What do you understand by Multiculturalism 7 Discuss Bhikhu Parekh’s views on Multiculturalism. (2017, 20 Marks)
Bhikhu Parekh draws a distinction at the outset. A society is multicultural as a matter of fact, when it contains several cultures. Multiculturalism is a normative response to that fact: the claim that cultural difference deserves public recognition and accommodation, so that no one is disadvantaged by the community into which they were born.
Understanding Multiculturalism
- The problem it answers. Uniform citizenship presents the majority’s language, calendar and customs as neutral. Minorities then carry costs the majority never notices, and resentment can turn into social conflict.
- Forms of diversity. Parekh separates subcultural diversity (lifestyles within a shared culture), perspectival diversity (critics of the dominant culture, such as feminists or ecologists) and communal diversity (self-conscious communities with their own ways of life). Multiculturalism concerns the third.
- Variants.
- Liberal multiculturalism. Will Kymlicka (Multicultural Citizenship, 1995) justifies minority rights by individual autonomy. National minorities get self-government; immigrant groups get polyethnic accommodations; disadvantaged groups get special representation, as with reservation for Dalits and Adivasis in India.
- Communitarian multiculturalism. Charles Taylor grounds it in the human need for recognition.
- Pluralist multiculturalism. Parekh values diversity itself and refuses to make liberalism the umpire.
Parekh’s Views: Rethinking Multiculturalism (2000)
- Cultural embeddedness. Humans share a common nature, but they live it through culture. A culture is a system of meaning that gives shape to life, so a person cannot be respected while their culture is dismissed. This applies to immigrants as much as to national minorities.
- Against moral monism. From Plato through Christian theology to classical liberalism, Western thought has held that one way of life is best. Liberalism, too, is a substantive doctrine, not a neutral umpire. Parekh therefore faults Kymlicka for tolerating only cultures that prize autonomy, and for ranking minorities without adequate justification.
- Cultures need each other. Every culture is partial and internally plural, a continuing argument among its own strands. Each learns about itself by meeting others, so diversity has value in its own right.
- Intercultural dialogue. When a minority practice such as polygamy, a dress code or ritual slaughter is contested, the starting point is the society’s operative public values: those embodied in its constitution, laws and civic relations. The minority offers its reasons, the majority responds, and either side may revise its position.
- Common belonging. A multicultural society needs a shared sense of belonging that rests on political commitment, not ethnicity, and is expressed through inclusive institutions.
- The Parekh Report. The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (2000), produced by a commission he chaired, described Britain as a community of citizens and a community of communities. Its remark that Britishness carried unspoken racial connotations caused a public storm.
Critique
- Brian Barry (Culture and Equality, 2001) argued that exemptions undermine equal law and weaken the common citizenship on which redistribution depends.
- Amartya Sen (Identity and Violence, 2006) warned against a “plural monoculturalism” that confines people within inherited identities.
- Operative public values give the majority’s status quo the home advantage, and dialogue supplies no rule for settling deadlock.
Indian Relevance
India’s Constitution anticipates Parekh: Articles 29–30, Article 25’s recognition of the Sikh kirpan, and plural personal laws. The Karnataka hijab dispute produced a split Supreme Court verdict (October 2022), leaving the question to a larger bench. It shows why reasoned public dialogue, not uniformity decreed from above, is needed.
Conclusion
Parekh moves multiculturalism beyond both liberal toleration and relativist enclaves. Its strength is to treat culture as constitutive of the self while keeping every culture open to reasoned challenge. Its weakness is procedural, since dialogue presumes the goodwill it is meant to create.