Beating the chinky blues : How to bear the unbearable

‘You’ve got to be who you are’. “I’m a Northeasterner and I’m beautiful”. This is a catch phrase with which every youngster from the Northeast should now saturate himself or herself [which I did in my college days all over India]. India consists of North Indians, South Indians and Northeast Indians.

I know how the youngsters in Manipur feel about their Hindu surnames in Mayang (non-Northeast) parts of India. They feel uncomfortable with them because of an identity crisis.

Meitei surnames were endowed upon us by Shanti Das Gosai; the Hindu missionary from Sylhet, who introduced a queer Bengali dialect of Sylhet to Manipur, such as ‘khanjon pakhi jemon Radha’. As the Meiteis were warlike and brave people, he thought it was prudent to give them the surnames of the brave Rajput men and women.

It was because of the surnames that the British built the Sana Konung (the Palace) in pseudo-Rajput architecture. The young Meiteis are doing away with these Hindu surnames, but I am not very sure whether changing their first name into Christian names such as George Moirangthem or Elizabeth Pukhrambam will enhance Meitei identity. It sounds to me as “a new rope on an old cow” (Manipuri) or “a new band on an old hat” (English).

No self-respecting writer from Manipur should demean himself/herself using the term “mainstream” or “mainland” India. Manipur is not a tributary of India. We are all Indians at par. Referring to them as mainstream would naturally entail Manipur as a tiny stream and the Manipuris as insignificant people.

I remember the late Hawaibam Ranabir from Uripok. Just after the War he was doing MA in Calcutta. Being a polite man he used to address coolies at the Sealdah Railway junction as “Aap” (respectable you). They called him “Tum” (normal you). Thereafter he called them Tum and they called him Aap.

There are ways of talking to people. Introverts are shy people and when they talk to people they are energised by their inner worlds, their ideas, emotions and impressions, while extroverts like me, are energised by outer worlds. They get energy from people they are talking to, their activities and things outside of themselves.

But one has to learn the run of the mill etiquette of talking. And there are some people with inherent superiority complex, such as the North Indians (not all by any means).

Six years ago my wife and I went to attend the wedding of a grand daughter of ours in Delhi, who was getting married to a Punjabi boy. The evening before the wedding we entertained the bridegroom, his parents and others with them, to a garden dinner party, thanks to my friend, a top Army General, at the Army Club in Delhi, with the General’s band playing Bollywood music.

We received the parents and I was chatting to the groom’s mother. To get the conversation going I asked her where she lived in Delhi. She answered in a condescending tone: “Do you know Delhi?” It was beside the point that I knew Delhi before she was born and that I wouldn’t have framed the question in that way if I didn’t know Delhi.

I changed the subject as I realised that she was lacking in decorum which would have determined how she would respond in further polite conversation. I move in high Punjabi society in Delhi, which I have visited almost every year for 40 years.

Next evening she made a point of ignoring us at the wedding function that she arranged. She lacked a sense of gravity, levity and propriety. I felt she needed a little push to go in the right direction for the benefit of humanity of her kind and gave her my piece of mind, regardless of consequences.

Chinky (slit eyes) or chipta (flat nose) are disparaging terms for the Chinese, like Paki is a racist term for the Pakistanis. These are north Indians’ interstate racism with similar jibes for the Sikhs, South Indians and even for Bengalis.

The Northeasterners must dispel the notion that our oriental face is ugly. The 2012 Miss World in the international beauty contest is a Chinese student Yu Wenxia (23).

‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ [c.300 BCE, Greek] ie perception of beauty is subjective. Most wives and husbands do not see each other as ugly. Intuitively they only see what he or she is inside. A girl of mixed race in London, with a black father and white mother was once asked by a BBC reporter what she thought of her black father. She said she saw her father only as her dad.

Meitei women usually regarded the north Indian women as quite ugly – “Shakthibi, mitlaobi, natumbi, and pajombi”, meaning, ugly women with far too-big eyes, pointed nose and far-too long eyelashes.

Ethnic Orientals develop their own standards of beauty, based upon their families, societies and peer groups. I still find my father, mother, brothers and sisters very good looking indeed.

Beauty is a highly objective thing to quantify.

The North Indians lose “their beauty” altogether when exposed among the Europeans. Only the other day I proudly showed the allegedly most beautiful Indian actress Madhuri Dixit on TV to my wife. She commented she was no better looking than many Indian/Pakistani women here except that she was heavily made up and lavishly dressed.

Once, the late film star Nargis told this story. She was sitting in the foyer of a big hotel in New York. A few middle age American women were also there. They had been staring at her. She thought it was because she was very beautiful in her colourful sari. Then, one of them asked where she came from. She said – from India. Oh! Said the woman; “Do you have houses there?” Irritated she replied: no, I live in a hut on top of a coconut tree.

Beauty is only superficial. A person’s character and personality are more important than his or her physical appearance. Researchers have now honed in on the idea of symmetry as being part of a universal standard of beauty, which is held across many cultures.

The Northeasterners are certainly not lacking in symmetry. What they need is to cultivate a sense of self-esteem and have confidence in themselves.

Racism of course, exists in North India, developed as an egoistic ‘Aryan trait’ with Rama and Rishis as their Aryan ancestors. But the trait is wearing thin as other Indians have been standing up to them.

Open Sardarji jokes have mostly stopped after the Khalistan movement and the assassination of Indira Gandhi, and it is now unheard of after the Prime Ministership of Manmohan Singh. South Indian jokes have mostly stopped after a series of South Indian Prime Ministers, Presidents and Home Ministers and now that Delhi is saturated with very prosperous South Indians.

No one calls a Ghurkha chinky, anywhere in the world as they are respected because of their bravery.

Following WWII the North Indians still ridiculed the Chinese as “Chinkies” but not the Japanese, because of the Japanese ability to defeat the Americans in the sea and the British and Indian Armies on land, until two atomic bombs put an end to that.

After the Chinese humiliation of India in 1962, the racial chinky slur appeared only in squeaks. Now hardly anybody calls the Chinese Chinkies, what with the recent ground to air combat military exercises by the PLA in the Tibetan Plateaux.

Looking for new targets, now they have unleashed their vituperative insults on the hapless student communities and a few professionals from the Northeast, living in Delhi.

Racial abuse and racial discrimination have zero tolerance under the British law, punishable by appropriate fines and even jail terms.

My understanding is that the Indian Government (GOI) is taking up such measures so as to stop racial abuse of Northeast Indians as most of them are classified as Scheduled Castes. That means if it is found out in the court of law that a certain Northeast Indian eg a Meitei who does not belong to the Scheduled Caste, then the abuser can go scot-free.

It’s worth remembering how Indians must have felt when during the height of the British Empire; the Taj Mahal hotel in Bombay was built by a Parsi industrialist J. N. Tata. The reason he built this hotel, open to all Indians, was because the hotel next door was “British Only. Indians and Dogs not allowed”. Discrimination is abhorrent, hurtful and inhuman.

The northeast Indians need protection in other states of India but not in their own states, but the Indian Government is doing the opposite with Restrictive and Protective Area Permits.

While hoping for the GOI to make legislations for punitive actions against racial harassment, the aim of the young Notheastreners should not be to retaliate the racial-profilers, but to win their friendship with self-confidence. ‘You’ve got to be what you are’. They are just lacking in educated civility. After all, the Northeast did not beg to be integrated to India.

The writer is based in the UK
Email: imsingh@onetel.com
Website: www.drimsingh.co.uk

23-Sep-2012 / 01:31 AM / Dr Irengbam Mohendra Singh / 6 Comments