Wars of Culture
by Alice Henderson

As I type from my dorm room in these early hours of the morning, just across the hall are two sleeping Indian students, roommates in some strange potluck twist of fate. One is Punjabi and one is Gujarati- they are enemies, just as in India, forced to share a common space. Both American sons of immigrants, their generation has not lost the understanding of the conflicts between the many ethnic and religious groups in India. In jest, of course, but with underlying truth, common remarks between the two boys include, “What do you know, idiot Punjabi!”, “Shut up, you filthy Gujarati!”, and “Dude, get up off my culture!”. Here in the United States, it’s just a little power struggle with no real effect on their lives, but the intensity with which insults are slurred thousands of miles from India by teenagers who have never lived there is a testament to the ingrained nature of the nation’s ethnic and religious animosity. As a constitutional republic with thirty political parties, there is plenty of understandable antagonism, but the most prominent and most bloody struggle is between the Muslims and the Hindus.

India is far from the only nation to experience conditions in which a nation is divided geographically, ethnically, and ideologically. Irreconcilable differences- and war- shape all of human history, but there is an undeniable trend in the role of European (and now U.S.) imperialism. As we learned in the Don Cheadle movie, Hotel Rwanda, the genocide in Rwanda was in part a result of Belgian colonists exacerbating the antagonism between the Tutsis and the Hutus by giving the minority Tutsis power during colonial rule. After World War II, Korea was separated into North and South Korea as a result of the United States fairly arbitrarily dividing of the land with the then Soviet Union. Madhu Kishwar, senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, claims the same invasion occurred in India and has led to the current situation:

As long as Hindus and Muslims believed that they were two religious-cultural communities living and sharing a common soil, they could easily work out decent traditional norms for co-living on the basis of other common layers of identity such as language, village, and culture. The moment the virus of ethnic and secular nationalism invaded us from the West, religious differences began to be dragged into the realm of secular politics and came to be used as the basis of mobilizing communal monoliths. 1

The nationalism to which she refers began in 1858, at the beginning of British colonization, as a defense against the growing influence of the West. In 1885 the Indian National Congress was formed by Hindus as an organized national defense and remained the dominant political power until the mid-1990s. As the Congress grew, India’s Muslim population naturally felt the need to defend their own rights and responded with the Muslim League. During the 1920’s, the first large-scale Hindu-Muslim riots broke out and thus began the preoccupying conflict in India.

On May 22, 2004, India’s first non-Hindu prime minister was sworn in. Whether Manmohan Singh and his new political ties will alleviate or aggravate the fighting, he does at least provide the possibility for change and with words that aspire to peace.

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