Indian Instincts

by Miniya Chatterji

  Bahri, Charu. 2016. Muslims at bottom of higher-education ladder, alongside backward tribes. Indiaspend, 22 July.

  Bhaduri, Amit. 2009. The Face You Were Afraid to See: Essays on the Indian Economy ((New Delhi: Penguin Books India).

  Bock, K.E. 1955. Darwin and social theory. Philosophy of Science 22, pp. 123–34.

  Bongaarts, John, and Christophe Z. Guilmoto. 2015. How many more missing women? Excess female mortality and prenatal sex selection, 1970–2050, Population and Development Review 41.2, pp. 241–69.

  Census of India 2011. http://censusindia.gov.in.

  Colundalur, Nash. 2011. Devadasis are a cursed community. Guardian, 21 January.

  Dalrymple, William. 2008. Serving the goddess: The dangerous life of a sacred sex worker. New Yorker, 4 August.

  Dalrymple, William. 2015. The great divide: The violent legacy of the Indian partition. New Yorker, 29 June.

  Das, Gurcharan. 2002. India Unbound, first edition (New York: Anchor Books).

  Economist (US). 2017. The war on baby girls winds down. 21 January.

  Fernandes, Walter. 2007. The Indian indigenous peoples for sixty years. North Eastern Social Research Centre, p. 1.

  Firstpost. 2015. Literacy rates of scheduled tribes far below national average, says Parliamentary panel. 15 March.

  Ganguly, Meenakshi. 2012. Between two sets of guns. Human Rights Watch, 6 July.

  Guha, Ramachandra. 2007. Adivasis, Naxalites and Indian democracy. Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 42, no. 32, pp. 3305–3312.

  Guha, Ramachandra. 2008. Lost in the woods. Hindustan Times, October 23.

  Hardiman, David. 2008. Missionaries and Their Medicine: A Christian Modernity for Tribal India (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press).

  Haq, Zia. 2016. Untouched by economic growth: One in 4 beggars in India a Muslim, reveals census. Hindustan Times, 30 July.

  Hindu Business Line. 2016. Raghuram Rajan to quit after term ends. 18 June.

  Hindustan Times. 2017. Sukma ambush in response to gang-rapes, murders by security forces: Maoist statement. 28 April.

  Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2016. Dalits still left out. Indian Express, 18 February.

  Kaminsky, Arnold P., and Roger D. Long. 2011. India Today: An Encyclopedia of Life in the Republic (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO).

  Kumar, Jai, and Rajni Kant Kumar. 2017. Assessment of development plan and protection for Birhor community of Duru Kasmar village, Mandu, Jharkhand. IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science 22.05, pp. 77–82.

  Ministry of Minority Affairs, Press Information Bureau, Government of India 2016. http://pib.nic.in/newsite/mbErel.aspx?relid=147450.

  Neill, Stephen. 1986. A History of Christian Missions (Penguin Books).

  Phadnis, Aditi. 2016. Story In numbers: Muslim literacy rates rising faster than work participation. Business Standard, August 1.

  Pylee, Moolamattom Varkey. 2003. Constitutional Government in India (New Delhi: S. Chand Publishing).

  Rana, Preetika, and Joanna Sugden. 2013. India’s record since Independence. Wall Street Journal, 15 August. https://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2013/08/15/indias-record-since-independence.

  S., Rukmini. 2017. Five charts that tell sad and surprising stories about suicides in India. Huffington Post India, 3 January.

  Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India. 2006. http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/sachar_comm.pdf.

  Socio-economic Caste Census. 2011. http://secc.gov.in/reportlistContent.

  Spencer, Herbert. 1860. The social organism. Westminster review 17.

  Statistics of School Education. 2010. http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/SES-School_201011_0.pdf.

  Tewari, Saumya. 2015. 75 percent of rural India survives on Rs 33 per day. India Today, 13 July.

  Water.org. 2017. India water crisis: Clean water scarcity In India. https://water.org/our-impact/india.

  World Health Organization. http://www.who.int/countries/ind/en.

