As
we opened the Matryoshka layer by layer, the
question that struck me was playing in the minds of Jayanta and Alice Robert as
well:
‘How can it be?’
May
be at a different time, place and magnitude….it was possible. What I am writing
is like a parallel fiction, fact, fantasy or a juxtaposition of all the three…..
Jayanta
was the protagonist from an out of the box movie made in the early fifties.
Alice is a medical graduate, TV host, anthropologist-cum-writer. As for myself,
well, I am yet to find out who I am…
All
of us had a different set of Matryoshka
dolls,
but the question was the same…
For
those who will accuse me of esoteric interference, let me tell you that Matryoshka
is a Russian doll specially designed in such a way that one doll has a series
of its replica underneath it. Just like a cabbage.
Had
it been a story, I would have definitely made it a murder mystery because of the
amount of hatred of the underlying dolls towards the doll at the surface. The reason
for this murderous hatred is eternal - The longing for identity and
existentiality. Each doll is unique, beautiful and complete, but the face that
is celebrated is of the external doll only. The dolls that remain underneath have
no recognition at all.
I was
deeply disturbed by this underlying vibe that I had sensed among the Inner
Dolls.
Half
a century ago, Jayanta tried to bring all the dolls together by inviting the individual
pieces of the whole system to bask in the sunshine on a chilly December
morning. All of them rushed out into the open field with the collective hope of
a place in the sunshine….
Dalimi
from the Hills
And
this diversity in the combination shaped the cloth that was weaved out of the
various ethnic groups to represent Jayanta’s native place, Assam.
Jayanta,
or the person inside him was a dreamer. Because of some efforts like that of
Jayanta, the Matryoshka still bears the same
feeling of unity among its natives. But, over the years, the separatist feeling
of the underlying dolls and their hatred has increased manifold. Many times, we
fear that the Matryoshka model, that we are
emotionally attached with, will crack at anytime. That was my initial concern,
when I was inspecting the anguish of a radical doll beneath the Matryoshka.
But Alice carried the thought process to a different level. If we belong to the same
human race, how can we all look, think and behave so differently? Why were
there so many underlying layers in the anthropological Matryoshka
she was looking at?
‘How
can it be?’, sighed this medical graduate who had shifted her interest from
Anatomy to Anthropology. She had explored every nook and corner of the globe in
search of the answer and combined her knowledge of medicine and anthropology. With
genetic mapping of all the races in the world, including aborigines of faraway
places, she proved it beyond doubt, “All of us are descended from the same race
that went out of Africa thousands of years ago.”
Then
the question was raised as to why we are all so different in appearance. Say
for example, ‘Why am I brown, and Nick is darker while Ms Alice is so fair?’
She
had a hypothesis for this also: maybe due to the effects of the Ice Age. As for
example, in Europe, only few of the races survived the extreme cold by hiding
in caves, without sunlight. This probably led to Vitamin D deficiency and this
vitamin is vital for melanin synthesis, the pigment responsible for skin colour!
Agreed,
but how could one come out of Africa in that prehistoric era? Crossing the Sahara
and the mighty ocean is difficult even today. She answered that query too.
From
her ground breaking work, we can infer that the entire human race belongs to
one small family that started its journey from Africa and swarmed over the
entire planet.
Thus,
it is not a question of identity that we have to address, but the sense of inequality
among us for dealing with this Matryoshka revolt.
#: lyrics from a popular Assamese song
that embark the unity among diverse structural organization of Assam.
