There are many things that make me despair about us Indians, or, indeed, us desis, i.e. subcontinentals. Among the worst of these is how we consistently manage to be racist to ourselves. This boiled up when a friend recently described a visit to a vegetarian restaurant in Drummond Street, the street near London’s Euston Station, which is filled with desi-eating joints. The group my friend went with consisted of Indians and Pakistanis. The manager and waiter were very rude, making all sorts of demands for a minimum order of this or that many main courses. A short while later, a white English friend joined the group and my friend and the others recounted the treatment they’d been receiving. The English guy was surprised: “But I come here all the time and they’ve never behaved like this. I’ve always ordered what I wanted, even if it’s just a bhelpuri , and they’ve always brought it. No minimum, no main course required, nothing.” Similarly, I went to an Indian eatery the other day with a white friend and we ordered a single main dish to be shared between us. The waiter came and put down the main dish in front of my gora pal , putting a side plate in front of me. My friend then pushed the dish to the centre of the table and asked the man to get us another empty plate. The man did as asked but with zero awareness of why both our eyebrows were raised.
Configured for racism
I wish I could say the problem is contained to desis working in restaurants in white-majority foreign countries, but it’s not. Time and time again at functions and buffet dinners in Indian metros I’ve seen the waiting staff serve a white person first even though several of us brown-skinned guests have been waiting far longer. In case you think this is a class thing, with the waiters lower down the hierarchy not knowing what to do, divest yourself of the idea. I’ve seen highly trained bartenders and senior managers in five-star hotels also enact the same stupidity, pouring unctuosity over the white guest while ignoring natives who should have been served first. Unsurprisingly, these same top-guns don’t treat black foreigners with the same preferential servility, even though those guests may be as wealthy and as foreign as the Caucasian customers. And while many white people have the civility and sense of fairness to step back when they realise what’s going on, there are some Imperialism ke Aulad who actually consciously leverage this to their advantage, often with a disingenuous manner conveying, “Who me? What can I do if he serves me out of turn?”
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This inward racism is hardly contained to the catering, hotel or tourism industries, though these are the sectors where it’s most nakedly apparent. On the other hand, the one area where we overcompensate, perhaps, is in our cricket, where, over the last 25 years or so at least, our players have developed a habit of handing it back with interest to sledger-teams, no matter what their racial or ethnic make-up. But even here, the overdoing of the return aggression perhaps reveals a kind of insecurity. Whatever one may say back to the gum-chewing, mother-abusing, sun-block-masked slip fielder or fast bowler, in the end, by sledging or abusing back, this is his verbal game you are playing and not one of your choosing.
Either way, whether it’s the aggression on the cricket field or the hard-wired
One would think that with a young population such as ours, the opposite would be the case; one would imagine that younger people, not carrying the deadweight of their parents’ narrow world views, would be open to engaging with people different from themselves, would be tolerant and curious about what they don’t know, about people they know very little about. Instead, what we are seeing is a continuation and even increase of the old, blindered, fearful gaze. Forget about the “million mutinies” V.S. Naipaul delusionally imagined in the early 1980s, what we have now is the propping up of a million ghettos, and these ghettos are not only to be found in the villages and small towns of India, they are present in the most privileged enclaves of our country.
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Cross-national crippling
Perhaps it’s an absurd stretch to take off from the petty racism of a waiter or hotel manager and accuse a complex, billion-strong society of a serious debilitation, perhaps it’s not. What we do need to accept is that this ingrown casteism, this toxic inferiority complex that occasionally turns inside out like a sock into macho chest-beating comes from a network of abscesses in our education, and in the limited way our leaders — such as they’ve recently been and such as they currently are — see themselves. This cross-national crippling is not down to any one megalomaniac small-town emperor, any single backward-looking political agenda or any single proclaimed ideology. It has to do with our ongoing collective failure to open the minds of our youngsters, generation after generation, our collective failure in delivering to them the means of a balanced, genuine confidence, a positive humility or a creative curiosity.