What Martin Luther King Jr. can teach us about our identity

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and I am reminded of a core principle that inspires my approach to life and my relationship with humanity.

MLK is one of my favorite leaders among all I've studied, and he had a special connection with my native land, India. This photo above is from his one visit to that country. He was drawn to going there in part because his thinking and his work was so influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, once writing, “while the Montgomery boycott was going on, India's Gandhi was the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.”?

In turn, Gandhi was very influenced by the American Transcendentalists. His novel approach of civil disobedience, which he used so effectively in South Africa and in India, was forged after he read Henri David Thoreau's essay on On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. Thoreau wrote this essay at the age of 32, encouraging readers toward deliberate disobedience of unjust laws. Gandhi was drawn to his idea that prison is where a just individual belongs under an unjust government, and referred to Thoreau as his "teacher".

And Thoreau's ideas were heavily influenced by India's scripture, the Bhagawad Gita. In his classic "Walden, or Life in the Woods" Thoreau wrote “I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial…The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges”

Here is the lesson all this teaches me. That none of us are monolithically one race, one nationality, one anything. Black, white, brown...the people who we admire, and who have shaped our civilization, have all opened themselves up to absorbing the best of every culture so they can express the best in themselves.

You might say, "Hitendra, but you only spoke about America's influence on India, and India's influence on America. What about the rest of the world?"

I focused on these two cultures to simplify my story, and because I have a special fondness for the land of my birth and the land of my residence. But it is not lost on me that Gandhi, for instance, was also strongly influenced by Tolstoy's "The Kingdom of God is Within You", and by the teachings of Jesus Christ. And these individuals were neither American, nor Indian.

"Well," you might say, "these are all men! There are no women involved." Then I would have to tell you about how deeply Gandhi was influenced by his wife Kasturba, and how Martin Luther King Jr. was shaped by his wife Coretta, of whom he wrote, "I am convinced that if I had not had a wife with the fortitude, strength, and calmness of Corrie, I could not have withstood the ordeals and tensions surrounding the movement." Or how King's most epic moment was catalyzed by Mahalia Jackson, a gospel singer who was on the podium with King on the steps of Lincoln Memorial that historic day when he gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. He would likely have not departed from his script to go on a soaring impromptu journey of sharing his dream in the second half of his speech if she had not, on an impulse, nudged him by saying in front of 300,000 people, "Tell them about the dream, Martin! Tell them about the dream."

That, perhaps, is the message Martin Luther King Jr. would most want us to take from his life today. That it is pointless to foment divisions across races and nations and genders. That we are all already part of each other -- that, as Walt Whitman once wrote, "I am large. I contain multitudes."