In a few days there will open in Montgomery, Alabama, the Legacy Museum, devoted to slavery, segregation and equality. It includes the first memorial to lynching victims. I love the United States, the land of my adoption, as a country prepared to face, in some small measure, the blackest period in its history.
The country tortured and lynched no less than 5000 recorded African Americans, perhaps many more, after the so-called emancipation, and kept lynching as recently as 1970. The lynching ritual is well illustrated by the case of Sam Hose, a black Georgian, never charged with any crime, who was lynched on 23 April 1899. He was stripped, chained to a tree, his ears, fingers and genitals chopped, his face skinned, knives plunged into his body, kerosene-soaked wood piled around him and he was set on fire. As the flames rose, the body contorted, eyes bulged out of their sockets, his blood sizzled and veins ruptured. Later, they sliced open his heart and liver, crushed his bones, and distributed pieces to spectators as souvenirs.
Besides its entertainment value, the ritual was essentially to terrorize the black people. To tell them that, though the law said they were free, not only were they economically in hock to the whites as servants and sharecroppers, they had to be totally subservient, slavishly dominated and servile. Much has changed in the US since then, but what has not changed is the long tradition of inequality, the subservience of African Americans. It continues, in business and education, in every aspect of social affairs or the justice system.
I hate the United States for what it has done and keeps doing to a section of its own people.
When I started living in the US as an Indian emigré, what intrigued me was that the Indian community believed it to be indistinguishable from the whites. Unquestionably, the Indians have done well in the US and become the most successful community in its history, besting even the Jewish record in terms of individual affluence and community status. But, socially, they remain clearly what sociologists call an outgroup. They are a minority community and will remain one for the foreseeable future, their destiny tied with that of other minority communities like the African Americans and the Hispanics. They must do what they are loath to do: identify with the cause of the Hispanics and African Americans and fight against the pervasive evil of inequality. Nothing is more laughable than the pains of Indians arranging religious rituals for the success of Trump, who despises non-white groups with instinctive disdain, or Indians who have attained US citizenship trying to align with political groups that have historically kept minority groups at arm’s length. White America does not accept Indians as equals and will not do so in the foreseeable future. The spurning of Priyanka Chopra for a movie role because she is brown is only the latest tell-tale sign.
I hate the United States for what it has done and keeps doing to a section of its own people.
When I started living in the US as an Indian emigré, what intrigued me was that the Indian community believed it to be indistinguishable from the whites. Unquestionably, the Indians have done well in the US and become the most successful community in its history, besting even the Jewish record in terms of individual affluence and community status. But, socially, they remain clearly what sociologists call an outgroup. They are a minority community and will remain one for the foreseeable future, their destiny tied with that of other minority communities like the African Americans and the Hispanics. They must do what they are loath to do: identify with the cause of the Hispanics and African Americans and fight against the pervasive evil of inequality. Nothing is more laughable than the pains of Indians arranging religious rituals for the success of Trump, who despises non-white groups with instinctive disdain, or Indians who have attained US citizenship trying to align with political groups that have historically kept minority groups at arm’s length. White America does not accept Indians as equals and will not do so in the foreseeable future. The spurning of Priyanka Chopra for a movie role because she is brown is only the latest tell-tale sign.
For Indian Americans to align themselves with the struggle for equality in the US would be particularly appropriate, for that is the supreme Indian tradition: of acceptance and assimilation. I love India, the land of my birth, for its greatest strength has been to meld a common link among diverse groups. To bring together people of different languages, religions and cultures and confer a common sense of purpose, as when the Indians combined to throw out the exploitative English occupiers.
I grew up in Kolkata, which still bore the trappings of a capital city, of no less than a territory of the British empire. I lived in a house that bordered on a large Hindu community with its own temple and tradition and an even larger if poorer Muslim contingent that had its own mosque. It was not far from a Buddhist temple and an important Jain hospital. Practically facing the hospital was a tall Episcopal church and an adjacent Christian compound. A large number of Indians spoke Bengali and Hindi interchangeably, some of us spoke English, but our gardener spoke Oriya, our guard spoke Bhojpuri and our father’s factotum was most comfortable in Urdu. But we were a family and a community, and we saw ourselves as of one land. We played football, hockey and badminton, and other games I have forgotten. We were happy.
That was the India, the land of my birth, I loved.
I grew up in Kolkata, which still bore the trappings of a capital city, of no less than a territory of the British empire. I lived in a house that bordered on a large Hindu community with its own temple and tradition and an even larger if poorer Muslim contingent that had its own mosque. It was not far from a Buddhist temple and an important Jain hospital. Practically facing the hospital was a tall Episcopal church and an adjacent Christian compound. A large number of Indians spoke Bengali and Hindi interchangeably, some of us spoke English, but our gardener spoke Oriya, our guard spoke Bhojpuri and our father’s factotum was most comfortable in Urdu. But we were a family and a community, and we saw ourselves as of one land. We played football, hockey and badminton, and other games I have forgotten. We were happy.
That was the India, the land of my birth, I loved.
That India is now being wrecked. It is being replaced by an intolerant, hate-filled India one barely recognizes. The India I hate is the India where men in saffron break down sanctuaries in the name of religion, false gurus foment distrust of other faiths in the name of patriotism, people are murdered ostensibly for the welfare of cows, media is cowed into compliance or silence, journalists are threatened and shot down, leaders in power use crooks and criminals alongside the police to carry out their pogrom, and the glib-tongued supreme leader who promises the moon but delivers little more than moonshine, abets a regime of hate and intolerance, and uses well-honed publicity gimmicks to hold on to power he should have long forfeited. Yes, to promote hate is hateful.
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