Sudhir Kakar & Katharina Kakar, Indians Portrait of a People, New Delhi, Penguin Books, [2007], 2009
INTRODUCTION
…. Of course, in an individual Indian the civilizational heritage may be modified and overlaid by the specific cultures of his family, caste, class or ethnic group. Yet an underlying sense of Indian identity continues to persist, even into the third or fourth generation in the Indian diasporas around the world….—p.1 [Indian]
Identity is not a role, or a succession of roles,.. is not a garment that can; it is not ‘fluid’, but marked by a sense of continuity and sameness irrespective of where the person finds himself during the course of his life….—p. 1 [identity]
… It is {Identity} not something he has chosen, but something that has seized him. It can hurt, be cursed or bemoaned but cannot be discarded, though it can always be concealed from others or, more tragic, from one’s own self.—p. 2 {identity}
…Like the proverbial river one never steps into twice, one also never uses the same brain twice….In other words, the possibilities of ‘fluid’ and changing identities in adulthood are rather limited and, moreover, rarely touch the deeper layers of the psyche. So, in a sense, we are Spanish or Korean-or Indian-much before we make the choice or identify this as an essential part of our identity.—p. 2 [identity]
…Yet from ancient times, European, Chinese and Arab travelers have identified common features among India’s peoples. They have borne witness to an underlying unity in apparent diversity, a unity often ignored or unseen in recent times because our modern eyes are more attuned to spotting divergence than resemblance….—p. 3 [India]
In more recent times, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote in his The Discovery of India
The unity of India was no longer merely an intellectual conception for me; it was an emotional experience which overpowered me… It was absurd, of course, to think of India or any country as a kind of anthropomorphic entity. I did not do so… Yet I think with a long cultural background and a common outlook on life develops a spirit that is peculiar to it and that is impressed on all its children, however much they may differ among themselves. {J. L. Nehru, The Discovery of India, Calcutta: Signet Press, 1946, p. 30}—p. 3 [India]
Indian-ness, then, is about similarities produced by an overarching Indic, pre-eminently Hindu civilization that has contributed the lion’s share to what we would call the ‘cultural gene pool’ of India’s peoples. In other word, Hindu culture patterns….have played a very major role in the construction of Indian-ness….—p. 4 [India, Hindu]
We do no mean to imply that Indian identity is a fixed (p.4) constant, unchanging through the march of history. Indic civilization has remained in constant ferment through the processes of assimilation, transformation, re-assertion and re- creation that happened in the wake of its encounters with other civilizations and cultural forces, such as those that came with the advent of Islam in medieval times and European colonialism in the more recent past. Virtually no part of Indic civilization has remained unaffected by these encounters, be it classical music, architecture, ‘traditional Indian cuisine or Bollywood musical scores. Indic civilization has not so much absorbed as translated foreign cultural forces into its own idiom, unmindful or even oddly proud of all that is lost in translation. The contemporary buffeting of this civilization by a West-centric globalization is only the latest in a long line of invigorating cultural encounters that can be called ‘clashes’ only from the shortest of time frames and narrowest of perspectives. Indic civilization, as separate from though related to Hinduism as a religion, is thus the common patrimony of all Indians, irrespective of their professed faith.—pp. 4-5 [India, Civilization, West]
…Indian polity, where various groups clamour for recognition of their differences, the awareness of a common Indian-ness, the sense of ‘unity within diversity’, is often absent. Like the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges’ remark on the absence of camels in the Quran because they were not exotic enough to the Arabs to merit attention, the camel of Indian-ness is invisible to or taken for granted by most Indians….—p. 5 [India]
…This is why in spite of persistent academic disapproval, people (including academics in their unguarded moments) continue to speak of ‘the Indians’—as they do of ‘the Chinese’, “the Europeans’ or ‘the Americans’—as a necessary and legitimate short cut to a more complex reality.—p. 6 {India]
…We suspect that Hindus belonging to the upper and middle castes will see a picture in which they will find many features that are intimately familiar. Others at the margins of Hindu society (such as the dalits and tribals, or the Christians and Muslims) will spot only fleeting resemblances. Even in the case of Hindus, who constitute over eighty per cent of India’s population, the portrait is not a photograph. But neither is it a cubist representation à la Picasso where the subject is barely recognizable….—p. 6 [Hindu]
