Socio-

anthropology
20 | 2007
Small objects, big challenges
Notions, bodies and identity

Identity disorders: case

studies
Community, Religion and Nation in South
Asia

Jackie Assayag
p. 61-86
https://doi.org/10.4000/socio-anthropologie.843

Full text
 "It is part of the fabulatory function to invent a
people."
Gilles Deleuze

1 It is 1977 on a train in Sri Lanka . 1 Anti-Tamil riots,

led by Sinhalese Buddhists, have just broken out. The
conflict is raging. Today, it is still going on — for more
than 25 years. But let us go back to 1977. A Sri Lankan
woman is sitting in a compartment. In this same
compartment, a retired Tamil schoolteacher is facing
her. Suddenly, a horde of Sinhalese militants storm the
carriages to remove the Tamils, to beat them once they
get off on the platform. The Sri Lankan woman, a
Sinhalese Kandyan recognizable by the way she wears
a sari, comes to sit next to the man and calmly takes
his hand. A few Sinhalese militants burst into the
compartment. However, they do not linger. They are
already heading to the next compartment. This simple
gesture of marital familiarity convinced the Sinhalese
rioters that the man was Sinhalese. This kind, silent
micro-interaction between a man and a woman,
strangers to each other, transformed the former's
ethnic (Tamil) and religious (Hindu) identity, and
probably saved his life . 2
2 Let us now return to Europe, in June 1992. During
the electoral campaign preceding the Danish
referendum on the country's accession to the
European Union - the famous Maastricht Treaty - one
of the leaders of the party opposed to integration into
Europe hammered out a slogan to the very dense
crowds who came to listen to him: "I want a country to
be European in"; roughly translated: "I want a country
where I can be European" 3 . This formula, obviously
intended to be paradoxical, suggests not only that
personal identities are intimately linked to political
processes but also that national identities, for
example: Danish, British, French or European, are not
 given once and for all but negotiated over time, and in
this case hotly contested.
3 Since this introduction is a resolute invitation to
travel, let us now turn to Ulysses. Not to the
emblematic ancient figure who identified himself with
the name of "Nobody" in the face of the Cyclops 4 , but
in its modern version, the famous novel by James
Joyce - a flagship work, a monster work. We read
there, around page 300, this dialogue with all the
Socratic irony:

"—But do you know what a nation means?" asked John

Wyse.
"Yes," said Bloom.
"What is it?" said John Wyse.
"A nation?" said Bloom. "A nation is the same people living in
the same place.
" "My goodness, then," said Ned, laughing, "if that's so I'm a
nation because I've lived in the same place for five years."
Everybody then began to make fun of Bloom, and in order to
get out of it he corrected himself:
"Or living in different places.
" "That covers my case," said Joe.

4 Clearly, this statement has a strong smack of

rebellious Ireland, the homeland of this writer from
an old Catholic family who became a cosmopolitan
and who, in his final novel, Finnegans Wake — "an
extravagant excursion into forbidden territory," in his
own words — used what he called, in his notes, "an
English for Europeans," in a mix of languages ​and
dialects for a polyglot who would not exist, mixing
Chinese (sic), Ruthenian, Basque, Gaelic, Esperanto
and Volapuk... The work comprises 650 tightly packed
pages in its full version at Gallimard — one dares not
say in French!
5 This juxtaposition of three examples: a simple
gesture in an Asia where Hinduism, Buddhism and
Islam confront each other; the slogan of an election in
the real or virtual community of a divided Europe that
is happening despite everything and very often in
 spite of us; a brief extract from a novel by a writer
without whom modern literature would not be what it
is, are intended to introduce the subject of the day. It
will deal with the production of identity through those
of communities, religion and nation, as well as
through the medium of language. The effort aims less
to define each of these notions in isolation than to
suggest their delicate or brutal character while
showing the continuity or intermittence of their
relationships, often complex and polemical. The
interest in the mechanisms by which communities,
religions and nations are constructed in and through
history will highlight the transformations that their
articulation induces or implies.
6 I will proceed in three stages. First, by recalling the
destiny of identity with its entry into modernity; then
by explaining its avatars, both individual and
collective, in the history of South Asia, this cultural
area to which I have devoted my research and work
for 20 years; finally, by focusing on the question of
language in this same subcontinental context: India,
Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
7 I confess, in fact, to having the weakness of believing
in the heuristic nature of the distant gaze in a distant
land to disorient the conventional debate on the
production of identities and the so-called "identity"
manifestations, too often repatriated to Europe, almost
always filtered by Europe, having value only in the
eyes of Europe. Leaving the Western world in which
we are locked, by thinking of it in relation to others,
leads to this generalized and fertile face-to-face
between the different cultures to which the
contemporary world exposes us. It would therefore be
appropriate to consider this presentation on these
other ways of living the human condition, like a test of
"disidentification" - a neologism that must be
positively understood as an exercise in disorientation:
a different way of constructing the relationship with
 others from a representation of oneself fixing the
affects of love and hate.

