Some musings on names and symbols in India.
Nota Bene: Symbolism, and word association, are heavily dependent on cultural context. Some words and symbols that are considered deeply offensive or provocative in the US do not carry the same weight here in India (and vice versa). In this post I am merely pointing out a few examples of this that I found particularly striking, and mean no offense; nor do I mean to cast judgment on the way English is spoken in either India or the US!
The Swastika
I’m actually going to start with a story from elementary school. Once, for show and tell in 5th grade, I brought an Amar Chitra Katha comic book from India. The Amar Chitra Katha comics are famous and numerous, and depict many stories from Indian mythology and history. This particular comic was the story of Ganesha, a son of the goddess Parvati.
It was a source of great consternation to my peers that on the cover drawing, in Ganesha’s outward facing right hand, was a swastika.
For some of my readers (the Hindus in the audience, for one), this will come as no surprise. But Americans, and even more so Europeans, are very leery of the swastika! The swastika was the symbol of the Nazi Party, the political group that controlled Germany from 1933-1945, precipitated the Western Theater of WWII, and was responsible for the Holocaust, a systematic killing of millions of Jews and other minorities. Today, the swastika is banned in Germany and a few other countries. Most Americans –most of my 5th grade teachers and friends, certainly- have only seen the swastika used as a symbol of National Socialism and its atrocities. Willamette Primary taught an overview of WWII in 5th grade. Of course, the full scale and depravity of Holocaust was neither explained to nor understood by a group of 10-year-olds from a Portland suburb, but many of my classmates could recognize that the Nazis had done very bad things, and that their flag was the swastika.
And here it was on Ganesha’s palm.
A shrine to Hanuman in Mysore
But wait a minute. The word “swastika” sure doesn’t sound very German. In German, the letter ‘s’ makes the English ‘z’ sound, and ‘w’ a ‘v’ sound (‘z’ is pronounced closer to ‘ts’, and ‘v’ is softened to ‘f’). In fact, the German word for the swastika is ‘Hakenkreuz’ (literally, hook-cross). So the swastika was clearly not a Nazi invention. Indeed, the word ‘swastika’ comes from the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit, and is written in the Devangari script as स्वस्तिक.
It predates both Nazism and the German language by thousands of years. In India, the swastika is a sign of God, and a generic talisman. In addition, the swastika bears a special association with Brahma, the four-faced god of creation.
Swastikas shows up all over the place in India. Many temples and houses, and even shopping malls, will display swastikas on doors. Swastik Roofing is a widely-advertised (using, of course, a swastika) roofing company in many states in India, including Tamil Nadu.
A shopping mall in Howrah
Furthermore, not too many Indians recognize the connection between the swastika and the Holocaust- nor, as a general rule, do they know what the Holocaust was. Americans tend to be very proud of their country’s role in World War II (rightly so, in this American’s opinion), but most Indians have heard of WWII only in passing, if at all, and tend to view it in a very different light. WWII was fought from 1939 to 1945. By 1939 India* had been struggling for Independence for many, many years, and the scars of colonialism run deep. For example, some 82,000 Indians had died fighting for the British in World War I twenty years earlier (1914 – 1918). About 2.5 million Indians – including my great-grandfather, an army doctor – served in the British armed forces in World War II (neither war would reach Indian soil). In 1943, a disastrous famine struck Bengal. Winston Churchill (the British prime minister during the war, and considered a courageous and heroic figure by many outside of the Indian subcontinent), repaid the service of millions of Indian soldiers by responding to desperate pleas for help from his viceroy in India with a telegram asking why, if the famine was so bad, Gandhi was still alive. Roughly 2 million Bengalis died as a result of famine that year- over 4 times the number of English war dead for all of WWII.
It is perhaps unsurprising that Indian history textbooks tend to overlook Allied successes against the Nazis (and Japanese) in favor of figures such as Subhas Chandra Bose, who lead Indians against the British during WWII, and why the horrors of the Holocaust tend to be overlooked in favor of atrocities committed at the hands of the British (although I’m not sure that excuses ignorance of the deadliest conflict in human history). In any case, WWII is largely eclipsed in Indian memory by the story of the concurrent, non-violent struggle for independence. India was granted independence in 1947, the year my grandmother turned 6.
* The pre-Independence British India included territory that comprises the modern nations of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. From 1886 to 1937 Burma (Myanmar) was also administered as part of British India.
The Knight Riders
I was sitting at a restaurant the other day, drinking tea and absently staring at the TV. A cricket game was on. A cricket game is always on. I know many of the rules of cricket (I actually played a few cricket games as a schoolchild in Singapore), but I have zero clue as to the leagues and teams. I was more intrigued by the names of the teams than the score. First were the Hobart Hurricanes, which is funny because who knew that Tasmania had enough people to staff a cricket team?
