A Selection from THE INDIANS: Portrait of a People

A Selection from

THE INDIANS: Portrait of a People

Sudhir Kakar and Katharina Kakar

INTRODUCTION

Our book is about Indian identity. It is about 'Indian-ness', the cultural part of the mind that informs the activities and concerns of the daily life of a vast number of Indians as it guides them through the journey of life. The attitude towards superiors and subordinates, the choice of food conducive to health and vitality, the web of duties and obligations in family life are all as much influenced by the cultural part of the mind as are ideas on the proper relationship between the sexes, or on the ideal relationship with god. 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—and not only when they gather for a Diwali celebration or to watch a Bollywood movie.

Identity is not a role, or a succession of roles, with which it is often confused. It is not a garment that can be put on or taken off according to the weather outside; 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. A man's identity—of which the culture that he has grown up in is a vital part—is what makes him recognize himself and be constant, unchanging through the march of history. Indic civilization has remained in constant ferment through the processes of assimilation, transformation, re-assertion and re­creation 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.

Indians, then, share a family resemblance in the sense that there is a distinctive Indian stamp on certain universal experiences which we shall discuss in this book: growing up malcountrye, sex and marriage, behaviour at work, status and discrimination, the body in illness and health, religious life and, finally, ethnic conflict. In a contentious 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. Their 'family' resemblance begins to stand out in sharp relief only when it is compared to the profiles of peoples of other major civilizations or cultural

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This 'spirit of India' is not something ethereal, inhabiting the rarefied atmosphere of religion, aesthetics and philosophy, but is captured, for instance, in animal fables from the Panchatantra or tales from the Mahabharata and Ramayana that adults tell children all over the country. It shines through Indian musical forms but is also found in mundane matters of personal hygiene such as the cleaning of the rectal orifice with water and the fingers of the left hand, or in such humble objects as the tongue scraper, a curved strip of copper (or silver in the case of the wealthy) used to remove the white film that coats the tongue.

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 words, Hindu culture patterns—which are the focus of this book—have played a very major role in the construction of Indian-ness, although we would hesitate to go as far as the acerbic critic of Hindu ethos, the writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who maintained that the history of India for the last thousand years has been shaped by the Hindu character and that he felt 'equally certain that it will remain so and shape the form of everything that is being undertaken for and in the country.'⁴ Here we can mention only some of the key building blocks of Indian-ness, which we will elaborate upon in this book: an ideology of family and other crucial relationships that derives from the institution of the joint family; a view of social relations profoundly influenced by the institution of caste; an image of the human body and bodily processes that is based on the medical system of Ayurveda; and a cultural imagination teeming with shared myths and legends, especially from the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, that underscore a 'romantic' vision of human life and a relativist, context-dependent way of thinking.

We do not mean to imply that Indian identity is a fixed constant, unchanging through the march of history. Indic civilization has remained in constant ferment through the processes of assimilation, transformation, re-assertion and re­creation 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.

Indians, then, share a family resemblance in the sense that there is a distinctive Indian stamp on certain universal experiences which we shall discuss in this book: growing up male or female, sex and marriage, behaviour at work, status and discrimination, the body in illness and health, religious life and, finally, ethnic conflict. In a contentious 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. Their 'family' resemblance begins to stand out in sharp relief only when it is compared to the profiles of peoples of other major civilizations or cultural (Page 6 omitted)

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First published in Viking by Penguin Books India 2007 Published in Penguin Books 2009

Copyright 0 2007 All rights reserved

ISBN 9780143066637

CONTENTS

Introduction                                                        1

The Hierarchical Man                                           7

The Web of Family Life                                       8

Indian Culture and Authority                               13

The Inner Experience of Caste                            25

Dirt and Discrimination                                        29

Indian Women: Traditional and Modern            41

A Daughter Is Born                                              42

Discrimination and the Maiden                             46

Entering Puberty                                                  52

Marriage: Is Love Necessary?                              56

The Home and the World                                     66

Sexuality                                                             71

Sex in Ancient India                                            71

Women in the Kamasutra                                     76

Love in the Age of the Kamasutra                        78
Sexuality in the Temples and
                  Literature of Medieval India               81

Contemporary Sexuality                                       84

Sexuality and Health                                            86

Virgins and Others                                               89

Sexuality in Marriage                                           93

A Shadow on Male Sexuality                                96

Alternate Sexualities                                            100

Health and Healing: Dying and Death               107

The Body in Health and Illness in Ayurveda         111

A Visit to the Ayurvedic Doctor                           115

Food and the Indian Mind                                    121

Health and Modern Medicine                               125

View of Death                                                      128

Religious and Spiritual Life                               134

The Hindu Nationalist                                          135

The Flexible Hindu                                              144

Conflict: Hindus and Muslims                           152

Hindu Image of the Muslim                                 156

Muslim Image of the Hindu                                 159

From Conflict to Violence                                    162

The Build-up to Violence                                     162

                                        The Role of Religious-Political Demagogues      164

Rumours and Riots                                              168

Moralities of Violence                                          175

The Future of Hindu—Muslim Conflict               177

The Indian Mind                                                 180

The Hindu World View                                        180

Moksha, the Goal of Life                                      182

Right and Wrong                                                 185

Karma, Rebirth and the Indian Mind                    193

I and the Other: Separation and Connection        196

Male and Female                                                  201

Notes and References                                           204

Index                                                                    218