Identity and modernity

8 The sociological observation is well known, if not
hackneyed. With modernity, two contradictory social
processes affect social identity. On the one hand, the
emergence of industrial forms of the organization of
production and consumption, but also of work and
exchanges, simultaneously cause the massification and
atomization of individuals. On the other hand, by
giving greater meaning to individual identity and the
singularity of biographies, each individual is invited to
affirm the value of his or her unique character; but by
each , we must obviously understand all. "Unique
power of the mass", to divert the title of a work by
Elias Canetti.
9 But modernity has also produced other processes,
such as "governmentality" or nationalism, which also
inflect the trajectory of identities. One way of
producing identities is to transform people into
"populations" or "communities". This is the project that
modern European states have devoted themselves to,
at least since the 17th century . One of the major
features of modern politics is, in fact, to treat "peoples"
or "communities" under a single jurisdiction, as
autonomous entities, to transform them into
"populations" capable of being governed, as Michel
Foucault's work on "bio-politics" (1977; 1997) has
shown in particular.
10 Such an objective presupposes some conditions. For
example, the relative fixity of the control of space
which itself presupposes the cartographic
establishment of a delimited territory on which the
sovereignty of power can be exercised. In addition to
the military or police means available to the said
 power to do so, the effectiveness of the latter actually
depends on the establishment of a bureaucratic
apparatus with a panoptic aim capable of providing
both the information and the classification rules
required by such a control device. Ultimately, only this
allows the State to apprehend its populations by
producing them, in particular through the
enumeration and description, by means of
quantification, statistics and taxonomies of all the
resources of the nation: flora and fauna, properties
and wealth, communities and religions.
11 Alongside this cognitive model, the second element
inherent in this transformation of "people" and
"peoples" is the emergence of an idea, specific to the
voluntarist and "perfectible" philosophy of the
Enlightenment: that of the plasticity of the social and
political world. Populations, or communities, are now
conceived as being able to be transformed by the
oriented action of various institutions for which they
become at the same time "resources" that should be
managed in accordance with the rules of a self-
proclaimed rational administration. The diffusion of
this new cognitive model and this unprecedented
representation of action, both individual and
collective, has gradually been put in place to the point
of becoming part of the daily common sense of men in
society. This genesis can explain how the idea of ​
nation was able to instill itself in the brains and the
routine form that the modern feeling of obvious
belonging to a community took, which the sociologist
Michael Billig (1995) has rightly called "banal
nationalism", that is to say the expression of an infra-
conscious patriotic attachment, self-evident and
independent of situations of crisis or identity
exasperation; to such an extent internalized that the
individual often only becomes clearly aware of it
when confronted with another identity.
12 Obviously, the way in which these processes
unfolded in South Asia was different from that which
prevailed in the West 5 – at least in the eyes of the
anthropologist who rejects the idea of ​a
“rationalization” or a “modernization” exclusively
modeled on the Western model, in the manner of Max
Weber or Ernest Gellner 6 . If only because power in
colonial societies was more arterial than “capillary,” to
use Michel Foucault’s expression, it was spatially and
socially concentrated in certain places, and did not
irrigate much beyond. This is to say that such
processes occurred in the Indian peninsula through
the particular way that colonialism had of introducing
the so-called “modernity” into organizations governed
by other forms of rationality, bearers of another
modernity . I would like to show how, during the
colonial period, the template of identities in the Indian
subcontinent underwent a decisive historical change.

Community, Religion and the

Colonial State
13 The term most commonly used to designate the
major religions in India: Hinduism, Christianity or
Islam 7 , but also Buddhism, Sikhism, or
Zoroastrianism, is that of "community". We often
speak in this regard of harmony between communities
or of intercommunity conflicts; we readily diagnose a
rise in identity claims over the last twenty years, that
is to say the increase in tension between religious
groups, mainly Hindus against Muslims, which can
lead to violent and often deadly clashes (very often in
reality pogroms of the latter organized by the former)
8.