Next up were the Kolkata Knight Riders, and I stopped chuckling.
For clarity, and because I think history is important, I’m going to provide some background here. The US has had a long and ugly history of racism and racialized slavery. Slaves in the US were almost entirely of African descent, and even free people with black skin suffered severe restrictions for a long time. An 1857 Supreme Court ruling, Dred Scott v. Sandford, actually held that “Persons of African descent cannot be, nor were ever intended to be, citizens”.
Slavery never gained much traction in the north of the country, but was widespread in the Southern states even before American independence. Slavery was only outlawed in the south in 1865**, after a long and bloody civil war was fought between the Northern states (where slavery was outlawed†) and the slave-holding Southern states.
With the support of the federal government, black Americans gained citizenship and many rights during the Reconstruction years (1865 – 1877), including a reversal of the deplorable Dred Scott ruling. But as federal support for black enfranchisement waned, southern state governments did their damndest to disenfranchise African-Americans in the following years. For the next century, the African-American community across the United States struggled to attain the rights afforded to white Americans, and the struggle for equality continues in many ways today.
For their efforts, the black community in the US faced severe harassment from both government officials and groups of private (white) citizens. The most notorious of these groups was the Ku Klux Klan, which in various incarnations shot, lynched, and generally terrorized African-Americans and their white allies in many parts of the country- in one instance, killing children by bombing a church. Klansmen have referred to themselves as Knight Riders or Night riders (presumably the homophone is intentional) almost since the founding of the KKK in 1865. Nearly a full century later, KKK nightriders shot into houses in a black community in Florida. Today, the KKK is all but extinct- all that remains are a few splinter groups that operate in semi-secrecy.
But even today, the official name of the KKK group operating in Little Rock, Arkansas, is the Knight Riders. The Kolkata cricket team shares its name with one the most reviled hate groups in America.
Of course, there is no reason that sportsmen in Kolkata should be familiar with the sobriquets of largely historical American wingnuts (and American sports teams occasionally do choose unfortunate names as well). In fact, many Americans might not make the connection either: the name Knight Rider was usurped by a 1980s TV show starring David Hasselhof and an intelligent car! So I guess it is really only the pedantic who would be bothered by the Knight Rider name.
Kolkata and NBC not the only ones to be unawares of the history of Knight Rider name: interestingly, there is a facebook group for the Birmingham Knight Riders, another cricket team! That’s Birmingham, England, of course: cricket is utterly alien to the city of Birmingham, Alabama, and as a city at the heart of the Civil Rights movement with an extant KKK chapter I doubt any sports team from Birmingham would dare call themselves the Knight Riders.
Of course, this is not the only time that Indian vernacular is little insensitive to American racial struggles. One example that really caught me by surprise was the use of the word ‘Negro’. To call someone a Negro, even in third person, would be quite offensive in the US, and has been a controversial epithet for a long time. Honestly, I’m a little uncomfortable attaching my name to a document that has the word ‘Negro’ written in it. But in Tamil Nadu, where folks are about as dark-skinned as they get (at the gym they refer to me as ‘that white guy’), people use the word Negro simply to distinguish black-skinned people of African descent from those of Indian descent. As with the swastika, the cultural context is different- despite all of its sins of imperialism, Britain actually outlawed slavery well before the USA did, and the African slave trade did not impact India as it did the American colonies.
**Slavery was abolished in areas “in rebellion against the United states” in 1863, and then nationwide shortly before the end of the war with the 13th Amendment in 1865.
†Four border states, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, permitted slavery (in 1860) but sided with the Union (the northern states) during the Civil War.
For further information on the Indian involvement in WWII:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/82/a1934282.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_independence_movement
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/06/07/islamismism
Some resources on the Civil Rights movement in the US:
http://www.splcenter.org/
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aopart9.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma_to_Montgomery_marches
The history of the Reconstruction years is truly fascinating, and impressively violent: federal soldiers, white militias, black militias, bounty hunters, gunfights, and corruption all abounded in the wake of the Civil War. A good overview (and required reading in one of my college history classes) is a book titled The Colfax Massacre:
http://books.google.co.in/books/about/The_Colfax_Massacre.html?id=8UB5AAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y
For Indians looking for an introduction to some of the culture surrounding the American Civil Rights movement, I would recommend The Watsons go to Birmingham, 1963, and Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry. Both are poignant (the former is also quite funny) fictional accounts of black families in the US, and both books were required reading for me and thousands of other Americans in primary school.
and then of course:
The Road Goes Ever On and On 