Course Paper Modular Period I

Ain’t got no
home(land)
Submitted to: Paula Ditzel Facci

University of Innsbruck

MA in Peace, Development, Security and

International Conflict Transformation

Lucano Alvares
09 December 2019
Contents
Introduction ................................................................................................................................................. 1

1 – At home in the world........................................................................................................................... 1

2 – Ain’t got no mother ............................................................................................................................. 6

3 – Imaginary homelands......................................................................................................................... 12

4 – Losing my religion .............................................................................................................................. 16

That old-time religion .......................................................................................................................... 16

Back to the story ................................................................................................................................... 18

An uneasy homecoming ..................................................................Error! Bookmark not defined.

5 – Birth and death of a nation ............................................................................................................... 21

(Un)seen by the state............................................................................................................................ 21

Get me out of here! ..........................................................................Error! Bookmark not defined.

Re-imagining communities.................................................................................................................. 26
Introduction

This is an exercise I struggled with in the first term, and the struggle has only got harder this term.

Defining an abstract term like ‘homeland’ under other abstract categories such as ‘culture’,

‘politics’, ‘religion’ and is an act whose futility has only become more evident to me as I have

progressed through the exercise. In every instance, my main takeaway has been about how

arbitrarily these concepts are defined, how much disagreement there is among theoreticians and

academicians about correct definitions, and how little these definitions and disagreements matter

in everyday life. Over the next few chapters, I will seek to cover few of the reasons for my

discomfort in engaging in an activity like this.

1 – Homeland goes wherever I go

Fortress homeland

I was somewhat underwhelmed to learn that the theme for this term was ‘homeland’. Strangely,

the first thing that came to mind when I read the word was the US Department of Homeland

Security, created in the aftermath of the attacks of 11 September 2001 in the USA. The idea of a

homeland has thus come to represent, for me, an exclusive space that is to be defended from

outsiders. I have grown to detest most manifestations of nationalism and patriotism,

simultaneously rejecting most forms of belonging that seek to exclude the other. And it is an

unfortunate reality that in many nation-states, these forms of exclusive and exclusionary belonging

are expressed in a wide range of ways. I will endeavour, in this and the following papers, to try and

give shape to my misgivings about ideas of homeland and their manifestations in an increasingly

fractious world.

Felt like home to me

I grew up in an urban settlement that, for all practical purposes, was an island in the south of the

city of Bombay. Growing up there, I was very rarely confronted with the realities that many other

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denizens of this blighted city had to face. I gullibly swallowed the versions of history that were fed

to us in school, and was comfortable in the idea that I lived in a utopian idyll in one of the biggest

cities of a country with (so we were told) a great future ahead of it.

I am not sure that I can call this state of ignorance (bliss?) ‘connection to a homeland’, but

there can be no doubt that I did feel a somewhat strong, although not very specific, sense of

belonging. However, it is clear to me that this sense of belonging was felt more strongly to my

immediate surroundings, rather than to some imaginary homeland. In that sense, rather than

feeling like I belonged to some abstract entity that only existed in textbooks—homeland,

motherland, call it what you will—my sense of belonging was to my immediate surroundings and

to the community of people that inhabited these surroundings.

The only other place in which I can say I have experienced this sense of belonging is in Goa.

Ever since I was three months old, I would spend holidays and time off in this, the youngest state

of the Indian republic. As far as I recall, I always felt at home there, and as I grew older, I began

to entertain the dream of one day living there.

I eventually realised this dream in January 2009. I was married, with a son. The first place I

moved to was Calangute, which is one of Goa’s main tourist destinations. I hated it there, and

eventually move to the village of Aldona. This was the first place in which I truly felt at home, and

I lost no time in inserting myself into the community.

However, I was soon to learn that my idealistic notions of one day being a dyed-in-the-wool

member of the community of Aldona were to be belied by the lived reality of the place. My

experience there taught me that distinctions of place and caste were well and truly alive, and that

I could never even dream of being considered a true-blue member of that community, unless of

course, I somehow managed to produce some sort of documentary evidence of having descended

from one of its so-called original inhabitants. And yet, as long as I recognise and accept these

caveats, I am still seen to be a valuable member of the community.

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Lethal fictions

Based on my experiences, it is clear to me that the idea of a homeland more often than not is an

abstract one, based on sometimes unhinged and oftentimes enforced notions of a shared history,

and as a result, a shared destiny. It should be obvious to any student of history that this urge to

define homelands and the impulse to protect or expand these homelands are and have been the

source of innumerable conflicts throughout history. In my mind, the more abstract the idea of a

homeland, the greater its potential for enforcing exclusion, with the implicit or outright threat of

violence in defence of this idea.

I have experienced this first-hand in the country of my birth. When I was in school, I had

no problems swallowing wholesale the shop-worn ideals of nationalism and patriotism. Although

I had a nascent awareness of my separateness, I would still sing the national anthem and feel a

sense of pride when the Indian cricket team won a game against a foreign country (particularly

Pakistan!).

India, at least the parts I am familiar with, is a country that places great importance on

knowing your background: “What’s your native place?” (referring to the place your ancestors came

from) is a question that one often encounters when meeting someone for the first time. What is

implicitly understood is that the person asking this question seeks to, based on a combination of

the respondent’s name and place of origin, place you in a pecking order of caste, religion and

ethnicity.

Of course, as a young boy growing up in (what I thought was) a cosmopolitan city like

Bombay, I was privileged enough to be unaware of these distinctions, or the wily ways that

seasoned professionals had of drawing them out of you. As I grew up, I began to learn about the

casteist and exclusionary roots of these seemingly innocent questions. And yet, I initially tried to

maintain a façade of innocence (I’m Roman Catholic! We don’t believe in caste!). It was only until

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much later that I learnt how deeply ingrained these habits were, and how hard they are to be

discarded.

So my experience of growing up in India was one of nationalist indoctrination on the one

hand, coupled with the dawning realisation, on the other hand, of how fiercely divisions between

groups—castes, religions, ethnicities—were created and maintained. In a sense, this idea that ‘all

Indians are my brothers and sisters’ was a lie, a pathetic fig-leaf that barely managed to cover the

festering divisions between different groups. And although these groups would seemingly get

along most of the time, there would be sudden outbreaks, shocking in their intensity of expression,

of violence as one group sought to put the other in its place.

