The plurality of identities

WRITER'S BLOCK

In The Argumentative Indian, published last year, Amartya Sen postulated that the history of countries and civilisations is much more complex than it is made out to be. In his new book Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, another collection of essays and lectures, he examines the complexities of human beings. Pointing to the dangers inherent in classifying people according to a singular identity, Sen writes:

"Civilisational or religious partitioning of the world population yields a 'solitarist' approach to human identity, which sees human beings as members of exactly one group... This can be a good way of misunderstanding nearly everyone in the world. In our normal lives, we see ourselves as members of a variety of groups "" we belong to all of them. The same person can be, without any contradiction: an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a long-distance runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a theatre lover, an environmental activist..."

The essential plurality of human beings, and how the undermining of this plurality lies behind most of the world's conflicts, is the central theme of this new work. The miniaturisation of people, Sen explains, paves the ground for those with vested interests (rabble-rousing religious leaders, for instance) to foment tensions between groups. In times of duress, singular classification can have murderous effects, as we all well know.

The essays in this book will strike a chord with anyone who has witnessed how even the best-intentioned people can, through an insidious brainwashing process, be made to see members of another community/religion/state as irreconcilably different from themselves, and hence a threat to their own worldview.

From here, it's a short step to the complete dehumanisation of the Other "" and it's precisely on such ground that tragedies like the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda, the 1947 Partition riots and Gujarat 2002 occurred.

Sen reminds us that the world's most destructive conflicts occur between groups, not between individuals. And he effectively draws on personal experience to make the point "" reserving for the book's very last chapter the story of his own first exposure to murder.

As a child, during communal riots in 1944, he saw a wounded Muslim staggering through the gates, asking for help. The man, a day labourer, had been knifed on his way to a nearby house where he was working, in a Hindu-majority colony; he died shortly afterwards.

The 11-year-old future Nobel Laureate was perplexed by the idea that a man could be murdered by people who probably didn't know anything about him except for this crucial, all-subsuming fact: that he was a member of a particular community "" hence the Enemy. "For a bewildered child, the violence of identity was extraordinarily hard to grasp," he writes. "It is not particularly easy even for a still bewildered elderly adult."

Sen is also critical of the frequent employment of "moderate" religious voices to counter "extreme" religious voices "" e.g. governments calling on moderate Muslim leaders to criticise violent acts in the name of Islam.

The effect of this religion-centered political approach, he believes, has been to strengthen the voice of religious authorities, and to give them disproportionate power in contexts that should fall outside the ambit of religion.

People who are overly attached to religion or community will find much to be queasy about here. But then, Sen doesn't cater to those who look at the world in black-and-white terms. He illuminates the complexities in human behaviour and interactions, and if he succeeds in making people feel uncomfortable, well, that's a mark of his success.