The philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti says, ‘Your consciousness as an individual represents the consciousness of humanity’. I thought I had comprehended the meaning of this statement when I first encountered it in high school, and volunteered to teach English to rural children. I realized how naïve my understanding was when I spent one month this summer in Dharamsala.
Who is a person? What is consciousness? Such philosophical questions have frequently visited debates and discussions in my class. My exposure to the Tibetan community has helped me engage with the concept of an individual’s identity, how this identity is constituted, and ways in which identities undergo change in relation to external and internal environments.
I had earlier taken the connection between being a citizen of a free country and individual identity for granted. Having myself always felt a sense of belonging to a family, a nation, a culture, I was jolted out of my comfortable cocoon. Tibetans who have been born and brought up in India, whose idea of ‘home’ is grounded on the recollections of their elders, experience an uneasy sense of loss. Where are they from, and where do they belong? I observed that the Tibetans, having been forcefully displaced from their land, experience a greater urge to preserve their culture and identity as Tibetans. It then becomes critical to understand the complexity through which identities are constituted, especially for those in exile. The poignancy of this human condition is captured by poet and political activist Tenzin Tsundue, “I have nowhere to call home and in the world at large all I’ll ever be is a ‘political refugee’”.
The physical movement of people globally, and the fluidity of such movement, results in flexible and often fragmented identities. In my understanding, the premise for a phenomenon like migration (whether forced or voluntary) to exist is Krishnamurti’s statement, ‘you are the world’. In other words, the universality of the human experience allows the global movement of people. A study of migration is then a study of this global consciousness in its various manifestations be they economic, political, or social-anthropological.
