by Sudhir Kakar
What is this ‘joint’ family that is so much a feature of an Indian’s inner landscape, even in places and social strata where it is not the dominant form of family organization any more?4 As an ideal type, a joint family is one in which brothers remain together after marriage and bring their wives into the parental household. It is governed by the ideals of fraternal loyalty and filial obedience which stipulate common residence and common economic, social and ritual activities. In addition to this core group, there may be others who are either permanent or temporary residents in the household: widowed or abandoned sisters and aunts, or distant male relatives, euphemistically called ‘uncles’, who have no other family to turn to. In practice, of course, brothers and their families may not share a common kitchen or may live in adjacent houses rather than in a single residence, or a brother may have migrated to the city in search of economic opportunity. Yet even in cases of many families that appear ‘nuclear’ in the sense that they are composed of parents and their unmarried children, a social and psychological ‘jointness’ continues to operate. When a brother moves to the city, for instance, his wife and children frequently continue to live with the village family while he himself remits his share to the family income; or, if he takes his family with him, they return ‘home’ as often as they can. Even in the upper and upper-middle classes, it is the psychic reality of the joint family which makes them take it for granted that they can visit and live for weeks, if not months, with their adult married children who are working in distant parts of the country or even outside India.
The point we wish to make here is that most Indians spend the formative years of their life in family settings that approximate to the joint rather than the nuclear type. Even grown children who nominally live alone or in a nuclear family make long and frequent visits to members of the joint family. Not only do families get together to celebrate festivals, but people also prefer to go on vacations or on religious pilgrimage in the company of other family members. The ideals of fraternal solidarity and filial devotion are so strong that a constant effort is made to preserve the characteristic ‘jointness’ at the very least in its social sense. Anyone who has been surprised at the heavy traffic in an Indian city on a late Sunday morning only needs to remember that many of the men, women and children, dressed in their best clothes and precariously perched on scooters, or crammed into buses and small Maruti cars, are on their way to visit family members living in other parts of the city.
In part, the demography of childhood in India reflects Indian marriage patterns. Leaving aside the urban middle and upper classes where the marriageable age has been increasing, most couples marry in adolescence when they have neither the economic nor the psychological resources to set up an independent household. Separation from the joint family, if and when it does take place, comes later, when their own children are well into the middle years of childhood. Thus it is not surprising that uncles, aunts and cousins, not to mention grandparents, figure prominently in the childhood recollections of most Indians. They occupy a much greater space in the inner world of Indians than is the case with Europeans and Americans growing up in nuclear families where it is only the mother and the father (and perhaps also the siblings) who cast such a long shadow on their emotional lives.
More than any other factor, then—the recent high rate of economic growth, the improvement in the status of previously oppressed sections of society and even the strength of religious belief—it is the family, and the role family obligations play in the life of an Indian, which is the glue that holds Indian society together. Of course, the flip side of the coin is—and there is always a flip side—that this focus on the family as the exclusive source of satisfaction of all one’s needs also reflects a continuing lack of faith in almost every other institution of society. The result of this is often extreme divisiveness, a lack of commitment to anyone or anything outside one’s immediate family.
In a country without large government programmes of social security, unemployment compensation and old age benefits, the family must give temporary relief when a man loses work, a young mother is ill or monsoon floods destroy the harvest. If we exclude the rising middle class and the very small upper-class elite, it is the family that provides the only life insurance most Indians have. Naturally, then, in the imagination of most Indians a man’s worth and, indeed, his identity are inextricable from the reputation of his family. How a man lives and what he does are rarely seen as a product of individual effort or aspiration, but are interpreted in the light of his family’s circumstances and standing in the wider society. Individual success or failure makes sense only in a family context. ‘How can a son of family X behave like this!’ is as much an expression of contempt as ‘How could he not turn out well? After all he is the son of family Y!’ is a sign of approval.
Psychologically, an individual derives much of his self-esteem from myths that ascribe to his family some kind of distinction or prominence in the past or exaggerate its importance in the present. His closest ties, often including even friendships, will not be outside but within the family. As a Hindu proverb puts it, ‘A mustard seed of relationship is worth a cartload of friendship.’ These special relationships within the extended family are a major source of support needed to go through life and constant affirmation of a person’s identity.
