This is the first article in a three-part series.
“Please don’t make friends with Muslims.”
Lasya Nadimpally remembers being taught this when she was just five-years-old while growing up in a household that believed the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 was cause for celebration. Being a Hindu Brahmin, her extended family told her, made her a part of an elite community. She watched as her family reserved separate utensils and seating areas for the house help who were allowed to clean the house but not use it.
Meanwhile, her mother also taught to her the famous lines by Sahir Ludhianvi, “Tu Hindu banega na Musalmaan banega, insaan ki aulad hai, insaan banega,” (meaning: you neither become a Hindu nor a Muslim, you’re the child of a human being and that is what you will become).
Lasya recounts her experience as one that was thoroughly confusing. “While half of the family told me that I wasn’t supposed to talk to people from other castes and religious communities, it also discriminated against me because I am a girl.”
Also Read: Understanding the Psychology of Hatred
Lasya is not alone in her experience. There are countless children who have grown up in India around the turn of the century who seem to have been raised in a dichotomy. On one hand, they were taught to value love, respect, and equality, but on the other, they looked on as their families practised malice, discrimination and hatred.
The sheer amount of pressure that is put on children to identify themselves into social constructs of caste, religion and ethnicity can be overwhelming and suffocating, to say the least. Over the years, some of these children naturally gravitate towards questioning their conditioning and objectively deciphering this juxtaposition. Teenage curiosity, growing access to information via the internet and globalisation all aid in recognising the underlying hypocrisy of preaching equality but not practising it. But some others remain unfazed even as they grew up to learn new things, retaining what was taught to them during their early childhood.
“Our attitudes and emotions towards others are transmitted down generations, and as children we receive these cues consciously and unconsciously from those older to us. These can be in the form of explicit and overt statements of prejudice about certain communities, or in the form of more covert and subtler bodily reactions – freezing or flaring up, keeping distance – that somehow communicate to us that the other is dangerous and threatening,” says Deepti Sachdev, an assistant professor at the School of Humanities in Ambedkar University, Delhi.
To understand the point at which a person learns to hate “others” or divide society into people belonging to different social constructs such as caste and religion, we approached Varud Gupta and Ayushi Rastogi, co-authors of the graphic novel Chhotu, a tale set in the time of India Partition during Independence. Gupta and Rastogi did first-person research to understand the atmosphere at that time. “Our grandfathers were the primary first-person research we did and in fact it is quite interesting to see how their initial stories varied in perspective and depth from the stories we uncovered over time. Most notable of which was going from stories of a hardened man with the prejudices many still hold to the story of a naive child who didn’t understand their world was changing,” they say.
With the generational memory of events such as the Partition slowly waning, is it then safe to say that the increased exposure to different communities is influencing today’s generations to think differently; or is it making them easier targets susceptible to increasing hatred in society and the political environment in the world?
“The truth is that the young are fairly divided, as perhaps the older might be between those who are committed to totalitarian ideologies and those who speak for democratic processes and egalitarianism. The younger generation does have greater access to media, internet and often are more educated. However these sources are as diverse as the people who use them. The young are also fairly divided between those who worship or idealise their elders and those who seek to create autonomous identities. Some of them are carrying forward their family traditions. Others have rejected the relatively progressive perspectives of their families. There are still others who break away from family traditions to adopt progressive values,” says Rachana Johri, professor, School of Human Studies, Ambedkar University, Delhi. Her research and teaching are at the intersections of psychosocial studies, gender, disability and mental health.
School children with Muslim and Hindu religious symbols. Photo: Reuters
“Fortunately children are not replicas of their parents. They discover hidden flaws and contradictions in their families. These become a part of the self that then searches for answers in the world outside particularly during adolescence. Exploration is a product of security so parents who are caring are likely to facilitate identities that differ from them in acceptable ways. University life specially creates the possibility of new discoveries about the self. A critical questioning self develops as there is a flood of stimulation. Encounters with new mentors bring about changes as do the intense experiences of being with one’s own peer,” adds Rachana. She also opines that the antidote to hate seems to be the ability to tolerate differences. It requires a capacity to suspend a quick moral judgement and tolerate uncertainty.
In the 21st century, globalisation and exposure to different cultures has brought a lot of millennials and gen-z kids to unlearn their privilege, understand social conditioning and think differently. Once children step out of their sheltered childhoods and into the melting pot of cultures that is the real world, they are suddenly forced to encounter people of all shades, even those belonging to communities they’ve been taught to fear. This can happen during schooling, college education, or even when they get their first job.
Further, travel and moving cities can offer exposure to a heterogenous set of people from across the world, which might push individuals into unlearning their conditioning, understanding their privilege and truly respecting diversity. Peer to peer learning, social mobility, access to resources, financial dependence and education are also some factors that come into play while determining the passing on of prejudices between generations. Ultimately, it is the individual and how they perceive the world through the experiences they have had that informs their views. Empathy can be taught, but only where there is an earnest willingness to listen.
Also Read: Seven Things Indian Parents Can Do to Keep Secular Democracy Alive
Anahitaa Bakshi, who works at a development consultancy firm, sums up what a lot of us feel by saying, “My sheltered upbringing living in a higher caste and upper-middle-class bubble in South Delhi blinded me from seeing my privilege for what it truly was – an identity assigned to me by birth that gave me an unearned advantage in life. My privilege was not taught to me outrightly but I was also never in a situation where it was questioned and that was why it was difficult for me to comprehend fully what I gained from it. Once I started travelling more, volunteering and speaking to people who were different from me I learned to be more empathetic, to recognise my privilege, and to consider ways of equalising power and using my ascribed identity to help others by trying to level the playing field.”
It is difficult to grow up and apart from those who raised you, it is even harder to confront your emotions which can potentially develop into daily conflict. But it is for us, the children of this strange dichotomy, to choose how we live the rest of our lives – on the back of our new found principles and convictions or the immortal hypocrisy that we were raised with.
Lasya is the community manager at Belongg, a social venture focussed on diversity and inclusion. Shachi is an activist, writer and political consultant.
