Fault lines

SAY, I was walking down the street and I met you, a total stranger. You asked me who I was, how would I answer you? Depending on who you were, my answer would vary. I could say I was an Indian or I would say I was Tamil, I could mention my "native place" or my caste-affiliation , I could say I was Christian, and go into details on which branch of the religion I subscribed to, I could say I was a publisher or a newspaper columnist and so on.

Unlike most multiple choice questions, all these answers would be right, as all of us are composites of our various identities. This is what fundamentalists of every stripe miss, when they insist that you can only be one thing or the other.

It is this sort of narrow definition of who we are that leads to strife, murder, and suspicion. As Amin Maalouf says in his brilliant book On Identity (Harvill Panther), a book which should be required reading in India today, to insist that every individual has one "over-riding affiliation" that outweighs all the rest (whether of religion, citizenship, region, caste, village ...) is nonsensical; depending on the situation one finds oneself in, one might choose one aspect of one's identity over the other, but to ignore the existence of the rest is madness. This might seem an obvious truth, but try telling your friendly neighbourhood fundamentalist that! The author argues his case passionately and his central thesis deserves to be reproduced in his own words.

"Each individual's identity is made up of a number of elements, and these are clearly not restricted to the particulars set down in official records. Of course, for the great majority these factors include allegiance to a religious tradition; to a nationality - sometimes two; to a profession, an institution, or a particular social milieu.

"But the list is much longer than that; it is virtually unlimited. A person may feel a more or less strong attachment to a province, a village, a neighbourhood, a clan, a professional team or one connected with sport, a group of friends, a union, a company, a parish, a community of people with the same passions, the same sexual preferences, the same physical handicaps, or who have to deal with the same kind of pollution or other nuisance.

"Of course, not all these allegiances are equally strong, at least at any given moment. But none is entirely insignificant, either. All are components of personality - we might almost call them "genes of the soul" so long as we remember that most of them are not innate.

"While each of these elements may be found separately in many individuals, the same combination of them is never encountered in different people, and it is this that gives every individual richness and value and makes each human being unique and irreplaceable."

Maalouf is a Lebanese Christian who has lived over half his life in France, where he has made a name for himself as a novelist and essayist. He began this book because he was constantly asked "who or what he was". For example, if he defined himself as a Christian, he was a minority in Lebanon but a majority globally; as a Lebanese he was a majority in his own culture, but a minority in France where he lived. And so on and on.

Given the persistence of these questions in his life, he decided to explore why, when we all know that it is our multiplicity that gives us our personality, we still seek to exclude and victimise others who do not have exactly the same affiliations (which ironically is an impossibility for, until we are all cloned from one common source, we cannot even begin to resemble one another except perhaps in the labels we adorn ourselves with). Though the force of habit or the lack of imagination or just indifference ensures that we do not question the people who would have us define ourselves rigidly and inaccurately, Maalouf argues that this is something we should fight.

He writes : "Each of us should be encouraged to see his identity as the sum of all his various affiliations, instead of as just one of them raised to the status of the most important, made into an instrument of exclusion and sometimes into a weapon of war." Is anyone listening?

DAVID DAVIDAR

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