To rewrite the history of a nation as built by only one community is to pretend there were never mergers, cohabitation, cooperation between/across cultures ILLUSTRATION: GURU G By Pramod K Nayar When the rhetoric of purity subsumes all other rhetoric, blended identities are erased from the histories of nations. When communities clamour for recognition and rights, they are subject to this rhetoric and practices — as the Nazis did with the Jews — of conditional inclusion or worse, exclusion. When the state moves today to determine the quantum of ‘pure’ blood, to document interfaith, intercaste and other miscegenated relationships, the census merges with scientific racism to divide the society that has lived symbiotically, for centuries. To rewrite the history of a nation as belonging to and built by one community, to claim a monolithic identity for a specific community, is to pretend there were never mergers, cohabitation, cooperation between/across […]

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