Is it true that there is no such thing as an Indian Race?

Is it true that there is no such thing as an Indian Race?

Aug 28, 2024

Nehru Sathiamoorthy


“India is not a real country. Instead, it is 32 separate nations that happen to be arrayed along the British rail line.” 

– Lee Kuan Yew

It seems a new controversy is emerging amongst the Indians in Malaysia, and this time it has to do with the terminology “Indian” and “Tamil”.

According to news report, a faction of the Tamils here are claiming there is no such thing as an Indian race, there is only such a thing as a Tamil ethnicity.

In response to their claim, MIC Youth and a number of NGOs have urged the police to investigate several TikTok videos for allegedly spreading hate speech against the Malaysian Indian community.

Is it true that there are no such things as Indians and it is hateful to say that only Tamils exist?

Before we discuss whether what these factions are claiming is hateful, let us first investigate whether it is true.

You see, they say that if you break anything up far enough, you will end up with nothing, and once you have nothing, you can make it into anything.

Science used to say that the atom was the smallest unit of existence, but then they broke it down to sub-atomic terms and today, I reckon they have even broken down the subatomic particles into sub-sub-atomic terms, and at the rate they are going, scientist are soon going to say that when they probed a thing to its very source, what they have found is that that there is nothing at anything’s core, and therefore everything came from nothing, and has the potential to be everything.

If a clever man, through clever words, can say that everything is essentially made up of nothing, because the very atom that makes up everything is made up of nothing, how hard will it be for someone to argue that a man socio-political term like “Indian” also means nothing.

Afterall, From one point of view, you can indeed say that there is no such thing as an Indian because like Lee Kuan Yew said, India is basically just 32 nations connected by a railway system that the British created.

But if you take this point of view, then you can also argue that there is no such thing as a Malaysian either, because even the term Malaysia only became extant in 1963 after the formation of Malaysia. If you told anyone before 1963 that a Chinese in Malaysia and a Kayan in Sarawak are one people, they wouldn’t have any clue as to what you mean.

But just because the term Malaysian itself only came into existence around 60 years ago, does it mean that you and I are not Malaysians? Does it mean that I am just an Indian while you are just a Chinese or a Malay, and there is nothing meaningfully connecting you and me, because only races like Indian, Chinese and Malay provide meaningful connections, while nationalities like Malaysian are just imaginary concepts that have no foundation in reality?

Even if you say yes, you still can’t rest there, because then you will have to investigate what races like Indians, Chinese or Malay stand for, and I am sure that if you investigate the concept of race deeply enough, you will find that even the idea of race doesn’t stand on anything concrete.

Is there really such a thing called a “Malay” race or is the term Malays basically just an overarching category for ethnicities like the Bugis, Minangkabau, Javanese etc, without having any meaning or significance in and of itself? Or is the term “Malays” just a constitutional construct, as Mahathir loves to claim, that only came to being when the constitution was ratified in `1957 ?

According to Beijing, the people of Tibet, Xinjiang, Manchuria and Mongolia are all Chinese, but it is unlikely that the Tibetans, Uighurs, Manchurians and Mongolians fully agree.

Today, even some people who used to claim that they were Chinese, are saying the opposite thing.

If you go to Hong Kong for example, some people that used to have no problem saying they are Chinese are today saying that they are not Chinese but Hong Kongers. To them, it’s the mainlanders that are Chinese, while they are not mainlanders. At the rate that the Taiwanese are going at it, it is quite likely that they too will no longer be Chinese in a couple of generations. They are so insistent on not being Chinese today, that the Taiwanese look like they are even willing to start World War 3, just so they do not have to reunify with China and identify themselves as Chinese once again.

At the end of the day, I suppose this is why it is said that the messenger matters as much as the message. Intention matters. We can only decipher meaning from a word, by gauging the intention in which it is said. If we don’t know what the intention behind the word is, the word is just a string of vowels and consonants, without any soul or spirit in it.

I have already mentioned previously that if the Indians are unable to unite, we are going to become extinct.

In history, we know of such identity groups like Etruscans, Mayans, Yavanas, Gauls, Saxons and whatnots used to exist, but they no longer exists today, because at some point in their history, they either 1) become extinct 2) were swallowed by a bigger and powerful race or ethnicity or 3) had to combine their group identity with other identity groups in order to become stronger or stop becoming weaker.

If Indians are continuously unable to unite, we are also going to experience the same fate.

That there is already a movement by a faction of Indians in Malaysia to break-up the Indians into smaller groups foreshadows what awaits us in the future.

University politics is more vicious than national politics precisely because the stakes are so small – Henry Kissinger

What Kissinger is saying here is that you cannot only assume that politics is heavy amongst those who have much to gain – it is likely even heavier amongst those who have everything to lose.

While Tok Mat of Umno is lamenting that the Malay politics is heading to desolation and ruin on account of vicious and toxic politicking in the Malay political landscape, let us not forget that Indian politics is also heading in the same direction for the exact opposite reason.

While Malay politics is heading to ruin because Malays are fighting in a no hold barred method for the sake of all that they can gain, the Indians are fighting in an even more vicious manner, simply because we are afraid to lose everything.