Multiculturalism / Multicultural Democracy | PSIR Optional for UPSC

Introduction 

Multiculturalism is the co-existence of diverse cultures, where culture includes racial, religious, or cultural groups and is manifested in customary behaviors, cultural assumptions and values, patterns of thinking, and communicative styles.

Bhikhu Parekh’s views on Multiculturalism

Bhikhu Parekh advances a theory of multiculturalism (which he prefers to term a "perspective on human life"), in his book “Rethinking Multiculturalism” and then deploys this in analyzing most of the issues which confront multicultural societies from the appropriate structure of the polity, group representation, justice and rights through to questions of national and cultural identity, intercultural interaction, education, and gender relations.

Parekh's multicultural perspective can be summarized in three Central insights.

• First, human beings are deeply shaped by culture but not determined by it.  
• Second, different cultures represent different systems of meaning and visions of the good life. 
• Third, all cultures are internally plural, although not incoherent, which means that a culture cannot appreciate the value of others unless it appreciates the plurality within it. 

Bhikhu Parekh argues that multiculturalism occupies a middle position between two dominant strands of political theory-naturalism and culturalism.  It is useful to see the current debates about multiculturalism as an extension of liberal/communitarian debate because multiculturalists echo the communitarian’s concern that we recognize that we are social beings that are embedded in particular cultures and different cultural practices. 

• Multiculturalists, according to Parekh, share the conviction that cultural plurality must figure prominently in our theorizing about how we ought to live together collectively as a society. 
• Parekh’s thesis on multiculturalism stems firstly out of a rejection of relativism and monism and subsequently from the claim that liberal attempts to respond to the fact of multiculturalism do not take the concept of culture seriously enough.

Multiculturalism is not about difference and identity but about those that are embedded in and sustained by culture; that is, a body of beliefs and practices in terms of which a group of people understand themselves and the world and recognize their individual and collective lives.