We are also aware that what we are attempting here is an unfashionable ‘big picture’, a ‘grand narrative’ that may be regarded with reflexive hostility by many who profess the postmodernist credo. Yes, there is a speculative quality in this exercise of settling on certain patterns of Indian-ness as central. Yet without the big picture-whatever its flaws of inexactness- the smaller, local pictures, however accurate, will be myopic, a mystifying jumble of trees without the pattern of the forest.—p. 6 [India,]
In an article titled ‘Where rank alone matters’, the well-known Indian journalist Sunanda K. Datta-Ray writes….India is not a country for the anonymous, he concludes. You must be somebody to survive with dignity, since rank is the only substitute for money…..{S. K. Datta-Ray, ‘Where Rank Alone Matters’, The Times of India, July 2005}—p. 7 [hierarchy, India]
The need to be noticed, to stand out from an anonymous mass, is, of course, not uniquely Indian but a part of the narcissistic heritage of all human beings….—p. 8 [attention]
…Indians are perhaps the world’s most undemocratic people, living in the world’s largest and most plural democracy.—p. 8 [India]
…There are six basic nursery sounds, a universal baby language used by infants all over the world with only slight variation from one society to another.{M. Lewis, Language, Thought and Personality in Infancy and Childhood (New York: Basic Books, 1964), p. 33} These ‘words’ are repeated combinations of the vowel sound ‘ah’ preceded by different consonants—‘dada’, ‘mama’, ‘baba’, ‘nana’, ‘papa’ and ‘tata’…..In most Western countries, only a few of these repetitive sounds, for example, ‘mama’, ‘dada’ or ‘papa’, are recognized and repeated by the parents and thus reinforced in the infant….—p. 14 [language]
…In India, it is not the rupture but the stretching of traditional values that becomes a means for the young person to realize his dreams for life….—p. 15 [India]
…Guilt and its attendant anxiety are aroused only when individual actions go against the principle of primacy of relationships, not when ‘foreign’, different ethical standards of honesty, equity and justice are breached.—p. 16
….Charisma, then, plays an unusually significant role among Indians and is a vital constituent of effective leadership in institutions. In contrast to most people in the West, Indians are generally more prone to revere than admire.—p. 17
…there is a strong preference for an authoritative, even autocratic (but not authoritarian) leader who is strict, demanding but also caring and nurturing—very much like the karta, the paternalistic head of the extended family….—p. 18 [authority, India]
The absence of a democratic mode of functioning in Indian institutions is not resented as long as those in leadership positions develop a close personal relationship with the led….—p. 19 [Leader, India]
…Most accept that people in authority will make a distinction between their ‘own people’ and those who are not in the same privileged position. They have a sneaking sympathy for a senior politician’s incredulous reaction to a journalist who questioned the appointment of the politician’s son to a high post within his party: ‘Who else will I appoint? Your son?’ If there is one ‘ism’ that governs Indian society and its institutions, it is familyism.—p. 20 [India, dynastic]
…international comparison is humane orientation, that is, the degree to which people are caring, altruistic, generous and kind. (The lowest here is Germanic Europe. Closely related to humane orientation, although as its opposite, is assertiveness, the degree to which the culture’s people are assertive, confrontational and aggressive. Here, next only to Scandinavia, South Asia is the least assertive culture; Germanic Europe and Eastern Europe, in that order, are the most aggressive and confrontational….—p. 21 [West, aggressive]
…Combining humane orientation with a high power distance produces the kind of Indian leader we have discussed earlier: authoritative but not autocratic, sometimes despotic perhaps, but generally benevolent—p. 21 [Indian, leader]
South Asia also scores the highest on in-group collectivism, that is, the degree to which people feel loyalty toward such small groups as their family or circle of friends (Scandinavia, followed by Germanic Europe and North America, scores the least)….—p. 22 [individualism, society]
…As a North Indian proverb, addressed to men, pithily puts it: ‘Treat a son like a king for the first five years, like a slave for the next ten and like a friend thereafter.’—p. 22 [son]
If marriage and kingship are its body, the hierarchy is soul of caste….—p. 27 [caste]
…As the Marathi poet Govindraj pus it, Hindu society is made up of men ‘Who bow their heads to the kicks from above and who simultaneously give a kick below, never thinking to resist the one or refrain from the other….’{Cited in Irawati Karwe, ‘What is Caste?’ Economic Weekly 11, 1959, p. 157}—p. 27 [hierarchy]
…To give another example, ‘noble’ (ashraf) Muslims, descended from Turks, Arabs and Persians who settled in India during the eight hundred years of Muslim suzerainty, look down upon and discriminate against the vast majority of their ‘base’ (ajlaf) coreligionists whose forefathers were low-caste indigenous converts. Even lower than the ajlaf are the arzal, the Muslim counterparts of the untouchables of Hindu society.—p. 28 [caste, Islam]
