Culture shock and culture wars: the search for identity

IDENTITY crisis is a relatively new phenomenon giving rise to its own tensions and conflicts. The clash is not merely between cultures, but between orthodox and liberal within cultures. As cultures interpenetrate further in the new century, the search for identity by individuals and societies will challenge tradition in ways that could destabilise or enrich. How will we cope?

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MARIA COUTO

--- I hope you will allow me to make a personal presentation where I will focus in particular on my own identity and the identity of my mother who is 90 years old. I would like to share with you the tensions of this identity, how it has been constructed and adjusted, how it has changed and deepened with elements that combine conservative and progressive features of the culture into which I was born ...

The birth of political agendas in the world which assert regressive orthodoxies divide us and destroy the cohesive nature of plural cultures. In India they threaten our diversity and our survival. I was born in Goa, ... the Goa of the Inquisition, of colonisation through the cross and a process of conversion which erased the culture of our Hindu origins. But I would like to state in no uncertain terms that the roots of my Hinduism survive subliminally in my consciousness.

I have often reflected on the transition made by my mother from a conservative, orthodox Latin Christian culture to a pluralistic, spiritual and humane mainstream Hindu society in a small town. It was a transition made at a time of deep personal stress and she had no support system of either family or friends in her new environment. Her ability to survive and achieve phenomenal success in raising her young family was due to the compulsions of a struggle, but also to the stability of the society in a small town which was an academic centre, where she was surrounded by a professional class, a broad-minded, concerned and caring group of people quite unlike the predatory, self-absorbed middle class to which I belong.

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My mother remained moored to Latin Christianity yet she allowed us to wander and explore. She had a blind faith that we would not stray. But she also had faith in the religions and culture which had begun to influence the identity of her children. For there was a time not too long ago in our history when faith in faith was the most important aspect of Indian life from the Himalayas in the north to Kanyakumari in the south. For us in India life itself is faith and so the conversion process that culturally isolated her community in Goa had little impact on a woman who was secure in her own faith, who trusted other faiths and was not concerned with territoriality, hegemony, power and the state. Her concern was the education of her young family. In this she found complete support in her surroundings, perhaps because she posed no threat, I really do not know. But I would like to believe that in that small community we functioned as human beings who reached out in times of need to help or ask for help. The formal, orthodox and rigid Catholicism of Goa perceptibly changed into a more relaxed form of worship among many other forms of worship that surrounded us. We began to celebrate with our Muslim and Hindu friends the innumerable festivals of the Indian calendar. We varied our food habits, we learnt about the wider context of our lives. It may well be that this openness in my home was imposed by contingency and may not have been a considered choice. But it did enrich our lives. It created tensions and contradictions for me when I visited Goa. But for my mother it was a liberation. Indeed when we all grew up and wanted her to go back to Goa in 1974, so that she could be with her extended family, she point-blank refused. She said she could not bear the thought of the rigidities of caste and community that would enclose her again.

Now let me enlarge this. Some of you may be familiar with the work of Sara Suleri who teaches at Yale. Her graceful and insightful vignette

Meatless Days captures the contradictions and tensions of women in particular trapped in an orthodox society in Pakistan, a world where the concept of a woman was not really part of an available vocabulary.

Though the situation in the Goa of the 40s and contemporary India is not quite the same, the struggle and experiences are, I think, analogous. My students, trained to think independently, their minds alive with reading of literature and history, their perceptions deepened with exposure to great film and art, find themselves trapped in marriages and in a society that does not recognise the identity they have constructed. Now in India the nation and civilisation that has been historically receptive, inclusive and generous in its capacity for absorption and mutual enrichment is being re-modelled, our history distorted and shaped beyond recognition.

I have drawn you into my mother's life in order to present a very small example of the control exercised by an orthodoxy and tradition in which my mother had a good life but no exposure to the other. Such enforcement of orthodoxy and distortion of reality is currently being deployed to establish hegemony whether in the Balkans, in India, Afghanistan or Iran. The culture wars of today are projected as being fought between the Christian secular world and Islam, between the plural cultures and religious traditions of India and the Hindutva camp. The complexity of these traditions is being erased and protesting voices stifled. The paradox of the situation is that, in order to maintain hegemony, the group in control foments subdivisions, targeting groups. It was first the Muslims, then it was the Christians. We will wait and see who comes next. It is an insidious political agenda that has appropriated Mahatma Gandhi and Vivekananda, quoting them out of context to suit their manipulated game plan.

The appalling prospect of vitiation of the body politic calls for responses that restore faith in the multiple identities of our tradition. Our response must have an overriding vision of tolerance, justice and humanity, which has been stressed by both Mrs. Sonia Gandhi and our President. There is a danger that some of us will give up our identity altogether and sink into a rootless, mindless existence out of sheer panic. The other response that is taking shape is to go back to a kind of atavism.

Since conversion is so much part of our discourse today, and it has almost become a dirty word, perhaps I should say a word about it. Conversion as it took place in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, in the earliest years of Christianity, did not vitiate culture and tradition. From all accounts it was a discourse, it was a dialogue and it ended with a change of faith, all with mutual respect. When conversion resorts to other means - material, economic or technological - then according to definition it is not voluntary acceptance but compelled by inducement. The question is why should the converter resort to such means? It can only be because of reasons relating to hegemony, power and exploitation, albeit with the best of intentions, where the exploited see themselves as finding a deliverance, a way of escape, to a better material life.

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I do think that in the Indian context we can isolate identity from its spiritual moorings. Religion should not be brought into politics but Indian culture cannot be defined without consideration of its spiritual moorings. I speak of experience of life not in Delhi or Bombay but in small towns in Bihar, Karnataka and now in Madras where my bonafides as an Indian Christian have never ever been questioned.

We have been talking for the last day or more about the politics of hate. I've also heard about the politics of vengeance which is being articulated by exploited groups. It's being said that there is no meeting point, that there can be no dialogue. I am afraid I cannot afford to give up hope because I need to survive in an India which allows for multiple identities. But this does not mean that we should be dreamy-eyed and just tout blindly the ideas of democracy and pluralism. We have to work for it.

New century, whose century we ask. In India and in the world few people have the leisure to think beyond the struggles and deprivations of the day ... The challenge that faces us today is to grasp this reality and to end the glaring inequities of our society. Most importantly, we need to learn to live without the idea that out particular beliefs and values are rooted in absolute, transcendent or universal truth. It is significant that a reiteration of liberal values has come from those outside the elite, who are caught up in a rootless race for globalised power. In a sense, it is the making of such an identity through experience and ennobled by an awareness of suffering and deprivation which can help us achieve a true identity, which is the identity of the other as included in one's own. Identity is more than a matter of one's own caste, class, religion or nation. It has to be the focus of commitment. The 21st century, which has been called the information age, can sustain humanity only if it connects identities and cultures with wisdom and conscience.

(Concluded)

Maria Couto's articles, reviews and current studies of communities in Goa are concerned with colonial and liberation encounters, the survival of identity and human values.

Extracted from: New Century: Whose Century?, compiled and edited by Manmohan Malhoutra, UBSPD, New Delhi, Rs. 595.

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