Beware of the Next Cartoon

Beware of the Next Cartoon
Sach Kanwal Singh

Vishwajit Singh’s maiden cartoon for the WSN

Vishavjit Singh of the Sikhtoons.com fame was quick off the block to react with a rather pithy cartoon depicting Prince Charles with a Nazi swastika symbol emblazoned on his arm after the Royal father-son duo got embroiled one after the other in controversies involving use of racist terms. Prince Harry had called a fellow “Paki” while his father Prince Charles, never at a loss for appropriate words, got the acidic taste of the cartoonist’s quill because he had called a Sikh polo-playing friend “Sooty”.

Clearly, both usages were linked to the tone of the skin color and by all means, the cartoonist’s subdued and controlled anger was fully justified. Some may actually have wanted him to add a few sharp words too.

But as the great Sufi tradition goes, when you find something good in the other person, try to emulate it. And more importantly, when you stumble across something you really find galling, look inwards to ensure that you don’t have the same affliction.

The British Royals have once again given us an opportunity to look inwards, and by all indications, the debate that it may trigger in our hearts will not be a simple one. How many times do people in Punjab and members of the Punjabi Diaspora refer to migrant laborers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar as “Bhaiyas”? Most of the debate in Punjab against the migrant laborers impacting the Punjabi demography, culture and language is often punctuated with diatribes and vituperative terms.

	Scenes of migrant labourers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh often remind one of Surjit Patar’s poem Aya Nand Kishore, a poem about the contrast between a Bihari migrant labourer’s daughter learning Punjabi in a dilapidated government-run school against a landlord’s grandchildren being chauffeured to town, to learn English

While the language of discourse and public debate may be still acceptable, or at least somewhat tolerable, the terms used in the security of the four drawing room walls about the migrants or about lower caste people in villages and towns will shame human beings scoring much less on the decency scale.

It is not for Vishavjit Singh to draw all the cartoons at the same time or put all strains and threads of a complex debate into the same cartoon but the talking point that he has created with his very first cartoon for the World Sikh News should be the beginning of a considered debate about banishing from the Sikh community any undue references to people on the basis of birth or blood.

At a time when the United States is being led by the first Black president in history and the world has better hopes of a more equitable society, it is time the Sikhs came up with their own contribution, inspired by the great teachings of and the ideals set by the Sikh Gurus and martyrs. We need to push the credo that “I am a Sikh, therefore I cannot be a racist.”

But Race is not the only construct abut which we need to be careful. In the American context, surely Race is something that we need to contend with and engage with and understand it. The WSN had particularly hailed the Philadelphia speech of President Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination campaign. But for the Punjabi Diaspora, we need to contend, other than Race, even with the constructs of caste, religion and region.

How many Sikh teenagers have gone through the experience of a dear friend seeking their permission before narrating a joke: “Excuse me please, but can I tell you a real wonderful Sardar ji joke?” The malicious and degrading sub-text of the permission seeker’s light-hearted banter in friendly company and setting is where the abuses and racial prejudices seep into our minds, language and mental furniture.

And we need to first of all acknowledge that there is a deeply ingrained prejudice and it has seeped into our mental furniture; it is an almost-unnoticed part of our daily lives and conversations. References to our “Madrasi” friends when they don’t even come from Tamil Nadu or descriptions of North-East’s residents as “Chinki” or “Chini” are horrible by any standards, but perhaps the realization seeps only into those who are at the receiving end.

“Paki” as an insult makes its presence felt only when a Sikh from Gurdaspur gets called that on the Oxford Street simply because his skin color is brown.

Indian college and university campuses ring out with words like Bongs, Panjoos, Chinkis etc with an innocuousness that only underlines that entire generations may fail to register the violence of such references. Ethnicity defines your particular insult in India when Race doesn’t.

Five years ago, Professor N Jayaram wrote an essay titled ‘Identity: A Semantic Exploration in India’s Society and Culture’. It listed the words used in different parts of the country to denote outsiders. In Goa, words such as “Ghati” (someone from across the ghats) or “Bhilo” (Konkani for outsider) are used in a derogatory sense. Similarly, when someone in Bangalore refers to a Tamilian as “Konga”, it’s usually said in a derisive tone.

Jayaram says, “The biases are deeply embedded in our psyche and operate at a covert level. We may come across them in our daily interactions but may not take them so seriously. Only when they get malicious, we notice them”. The professor, who heads the School of Social Sciences, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, cites the word “Bhaiyya”, which is used to refer to people from Uttar Pradesh. It’s the context that denotes whether it’s respectful endearment or abuse.

Kuldip Dhillon may contend that he did not feel insulted and that Prince Charles was not being racist and that the word was a “term of affection” but the real crux is that it is the context that defines the abuse. By themselves, the words are innocuous. It is their use that makes them acceptable or unacceptable.

The Sikh Cartoonscape

How many Sikh teenagers have gone through the experience of a dear friend seeking their permission before narrating a joke: “Excuse me please, but can I tell you a real wonderful Sardar ji joke?” The malicious and degrading sub-text of the permission seeker’s light-hearted banter in friendly company and setting is where the abuses and racial prejudices seep into our minds, language and mental furniture. The answer is not to seek an advance permission to tell a Hindu joke next. The answer is to engage in a debate that is aimed at banishing the abusive subtexts from our conduct.

A columnist of The Times of India, while venting out her spleen against prejudiced Indians, recalled the words of Dalit writer and activist Chandra Bhan Prasad who claimed that “he always finds it demeaning when people would refer to former president KR Narayanan as an ‘exceptional Dalit’, (which) unwittingly suggests that other Dalits are undeserving or unworthy.”

Chandra Bhan Prasad is right, but is the columnist too not committing the same mistake by referring to Chandra Bhan Prasad as a “Dalit writer”? I mean when was the last time you read about Brahman Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru or a leading Brahman lecturer on college campus or a Kshatriya Chief Minister’s press release?

Chandra Bhan Prasad can call himself a Dalit writer, it is his prerogative, but he does not go around calling people Brahman writers!

Many Punjabis, and that includes endless number of Sikhs, use the term Bhaiya as an abusive hailing out term. Calling someone a “Choohra”, “Chamar” or “Bhangi” is becoming increasingly unacceptable even within the confines of the drawing room; many of us now try not to use the term “Bhaiya” because it is so clearly pejorative and prejudiced, but new terms are being coined so that our drawing room conversations can retain the sickness of our deeply-held prejudices. Hence, we are now hearing the term “quotawallah”. We all know what we are trying to say about a vast section of the humanity by using this term and we all know that Vishwajit Singh will not rush to draw a cartoon about it because he too knows that we will all miss the point.

It is time we prepare ourselves for that future cartoon from Sikhtoons.com and when it comes, we have the satisfaction of telling ourselves that we are not the subject of his quill’s lines. We cannot be casteists because we are Sikhs. Are we?