14 Without wishing to go into the details of the

criticism of the notion of "community", it must
 nevertheless be emphasized that it was only with the
advent of the British Raj, towards the end of the 18th
century , that the notions of "Hindus" and "Muslims"
took on a stable and generically representable
meaning . 9 These categories, promised a bright
institutional future in reports and censuses (Barrier
1981), are in fact the product of the British
administration then in search of a principle of
organization of the Indian social world whose
abundance seemed to escape all intelligibility and
social control . 10 This project, both intellectual and
bureaucratic, cognitive and institutional, neither
entirely disinterested nor strictly manipulative,
oscillated between the model of identity with Great
Britain and that of the difference that Albion
experienced with its other neighbour, rebellious
Ireland, but which it hypostatised in the case of the
Orient, this Other for it more radical 11 .
15 Depending on the period of colonization, the
governmental balance tipped in turn towards
assimilation — the tanned tropical subjects are similar
to those of the Crown in the metropolis by their Aryan
origins — or differentiation — these natives embody
an irreducible black otherness. The debate was fueled
by the disagreements between the various political-
administrative leaders, the resistance put up by the
Indian elite but also by the strength of English public
opinion, the turbulence caused within more or less
administered populations and those who refused to
submit. The ideology finally applied to the colonized
invited cynicism, as attested by the motto of "not same
quiteness": "Admire us; emulate us; become like us, but
you can never be one of us!"
16 While the classification schemes familiar to the
British were not entirely absent—professional
occupation played a determining role in the ordering
of Indian society—the categories of "caste,"
"community," and "tribe" were placed at the heart of
 the Indian social system . 12 But where surveillance
and control in metropolitan society were aimed at the
individual, the colonial power tended to want to see
and recognize only communities. As a result, Indian
social organization was understood holistically and
described as "hierarchical," or even considered the
paradigm of hierarchical society not only by colonial
administrators but also by common sense and, until
recently, by the sociological or anthropological
approach . 13 Unlike its ancestor in England, the Indian
census also sacrificed itself to exoticism by taking a
very ethnographic turn and focusing on religions or
castes. Thus, the 1853 census of the North-Western
Provinces mentioned only the religious communities—
Hindu and Muslim. Caste and occupation designations
were added only in the 1872 census. In 1881, the
Census Commissioner of the Punjab wrote in his
report: "Every native who is incapable of defining his
creed, or of being described by any other name than
that of the recognized religions, will be held to be and
classed as a Hindu" (Jones 1981: 92).
17 Religion was therefore initially the fundamental
category for organizing data and understanding the
supposed mysterious complexity of the Indian world.
At the same time, it was reduced to a juxtaposition of
religions mapped on a cadastral territory. Thus, in
addition to the organization into castes among Hindus,
the orders of yogis and renunciants were
distinguished and even the reformist organizations
were retained: Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj, Dev Samaj,
Radha Soami Sat Sangh, etc. In the other communities,
considered less marked by castes, the Muslims were
divided into Sunnis, Shiites and Wahhabis and, for
Christians, into Anglicans, Baptists, Presbyterians but
by amalgamating all Roman Catholics. The category of
"sect" thus served to identify and clarify the diversity
of identities in the Indian world, for both Hindus and
non-Hindus.
18 On the other hand, class in its socio-economic sense,
recognized by the Victorians as the determining
principle of their society, that is to say the ultimate
phase of capitalist evolution since the appearance of
communities, was nowhere to be found among the
Indians, this people fossilized in history, according to
the Western topos that Hegel systematized in his
philosophy of history. Symptomatic of the difference,
the ideas of "community", "religious affiliation",
"community belonging", appeared fundamental as
religion continues to dominate India, homeland of
superstitious irrationality and the most incongruous
spirituality in the eyes of Europeans 14 .
19 The division of the "nations" or "peoples of India"
into religious communities, and the conception that
individual identity is less marked there than
elsewhere, or even that the person is non-existent
because dissolved in caste, obviously does not date
from the 19th century . A historian recently recalled
that there existed a broadened identity consciousness
among both Hindus and Muslims well before the
British period, even though these groups experienced
deep intrinsic divisions (Subrahmanyam 1996).
20 Since ancient times, travelers had observed the
differences in morals between Hindus and Muslims
and correlatively forged a stereotypical opposition:
Muslims are violent, despotic and virile, Hindus
indolent, passive and effeminate. The former fight
with the sword; the latter with trickery and
compromise. Such an "identity" dichotomy was not the
work of travelers alone: ​it was partly relayed by the
scholarly discourse being formed in the 18th century .
