What does it mean to be other? During one of my social work classes in Ohio with unusually mixed demographics, our professor asked us to write down about 10 of the identities we felt we occupied. Every single student of colour and other in the classroom mentioned only their race, colour, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or disability.
Others are us who understand we are not dominant.
The white students, on the other hand, would read out categories like “sister”, “friend”, “artist”, “student”, “cat-lover”, etc. My mind was blown by this simple exercise. It was that moment where I realised these were chains that we now willingly wore. We have been compelled to view ourselves as the Master views us.
As scholar Sharmila Sen puts it, “…real power lies in being so dominant that you need not be named. The normal needs no name, no special qualifier… And when we who are not male, white, or Protestant choose to name these things, we risk sounding like people with grievances — angry, shrill, dangerous…” (Sen, 2018).
Every Indian student has a chapter in their school political science textbook called “Identity Politics”. It is normative in the country to use identity for political gain.
During its conception upon freedom from the British Empire, the government formed by the Indian National Congress was tasked with securing a future for a nation that had been systematically divided by identity and stripped of all its wealth.
From 1947 to 1950, India remained under British dominion while the INC transitioned itself into the existing British governance system and drafted a constitution. It was to be no small task as India was in a state of destitution after the previous two centuries of British exploitation.
It took almost three years to draft the most comprehensive and lengthy constitution in the world. Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, deemed the Father of the Constitution of India, presided over the 398-member assembly of people undertaking this task. After the India-Pakistan partition, the assembly reduced to 299 members.
Dr. Ambedkar was a revolutionary and constitutional expert who had studied over 60 constitutions. He held 11 sessions over a period of 165 days. The members of his committee represented a plethora of ethnicities, states, languages, cultures, castes and experiences.
As the Preamble of the Constitution of India states, the committee “solemnly resolved to constitute India into a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic”. The injustice of the previous centuries needed to be remedied — India was to become a country vested in compassion and truth.
However, India today is far from realising these principles enshrined in the constitution. It largely remains a casteist and sexist society, with these systems being conveniently maintained through the same institutions set up by the British. For example, while Brahmins are a minority, they continued to hold a majority of the power in India — be it in the administrative services, educational institutions or media.
We remain divided and structured by various social constructs called identities that allow us to believe we are inherently different and separate from each other.
So, what is identity? Often, the truth lies in asking the right questions even when there seems to be no right answer. Identity is an explanation of one’s oppression. It depicts a complexity of barriers and simple privileges distributed across human beings based on arbitrary factors. These factors, including caste, class, race, religion, gender, sex, sexuality, culture, language, geography, disability, have come to demonstrate how the powerful view “others”. It is why whiteness or the dominant identities that mimic it do not need to be named.
This is not to undermine the very real consequences that arise from false categories such as “dalit” or “woman”. We can only deconstruct such identities by naming and debunking the purpose for which they have been constructed.
Identities are meant to exist for an understanding of one’s purpose in relation to dominant groups of people.
Yet, every human being is inherently different. Even when two children grow up in the same house they have entirely different experiences of life. Much to the discomfort of the coloniser, we are all mysteries that cannot be solved through our labels. When we are assigned identities, it is to become identifiable through what they stand for and not who we are. This makes otherness easier to categorise and control.
Different identities tend to describe our experiences in arbitrarily convenient contexts for capitalist gain. The British “Divide-and-Rule” policy was explicit in its intention of pitting brother against brother and spreading hatred to maintain control over the economy. They used pre-existing forms of social stratification such as caste to easier and further perpetuate these divides.
Our perspective as human beings remains distorted by the view that each person can be defined somehow by the groups they are associated with. But, we are not our race, ethnicity, gender or colonially assigned identity. They are constructs that allow our society to construct who we are for us.
The very existence of intercaste, inter-religious, interracial, or intergroup couples and the children born from their love deconstruct binaries that have historically structured our society. They disrupt the lines that have been drawn to separate people by exposing the fallacies of caste, class, religion, race or other such social constructs.
These relationships contradict identity and all the baggage that comes with it by highlighting what it means to simply be human and in love.
Today, we continue to utilise colonial divisions such as “Hindu” and “Muslim”, “man” and “woman”, “black” and “white” or “upper-caste” and “lower-caste” to advance identity-based political power rather than to recognise and mitigate socioeconomic differences. In reality, we can each only ever be summed up by the names we call ourselves.
I am Malini, the name given to me by my mother. I am not Indian, woman, etc. I cannot reduce myself to social constructs as I am a unique drop in this shared ocean of existence we call life. But, this is a privilege that must be fought for through resisting and disruptive the systems that deny them. No one is immune to death, so why do we insist on difference and separation in life?
As the saint Ramana Maharishi said in response to the question of how we should treat others — “there are no others.”
References
Easwaran, E. (1978). Gandhi, the man. Petaluma, CA: Nilgiri Press.
Sen, S. (2018). Not quite not white: Losing and finding race in America. NY, NY: Penguin Books.