It is not as if family interactions and obligations have been static. Hindu nationalist writings and some women’s magazines are full of alarmist stuff about the Indian family being under attack by forces of Western modernization. Many of the changes have to do with the rise of individualism and the role of women in urban areas, to which we will come back later. Family obligations too are changing. Thirty years ago it was taken for granted that a man would look after a cousin or a nephew if he came and stayed with him for many years of schooling which was not available in his home town or village. Most middle-class families will now hesitate to put themselves out to the same extent. Yet, while there has certainly been a contraction of family obligations, they have not disappeared; one may not feel as obliged to look after a distant aunt but there is no question of not looking after the emotional, social and financial needs of an aged parent. All in all, the Indian family remains distinctive (and distinctly conservative) in its views on marriage, parenthood and the web of mutual responsibilities and obligations within wider ties of kinship.5
Unshakeable solidarity between brothers as one of the highest ideals of family life can lead to consequences that may appear odd to a ‘modern sensibility’ which looks upon the husband-wife couple as the fulcrum of family life. For instance, a man will often tolerate the adulterous relations of his wife with his brother—in the upper classes, mostly by feigning ignorance; the poorer sections of society dispense even with this fig leaf. Thus a cook from the hill state of Uttaranchal once came to his employer asking for leave to go to his village since his wife had just given birth to a son.
‘But how can your wife bear a son when you have not been to your village in the last one year?’ asked the employer.
‘How does that matter?’ replied the man. ‘My brother is there.’
This may seem like an extreme example, but only because it was explicitly stated. The situation itself is not as uncommon as we would suppose. For a time in Indian social history, the erotic importance of the husband’s younger brother—in the sense that he would or could have sexual relations with his elder brother’s widow—was officially recognized in the custom of niyoga. The custom goes back thousands of years to the sacred Rig Veda, where a man, identified by the commentators as the brother-in-law, is described as extending his hand in promised marriage to a widow inclined to share her husband’s funeral pyre.
Though the custom gradually fell into disuse, especially with the prohibition of widow remarriage (it still survives in some communities), the psychological core of niyoga, namely the mutual awareness of a married woman and her younger brother-in-law as potential or actual sexual partners, is very much alive. In psychothe
rapy practice, middle-class women who are on terms of sexual intimacy with a brother-in-law rarely express any feelings of guilt. Their distress is occasioned more by his leaving home or his impending marriage, which the woman perceives as the end of her sensual and emotional life.
INDIAN CULTURE AND AUTHORITY
An Indian’s sense of his relative familial and social position is so internalized that he qualifies, in Louis Dumont’s phrase, as the original homo hierarchicus.6 The internalization of hierarchy coincides with the acquisition of language. 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.7 These ‘words’ are repeated combinations of the vowel sound ‘ah’ preceded by different consonants—‘dada’, ‘mama’, ‘baba’, ‘nana’, ‘papa’ and ‘tata’. Infants repeat these or other closely related sounds over and over, in response to their own babbling and to their parents’ modified imitations of their baby sounds. 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. In India, on the contrary, just about all of these closely related sounds are repeated and reinforced since each one is a name for various elder kin in the family whom a child must learn to identify with the position that he or she occupies in the family hierarchy. Thus, for example, in Punjabi, ma is mother, mama is mother’s brother, dada is father’s father, nana is mother’s father, chacha is father’s younger brother, taya is father’s elder brother, masi is mother’s sister, and so on.
This transformation of basic baby language into names for kinship relations within the extended family is characteristic of all Indian languages. It not only symbolizes the child’s manifold relationships with a range of potentially nurturing figures in the older generation but also emphasizes the importance of the child’s familiarity with the hierarchy of the family organization. Indians must learn to adapt to the personalities and moods of many authority figures besides their parents quite early in life. Whether the highly developed antenna that makes an Indian almost anticipate the wishes of a superior and adjust his behaviour accordingly should be called ‘flexibility’ or ‘a lack of a firm sense of self’ is a cultural value judgement we are unwilling to make. The fact remains that such early experiences in an extended family and the child’s early knowledge of when to retreat, when to cajole and when to be stubborn in order to get what he wants also make an Indian a formidable negotiator in later business dealings.
Regardless of personal talents or achievements, or of changes in the circumstances of his own or others’ lives, an Indian’s relative position in the hierarchy of the family, his obligations to those ‘above’ him and his expectations of those ‘below’ him, are immutable and lifelong. Already in childhood he begins to learn that he must look after the welfare of those subordinate to him in the family hierarchy so that they do not suffer either through their own misjudgement or at the hands of outsiders, and that he is reciprocally entitled to their obedience and respect.
Since young people in Indian families generally receive a good deal of attention and nurturance from the older generation and maintenance of family integrity is valued higher than an unfolding of individual capacities, a young Indian neither seeks a radical demarcation from the generation of his parents nor feels compelled to overthrow their authority in order to ‘live life on my own terms’. This is in stark contrast to the West where ‘generational conflict’ is not only expected but considered necessary for the renewal of a society’s institutions and, moreover, is considered (we believe erroneously) to be a universally valid psychological truth. 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. It is telling that in spite of their fascination with sport and cinema stars, and the omnipresence of these celebrities in advertising, the primary role models for a large majority of Indian youth are from the family, most often a parent.