…In spite of the absence of any prohibition on changing one’s religious faith, and the well-known Hindu respect for all manner of theological currents and openness to a wide variety of spiritual beliefs, it was the prospect of being together with untouchable converts in the same congregation that acted as a powerful deterrent to conversion….—p. 28 [caste, conversion, Hindu]
‘…It is an abuse of language to say we Hindus extend any toleration towards our Panchama brothers. We have degraded them and then have the audacity to use their very degradation against their rise.’ [Gandjiji]—p. 30 [untouchability]
…There is no parallel in India, for instance, to the Western scatological fixations in speech. Equivalents of ‘Merde!”, “Shit!’, ‘Scheisse!’ are not common expressions of frustration in any Indian language; nor is there any counterpart to ‘Asshole!’ or ‘Arschloch!’ as a familiar term of abuse that gives vent to infantile rage—Indians prefer various incestuous possibilities instead. In other words, it is not in India but in European and Anglo-American speech that one hears the long-postponed vengeance of a child forced to control its bowels…..—p. 31 [India, West]
All young children, everywhere in the world, try to disown their ‘bad’, socially disapproved dirtiness by projecting it outside. It is first projected on to animals and later to other people and groups of people—’reservoirs’, as the psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan calls them.{S. Anandalakshmy, ed., The Girl Child and the Family (Delhi: Dept. of Womena nd Child Development, Ministry of HRD, Government of India, 1994}7 These reservoirs are available to the child as a pre-selection by his own caste group. Since ages, the untouchables have been the selected reservoir of dirtiness for the upper-caste child, just as Muslims were and still are for Hindus (and vice versa). It is significant that Gandhi recollects his mother telling him when he was a child that the shortest cut to purification after touching an untouchable was to cancel the touch by an even dirtier one—by touching a Muslim.8 {M. K. Gandhi, ‘Speech at Suppressed Classes Conference April 13, 1921’, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 23}—p. 32 [Untouchability, Islam]
Viewing an antagonistic group as dirty, and thus subhuman, whereas one’s own cleanliness is not only humanely civilized but next to godliness, is commonplace in ethnic conflict. ‘Dirty nigger’ and ‘dirty Jew’ are well-known epithets in the United States. The Chinese regard Tibetans as unwashed and perpetually stinking of yak butter, while Jewish children in Israel are brought up to regard Arabs as dirty. In the Rwandan radio broadcasts inciting the Hutus to massacre the Tutsis, the latter were consistently called rats and cockroaches, creatures associated with dirt and underground sewers, vermin that needed to be exterminated.—p. 32 [untouchability]
…We see the reflection of this psychological predilection in the immaculate cleanliness inside Indian homes and the garbage dumped outside into public spaces. As has been perceptively remarked by many before us, Indians are a very clean people who live in a filthy country.—p. 35 [clean, pure, Indian]
…in India, caste almost always trumps gender in the sense that a brahmin woman will have higher status than a low-caste man…..—p. 41 [caste]
Your spirit only seeks a single quest
So never learns to know its brother
Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast
And one would gladly sunder from the other.—Goethe.—p. 42 [conflict]
These, then, are the objective facts of discrimination against daughters in traditional India. But what is the subjective reality? How is a factual discrimination viewed by the girls themselves? We know that what is psychologically significant is not what has happened to us but what we believe occurred….—p. 47 [discrimination]
From anthropological accounts and other sources, we know of the affection and often compassionate attention bestowed by mothers on their daughters throughout their lives. ‘I turn the stone flour mill with the swiftness of a running deer’ that is because my arms are strong with the mother’s milk I drank.’ This and other similar couplets sung by women all over India bear witness to the daughter’s memory of her mother’s affection for her and to the self-esteem and strength of will this has generated in turn.—p. 49 [woman]
..Thus in folk tales, however many sons a couple may have, there is often one daughter in their midst who is the parents’ favourite.—p. 49 [daughter, woman]
…The much-maligned Hindu law giver Manu is only a qualified misogynist. His infamous pronouncements against women are limited to younger women: ‘The teacher is ten times more venerable than the sub-teacher, the father a hundred times more than the teacher, but the mother is a thousand times more than the father.” [‘The Laws of Manu’, trans. G. Buhler, in M. Mueller, ed., Sacred Books of the East, vol. 2.5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886), 56. –Sudhir Kakar and Katharina Kakar, The Indian Portrait of a People, New Delhi, Penguin Books, 2007, p. 51
