for our emerging multi-cultural citizens. What I want to propose is a significant departure from going on thinking and doing things in the way in which we have always done. I want to talk about why and how an intercultural society should be conceived and constructed. In the past, out of a perfectly understandable and well intentioned but somewhat misguided liberalism we have tinkered with the idea of multiculturalism as a composite, a simple arithmetic sum, of self-contained cultures existing side by side in parallel worlds. But the whole point about parallel lines is that they never meet.
I am now convinced that the future must lie in creative connections and crossovers. However, before this debate about both defining and breaching cultural boundaries can take place, there has to be a much greater understanding of the richness and complexity of cultural traditions that pre-date the West. In general, the public, White or Asian, remains deeply uninformed about the long, highly complex and refined traditions of South Asian music and dance, the key texts, poets and novelists, of great civilisations, and the extraordinarily varied cultural history of the Indian sub-continent. This knowledge remains beyond the reach of even the well-educated.
The next challenge is to conceive of our identities in a radically different way. Our cultural identity is neither fixed and unalterable, nor is it wholly fluid and subjected to unlimited reconstruction. Those of us who are brought up in non-Western cultures marked by dualism should not find it too difficult to live with contradiction, to reconcile the ha and tha, the ying and yang of life. So our task as cultural actors is to both preserve our own cultural identity and develop our national identity. This means finding novel ways of balancing the demands for unity in our public life and diversity in our private life...
We need to construct an intercultural space - mental and physical - where inter and intra group tensions are constantly being played out between black and white communities, between South Asian and Caribbean groups, between Gujerati, Panjabi, Kashmiri and Bengali traditions, between bourgeois and proletarian cultures, between folk and classical traditions, and between tradition and modernity.
Interculturality is not a convenient opportunistic device – it is creative, dynamic, elusive and defies a precise definition. Yet it is deeply symbolic of a new way of re-imagining contemporary Leicester and rethinking a plural Britain. It is emotionally demanding, intellectually challenging, and deeply satisfying. But that, after all, is what a good life is all about.
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