Identity, Culture and the ages of Paradoxes

“It was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity.”

In the operational doctrines of colonialist and imperialist ideologies, the conceptual path to normalising the coloniser’s culture in an invaded and/or occupied land often passes through what we may call the ‘Uniqueness Argument’. It works as follows: At the initial stage of colonisation, invasion followed by forceful occupation of parts of a country takes place, which is sometimes accompanied by a drastic demographic change of those parts. This almost always gives rise to political dominance by the invader over the land and administration of the invaded.

Then, a significant portion of the invaded and/or partly occupied land, originally belonging to the victims of invasion, is painted as a ‘unique’ cultural zone. This depiction is incessantly repeated through aggressive propaganda, using the powerful channels of academia and media. As the propaganda penetrates increasingly into all levels of public discourse, it acquires the air of an undisputable, default position from which all discussions around the subject must proceed—an unmistakable mark of ideology which is false consciousness. This is the stage of turning manufactured narratives into powerful discourses. It requires some time and a certain amount of indolence on the part of the intellectuals produced by the culture under siege.

The purported ‘unique’ cultural character of the demographically and/or politically colonised area is then exploited to project this area as a distinct sociocultural identity, altogether different from the mainland. As is the nature of invasions, such attacks advance from the border areas and move gradually inward. The very next step—and the most crucial one in the process—is to claim a distinct political identity of the colonised area. This is where benign and diverse cultural nuances are painted with the broad strokes of monolithic category-driven identity politics, and identity turns into a tool of power. Identity politics is thus activated.

The primary goal of this politics is to amplify intra-cultural nuances of the besieged civilisation and thus foreground them as cultural differences that are seemingly set in stone. In reality, however, those cultural nuances are hardly ‘differences’ per se; instead, they are the local expressions of a broader civilisational outlook—the local manifestations of an orthogenetic development (which is a series of gradual and slow changes occurring organically and brought about by internal or indigenous factors, as opposed to changes brought about by disruptions that are by nature sudden) within a great civilisation, such as India. The amplification of intra-cultural nuances is then forcefully applied in the discourse as well as in day-to-day actions, to cut off a region’s culture from its civilisational roots, from its fountainhead, so that the process of a cultural takeover by the predatory religion representing a foreign culture—the coloniser’s culture—is made easier.

Read More https://thedailyguardian.com/identity-culture-and-the-age-of-paradoxes