If you want to bring India into this conversation, that helps me more than it does you. India is an extremely multicultural country. The cultures here interact and take from each other whatever they please. Everybody likes this. Everybody celebrates this. Hindus celebrate Christmas. Muslims go on pilgrimages to Hindu and Buddhist sites. People have names from different languages, nobody can pronounce anybody’s name, everybody has a nickname, everybody dresses like each other. The western discourse on who can wear hijab would be ridiculous here – I, a Muslim, have never veiled. But when I went to the Nizamuddin Dargah, it was a Hindu friend of mine who set my veil up properly. Indian social justice icon Bhimrao “Babasaheb” Ambedkar writes on the subject:
An ideal society should be mobile, should be full of channels for conveying a change taking place in one part to other parts. In an ideal society there should be many interests consciously communicated and shared. There should be varied and free points of contact with other modes of association. In other words there should be social endosmosis. This is fraternity, which is only another name for democracy. Democracy is not merely a form of Government. It is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards fellowmen.
While it is without fail the Hindu extremists who adopt your position, that “cultural appropriation” poses some kind of existential threat. It’s the Hindu extremists who go around beating people up for holding hands in public and celebrating Valentine’s Day because they think western culture is this big scary foreign bogeyman. They are fascists and if you argue with them they will call you an anti-national. On the other hand it is the enforcers of the caste system who take offence on the adoption of “markers” of one caste or culture by members of another. They do this because the caste system is a series of “markers” from which a peoples’ entire identities are considered to have arisen. Everybody hates this. Everyone with a progressive bone in their body. My roommate who stopped speaking to me after she saw me eat an egg sandwich and believes that it’s appropriate to arrest college students for chanting “Free Kashmir” thinks this.
Being that I live in India it’s expected, actually, that I conduct myself in certain ways and that I adopt certain aspects of the various cultures with which I interact. In fact it’s expected that I acquire an Indian accent so people can understand me. This is the mark of a healthy society. It is one of the few healthy marks that Indian society has, actually. There’s some real problems here as you may have surmised.
In the Balkans the situation is the same. Greece is virtually a fascist Apartheid state, as you and I have discussed in the past vis á vis its treatment of Albanian immigrants. What we didn’t discuss was its ethnic cleansing of the Macedonians from Aegean Macedonia in 1913 after it was annexed to Greece in the Treaty of Bucharest. Macedonians were killed and tortured to give up their identities and their language and forced to change their names even so that they could become “Greeks”. It’s a more violent (to my knowledge) version of what happened to my people, the Arvanites, and what happens to Albanian immigrants now who pursue assimilation and citizenship. To this day Macedonians who go into Greece are attacked and harassed and have their passports and cars destroyed by racist Greeks. Why? Because the Greek nationalists claim that only they have the right to the name Macedonia. They claim that the Republic of Macedonia is somehow appropriating their culture. Sometimes using these exact words. I spend a lot of time around nationalists, both Balkan and Indian. The RSSBJP in India loves accusing people of cultural appropriation. And so do the Greek nationalists. So do all nationalists.
The distinction between an Arvanite and an Albanian is arbitrary. The distinction between an Arvanite and a Greek is arbitrary. If you ask an Arvanite if they’re an Arvanite they’ll get offended, if you ask them if they’re a Greek they’ll say of course. But if you ask a Greek if Bouboulina was Albanian, which she was, or if Kapodistrias was an Italian, which he was, his original name was Capo D’istria, and he was in fact not fluent in Greek, few people were in that time, most of the Peloponnesos (which was the entirety of the Greek state at first) was Albanian speaking, including Athens, up until the fascist regimes in the early 20th century) they’ll get offended. You can go to Cyprus and ask people if they’re Greeks or ask people if they’re Turks and see how uncomfortable the atmosphere gets. In Greece there are people whose surnames are Voulgarakis who will harass Macedonians by telling them to “go back to Bulgaria”. Few national identities are as flagrantly made up as Greece’s. India’s makes the short list and there are many books about why that is. But they are all made up. Every single one of them. They don’t have to be the way they are. They’re the way they are to crystallise existing power structures. They don’t need to be. They can change overnight. Two weeks from now a dictator can come along and decide actually those surnames aren’t Greek, you have to change them, this haircut isn’t Greek, you have to shave it, this language isn’t Greek, you can’t speak it. It can happen to any country. It has happened to every nation-state. If you’re familiar with the Jewish critique of Zionism that it puts a state in charge of Jewish identity, you’ll understand what I mean. The ongoing disputes between Greece and Macedonia centre on who is Macedonian and who isn’t. There’s literally people arguing about it. I know I’m on Macedonia’s side (not Zaev’s, but I’m against Macedonia-denial) but there’s the possibility that Zaev will abandon Macedonians living in Greece. He’ll say from a position of authority that they’re not Macedonians anymore. The other example is the shitstorm that’s lasted 200 years over whether the Muslims living in Thraki are Turks or simply “Muslim Greeks”. There’s people arguing about it, and every Balkan nation tries to homogenise itself and decide who to include and who to exclude. The Roma had no trouble being Romans or Ottoman subjects, but suddenly when it came time for them to be Greeks or Macedonians or Serbians or Romanians or Bulgarians or Romanians there was a big issue, even though they speak Greek, practice Greek Orthodoxy, live in “Greece” next to “Greeks”…
It’s a series of privatised hells predicated on exclusionary citizenship proto-fascist and actually fascist apartheid regimes. Refugees die to get in and then they die to get out. Of course they’re fake. People live wherever. People go wherever. People do whatever. People change their cultural identification, sometimes overnight, sometimes legally, sometimes by taking oaths to lie about it (as is involved in Greece’s actual immigration process). This has been absolute fact throughout history ever since we were the Yonavas who’d never heard the word “Greece” going to India and starting Buddhist kingdoms and even before. Wikipedia will tell you the Yonavas were Greeks, but we couldn’t have been Greek at the time when the Buddha talked about us because Greece wouldn’t be founded for another 2000 years. It’s another example of a blatant nationalist lie everyone believes. But it’s all lies. They’re all lies. Nothing is redeemable in the nationalist project in Greece or India or anywhere. The end.
Also, if you want to see “what I’ve been reading”, I keep something of a record at antihellenism.tumblr.com of all my sources.