As I learnt about these divisions and the futility of trying to hide them under notional

concepts of being part of the same nation, I began to question the ideas I had received about my

homeland (or motherland, as it is more commonly expressed in India). It became increasingly

evident to me that the capacity for violence behind any concept of a homeland was directly

proportionate to the abstractness of the concept. As long as a homeland refers to a living

community that one fully belongs to and participates in, at a human scale, there can be very little

room for violence. Take this up to the level of an imagined community, however—be it religious,

caste-based, regional or linguistic—and the possibilities of violent acts of defence and offence

against outsiders increase exponentially.

Slipping through the cracks

In my personal experience, even though I was exposed to the standard nationalist indoctrination

that most children in India go through at school (an indoctrination that increasingly involves made-

up ‘histories’), I struggled with my Indianness from a very early age. I felt at home and at ease in

my neighbourhood, but anything beyond that was alien to me. A large part of my cultural

references while growing up—music, popular entertainment, literature—was Western in origin,

4
and I often had a hard time reconciling this with the cultural realities I would suddenly be faced

with every time I stepped out of my cocoon.

One reason why I feel so much at home in Goa was that this sense of identification with

Western culture (with a strong Latin influence) is more strongly felt here than in most other Indian

states, particularly among Goan Catholics. The sense of not being completely assimilated into the

Indian story, of being somehow peripheral to it, is one that is widely shared. It is through this

shared sense of othernesss that I have ironically come to feel at home.

However, my story is by no means unique. For instance, the first time I encountered people

who occupied a similar space was in college, when I got to know members of a sizeable group of

students from the country’s north-east region. This region is comprised of the country’s seven

eastern-most states, some of which share borders with China, Bhutan, Burma and Bangladesh. Its

original inhabitants belong to a multitude of tribes, with physiognomic characteristics that

significantly mark them out as different from what many mainland Indians see as the norm. As a

matter of fact, a good number of them would share experiences of how they would frequently be

assumed to be from either Nepal or China, often having to convince their incredulous interlocutors

that they were actually from an Indian state.

Many parts of India’s north-east, I was to learn in university and through my interactions

with my north-eastern friends, had historically felt left of out the national conversation, and had

been involved in all sorts of movements and campaigns against the Indian state, many of them

fighting for outright independence. I learnt from my friends and my own research of the horrors

that had been visited upon them by the Indian state, largely through its army. For the first time, I

saw the ugly side to the nationalistic zeal often expressed by many mainstream Indians and

celebrated in India’s popular culture.

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Context, context, context

In conclusion, it is evident to me that the word homeland can be an extremely loaded term, and if

it is to be entertained in any kind of discourse, it needs to be seen in the right context. Too often,

narratives of homeland tend to be larger than life, and thus threaten to either consume or erase

the realities of minorities, be they from lower castes, tribes or other minority religious or

community groups. While it is true that a shared sense of belonging (often entailing a shared sense

of origin and destiny) can sometimes be helpful and empowering to members of a group, my

experience has shown me that this is the case in a vanishingly small number of cases—invariably

correlated to the size of the group that shares this sense of belonging. For me, it is precisely by

framing these issues in terms of scale and context that I can hope to make productive use of such

a loaded concept.

2 – Untold mothers

Introduction

Now, I wish to deal with the question of how to define a mother tongue, and whether the term is

a useful one at all. Following that, I will try to outline the historical use and re-emergence into

prominence of the term ‘homeland’.

Whose tongue is it, anyway?

Taken at face value, the most obvious meaning of the term ‘mother tongue’ is the language one is

first exposed to, which for most people is in interactions with their mother. In my case, although

I have no recollection of this, my mother would communicate with me in Konkani, which I would

have considered her mother tongue (and that of the Mangalorean Catholic community1 that she is

1 Most Mangalorean Catholics are considered to be descendants of Goan converts to Catholicism who migrated
southwards to Mangalore in the 16th and 17th centuries (Farias, 1999). The ‘mother tongue’ of most Mangalorean
Catholics has traditionally been considered to be Konkani (derived from the name for the Konkan region on India’s
west coast) (Miranda, 2014).

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part of). However, my mother also speaks English, Hindi and Marathi, depending on the person

she is speaking to and the context. As for me, as far as I can recall, I always spoke English while

growing up, whether it was at home, with my friends in my neighbourhood, or at the school I

studied at2, and therefore would, till very recently, consider English to be my mother tongue.

That is what I thought, at least, until I started exploring the historical roots of the term. The

Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich, for instance, opposed the term ‘mother tongue’ to ‘vernacular

speech’ (Illich, 1980). According to him,

Vernacular comes from an Indo-Germanic root that implies "rootedness" and "abode."
Vernaculum as a Latin word was used for whatever was homebred, homespun,
homegrown, homemade, as opposed to what was obtained in formal exchange. (Illich,
1980)
Furthermore, “vernacular speech is made up of the words and patterns grown on the speaker's

own ground, as opposed to what is grown elsewhere and then transported” (Illich, 1980). In

comparison,

Mother tongue, since the term was first used, has never meant the vernacular, but rather
its contrary. The term was first used by Catholic monks to designate a particular language
they used, instead of Latin, when speaking from the pulpit. No Indo-Germanic culture
before had used the term. The word was introduced into Sanskrit in the eighteenth
century as a translation from the English. (Illich, 1980)
In the light of Illich’s arguments, I am faced with the realisation that for me, the only language I

have roots in is English. It is, as Wolfgang Dietrich once said, “the mother of my thoughts”

(Dietrich, 2019) or to extend Illich’s analogy, the yarn from which the garments of my thoughts

are woven. In the larger context of my upbringing however, conceptions such as these are simply

2 According to the linguist Gail M. Coelho (who incidentally happens to be Mangalorean), “an increasing number of
persons belonging to traditionally non-English-speaking Indian communities have shifted to using English as their
first language, and use an "Indian" language only as their L2 (…) For example, some sections of the Mangalorean and
Goan Christian communities show loss of their community language (Konkani) and shift to English as a first
language.” (Coelho, 1997)

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not permissible. In this context, the ‘mother’ in the term ‘mother tongue’, takes on an oppressive

role, possessive of her purported children and demanding their exclusive loyalty at all costs.3

The question of my ‘mother tongue’ never bothered me until I completed my school

education and had to fill out admission forms to get into college, and it is one that I have had to

deal with many times since then. I work with languages, as a translator and interpreter. And in the

process of signing on new clients, I often have to field doubts concerning my proficiency in my

target language, i.e., English. “Are you sure English is your mother tongue? Considering that you

are Indian, shouldn’t it be Hindi?”.

