Saare Jahan Se Achcha

In the civics portion of the curriculum, back when I was in grade VIII or IX (I think we used that number system, much like how the Super Bowl years are numbered) or sometime then, the textbook presented a wonderful portrait of a secular India.  A secular and peaceful country despite the gazillion religions and the tensions between them.  I felt good about my country.  Saare Jahan Se Achcha, I too mouthed whenever I heard the song even though I knew very little Hindi.  (It translates to: Best among the entire world.)

It was a convenient narrative that overlooked one important detail: It was not the reality.

Yes, it was a land of a gazillion religions.  While they were all equal, one was more equal than the rest put together.  And for a while I was proud to be part of the dominant group.  I write that off as the kind of mistakes that we make when we are young.  What is youth for if we cannot make mistakes and learn from them?

Decades have gone by since the civics class that was taught by Mr. Venkatesan, whose approach to teaching the social sciences completely washed away my intellectual curiosity about those topics, which I then came back to on my own after the undergraduate engineering program.

Every visit to India, I worry that most interactions among people are defined by the "in group" and "others" criteria.  In the non-work social space, there appears to be a great deal of conscious and subconscious decision-making based on various "in group" attributes, especially religion, language, and caste and sub-caste.

It worries me even more than that this gets spatially reflected: neighborhoods with dominant "in group" demographics.  Worry is an understatement, though--it freaks me out quite a bit.

Such a geographic separation of "in group" and "others" was not uncommon here in the US, too.  After all, even the history of "white flight" as a response to racial integration is not easily forgettable.  Fair housing laws and a lot more inter-racial and inter-cultural mixing, along with education and understanding, has decreased a great deal of geographic exclusion of the "others."  Thankfully!

Sometimes, I think of the geographic exclusion in India as non-violent and passive-aggressive "ethnic cleansing" of neighborhoods.  It freaks me out even more.

India, with its long history of the awful caste system, has a terrible history of geographic separation of people along religious lines too.  My grandmothers' villages were classic examples of these.  In the small village of Pattamadai, the brahmins, for instance, lived in "agraharams" while Muslims lived in a different part of town, and the non-brahmins in yet another part of town.

In my other grandmother's place, in Sengottai, it was no different.

In the map on the right, which is of the eastern half of Sengottai, the brahmin neighborhoods were clustered about the center.  (Click on the figure for a clearer image.)  As is typical of the "agraharams," temples were the focus of the neighborhoods. 

The Muslim part of town was across on the west side.  In between are the traditional non-brahmin neighborhoods, including the one where the my high school friend's grandfather's home is located.

During my childhood, I have spent many summer vacations in Sengottai and Pattamadai.  But, never had I even remotely wandered into the Muslim areas.  It was much later, did I walk around these places and get a sense of the lay of the land.  Graduate schooling, which helped me better understand these issues, furthered my intellectual and personal curiosities. 

It boggles my mind that all through my life in India I had never been inside a Muslim home.  How could that be possible unless society was such that one could live a life in a bubble without ever socially interacting with the other.

The secular facade was shattered when the country elected to power a Hindu nationalist party.  Over the recent decade, every day I have been witnessing from the other side of the planet the old country becoming overtly Hindu majoritarian that bullies the minority religions.  In the latest installment (and with no end in sight, I fear), the governing party's national spokesperson participated in a television news program and dissed Prophet Muhammad.  This was a shot that was heard all around the Islamic world. 

Writing about this unfolding crisis, Rana Ayub, an Indian journalist who has made plenty of enemies by critiquing the Hindu majoritarian politics, notes the deafening silence from India's Prime Minister even as the country rapidly descends into hate.  Ayub writes:

The world has long viewed India as a nation that has been the melting pot of cultures, religions and customs; a leading light in fighting tyranny and oppression; and a leader on discourse around secular and plural values. India under Modi, however, is coming across as a petty, vindictive nation that seeks pleasure in humiliating the oppressed and the less privileged. 

The land of Mahatma Gandhi, Abul Kalam Azad and Rabindranath Tagore is being reduced to a caricature of hate on the global stage.

I worry that the idea of "India as a nation that has been the melting pot of cultures, religions and customs" was always false and what we are witnessing now is the real India.  Saare Jahan Se Achcha it is not.