How the idea of an Indian face fuels racism against those from North-East

“The concerns of the people of the North-East living in other parts of the country” was the official mandate of a committee formed in 2014—and headed by retired top civil servant M P Bezbaruah— to address the racially motivated attacks on North-Easterners in the nation’s capital. That the govt chose to employ this elaborate euphemism—and avoid the term ‘race’—was not accidental.

Many Indians believe that racism occurs only in the US, Australia, and Europe, and that Indians are always on the receiving end of White racism. Thus, in 2009, when the media was reporting on the rise in racial discrimination against Indians in Australia, then Mizoram chief minister Pu Lalthanhawla caused a national uproar by saying that racism also exists in India. “In India,” he said at a conference in Singapore, “people ask me if I am an Indian…They ask me if I am from Nepal or elsewhere. They forget that the North-East is part of India. I have told many that see, I am an Indian like you. I am a victim of racism.”

Fifteen years later, making such an assertion in the hill city of Dehradun cost young Anjel Chakma his life. When the Tripuri youth was abused racially as “a foreigner”, he said, “We are not Chinese…We are Indians. What certificate should we show to prove that?”

The Bezbaruah Committee, to its credit, did not shy away from using the word race. “Calling NE people ‘chinki’ will land you in jail” was how The Times of India headlined its report drawing attention to its key recommendation: to criminalise racial slurs and violence against North-Easterners. While this didn’t happen, a few Delhi-specific recommendations were implemented.
But given how persistent the issue has been, we may need to look beyond the law for an enduring solution. Anthropologists Jelle J P Wouters and Tanka B Subba make the useful observation that there is no place for the “Mongoloid phenotypes” —preponderant in North-East India —in the way ‘the Indian face’ is commonly imagined by many Indians.

The use of the term ‘Mongoloid’ in this context can be traced back to German naturalist J F Blumenbach who, in 1795, proposed that there are five biologically based races. He named them by associating physical traits with geographical location. However, the idea of separate human races in a biological sense is now outdated, especially with the development of modern genetics.

But behind the notion of ‘the Indian face’ is the idea of a ‘physiognomic map’ of India whose outer borders are determined not by markers of state territoriality, but by phenotypic considerations. Wouters and Subba point to the book ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’, in which British sociologist Paul Gilroy contends that even if they were born in the UK, Black Britons are always viewed as the Other due to their racialised features. The notion that there are no Mongolian phenotypes in ‘the Indian face’ parallels Gilroy’s claim about the status of Blacks in the UK.

It can be said that the phrase “Mongolian fringe,” coined by Olaf Caroe — the foreign secretary of British India —foreshadows the postcolonial term North-Easterner. For Caroe, the Mongolian fringe, in which he included Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, and the North-East Frontier Tracts (i.e., mostly today’s Arunachal Pradesh) was British Imperial India’s inner ring of defence. In his official note, he tried to show that China regards Tibet and these areas as unredeemed lands.

But must the physiognomic map on our minds continue to carry the debris of imperial geopolitics?

An important beginning towards changing this mindset was made by philologist and author Suniti Kumar Chatterji (1890-1977) in a book published 75 years ago ‘Kirata-Jana-Kriti’, which has the subtitle The Indo-Mongoloids: Their Contribution to the History and Culture of India. “The civilisation of India,” wrote Chatterji, “is the joint creation of her diverse peoples, Aryan, Dravidian, Austric (Kol) and Mongoloid” — utilising racial classifications that are now obsolete but were commonly used at that time. Of these “the Aryan base has always received the greatest attention”. While there has been significant progress in the study of the Dravidian heritage and some amount of work on the Austric heritage, “the Mongoloid contribution has not yet been seriously studied as an element of Indian history and civilisation”. Chatterjee also claimed that Sanskrit term Kirata referred to the “Mongoloid people” living in the mountains, particularly the Himalayas and the Indian North-East.

The notion that North-Easterners are descendants of the Kiratas of ancient lore offers a promising path of regarding them as co-creators of an ancient civilisation, and full citizens of a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and multi-religious modern civilisational state.

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