For many linguists, however, “[t]he whole mystique of the native speaker and the mother

tongue should probably be quietly dropped from the linguist's set of professional myths about

language”, and “dissatisfaction with the terms native speaker and mother tongue is now very

widespread” (Rampton, 1990). In contrast, the linguist Ben Rampton proposes the use of terms

such as language expertise and language loyalty or allegiance, as these terms “tell us to inspect each

native speaker’s credentials closely, and they insist that we do not assume that nationality and

ethnicity are the same as language ability and language allegiance” (Rampton, 1990).

The well-known Indian writer Amitav Ghosh echoed my misgivings in his acceptance

speech for the Jnanpith Award, which is one of India’s most prestigious literary honours (India

Today, 2018).. As India’s first writer who writes exclusively in English to be given this award, he

said that he when he started writing in the early 1980s, he would never have imagined that he could

ever receive it, as Indians writing in English were “accustomed to thinking of themselves as

marginal, both to Indian and to English literature. This despite the fact that even back then writers

3 This is an issue that takes on particular importance when it comes to state education policy, as many states in India
insist that state-funded schools only teach in the ‘mother-tongue’, which in most cases turns out to be the official
language of that state.

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from the Indian subcontinent had produced a corpus of work in English that was truly impressive

for its breadth and quality” (Ghosh, 2019).

Most Indians are comfortable with the idea of speaking and using more than one language,

and it is a fact that

[t]here is nothing solid about the way that languages interact with each other in the Indian
subcontinent: they mingle, flow and infiltrate, not just between groups but, most
significantly, within individuals. The distinctive thing about our reality is that diversity
and pluralism are intrinsic to our innermost selves – simply because it is impossible for
an Indian to be monolingual in the manner of some Europeans and most Americans. We
all grow up multilingual to a greater or lesser degree: we speak one language or dialect at
home, another on the streets, yet another with our friends, and still another in the
workplace or when we deal with government offices. It is almost impossible to function
in an Indian city or town with a single language. (Ghosh, 2019)
And yet, a good number of these Indians would normally draw the line at accepting English as an

Indian language, as this would imply allegiance to a foreign country. For this reason, the decision

by the Jnanpith committee to give the award to a writer in English is heartening, as it indicates that

there is finally some willingness to acknowledge that English might indeed have a place in Indian

society, at least when it comes to literature.

In from the cold

In the previous chapter, I stated that “the first thing that came to mind when I read the word was

the US Department of Homeland Security, created in the aftermath of the attacks of 11 September

2001 in the USA”. Even so, I was eventually surprised to learn that the word had indeed not had

much currency among English-speakers (at least in the Anglophone countries of the West) before

then, as evidenced by the line “in more extensive use in U.S. after 2001”, from the entry for

‘homeland’ in the Online Etymology Dictionary (Online Etymology Dictionary).

In that light, considering the American origins of its new-found popularity, I would like to

refer to a description of these origins written by William Safire. In addition to his political

commentary for the New York Times, Safire also wrote a long-standing column on popular

9
etymology, “On Language”. In his column dated 20 January 2002, he writes that the word

‘homeland’ has

…a history that rivals any for resonance in the realm of politics. Its origin in English
comes quickly to hand: in 1670, Richard Blome wrote in his geographical treatise, ''Travel
and Traffick,'' of merchants plying their trade between Scotland and Ireland as
''Homeland-Traders.'' The O.E.D.'s definition makes a nice distinction between senses -
- the land which is one's home or where one's home is'' -- before settling on the more
general ''one's native land.'' (Safire, 2002)
He goes on to cover the “deliciously complex geopolitical connotations and semantic shadings of

the word”, noting its use in the British Political Science Quarterly in September 1918. The journal

referred to a declaration by Lord Balfour, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, “in favour of the

establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine”. Subsequently, the declaration establishing the

state of Israel on 14 May 1948 contained the Hebrew moledet, translated as homeland (Safire, 2002)4.

Safire then refers to use of the word Heim by fascists in Austria and Germany in the late

1920s, where “the home guard, or homeland defence forces, were known as the Heimwehr or

Heimatschutz”. He continues to detail its use during World War II by leaders among the Allies to

refer to the “islands of Japan, as distinct from the territory conquered by the Japanese”. He then

notes that it surfaces in South Africa in 1962, when R.F. Botha, the foreign minister of the

Apartheid regime, introduced the “Bantu Homelands Citizenship Bill” in 1969, which “linke[d]

blacks to tribal sites of origins, or “Bantustans”, seeking thereby to separate the races permanently

(Safire, 2002).

Finally, in 1997, the word makes its first appearance in an official policy document, in the

US, the Quadrennial Defense Review, a study by a panel with the aim of rethinking military strategy

up to 2020. The study foresaw a “need to counter potential terrorism and other ‘transnational

threats to the sovereign territory of the nation’”, recommending an “increased emphasis on

4In a “kind of linguistic full circle (…) the P.L.O., in Article 1 of its national charter of 1968, stated, ‘Palestine is the
national homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland.’” (Safire, 2002)

10
homeland defense”. And then, a month after the attacks of 11 September, the Bush administration

established the Office of Homeland Security (Safire, 2002).

Even at the time, the choice of the word ‘homeland’ was one that many found unconvincing,

or even un-American! One commentator wrote about the reasons the American public was yet to

embrace the phrase, “some rational, others rooted in the mists of confused history and memory”.

