A radio riot

It was a Himalayan blunder and the repercussions were rocky. By calling the Indian Idol winner Prashant Tamang a 'gurkha', a radio jockey unthinkingly started an ethnic riot. After the television talent show results were announced, he went on air and prattled away, as radio jockeys are known to, remarking wittily (or so he thought), "If all Gurkhas take up singing, then shopkeepers will have to guard their own premises."
Finally, the army had to be called in to restore calm.The radio announcer's remark had touched a nerve, or more like gouged it. The chowkidar stereotype is something Nepalis have long suffered and deeply resent. Siliguri and Darjeeling, with large Nepali populations, exploded; 30 were injured, the towns burned, and the army had to stage a flag march. In Delhi, union minister Priyaranjan Das Munshi proposed that the FM station should be banned for a week as punishment.
While I could identify with the outrage, I was dismayed by the over-the-top reaction-the violence and the proposal to ban the station. I thought it was out of proportion and unjustified. As a Nepali growing up in Mumbai, I have also gone through my share of ethnic slurs, though my father never worked as a watchman. In school, I was often accosted with calls of "Nepali, Nepali" behind my back, which I soon learned to tackle by counter calling. I remember once shouting back, “Madrasi, Madrasi," knowing fully well that South Indians hated being lumped under that one name that denied them their regional identities. Now, I know better, and as one grows older one learns to laugh these things off.
But what helped me come to terms with the ethnic jokes is the fact that no community in India is spared.
This, perhaps, is our sole defence against our national habit of laughing at other communities, making fun of accents, clothes and food habits. Everyone from north to south is fair game, is laughed at and caricatured. Ask the Sardars, a community so mercilessly lampooned, that earlier this year a delegation actually approached the Mumbai police commissioner to protest the publication of a Santa-Banta joke book-a move that only set off another round of jokes. Or ask any UPite or Bihari about how they have to suffer the derogatory term, Bhaiyya.
The fact is that Indians are not a subtle people, and we couldn't give a hoot about being politically correct. Going by popular perception, Tamilians only speak 'andu-gundu', Marwaris have to be 'kanjoos', Bengalis pretentious and 'caaltured', Gujjus listen to 'pope music in the marriage hole', and Parsis are mad. Go to any city college and you will find that Sindhi youngsters are quite inured to being called papad because of the community's fondness for the crunchy discs. Even the locals in Mumbai have been labelled ghaatis.
Sample this: What do you call a Marathi wearing jeans? Answer: Western Ghat. Not funny. Yet, so common. "I have always felt strongly about this," says film-maker Madhur Bhandarkar, who touched on it in his film Page 3, where a Mumbai policeman who busts a drug party is taunted by a young woman who calls him ghaati. The cop shoots back, "This ghaati is an MA in English Literature." Bhandarkar, who coincidentally is in Nepal right now, adds, "It's very unfortunate that we make comments like this. It's rampant but very wrong."
Dr K P Jayasankar, professor of the Centre for Media and Cultural Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, says name-calling is an established psychological behaviour that makes the name-caller feel superior. "Construction of a deviant 'other' (generally someone who belongs to a minority) is necessary to assert our own 'normality'. We, the dominant group are normal, the other is not."
As a human resource director in Hoechst Pharmaceuticals, George Menezes conducted exercises among employees to find out how deeply entrenched stereotypes were. "I would ask, 'what are all Marwaris?' And back came the answer: kanjoos. The moment I pointed out that the most expensive gift I received for my wedding was from a Marwari man, people would nod their heads immediately," says Menezes, who did an internship in behavioural science in the UK. He was shocked when he asked about his own community. "I said Goan and they said 'drunkard'. I expected lazy," he says. "These beliefs get so entrenched in our psyche that we need to challenge them."
Bollywood, of course, is the great perpetuator of these impressions. The Christian community has long been depicted as wearing mini skirts and being layabouts. So much so that about ten years ago, the Archbishop of Bombay even wrote to Bollywood's film association-they took scant notice-demanding that this kind of negative portrayal be stopped. Trust the same film industry to twist the phonetic structure of the Nepali language into the lisping Shalaam Shaab.
What was really distressing, and what was lost in the melee, was that the riots in Siliguri were only symptomatic of deeper social and political unrest. The violence in fact was an angry cry for attention. For a part of the country that almost never makes it to the national headlines, and which in any case is nursing a sense of isolation, being called Gurkha was both insulting and an affirmation that no one takes them seriously.
Winning the talent contest meant more to this neglected region than it would to, say, a confident city like Mumbai or Delhi. It was as if a musical bridge had been built, and then came the Gurkha remark, showing them their place. Dr Jayasankar says the origin of the Gurkha label can be traced to our caste system. "It comes from the belief that a Gurkha's son must become a security guard; and that a Dalit must be a manual scavenger," he says, pointing out the hidden and subconscious thinking behind the remark.
And generalisations of this sort, apart from being hurtful, can turn dangerous. More recently, Muslims have been at the receiving end of such ill-conceived classifications with careless and angry remarks equating Muslims with terrorism. Jayasankar warns, "The distance between such comments and the concentration camp, metaphorically, is not very far."