In India, thousands of diverse local communities are defined by the conviction that there is something unique shared among the people of a particular community. We assume that we must naturally display some characteristics of the community to which we are connected by blood and heritage.
This belief among Indians—that we display a set of settled characteristics because of our membership by birth to a certain community—has far-reaching and varied effects on our thinking about ourselves and about others. It gives some of us a sense of mystic belonging to a community. We might believe that our behaviour can’t be helped since our mannerisms were predetermined by birth as per that community. We might even forcefully emulate some of the community’s established characteristics to feel divinely connected to it. This could also mean that we are left with hardly any place for choice or individuality.
For example, a Gujarati is supposed to be entrepreneurial by blood. Now, if a young Gujarati boy is told this from the day he can distinguish language from random sounds, that is likely to be the ambition he will grow up with—emulating the characteristics of his fellow Gujarati business wizards, and feeling a sense of community bonding. Similarly, when a Parsi or a Sindhi meets another Parsi or Sindhi for the first time in any corner of the world, there is often an immediate sense of familiarity and trust between them. The bond between two members of the same community is often accompanied by a willingness to help the other out. To cite another example, the cultural cliché is that Bengalis are good at the arts, that they make good writers, musicians, painters and so on. How does that cliché affect a young Bengali child in Kolkata in terms of the education she or he receives and the expectations from the community? When this child grows up, she or he can probably leverage the instant ‘community bond’ with fellow Bengalis in creative fields to land a similar job.
I had no such luck. I am a native Bengali speaker, but my Hindi language skills are just as good. My family does not belong to the business or academic community, yet I belong to both. In fact, even though I am an Indian by nationality, I also feel like the offspring of at least two more of the eight countries I have lived in for education, work and love. However, I do share an immense liking for sweets with most of my fellow Bengalis.
These differences as well as similarities which I share with the various communities that I am supposed to be a part of ‘by birth’—Indian, Hindu, Brahmin, Bengali—were what made me first wonder about the origins of such supposedly shared characteristics. Has the idea of ‘community characteristics’ been forced upon us?
My father was a pilot in the Indian Air Force, and every three or four years, I moved with him, my mother and my younger brother from one military camp to another in various far-flung regions of India. We lived in Agra in Uttar Pradesh, Jorhat in Assam, Chennai in Tamil Nadu, Dehradun in Uttarakhand, and in many other big and small towns. I changed nine schools across five states. The medium of instruction at each of them was in different languages, and we were taught several interpretations of India’s history and culture. Perhaps because of this kind of upbringing, I did not develop the specific characteristics I was supposed to have inherited at birth. But living among various other communities in India made me more curious than ever about the truth of these clichéd ‘community characteristics’ within the remarkable diversity of the country.
I was a voracious reader—a habit inculcated in me by my mother who, given my father’s peripatetic vocation, had taken to teaching high school English in every city we lived in. There was no Internet in those days, not even a landline telephone in most of the places we lived in. Moreover, I was a child and my access to the world was limited by the restrictions of each place my father was posted in. And so I tried to find the answers to all my questions about human diversity in books.
The books I found on the subject could be divided into two broad categories—historical and anecdotal. However, in both kinds, the respective authors only presented their own perception of our origins; none of them could give an adequate explanation in scientific terms.
Initially, I found oral histories interesting, but they were specific to distinct communities. When I was a pre-teen, palaeoanthropology provided me details of fascinating possibilities about our ancestry, but none that I could consider scientific. Later, I found that reading about human morphology—the practice of digging up and studying bones and skulls—was even more interesting. I learnt about Carl von Linne, a Swedish botanist who, in the eighteenth century, categorized about 12,000 species, and eventually coined the term homo sapiens, or ‘wise man’ in Latin.8 In the post-Darwinian era, von Linne declared that humanity was divided into different categories—Africans, Americans, Asians, Europeans, and a blatantly racist category he called ‘Monstrosus’ in which he included deformed people and imaginary folk like elves! When I read about this, I was tempted to conclude that we must have no concrete details about our ancient past for von Linne and others to consider such obtuse possibilities about our origins.
We did not have a television at home, but my father would tell me about his travels to other countries. He had friends in Russia—the manufacturers and engineers of the Russian AN32 airplane that he flew—who would visit our home. At that time we lived in far-flung Assam, in the north-east of India. So strong was the Russian influence in our family that my younger brother was
