Show me your race card

We, Indians, are racists to the core. With a shocking history of casteism, where a minuscule population has lorded over a majority by mouthing Manu, Indians should not be pointing fingers at others. If the monkey word was used, Harbhajan Singh should have been pulled up. But when jingoism is mistaken for patriotism, good sense is an early victim. Someone needed to write on that. Someone has.

'Monkey? Not at all. I said simian'

There is a sordid history to Symonds anger, if Harbhajan did use the word. I am done with waiting for someone more learned to say it. I have to say this myself before I burst a brain vessel, I have to: calling a person of African origin 'monkey', is not the same as calling him 'donkey' or 'elephant' or 'idiot'. Why is everyone suddenly acting so damn ingenuous, as if butter wouldn't melt in their mouths? Perhaps because, in our heart of hearts, we all know that it is a hit way below the belt.
One of the dubious advantages of being an Indian is, I suppose, the fact that when it suits us, we can claim 3,000 years of unbroken memory, or, if the occasion demands it, pretend complete innocence. What else can explain the sheer ignorance of statements like: "Bhajji called him a monkey, he should call Bhajji a donkey, and be done with it." Or, "What's so bad about calling him a monkey – he called Bhajji a bastard!" The word bastard is just another swear word. But is everyone really unaware of the hugely contentious association of the words ape and monkey with people of African origin?
Right through history, people of African origin have had to wage a very real war: to be accepted as human beings by non-Africans. Forget about being accepted as equals, or equally endowed human beings. Just human beings, plain and simple. The European scholars of the Enlightenment constructed their theories of racial hierarchies, with the 'Negroes' just above the apes, the Whites at the top and Indians and Chinese, amongst others, somewhere in between. Darwin was used and abused. They measured the projection of the jaw and the facial line in Africans and Apes, and searched for the Missing link, debating which defective human line had mated with which apes to produce the African race. Constantly, the effort was to bolster the claim that Africans were subhumans, closer to the apes than to Europeans. So influential were these theories that Campier's images of the progressively receding jaws, from ape to 'Negro' to European became an icon of so much subsequent racism, right up to the Nazi eraand we all know what their take on race was.
Let's go back to 1906: A huge crowd turns up at the Bronx Zoo in New York to see a new exhibit in the Monkey House. A new simian? Well, almost, according to the zoo officials. The new exhibit was Ota Benga, a captive from the Congo, what those schoolbooks of ours called (and do, to this day) a Pygmy. He shared his cage with an Orang Utan, a chimpanzee and parrot.
The Black American com munity was outraged and, eventually, Ota was let out of his cage and made to parade around the zoo in a white suit, only to return to it to sleep at night. The zoo director said that he hoped to use Ota to further research on the Miss ing Link. "Their heads are much alike," wrote one jour nalist, comparing the Orang Utan to Ota Benga. "And both grin in the same way when pleased." (One wonders what this white American would say if a picture of a certain President was placed next to one of a Rhesus monkey, a striking similarity that has not escaped comment).
Being allowed to roam around the zoo made life hard er for Ota. He was chased all day long by jeering crowds, who poked and kicked him, much as Indian crowds do the monkeys and apes in our zoos, until in desperation, he made himself a bow and arrow and began to shoot at them. He was then removed from dis play Ota borrowed a gun and shot himself in the heart in 1916.
Back in his country of origin, Ota's compatriots were being colonised by French speaking white skinned people who called them Macaca, a word derived from the local word for monkey, and treated them with all the violence and derision that monkeys were felt to deserve in those (prePETA) days.
A blog that I happened to read said words to this effect: If you haven't been chased, if you haven't been jeered at, don't you dare me tell me that "it isn't really racist." I think what the writer meant was that, apart from direct experience, every community has a pool of cultural memory to which he is a party and which helps to form his consciousness. Calling a person of Indian origin anywhere in the world a coolie will instinctively raise hackles. Similarly, calling a person of African origin a monkey will draw blood from a wound that has not yet healed.

Ujwala Samarth is a writer based in Pune