  World Bank. 2017. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS.

  3

  Exploration

  We have made it incredibly difficult for ourselves to roam freely.

  The last time I landed at the Lahore airport in the summer of 2013, I was greeted by a man in a Western-style suit without a tie, wearing a badge with his name and holding up a placard with my name on it. I was visiting to conduct meetings on behalf of the World Economic Forum with our stakeholders in Pakistan, and so I presumed that he had been sent by my official hosts in the country. He completed all my immigration formalities, picked up my bags, and put me in a taxi to the Pearl Continental hotel. The next four days were filled with meetings with various political and business leaders in Lahore and Islamabad. I also got to experience the warm, generous hospitality of the friends I made among my professional acquaintances. It was time for me to head to the airport again, this time to take my late-night flight back to Geneva. At the penultimate check, the immigration officer held me back.

  ‘You cannot board this plane,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  ‘You are Indian. Indians are supposed to report to the local police station in the city and register themselves there. You have not done so.’

  ‘But I did not know . . .’ I started to explain.

  ‘Here, take her inside.’ The immigration officer beckoned to a colleague standing close by, and pointed to a room on the other side of the immigration hall.

  The room turned out to be the Lahore airport police station.

  ‘Should we let her go?’ one cop asked the other in what I thought was Punjabi.

  ‘No . . . let’s keep her,’ the other chuckled, looking at me seated across the desk.

  I was allowed to pick up my luggage as I was offloaded from the aircraft.

  ‘I am so sorry . . . The citizens of both countries are friendly, it is just that the military and politics keep us apart,’ said a Pakistani man as I turned my suitcase around to drag it back to the airport police cell, accompanied by a few policemen.

  After a few phone calls to my hosts in the city, at around dawn the following day, the police let me go and I returned to my hotel in Lahore. I didn’t sleep a wink as I waited for my worried hosts to visit me at the hotel.

  ‘I did not know I had to register with the police upon arrival,’ I told them.

  ‘Did they give you any such instructions when you were at immigration while entering the country?’ they asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t know—the man you had sent to the airport . . . he did my immigration procedures,’ I said.

  ‘Which man?’

  ‘The man wearing a badge, standing at the gate holding a placard with my name, the one you sent.’

  ‘But we sent nobody!’

  After a few more visits to the police, I was finally able to fly out of Lahore the following day. Only later did I find out that the man assisting me at the airport had been sent by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, and that he had gathered all the information from my passport and probably also covertly followed me to my meetings in the country.

  The following year, when the World Economic Forum again applied for a visa for me at the Pakistani consulate in Geneva, all it received were weeks of silence and inaction. Despite follow-up inquiries made at the ministerial level in Pakistan, there was no news. Until one morning when, while on my way to work, I received a phone call.

  ‘I am calling from the Pakistani consulate,’ a man announced at the other end.

  ‘Thanks for this call. I had applied for a visa for my work trip to Lahore, which is in two days!’ I exclaimed, delighted to finally hear from the consulate.

  ‘I am calling to tell you that there is no visa application from you,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that your application never existed. Even if you get whomsoever in Pakistan to help, you will still not get a visa,’ he explained in an icy voice.

&nbs
p; ‘Why not?’

  ‘Diplomatic reciprocity, beti,’ he said coldly, and disconnected the call.

  This is an example of the difficulties faced in exploring India’s contentious neighbourhood. Migrants who travel to more distant countries to live there for long periods, sometimes permanently, must face even greater challenges. How ironic it is that we ourselves have cut up the planet with political borders, such that we need to take great pains to now cross them. Diplomatic relations, immigration policies, visas, national and international laws, work permits—these are all structures and procedures of our own making, intended to secure our borders in order to protect us, yet they restrict the free movement and exploration that our species was once naturally meant for.

