Kindle magazine has an issue full of judicial reform stories this month. In the light of Section 66A and so many other attacks of fundamental freedoms, the articles gain heightened sense of relevance. I write on racism and wonder if Indians are subtly more racist that everyone else we accuse of being. It comes a few weeks after the horrific mob attack on some African students in a Bengaluru neighbourhood. Read the column here or see below.
THAT MALLU JOKE. OR THE FEAR OF THE OUTSIDER.
Are Indians subtly more racist than they like to believe? Are the innocent jokes and harmless stereotypes not so innocent and harmless after all? In a world where people are constantly moving between states and countries, Deepa Bhasthi takes a look at the idea of the ‘outsider’.
Heard that Mallu joke yesterday? You must
have. It's an old one, about how there was a chetta on the moon manning a chai-kada
when Neil Armstrong gingerly laid down his foot in his leap for mankind. It is
an old joke, but never fails to elicit a snigger dressed as a half-hearted
laugh. I want to think that the parties involved in the telling of and
listening to this old hash anecdote form in their minds a clichéd image of the
shrewd Mallu, the one who takes away the jobs, infuses everything and himself
in coconut oil and wears the mundu.
Then there is that famous mundu joke.
There are always jokes, stereotypes
masquerading as harmless time-pass stories during lunch hour. We have laughed
at them. We have our own versions of stereotypes. We are such clichés. But
these are not meant to be just jokes, innocent caricatures, are they? Racism is
much more than deeper than the shape of the eyes or the colour of the skin. And
let it be said aloud today. Indians are about as racist as it can get out
there.
A couple of weeks ago, some Africans were
attacked by a mob, in the cosmopolitan metropolis of Bengaluru. The supposed
New York-like town in this country, where there is always space for everyone,
where every culture comes into the melting pot and permeates its unique flavour
into the rest of the dish. At Byrathi, a far flung neighbourhood where there is
a huge population of Africans, the 'locals' decided to 'teach a lesson' to the
'outsiders'. Dear John was attacked by a blood thirsty mob, and newspapers
spent that week spluttering about how Bengaluru is a tolerant city and this is
just the work of a 'fringe outfit.' Right, then.
It isn't the first such incident in this
city, or any other city, for that matter. From seemingly innocuous jokes to
baying for blood, it seems like a giant leap. But is it? I have often wondered.
A mob is a set of people who wouldn't individually resort to such immense
violence. It is the safety in numbers that triggers the latent beast in us all.
Are we all mobs waiting to unite?
Which brings me to the question as to who
the outsider is and why we don't like them too much. Racism is as much about
the local/outsider as it is about my community/not my community. I am an
outsider here, in this city. I moved here a month short of nine years ago. It
has been a difficult relationship, for I have never been a city person. It took
me several years to even begin to think of Bengaluru as anything more than a
place of transit, between my home and where my new home would be. But I can
tell you where to get the best idlis and where to shop for the cheapest kurtas.
I suppose that insider knowledge makes it a reluctant home now. But certain
fringe outfits will call me an outsider always. So what if I speak the
language? It is still not the language of those born here.
This racism and the fear of the outsider is
a rather funny thing. Funny being sarcasm. I suppose it is a remnant of a
long-past time when a new member in the tribe meant lesser food to eat and
added burdens. Strange were their ways - they spoke different, wore different
things, ate different things and behaved weird, "not like us." And so
the outsider was shunned. For it was the fear of the unknown and thus, by
extension, the discomfort of not knowing how to respond to them.
Then began to creep in scant knowledge of
their ways. Then came the mockery, which the outsider put up with because they
were fewer in number. With safety in numbers for the 'local' came the arrogance
of assigning stereotypes to everyone but themselves. Like the hard-wired gender
roles that we assume often, like the hard-wired social conventions we are
obliged to follow, subtle (and not so subtle) racism is just as imbibed in our psyche.
Old habits die hard.
This argument has been presented scores of
times, every time an 'outsider' is targeted by the 'local.' The law allows you
to go and live where you please, no sena can do anything about it. But the
argument still needs to be made, even if only with the hope that repeated pleas
will make a fervent hope a natural reality. We live in a world that is more in
movement than the human race has ever been in, both physically and digitally.
With the millions of pieces of information available, with the option of
selecting a side of the media to follow, with so much of everything, logic
would be to think that people would be more open-minded. Logic would be to
think people would mimic the rules of an ancient close knit village, not
perfect, but a system that fairly functioned, sans the fears and rigidity of
the unknown, the unfamiliar.
But perhaps I dream of a distant utopia.
Manufacturing consent being the humungous industry that it is, it is a
regressive strategy this global village seems to have chosen. If anything, the
fear of the unknown is heightened by the more 'others who are unlike us' that
we meet. By effect, the jokes are louder, cruder, more personal, more vulgar, and
more disrespectful.
I want to spin myself around in circles with
this train of thought now. One section of the argument leads to another path I
want to tread on, just because there is so much to say. Yet, so little needs to
be said. All that really needs to be said it that racism masked within rehashed
jokes and loosely constructed stereotypes are funny sometimes, but the question
we need to ask ourselves is where these biases are coming from. Because racism
is so.not.cool.
The simple truth is that beneath all our
biases and stereotypes, we are all the same, trying in our ways to live through
the day in the best way we can, in a way we think is right and workable for us.
Like there apparently being only seven plots in story writing - all the stories
in the world supposedly fit into these, one way or the other - there is only
one kind of human.
For a race that is so advanced, this
shouldn't be so hard to comprehend.
Yet...
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