The conflicts in India’s history have thus brought about a violent need to ensure the survival of our ‘identity’, but at the same time, it made clear that our sense of belonging is accompanied by more volatility than is seen in most other parts of the world.
Much of this conflict, which has threatened to tear contemporary India apart, is located along the cracks separating the enormous number of communities that live here.
‘Unscrupulous politicians make use of these cracks based on bogey theories of race, fanning whimsical thoughts in the minds of novice citizens and whipping up mass frenzy and fanaticism of various kinds,’ Professor Pitchappan once angrily wrote to me.
This does not come as a surprise because the complex layers in our sense of belonging—to a place, a community or an idea—are more fraught than anywhere else in the world. We belong to several communities, to some more than to others depending on context and time, with a few occasionally overlapping or colliding among themselves. Identity is not static anywhere in the world, but in India, where the different aspects of identity often lead to fires being lit and doused, the friction can spark off a blazing inferno. The fascinating fact is that yet we hold together, with all our diversity, within this unlikely democracy that still survives.
India has been witness to much bloodshed over convictions about the superiority of one community over the other, and the belief that the inferior one must be driven out of certain political boundaries. The naive belief that each community has different bodily compositions because of race or ethnicity has been stretched to such an extent that we are ready to kill in its defence. But genetic science shows us that everyone—regardless of religion, region, caste or tribe—has originated from the same woman in Africa. The origin of the human population across all the communities in the world is the same. However, each of us has different characteristics, and for this reason we must accept that our characteristics or identities are by no means a derivative of our origins. This is the single most important truth that can stop a large amount of conflict in our country. ‘Race’, in fact, is a political concept that has been created by constructs of power and knowledge. Who determines what counts as knowledge? Who decides whose voice will be heard, whose stories will be remembered? If we agree that we are all born of the same woman in Africa, we must see clearly that the entire issue of race is about the way history has been written and validated by society, through violent conflicts as well as silent negotiations, over generations. Our identity thus has little to do with our origins—which are the same for all—but is a product of the cumulative experiences of a lifetime that change according to context. This is perhaps the reason that despite being a Bengali who has never lived in Bengal, I am unlikely to display many of the characteristics that my community would have expected to naturally just be ‘in my blood’.
I had known Professor Pitchappan for several months but I finally got the chance to meet him when he invited me to the wedding of his granddaughter. I was surprised and grateful at his generous gesture.
The rational, clear-headed and patient man I had become acquainted with was as passionate about his family responsibilities as he was about his research. He had mentioned his family to me in several conversations. He told me he had grown up with two sisters in a village and that he now had three children, from whom he had two grandchildren each. His eldest granddaughter, Valli, was a medical doctor, he proudly announced. She was to get married in his native village about 200 kilometres away from Madurai to another medical doctor. He also told me that it was Virumandi who would receive me when I arrived in Madurai for the wedding.
Virumandi arrived with his cousin Ganesha, both dressed in loose trousers and checked cotton shirts. He was fairly broad, with a receding hairline that stretched his forehead further above his small eyes and large flat nose. While Virumandi had a calm demeanour and seemed eager to help, Ganesha spoke enthusiastically in Tamil—a language I had already told him I did not understand a word of. We sat down for some tea in the veranda of my hotel.
‘In 2001, I was working as a laboratory assistant at Madurai Kamaraj University,’ said Virumandi as soon as we sat down on a cane sofa. ‘I was a regular blood donor anyway and had volunteered my blood to be sampled for Professor Pitchappan’s gene project. I did not know the professor, and my blood sample was one of thousands that the professor was collecting from all over India for his research. One day, while I was away, my parents told me that the professor had come to my home in my village looking for me. I was perplexed. The next day, I went to his office at the university. Initially, his assistants would not let me in, but then the professor happened to see me. He took me to his chamber and explained that my genes matched the genes of the first man out of Africa.’
‘At that time, did you know anything about genetic science?’ I inquired.
‘No. But within weeks, Spencer Wells from the US came home to meet me to confirm this discovery, and then he explained everything to me. Do you know Spencer Wells?’ he paused to ask.
‘Yes, I have heard of him,’ I replied.
‘When I first met him, I had many questions. He told me that we are all brothers, with a common ancestor born in Africa. He said that the whole world—Chinese, Americans, Europeans, Indians—is one family. I told him that what he was saying was correct, but I had a doubt because I was black and he was very fair. How is it possible that we are