People would either “find it a little quaint, a little forced”, or would associate it with “sinister

historical precedents”, particularly “American Jews (…) for whom it has a menacing association”

(Becker, 2002). This is a reference to the use of the word heimat in Austria and Germany from the

late 1920 until World War II. The thoughts of this commentator have been echoed by others, who

have called the term “creepy” (Truthout, 2014) and “morale-sapping” (Kaus, 2002).

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, the word homeland was not one I would encounter

very much while growing up in India. People would more often identify with regions, ‘native

places’ and ethnicities. However, in recent years, it has seen increased use, particularly among the

Indian diaspora. As these are issues that go beyond mere sociolinguistics, I would like to explore

them in greater depth in the next chapter.

Go away, home(land)

The term ‘mother tongue’ was for a long time a problematic one for me, one that made me feel

wanting or inadequate in some way, particularly when dealing with state officials or with people

who felt they had to wear their nationalism on their sleeve. I have, over recent years, started to

come to terms with the fact that whether or not the language I speak is my ‘mother tongue’ or not,

does not really matter.5 Even if it were to be termed a ‘bastard tongue’ in a wider, nationalist

context, I would continue to express my allegiance and loyalty to it. I also encounter the shadow

aspects of the word ‘mother’ (as the possessive parent obsessed with exclusivity of affections)

5 Building on Wolfgang Dietrich’s formulation of the mother tongue as being the “mother of your thoughts”, I like
to think of my thoughts as having multiple mothers, if at all.

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when I try to approach the term ‘homeland’. The nativist, exclusivist, even xenophobic associations

it calls to mind are more than enough to make me head in the opposite direction. I prefer to remain

in exile for now.

3 – Imaginary homelands

In this chapter, I will attempt to explore a definition of culture that goes beyond the standard

dictionary definition, and will then try to define a culture as my own. I will follow this with further

deliberations on defining the term ‘homeland’ from a cultural perspective.

Pinning culture down

In the words of the Welsh academic Raymond Williams, “Culture is one of the two or three most

complicated words in the English language” (Williams, 2013, p. 87). In modern usage, it has three

divergent meanings: “a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development”, a

“particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general”, and “the

works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity” (Williams, 2013, p. 90)

Historically, however, the word was used far more polemically, often in opposition to the word

‘civilisation’, particularly in the 19th century. While civilisation was “a homogenizing system of

efficient, rational rules, designed to encourage discipline and ‘progress’”, culture was “the opposite:

an unpredictable expression of human potential for its own sake” (Rothman, 2014).

That particular historical meaning, using the word ‘culture’ to oppose the “abstract

rationalism” and “inhumanity” (Williams, 2013, p. 89) of the industrial civilisation that was

emerging at the time, is one that I instinctively identify with, but I am well aware that this is not

how it is understood today, either by lay people, or by academics, particularly in the social sciences

(or, for that matter, within this MA program). Bearing that in mind, and not wishing to embark on

a journey that demands greater time and space, I will for now settle on the more conventional

meaning of ‘culture’ as “the whole complex of learned behaviour, the traditions and techniques

12
and the material possessions, the language and other symbolism, of some body of people (Mair,

1963, p. 21).

There is a crack in everything

I was born in Mumbai, India, and am part of the diasporic Mangalorean Catholic community,

which has been involved in several migrations, not all of them out of choice (Mascarenhas, 2018).

I was raised in a ‘heritage village’ in south Mumbai (in which, it must be noted, the majority were

East Indian Catholic6), largely shielded from the cultural realities of the city and, by extension, the

country at large, with a simple and uncomplicated worldview of my ‘culture’, largely framed by

exposure to Western cultural influences (with an Indian flavour, of course).

This sense of isolation was first breached in December 1992, when Hindu extremists demolished

a mosque in north India, which they claimed had been built by Muslim invaders on the site of the

birth of the Hindu god Ram (Sharma, 2001). This act was followed by riots throughout the country,

and Mumbai saw a particularly intense expression of this violence. At the age of 12, I had a limited

understanding of what was going on, and even though I was aware of the heightened tension in

the air at the time, there was also a confidence that this tension and the very real violence (that I

only caught glimpses of7, for instance, in seeing Hindu neighbours triumphantly bring home stolen

loot from Muslim establishments), could never touch me or my community.

This was my first brush with one aspect of my Indian reality – an aspect I had been shielded

from but, as I realised much later, many other Indians are forced to deal with on a very regular

basis. From one day to the next, neighbours, acquaintances or customers could suddenly turn into

violent antagonists. I cannot speak of this as someone who has personally faced any threat to his

6 Different Catholic communities can be found in Mumbai, including East Indians--who see themselves as original
inhabitants—but also Goan and Mangalorean Catholics. To read more about the interactions between two of these
groups, see Goans and East-Indians: A Negotiated Catholic Presence in Bombay’s Urban Space (Faria & Mendiratta,
2018).
7 For just one of many accounts of the heinous riots in Mumbai in 1992 and 1993, refer to this review of the book

Riots and After in Mumbai—Chronicles of Truth and Reconciliation (Ketkar, 2012; (Menon, 2012))

13
existence, but the experience of others who have been at the receiving end are now all too familiar

(Gowen & Sharma, 2018).

Mistaken identity

India, unlike the image that is often presented and consumed in the West (an image that I had

unwittingly accepted as well while growing up), is a society riven with deep divisions, papered over

by a superficial spirituality. Caste, while being the best known of these divisions, is still only one

among many. Although most caste Hindus still claim primacy as the principal progenitors of

‘Indian culture’ (which is, in their worldview, indistinguishable from Hindu culture 8), the fact

remains that India was inhabited much before the arrival of the so-called Aryans9.

My ancestors would have been nominally ‘Hindu’ under present-day characterisation, but they

were converted to Catholicism by Portuguese missionaries between the 16th and 17th centuries

CE in Goa. Over the ensuing centuries, the cultural group I belong to carved out its own niche in

society, enjoying the privileges of belonging to the religion of the dominant power at the time,

combined with the caste privileges they still maintained.

