When I was around twelve years old, I participated in a recitation competition organized by Vivekananda Kendra in Guwahati. For hours, I memorized and rehearsed Tagore’s poem from the book Gitanjali, “Where the Mind is Without Fear.” On the day of the competition, I recited it with great emotion. I won the prize. But I was too young to understand the implications of what the poem really meant.
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1980s-Shillong was burning. I was eight years old, sitting in class taking a spelling test. Suddenly all the teachers were called urgently by the Headmistress for a meeting. A massive agitation of the Khasi Students’ Union had broken out in the city and police had ordered firing on the agitators. The Khasi students’ movement’s assertion was that Meghalaya belonged to the indigenous tribes, especially the Khasis. And their demand was that “outsiders”, i.e. Non-Khasis like us should be evacuated from Meghalaya. The Chief Minister had called an urgent curfew, but we were still stuck in school.
By this time, most parents had heard the news and were scrambling to reach the school. I was relieved when my teacher announced that my father was there to pick me up. Our Khasi driver, Teron Dada was in the driver’s seat. He had brought two other Khasi friends with him in the car just in case we were stopped on the way by the protesting students. They thought having local boys in the car would prevent the mobs from attacking us.
Although this incident took place decades ago, I still remember the tense look on my father’s face as our driver avoided the main roads and took narrow winding streets to reach the safety of our homes. Soon after, my father changed jobs and we moved out of my beloved Shillong.
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1990s-My mother is a Bengali, born and raised in Assam. She belongs to an immigrant family from erstwhile East Bengal settled for several generations in Assam. My father is indigenous Assamese, what they call “sons of the soil.” Assamese people are very conscious that their identity is under threat from the unabated influx of Bangladeshi immigrants. Very often, such fears and prejudices are reflected in private conversations. Sometimes, we had Assamese visitors in our home who didn’t know that my mother is Bengali because she speaks fluent Assamese. And they would unwittingly crack jokes about Bengalis or pass disparaging remark, often related to stereotypes about the community. This hurt my mother’s feelings. From a young age, if anyone ever asked me “Are you Assamese?”, I always said, “Half Assamese-Half Bengali.” Perhaps this was my young mind’s way of acknowledging my mother’s identity, and her pain.
2000-When I came to college in Delhi, I made lots of friends from other states in Northeast India. Sometimes, we went out shopping in Lajpat Nagar, Dilli Haat or Sarojini Nagar. Inevitably, my friends would get heckled as “Chinki” which was the least offensive of the things that were said to them. I know that men who make such remarks are, in all likelihood, disrespectful of all women. But what made it worse for my friends from the Northeast was that the hecklers assumed that these women were of loose-character, not deserving of respect (perhaps because they dressed in ‘modern’ clothes/ because their societies were more permissive of allowing male friends). Once when we were returning in an auto after quietly swallowing such comments from a group of boys, one of my Naga friends broke down and started crying. None of us seated in the auto tried to console her. We all felt her humiliation and helplessness.
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The point of these anecdotes is that we often tend to think that issues such as regionalism, casteism, communalism as distant political issues—problems fanned and manipulated by political leaders for their personal gain. But only when the pain of those prejudices touches us at a personal level, are we truly moved. Only then are we able to truly empathize.
We have heard the slogan ‘the personal is political.’We are so attuned to listening to news and social media narratives that even our interior lives unconsciously get shaped by these ideologies. What we assume is our own free will and informed opinion is often produced elsewhere and has been recruited to do the work of these repressive ideologies. Sometimes, through our own prejudices, we also serve to perpetuate these ideologies.
If I could free myself of one thing, it is any generalized prejudices I may have against people, based on some aspect of their identity (their caste, religion, skin color, region they come from, sexual preferences). Prejudices dehumanize us, make us look at other human beings through a narrow, lopsided lens. But if we could look into each other’s hearts and see that it beats the same as our’s, hurts at the same things as our’s, we would treat each other much more gently, with more love, patience, tolerance and care.
It has taken me more than twenty-five years to understand the profound implications of Tagore’s poem. Tagore wrote the poem 120 years ago, but it is more relevant than ever. It envisages a free, inclusive world—one where people seek fearless truth, spanive action and see the world as one, undivided by borders or “narrow domestic walls.”
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
If I can free myself of my prejudices, I would have done my bit to creating such a “heaven of freedom.”
***THE END***
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