What happens to love in an arranged marriage? Is it fated to remain a dream, an unslaked thirst? Must it be completely submerged in the arranged marriage’s ideal of safety? An arranged marriage does not quite obliterate the allure of the dream of love, although it must be admitted that it mutes the dream’s vivid colours. Studies show that in the case of poor women in traditional India, the expectations from a potential husband are pretty basic: ‘He should not drink or beat me, and support me and the family’. {T. K. Sundari Ravindran, ‘Female Autonomy in Tamil Nadu’, Economic and Political Weekly, April, World in L. Bennett et al., Gender and Poverty in India: A world Bank Country Study (Washington, D. C.: World Bank, 1991), 38} Women belonging to higher strata may have additional expectations, namely that the husband be educated, have a salaried employment and be ‘modern’ in the sense of not unduly restricting the freedom of his wife. In the upper classes, where the expectations are even greater, young women still do not enter marriage with as high hopes as in the West. The woman does not expect, as is often the case in Western societies, that the partner will satisfy all her emotional needs and longings, that her husband will not only be an adult sexual man but also a father, mother, a little baby boy and a twin brother (and vice versa in the case of a man). Her demands on the husband, mostly unconscious, to fulfil these multiple roles—rather than their being spread over the larger family as in India—can certainly be a source of disquiet in Western marriages.—p. 63 [India, marriage]
The persistence and importance of the jodi for the woman’s sense of identity helps us comprehend better why many women, in spite of their economic independence, choose to suffer humiliation rather than leave an oppressive husband; why some women, in times of extreme marital stress and burning rage towards the spouse, exercise the option of suicide rather than separation. It is the persistence of this ideal which explains why a woman, from any class, is apt to deny the presence of marital problems, such as a husband’s alcohol abuse and violence, in order to hold aloft the portrait of a happy couple. To confess to an unhappy marriage is not only (p. 64) to reconcile one’s self to the loss of a cherished personal goal but also betray a powerful cultural ideal.—pp. 64-65 [Indian, marriage, woman]
…In other words, the dream of love remains necessary for marriage. The difference is that in Indian marriages this love has a different quality; it is less romantically or erotically imperious and does not have to prefigure marriage but can waft in gently afterwards, sometimes years later, when the couple is well into adulthood.—p. 65 [marriage, India]
…Except for a minuscule upper class, these conditions hold substantially true for the rest of Indian society. The hormonal pressure created by enforced celibacy during youth and a lack of experience with the opposite sex ensure that the young person is biologically and emotionally primed to fall in love if the marriage partner is even reasonably satisfactory.—p. 65 [marriage]
…Compared to the conservative sexual attitudes and oppressive mores of today, the stance of ancient Hindus towards the erotic and sensual life, at least as it comes to us in literary and scholarly texts, as also in temple sculptures, seems to belong to another galaxy. The terrain of ancient Indian sexuality is home to a siren’s song to which most contemporary Indians continue to shut their ears.—p. 71
…Indeed, Shvetaketu Auddalaki, the legendary composer of the first textbook on sex, was credited with trying to put an end to unbridled sexual coupling and profligacy in relation to intercourse with married women which is so (p.73) prominent in the Mahabharata. Prior to Shvetaketu’s treatise, both married and unmarried women were viewed as items for indiscriminate consumption, ‘like cooked rice’. Shvetaketu was the first to make the novel suggestion that men should not generally sleep with the wives of others.—pp. 73-74 [adultery, sex]
…In the final analysis, though, given the fact that the text was composed by a man primarily for the education of other men, the fostering of a woman’s sexual subjectivity is ultimately in the service of increasing the man’s pleasure. The Kamasutra recognizes that a woman who actively enjoys sex will make it much more enjoyable for her male partner.—p. 76 [sex]
The porosity, the surrender, the identification and the idealization, are not a part of the erotic love we find in the Kamasutra or, for that matter, in the classical literature of that period. In Sanskrit and Tamil love poems, as in the textbooks of erotics, the beloved is a partner who is a source of excitement and delight, enlivening the senses but not a beacon for the soul. She is to be explored thoroughly, in enormous detail, and therefore she is not quickly abandoned. Yet her inner life or her past and future are not subjects of entrancement; the impulse is not of fierce monogamy.
