http://ekantipur.com/mobile/article.php?news_id=37017 APR 18 -

Identity is a strange thing, much maligned and deconstructed but also much sought after. It is maligned by those who already possess dominant identity and deconstructed by those who have already achieved heights of intellectual power such that they don’t need the crutch of identity to move forward. But there are still those whose hunger for identity is unquenchable because they don’t have any other sources of power.

All three of these positions are only works-in-progress, never fixed and immutable. For example, many whites in the US, upper castes in India and hill high castes in Nepal seek to denigrate the hunger for identity. In the United States, many frown upon the identity politics of African, Asian, Chicano/Chicana, Native and Hispanic Americans. In India, the rise of the

Other Backward Castes in the 1970s in the aftermath of the Mandal Commission report was heavily contested by the upper castes, especially in colleges and universities, where they formed the majority. In Nepal, since 2006, the rise of identity politics has become a subject of much anguish and target of media vitriol.

In the US, for example, the Black Power Movement of the 1960s spawned a whole host of assertions of identities. Until the 1960s, the US had Chinese, Japanese, Native Americans, Hispanic and Chicana/Chicano Americans but the immigration policy until then had been dominated by the melting pot ideology. In other words, those who came to the United States, somehow under the ever evolving immigration laws and policies, and were not White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASP) or from Northern or Western Europe, such as the Italians, Jews or the Irish, were expected to merge their identities into the mainstream melting pot of white Americans. That’s why only a limited number of Jews could get into elite universities or become professors. Even though the Irish had saved civilisation (the title of a famous book), they were still on their way to being white (the title of another well-known book).

That’s why JFK’s election in 1960 as the first Catholic president came to be both celebrated and frowned upon, and when he was assassinated in 1963, it hit the liberal consciousness as few things had done before.

Then, their consciousness raised by participation in WW II, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, their minds inspired by predecessors like W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey and Richard Wright, American blacks launched the Black Power Movement, a composite name given to the emergence of black politics, black aesthetics and black activism in general that combined the arts, literature, music, theater and choreography with politics. From the moderates like the non-violent civil righters led by Martin Luther King, Jr., to the black nationalists and separatists like the followers of the Nation of Islam, like Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, to the armed rebel Black Panther Party leaders like Bobby Seale and Huey Newton—both the integrationists and the separatist nationalists—revolted against overt segregation of the South and covert racism of the North. The Black Power Movement had far reaching impact on the idea of the US as a state. It weakened the melting pot ideal, replacing it with multiculturalism.

You didn’t have to assimilate anymore into the white mainstream. You could do your own cultural thing, follow your own gods and rituals, don your own clothes, eat your own smelly food; yet, you could be equally an American. The Black Power Movement also taught ethnic groups to take pride in their cultures or at least not be ashamed of them. Because, after all, American blacks faced the brunt of American racism despite being the sweat and blood of American earth in the form of slavery and its aftermath, they confidently not only challenged Western values but struggled to establish Black Studies programmes, first at San Francisco State University and later, everywhere. Soon, other ethnic studies programmes followed, gradually transforming the curricular landscape of America. That’s why I tell many Asians, especially South Asians, that had it not been for American blacks, whom you sometimes look down upon, you would be pissing in a coloured bathroom and quenching your thirst at a coloured water fountain.

The case of the Mandal Commission Report and the revolt of the OBCs in India differs slightly. Because both the upper castes and OBCs follow the same religion and speak the same language, the differences are not as stark. But upper caste identity is as staunch in many parts of India as black-white racial identities were in the US because endogamy and commensality still remain the hallmarks of the Indian caste system. The so-called Cow Belt is the worst. Since the 1970s with the JP Movement, the rise of Mandal politics of the OBC quota system, political and power equations have slowly undergone a shift in north India.

What shape will Nepali identity politics take? The Nepali case is much more complex. It’s not just a White and non-White binary or upper vs lower castes, as in India. What immensely complicates the Nepali picture is the minority status of each cultural group even though the Nepali language and Nepali speakers form a clear dominant group.

So, identities need to be constantly deconstructed even as they are rightly championed because identity is both necessary and superfluous. But let’s not malign and reject it, for it’s not going away without its pound of flesh.