by PHIROZE VASUNIA
Last year, an exhibition on Black History Month at University College London included Mahatma Gandhi in its list of illustrious black students
“If we were racist, why would we have all the entire south – which is complete, you know Tamil, you know Kerala, you know Karnataka and Andhra – why do we live with them? We have blacks, black people around us.”
– Tarun Vijay
Tarun Vijay has been rebuked for suggesting that racism does not now and never has existed in India. One of the interesting assumptions of Mr. Vijay’s remarks, for which he has since apologized, is that some Indians are black and others are not. He evidently places himself in the non-black category. Mr. Vijay has doubtless been brushing up on the history of race relations in India since the fracas erupted and he will have come to appreciate the irony of his comments, since there was a time not long ago when many Europeans regarded all Indians as black. They used other racial terms as well, but from the early modern period and into the twentieth century, Europeans frequently referred to Indians as blacks, regardless of complexion. Of course, European writers referred to neither Africans nor Indians exclusively as black and also called numerous other peoples black (in the Americas, for example, or the South Pacific). The very fluidity of the term was what enhanced its appeal to the European observer: the opportunity to generalize about the exotic Orient increased if one was prepared to think of the Ottoman, the Arab, and the Indian as different markers on a continuum of darkness.
The legacy of this history continues into the present, often in benign ways. Last year, an exhibition on Black History Month at University College London, which likes to claim Gandhi as an alumnus, included the Mahatma in its list of illustrious black students. Nothing sinister was intended: Gandhi was being celebrated as a distinguished black former student. One wonders what Gandhi himself would have made of the honour. His views on race seemed to evolve over time and to move beyond the thoughts he expressed in South Africa, but I would not wheel him out, as Vijay also does, as a spokesperson for enlightened attitudes to race. Perhaps someone ought to have reminded the organizers of the unfortunate remarks about Africans that he uttered in the early phase of his political career
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