A discourse informed by this contemporary India
dominated by the Mughals since the 16th century , who
nonetheless remained a minority in the impressive
Hindu population of the peninsula. Hindustan
therefore called for an explanatory model that
borrowed from two orientalist traditions: one, derived
 from the encounter between Europeans and Muslims,
discovered in the Middle East and in Ottoman
countries regions where the most extravagant
despotisms flourished; the other, resulting from
attempts to describe the overheated lands of Asia,
linked the debilitating climates to the effeminization of
their inhabitants and the capricious and cruel
idiosyncrasy that resulted from it. Politically Muslim
and geographically tropical, India could therefore only
be the "seat of the greatest empires", and "the nurse of
the most abject slave", to quote Alexander Dow, whose
work, History of Hindustan (1770), was for a time an
obligatory reference; this Briton knew what he was
talking about, he who wrote about the conquest of
Bengal: "The sabre is our title deed". Thus typified in a
series of hardened contrasts, the two Hindu and
Muslim "communities" could only oppose each other
in their mutual identity intolerance (Inden 1986: 404-
408, 423-424).
21 In reality, Hindus and Muslims have continuously
experimented over the long term with complex
restructuring of identity through exchanges and
borrowings, various forms of acculturation,
hybridization and syncretism, popular or scholarly. I
tried to explore the tenuous and changing modalities
in a monograph, entitled At the confluence of two rivers
(1995), which highlights in situ (in Karnataka) the
variability and accommodation of this "identity
frontier" according to social morphology, contexts and
circumstances 15 . To do this, I had opted for the
following methodological approach: observe or listen
to social actors while pretending to ignore, at least
initially, who was Hindu and/or Muslim? In fact, this
one or that one is not always the one we think.
22 But back to history. It was only with the codification
of a system of laws that met the colonial need to
administer the vast and motley population of the
subcontinent, and to do so with the utmost respect for
 the customs peculiar to their new subjects, that Hindus
and Muslims came under separate legislation. The idea
dates back to at least 1772, when Governor Warren
Hastings decreed that: "in all matters relating to
inheritance, marriage, caste, and all other usages or
institutions, the laws of the Koran, for the sake of the
Mahometans, and those of the Shastras, for the sake of
the Hindus, shall invariably be adopted." As a result,
the British considered that modern Hindu society
came from its ancient texts that scholars ( pandit )
were responsible for selecting, collecting and then
translating in order to propose A Code of Gentoo Law
— the title of the work by Nathaniel B. Halhed which
served as the basis for the first codification of Anglo-
Hindu law (for the government of Bengal); these
scholars were also going to order the "inextricable
jungle of disordered superstitions" that was Hinduism,
according to the expression of the administrator
Alfred Lyall, by perpetuating a Brahmanical prejudice
shared by more or less enlightened amateurs, whether
they were British, French or German.
23 On the Muslim side, now frozen on the other side of
the ethnic and religious border, it was from the
munshi, considered the scribes of the tradition of
Islam, that the so-called "Mohammedan law" was to be
collected, a codification that already existed and was
more highly regarded by the British because it was
inspired by monotheism; in this respect, the colonizer
showed relative sympathy for the Indian Wahhabi
reformist movement that campaigned for a
"purification" of Islam and a strengthening of the
Islamic identity of Indian Muslims, more in line with
their version of the Medino-Meccan model, at least at
the beginning. But after the so-called "Great Mutiny" or
"Sepoy Rebellion" of 1857, the British clearly favored
the Hindus.
24 Over the years of their domination in India, the
British sought to mobilize more and more Hindu or
 Muslim supporters to their cause among their subjects.
This was to encourage, within limits that gradually
widened, the participation of Indians in decision-
making by extending a certain number of franchises to
duly identified representatives. To the extent that
India was now conceived as a society composed of a
determined number of communities, each with its
own religious particularities, these were predisposed
to become political actors by self-representing
themselves as such in the public space sparingly
arranged by the colonizer. Defined as a form of "ethnic
identity", fixed, identifiable, permanent, more than by
a principle of adherence to a belief or the exercise of
this or that practice, religion was considered a decisive
factor in the organization of the colonial system. So the
Raj's system of social classification, in religious and
ethnic terms, was transformed into a political system
(Metcalf 1995: 186).
25 Let us emphasize that unlike in Europe, where
"public opinion" is expressed in the "public sphere",
that is, in this intermediate space between the State
and the people that guarantees the conditions of
legitimacy and authority, it is the State itself that
creates and defines the "public space" and its agents
licensed in the colonial system. In this system, the
development of electoral representation is not linked
to the emergence of the "public sphere". This
