The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe
An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and
the solidarities we have yet to build
Mohan Jyoti Dutta
I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I
tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to
think.
Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that
matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a
university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical
socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was
never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this
not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you
see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the
margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit.
The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It did not cause
me alarm. It did not make me feel unsafe. I want to say that plainly, because a
great deal of the commentary that followed has worked hard to produce exactly
that feeling in people like me — to recruit Indians into a sense of collective
racial injury, as though the haka were aimed at us, at all of us, as a people.
That is not what I saw.
What I saw was pain. What I heard was the anguish of a people watching
their foundational constitutional covenant — Te Tiriti o Waitangi — being
dismantled by a government in which Parmar has played a conspicuous and
enthusiastic role. What I read in the haka was an expression of resistance to a
colonial structure that has, for over a century and a half, worked to
dispossess Māori of land, language, and political power. In that context, the
haka named a betrayal. It called out complicity. It refused the performance of
multicultural civility that is so often demanded of Indigenous peoples when
they are being actively harmed.
*
Now, let me also say this: there are elements of the haka that invoke
stereotypical depictions of Indians. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I
do not think it serves anyone — least of all the project of building genuine
solidarity — to look away from that. Stereotypes of Indians, like all racial
stereotypes, deserve critique. They flatten the extraordinary diversity of
South Asian communities into caricature. They erase the internal hierarchies of
caste, class, religion, region, and language that make “Indian” an almost
impossibly broad category. And they risk producing the very lateral violence
that undermines the coalitional work decolonisation demands.
But here is what the outrage industry around the haka conveniently leaves
out: these same stereotypes — the very tropes being decried — are not
Indigenous inventions. They are colonial inheritances. The British Crown
perfected the art of racial typology as an instrument of imperial governance.
Under colonial rule, Indian communities were catalogued, ranked, and sorted
into hierarchies of civilisational worth. Martial races and criminal tribes.
Loyal subjects and seditious agitators. The industrious and the indolent. These
categories were not descriptions of reality. They were technologies of control,
designed to divide colonised peoples against one another so that a relatively
small number of British administrators could govern a subcontinent of hundreds
of millions.
Divide and rule was not a metaphor. It was policy. The same British Crown
that partitioned Bengal in 1905, that engineered communal electorates to
fracture Hindu-Muslim solidarity, that set caste against caste and region
against region across the subcontinent — this same Crown signed Te Tiriti with
Māori rangatira and then spent the next century violating it. The colonial
playbook is remarkably consistent. And one of its most enduring legacies is the
way colonised peoples learn to see one another through the coloniser’s eyes.
So yes, stereotypes of Indians must be challenged. But the challenge
cannot stop at the surface of representation. It must go to the root: who
produced these stereotypes, and to what end? And — more uncomfortably — which
of us have internalised them so thoroughly that we now deploy them against
others?
*
This is where I want to turn inward, because the real reckoning here is
not with the haka. The real reckoning is with ourselves.
I grew up in a large joint family in India, in a household animated by
social justice and community work. But I also grew up inside the unspoken
architecture of caste. I know what it sounds like when upper caste Indians
speak about Adivasi communities — the Indigenous peoples of India. I know the
tone. The pity that is really contempt. The development rhetoric that is really
displacement. The assumption that tribal peoples are obstacles to progress,
that their attachment to land and forest is backwardness, that they would be
better off assimilated into the mainstream. I know this because I heard it at
dinner tables, in family conversations, in the ambient common sense of the
world I was raised in.
That same logic travels. It crosses oceans. It settles into diasporic
communities with remarkable ease, because it was never just about India. It is
a colonial logic, and it finds new hosts wherever colonised peoples encounter
Indigenous peoples whose presence and whose claims unsettle the settler
bargain.
In Aotearoa, this logic takes a specific and pernicious form. It is the
model minority ideology — the story we tell ourselves, and that the settler
state tells about us, to conscript us into the machinery of Indigenous
dispossession. The model minority does not need to be explicitly anti-Māori to
do anti-Māori work. It just needs to perform its own success loudly enough that
the comparison becomes implicit. We work hard. We contribute to the economy. We
don’t ask for handouts. The unspoken second half of every one of these
sentences is: unlike them.