For most modern readers who have an affinity for the personal and the subjective, this emphasis on love as a depersonalized voluptuous state, while delighting the senses, does not touch the heart….—p. 79 [sex]
…In Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda, perhaps the swansong of this era which was coming to an end by the twelfth century, after their ecstatic lovemaking has subsided in orgasmic release, a playful Radha (the emblem of the human soul) asks Krishna (an incarnation of the divine) to rearrange her clothes and tousled hair:
Paint a leaf on my breasts,
lay a girdle on my hips,
twine my heavy braid with flowers,
fix rows, of bangles on my hands
and jewelled anklets on my feet.’
Her yellow-robed lover
did what Radha said.{Jayadeva, Gita Govinda, tr., Barbara Stoler Miller, New York: Columbia University Press, 1977, p. 89}12
Jayadeva, legend has it, hesitant to commit sacrilege by having god touch Radha’s feet, a sign of abnegation, had been unable to write the last lines and had gone out to bathe; when he returned he found that Krishna himself had completed the verse in his absence….—p. 83 [poem, bhakti]
…As we look back over the centuries, the Indians of a bygone era are involved in the metaphysical questions raised by death, certainly. Yet they do not let the search for answers dominate the living of their lives; nor do they withdraw from life’s possible joys because of the probable sorrows….—p. 84
….Indian sexuality remains deeply conservative if not puritanical, lacking that erotic grace which frees sexual activity from the imperatives of biology, uniting the partners in sensual delight and metaphysical openness.
Many observers wonder as to what could have happened to the same people who produced the Kamasutra to turn (p. 84) contemporary Indian eroticism into a sexual wasteland, a country where till recently kissing was banned in films yet where temple panels in Khajuraho and Konarak blithely show he pleasures of oral sex. Some blame the Muslim invasions and the medieval Muslim rule, although there is little evidence that Islam is a sexually repressive creed. At least in the upper classes, sexual love in most Islamic societies has been marked by a cheerful sensuality.{A. Bouhdiba, La Sexualite en Islam (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975)} Indeed, a number of hadiths, the Commentaries on the Quran, strongly favour the satisfaction of the sexual instinct. At least, that is, for the privileged male.
Others blame the Victorian morality of British colonial rule, itself the consequence of Christianity’s uneasy relationship with the body, for a state of affairs where modern Indians are embarrassed by Khajuraho’s sculptures and feel the need to explain them away in convoluted religious metaphors and symbols or to dismiss them as products of a ‘degenerate’ era.
For the ‘fault’, if it can be called one, one must look within Hindu culture itself, to its holding fast to the ascetic ideal and the virtues of celibacy. At the same time that the Kamasutra came into existence, there were other texts painting scary pictures of what the loss of semen could entail for the man and elaborating a whole mythology of the woman ‘draining’ the man in the sexual act. This near-primal fear, intimately linked with the Hindu concept of purity and impurity, results from the belief that what is most pure needs the greatest protection. Semen, the purest bodily product of a man and the source of his power, needs to be protected from the woman’s ferocious and insatiable desire….—pp. 84-85 [sex, Islam]
…The physiology of Ayurveda maintains that food is converted into semen in a thirty-day period by successive transformations (and refinements) through blood, flesh, fat, bone and marrow till semen is distilled-forty drops of blood producing one drop of semen. Each ejaculation involves a loss of half an ounce of semen, which is equivalent to the vitality produced by the consumption of sixty pounds of nourishing food. In another calculation with similar pedagogic intent, each act of copulation is equivalent to an energy expenditure of twenty-two hours of concentrated mental activity or seventy- two hours of hard physical labour.—p. 87 [sex]
Sexuality is notorious for not conforming to the commands of the culture’s moral guardians….—p. 89 [sex]
…It needs to be noted here that this idealized image of the ‘good mother’ is largely a male construction. Indian women do not sentimentalize their mothers in this way. For daughters, the mother is not an adored and adoring figure on a pedestal; she is a more earthy presence, not always benign but always there….—p. 96 [mother, woman]
….As the late folklorist and poet A. K. Ramanujan has observed, Indian men tend to repress their independence from their mothers while, in contrast, Western men tend to repress their dependence.{A. K. Ramanujan, ‘The Indian Oedipus’, in E. Lowell and A. Dundes, eds., Oedipus: A Folklore Casebook, New York: Garland, 1984, p. 254}—p. 97 [India]
…Muslim theologians in India held that the Prophet advocated severest punishment for sodomy.33 Islamic culture in India, though, also had a Persian cast wherein homoeroticism is celebrated in literature. In Sufi mystical poetry, in Persian and later in Urdu, the relationship between the divine and the human was expressed in homoerotic metaphors….—p. 103 [Islam]
33 se Saleem Kidwai’s Introduction to Part 3 of R. Vanita and S. Kidwai, eds., Same-Sex Love in India, New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000, 107-22.
