In creating Telangana, India has a wonderful opportunity to showcase the global cultural heritage in its geographical center. The cosmopolitanism of Telangana culture is invisible to those who see the world through colonial eyes. But if we shed that colonial perspective then we can craft a state, in the heart of the Indian nation, which highlights the most hybrid aspects of Indian civilization. Telangana is what Indians have sought to safeguard in Kashmir: a living symbol of our richly plural and thickly cosmopolitan inheritance. We respond to Telangana’s demand for statehood in ways that are not too dissimilar from China’s response to Tibetan demands for autonomy. There is anxiety about regionalism, fear of balkanization, apprehension about violence and worry over the likely flight of capital. Such paranoia is unbecoming of a healthy democratic polity. Its origin lies in our deeply colonial way of thinking that the West and its historical trajectory of development is the only model for us to follow. Those who assert that the Telangana movement is a sign of separatism and that it somehow detracts from our pursuit of a global India are ignorant of the region. Historically, Telangana has been at the crossroads of multiple cultures and communities. To echo the words of Jawaharlal Nehru on India’s diversity, Telangana manifests the “widest tolerance of belief and custom” and does so not only at the elite level but also at the level of ordinary folks and everyday life. Iranians, Turks, Kayasths, Marwaris, Chinese, Bengalis, Syrian Christians, Marathis, Tamilians, Jews and Parsis, among others, have long found a home here. Even as the student agitation was picking up speed, it was making room for Christmas and Muharram in scheduling its bandhs. Telangana’s culture is anything but parochial. The Osmania University Arts College that forms the backdrop for the hunger strikes and gatherings of the students, the singing of songs such as Jai Bolo Telangana during the Vidyarthi Garjana, the ubiquitousness of Dakhni, the names of its districts, towns and streets (Nizamabad, Adilabad, Karimnagar, Kazipet, Abid Road), the Iranian chai cafes, the largest Asian Christian diocese (in Medak) are all material testimony to Telangana’s cosmopolitan heritage. To listen to Prof. Jayashankar, one of the main intellectuals of the movement for over 50 years, is to listen to someone eloquent in Urdu, English and Telugu. Watching him move mellifluously among these three languages is to witness the best of India’s plurality on display. What is remarkable is that such multi-cultural competence is not at all unusual in people from this region. But, of course, the dominant understanding of cosmopolitanism that we now subscribe to doesn’t easily fit these people. Neither the students at the forefront of the agitation nor its intellectuals match what we have come, mistakenly, to read as signs of a global identity: chirping English with an American accent, branding oneself with designer clothes, spouting the latest clichés from Hollywood or being spotted at pubs and country clubs. Given this superficial conception of cosmopolitanism, it is easy to read the agitators as “provincial” even when they articulate their political demands in a hybrid tongue and with an egalitarian and solidaristic ethos that would put any twittering connection or facebook friendship to shame. The movement’s experiments in participatory democracy as well as the solidarities visible on the streets and campuses of Telangana have much in common with social democratic struggles everywhere. Rallying on the streets through festivals, rice-planting rituals, the playing of kabbadi and the conducting of school examinations is surely a progressive way of visibly bringing together groups that are relatively invisible in our political spaces. For anyone familiar with the rhythms of daily life in Telangana, such democratic struggles are but a logical outcome of its rich cultural idioms and languages. It is easy therefore, in the public spaces of Telangana, to tap into a culture that is deeply evocative of India’s hybrid heritage. This is a culture that is a daily reality for the millions of ordinary people settled in Telangana, from the nearby districts, coastal Andhra, Rayalaseema or many other parts of the country. The political demand for Telangana is therefore not a call for a socially exclusive segregation. To read it thus is to distort what’s at stake. Sectarianism is not the issue here but political justice for a plural polity. A separate Telangana is necessary in order to resist oppressive governance in the name of an integrated state. What the idea of a state integrated only around a linguistic identity hides are the historical tensions between a Sanskritized and a hybrid Telugu. Telangana’s culture has evolved in the direction of a hybrid Dakhni that is open to Marathis and Muslims and various socially marginalized communities. A Sanskritized Telugu, on the other hand, only attains purity by closing itself off and seeking to reform hybrid/“lesser” forms in its image. To be at home in a culturally hybrid Telangana then is always already to be seen as an inferior form of a purer self within an integrated state. One should not be surprised then if the Telangana persona on screen or in society appears only as a villain or a comedian. As Lateef Mohammad Khan, chief of the Muslim Forum For Telangana, put it, “To cut a long story short, the Hindus in Telangana are called jokers and the Muslims terrorists.” Neutral observers must take care not to casually dismiss the movement as a struggle for a purely parochial identity. The idea of Telangana represents something far richer and far more cosmopolitan than the idea of an integrated Andhra state. It is the idea of a plurality of cultures, religions, languages and social identities inhabiting a particular place and seeking to protect that against the ravages of a supremacist and one-dimensional dominance. Successful or not, it does not detract from India’s nationality or globality but stands at its heart as one of their more exquisite political and cultural manifestations. Creating Telangana means crafting a state that is territorially local, culturally global and equitably and emotionally well integrated into our national imagination.
Posted on: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 09:14:28 +0000
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