“All languages come out of Sanskrit.”
“Urdu is written back to front.”
“Now, one goes to visit Qutub Minar, it is written right there that such Hindu temples were demolished in the process.”
“Yes, the government can’t be held responsible for this. It depends on the local people, parents and village council to ensure the right education for children. The government has done its part by allocating the budget.”
These were some of the things Hindu officials said to their Muslim colleagues during a conversation about education in Haryana’s Mewat region that was documented in an academic paper about “microaggressions” against Muslims in the workplace in India.
Prerna Bakshi, a sociolinguist and lecturer at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, who authored a paper, Language, religion, and workplace discrimination: intersectional microaggressions in India, spoke with Article 14 about these put-downs, insults and jibes that Muslims experience.
This kind of targeting—conscious and subconscious—is prevalent to the point that it goes unnoticed and is far from being addressed, let alone studied.
“While strides have been made to address workplace discrimination by introducing laws and training initiatives, discrimination persists because of the tendency to view discrimination overtly and intentionally, without much regard for the covert and subtle ways in which it manifests itself, which may not be so easy to spot, capture or challenge,” said the paper.
Microaggressions take the form of microassaults, microinsults and microinvalidations.
The paper explained that while a microassault was a conscious act to make an overtly derogatory remark to hurt the target, microinsult and microinvalidation were subconscious acts in that perpetrators may be unaware that they were being offensive.
“Microaggression” was coined by psychiatrist Chester Pierce in the 1970s to describe subtle forms of race-based discrimination against African Americans, but research on religious discrimination in literature is rarely seen, with no study on religious microaggressions in the workplace for Muslims in India, the paper noted.
While working on educational issues in Mewat, Bakshi found that a recurring theme was the encounters of Meo Muslims with prejudice and discrimination. The focus group of six people that she observed consisted of four Meo Muslims and two Hindu officials of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, an Indian government campaign to promote education.
The Meos, a pastoral community included as “other backward class” (OBCs) by the Indian government, has historically been known for their syncretic traditions—sometimes called ‘half Muslims’—following Hindu and Muslim customs and traditions, the paper noted.
When Meo officials explained that students struggled to follow teachers who spoke Haryanvi (not Mewati, the local dialect), the paper said they were constantly interrupted by non-Meos, speaking in a dominating voice. When the Meos said that Haryanvi and Mewati were “poles apart”, a non-Meo said, “The mother language of all these is Sanskrit though” and that “all languages come out Sanskrit”.
The paper said this was an example of “microinvalidation”, where non-Meos “attempted to negate, deny or undermine” the account of the Meos by “stressing all languages emerged from Sanskrit, thereby implying it did not or should not pose a significant challenge for students, even when it did not correspond to the ground reality as Meo participants indicated”.
Humour was also deployed.
When Meos disagreed that all languages emerged from Sanskrit, saying, “Urdu is different”, a non-Meo laughed and said it was written “back to front”.
“Humour is tricky, as it offers the speakers a plausible deniability while simultaneously giving the impression that those on the receiving end of it could be acting ‘too sensitive’ if they resist or register a protest,” Bakshi wrote.
When Meos expressed concern about the lack of representation of Meos in the textbooks, non-Meos said the purpose of the books was not representation and used a conspiracy theory that temples were destroyed to build the Qutub Minar, suggesting that the Hindu majority suffered discrimination as well, the study noted.
“This was a deliberate and conscious act of making purposeful and provocative remarks against the Muslim community,” Bakshi wrote. “The underlying motivation is that either Meos are to blame or held responsible for some imagined historical wrong that needed to be righted. Its effect was there was a palpable tension, and the underlying power dynamics came to the fore. This resulted in Meo participants either withdrawing from the conversation or acting neutral.”
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here .