  I therefore find it admirable that in each of the eight countries—France, Germany, Belgium, the US, the UK, Egypt, China and Switzerland—I lived in over fourteen years, there has been a sizeable Indian migrant community. In Europe, where I lived for ten years, I noticed that people of particular communities in India did specific jobs in different cities to overcome the challenges of immigrant life. This was essentially the consequence of a grand chain reaction of learning from and following in the footsteps of those who had arrived earlier. In Paris, Indians worked in restaurants, set up shops selling cheap international phone calling cards and sold roses to tourists on the streets. In Berlin, a large number of Indians were nurses or medical doctors from Kerala.

  To ease the hardship of living in a new country, the Indian community often live concentrated in one area, which is usually the outskirts of a city. They support each other by working together in the same area, thus creating a bustling quarter alive with Indian restaurants, the sound of loud cricket commentary, and colourful pirated Bollywood DVD stalls.

  I conducted about three thousand interviews with these Indian migrants in Europe for my PhD research. I found many stories of how they courageously and painstakingly established themselves in a new country.

  And so upon my return to India in 2014, I wondered more than ever why the large number of immigrants I met had made such valiant efforts to move out of the country to which I had just returned.

  Our international diaspora is sixteen-million-strong, the largest in the world.1 And even within India, four out of ten Indians—the combined population of the US, Germany and Canada—are migrants.2 It seems that more than any other people in the world, we are ready to pack our bags and leave. Why?

  I found all this bewildering because, first, looking at it sociologically, in a society where joint families are still the norm, a family member’s immigration to another city or country has many socio-economic consequences. Second, from a religious point of view, the Manusmriti3, the Baudhayana Dharma Sutra4 and other religious scriptures at times specifically dissuade Brahmins from sea travel and impose penalties and penances on those doing so. Third, historically, the Indian subcontinent has been invaded several times, but we have rarely gone looking for new regions beyond the Himalayas to conquer.5 Author Gurcharan Das6 mentions the ‘know-it-all Indian attitude’ in his book India Unbound, which traveller Al-Biruni7 has also described in his writings on ancient India. I wondered then, if we are so bound by political boundaries, visas, society, religion, geography, or—as Das and Al-Biruni suggested—if Indians are simply not curious enough, how is it that so many Indians now migrate to other locations within the country and outside of it?

  In fact, a great deal of scientific research has been done on the psychology of curiosity that challenges Das’s and Al-Biruni’s suggestions. Some absolutely fascinating research on curiosity was conducted in two ‘waves’ of intense academic activity amongst psychologists. The first wave, in the 1960s, focused on curiosity’s underlying cause. Psychologists speculated about why people voluntarily sought curiosity-inducing situations such as mysteries and puzzles. Some interpreted curiosity as a primordial drive and viewed it as aversive, predicting that people would want to minimize curiosity rather than seek it out. A few others—a limited number of researchers in fact—examined the situational determinants of curiosity. The first wave of curiosity research subsided before the situationalist revolution in psychology could even take off. The second wave began in the mid-1970s and concentrated on the problem of measuring curiosity.8 Can we correlate levels of curiosity with individual characteristics such as age, gender, origin and IQ? The researchers of the second wave conducted several experiments, but every attempt to cross-validate the curiosity scale with an individual’s other traits failed. This means we cannot determine if specific profiles of people are more or less curious than those of others. We cannot say that people of a certain age group are more curious than others, or that all women are curious while men are not. We cannot, therefore, make the sweeping statement that all Indians are disinterested, incurious and have a ‘know-it-all attitude’.

  There are, of course, several other approaches to curiosity studies, but they all seem to point to the same conclusion—that the adage ‘curious by nature’ cannot be true. For instance, another commonly studied aspect of curiosity is the dichotomy between state and trait curiosity. ‘State curiosity’, in academic literature, refers to the curiosity aroused by a particular situation. ‘Trait curiosity’ refers to the general capacity or propensity of a person to experience curiosity.9 At the core of this discussion is the question: do situations make people curious or are some individuals just more curious than others? Does the situation in the pre-migration country of potential migrants make them curious about living in a new country, or is it just their ‘innately curious nature’? After experiments, it was concluded once again that there was no curiosity trait per se in people—it was the environment that people lived in that made them curious. For example, an environment of mental stimulation at school can make a child curious about the world. The condition of slavery can evoke curiosity about freedom. A state of deprivation, say, in a dictatorship, can catalyse a revolution based on citizens’ fascination for what they do not have. A country in which life is full of great hardship can make its citizens curious about what lies beyond and perhaps cause them to leave.

