The profanity of sameness

Fortunately or unfortunately, this piece, like the headquarters of SAARC, will have to be located in Nepal. My case, quite frankly, is that if there is a larger identity I sense other than being Indian (I am, after all, also such difficult and politically incorrect things as Brahmin, Bihari, eastern, middle class and privileged), it is that I am Asian, not Southasian. And to me, the clues to why Southasia remains no more than an accident of geography – or worse, a figment of vested intellectual fantasy, the sad whore that feeds seminarist appetites on longtables – are nowhere more blatant than in the manner in which India and Nepal have come to abuse their sameness. I think it was Pablo Picasso who once stated what has since become a tried-and-true maxim: learn the rules first in order to be able to break them. Southasia, likewise, must begin with learning to recognise, and then grasping, the profundity of its differences.

Until then, it will only profane its sameness. Allow me a parentheses, too tempting and critical to bypass. Actually, for all the resonance it might have in relation to the rest of the world, the idea of Southasian sameness makes me laugh (and cry) in our collective context. Gujar, Gurung, Dalit, Pathan, Limbu, Yadav, Baloch, Naga, Shia, Sunni, Kashmiri, Madhesi, Meitei, Pahari, Brahmin, Bakerwal, Baangaal, Ghoti, Magar, Moplah, Tamil, Kannad, Tharu, Sinhala, Newar, Kumaoni, Kutchi, Sylheti, Sindhi, Bohra, Syrian, Suhrawardy, Chhetri, Ladakhi, Mizo, Upper Valley, Lower Valley, Badi Dhoti, Chhoti Dhoti, Hinayana, Mahayana, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Isahi, apas mein ki khub ladai. Sameness? And yet, here we are, ineffably together despite ourselves, a preposterous, and fairly thriving, challenge to whatever laws there are that keep the cosmos going. End of parentheses. The beginning of yet more differences.

Please make a note of them. Please note that Nepal is not a nation of Indian origin; it never was. Pakistan and Bangladesh aren't nations of Indian origin. If anything, as modern nation states, they are of imperial origin. This might be a terribly obvious thing to say, but it needs stating because this is still not obvious to most Indians, just as it wasn't obvious, or acceptable, to a fair few till very recently that Pakistan was irreversibly separate, a nation in its own right. For all our common twines of history and geography, and of religion and culture and language and race, we are different nations. Of the many things we have in common, perhaps the most significant one is, and should be, our common frontier. We are two sovereignties. Perhaps the fact that we are able to arrive in Nepal sans passport and visa encourages us to forget this.

But if that is what it would require for us to realise the fact of different sovereignties, so be it; let's have a visa regime. Travel formalities you must undergo in relation to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and all the rest automatically modulate your psychology to essential differences; you arrive at each of these places from a different country. Nepal happens seamlessly, whereas seams are required. You cannot arrive at a constructive sameness unless you have a full, almost desiccated, understanding of separateness. Singing the sameness song without a clarified notion of the elements between whom such sameness is being sought is merely, and uselessly, romantic. Neither Faiz nor Nazrul, celebrated as they are across fences to the west and east of India, have relieved us of our nettles. Poetry has its timeless enrichments, but nettles require the hard hand of statecraft.

Jagirdari diplomacy
If this plain little truth were to be understood across borders of the Subcontinent, it would make things so much easier for all those that occupy it. If it isn't a happy thing to be an Indian in Nepal – and trust me, it isn't – it is because we haven't made it a happy thing for Nepalis to be Nepalis. Psychologically speaking – and psychology often weighs heavier than our political or diplomatic understanding – when we cannot afford any longer to look at them as reliable watchmen or unreliable servants or pliant prostitutes or medieval khukuri-clad Gurkhas, when they emerge above those stereotypes, Nepalis still remain as sub-nationals to most Indians, and their country as a hilly extension of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, an auxiliary vignette flung on the far Himalayan skyline.

Nepal, probably all of Southasia, is India's own little Orient, in the sense that Edward Said spoke of it. In relation to Nepal and the region, we employ an abstract imperialism of ideas and practice that, to quote Said on the Oriental-Occidental relationship, "gives the Westerner positional superiority and put him in a whole series of relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the upper hand." Diplomacy is one thing, jagirdari quite another. Often, the latter is the mindset out of which India operates in Southasia, to the extent it is allowed to do so. It is key to remind ourselves of that: there are indeed extents to which jagirdari works. Remember the Sri Lankan soldier's rifle butt on Rajiv Gandhi's nape during that post-Indian Peacekeeping Force 'guard of honour' in Colombo?

That was a caveat to jagirdari. Nepal has to be left to Nepalis, as Pakistan to Pakistanis, Sri Lanka to Sri Lankans, Bangladesh to Bangladeshis and so on. There are, of course, no islands in Southasia, not even Sri Lanka and the Maldives, metaphorically speaking. They all impinge on each other in both happy and terrible ways. There are problems that this impossible 'sameness' constantly throws up, but there are opportunities too. And India, as the largest, most advanced component of this 'sameness', has the most critical role to play. And the role that it can best play is by working with the rest, as one country works with another. As victims of protracted Orientalism ourselves, we should have learned to reject its mechanics, not create our own little Orient.

~ Sankarshan Thakur is a Delhi-based journalist.