However, taken out of the very limited context of colonial Goa, many of these privileges have lost

their weight, and now have the potential to drag one down. The current social and political reality

I currently occupy in India is an increasingly majoritarian and exclusionary one. In May 2014, a

decades-long campaign to stake the primacy of ‘Hindu culture’ in the Indian polity culminated in

the landslide victory of the Hindu right-wing BJP party. This campaign has carried on unchecked

since then, with demands that members of minorities, particularly those who are seen to be

descended from or converted by ‘invaders’, not just acknowledge, but celebrate their Hindu past.

8 One among many critics, the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam questions “the notion that at some distant point in the
past, say about AD 500, the concept of "Indian civilization" had already been perfected”, where “everything of any
importance was in place: social structure, philosophy, the major literary works”, which soon becomes “the same as a
notion of closed India” (Subrahmanyam, 2013). Some even call into question the idea of Hinduism as a monolithic
religion (King, 1999).
9 The ‘Aryan invasion’ hypothesis is still a hotly contested one, but recent studies have shed new light on this theory

(Joseph, 2018).

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This narrative denies agency to the multitudes who sought conversion out of Hinduism as an

escape from the rigid caste hierarchies of mainstream Hindu society. It also presents all

conversions as forced ones, performed under the threat of exclusion, violence or death.

Against this background, the task of defining the role of culture and society becomes even more

fraught. While I rarely experienced this othering while growing up (unlike members of India’s

many lower-caste, untouchable and tribal communities), I have increasingly been made aware of

my otherness in recent years. Like other minorities, I find that I need to self-censor when

expressing myself in public, and have learnt to keep my political opinions to myself in unfamiliar

company.

A homeland of my own

As a result of my growing discomfort with manifestations of mainstream Indian culture I would

encounter in Bombay, I moved to Goa, a state with a higher proportion of Catholics (around 25

per cent, per the latest census (Census department of India, 2011). Goa, thanks to its unique

cultural identity, continues to be seen as different from India (Rajiva & D'Sylva, 2014; Henn, 2000).

Like me, many people who feel that they no longer fit into the majoritarian vision of India have

felt themselves drawn to this haven in recent years. I know that I will never be seen as a true Goan

by most Goans, as Goa is not my ‘native place’10. Yet, it is the one place in India in which I always

felt some sense of belonging, and which I had once hoped to call home.

However, as the years went by, I was forced to recognise that while Goa was still a place I loved

dearly, it also made it easy for me to lull myself into a state of complacency. Falling into a seductive

routine that I could easily carry on for the rest of my life, I felt like I was stagnating intellectually

and spiritually. It was clear that I would have to break out of this gilded cage if I were to achieve

any kind of significant personal growth.

10 A term with unique significance in India (Culturama, 2018)

15
Where do I go from here?

When I look back on the last 20 years of my life, I realise that one of the major instigations behind

my itinerations has been an often irresistible drive to escape from different kinds of homelands,

some of which I had admittedly been initially drawn to. I left home and country in my mid-

twenties, only to return a year later. I got married and started a family in what I saw as a journey

to establish my own home and hearth, only to later seek escape from what I came to see as a

stifling institution. My move to Goa was spurred by hopes of homecoming, but I realised over

time that the desired homeland also gets a say in who stays and who leaves. Over the last three

years or so, I cannot avoid the sensation that the place I once dreamed of making my home has

started to gently (and increasingly, not so gently) nudge me out. As I prepare to embark on yet

another escape, I do so in the hard-won awareness that my homeland does not necessarily have to

be a destination.

4 – Losing my religion

As with the preceding chapters, my endeavour here is to first excavate the grounds on which the

concept of religion stands in current modern usage, followed by a brief outline of my own religious

journeys. I will, through this process, try to place these understandings and experiences within the

framework of the concept of homeland(s).

That old-time religion

First of all, we need to establish a frame. The term ‘religion’ (as is the case with terms like ‘culture’,

‘mother tongue’, ‘nation’, and so on) in social and cultural studies is increasingly being questioned.

It is “an invention of the Western world” (Atalay, 2016), “inadequa[te] as an analytic concept”

(Fitzgerald, 1997), a “product of European colonial history” (Nye, 2019), and so on. Brent Nongbri

starts his book Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept, by stating that “no ancient

16
language has a term that really corresponds to what modern people mean when they say ‘religion.’

(Nongbri, 2013) Furthermore,

“(…) terms and concepts corresponding to religion do not appear in the literature of non-
Western cultures until after those cultures first encountered Europe an Christians [and] the
names of supposedly venerable old religions can often be traced back only to the relatively
recent past (“Hinduism,” for example, to 1787 and “Buddhism” to 1801). And when the
names do derive from ancient words, we find that the early occurrences of those words are
best understood as verbal activities rather than conceptual entities; thus the ancient Greek
term ioudaismos was not “the religion of Judaism” but the activity of Judaizing, that is,
following the practices associated with the Judean ethnicity; the Arabic islām was not “the
religion of Islam” but “submitting to authority.” More generally, it has become clear that the
isolation of something called “religion” as a sphere of life ideally separated from politics,
economics, and science is not a universal feature of human history. (Nongbri, 2013)
He goes on to quote the Islamicist and comparative religion scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who

has argued that “we should stop using the term ‘religion’ because it has come to refer to systems

rather than genuine religious feelings”, preferring “to use the designation ‘faith’ to describe what

he believed were the universal, authentic religious feelings of all humans”. He referred to the

history of religion as a story of what he “called ‘reification’, that is, ‘mentally making religion into

a thing, gradually coming to conceive it as an objective systematic entity” (Nongbri, 2013).

While this focus on reification is shared by many in the field of religious studies, according

to Nongbri, it “tends to confuse more than it clarifies”. But even though ancient people

systematised and “had ‘concepts’”, the real problem, in Nongbri’s eyes, is that “the particular

concept of religion is absent in the ancient world”, as it lacked the dichotomy of ‘being religious’

and ‘not being religious’. He then quotes the anthropologist Talal Asad as saying that “’religion’ is

a modern concept not because it is reified but because it has been linked to its Siamese twin

‘secularism’”. So the birth of religion had to be accompanied by the simultaneous birth of

secularism (again, a dichotomy not found in the pre-modern world). In Nonbri’s telling, the birth

17
of the twins ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’ can be seen as having taken place in the period following

the Protestant Reformation in Europe11 (Nongbri, 2013).

