Family Politics: how my protest began at home
As protests sweep the nation, Katha Vyas rebels against deep-rooted ideas of communal hatred within her family in a scenario familiar to many young Indians for whom dissent begins at home.
Illustrated by Anjali Kamat
Every day began with a fight.
It wasn’t always loud, it didn’t always last long.
Sometimes it was barely a whisper.
Most days it carried on in my own head long after it was done.
How can the people who raised me be so different, do they not see what I see?
Can hate skip a generation? Was I spared or speared?
And if they can hate so vigorously, can they love at all?
Most of all, can they love me?
And even still, do I want to love them back?
****
Living with a family whose political and religious views are radically different from yours can never be easy, and it especially wasn’t easy for me. Despite not being too attached to my extended family and living a thousand miles away from them, I had my fair share of exposure to our opposing world-views.
Every family gathering was dreaded for weeks. Every minute in the reunions passed like an especially painful kidney stone. There would be all the usual suspects - the food, the raucous laughter, the endless bullying passed off as jokes, and all the other usual suspects - subtle (and sometimes blatant) casteism, sexism, and islamophobia. Uninvited, these hateful qualities always managed to sneak in, and once they arrived they were always made to stay.
I quickly grew tired of spending any time with my family, refusing to answer phone calls unless absolutely forced to, making excuses each time they visited. At first, I couldn’t understand why I would avoid them. My mother wrote it off as a part of my “shy” personality. Looking back, I can now see that it was a clear expression of my fundamental disagreement with them. Even the six-year-old me was compelled to cringe at their “Muslim jokes” and sexist remarks.
You see, my extended family comes from a radically right-wing Brahminical belief system, but my parents raised me to believe in the principle of equality.
The problem with this was simple: despite the constant teachings of “treat everyone with respect” repeated around the house in various forms, their actual practice, I observed was vastly different.
Everyone is a product of their times. My great grandmother would refrain from speaking to anybody before knowing their caste. My maternal grandmother keeps separate vessels for anybody from a ‘suspicious background.’ My paternal grandmother threw a fit when my aunt wanted to marry into a lower caste, and threats of excommunication and worse were thrown around.
But my parents expressed their prejudice in a much more appetising manner. Their prejudice is not direct, they even think they believe in true equality. But they do not have any Muslim friends. They would not hire any Muslim teachers for me. In fact, we have barely ever had a Muslim come over to the house.
“Isn’t that a Muslim country? Why do you want to go there?
Anything can happen when there are so many of them.”
- heard upon announcing a trip to Indonesia.
“Don’t use that plate. I’ll give you a separate one for her.”
- heard when offering food to the house help.
“Who are the other families on this floor? Are any of them Muslim?”
- heard when looking for a new flat.
“You should always treat everyone with respect. They are also human beings.”
- heard on a Diwali morning.
This apparent lack of conviction in their assumed belief systems created a storm of dissonance in my teenage brain. I even caught myself adopting some of their prejudices without realising it. Only when I started on the path of firm rebellion did I start to think for myself and discover that I believed what my parents said about equality was right. And not what they practiced.
As my schooling came to an end, the India Against Corruption movement began. With the grand BJP-Modi wave coming in, it seemed to me like the country could talk of nothing but politics. I started to have conversations about the events with my friends and itched to have them with my family. I knew my father greatly appreciated the movement and had even encouraged me to go out and join it, but the thought of having a conversation at home was still terrifying due to the tendency of dismissing everything I said as “young people nonsense”. Reluctantly at first, I dipped into a pool of borrowed courage and began to initiate political discussions at home.
My family’s hatred for the Congress and support for the IAC movement quickly turned into a vocal and vociferous love for Narendra Modi and his ideas. Hindus, they said, were finally going to have their time that was due. They would be revived, and they could reclaim. It was becoming blatantly obvious to me that my family were supportive of Modi and his regime, despite 2002, and I was shocked to realise that some of them were supportive of him because of 2002.
I found myself recoiling again. All the childhood unpleasantness of their behaviour came up like bile. They spun their narratives, shared offensive xenophobic jokes, sexist good morning messages, and the mandatory propaganda message on our family WhatsApp group. I couldn’t escape it. Every time I would want to leave the group, my mother would convince me to stay for the sake of politeness and civility. So I did the only thing I could, I muted the group. But every so often I would indulge in a self-destructive scroll through of all the hate and jingoism being shared on the group and bring myself to tears.
Five years later, I decided something had to give.
And it all began with my mother.
After weathering the turbulent times of my teenage years, my relationship with my mother began improving upon my departure from home. We began having meaningful conversations beyond the mechanical ones, and I discovered a new side to her that I felt deprived of in my younger years. And it was when we started talking about politics is when I realised that the fear and disagreement with my extended family was shared by her too.
The relief! I couldn’t express it.
We began talking about opinions and ideas that were expressed on the group. It gave me so much courage to have another person to speak with, and I found myself countering the occasional hateful narrative being peddled with facts and figures from my own findings.
My mother shared my apprehensions about Modi, but by constantly being told she wasn’t good enough and not having been taken seriously by her family for all these years, her voice of dissent would always be kept hidden away. She still doesn’t approve of my volatile fury, but I know now that she has a burning flame inside her too.
And that is enough for a start.
Because the flame is spreading. My mother has started speaking to my aunt about this, and we know she shares our concerns and fears.
The ruling party’s second term has brought in so much despair, and with it has come the need to fight it. I can see it slowly turning some of the fence-sitters in my family around. And because of the silent solidarity my mother offers me, I am able to call out the islamophobia in my family more often, and I am able to fight them a little harder.
We are heading towards a very difficult time for our nation. The war is not with strangers and foes, but with friends and kin. It pains me to think of our generation as the one with broken families, the ones who have two choices: to stay and live in conflict, or to walk away with a broken heart. I cannot imagine either choice being pleasant or easy. But it is the cross of our time and we bear it we must. For myself, having traversed the spectrum between these choices over the last decade, I am settling for a combination of approaches. Not for reasons of tactful strategy or conniving thought, but because that is what I have strength for.
All regimes end and all power has its limits. The dissent has only just begun showing. The roars of thousands who have been discriminated against have only just begun rising. And we must conserve our energy for the big fight, and not let the interim battles tire us out.
As an individual I only know this- I need to continue standing up for what I believe is right, no matter what people who raised me have to say about it.
Katha Vyas is a 20-something student of art history currently exploring the rigid structures of her Indian upbringing with kinder eyes.