I believe that one of the greatest threats to our right to speak freely is our tendency to be subservient to any authority that asks us to compromise on our freedom. We are prone to believing that doing so is necessary for us to transform from our supposedly ‘barbaric’ selves to more ‘civilized’ beings. In the face of authority, we do not trust our own selves and let go of our sense of judgement.
Why do we do so? Perhaps because centuries of colonial rule have made us guilty about expressing joy, anger, sorrow, desire—we had been told by our colonial rulers that it was ‘barbaric’ for us to do so. When the Europeans came to India, they brought with them their need for order. We were asked to cover up our bodies (like wearing a blouse under our sari to cover our naked breasts) as well as our emotions. Their rationale was the same as our politicians’ today—freedom of thought and expression makes a public hard to control.
But the foundation of India has been the freedom to express even dissenting voices. Kautilya opposed the Nandas of Magadh when the latter were complacent in the face of Alexander’s invasions. The mutinous soldiers of Barrackpore and Meerut led to the first war of independence against the British in 1857. During the long and bloody freedom struggle from the British that ensued, our freedom fighters, each one of them, were all dissenters. Even at the time of our independence, Dr B.R. Ambedkar disagreed with Gandhi, and gave India its Constitution.
I cite these examples from history to draw a stark comparison with recent years. It is worth wondering what has happened to our spirits now. How did our dissenting voices, which have historically risen against forces squashing our freedom, become so enfeebled?
When Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency and censored the press in 1975, we were distressed for a while, but then became inured to it and went about our lives. The majority of us sits by and watches when talented artists, writers, film-makers and members of the press are persecuted by religious groups, political parties or the authorities. In 2016, after the initial shock, we ultimately shrugged off our anguish about Kanhaiya Kumar’s arrest. In 2017, we have been told what we cannot eat after the government ban on the sale and purchase of cattle for slaughter, and we obey. Often, we cannot express in traditional and social media views contrary to those of the establishment, and we go with that. We have surrendered, given up the fight to differ. When our freedom to freely express our emotions is curbed by an authority, we briefly worry, but soon after, we calm down by telling ourselves that this restraint must be for our own good.
We have been ‘brainwashed’, first by the British and thereafter by our politicians. In neuroscience, the phenomenon of ‘brainwashing’ has been proven—research shows that repeated transmission of the same message eases the replacement of an old belief structure by a new one in our brain.19 The technique of brainwashing has been used in ancient sexual initiation rites, rhythmic singing in primitive societies, and in evangelical speeches in many parts of the world. Now, it can be seen in political rhetoric the world over as politicians repeat a particular message constantly in their speeches to induce a change in attitude among their audience. The rhetoric that has been hammered into our heads by anyone who has wanted to govern India is that we Indians need to mind our expressive ways. This is part of the psychological foundations upon which contemporary Indian society is now being built.
And so we accept to be stopped short of speaking up, writing and expressing, or creating works of art that reflect the soul. We are left under-confident and suspicious of our own natural tendency to uninhibited expression. Our films—which tend to be an explosion of emotions, songs, dance and elaborate fights—are considered to be good ‘art movies’ when they are more restrained. On the other hand we find it odd, but ultimately accept the chopping of all sex scenes by the CBFC, a government authority which advocates that adults cannot express their sexuality even in their bedrooms. Why? Because we, the people from the land of the Kamasutra, are too barbaric to know whom to have sex with and when, so our expressions of love and desire need to be controlled.
Ultimately, the contrast is glaring: on the one hand, Indians have thrived on unbridled self-expression, while on the other, the freedom of expression allowed to us is consistently and dangerously restricted.
When I moved from Geneva to Delhi, I observed that people in India liked to talk. But after a few years here, I also discovered a unique pattern of conversation starters I had never experienced anywhere else in the world. The first set of questions I was usually asked by someone I met socially for the first time would be: ‘Where do you live?’, ‘What do you do?’ Both questions were often asked in the same breath. With my response, my interrogator would have sized me up, placing me mentally in the hierarchy of social status. Did I belong to ‘high society’ and therefore deemed good enough to be befriended? I was used to people in Europe being friendly without getting on to personal territory during initial conversations, but in Delhi, it was quite the opposite.
