ALFP e-magazine issue 4: Culture and Identity

With Love to Insiders and Outsiders
Samrat Choudhury1 (India)
Author / Independent Journalist / ALFP 2018 Fellow

It is perhaps a very human tendency to form groups of “us” and “them,” of insiders and outsiders.
Where the differences are obvious the matter of identifying “us” and “them” becomes quite easy;
for instance, to determine an “us” and a “them” based on skin color. Sometimes, though, thedifference is not easily evident. For instance, it may not be easily apparent even to Indians,
Pakistanis and Bangladeshis which of the countries a stranger they spot on the street is from.
Nonetheless, this does nothing to dim the ardor of Hindu nationalists in India keen to evict alleged
Bangladeshi immigrants into the country, for instance. On the contrary, it actually worries themthat millions of Bangladeshis are slipping into India unnoticed. The true root of this worry is in aquestion of power: the peril of democracy is that any group that has sizeable numbers becomes therulers. The Hindu nationalists fear that growth in the population of Muslim migrants from
Bangladesh will shift power out of their hands. The matter becomes more complicated because ofIndia’s multiplicity of languages and ethnicities. Small ethnic communities in the areas bordering
Bangladesh, many of which are tribal Christian groups, don’t care for Hindu religious politics.
However, like the Hindu nationalists, they too fear local power slipping away from their own hands.
Therefore, culture and identity become the arena of contestation in what is primarily a politicalstruggle for power at the local as well as the national level.
Given the realities of the world we inhabit, such contestation is inevitable. It was possible, in theworld before the advent of mechanized transport, to live local lives untroubled, for the most part,by the happenings of the wider world. Movement of human populations has occurred throughout
the world and through history, but the rapidity, frequency and scale were orders of magnitude
lower. Moreover, the notion of border in terms of both territory and identity was fluid. Identity
before the advent of universal education seems to have been a very different thing in large parts ofthe globe. Linguistic identity, for instance, was evidently not the most important in many places.
This continued down to the First World War when the age of empire ended. The changing identityof the British royal family illustrates this point well. It was only after World War I broke out thatthe British royal family, which was of German origin, changed its name from the House of SaxeCoburg-Gotha to the House of Windsor. Several previous rulers including Queen Victoria, whowas Empress of India, had German as their first language. Her husband, Prince Albert, was also
German. Their linguistic identity as German speakers ruling the British Empire had not been anissue in the era before the advent of linguistic nationalism, which emerged in the 1800s. Examples
similar to the British royal family abound from around the world, of people taking on the linguistic
identity of whichever territory they were in. We sometimes forget that a language can be learnt, andthat family names have often changed over the years. The current American president’s family
name, for instance, was Drumpf, and his family too came from Germany. An ancestor in the 17th

1 The author’s latest book is an edited volume titled Insider/Outsider (Amaryllis, 2019). He can be reached atsamratx@protonmail.com© 2019 International House of Japan and Japan Foundation

ALFP e-magazine issue 4: Culture and Identity

century changed the family name to Trump, and Donald Trump’s grandfather Freidrich, whomoved to New York, changed his name to Frederick.2
The predominance of linguistic identities followed the rise of national vernaculars that went handin hand with the secular study of languages. It was a process by which “the old sacred languages—
Latin, Greek and Hebrew—were forced to mingle on equal ontological footing with a motleyplebeian crowd of vernacular rivals, in a movement which complemented their earlier demotion in
the marketplace by print-capitalism,” according to Benedict Anderson.3 Secular education built on
this. Anderson quotes Eric Hobsbawm to add his weight to Hobsbawm’s dictum that “the progressof schools and universities measures that of nationalism, just as schools and especially universities
became its most conscious champions.” The map, the census and the museum further contributedto the reimagination of the world. 4 The world where German queens could rule the Britishempire—and largely enjoy the loyalty of her distant Indian subjects—disappeared. Between WorldWar I and World War II, the old world of multicultural empires, such as the Austro-Hungarian andOttoman, collapsed, and a new world of nations with national cultures and languages came intobeing—a process of which the end of colonialism following World War II may be seen as thehighlight.
World War II, however, was also a clash between rising national empires with colonial ambitions,and existing empires with colonies. Its horrors made the perils of combining nationalism withimperialism and colonialism painfully apparent. The world has shrunk away from all of these very
substantially in theory if not always in practice. Religion had already been pushed aside by
secularism in a large part of the world when modern nations were born. After the Cold War, evenideology, which was a kind of religion, suffered defeat. The grand theories departed, leaving avacuum in many a human heart. Although there is a clear economic dimension and an aspect ofpolitical competition driving identity politics in many places, there is also perhaps something deeper.
The reactions that we see around the world now, in country after country electing right-wing leaders,and in the ascent of religious nationalists in various places, may perhaps reflect a quest for stable
and meaningful identities beyond what is offered by consumer capitalism.
Identities and cultures are human inventions, prone to continuous change, but they are essential
mental software that help people find answers to the basic existential question, “Who am I?” It is
practically impossible to live outside of the matrix of culture and identity. Our relationship with
the national and religious culture that, by the accident of birth, we are born into, is often
complicated by the demons and angels of history. Nonetheless, we cannot shun one culture andidentity completely without adopting some other, because to do so would be practically impossible.

2 Daniel Victor, “Donald Drumpf: A Funny Label, but Is It Fair?”

The New York Times, March 2, 2016,
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/03/us/politics/donald-drumpf-a-funny-label-but-is-it-fair.html (accessedFebruary 2019).
3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (London: Verso Books,2006).
4 Ibid.
© 2019 International House of Japan and Japan Foundation

ALFP e-magazine issue 4: Culture and Identity

Visitors at Umananda, a river island on the Brahmaputra in Assam, India.5

If we view human cultural diversity as we view biodiversity, we come to a very different conceptionof how to deal with the difficult question of identifying with cultures. A famous quote usually
attributed to the explorer and anthropologist Wade Davis put it very nicely: “Other cultures are
not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.” Different
cultures, including the ones we are born into, have grown and flowered in different parts of theworld through centuries of human endeavor and creativity. It is only right that they should all beaccorded due respect and viewed with affection—both those that we happened to be born into, as
well as all others, which are part of our shared human heritage, and manifestations of the humanspirit.

The contents of this article reflect solely the opinions of the author.
5 The island has a temple several centuries old that is visited by Hindu pilgrims, mainly from India. Despite theirshared religion and nationality, they speak a multitude of languages and reflect a great diversity of ethnicities that
may not be immediately apparent at first glance.
© 2019 International House of Japan and Japan Foundation