representation appears rather as a mechanism by
which the State effectively supervises a society
composed of a number of communities anchored in
their caste particularities, singularized in an assigned
and lasting ethnic or religious identity. Creating the
channels through which the communities can express
themselves, the State is ultimately the sole arbiter of
legitimation of public discourse.
26 Knowing that the task of the British government was
to provide opportunities for the satisfaction of the
desires that it had itself aroused, the creation of a
 separate electorate for Muslims (in 1909) only
reinforced the idea that there did indeed exist, in the
eyes of all the actors in Indian social life, two large
opposing communities: Hindus against Muslims, and
vice versa. The colonial state generated at the same
time a space of competition in which personal
religious commitment and public claims of belonging
and solidarity led to a politicized conception of the
said communities. The colonial state had succeeded in
widely disseminating this idea that each of the
inhabitants and social groups of the subcontinent had
first and foremost a religious and/or caste identity. A
claim that the Indians took up in order to conceive of
themselves and with the aim of representing
themselves when it was necessary to decline or defend
their identity 16 . The exo-assignment of identity had
been transformed into self-identification, taken either
in a transitive sense corresponding to the verb to
identify, or in a reflexive sense corresponding to the
verb to identify oneself. A way of suggesting, in
passing, that identity is only one of the possible
identifications of a subject, as psychoanalysis has
strongly emphasized. But also to recall the importance
of the appropriations, reconfigurations, and upheavals
that indigenous actors subjected to the hegemonic
cultural and political project of the colonizer;
understand: the problem of the substantial remodeling
of colonization by the colonized themselves —
resistance, struggle, subversion, invention — which we
will not address here because we are determined to
stick to the sole production of identities "from above."
27 The Hindu reformist movements of the late 19th and
early 20th centuries stepped into the breach by
reinforcing the idea, which helped to strengthen them,
that there was an Islamic community gathered around
practices and ideas that were inherently foreign to
Indian culture. And the Hindu opposition parties have
today succeeded in transforming into a political
 platform the idea that Indian Muslims were above all
else "people of Islam", and as such identified with
"foreigners" to the country, or even members of
Pakistan's fifth column. The argument was not for
nothing in the erosion of the electoral base of the
Congress Party, which had benefited from the "Muslim
vote" since 1947 and had remained in power almost
continuously since then. Thus liberated for over a
century now, the rhetoric of community identity has
allowed activists to play the nationalist, territorial
and/or religious card, from which Pakistan emerged
and which today feeds Hindu propaganda, called
"saffron" in reference to the color of the clothing of its
renouncers 17 . The binary logic of identity now allows
it to exploit with ever greater success what has been
called "the minority complex of the majority" but also
to exploit at opportune moments what Étienne Balibar
called "panic identities" (1988). Let us recall, calmly for
our part, that Hindus constitute 82% of the population,
Muslims approximately 12%.
28 On the Christian side, about 2%, their role was
minor in the creation of independent India. But soon
after the Morley-Minto reform of 1909, which gave
political expression to latent socio-religious divisions
in the form of communal representation, they became
aware of the need to strengthen their identity as
Christians. This compelled them to take political action
that would safeguard their interest in the framework
of the future Indian nation. While the Protestants
acquired a fairly well-defined identity through the All-
Indian Christian Conference held in 1914, the Catholics
took several decades to achieve a unity that allowed
the concrete expression of their political needs. The
arrival of the Cripps Mission in Delhi in 1942, which
proposed greater autonomy for India, made the
question of cooperation between Catholics and
Protestants urgent. Following talks, their respective
official representatives met in Bombay in September
 1945 to found a Joint Committee of Indian Christians,
long desired by the Protestants and finally approved
by the Catholic hierarchy. A sign of ideological
maturity or political short-sightedness: the Christians
renounced the idea, agitated for thirty years in their
ranks, of a separate electorate as a minority. Preferring
to fit into the structures of democratic India, they
credited the Constitution with the defense of their
cultural and religious rights. This was very
unfortunate for them since they have periodically
become the designated targets of the hatred of Hindu
zealots, after having been that of Muslim radicals in
the 19th century . Their proselytism and their
(supposed) mass conversion campaigns - called
"denationalizations" by saffron militants - would
threaten Hindu identity and the integrity of the
majority. To the point that the most extremist Hindus
consider that only an ethnic cleansing of Christians,
but especially of Muslims, could today regenerate the
immemorial identity of the glorious body of India and
Hinduism — Back to the Veda!