Contrary to my education, which had taught me that ‘name dropping’ was anathema, in Delhi, if you knew a well-known person even remotely, then you had the licence to announce him or her as your ‘close friend’ in public at the first opportunity.
Then came the point in the conversation when the other person spoke about his or her own self. I had been taught to be understated, to reveal little, and instead be gradually revealed to the other person in the conversation. Instead, those I met would immediately jump into a monologue of—I only later deciphered—a rather exaggerated version of their life story.
Meeting someone for the second time around was even more bizarre. The trend was to seem forgetful about the people you have met. I was only later explained this simple logic—if you recognize the person immediately (even if you actually do remember them), it would mean that you don’t meet enough people in a day, and therefore you are socially or professionally (or both) unsuccessful.
And if both parties do recollect meeting each other earlier, the answer to the innocent question ‘How are you?’ must unfailingly be ‘Terribly busy’. To be not busy here, I learnt, signified being unwanted and therefore unimportant. In every other country I had lived in, such a question usually elicited a more optimistic or at least a more emotionally neutral answer.
There is certainly no right or wrong way of conducting an appropriate conversation, and comparisons of cultural moorings in this regard can be brushed aside as, at most, amusing. However, my only—and intensely depressing—discovery in the social circuits of Delhi was that ideas and hypocrisy in a conversation were two sides of the same coin. And my only solace lay in the fact that these interactions were perhaps specific to their own local sphere, and not representative of the rest of India.
Over the past three years of living in India, I studied a larger and more diverse sample size of people and their conversations. I found, of course, plenty of honest discussions and disagreements as well as genuine aspirations to act in accordance with deeply held commitments. Many did engage in fascinating deliberation and dialogue because they were open to the possibility of other opinions.
But I also observed something else. I realized that the pretence—in cases where it existed—of upholding a certain virtuous ‘image’ played an important (and perhaps necessary) part in conforming to the dominant vision of the way ‘we ought to be’ in a country as diverse as India. This brings us back to the argument I earlier made about our guilt at being ‘barbaric’. Indeed, to be self-interested, lazy, unfaithful and deceitful is considered barbaric, and so we are coerced by our own collectivity (society) to conform to more ‘civilized’ ways. But when we are unable to conform to these so-called civilized ways, we merely pretend to others that we do.
I also discovered that this apparent pretence is not necessarily always bad for society. As every ‘hypocritical’ public utterance declaring the pretence of an unpractised virtue, the strength of that virtue is reinforced, albeit deceitfully. For example, uttering lofty words about business ethics would sometimes be a lot of eyewa
sh to cover up corrupt practices. Expressing pride at working hard to run a thriving business could be a massive exaggeration of the reality. Long charades about fidelity in marriage could, in reality, be nothing short of a cover-up for an arrangement full of deceit. Those who went to great lengths to talk to me about the virtues of living in a joint family, I would discover later, were the ones who were most miserable and guileful in that set-up. In certain social contexts in India, I found that making public statements like this was the best that could be done. In some other cases, the pretence—of being ethical, persevering, faithful and so on—served as a constraint to the deviant behaviour, sometimes leading people to appreciate and eventually perhaps be transformed into the version of themselves they had pretended to be. In this way—for good or bad reasons—social pretence had a moderating effect on the diversity of thought and actions in Indian society. I have written earlier about our desire for preserving traditional community values.20 This, in reality, can be very hard to do. And so, what many might decry as hypocrisy towards values in Indian society—where people preach and practise different things—has at times been useful in maintaining some sort of societal harmony. At the same time, let us bear in mind that this silver lining of pretence is only a slim one.
