My identizones

I've been asked to wear my multiple identities as so many sites for appropriate feelings, of pride, of guilt, of shame, of grievance. “You're a male, adult, cis, hetero, Hindu, upper-caste, middle-class, married, parental, Bengali, Indian, resident (not diasporic), linguist; be proud, guilty, ashamed, aggrieved, in your capacity as a male, adult...”, they urge me.

Around upper-hand identities, the institutions offer readymade unifications, which rest on entrenched second-rating of their lower-hand counterparts, allowing for choice from second-rating practices that range from aggressive to moderate. Around lower-hand identities, there are solidarity systems that gather persons into networks to affirm the power of sisterhood and challenge the second-rating arrangements, with these challenging practices ranging from militant to gentle.

I could have illustrated this standard geometry of multiple identities, differentiated into upper-hand and lower-hand subcategories, by considering an abstract case. But it is unproblematic to choose oneself as an example in an elementary exercise.

First, an upper-hand example. As a Hindu in India, I have an upper-hand identity; I can choose how aggressive to be in my participation of the second-rating of non-Hindu compatriots.

Next, a lower-hand example. As a linguist based in the global South, I operate a lower-hand identity; I can choose how militant to be in my postures vis-a-vis the handlers from the global North whose linguists systematically second-rate us; I am expected to mildly or strongly resist the arrangement under which they get to control the systems of linguistry and get to assign franchises to designated individuals and groups in the South. All second-rating, in any collective-to-collective dyad, thrives on the fact that those second-rated bristle at the status assigned to them. That's part of the point.

This is the current pedagogy of identities and of the way a given individual handles her affiliation to several identities. Each identity J, at the categorial level, inhabits a relational space, typically but not always construed in dyadic terms, where J is mutually defined vis-a-vis adjacent identity K in a J/K binary. Either J or K has the upper hand in that binary and second-rates the other. In the cases where the relational space has three or more occupants, the dynamics can be resolved into binary dyads. Consider 'poor – middle – rich', for instance; this triad is most transparently parsed in terms of 'poor-middle' dynamics and 'middle-rich' dynamics; there are wrinkles, but they hardly affect the overall geometry.

All these dynamic processes may be narrated – at a given point on the curve, or following a historical curve or two – in social-scientific and historical terms, abstracting away from the subjectivities of this or that individual. One is able to do this in large part because the processes typically affect all individuals alike. What one calls personal differences can mostly be attributed to slightly different sets of categorial affiliations. But one can also run the story at the personal or biographical level. In such narrations one plays up the 'same' material in idiosyncratic terms, focusing on events, responses and interpersonal dynamics, placing aesthetics on a fetish-cherishing pedestal. Aesthetics (including one's approach to friendship, love, and their negations) that does for the sanctity of the personal level exactly what the social cherishing practices (which place religion, science, politics etc. on overlapping pedestals) do for the sovereignty of the collective level.

Can I challenge the complicated cage itself that they tell me is the universal city I must inhabit? Is it even meaningful, let alone feasible, to defy this pedagogy itself, the one outlined above, the one that is driving all narratives available to my prose in any language currently in use? If I want to mount such a challenge, at what Archimedean point do I stand in order to perform the operation? How can I even define the location of the point if I defy the standard geometry itself? How will any definition I offer be understandable to my interlocutors who inhabit the same pedagogy?

I am hoping to learn from Aniket Jaaware, who writes as a Dalit and asks how a person can inherit both the Dalit potential from all Dalits and the Brahmin potential from all Brahmins, and how one can make sense of the idea that only such a joint inheritance will make us whole. I am hoping to learn from androgynous thinking, which asks if a joint cultivation of both our yin and our yang is not only an option but an obligation. I am hoping to use the work of Punya Sloka Ray, who spoke of the teacher language/ learner language relationship between languages. I am hoping to learn from the writings of Lev Vygotsky, who proposed that a child's learning is best understood not by examining the individual child alone, but in the context of the child's intimate relationship of cognitive growth with direct encouragement from the mentor, idealizable as one mentoring adult for diagrammatic simplicity, a context conceptualized as the ZPD, the Zone of Proximal Development. I am hoping not to cleave to these positive contexts alone, not to ignore the cynical realpolitik of the notions of 'satellite' state and 'client' state in international relations as I seek to make sense of the as yet unclear geometry of the identizones in which I seek, relationally but not only in ways that are completely determined by the standard pedagogy, to understand why an Ambedkar could view an M.P. Rege as his spiritual child, and why a Rege could spend his life honouring this task that his spiritual father had given him. I knew Rege, and I am hoping to make sense of this without ignoring the fact that I had to keep him at a distance because there was much in his vision that I very strongly rejected.

If you can help me, please do.

Probal Dasgupta

21 November 2018