I have heard Indians in Aotearoa say, without a trace of irony, that
Māori should be grateful to us. Grateful because we pay taxes. Grateful because
we staff hospitals and build businesses and send our children to good schools.
Grateful because our labour subsidises their welfare, their housing, their
dole. This is not just ignorance. It is the active reproduction of colonial
logic by people who should know better — people whose own grandparents lived
under the boot of the very same empire that dispossessed Māori.
The model minority performance draws its energy from the denigration of
tangata whenua. It thrives on imbibed colonial tropes: the Māori on the dole,
the criminal Māori, the Māori on welfare, the Māori who cannot help themselves.
These are not observations. They are narratives manufactured by settler
colonialism to justify ongoing dispossession. And when Indians repeat them — at
barbecues, in WhatsApp groups, at temple gatherings, over chai — we are doing
the coloniser’s work. We are earning our proximity to whiteness by stepping on
the people whose land we live on.
*
This is why the haka should make us pause. Not retreat into
defensiveness. Not reach for the easy outrage of wounded dignity. But pause,
and reflect.
Unlike Parmar, whose lazy articulation of racism and migrant dignity
easily obfuscates and erases her own central role in perpetuating anti-Māori
racism, those of us with Indian whakapapa owe ourselves a harder conversation.
Parmar invokes the language of racial harm to shield herself from
accountability for policies that actively harm Māori. She speaks of migrant
dignity while serving a government that has made the dismantling of Māori
rights a centrepiece of its legislative agenda. She wants us to see the haka as
an attack on Indians. I see her framing as an attack on solidarity — a
strategic deployment of racial grievance to prevent brown communities from
recognising our shared interest in opposing the structures that harm us all.
The critical reflection I am calling for is not comfortable. It requires
us to turn inward. To ask: what is our role, as settlers of colour in Aotearoa,
in perpetuating the disenfranchisement and marginalisation of Māori? What caste
logics do we carry into our engagement with tangata whenua? What colonial
tropes have we absorbed so deeply that we mistake them for common sense? What
role are we playing — actively, passively, through silence — in the erosion of
Te Tiriti?
And, just as importantly: what positive role can we play? What would it
look like for Indian communities in Aotearoa to stand alongside Māori in
genuine solidarity against the forces of white supremacy that seek to divide
and conquer us? What would it mean to honour Te Tiriti not as an abstract
principle but as a living commitment — one that shapes how we organise our
communities, how we raise our children, how we relate to the land we have been
welcomed onto?
*
The political landscape of Aotearoa in this moment demands that we see
the colonial architecture clearly. The coalition government operates through a
precise division of labour in its divide-and-rule strategy. One coalition
partner thrives on anti-migrant rhetoric, stoking fears of the foreign other,
performing border anxiety as political theatre. The other partner deploys
migrants — recruits us, flatters us, instrumentalises our aspirations — and
then points us at Māori. Upper caste Indians are easy recruits for this
project, because we arrive with our own inheritance of the disgusting caste
system, a system that has spent millennia naturalising hierarchy, teaching us
that some people are born to lead and others to serve, that proximity to power
is virtue, that those at the bottom deserve their suffering.
Caste did not stay behind when we boarded the plane. It travels in our
social networks, our marriage markets, our temple hierarchies, our assumptions
about who is deserving and who is not. And in the settler colonial context of
Aotearoa, caste finds a ready-made partner in anti-Māori racism. The two
systems feed each other. The contempt for Adivasi peoples in India and the
contempt for Māori in Aotearoa are not identical, but they share a grammar — a
grammar of civilisational ranking, of developmental hierarchy, of Indigenous
peoples as problems to be solved rather than nations to be honoured.
The haka confronts us with this grammar. It refuses it. And it asks us —
if we are willing to listen — to refuse it too.
*
I want to be careful here, because I am not suggesting that Indian
communities bear some unique or exceptional burden of racism. Racism in
Aotearoa is structurally white. The primary axis of colonial violence runs
between the Crown and Māori, between Pākehā settler society and tangata whenua.