So how else have our dissenting voices been enfeebled? I have discussed earlier in this chapter how the project of building a nation requires a certain collective equilibrium among citizens, not chaos. Various governments in India have taken measures to control freedom of expression because they fear the diversity and audacity of the voices in our country. Politics has emphasized that more or less everyone needs to accept, believe and practise certain core values—which often change in a democracy, depending on the political leanings of the government in power—that become the defining traits of the nation, at least for that time.
Further, we form a collectivity called ‘society’ that often puts pressure on individuals to abide by certain ethics, morals and behaviour patterns, which make up a ‘proper’ code of conduct. Nationhood and proper social conduct, we are told, are the paths we need to take to move away from our barbaric ways and become civilized like the West. Individuals fear that non-compliance to these dominant values, ethics and morals established by politics and society might lead to dire consequences. In our history and all around us today, there are enough examples of punishment meted out to dissenters not just by the government, but also by society.
This is precisely what leads to the other side, the ugly side, of hypocrisy. In India, the diverse and rapidly evolving contexts that individuals live in preclude the slightest possibility of everyone honestly believing, voicing and practising the same set of values at any point in time. It is not possible for such a vast, diverse population to speak in the same voice. Ironically, while being most in need of honest expression as a virtue, politics and society in India produce the conditions that in fact undermine that virtue. This results in a never-ending cycle of lies and more lies because the only way to ensure political and social harmony is for individuals to compromise as much as possible to conform to these dominant values, ethics, morals and behaviour patterns. When individuals fail to conform, they can unceasingly lie, leading to unending deceit, corruption and betrayal.
In a society that loves to talk, silence is not an option. Conversations that could have been chaotic, diverse and therefore constructive can become platforms for people to zealously prove themselves—truthfully or not—as conformists to the expected dominant behaviour. But this hypocrisy need not continue if the grip of political and societal authority on what we say is loosened.
References
Albert, Alain, ed. 1995. Chaos and Society (Amsterdam: IOS Press)
Guha, Ramachandra. 2016. Democrats and Dissenters (Gurgaon: Penguin India), p.33.
New Yorker. 2012. The disappeared: How a fatwa changed a writer’s life. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/09/17/the-disappeared.
Nicolis, G., and I. Prigogine. 1977. Self-organisation in Non-equilibrium Systems (New York: John Wiley and Sons).
Print. 2017. The problem with India’s censor board is its morally conservative outlook. 1 October.
Rajan, Nalini. 2005. Practising Journalism: Values, Constraints, Implications (New Delhi: Sage Publications)
Reporters without Borders. 2017. India: Threat from Modi’s nationalism. 15 July. https://rsf.org/en/india.
Rukmani, T.S. 2011. Intellectual freedom in ancient India: Some random thoughts. Sanskrit-Vimarsah. http://www.sanskrit.nic.in/SVimarsha/V6/c14.pdf.
The Hindu. 2011. Requiem for M.F. Husain. 10 June. http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/ Requiem-for-M.F.-Husain/article13059657.ece.
The Hindu. 2013. Friday review: Aandhi 1975. http://www.thehindu.com/features/cinema/cinema-columns/aandhi-1975/article4742988.ece.
Yamunan, Sruthisagar. 2015. What is behind Dravidian parties’ silence in Perumal Murugan issue? The Hindu, 14 January.
Volokh, Eugene. 2017. Forbidden words in a documentary about Amartya Sen. Washington Post, 13 July.
World Bank. 2016. https://data.worldbank.org/country/India.
14
Aesthetics
Until I returned to live in India as an adult, I had never owned a sari in my life. Within the first week of my arrival here, I scooted off to the only sari maker I knew. I had visited him earlier in the year as a passive shopping companion to a girlfriend. Sanjay Garg was a reticent and withdrawn thirty-five-year-old man, so reclusive that anyone who wished to purchase his saris had to trek up to his home, an airy two-storey bungalow located in the midst of utter wilderness almost an hour’s ride out of Delhi.
