Anthropologist Luis Dumont’s , Homo Hierarchicus manifests that Indian society is ruled by the principle of purity/ pollution. It appears that when we separate culture from nature, we seem to create what Georgio Agamben calls ‘bare life’. The culture of the upper caste is thought to be natural to our country and that of the others is thought to be polluting and does not deserve any room in our society. These minoritized and deemed as polluted cultures and people are thought to deserve ‘bare life’ in our society. Although, everyone belongs to the people of India, the difference is underwritten in the notion of people who are deemed as polluted and therefore, thought to simply deserve ‘bare life’ in our society. These lines of separation cross our caste, gender and faith lines and a significant section of our people are seen as belonging to the unchosen people of India.
In several ways the upper caste keeps reasserting its privilege and entitlement ritually, violently and through discursive control. It is through these and other means that it reassures itself that it belongs to the chosen people of India. Often the right-wing politics is employed to do this job. Within this politics, the unchosen people are at best deemed as rejectee in the popular imaginary of the upper caste. The unchosen people are guilty for what they are. The law of Karma is often evoked to justify their fate. For being allowed to exist or for existing at all they are thought to be perpetually in-debt to the chosen people of our country. This produces the sense of moral superiority of the chosen people and the unchosen people thus, can be infiriorized and can be deprived of the benefits of the state.
The unchosen people of India are not thought of as objects but as pollutant or viruses and rendered fit to be abjected or expelled out of our society. Paradoxically the abjection or ejection of the unchosen people becomes a simultaneous condition to enact one’s identity as a loyal citizen or as one belonging to the chosen people. This in fact has lines of fidelity to Gods, one’s caste and faith too. This is why the lower castes, women , tribals and the minorities are foreclosed and abandoned as unchosen people of India. This a foreclosure then allows the upper caste and their stooges to downgrade the unchosen people of India as wanting in morality, education, aesthetic, agility as well as fidelity to the nation without any qualms of conscience.
In Goa we can clearly see the venomous discourse unleased by the likes of Subah Velinkar operates from this primordial separation from nature and culture. St. Francis Xavier being divested of his ‘afterlife’ produced by his presence post his death in Goan society becomes easy scapegoat to denationalize, de-naturalize the Christian minorities of Goa. Thus, we can notice the lines that separate the chosen people and the unchosen people also operate in Goa. Being thought to be unchosen people of India , the Christians and other minorities, therefore, can be easily bundled as deviant and be viewed as out-castes that are responsible for their own doom.
Thus, upper caste as chosen people of India has a way of forgetting its own responsibility and guilt. Their nobility is to be constructed through their adherence to the principle of purity and pollution. The obsession with purity appears to be at the heart of the timing of discourse in Goa that is under our consideration. It appears that this venomous discourse sets into our society only when perhaps the chosen people feel that the unchosen people of India are going to do something that will pollute the situation in our society. Perhaps a rant of Velikar ringing the bells for a purificatory ritual. Such a purification maybe a felt need for an sense of internal coherence for those that deem themselves as chosen people of India.
Maybe the Homo Hirarchicus of Luis Domont is still relevant to understand the anthropology of our society. Our society is still reeling under casteist purity pollution regime. We seem to be unfortunately blind to the fact that we construe our nobility on fact of the other being deviant. This imagination also enables us to deem the expulsion and abjection of the demonized other as justice. This is sense of justice appears to be undergirding the thinking that holds that Indian Government should not spend money for the event of the exposition of St. Francis Xavier. In fact, it might be even firing the thinking that wants St. Francis be sent to Spain forgetting the complexities of situation then and now.
In fact, when St. Francis Xavier arrived, worked and died , there was no nation state that we have today. Nation state arrives as a fruit of the treaty of Westfalia. India that we have today, did not exist in the same form. Hence, nationalism that colors the thinking of those that deem themselves as chosen people of India appears to be narrow, motivated and imbued in the worldview of the upper caste. The toxicity of this position remains undiscerned and is enforced on those that are deemed as unchosen people of India shamelessly. But our society cannot be suppressed for long the unchosen people of India will certainly reclaim their rightful place long the chosen people sooner or later. During the participation, people who chose India and during the opinion poll the people that chose Goan in the new India cannot be thought as unchosen people of India. The ideology that considers only a minority as the chosen people of India is un-Indian if not anti-national. Real Indian nationalism comes from mother India that accepts all its sons and daughters in their birth, life and death. We cannot have unchosen people of India neither can we offer them bare life.