Based on this history of the concept of religion, he reaches the provocative conclusion that

religion “is anything that sufficiently resembles modern Protestant Christianity”! Of course, while

“such a definition might be seen as crass, simplistic, ethnocentric, Christianocentric, and even a

bit flippant; it is all these things, but it is also highly accurate in reflecting the uses of the term in

modern languages”.

Back to the story

Having muddied the waters somewhat, let me get back to my story. I was raised in the Roman

Catholic faith, and was extremely pious in my youth. I completely accepted everything that was

presented to me about the religion and its rituals on faith, and would perform these rituals with a

sense of purpose that was uncommon in most children my age. However, it is also pretty apparent

to me now that part of this religiosity was performative, aimed at showing the world how good

and righteous I was. Of course, I also hoped that my devoutness would gain me rewards, both

worldly and otherwise. It was a world of easy certainties.

As I grew older, having tired of this role I had created for myself, I began to question many

of the beliefs I had taken for granted. Eventually, I reached a stage where I practically considered

myself an atheist, at which point a friend introduced me to Anthony de Mello. He was a Goan

Jesuit priest who had gained a reputation for his spiritual retreats, and wrote a series of books

containing short parable-like tales that fused Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. In his words,

Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep.
They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in
their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the
loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence. You know, all
mystics — Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, no matter what their theology, no matter

11Following the Wars of Religion, leading intellectuals saw the need to on the one had isolate beliefs about god to the
private sphere, while “elevating loyalty to the legal codes of developing nation-states over loyalties to god” (Nongbri,
2013).

18
 what their religion — are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well. (de Mello,
1992)
This was the first inkling I had of the world of spiritual experience that existed outside mainstream

Catholic tradition (a world inhabited by Christian mystics like Thomas á Kempis, Jacob Boehme

and Meister Eckhart). He also wrote about “losing oneself in order to find oneself” (de Mello,

1992), which to me was quite an enigmatic and eye-opening statement at the time.

In due course, I continued reading about and experiencing spiritual learning through

Buddhism, the Tao Te Ching, Zen koans, the songs and poetry of Leonard Cohen, with a few

stops along the way to check out Advaita philosophy (as propounded by Ramesh Balsekar, a self-

proclaimed Advaita master residing in Mumbai) and Chaos Magic (particularly the variety practised

and propagated by Gordon White, who runs the blog runesoup.com).

At the same time, I eventually came to see the spiritual value of belonging to a religious tradition

with roots as strong (and varied) as the Catholic church, and while I do not anymore consider

myself a practising adherent, and have many misgivings about the many and serious abuses of

power within the church, I still see the value of the church as a community, particularly when

expressed locally, and my membership in this community.

Even so, this sense of identity and belonging is limited to the recognition of what may be a

human need to belong to something that is much bigger than oneself, in the full awareness that

there are many like me who do not necessarily agree with all of church dogma and who still choose

to be part of the community. And in many ways, this sense of belonging that I experience has a

lot to do with the many ties and connections that go beyond the strictly religious, relating to

language, culture and worldview.

In a deeper sense, particularly after having had some contact with apocryphal accounts of

Jesus’ life and his sayings, I have found great meaning in many of them, particularly the more

19
radical pronouncements against authority and exploitation by authority figures that have managed

to survive, even in the accepted canon.

Particularly attractive to me is the notion that the figure of Jesus and what he represented

was eventually appropriated by society, resulting in a Janus-like figure. For instance, the anarchist

writer Darren Allen writes about the ‘two Jesuses’, one of whom he calls ‘Jesus Christ’, familiar

to us through the gospels, and the other, whom he refers to as ‘Jesus of Nazareth’, most

idiosyncratically represented in the apocryphal Gospel of St. Thomas, where

[he] talks of a reality that is not emotionally charged or mentally understandable and is
therefore radically weird: the Kingdom is like the yeast in bread, it is here and now and
to see it you must take no thought, love your enemies and become as little children. The
God of Jesus of Nazareth is also quite peculiar; He gives the same reward to people who
work for an hour as he does for those who work an entire day, and seems quite happy
with nudity, sin and even surreal absurdity (which, in Jesus’ teachings, is used as a radical
refusal of worldly constraints) (Allen, The Christian and the Nazarene, 2017)
In my current spiritual experience, this God transcends religious boundaries, and while the

foundations were laid through my experiences with Catholicism and explorations of marginalised

or peripheral thinkers within the faith, the structure is a hybrid that mixes Jesus’ teachings with

bits and pieces from a range of spiritual traditions

No homeland for the periphery

But where and how do these experiences fit into the larger scheme of things when it comes to

questions such as ‘homeland’? To start with, there has been a long-standing effort to identify ‘India’

as the homeland of ‘Hindus’. For instance, V.D. Savarkar, one of the icons of the current Hindu

right-wing dispensation in the country, called into doubt the loyalty of certain minorities (notably,

Muslims and Christians) to the Indian nation. For him, Hindutva (the militant, muscular form of

Hindu nationalism), “which helped forge a uniform national identity, was predicated on individuals

locating both their pitrabhu (fatherland) and punyabhu (holy land) within the territorial confines of

the Indian state. This definition created a dilemma for India citizens of religious denominations

that originated outside India—primarily Islam and Christianity” (Varma, 2019). I had never

20
actually considered this idea of possibly having divided loyalties, as I had never even thought of

possibly having any kind of loyalty to a notional ‘holy land’ (be it Jerusalem or Rome), leave alone

loyalty to a father/mother/home-land.

However, in recent years (particularly after the re-election of the right-wing Hindu

nationalist party in a landslide victory), questions like these, about the loyalties of minorities to the

Indian nation-state, have found wider acceptance. I mentioned the demolition of a mosque in

northern India, and the violence this act engendered. On 9 November 2019, the Supreme Court

of India handed over the property that was illegally destroyed by Hindu mobs to the Hindu litigants

in the case (Ayyub, 2019)! The message that this was supposed to send to India’s minorities was

loud and clear – know your place, or else!

