Early immigrants gang up against new

Keki Daruwalla

SO at last the chasm between the self and the other has been defined. It is not a battle between the flat earth walahs and the Copernican ones. It is not, as we once thought, the valley that divided the Ramzadas and the others, so felicitously defined by Niranjan Jyoti, Deputy Minister, in 2014. It was not the chasm between the believers and the kafirs, as defined rather stridently by the Islamic state, or the doctrine rammed down the throat of its followers by the Lashkar-i-Jhangvias as they set about killing the Shiites in Pakistan. It is not the divide between the revered gau rakshaks on the one hand and the beef eaters and the cattle skinners on the other. (There has been a good novel on cattle skinners by Githa Hariharan, recently). 

The war in the year of our Lord, 2019, is now between the immigrant and the earlier settlers, the ones who came with Captain James Cook aboard his ship Endeavour and their progeny. The ones who appropriated land, drove the original owners into limbo and worse, planted their flag, culture and language as the rightful owners. Captain Cook was a great seaman, cartographer and explorer, admitted. But two centuries later his progeny doesn’t get the right to kill the other handful that has strayed in by dibs and drabs. The mentality and the intensity that drove the Ku Klux Klan in America once, is buried into certain genes it seems. Is hate crime going to become one of our century’s markers? You want to come to my country, smear the sidewalks with your spit and betel, look scrofulous, dress outlandishly, speak your scabrous language in my hearing! And you expect me to welcome you! Where’s my Smith- and-Wesson, guys?

The Australian White, am not naming him, following the New Zealand PM’ example, had much more than a Smith-and-Wesson during his killing spree at the mosque in Christchurch. The New Zealand Prime Minster Jacinda Ardern has changed the gun laws within 10 days of the attack. She has shown great resolution and great compassion during these days, unprecedented for the country. Just one incident has been the trigger for a change in gun laws, while US President Donald Trump had numerous chances to act, but sidestepped the issue. He did not wish to mess with the red necks. Many Americans have fallen prey to their nostalgia — the wild cowboy era, and the ‘conquest’ of frontiers.

Old prejudices to the fore?

Marginalisation within a globalised world needs the proper attention of sociologists. Is it the old prejudices coming to the fore again, white against the blacks and the coloured, in India the age old prejudice of the higher orders against cattle skinners, and old feuds, Christians against Muslims? The odds are against the already-marginalised, the tribal, the Uighurs in China, Rohingiya in Myanmar, cattle-skinners in India. These sections are getting it badly.

A considerable racial divide has been caused in Europe by the exodus of the West Asians to Germany and other European countries. It is worth noting that Saudi Arabia and most Muslim countries in West Asia have not let the Syrians in, or the Palestinians for that matter. Even the diaspora to Europe contained only 20 per cent of Syrians. Others muscled in. Europe, especially Germany when Angela Merkel was heading it, opened its doors and let in over a million in 2016, while UK also let in 600,000. Already the Turks are a force in Germany, and it is held against their ace footballer for inviting President Recep Erdogan to his wedding. Erdogan has compared the Christchurch massacre with what the Isis did. He also threatened that anti-Muslim Aussies would be sent back in coffins like their grandfathers from Gallipoli, where in the first World War, 8000 of them died fighting Turkish forces. I remember when he was in dire trouble, with the coup against him being scotched, he blamed the Zathushtis for his troubles. A few Kurds had gone back to Zoroastrianism and that was rankling the President of Turkey. In a word, every conflict cannot be attributed to history.

The short story 

The short story has made a sort of a revival. Some excellent anthologies of European fiction have come out from UK and USA. The short story has changed considerably during the last 50  years. The plot has become secondary, it is the narration that counts, with twists and turns of the narrator’s mood. Let us say, an elopement can be planned for the night, every angle thought of, and then the man goes home in the evening, and the story ends. You will not be told whether they manage to flee. Since then this genre has been leaning towards metafiction. Borges and Marquez and Rushdie have shown writers the way. Kafka is always there in the unconscious, but Maupassant and O Henry are missing from the current vogue. Hemingway is also in the departure lounge. Despite the large scale transfer of readership to the web, the printed word and the short story are holding forth.