I have written about wanting to belong to a group in an earlier note on an update to universalism.

In this earlier post, I noted that my original definition of universalism was ‘avoiding restrictive identities’ and that, as of 2024, I would expand it to include belonging to some group identities, though restrictive, as long as their organising principle is not exclusion but a desire for shared belonging and experiences.

This is all good and merry, but today I was thinking about groups and belonging yet again, and I reviewed the original essay on my core values I wrote while completing the Young India Fellowship at Ashoka University in 2019. It had the following sentence on Universalism:

“Universalism and Stimulation bring together the pursuit and operation of Curiosity and Knowledge, which I believe is a means for ensuring continued engagement and, by introducing me to the world that surrounds me, aids me in developing the value of universalism.”

This is fairly unclear, but I think what I meant was that my values of universalism and curiosity/knowledge are closely linked.

I want to expand the scope of my engagement with the world beyond restrictive identities, yes.

I have also come to appreciate and realize the slightly different, but equally necessary, expansion of relations that belonging to a group enables, yes.

But belonging to groups without letting exclusion become the organising principle is hard. Because identities are often binary.

The minute you define a group, you simultaneously define what is outside it. Groups are defined by the boundaries of who or what is included and who or what is excluded.

It appears that the other is an inevitability, and it is a fool’s errand to deny that. It is more meaningful to cultivate a mutually beneficial and positive-sum frame for interaction with the other.

It is not enough to say “I want to belong to groups, but not at the cost of exclusion.” I must have a principle that guides my behavior when I come into contact with those outside my group. This is where I think my value of Curiosity comes in.

You can belong to one group and not exclude others by being curious about them.

There have been two recent events in which I found myself belonging to an in-group whose members looked at others not with curiosity but to mock their otherness.

In both cases, there was a totalizing judgment made about the other, inferred from a limited reading of their behavior, set against the rules of belonging to that group. In both cases, it was class-related, about people wealthier than all the members of the group, and it happened at gatherings at my house.

One was about a person who chose to live a certain cosmopolitan way that didn’t appear authentic to a member of the in-group, and the second was about a person who had ‘rich people problems’ that seemed too trivial to another member of the in-group.

In each case, the behaviors of these two people were pitched as funny, as something to be mocked, because they did not evoke, say, an authentic enough aspiration for upward mobility and an almost Protestant struggle for it, which, I now realise serves as one of the many unstated criteria of belonging in this group.

I found both events incredibly concerning, and I was rather perturbed by my initial inclination to respond positively to these comments.

In the second instance, though, I did not let it pass without notice and pointed out how this reveals, both, the incredible fragility of the group and its belonging criteria, as well as, the implied tendency of the group members to look at the other as a subject more limited than the self.

There isn’t much one can say to that without sitting down and zooming out, and thankfully none of us have the time for that, so my comments were taken in the black-hat spirit that becomes my strength in most groups I find myself in, and received a laugh (?) as very witty and rightly contrarian.

All of this was also telling about my own future in the group and the precarity of my belonging to it. Because if the group can exclude others for stepping over the line of their belonging criteria, then maybe not today, but someday, I will most certainly behave in a way that wouldn’t make sense under the same criteria, and at that point, it appears, I will not be met with curiosity about me, my doing, or the limits of the group’s belonging, but instead, the mobbish tendencies of othering, limiting, being reductive, and mocking.

But all this said, curiosity too has a lot of nuance in practice and is not a one-size-fits-all blanket principle for relating to other people and belonging to groups. There has been enough said about the colonial anthropologist’s curiosity in documenting the colonial subject and its nefarious ends.

I think there is a lot more for me to think about and live through for a further refinement, but an early framework I have, related to many themes I have touched upon before, is beginning to be aware of the difference in curiosity-as-consumption, curiosity-as-witnessing, and curiosity-as-an-epistemic-practice. But sketching that out is for another day!

For now, I just hope I always remember to be curious when I come into contact with everyone strange and steer clear of exclusionary rhetoric for the sake of belonging.