Identity and language(s)

29 Community identity is frequently associated with its
spoken language, since the latter is considered the
essence of what distinguishes it from another
community. By making the difference between "us"
and "them" clearly heard, it allows for the distinction
between real human beings and barbaric foreigners. It
cannot be denied that groups speaking a mutually
incomprehensible language living side by side tend to
consider each other as singular, different "by nature".
As if the difficulty or impossibility of understanding
each other, namely the language barrier, covered or
reinforced the ethnic boundary to the point of
 separating humanity into primordial realities and
irreducible entities.
30 But the identification of the nation with language
only became a "horizon of expectation" and urgency
during the 19th and 20th centuries . However, the choice
of the "official" language to form a national
community was not always simple or obvious 18 .
Doubtless even more so in many non-Western
countries where the "discovery" of indigenous
languages ​was linked to the exercise of colonial and
imperial domination (Cohn 1985). Thus, with regard to
the future independent India, the decision to opt for
the vernacular Hindi by Mahatma Gandhi - while he
himself had Gujarati as his mother tongue - proved
unacceptable to the speakers of the South, particularly
Tamils, who no one can dispute, however, that they
participate fully in the culture of "Indianness". This
opposition explains the choice of English, after
independence in 1947, certainly the language of the
colonizer but the least unacceptable national idiom of
communication for the Indians whose virulent anti-
colonialism is known notwithstanding. It is true that in
Tamilnadu, for example, education in Tamil opens up
career opportunities at the level of the whole State,
while the maintenance of English as the national
language of the Union does not put a person educated
in Tamil at a disadvantage, at the national level,
compared to those who have been educated in one of
the other vernacular languages.
31 Particularly instructive was the attempt of
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. His project was to
develop and maintain a single Hindi language based
on the unity of the national movement, that is, to
prevent the Hindu and Muslim variants of the
common lingua franca of North India from evolving in
opposite directions, while simultaneously providing a
national alternative to the use of English (Lelyveld
1993). But the champions of Hindi, with their
 ecumenical views, were attacked by a group, the Hindi
Sahitya Samelan (HSS), which was fiercely pro-Hindu
and anti-Muslim, and therefore anti-Urdu, the
language of the Muslim elite. In the 1930s, it took
control of the organization formed by the National
Congress Party to propagate the language (Hindi),
leading to the resignation of Gandhi, Nehru, and other
Congress leaders from that organization.
32 In 1942, Gandhi returned to his project of creating
an "expanded Hindi". The HSS, meanwhile, created a
standardized Hindi in accordance with his wishes: it
ended up building secondary and university
examination centers and then instituting diplomas in
this language, which was thus standardized for
educational purposes. It was endowed in 1950 with a
"Board of Scientific Terminology" responsible for
extending its vocabulary. The work of the HSS was
crowned by the foundation of the Encyclopaedia of
Hindi, work on which began in 1956. 19 Thus, language
policy had become an exercise in the formation of
society in its univocal Hindu sense while serving as a
potential instrument of exclusion for communities
who continued to identify with another idiom, notably
Muslims with Urdu, or even Persian or Arabic.
33 It is worth noting that, as early as the 19th century ,
the Sanskritization of Hindustani had been at the
origin of the divergence between Hindi and Urdu,
under the pressure of saffron activists who were
already working towards the coalescence of language,
nation and culture. The observation can be
reproduced at the regional level: the deliberate
Sanskritization of literary Bengali, as a language of
culture, distinguished the educated upper classes not
only from the popular masses, but from Hinduized
high culture, thus belittling the Muslim Bengali
masses; in return, there has been a certain de-
Sanskritization of the language of the state of
 Bangladesh, with a predominantly Muslim population,
since the partition of South Asia.
34 In any case, the work on language—self-definition,
homogenization, standardization, but also exclusion
and marginalization—has served to establish the bases
of a citizenship that excludes at least as much as it
includes, thus establishing a nomenclature of what is
potentially national and antinational. Such an
observation tempers Ernest Renan's assertion that
"Language invites us to come together; it does not
force us to do so."
35 But people do not always identify with their "nation"
as their leaders and spokesmen prescribe. The Indian
National Congress, which advocated a single, united
subcontinent, had to accept the partition of India in
1947, just as Pakistan, which advocated a single state
for Muslims throughout the subcontinent, had to
accept the secession of Bangladesh in 1971. More
generally, as soon as Indian politics was no longer
mobilized by a small, strongly Anglicized or
Westernized elite, it had to face movements
demanding the constitution of linguistically based
states—today there are 24 federated states and 6
territories—something the first national movement
had never thought of, even if a few Indian communists
had begun to talk about it just before the Second
World War. Regional linguistic rivalries - there are
now 18 languages ​recognised by the Constitution -
were to preserve English's position as the official
language of India to this day, although it is spoken by
only an insignificant fraction of the country's billion
inhabitants, because other Indians are not prepared to
accept the domination of Hindi, spoken by 30 to 40% of
the population . 20 So much so that, in the 1960s,
Tamils ​became inflamed, in the strict sense (with
petrol), in defence of their threatened language,
shouting during its agony: "Death to Hindi! May Tamil
prosper!" 21. The fact that language is first and
 foremost a "space of culture" and a "place of memory"
does not therefore prevent, at least in Tamil countries,
people from wanting to die for their homeland for it.
36 To the extent that the opposing communities
"differentiate themselves according to their level of
education and attempt to control or monopolize the
means of education" 22 by gaining access to certain
positions in the machinery of the State, this rivalry has
something in common with the rise of nationalism.
Thus this immemorial repository of sacredness
confused with the "Aryans" that is the ancient Sanskrit
language - it has not been truly spoken fluently for
more than a millennium23 - has always been used as a
spearhead by the zealots of Hinduism in their pursuit
of this imaginary community emblazoned with the god
Rama and his ideal kingdom, the Ramraj, which they
call for.24 This narrative creation of identity, first
confused with the movement to recover a specific past
linked to the anti-colonial struggle in the 19th century ,
then with the construction of the national idea as the
ideology of the State since independence (in 1947),
aims to transform India into a "place of memory"
purified of its non-Hindu dross and a source of
regeneration for the nation. Since the 1980s, a battle
for the revision of history in this light has been
engaged (1989). Knowing that "it is part of the
fabulatory function to invent a people", according to
the expression of Gilles Deleuze, Hindu nationalists
are today campaigning for the generalization of the
teaching of Sanskrit and Hindu culture in schools and
universities; by which we mean: Hindu culture "before
the Muslim invasions".
37 In extreme cases, languages ​can indeed lead to
separatism, as among the Tamils ​of Sri Lanka who,
under the British, were over-represented in public
services and probably in higher education. But today,
Tamil finds itself subject to pressure from the heavily
dominant Sinhalese majority (72% of the population),
 in particular, by the adoption, in 1956, of Sinhalese as
the sole official national language. This decision is one
of the origins of the interminable murderous conflict
between Tamils ​and Sinhalese, even if the aspirations
of the separatists did not replace the wishes of
federalism until about twenty-five years after
independence. Let us bet that in 1977 the Tamil sitting
in a compartment, mentioned in the introduction, did
not say a word during the assault on the train by
Sinhalese militants...

