Prejudice is pre-disposition to believe something about an individual or a group of people which is not warranted by reason and which is not borne out by facts. Although degree of prejudice differs from person to person, hardly anybody is completely free from it. Every body has his pet prejudices. Frequently one’s experience militates against one’s prejudice, but one is so much attached to one’s prejudice that it is almost impossible to give it up. It has been rightly said that it is easier to give up one’s money or comforts than one’s prejudice.
Prejudices are not in-born. These are learned from home, school and environment. Small children play freely among themselves without regard to the colour or religion of their play-mates. I remember when I was small and living in a village, many of my play-mates were from other communities. But as I grew up I was told by my mother that Jaggu belongs to the untouchable sweeper community and I must not play with him otherwise I may not be given food without taking a bath. Since my elder brothers and sisters were not associating with boys of that community, I also did not question the propriety of my mother’s directions and stopped playing with Jaggu. Now when I look back at the incident, I find it was a sheer prejudice to give up Jaggu’s company.
He has grown up to be an agreeable young man and talented player who plays Cricket for his College and has a wide circle of friends from all communities. His eldest brother is the Deputy Superintendent of Police of our District and quite a few persons of so called higher castes work as his assistants and even orderlies at his residence. Even though untouchability has been declared a crime, most of the older members of my family and many of my relations practice it in one form or the other.
They would not rent a house which has a man of a lower community as a neighbour even though that house is more spacious, cheaper and in a better locality.
Another pet prejudice of some members of my family is that servants are generally thieves. An inconvenient outcome of this belief is that whenever we leave our house for a couple of days, we have to leave the keys with our neighbours with whom we hardly socialise otherwise and who have not been available in their residence a num¬ber of times we returned from our visits.
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The house also remains uncleaned for days together and the servant has to be given money to eat from restaurants although it would have been much cheaper if he had stayed inside the house and cooked his own food. During one such absence for a week our car-stereo was also stolen. But all these incidents have not eroded the prejudice against servants who have incidently absolutely no record of stealing a single item from our house since my childhood.
Some other favourite prejudices entertained in our house are that the brown- eyed people are unreliable, that the gypsies kidnap children and that seeing a one- eyed person in the morning will spoil the day. My best friend Sweta is brown-eyec. She has never cheated me.
I am extremely fond of reading life-stories of Gypsies and have great sympathy for their hard life. The panwala near the bus-stand is blind of one eye that I have to face every morning while boarding my school bus and this has not been followed by any unpleasant experience in my school. But still, I cannot argue against these prejudicial beliefs of my family members as whenever I have tried I have been snubbed by my elders who I must say do not resent my friend Sweta but would none-the-less like to hold on to their prejudice about the unreliability of brown-eyed people.
The prejudices which I found prevalent among staff and students of my school (an English Medium School) are related mostly to the practices followed by Hindi- medium schools aided by the Government. The most widely held prejudice against Hindi-Medium Schools is that the teachers there are incompetent. They do not understand the subjects, they cannot explain the problems to the students clearly and they encourage students to take help of cheap guides for their examinations; the students of Hindi-Medium Schools who do well in examinations are able to do so by cheating in exams and by making use of the guides.
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Their intelligence and calibre is much lower than that Of the students studying in prestigious English-medium schools. Since we are paying hefty fees for studying in the English-medium school and one is naturally proud of one’s institution, we tend to believe all adverse opinions about Hindi-medium schools even in the face of the facts that my father, an All India Service Officer, and many of my relations occupying eminent positions in Universities and Industry have studied in Hindi-medium schools.
We also know that teachers of most Hindi-medium schools have to undergo a very tough written and oral examination and they have to be Bachelor of Education whereas the teachers of English Medium Schools do not have to possess similarly high qualifications or to undergo such tests and interviews for selection.
As a matter of fact, a prejudice is built on scanty information. Many a time there is a kernel of truth in the prejudicial belief. It is a fact that some students of Hindi- medium schools resort to unfair means in exams; when they are caught, the fact is published in the newspapers. But it is forgotten that a very large number of students, who because of lack of means of their parents, have to study in inexpensive Government aided Hindi-medium schools are brilliant, hard working and are able to become Engineers, doctors or top Civil Servants when they grow up. List of prejudices entertained by my acquaintances is endless. I will enumerate only a few and the funny ones. One of my acquaintances of Manipur State told me
that all North Indians are unclean and they do not like them to visit that portion of their house where idols of Manipur’s Cods are kept. I was stunned when I heard of this belief.
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Another strongly held prejudice among many of my acquaintances is that the reason of population explosion in India is mainly due to Muslim men having four wives as permitted in their religion. I know many Muslim families who have been our neighbours or my father’s colleagues in service. Not one Muslim married man known to me has more than one wife. I think experience of many of my acquaintances is also the same but they are not ready to give up this prejudice. Incidently this prejudice is propagated by some political parties for gaining votes of Muslim-baiters.
Many of my acquaintances believe that Bengalees, although intelligent and shrewd, are generally loud-mouthed and cowardly. They have never bothered to heed the historical facts that a very large number of revolu-tionaries who laid down their lives in freedom-struggle were Bengalis. Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, too, was a Bengali, who left prestigious I.C.S. to commit his body and soul to freedom struggle. He founded I.N.A., a fighting-outfit for bringing freedom to our countrymen. Prejudices are not likely to vanish from this world in the near future.
Knowledge and learning have repeatedly exposed the un-tenability of the prejudices. Germans were not uneducated barbarians who, under Hitler, became victims of the prejudice that the Jews were extortionists and evil and the cause of all their national miseries including Germany’s humiliating defeat in World War? Thousands of Germans became willing partners in the inhuman task of gassing and eliminating the Jews in jconcentration-camps set-up for them by the Nazis. This is all recent history. Various terrorist outfits we see in our country and the world today are the outcomes of strongly held prejudices.
People belonging to different ethnic groups, castes and creeds can rid themselves jof prejudice only if they develop a scientific temper of mind, if they come to believe that all mankind is one, that happiness and prosperity can be achieved and enjoyed jby collective effort and by sharing the joys and grief which man’s brief sojourn in this world brings to his lot.