In spite of rapid social changes in the last decades, an Indian continues to be part of a hierarchically ordered and, above all, stable network of relationships throughout the course of his life. This complex, relationship-based pattern of behaviour also manifests itself in work situations. Although intellectually the Indian professional or bureaucrat may agree with his Western counterpart that, for instance, the criterion for appointment or promotion to a particular job must be objective, a decision based solely on the demands of the task and ‘merits of the case’, emotionally he must still struggle against the cultural conviction that his relationship to the individual under consideration (if there is one) is the singlemost important factor in his decision. And among the vast majority of traditional-minded countrymen—whether it be a trader bending the law to facilitate the business transaction of a fellow caste member, or an industrialist employing an insufficiently qualified but distantly related job applicant as a manager, or the clerk in the municipal office accepting bribes in order to put an orphaned niece through school—dishonesty, nepotism and corruption are merely abstract concepts. These negative constructions are irrelevant to the Indian experience, which, from childhood on, nurtures one, and only one, standard of responsible adult conduct—namely, an individual’s lifelong obligation to his kith and kin. 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.
Although family relationships are hierarchical in structure, the mode of relationship is characterized by an almost maternal behaviour on the part of the superior, by filial respect and compliance on the part of the subordinate and by a mutual sense of highly personal attachment. We meet this kind of a superior—king, father, guru—in school textbooks where, in stories depicting authority situations, the ideal leader is a kind of benevolent patriarch who acts in a nurturing way so that his followers either anticipate his wishes or accept them without questioning.8 He receives compliance by taking care of his people’s needs, by providing the emotional rewards of approval, praise and affection, or by arousing guilt. High-handed attempts to regulate behaviour through threat or punishment, rejection or humiliation, lead less to open defiance than to devious evasion on the part of the subordinate.
Another legacy of Indian childhood in superior-subordinate or leader-follower relations is the idealization of the former. The need to bestow maana on our superiors and leaders in order to partake of this magical power ourselves is an unconscious attempt to restore the narcissistic perfection of infancy: ‘You are perfect and I am a part of you.’ This is of course a universal tendency, but in India, the automatic reverence for superiors is a widespread psychological fact. Leaders at every level of society, but particularly the patriarchal elders of the extended family and caste groups, as also religious and spiritual leaders, take on an emotional importance independent of any realistic evaluation of their performance, let alone an acknowledgement of their all too human weaknesses. Charisma, then, plays an unusually significant role among Indians and is a vital constituent of effective leadership in institutions.9 In contrast to most people in the West, Indians are generally more prone to revere than admire.
It is not as if Indians are not sceptical of authority figures. Indeed, their cynicism towards leaders, especially political leaders, is often extreme. It is only that when an Indian grants authority to a leader, his critical faculties disappear in the waves of credulity that wash over him. The granting of authority is involuntary in the case of family and caste leadership during childhood. It may be voluntary—to gurus of various hues, for instance—in situations of acute personal crisis or distress, the reason why, for example, healers of the most varied kind flourish in the country. The effectiveness of these healers may be less because of their particular healing regimens and more due to the unconscious vital forces that the healer’s charisma mobilizes in the p
atient in service of a cure.
Do these patterns of family life, especially those connected with the hierarchical ordering of relationships, extend beyond the home into other institutions like university departments, offices, political parties and the bureaucracy? The evidence suggests that they do. Authority relations in the Indian family provide a template for the functioning of most modern business, educational, political and scientific organizations.
First, 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. The organizational psychologist Jai Sinha has called this type of leader the ‘nurturant-task’ leader who is strict in getting the task accomplished and tries to dominate the activities of his subordinates.10 He is, however, not authoritarian but nurturing in the sense of being a benevolent guide to his subordinates and someone who takes a personal interest in their well-being and growth.
Among the subordinates, on the other hand, there is a complementary tendency to idealize the leader and look upon him as a repository of all virtues, an almost superhuman figure deserving of their faith and respect. Even in the upper echelons of modern business organizations, among senior managers with exposure to Western business education and practices, the influence of Indian culture on their perception of top leadership has not disappeared. The CEO of a modern company here is the recipient of far greater idealization than is usually the case in the West.11 This is a potential strength of Indian organizations and has many advantages, such as a greater esprit de corps in senior management and a higher degree of loyalty and commitment to the organization. It can also lead to a work ethic and performance that is much more than what a leader might reasonably expect in most European and North American organizations. Yet idealization, that great construct of human imagination which allows one to conceive with the conviction of a known fact a more perfect and valuable reality than what exists, can also distort the perception of leadership. The Indian leader is thus often deprived of critical feedback from the senior people of his organization that could help him develop more effective leadership practices.