His saris were woven on the loom, mostly lustrous silks from all over the country. Each piece was so unique that it even had its own name marked on its tag.
‘I don’t think I have seen you around here before,’ remarked Sanjay on seeing me seated cross-legged on the rug in his shop surrounded by saris.
‘You will see more of me from now on,’ I replied. ‘These saris are gorgeous.’
‘Then you must visit Jaipur, my hometown, and see the saris there. That is real Indian designs,’ he added, in faltering English.
I had picked three of Sanjay’s plainest saris. Much to the chagrin of my women colleagues, I wore the traditional Indian attire loosely with the most oversized shirts and blouses. A traditional garment, the sari was meant to be draped gracefully, not in the obtuse ‘comfort wear’ manner I wore it. But the sari was emblematic of the deep relationship between heritage and the daily lives of those colleagues who wore the garment. They were well-meaning and concerned that I would portray a ‘bad character’ the way I wore it.
However, I soon realized that the sari was a garment of great diversity. There were a range of draping styles influenced by regional identity, personal taste, and most of all by weather and occupation. The women of Coorg in Karnataka tie their sari pleats at the back, leaving their hands free to pick tea leaves on plantations in the mountainous slopes. The Maharashtrian sari is especially long—9 yards instead of the typical 6—so women can wear it in the traditional men’s dhoti style and work comfortably on farms. The traditional sari in Bengal is made of cotton because the soil in the region is so rich that it produces the finest-quality cotton. Moreover, the weather in Bengal is humid, so cotton is considered a more comfortable material than silk, and women wear it in a distinct style that covers the shoulders and the bust because traditionally they did not wear a blouse. Meanwhile, the warrior culture of Punjab and the cold weather in Jammu, among other reasons, makes it inconvenient to wear the sari at all in these regions.
‘Taste’ in the context of the sari has been defined and redefined over the centuries—it has been mentioned many thousands of years ago (as nevi) in the Rig Veda, and (as sati) in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
Since those ancient times, the garment has reinvented itself continuously, influenced by the ‘taste-makers’ of different eras who defined what beauty and propriety, meant. In lat
e medieval times, the royalty and aristocracy set the trend in the design and drape of the sari. Now that role has been delegated to politicians, actors and socialites. Of these, the influence of leading actors in films played the strongest role in defining culture, even though very little of that influence was truly long-lasting and took years to percolate down to the public.
However, I felt that there were other mechanisms at work, far greater than the influence of celebrities, which defined the Indian aesthetics of today.
I found that the taste of the masses was being defined primarily by each individual’s personal circles of interaction and influence over extended periods. Within community and family networks, there were always the ‘influencers’ and the ‘influenced’. The elders in the family would chastise the younger generation into wearing the sari in a certain regional or cultural style, just as my colleagues had tried to influence my style. These roles were fluid and mutable, each one influencing the other so that taste operated like a meme. Preferences were dictated and influenced by societal, religious and familial norms, as well as by economic factors, awareness and culturally defined ideas of propriety. It was through lenses such as these that the broader levels of aesthetic influence, such as those from cinema and celebrities, filtered in.
Indian aesthetics, I realized, was a vast topic, encompassing everything from architecture to art, music, food, clothing and much more. I chose to seek the answers to my questions about Indian aesthetics by following the trail of the sari.
My interest in the ‘sari chronicles’ led me to believe that cultural historians in India (and elsewhere) traditionally paid less attention to material culture—such as what we wear and why we do so—than to ideas, leaving the material realm to economic historians. Economic historians then neglect the symbolic aspects, and typically analyse matters such as the amount of an individual’s income spent on purchasing that item. The few studies of material culture, or the physical aspects of a culture that surrounds people, that do inspect the symbolic aspect focus mostly on the classic trio of topics—food, clothes, housing. These studies often analyse only the history of their consumption, try to draw conclusions about their symbolic role in displaying or achieving status, and explore issues related to identity, often emphasizing the influence of the media in stimulating the desire for these goods.
Indian Instincts Page 25