…At least among the upper classes of Muslims, the ‘men of refinement’, pederasty became an accepted outlet for a man’s erotic promptings, as long as he continued to fulfil his duties as a married man.—p. 104
…a person is simultaneously a body, the self and a social being….—p. 109 [man]
…Death is opposed to birth, not life….—p. 130 [death]
…whereas a consequence of the Western body image is to see sickness as something foreign and “poisonous’ inside the body (bacteria, virus, etc.) that needs to be rooted out, the traditional Indian view regards ill-health as a disturbance of harmony between the body and its environment that needs to be corrected and balance restored.—p. 132 [sickness]
…One can almost say that religious post-modernism has been realized in India: “Anything goes”.{A. Michaels, Der Hinduismus: Geshichte und Gegenwart (Hinduism: History and Present) Munich: Beck Verlag, 1998, pp. 17-18}—p. 135 [India]
…In this defensive mobilization, the primary role assigned to the woman is that of a carrier and mediator of tradition while the man’s role is that of the provider and protector.—p. 136 [Hindu Nationalism]
…Universality for the Hindu is the conviction that the fundamental insights of his faith also lie at the heart of all other religions. In other words, the ‘foreign belief’ is ultimately always a part of one’s own…..—p. 139
…. ‘I do not want my house to be walled on all sides and its windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.’{M. M. Joshi, ‘Need for Selective Globalization;, Organizer, 21 May 2000}—Gandhi, p. 140
…for instance, whereas Jesus Christ may sometimes find mention as a figure worthy of emulation and respect in nationalist writings (a courtesy not extended to Prophet Mohammed), traditional Vaishnava gurus have little difficulty transforming him into a son of Krishna, to give him the status of an avatar (incarnation of Vishnu), or to illustrate their teachings with examples from the Gospel and the lives of Christian saints.9 But greater tolerance tends to go together with greater indifference and the Hindu traditionalist, in contrast to the nationalist, is much less concerned with the impact of globalization on his faith, tending to regard this issue, if he at all considers it worthy of his attention, as one concerned with finding ‘Western answers for Western questions.’—p. 141 [Hindu, Christ]
….the theme of its universality is uncontested within Hinduism….—p. 142 [Hinduism]
…He worries whether in placing so much emphasis on universality, on the Vedic dictum of ‘Vasudhaiva kutumbakam’ (the universe is one family), the Hindus have not sacrificed the possibility of a community feeling and a necessary unity which they have lacked in the past and which they need to face the challenge of other faiths. He is concerned whether the concept of ‘Vishuabandhutva’ (universal brotherhood) has not led to a weakening of ‘Deshbandhutva’ (national brotherhood) and ‘Dharmabandhutva’ (religious brotherhood).{A. Pandya, Hindu Thought and World Harmony (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1989, 51-2} In other words, there are two conflicting souls, of universality and nationalism, of Hindu dharma tolerance and Hindutva militancy, that are struggling within the Hindu nationalist’s breast.—p. 143 [Hindu, Nationalism]
…This claim to universality which we also encountered in the case of the Hindu nationalist is articulated in the symbol of the Sathya Sai Baba community: a five-petalled lotus which has the Hindu Om, the Christian cross, the Zoroastrian fire emblem, the Buddhist wheel and the Islamic crescent and star depicted on its petals.—p. 148
…Equating globalization with consumerism and cynicism toward such traditional Hindu values as restraint on the satisfaction of material and sensual desires, and locating its threat in the flexible Hindu within the country, the nationalist (p.150) solution is pithily stated by Swami Chinmayananda, a founder of the VHP: ‘Let us convert Hindus to Hinduism and then everything would be all right.’….—pp. 150-151
Gandhi’s observation on the importance of finding a solution to the conflict for India’s future integrity and wellbeing continues to be valid, although he may not have sufficiently appreciated that what appears to be a perennial conflict between India’s two largest communities is not about religion. That is, it is not about matters of religious belief, dogmas, worship or adherence to different faiths and gods. Most knowledgeable commentators have identified factors other than religion as the root cause of an ostensibly religious conflict. Yet while there is near unanimity on the conflict not being religious, there is a singular lack of agreement on its root cause.—p. 152
… According to liberal historians, the large-scale violence between the two communities, which began to spread in between nineteenth century, was chiefly because of colonialism, namely the British policy of deliberately strengthening Muslim identity because of the threat of Indian nationalism in which Hindus played a prominent part….—p. 153
