‘We are all minorities in India’: Shashi Tharoor on nationalism and the constant struggle to belong

And yet, in the more than seven decades since we became free, democracy has failed to unite us as a people or create an undivided political community. Instead, we have become more aware than ever of what divides us: religion, region, caste, language, ethnicity. The political system has become looser and more fragmented. Politicians are mobilizing support along increasingly narrow lines of political identity. It has become more important to be a “retarded caste,” a “tribe,” or a religious chauvinist than it is to be an Indian; and for some it is more important to be a ‘proud’ Hindu than to be an Indian,” Tharoor writes in the book.

Tharoor points out that despite the illusion some may have that they are part of the ‘majority community’ and therefore immune to the dangers of the minorities, this is not true.

tharoor writes:

“Because, as I have often argued, we are all minorities in India. A typical Indian getting off a train, say a Hindi-speaking Hindu man from the Gangetic state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), might be under the illusion of representing the ‘majority community’, to use a phrase that much loved by the less zealous of our journalists. But he literally doesn’t. As a Hindi-speaking Hindu, he belongs to the faith held by about 80 percent of the population, but a majority of the country does not speak Hindi; a majority are not from Uttar Pradesh; and if he visited Kerala for instance, he would find that the majority there are not even male. Even more telling is that our archetypal UP Hindi-speaking Hindu only needs to mingle with the multilingual, multicolored crowds thronging one of India’s major railway stations to realize how much of a minority he really is. Even his Hinduism does not guarantee a majority, because his caste automatically places him in a minority too: if he is a Brahmin, 90 percent of his fellow Indians are not; if he’s a Yadav, a “retarded class,” 85 percent of Indians aren’t, and so on. Or take language. As I said before, the Constitution of India today recognizes twenty-two – our rupee notes proclaim their value in fifteen languages ​​- but in fact there are twenty-three major Indian languages ​​(if you count English), and thirty-five which are used by more than a million people. spoken (and these are languages, with their own scripts, grammatical structures and cultural assumptions, not just dialects – if we were to count dialects, there are more than

20,000).

Each of the native speakers of these languages ​​is in a linguistic minority as none enjoy majority status in India. Thanks in part to the popularity of Hindi cinema in Bombay, Hindi is understood by about half of the Indian population, if not always well spoken, but it is by no means the language of the majority; indeed, its pronunciations, gender rules and writing are unknown to most Indians in the south or northeast. Ethnicity further complicates the idea of ​​a majority community. Usually an Indian’s name immediately reveals where he comes from and what his native language is; when we introduce ourselves, we advertise our origin. Despite some elite-level intermarriage in the cities, Indians remain largely endogamous, and a Bangladeshi is easily distinguished from a Punjabi. The difference this reflects is often more apparent than the elements of commonality. A Karnataka Brahmin shares his Hindu faith with a Bihari Kurmi, but feels little identity with him in appearance, dress, customs, taste, language, or political objectives. At the same time, a Tamil Hindu would think that he has much more in common with a Tamil Christian or Muslim than with, say, a Haryanvi Jat with whom he formally shares a religion.