You are what you think. As Jude says “Love..Love.. Love… That’s all you should be thinking of”. A mind filled with happy thoughts sees greater things in life, art or science. This is why I have not written more on this blog, because even the very process of thinking about race/racism is melancholic.
The thought of race is just an outcome of a deeper insecurity in a person. This is all the more a reason why I feel sorry for India. When people in India fall prey to race (coated through terms such as caste, religion or region), they commit betrayal to the very notion of India.
As I mentioned earlier, India is the perfect antithesis of race. No person in India has a race. Not only does each person have a genetic imprint from diverse tribes of humankind, but also each person is different from everybody else in India. There is no Indian race.
I find it extremely offensive when Indians are termed as brown people.
Not only is it far from truth (there is variation of skin color ranging from very dark to fair within all regions of India), it creates a sense of alienation that Indians are different from African people. The notion of a brown identity results in racism exhibited by Indian diaspora towards natives in Africa, Carribean islands, Pacific islands etc. This is terrible.
What is Indianness ? It is the constant process of questioning and discovery about oneself, as illucidated by these lyrics of the sufi poet Bulla Shah. Throughout its history, India has offered welcome to thousands of tribes which have managed to preserve (and enrich) their own culture without the fear of persecution. None of the philosophers of India were satisfied by contemporary dogma, but created new and exciting directions of thought. When one claims to be an Indian, one should be strong enough to realize that one is alone in this world, that there is nobody else like oneself. Otherwise, one does not deserve to be labeled as an Indian. This is why I cringe at the word Desi (Indian social group). I am not a brown person. I am a person of many colours. Each human being is a person of many colours.
Indians are the citizens of the world. They are the children of Africa. They are the children of Persia, of China, of Greece, of Arabia … Any land at a cultural confluence is an India. Any person of mixed ancestry is an Indian. Any people fleeing persecution automatically become Indians. They will be welcomed by the mountains, forests and the rivers of India.
Indians are the children of men.
They have reason to treat every human being on this planet with the affection reserved to one’s parents.
Well said and true said.