In the wake of racist attacks on Indians in Australia, and a consequent backlash to such assaults, a large number of anti-Indian Australian Facebookers have accused Asian immigrants, particularly those from the Indian sub-continent, of being dirty and unhygienic in their public behaviour. In short, they’ve accused Indians of being literally filthy foreigners.
We Indians dirty? What utter rubbish. But it’s not the first time such a charge has been made. Last year it was the British who rubbished us. Tory MP Lucy Ivimy was reported to have said that Indians don't know how to dispose of their rubbish and are congenital litterbugs. Though she later apologised for her remark, Ivimy's accusation provoked dudgeon among Indians in not only Britain but, even more so, in India. Us Indians? Creating a mess wherever we go? What a load of garbage.
Unlike people in the West and other so-called developed societies we Indians are scrupulously particular about all matters pertaining to hygiene management and waste disposal. Take the example of household garbage. What do they do with it in these so-called advanced countries? They store it -- as though these scraps of leftover food, vegetable peelings, egg shells and other guck were precious jewels -- in a special container made for the purpose and generally kept in the kitchen. How thoroughly disgusting. Imagine keeping rotting refuse in the kitchen, which after the puja room is the most hallowed sanctum sanctorum of the Indian household.
A barbaric notion totally inimical to 5,000 years of Indic civilisation and culture based on the totems and taboos of ritual pollution. Which in turn is based on the concept of what has been called inappropriate context. For instance, it is appropriate to wear shoes to go outdoors, but it is inappropriate (ritually polluting) to wear shoes indoors, more so within a place of worship. Similarly, keeping ritually polluting garbage within the kitchen and defiling its symbolic purity is an emphatic no-no. So what to do with the muck? Simple. Throw it out of the window. That's what windows are for, apart from letting in air and light.
The scrupulous cleanliness of us Indians is attested to by the assiduity with which we expel all forms of rubbish, garbage, junk and litter from our homes and places of work and dump such offending and offensive matter where it rightly belongs: on our public streets and thoroughfares.
This is what less anciently civilised communities can't understand about us: the cordon sanitaire that we draw between our pure, pollution-free personal space (our homes, offices, etc) and the public space of the outside world at large (i.e. anything and everything beyond the sacrosanct confines of our homes, offices, etc) which we rightly use for the purpose it has obviously been designed, namely to be the natural receptacle of all our filth and rubbish. That the 'outside' India of our public space is unmitigatedly dirty and squalid only testifies to the fact that the 'inside' India of our personal domains is squeaky-clean and spotless.
There is a profound chasm, not just cultural but spiritual, between us and societies and individuals who are obsessed about 'outside' (and therefore irrelevant) cleanliness at the expense of 'inner' salubrity. It is this basic misapprehension of the uniquely Indian concept of sanitation that causes outsiders to trash us. Which they are once more planning to do at the forthcoming G8 meet where the US and Japan will try to arm-twist India into accepting emission norms for industry.
This western phobia about carbon emissions is incomprehensible to the Indian mind. Carbons are dirty things, right? In which case why are people so hung up about emitting them (i.e. getting rid of the darn things, like chucking garbage out of the window)? But people like Al Gore (and now our very own R K Pachauri) carry on something fierce about carbon emissions and how horrid they are (all the more reason to be shot of all that nasty carbon and dump it where it properly belongs: in the global public space known as the environment).
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is proposing to go to the G 8 summit, where presumably he will try to educate the US, Japan and other misinformed parties about the right and proper manner in which to deal with industrial emissions and all that rot. Will someone open the window, please?
Many Indians have been taken aback, shocked and dismayed by the attacks against them in the land they either had made their own or were in the process of doing so. Unknown to them, patriotism had metamorphosed into ultra-nationalism, morphed into racism and then mutated into plain xenophobia.
Old timers living Down Under don’t remember the laid back Australian to be the flag waving, Indian-bashing fiends they have turned into. The change happened in the last decade or so with the acceptance in mainstream political discourse of anti-immigration politicians like Pauline Hanson in a land that largely cared just for its sports and beer. Slowly the race riots began, at pubs, during football matches, musical festivals and Australia Days.
Writing for TIME, Sharon Verghis says, "Jingoistic young whites are turning the Australian flag into a symbol of exclusion". There’s that risk involved in waving flags too much. The chalk line that divides proud nationalism can blur too soon to melt into snarling exclusionism. It started that way in Hitler’s Germany and in Mussolini’s Italy. If it happens in Kevin Rudd’s Australia, it will be unfortunate because he was even learning to speak in Mandarin! And he may just have gone on to do a little talking in Italian, Greek, Arabic and Cantonese, the other languages many in Australia are now heard speaking in.
The mess-up is usually triggered the moment nations and peoples begin to establish their identity around that of the other. Jews are Jews not because they are not Arabs. Hutus are Hutus not because they are not Tutsis. Back home, Marathis are Marathis not because they are not Bhaiyyas.
With an increasing pile of jobseekers and Permanent Residence-crazy outsiders slowly but steadily popping up their black, brown and pale faces in restaurants, buses, classrooms and offices, the young of Australia and not so young nationalists like Hanson are deliberately letting the initial pride in their Australianness degenerate into hatred for the others, the biggest and most conspicuous symbol of which are Indians.
But I see this happening elsewhere too as the natives share space and precious resources with the newcomers, as land diminishes and competition increases. And the ones that come in late from the south gate are always the ones in a hurry to come out first from the north gate. It’s natural human psyche – you don’t mind that odd-looking face sitting next to you in a train that’s half empty. But you will if the train is packed and the only seat available has been occupied by someone who doesn’t come from where you do. The dynamics, equations, power balance changes almost immediately. The veneer of civility, compassion and universal brotherhood drops in tandem.
There are two things to be considered here. The reaction is natural and can be seen as an insidious form of defence mechanism. But what all nations that can still offer livelihood to shifting millions have to remember is that in such a rapidly shrinking world, where human traffic has never been this fast or this smooth, the original demography is bound to alter. There will have to be a way of making room for the door-knockers. And beating the daylights out of them is not one.
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