The U.S.-based Pew Research Center’s survey has thrown up an interesting finding on religious tolerance in India: Indians of all faiths, paradoxically, support both religious tolerance and religious segregation. Most Indians (84%) surveyed said that respecting all religions is very important to them and all religious groups must be allowed to practise their faith freely. Yet, a considerable number of them also said they preferred to have religious groups segregated and live and marry within their own community.
This curious finding has resulted in a BBC Asia report stating that India is neither a melting pot (diverse cultures blending into one common national identity) nor a salad bowl (different cultures retaining their specific characteristics while assimilating into one national identity) but a thali (an Indian meal comprising separate dishes on a platter where they are combined in specific ways). The academic Pratap Bhanu Mehta concluded that the survey shows that though India is committed to religious diversity, it is “exclusionary and segmented in toleration”.
An ‘unheroic form of tolerance’
Sociologist Ashis Nandy had developed a framework in the 2000s to understand these preferences. In a keynote address delivered in Australia (2010), Mr. Nandy observed that this form of living constituted a distinctly Asian cosmopolitanism. It had developed in regions which have to accommodate not just diversities but “radical diversities” that may prove to be dangerous if they are brought together in the same space. To accommodate these differences and peculiarities in the practices of different communities, everyday mechanisms of coping have evolved. This has resulted in a unique form of cosmopolitanism where differences can be accommodated without pressuring members of one community to be like the other based on a notion of universal brotherhood. On the contrary, members of one community can go to extraordinary lengths to help members of the other community maintain their own customary practices including their separate dining and dietary habits. Mr. Nandy called it a tolerance that is built into people’s everyday rhythms, is not backed by any ideological justification, and involves no sense of obligation to each other. He termed it an “unheroic form of tolerance” that allows interaction for various purposes without forcing one to declare brotherly love or adopt the other community’s practices.
It is this kind of cosmopolitanism that Mr. Nandy found operative in Kochi. In one of his earlier essays on Kochi (2001), he explored why the city, which has close to 15 diverse communities, had not witnessed any major religious strife in its 600 years of recorded history. When he interviewed people, they reasoned that Keralites are educated or progressive. But a different story emerged when he probed them about their own life histories. “Kochi’s tolerance was, alas, based on mutual dislike,” he wrote. Every community had an account from its own past to show that it was better than the others. This included two Jewish communities, each of which generally prevented its children from marrying those from the other community. Hence, Kochi’s pluralism and communal amity included hostilities and distances which, “because they operate within a widely shared psychological universe, have certain in-built checks against mass violence.”
This model of cosmopolitanism, where people accept “the otherness of the others”, is very different from the Enlightenment version which teaches us to divest ourselves of all prejudices so that we can emerge as the unbiased citizens of the nation state. The latter, a tougher version of tolerance, Mr. Nandy argued, forces us to hide our prejudices and preferences. As a result, everyday living becomes a struggle. It also leads to superficial forms of tolerance of diversity compatible with the demands of the middle class and the modern nation state where one can no longer accept radical diversities.
Another cosmopolitanism
Mr. Nandy’s explanation helped me make sense of my traditional-minded mother’s attitude on the cow slaughter bill that became an issue in Karnataka. While she showed her distaste at the thought of cows being slaughtered for food, when asked if the practice should be banned, she said, “But how can you ban it. It is their food. They have been eating it for years.” Mr. Nandy’s framework allows us to make sense of such seemingly contradictory actions in our everyday lives. Is this form of living detrimental to the health of a society or is this another unique form of cosmopolitanism whose organic form must be recognised? Perhaps it is the erosion of our abilities to accept the “radical otherness” of people who are different from us that has resulted in much strife today.
Shashikala Srinivasan is the author of Liberal Education and Its Discontents
