Ethnic prejudice, or what we in India term as ‘communalism’, is probably almost as old as humanity itself.
It lies at the root of most of the conflicts that have wrecked humankind since the very beginning of history, and even now, too. I don’t suppose more than just a few individuals are entirely free from the virus, including even many people who think they are ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’.
One reason why it’s so pervasive and hard it get rid of is because the virus infects us at a very young age itself, after which it so indelibly shapes the way we perceive ethnic ‘others’ that few of us ever manage to expel it from our minds—that is, if at all we want to in later life. Indeed, many of us willingly let the virus eat deeper into us as we become older and even more confirmed in the beliefs about ethnic ‘others’ that we inherited from our parents and others around us when we were impressionable children.
Growing up as a child in an upper-middle-class Punjabi family in Calcutta in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was groomed by my relatives and family friends to imbibe their ideas about different communities, ideas which they, in turn, and for no real fault of their own, must have imbibed from their relatives and others whom they were close to as children. Punjabis, I was told (sometimes quite blatantly) were really the ‘best’ sort of people that existed. They were, so I was made to believe, especially ‘hard-working’, ‘industrious’, ‘boisterous’, ‘cheerful’, and ‘good-looking’.
Apparently, no one knew how to ‘love life’ more than them, and the fact that a great many Bollywood heroes were Punjabis was touted about with much pride. Not surprisingly, then, the vast majority of my parents’ friends were fellow Punjabis, and, I suspect, they, too, shared the same assumptions about Punjabis and their presumed ‘superiority’ as my parents and other relatives did.
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