Miniya Chatterji - Indian Instincts:: Essays on Freedom and Equality in India

A lmost 200 years ago, the Swiss-born natural historian Louis Agassiz invented the premise for every xenophobes favourite argument. He said that the three major human racesWhites, Asians and Negroes, as he liked to categorize themhad risen independently from separate ancestral lineages. Agassiz declared.

As a professor at Harvard University, Agassiz was one of the first to propose that Earth had endured an Ice Age, but he also used his public stature as a scientist to prove racism. It was the era of scientific racism, which meant that there were others such as Samuel George Morton who used various so-called scientific methods to rank human races.

Fortunately for us, Agassizs argument was debunked by his contemporary from the other Cambridge, in the United Kingdomthe academic Charles Darwin. Darwin suggestednow famouslythat all of us had descended from one common ancestor in Africa.

But Darwin had actually spoken about apes, not modern man. Moreover, if we go back far enough, we will see that humans share a distant common ancestry with every living thing on Earth, including bacteria and mushrooms. Therefore, it might be more relevant to find out what happened after the first exodus of apes from Africa took place sixteen million years ago. Many apes left for South-East Asia to evolve into gibbons and orangutans, and the ones who stayed on in Africa evolved into gorillas, chimpanzees and humans.

So what happened after that? How did humans not only survive in Africa from that point onwards, but also go on to inhabit the rest of the world? And if we all have descended from that one human in Africa, why do we talk about race? Why do we believe that people belonging to specific nationalities, religions and ethnicities display common characteristics, and that each such community is different from the others?

In India, thousands of diverse local communities are defined by the conviction that there is something unique shared among the people of a particular community. We assume that we must naturally display some characteristics of the community to which we are connected by blood and heritage.

This belief among Indiansthat we display a set of settled characteristics because of our membership by birth to a certain communityhas far-reaching and varied effects on our thinking about ourselves and about others. It gives some of us a sense of mystic belonging to a community. We might believe that our behaviour cant be helped since our mannerisms were predetermined by birth as per that community. We might even forcefully emulate some of the communitys established characteristics to feel divinely connected to it. This could also mean that we are left with hardly any place for choice or individuality.

For example, a Gujarati is supposed to be entrepreneurial by blood. Now, if a young Gujarati boy is told this from the day he can distinguish language from random sounds, that is likely to be the ambition he will grow up withemulating the characteristics of his fellow Gujarati business wizards, and feeling a sense of community bonding. Similarly, when a Parsi or a Sindhi meets another Parsi or Sindhi for the first time in any corner of the world, there is often an immediate sense of familiarity and trust between them. The bond between two members of the same community is often accompanied by a willingness to help the other out. To cite another example, the cultural clich is that Bengalis are good at the arts, that they make good writers, musicians, painters and so on. How does that clich affect a young Bengali child in Kolkata in terms of the education she or he receives and the expectations from the community? When this child grows up, she or he can probably leverage the instant community bond with fellow Bengalis in creative fields to land a similar job.