In the light of these developments, it is a futile exercise for me to define my homeland when

it comes to my religion, worldview or spirituality. What I know for sure is that it does not lie in

India, and that it does not even have to exist at all.

5 – Birth and death of a nation

In the political and legal sphere, I have been made increasingly aware over the last decade of the

tenuousness of my standing, both in terms of everyday lived reality as I perceive it and in terms of

how I might be perceived by the realities I inhabit. I have previously referred to the sense of

alienation that has only been growing among many minorities, leading to a sense of potential,

threatened exclusion from the Indian national project. While this could be the source of some

anxiety, particularly when it comes to how I may be seen by the state, I have also come to recognise

and gratefully accept the potential for liberation this holds.

(Un)seen by the state

India, which is currently ruled by the right-wing BJP (on their second term, having won a second

landslide victory earlier this year), was established as a “secular democratic republic”(THE

21
CONSTITUTION OF INDIA, n.d.). However, it must be noted that the word “secular” in the

Indian context is used “in a slightly different sense from the rest of the world—for us, it’s code

for a society in which all religions have equal standing in the eyes of the law”(Roy, 2019), even

though this was never the case in Indian political reality. Instead, India had “always functioned as

an upper-caste Hindu state”, in which “large aspects of Hinduism which could be reconciled with

liberal nationalism defined Indian secularism”, while “it was largely non-Hindu groups which bore

the ire of Indian secularists, [particularly] the various Muslim communities in India, historically

crafted as the Other to Hinduism as well as Indian nationalism, which is de facto a Hindu

nationalism”(Fernandes, 2018).

This “conceit of secularism, hypocritical though it may be” was able to be maintained for a

large part of India’s independent history, and indeed is the “only shard of coherence that ma[de]

India possible”(Roy, 2019). India, as Roy states “is not really a country. It is a continent. More

complex and diverse, with more languages—780 at last count, excluding dialects—more

nationalities and sub-nationalities, more indigenous tribes and religions than all of Europe”. And

today, this “fragile, fractious, social ecosystem” is “suddenly being commandeered by a Hindu

supremacist organization that believes in a doctrine of One Nation, One Language, One Religion,

One Constitution”(Roy, 2019). The Hindu supremacist organisation Roy refers to is the RSS, the

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which was founded in 1925, and is the parent organisation of the

governing BJP. Greatly inspired by the ideologues of German and Italian fascism, its founding

fathers “likened the Muslims of India to the ‘Jews of Germany’, and believed that Muslims have

no place in Hindu India. The RSS also subscribes to the notion that India’s minorities, particularly

its Muslims and Christians, will always have divided loyalties to the Indian nation (Roy, 2019).

So even though India may be an “imagined community”(Anderson, 2006), the imagination

that has gone into constructing it has been poor indeed, which is why it has been so easy for it to

be perverted along its history. Perhaps this is something that has to be seen as an inherent part of

22
nation-building and nationalism, which counts on “the modern idea of the citizen”, who “has a

perpetual problem with the other, an hostility to all those ways of life that do not qualify for its

passport”(Visvanathan, 2006, p. 534). In India, this has seen expression in the pursuit of policies

like the Citizenship Amendment Bill, which seeks to define who can qualify as an Indian citizen,

and is designed to disqualify millions of Muslims and underprivileged Hindus (Mander, 2019).

Hence, “violence arises out of the normal logic of citizenship. Violence is only the unravelling of

the relation between the fixity of the citizen, his normalcy and its interaction with the moveable,

mobile, displaced margins of the nation”(Visvanathan, 2006, p. 534).

And when it comes to ideas of democracy (particularly the celebration of India as the

‘world’s largest democracy’), in actual practice, India is, as political psychologist Ashis Nandy

memorably called it, a ‘psephocracy’, that is, a system “totally dominated by electoral victories and

defeats”(Mateucci, 2012). And, of course, in such a system, it is only a matter of time before a

political party stumbles upon that perfect formula that can propel their rise to power, by means

fair and foul. India is hardly alone in this experience, as this is something that is being seen across

the globe, where unprecedented cynicism and opportunism on the part of political parties and

actors is matched by either aggressive majoritarianism or nihilistic apathy on the part of voters.

Perhaps this is just one of the symptoms of the fact that “nation states everywhere are in an

advanced state of political and moral decay from which they cannot individually extricate

themselves” (Dasgupta, 2018)”12.

So in a sense, the nation-state carries within it the seeds of its own destruction, and

is now

drowning in a 21st-century ocean of deregulated finance, autonomous technology,

religious militancy and great-power rivalry. Meanwhile, the suppressed consequences of
20th-century recklessness in the once-colonised world are erupting, cracking nations into

12 Dasgupta further argues that the prevalence of “apocalyptic nationalism”, typified by “the current appeal of
machismo as political style, the wall-building and xenophobia, the mythology and race theory, the fantastical promises
of national restoration” are but symptoms of this state of decline. (Dasgupta, 2018)

23
 fragments and forcing populations into post-national solidarities: roving tribal militias,
ethnic and religious sub-states and super-states. (Dasgupta, 2018)
The era of the nation-state is past its sell-by date, and the coming years threaten to be convulsive

ones as people who live in and believe in nation-states begin to deal with the fact of its demise.

What about the rule of law, the idea that the rights of minorities and the oppressed can be

protected institutional provisions, or checks and balances? In other words, this is the expectation

that “the same structure that holds power over them is supposed to protect them from itself”

(Crimethink, 2016), and

just as a ‘stopped clock tells the right time twice a day,’ so the law occasionally defines
and punishes powerful thieves, murderers, slanderers and liars. Should that same
definition ever be applied to the class of thieves, murderers, monsters and machines
who own and manage the world, it is immediately dispensed with or, through a legal
system weighted in favour of such power, circumvented. (Allen, 2018, p. 106)
Not a very rosy picture, but one that is increasingly plain to see everywhere one look, where

businesses ‘too big to fail’ are routinely bailed out so they can continue awarding record bonuses

to their bumbling managers while workers and students are buried under mountains of debt, or

where the very people responsible for illegally razing a place of worship to the ground are given

control of the site of that demolition (Ayyub, 2019).