Indians did not design this system. But we are not outside it. We are inside
it, and the question is always: on which side of the ledger do our actions
fall?
I think about the British Raj and how it recruited certain Indian
communities — upper caste, English-educated, administratively useful — into the
colonial apparatus. These communities did not hold ultimate power. The British
did. But they served the structure. They staffed the bureaucracies, collected
the revenues, enforced the laws. They were not colonisers, but they were
complicit in colonisation. And they were rewarded for it — with status, with
education, with the psychic wages of being considered more civilised than those
below them in the colonial hierarchy.
I see echoes of this in the way some Indian communities relate to the
settler state in Aotearoa. Not as its architects, but as its willing
functionaries. Not as white supremacists, but as beneficiaries of a system
organised around white supremacy. The model minority is not the coloniser. But
the model minority does colonial work.
Parmar is a particularly visible example of this dynamic, but she is not
an aberration. She is a product of the same forces that shape many of us. The
difference is that she has chosen to make anti-Māori politics her platform, her
brand, her career. She has chosen to serve a government that is systematically
attacking Te Tiriti, defunding Māori institutions, stripping away the modest
gains of decades of struggle. And when Māori respond to this with the political
and cultural tools available to them — including haka — she repositions herself
as the victim.
This inversion is textbook colonial strategy. The oppressor claims the
injury of the oppressed. The one doing harm cries out in pain. And the rest of
us are asked to choose sides in a contest that has been deliberately misframed.
*
I am not asking Indians in Aotearoa to feel guilty. Guilt is a useless
emotion in this context — self-indulgent, paralysing, and ultimately centring
the feelings of the privileged over the material conditions of the
dispossessed. What I am asking for is something harder: honest reckoning,
followed by action.
We need a critical pedagogy within our communities — one that recognises
the mutuality of the two coalition partners in spreading colonial divide and
rule. One that helps us see how anti-migrant rhetoric and anti-Māori racism are
not opposing forces but complementary ones, two arms of the same colonial body.
One that equips our young people to understand caste not as ancient history but
as a living system that shapes their relationships, their politics, and their
responsibilities in Aotearoa.
We need to build the kinds of relationships with Māori communities that
are grounded in genuine reciprocity, not transactional multiculturalism. This
means showing up. It means learning. It means accepting that solidarity is not
about inserting ourselves into Māori struggles but about doing our own work —
confronting casteism, challenging the model minority myth, refusing to be
recruited as foot soldiers in someone else’s war against tangata whenua.
And we need to understand Te Tiriti — really understand it, not as an
artefact of the past but as the constitutional foundation of this country, a
foundation that protects not just Māori rights but the possibility of justice
for all of us. When Te Tiriti is under attack, it is not just Māori who lose.
It is everyone who believes that the relationship between peoples and the Crown
should be governed by consent, by good faith, by mutual respect. If we cannot
see that, then we have not yet begun the work of decolonisation.
*
The haka was not comfortable. It was not meant to be. Haka is not
theatre. It is not spectacle. It is not a cultural ornament offered up for the
consumption of settlers. Haka is a political expression anchored in Māori
cultural logics of resistance, whakapapa, and relational accountability. It has
functioned, historically and in the present, as a language of refusal — refusal
of dispossession, refusal of erasure, refusal of silence. To read haka outside
of this political genealogy, to strip it of its epistemic grounding and recast
Indigenous resistance as incivility, is itself a deeply colonial move.
I read the haka as a reminder. A reminder of the careful and deliberate
work that is needed in building solidarities across communities that the
colonial state would prefer to keep divided. A reminder that the model minority
myth is a trap, not a compliment. A reminder that those of us who carry the
inheritances of caste and colonialism have a particular responsibility to
examine what we reproduce and what we refuse.
The haka was not directed at me. It was directed at a political project —
a project of Indigenous dispossession in which a woman of Indian heritage has
chosen to play a leading role. My responsibility, as an Indian in Aotearoa, is
not to defend that project. It is to dismantle the conditions that make it
possible.
Haka is not the problem. Our silence is.