Conclusion. Identity: Void or

Tomb?
38 "Any use of the notion of identity begins with a
critique of this notion," wrote Claude Lévi-Strauss in
his seminar at the Collège de France in 1975 (1977:
331). The task is made even more necessary today in
view of the plethora of incantatory use of the word.
We are in fact the contemporaries of a veritable
ideological industry of identity: of class, race,
language, nation, religion, gender, etc. And the word
proves to be conducive to the crystallization of all
sorts of wooden language. Normal, claim the
postmodernists: the contradictory effect of
homogenization and fragmentation specific to
globalization has transformed the world into a
supermarket of identities . 25
39 Let us note, however, that the term "identity" is very
old, from late and scholastic Latin. Identitas means
being in itself, at the same time semper idem , the Same
free from inconstancy in time, semper unum , the One
free from multiplicity in space (Fumaroli 1977: 117).
The meaning is metaphysical and refers to uniqueness,
singularity, an escape from time when there is only
becoming, passage or repetition. In other words,
 philosophically, identity is a short-lived idea. In other
words, it is a decoy, socially. Hence, for example, the
legal fiction of the passport or the identity card. Above
all, hence the hardening of living singularities into
poor identities, bristling with defense. Hence, alas, the
funerary character of identity insofar as its invocation
periodically awakens the allegory of death armed with
its scythe. Indeed, "xenophobia seems to become like
the mass ideology of the twentieth century fin-de-siècle
" (sic), according to the formula of Eric Hobsbawm
(1996: 254). Nothing is therefore more urgent than to
meditate on the said "conflicts of identity", in this
twentieth century ending, but by distrusting the notion
of identity. A task briefly begun before you, on the case
of a subcontinent heavy with a billion people; a region,
by the way, which is predicted to be, in demographic
terms, the first in the world by 2020.
40 If it is impossible for me to reduce the semantic
deficiency of the presentation, in the space allotted, I
nevertheless have the duty to ultimately reduce the
"identity" disorder: at least that of the observed
observer. If only because the anthropological exercise
now imposes on its practitioners the reflexive return,
particularly in the era of the resurgence of identity
affirmations. Allow me therefore to point out that
nothing in my so-called personal, family, social or
national "identity" had preluded the study of South
Asia that I briefly discussed with you. This is why I was
unable to begin my remarks with this ethnic exordium
for legitimizing use that one of the most famous
American anthropologists, Renato Rosaldo,
pronounces before each of his interventions: "First as
a Chicano, and, second, as an anthropologist, I want to
say that...".
41 By implying that only indigenous identity
sovereignly authorizes the discourse held on its own
culture, the statement may appear dangerously
indigenist or third-worldist. But this warning
 nevertheless expresses the feeling of injustice of
certain peoples, or of what were still called "nations"
in the 18th century , in a minority situation in an
environment proclaimed to be multicultural although
in reality still segregationist. Such an exordium also
serves as a reminder of the "precautionary principle"
for all those who discourse on cultures whose identity
they do not share but whose nature and history they
question, as well as the more or less radical forms of
otherness.
42 On this side of the Atlantic, the time has come for
European construction and the observation of a
relative dissolution of national identities while
regionalist or ethno-nationalist sentiments are rising
in society. Such an (apparent) contradiction cannot fail
to challenge the anthropologist of the "here and now",
even if he had first chosen to investigate
contemporaneity "over there". A specialist in cultural
identities, here he is, often in spite of himself, at the
center of ethnic or nationalist, or even religious,
claims, and therefore at the heart of the political
debate. Especially if these observers or defenders of
cultural heritage are sometimes called upon to rule on
the legitimacy of identity claims, anthropology has
every reason to adopt a resolutely critical view: its
contribution has often been used to justify and
legitimize territorial, political or cultural claims,
whether they are conceived from "below", by the
independentists, or concocted from "above", that is to
say by the State.
43 Hence the interest in adopting, in the face of these
two interlocutors, the ideal definition given by Claude
Lévi-Strauss: "identity is a sort of virtual home to
which we must refer in order to explain a certain
number of things, but without it ever having any real
existence" (1977: 332). Failing to be this void, this
phantom of reference or fictitious subject, identity can
become a tomb, as illustrated by the daily reading of
newspapers at the end of the millennium - this "prayer
of modern times", according to Hegel.

