Imagining Identitiest
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: June 11 2015 -

There are numerous ways of “imagining and constructing” views on identity of a community or even a nation.

The most banal of the ways include defining a group through acquired cultural values and perceivable differences.

It is interesting to note how the ways of constructing the “self’ and the “other” have been translated into modern political missions. Madhavrao Sadashivrao Golwalkar who was the leader of Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) from 1940-1973 in 1956 said “whatever we believed in, the Muslim was wholly hostile to it. If we worship in the temple, he would desecrate it… If we worship cow, he would like to eat it.

If we glorify woman as a symbol of sacred motherhood, he would like to molest her. He was tooth and nail opposed to our way of life in all aspects - religious, cultural, social, etc.”

Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s, the Muslim League leader and father of the Pakistani nation’s presidential address to his party’s annual Lahore meeting held in March 1940 said “The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, and literature. They neither intermarry, nor inter-dine together, and indeed they belong to two different civilisations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions.”

Add Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s remark on the assumed role of an independent Indian nation state in 1947.

Three months after the partition, he wrote, "Whatever the provocation from Pakistan and whatever the indignities and horrors inflicted on non-Muslims there, we have got to deal with this minority in a civilised manner. We must give them security and the rights of citizens in a democratic state.”

While acknowledging these “bunch of thoughts” intrinsic to the three views given above, most of us have missed out the fourth, fifth or sixth view on “imagining” the idea of “shared” nationhood.

When the British Statutory Commission headed by John Simon (also known as Simon Commission) was assessing the political situation in 1929 in the wake of intensified struggle by the people of the sub-continent, the Naga leadership too submitted a memorandum to the commission.

The memorandum had this to say, “Our language is quite different from those of the plains and we have no social affinities with the Hindus or Mussalmans. We are looked down by the one for “beef” and other for our “pork” and by both for our want in education, is not due to any fault of ours.

This basically means that a conscious recognition of what we eat and drink is one way of exhibiting collective identity. Political theorists have even recognized this form of “social construct” as one of the many valid “qualifiers” of a community’s identity however modern or primitive.

How much of banal approaches to the construction of identities should one accept largely depends on the choices one makes.