When you travel to countries like France or England, the first thing that strikes you is uniformity. There is a sharp contrast between India and those nations. Even if you are in Bedford or in Surrey or in Cambridge or in London, the United Kingdom speaks English. It follows the same mass religion and it has the same system of social behavior. It’s not like that in India. You go to Punjab, and the people speak a new language and live a new way of life. In Tamil Nadu, the difference is obvious. It’s not like that in the nations I mentioned a while ago. And then your chest swells out in pride when you tell an Englishman or a Frenchman, ’’In my country, each province has a different language and a different culture. Still we are all united. We belong first to India then to our mothers and then to our provinces’’
But how true is that claim? That’s a question that Indians have never found an answer to. Some say that when some calamity falls on our country we all rise to the occassion to assist each other. They quote the gret examples of generosity of how Gujaratis spent money to help the Oriyas during the cyclone and how Punjabis sent bags of food to Gujarat when the earth ripped their houses apart. And that is suffecient evidence to support our claim of unity under the surface of diversity.
I think that’s not suffecient proof at all! First of all, it makes no sense to prove the country’s unity by quoting how people from one province assisted the people of another when they were in trouble. It happens in all countries. It’s called basic humanity. I wonder whether there is anything to be too proud of if you’re proving that you have the sense of basic humanity. For God’s sake, so what? Then of course the Punjabis will help the Gujaratis and the Marathis and they will in turn help the Punjabis. It’s expected.
I never feel far too proud of myself when I lend my younger brother money when he needs it. It’s no generosity at all. Unfortunately, in India, generosity, unity, brotherhood has been assigned this status. So our claim that we are united beneath our diversity hasn’t been proven yet. I do not dismiss it as a false claim. May be it is true and I hope that it is. But the evidence we furnish in its favor is insuffecient. We need to prove it better.
--|| How To Use Diversity || --
The most interesting way in which we can use our diversity to our advantage is by nurturing our diversity. Often it is believed that if we can make the whole soceity come under a single unified cultural system, unity will prevail. It is a valid argument and there is no doubt about that. But yet the possibility of enriching our diversities and using that as a tool to build a strong inter-cultural bonding cannot be ruled out. Imagine this scenario...
Every province, as we say, has its own unique culture. Consequently, each province has its own identity. Assume that the people of each province have a profound and wholesome sense of identity. In that case, the chances of a competitive spirit arising between people of one province and those of another get reduced. In fact, because the sense of identity is so strong, people of diverse cultures learn to appreciate and respect the classics of other cultures. So we create a nation that is a gigantic mutual admiration club.
So then the Punjabis and the Tamils and the Bengalis and the Biharis and the Marathis will all be very staunch supporters of their individual cultures. But in addition to that, they will be very sincere admirers of each other. If you observe people who have very sound and balanced family lives, you will notice how well they get along with other families. Extend that correlation on the national scale and you will know what I am saying.
--|| How To Abuse Diversity || --
Disclaimer: I request my reader to take the following paragraphs as neutral academic discussions and not as racist sentiments.
The reason why people from North India have some sort of reluctance to mingle with people from down South is something strange. Hindi is our national language and so people from a large number of states speak it. The prevalance of Hindi is strong in states north of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. In the states we call ’’South Indian States’’, English finds as much prevalance as Hindi does in, say, Maharashtra, as the language to be spoken between people who do not understand the native tongue. So when a Mallu visits Tamil Nadu and he does not understand Tamil, he speaks English. However, when a Punjabi comes to Maharashtra or to Gujarat or when a Bengali goes up north or to the west, he speaks in Hindi.
What does this have to do with the aforementioned reluctance to befriend? It does. (Please read the disclaimer once again). By and large, people from the South have a somewhat elitist air about themselves for their apparent fluency in English as compared to the rest of the country. To a large extent, their pride is even justified. We already know how much we Indians crave for English and anything Western. Consequently, the Southies try to establish a superiority-complex of theirs over the rest.
The primary reason for this tension was linguistic diversity. In the face of such a diversity, a unifying language is needed to free communication. We chose Hindi but we did not all of us accept it. This gave rise to a little bit of a diversity. The Southies are traditionally bad at learning Hindi. This diversity is converted into petty ego issues. Consequently, we have groupist tendencies. So you find the South Indian community in a lot of states sticking together and making very little friends outside. I do not dismiss exceptions and I do not refuse to accept that trends are probably changing or they already have. But this observation of mine is not altogether irrelevant. I am sure the reader will agree.
-- || Diversity--Used or Abused?-- Is India truly united? --||
This question does not have a clear answer. But the confused noises that we make as answers tend to bow down to the negative. Consider how the Biharis were attacked by the Shiv Sena. This is just one example of how people of individual provinces resent the presence of people from other provinces. This sentiment is sometimes only in the form of personal biases or sometimes in the form of community hatred or fear. In either case, diversity here acts as a tool of dividing and the argument of ’unity in diversity’ is defeated.
In conclusion, I can only suggest that our claim of ‘unity in diversity’ is not entirely true. Although it is not entirely false. Consider how we rose up and protested the attacks on Sikhs in the USA after the 9/11 attacks. Any attack on India is resisted by the country as a single mass even though the attack may directly hurt only single or a small number of communities. This is, unfortunately, only the smaller, rosier of course, but smaller side of the story. The insider knows that there is a frothing sense of resentment between several communities and in fact the tensions are strong enough that we can feel their vibrations some times.
So, well, we still have a distance to go before we can swell up and say how united our country still is despite the diversities and in the process make a completely true statements. As of today, however, our claim will remain insufficiently justified and even, to an extent, wrong.
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