It is interesting to note that generally a Hindu’s self-identification as a Hindu occurs only when he talks of the Muslim; otherwise the conversations on his affiliation are more in terms of caste. A Hindu is born only when the Muslim enters the scene. Hindus cannot think of themselves as such without a simultaneous awareness of the Muslim’s presence. This is not so for Muslims, who do not need Hindus for self-awareness. The presence of the Hindu may increase the Muslim’s sense of his religious identity but does not constitute it’ (p.157)
….Besides expressing moral outrage, rape rumours may also be used by the men as an unwanted but wished for vicarious satisfaction of their sadistic impulses. Perfectly ordinary men talk at length about rape and defilement in graphic language otherwise encountered only in extreme, psychopathic pornography.—p. 171
Every civilization has a unique way of looking at the world This world view, the civilization’s centre of gravity, is a cluster of ideas which define the goal of human existence, the ways to reach this goal, the errors to be avoided and the obstacles to be expected on the way…..—p. 180 [civilization]
… A predominant feature of the Chinese world view is a sense of duty rather than the demand for rights.—p. 181
Three interlinked elements comprise a major part of the Hindu world view: moksha, dharma and karma…..—p. 181
…The ironic vision of life, which brings a detached and self-deprecating perspective on the tragic and in which gods have feet of clay, is rarely found among Indians. Even among those living in enclaves of Western modernity, an ironic stance towards the spiritual is at the most an affectation of a few young people which normally disappears as they begin to age….—p. 183 [spiritual, India]
In lessening the burden of the individual’s responsibility for his actions, the cultural view of right action alleviates the guilt suffered in some societies by those whose actions transgress rigid thou-shalt and thou-shalt-not axioms. Instead, an Indian’s actions are governed by a more permissive and gentle, but more ambiguous, thou-canst-but-try ethos……The ethical relativism of dharma supports tradition and modernity, innovation and conformity.
The ethical relativism of dharma has been broadened by the late poet-scholar A.K. Ramanujan to embrace the very way Indians think in most situations. In his stimulating essay ‘Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?2 Ramanujan begins his exposition with a survey of Indian intellectuals done some thirty years ago where they were asked to describe the ‘Indian Character’. As one can imagine, given the Indian talent for self-criticism, the intellectuals wrote quite sharp comments. They all seemed to agree on one thing: the Indian trait of hypocrisy. Indians don’t mean what they say, and say different things at different times. Many occidental travellers in the last centuries complain about the same thing and, in fact, in the (p. 187) famed Indologist Max Mueller’s lectures of 1883 on India, he felt compelled to counter these accusations by writing a chapter called ‘Truthful Character of Indians’.3—pp. 187-188 [India]
2 A.KI. Ramanujan, ‘Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?’ in M. Marriott, ed., India through Hindu Categories (Newbury, California: Sage, 1990), 41-58}
3 F. Max Mueller, India: What can it Teach us? (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000.
There is no notion of a universal human nature in Indian culture and thus we cannot deduce ethical rules like ‘Man shall not kill’ or ‘Man shall not tell an untruth’ or any other unitary law for all men. What a person should or should not do depends on the context….—p. 188 [moral, relativism]
…The nature of punishment, of course [for adultery], depends on the respective castes of the adulterous couple and there are also exceptions, such as the one which condones adultery with ‘the wives of actors and singers’.—p. 189 [caste, India]
Context-sensitivity is not just a feature of traditional moral law but extends to many areas of contemporary Indian life and thought…..—p. 189 [Bible, community, society, identity]
…Americans characterize a person with abstract, generic words like ‘good’, ‘nice’, while the Oriyas use more concrete, contextual descriptions like ‘he helps me’, ‘brings sweets’, etc. The descriptions provided by the Indians were more situation- specific and more relational than those of Americans. Indian descriptions focus on behaviour. They describe what was done, where it was done, and to whom or with whom it was done…. [Richard Shweder and E. J. Bourne, ‘Does the Concept o the Person vary Cross-Culturally?’ in R. Shweder adR. LeVine, eds., Culture Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 158-99} ]—p. 190
If truth is relative, something you are never destined to know, then there is no choice but to be tolerant of the truth of others….The roots of the vaunted Hindu tolerance [like that in the story of six blind man arguing over the nature of an elephant}, then, may well lie in this context- dependent way of thinking. Yet because of its intimate connection with matters of religious faith, to a person’s deepest values, this particular civilizational heritage of ethical action being inseparable from its context does show some variation across religious communities. (p. 190)
