Identity is powerful unless it becomes an everyday entitlement

Travel experiences, even if distasteful, can provide real-time education in identity, nationalism, and equality.

Recently, while flying from Amsterdam to Delhi, I was detained overnight on the Kazakhstan border and treated with measured disdain and, at times, explicit ridicule by the airline by which I was travelling. It was all because of the airline’s own mistake. Transiting through Kazakhstan doesn’t need a visa, the airline staff said. Well, it does. Once the Kazakh security forces descended on me, all the sociological theory of my professional life suddenly came alive. I was a proud Indian whose identity became a cause célèbre: I was the only person on board who was not exempted from the transit visa because I was Indian.

Visa laws are one of the legitimised controlling methods of modern nation states to keep out the ‘undesirables’; a type of modern-day colonisation. Spending a night in the security stronghold of a remote town in Kazakhstan also coerced me to think about my own identity as a law-abiding Indian and its value within both an ultra-nationalist India and other parts of the world. That pride in one’s identity may be an utterly meaningless emotion because there’s always another identity that (erroneously) self-assesses itself to be relatively superior.

Human>Animal. European>Indian. Indian>Muslim. Sunni Muslim>Shia Muslim. Syed Sunni>Sunni Bohra>Sunni Pinjara. Man>Woman... It’s an equation of hierarchical endlessness.

The logic is not difficult to understand. Once identities are perceived as opaque boxes, we begin to create and sustain stereotypes: the negative stereotype of the Gujarati stealthily finding ways to sneak into a foreign country, or of the skull-capped Muslim queuing up to be the next jihadi. Worse is the positive stereotype of the scrupulous white man, or the fastidious Indian nationalist who sings the national anthem in the movie hall and beats up anyone who doesn’t.

When German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed Muslims fleeing the Syrian war into the country, an interesting interplay of negative and positive stereotypes became conspicuous: Muslims? Therefore, terrorists and “bad”. Muslims? Therefore, refugees and “good”. Neither is true, of course. Why not welcome them as humans? Else, there emerges what may be called the ‘elite refugee’, an educated, economically well off individual who is undesired by her own country for being a less demonstrative nationalist than what the (positive) stereotype demands, and undesired by a foreign country for being, in our case, Indian.

Pigeonholing people is easy. Studies of group threat have shown how easily we tend to prejudge someone who’s not like us because we reduce them to monolithic identities. Others do the same to us. Psychologist Gordon Allport once noted a student saying, “I despise all Americans but have never met one I didn’t like.” The individual is often lost in an ocean of identities. Historically there has been a purpose in instilling pride in monolithic identities — the might of the ‘Indian’ against the colonisers, for instance. With pride comes reflexivity. Identity is powerful unless it becomes an everyday entitlement.

Raheel Dhattiwala is a sociologist based in the Netherlands