Negotiating exits

In this dismal context, then, can there be any way out of this conundrum? I believe that if we look

to the margins, it might be possible to find more than a few. One path was proposed by Mohandas

Karamchand Gandhi (who, funnily, was marginalised by being placed on a pedestal): he objected

to modern civilisation’s “technologised desire for universality”, with the modern emphasis on

universal ideals such as ‘humanity’ and ‘freedom’(Devji, 2019). He “blamed humanity, or at least

its definition in terms of life as an absolute value, for the massive scale of modern violence”.

According to him, humanity’s “claims to speak on behalf of the human race [were] historically and

necessarily imperialist, but […] the value they put on human life was itself a cause of

violence”(Devji, 2019). In his words, “I am so constructed that I can only serve my immediate

24
neighbours, but, in my conceit, I pretend to have discovered that I must with my body serve every

individual in the Universe. In thus attempting the impossible, man comes in contact with different

natures, different religions, and is utterly confounded”(Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1921). In

my mind, it is this conundrum that has (in a sense, unavoidably) confronted practically every

modern national project.

In this context, any effort to address mankind, or a nation’s citizens, as a whole is

“fundamentally violent”, a sin. This is “because man’s universality [can] only become manifest be

destroying the social particular”, a project that can only fail (Devji, 2019).

In Gandhi’s eyes, the only way to approach the universal is negatively, “by refusing it any

positive identity that might be colonised by some group or another” (Devji, 2019). This was the

impetus behind his concepts of non-violence and non-cooperation. For him, non-violence,

existed everywhere and did the work of sustaining families, societies and indeed the world,
not the violence whose aim could only be that of safeguarding certain individuals, peoples
or states at the cost of others. Yet non-violence could not be understood as universal so
much as ubiquitous, since it had no positive character. It was in this sense non-universal and
could not be reduced to positive categories or particularities.(Devji, 2019)
So, by consistently deploying negative concepts, he achieved “the reverse of defending any specific

or even singular Indian trait”, and instead “took the air out of the universal and rendered it as a

negative or deferred notion”, because he recognised “even humanity’s most transcendent form as

a universal and inclusive identity to be a violent one”, with its emphasis on supposedly ‘universal’

rights, including the right to life(Devji, 2019). For Gandhi,

It was only by refusing to treat life as an absolute value that Gandhi was able to accomplish
his aim and spiritualize politics, for he thought that as long as life remained its basis, political
action could never answer to moral principles. After all, the desire to preserve life was
something that all political actors shared and therefore no moral principles could be drawn
from it, these having been reduced merely to second- order justifications for valuing some
lives over others.(Devji, 2011, p. 270)
In Gandhi’s own words,

Man does not live but to escape death. If he does so, he is advised not to do so. He is advised
to learn to love death as well as life, if not more so. A hard saying, harder to act up to, one

25
 may say. Every worthy act is difficult. Ascent is always difficult. Descent is easy and often
slippery. Life becomes liveable only to the extent that death is treated as a friend, never as
an enemy. To conquer life’s temptations, summon death to your aid. In order to postpone
death a coward surrenders honour, wife, daughter and all. A courageous man prefers death
to the surrender of self-respect.(M K Gandhi, 1999)
What I find astounding is how removed Gandhi’s politics of nonviolence was from

“humanitarianism and its cult of victims”(272). In response to suffering, his approach

was not in the first instance to ameliorate it but instead to make sure that those who had
been wronged behaved like moral agents and not victims, thus allowing them to enter into
a political relationship with their persecutors. These people, after all, were themselves in
need of a moral transformation, for which their victims were to be made responsible,
preferably without the intervention of a third party.(Devji, 2011)
It is this kind of theory of “spiritualisation of politics” that I find refreshing in the current crisis of

modernity that most nations face today.

Re-imagining communities

Considering my misgivings about the nation-state, and my experience of being an (unwilling)

citizen of one, it causes me some amount of shame to admit that I had been ignorant of such a

radically innovative response to the predicament I felt I had to deal with when dealing with modern

notions of nation (but also culture, religion, language and so on). The insights I have gleaned from

radically new readings of Gandhi’s thought have served to open a door to an exciting new world,

one that I was pleasantly surprised to find just lurking around the corner. These readings, I am

sure, can only be food for more fruitful imaginings of potential future communities.

6 – Conclusion: the end

As I stated in the introduction, the exercise of producing the individual assignments that eventually

became the chapters of this paper was unexpectedly difficult. On the one hand, this was due to

what I saw as the increasing hollowness and limited value of using concepts like ‘mother tongue’,

‘religion’, ‘culture’ and so on to describe the significance of the term ‘homeland’ (itself a particularly

unwieldy term with a lot of baggage). On the other, I ended up in more than a few rabbit holes

when it came to researching these concepts, to the extent that I would sometimes feel at a loss to

26
actually describe my position on these concepts. However, what is clear is that in the last three

years or so, I have come feel the oppressiveness of these concepts in a way I had not experienced

before. The now-shrill demands for blind loyalty and allegiance that one hears in the India of today

are slowly building up into a crescendo and are beginning to spurt out in paroxysms of violence

and aggression. The Indian state, with its new-found Hindutva machismo, has started to flex its

muscles and bear its fangs at minorities around the country, cheered on by a pliant media and

intelligentsia. This, of course, is a trend that is hardly limited to India, but which is playing out in

differing degrees around the world.

It is some comfort then, to encounter the radicalness of Gandhi’s thought in this context. I

had already started questioning the many universalisms and essentialisms that many in the Western

world (or in educational and academic structures fashioned after Western models) accept as basic

assumptions, but the searing clarity of Gandhi’s pronouncements against this trend towards

positive universalisation (embodied, for instance in the human rights narrative) has served to

provide me with new bearings on the direction in which I should direct future investigations.

In this context, it is clear to me that the term ‘homeland’ is tainted with associations that are

extremely hard, if not impossible to ignore. If at all there is any point in seeking its recovery, it can

only be done at the level of one’s immediate horizon, in full recognition of the folly of seeking to

“grasp the human race beyond one’s neighbourhood” (Devji, 2011).

27
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