(written in 1995)

Recent events In India and abroad has shaken the very ethics of over rationalized paradigms of reasoned order and it is becoming extremely clear that philosophy/Ideology/religion/politics thought cannot be explicitly separated from their inherent violence and the way these forces fashion/produce/orient and thus govern all thought and action from outside. Here violence operates with a very different language and gets visibly associated with increasing control of the means of signification, interpretation, and understanding.

Diversity as ‘Ethnicity and Essentialism’:
‘Essentialism’ more generally is a theory of essences – and often applied to different beliefs that particular things have essences which serve to identify them as a particular thing that they are.
‘Ethnicity’ is relatively a new concept which refers to whole range (and often in combination) of communal characteristics like: Lingual, ancestral, regional, religious, etc, which are seen to be the basis of distinctive identity.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engel forecast that ‘all pre-industrial distinctions of an ethnic character would disappear with the emergence of the world wide Industrial Proletariat united by a perceived common condition and shared interest.’
But today, this remains a far fetched reality and almost sounds like an ‘Utopia’.

Culture and Dominance (hegemonic Vocabularies):
As Homi Bhabha had suggested ‘nations themselves are narrations’.
The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important constituent of any cultural ‘Self’ privileging and preservation.
In the modern world, grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment has mobilized Western Nations and these have led to a new global narrative based on the utopian concepts like Equality and Global Human Community etc. But in recent times such modernist concepts have been seriously challenged as growing Cultural Imperialism.
On the other side, the Western narratives of progress was seen as continued Western cultural dominance ’imperialism’ and as a narrative specific to western culture which was been forced onto the rest of the world in the name of global progress and humanistic emancipation of class and gender with utter disregard for the native tradition and its structural realities etc…; Thus there arose a great movement of resistance and narratives of de-colonization.
Here narratives of national culture was seen as a refining and elevating element, as society’s reservoir of the best that has been known and thought became privileged over and above Western narratives...
Although strategically, this helped Indian culture to resist, and evolve its own unique forms of social and cultural identity/understanding and art. In time it came to be associated often aggressively with the notion of the Nation and the State (linguistic modes of Identity) and further forking into 'The Hindu' and Minority narratives (folk and tribal heritage). These narratives worked itself up through the concept of essentialist identity by filtering out the discourse of the ‘Other’ which differentiated ‘Us’ from ‘Them’ and often with some degree of xenophobia.
Culture in this sense became a source of identity and reached almost dangerous levels of self determination, often bordering on religious, nationalistic and separatist fundamentalism.
Today it seems that essentialism and ethnic narratives have become a very tricky business. It is ridden with some inherent contradictions and complications as it derives its strength only from what it is pitted against.
The danger is that it often degenerates into jingoism, chauvinism, or narrow minded communalism and so becomes culturally dangerous and self defeating.

The problem of Diversity and the Discourse of ‘Indianness’:
The narration of unity began when Indians started their organized struggle for freedom especially after the disorganized and premature 1857 failed uprising.
In this narration all Indians (Hindustani=Indianness) together constituted the ‘Self’, and the British rule was treated as the ‘Other’.
But within this narrative of the ‘Hindustani’ was also the narrative of the ‘The Other’ and this ‘We’ and ‘They’ narration’s which consequently lead to the bloody partition and whose aftereffects are still felt as communal riots rips the wounds afresh as the nation bleeds.
The equation further changed in independent and post colonial India as the concept of Swaraj was given concrete content in terms of social justice, equal rights for different sections of Indian communities esp:- Religious minorities, The Working Class, Peasantry, Women, and Dalits.
New narratives on these lines emerged in the 1960’s with great potential for diversity. (This phase is often spoken as Progressive Vaad).
Progressive Vaad was considered modernist in so far as it derived its origins from the narrative of Enlightenment of the West.
This era was a celebration of the liberating potentials of the social sciences, the materialistic gains of capitalism, new forms of rational thought, due process safeguards, abstract rights applicable to all, and the individual…. It was a time of great optimism.
This phase operated on two fronts simultaneously - one as revivalist nostalgia; trying to retrieve a supposedly lost metaphysics past and an exploration into the possibilities of alternate genealogies that take into account the indigenous element of our popular creative culture (folk and tribal).
It did not discard the idea of unity but emphasized diversity by revising ones understanding of unity; It tended to see all growth as a continuous and evolving process of open dialogue and creative interaction among our different languages and cultures including the marginalized minorities, the Dalits and the Tribal’s, and from the 1990’s – the Gender.
Although it privileged diversity without privileging the dominant (elitist) or the subaltern POV. This narration had its inherent contradiction. It was unaware of its derivative stance and often was voicing progressive ideology that was derived from the Western traditions.
In itself progressive vaad became a monolith, a master narrative which privileged diversity at the cost of the ‘erasure’ of the higher social identities and as a reaction and effect to which we can see today the resistant and opposing narratives born out of religious and communal fanaticism is a direct result of it and has resulted in the Sikh, the Hindu, the Muslim, the Dalit, and the Gender specific revivals. Today the voice of diversity is almost lost in jingoism chauvinism and narrow minded communalism.
Another side effect of this ‘Progressive Vaad’ optimism was entrenched Bureaucratic powers, monopolies, the manipulative advertisement industry, environment degradation, dominant and totalizing discourses, and the ideology of the legal apparatus which once were hailed as liberating now were seen as exerting repressive powers.
Today, diversity needs to be redefined and this is a very tricky business as any definition would need to quantify that the privileged values no way leads to the erasure of the ‘Other’.

Conclusion:
As already pointed out that ‘Diversity and multiculturalism discourses do not and possibly cannot take into consideration the macro and micro fascism that lurks within all political and social narratives and violent eruptions keep occurring here and there, in fact there is no guarantee that these forces that seek emancipation under the multicultural and essentialist diversity discourses may in time release its own repressive powers which clearly ends in blood letting and chaos in name of tradition culture and self determination..’