  Why did I leave India many years ago?

  When I was all of nineteen, my parents found their daughter’s groom-to-be via a newspaper advertisement and a few photographs. I had met the boy twice.

  The first time was at a dinner that my parents pleaded with me to attend. I found my parents’ dream boy to be soft-spoken, and I noticed how he combed his hair with a neat parting on the side. He embodied the very definition of an ideal match in India—Bengali like me; Brahmin by caste, like me; an engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), India’s premier engineering school; a management graduate from IIM, another great Indian institution. And as if this seemingly made-to-order curriculum vitae for marriage was not good enough, I was told that he worked in a large global investment bank, and lived in Tokyo.

  He was really lovely, and so, when our parents left us to talk in private for a few minutes, I told him I was not interested in marrying him, or anyone else, for that matter. I also told him I had a boyfriend who was Muslim, and that my parents were enormously paranoid about the outcome of that relationship. I explained to him that a few months ago, they had kept me locked up at home for days and prohibited me from going to university until I agreed to never meet my Muslim boyfriend again. But of course we continued to. The boy nodded his head at what I told him, and we returned to join our families at the dinner table. Pleased with myself for having closed this case, I never gave that evening another thought. The entire incident had just seemed very bizarre to me and I felt it was best forgotten.

  A year later, I met the same boy for the second time due to the persistence of my father, who paid me a surprise visit at JNU, picked me up and dropped me off at a restaurant, where I found that the boy was waiting to meet me. Five minutes into the conversation, this boy gathered that I had not been told the news. So he gently informed me about our engagement which was to take place that eveni
ng. Rushing out of the restaurant, I took an autorickshaw to go home.

  Robert Butler, in his book Curiosity in Monkeys, writes that monkeys kept in a colourless, shielded cage learnt to discriminate the colour of the window that would afford them a glimpse of what lay outside.10 He compares this trait to that of humans who, like most animals, can be powerfully motivated by the situation they are in to explore outside that realm.

  On my way from the restaurant that afternoon, I too felt trapped. Images from when I was six years old flashed in front of my eyes, of a priest who spoke in a language I did not understand, of my dismay at finding out that even my parents did not, and how nobody was interested in explaining to anybody the reason or meaning of the rituals. Ever since then, I had managed to find a way to not participate in religious rituals.

  I remembered how, at fifteen, I had withstood the pressure to be an engineer simply because I did not want to become one. At seventeen, I remembered how I quit my first job within a week—which, to my father’s delight, would send home a chauffeur-driven car to pick me up—because I did not want my precious hours spent on anything that lay outside my area of interest. I liked to eat nutritious food, dress well, buy plenty of books, go to a health club, play sports—to pay for all this, I worked on all kinds of odd jobs, from translating documents to being an usher at public exhibitions in the city for a few days each month. Despite my father’s insistence, and much to his chagrin, I did not wish my middle-class family to take care of this extra expenditure, and would pay my expenses myself.

  Sitting in the back seat of the autorickshaw, the wind hitting my face, I remembered how I would find our Bengali family weddings outlandish with their superficial display of wealth and chants no one understood. I remembered how I had hardly ever accompanied my parents to any of those weddings. I remembered how my parents had thus given up on me, proclaiming that I was just trying to be different from the rest.

  Upon reaching home, I found that the news about my engagement was indeed true. Without saying much, I packed a few pieces of clothing into a sling bag and left home to live with two friends in the boarding facility of my university. I slept on the floor for six months before I got a room of my own, which I shared with another student. Between classes, I worked as a junior editor at a nearby magazine so that I could pay for my education. With no means of transport, I would walk to work and back to class several times a day.