I wrote in my last column about how arbitrary and tenuous are our borders and how we should treat them with a bit of healthy contempt. The right attitude is to think of 'South Asia without Borders', which is the title of a seminar at Harvard, and which is consistent with the cosmopolitan Indian way of the first millennium AD, when Sanskrit was the subcontinent's common language of culture before the vernaculars rose.
Amartya Sen wisely suggests that all of us have multiple identities and we ought to resist privileging our national identity. For example, I am an Indian male, but I am also a Punjabi, a father of two, a writer, a vegetarian, an enthusiast of Kishori Amonkar's music, a cheerleader of our liberal reforms, a fan of the Indian cricket team, and so on. I have different identities, and which one I choose at a particular moment is often a practical decision. When I am amongst Punjabis, I relish abusing in Punjabi; among music lovers I talk about Kishori's latest concert; with my children I try to behave like a responsible father (usually without success); and in the recent cricket World Cup I cried myself hoarse before the TV.While I am proud of my Indian identity, I don't feel that I have let the side down if I enjoy Thai green curry or Italian pasta, Bach's German baroque or Kurusawa's Japanese films. Our identities also change with time; some people even change their religion; others migrate and change their nationality. And it is certainly human to stop and occasionally ask like Socrates, "Who am I?" When I go to sleep, I prefer my male identity for I can dream of Krishna kanhaiya surrounded by a hundred gopis, but when I die I'd like to be remembered as a human being, not delimited by nationality, caste or religion (a lesson that Tagore teaches in Gora).
The point is that identity is a matter of reasoned choice. Unfortunately, both Hindu nationalists and American chauvinists (who ventured blithely into Iraq) want to force fit me into an overarching, rigid nationalistic identity that takes away this choice and impoverishes my plural human spirit. They would return me into the cesspool of pre-modernity where my religious identity is the only one that counts.
I had not realised the damage that 9/11 has done to the free American spirit until last month when I was refused entry into an office building in New York because I had forgotten my "picture id". I went back to the hotel for my passport but I was stopped again, this time because I did not have the phone number of the person I was to meet. Sure, I felt humiliated and even angry, but then I thought, I am only a visitor here, whereas all Americans are now subjected daily to this identity paranoia.
It is our unreasoned acceptance of a single identity that is responsible for the atrocities of our times. I was only four years old when Partition took place, but even as a child in Lahore I could tell that our newly devised Hindu identity had redefined our Muslim friends as enemies in 1947. The Pianist, the much-honoured recent film by Polanski, makes your stomach turn as you watch German nationalists express their nationalistic identity by killing half a million Polish Jews.
We should think of human beings as diamonds with many faces. Hate begins when we categorise people, choosing one face and ignoring the others. When we reduce people to one dimension we encourage a fragmented view of humanity, whereas we should celebrate our plural identities. The tragedy of war, including this one in Iraq, is that we privilege one face, usually our national identity.