When we look at the moral judgements of Hindus and Muslims on their interactions with each other, both in times of peace and conflict. There are many such interactions in normal times: eating with a member of the opposite community, working with him, punishing a member of the other community who is making fun of your religious symbols or insulting a woman of your community. And then there are the interactions during a riot: killing, arson and rape. As compared to the Muslims, the Hindus were much more relativistic and contextual in judging a behaviour as a transgression and more easy-going in proposing punishment for actions judged as wrong. Irrespective of age and gender, ‘It all depends’ was an almost reflexive response. When it came to cases of interaction with the Muslims, the answers were almost always framed in terms of a context, temporal or spatial. The linkage of morality with time would be typically expressed thus: ‘ [Killing] was wrong when times were different but it is not wrong now.’ The individual can thus convincingly state that an action is wrong in right times but right in wrong times. Similarly, space is also involved in moral judgements. Hindus often said that actions such as beating up a Muslim or arson or looting of Muslim shops during a riot were wrong if you lived in a Muslim-majority area but all right if you were living in a Hindu-majority neighbourhood. As a result of this contextual stance, wrong actions by the members of one’s own community evoked far less emotion and righteousness than the corresponding actions among the Muslims. In this particular instance Muslims were more definite and unambiguous about which actions were right and which were clearly wrong, even during a riot.
The moral relativism of the Hindu mind is not an absence of moral code but only a more context-sensitive way of looking at and dealing with its violation. In many ways, Hindus are extremely strict in their definition of what constitutes (p. 191) a deviation from morality….—pp. 190-192
The high cultural value placed on connection is, of course, most evident in the individual’s relationships with others. The yearning for relationships, for the confirming presence of loved ones and the psychological oxygen they provide, is the dominant modality of social relations in India, especially within the family. Individuality and independence are not values that are cherished….
The high value placed on connection does not mean that an Indian is incapable of functioning when he is by himself or that he does not have a sense of his own agency. What it does imply is his greater need for ongoing mentorship, guidance and help from others in getting through life and a greater vulnerability to feelings of helplessness when these ties are strained.
The yearning for relationships, for the confirming presence of loved ones and the distress aroused by their unavailability in time of need, are more hidden in Western societies. There the dominant value system prizes autonomy, privacy and self-actualization, and holds that individual independence and initiative are ‘better than mutual dependence and community. But it depends, of course, on the culture’s vision of a ‘good society’ and ‘individual merit’ whether a person’s behaviour on the scale between fusion and isolation is nearer the pole of merger and fusion with others or the pole of complete isolation.—p. 197
…In India, as compared to modern European and North American cultures, the optimum position entails the acceptance of more pain in order to get greater warmth.—p. 198
…The Indian body image, then, stresses an unremitting interchange taking place with the environment, simultaneously accompanied by a ceaseless change within the body. Moreover, in the Indian view, there is no essential difference between body and mind. The body is merely the gross form of matter (sthulasharira), just as the mind is a more subtle form of the same matter (sukshmasharira); both are different forms of the same body-mind matter-sharira.
In contrast, the Western image is of a clearly etched body, sharply differentiated from the rest of the objects in the universe….—p. 198
‘The Indian mind has a harder time experiencing and expressing anger and guilt but is more comfortable than the Western individualistic psyche in dealing with feelings of sympathy and shame’….—p. 199
…In a postmodern accentuation of ‘fluid identities’ and a transitional attitude toward relationships, of ‘moving on’, contemporary Western (p.200) man (and the modern upper-class Indian) may well embody what the Jungians call puer aeternus—the eternal youth, even in pursuit of his dreams, full of vitality, but nourishing only to himself while draining those around him.15—pp. 200-201
15 M. Franz, Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood (Toronto: Inner City Books, 2000). We owe this reference and observation to David Johnston, A Comprehensive Approach to Psychotherapy’, unpublished ms., November 2005.
…where the voice of the Tamil saint-poet Nammalvar—also a man—who wrote 370 poems on the (p. 202) theme of love, was always that of a woman…..—pp. 202-203 [bhakti]
…the British in the colonial era labelled Indian men (excepting the ‘warrior races’ such as the Sikhs, Rajputs and Jats) as ‘effeminate’. Such judgements are a reflexive outcome of deep-seated ad rarely examined convictions on what is masculine and what feminine…..—p. 203
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