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Notes
1 I thank the organizers of the interdisciplinary seminar of
the ARC program "Languages ​and collective identities", in
particular Professor Robert Deliège, for inviting me to give
this conference at the Catholic University of Louvain-la-
Neuve on November 17, 1999.
2 This description is taken from the book by V. Daniel (1977)
which studies intercommunity conflicts in Sri Lanka.
3 The quote is taken from the book by TH Eriksen (1993).
4 On the construction, in mirror, of the person and identity
of this eminently heroic character if ever there was one, one
will read J.-P. Vernant (1997).
5 An attempt to rethink these other processes, in the Indian
colonial situation, in an article by S. Kaviraj (1991).
6 The latter is the author of one of the most famous works
on nationalism in 1983; cf. the critique by J. Assayag (2000).
7 For a general view of these religions, as well as for in situ
case studies , consult the collective volume coordinated by J.
Assayag & G. Tarabout (1997).
8 Une riche collection de textes sur ce thème dans les
ouvrages coordonnés par V. Das (1992) et K. Basu &
S. Subrahmanyam (1997).
9 C’est la thèse « constructiviste » développée dans le livre de
G. Pandey (1990).
10 Les travaux pionniers sur cette question sont ceux de
B. Cohn (1987 ; 1996).
11 Ce modèle dichotomique est développé par T.R. Metcalf
(1997).
12 Une approche critique de cette vue sur les
« communautés » dans N.G. Barrier (1981), sur les « castes »
dans N. Dirks (1992), sur les tribus » dans S. Guha ; cf.
également J. Assayag (1996a).
13 Pour une critique de cette conception, on pourra se
reporter à J. Assayag (1992).
14 Le volume de C.A. Beckenridge & P. van der Veer (1993)
traite, de façon critique et polémique, de l’héritage
orientaliste européen.
15 Nous reprenons de F. Barth (1969) la notion de
« frontière ».
16 Pour une présentation des métamorphoses de la caste
depuis la colonisation britannique, on pourra se reporter à
J. Assayag (1995b ; 1996b ; 1999b).
17 S’agissant de l’implication des religieux et de la religion
dans le nationalisme indien contemporain, on lira L. McKean
(1996), J. Assayag (1997 ; 1999a).
18 Sur la « nationalisation » du hindi et des traditions
indiennes au XIXe siècle, on lira V. Dalmia (1997).
19 Sur cet épisode, on lira les articles de J. Bhattacharya
(1987) et J. Das Gupta & J. Gumperz (1968).
20 S’agissant de la politique des langues régionales en Inde,
on se reportera à l’ouvrage de R.D. King (1997) et pour la
question des identités politiques régionales à celui de
D. Taylor & M. Yapp (1979).
21 Sur la question du tamoul, on lira le dossier fouillé de
S. Ramaswamy (1997).
22 L’extrait de la citation est de F. Barth (1969 : 34).
23 Pour un vue ample des rapports entre sanscrit et langues
vernaculaires en Asie du Sud et du Sud-Est, on lira S. Pollock
(1998) ; sur les Aryens, cf. T. R. Trautmann (1997).
24 Des études sur cette question dans l’ouvrage dirigé par D.
Ludden (1996).
25 C’est, par exemple, la thèse développée par A. Appadurai
(1996) ; cf. la critique de J. Assayag (1998a).

Pour citer cet article

Référence papier
Jackie Assayag, « Les troubles de l’identité : cas de
figure », Socio-anthropologie, 20 | 2007, 61-86.

Référence électronique
Jackie Assayag , "Identity disorders: case studies" , Socio-
anthropology [Online], 20 | 2007, published on November 26, 2008
, consulted on February 6, 2025. URL :
http://journals.openedition.org/socio-anthropologie/843; DOI :
https://doi.org/10.4000/socio-anthropologie.843

Author
Jackie Assayag

Interdisciplinary Institute of Contemporary Anthropology,

CNRS/EHESS

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