by Sudhir Kakar
Since Indian institutions are markedly hierarchical, collaborative teamwork across levels of status and power proves to be difficult. Decisions tend to be pushed upwards and the top leadership must often intervene in organizational processes. More than in most Western cultures, the legacy of Indian family and childhood ensures that the quality of leadership becomes pivotal for the success or failure of an institution.
The difficulty in working in teams is compounded by the cultural obstacles to giving or receiving negative feedback. With the preservation of relationships as the primary principle governing their actions in interpersonal situations, Indians find it difficult to say a frank ‘No’ to requests they are unable or unwilling to grant. The refusal has then to be interpreted from the words in which the rejection is couched (‘Let’s see’ or ‘It’s difficult but I will try’, and so on), and from the tentative tone of voice and cautious body language. One has to exercise the same kind of judgement when asking for directions on an Indian street. The man who might not have an idea of the right directions but nonetheless proceeds to guide you to your destination is not only saving face by not admitting to his ignorance but also hesitates to introduce any negative vibes in the fleeting relationship that has just come into being.
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. In fact, effective leaders in India, both in the workplace and in the political arena, place great emphasis on the building and cultivating of relationships. This, as we have seen above, is consistent with an Indian’s experience from his earliest years where he has learnt that the core of any social relationship—in family, caste, school or at work—is caring and mutual involvement. What he should be sensitive to (and concerned with) are not only the goals of work that are external to the relationship but the relationship itself, the unfolding of emotional affinity.
As in the extended family, where favouritism has to be avoided to maintain harmony (for example, in the ideology of a joint family a father should not be seen as favouring his own son above the sons of his brothers), people in Indian organizations develop almost paranoid abilities in detecting signs of a leader’s favouritism toward selected subordinates. Not that they are particularly troubled by nepotism—as long as they are the intended beneficiaries. 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.
Given the strong need for nearness to the superior, to be considered ‘his man’, what is galling for an Indian is being excluded—or the feeling of being excluded—from a charmed circle that enjoys the superior’s favour. The result of this, almost always, is a good deal of hidden anger and passive aggressive behaviour. Effective leaders in Indian institutions are thus constantly on their guard against any impression of favouritism, because it can cause serious damage to the morale of the institution.
Some of the values that govern Indian institutional and work life have been empirically demonstrated by the GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness) research project, which surveyed over 17,000 middle managers in various industries in sixty-two societies.12 In this project, the sixty-two countries were grouped into ten cultural clusters: Latin Europe, Germanic Europe, Anglo Europe, Nordic Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Confucian Asia, Anglo (outside Europe), Sub-Saharan Africa, Southern Asia and Middle East.
If one looks at South Asia, where India is by far the largest country, this cultural cluster stands out prominently in three of the nine dimensions of the study. South Asia has the greatest power distance, that is, the degree to which the culture’s people are separated by power, authority and prestige.13 In other words, the difference in status between the chief executive and the office peon, the raja and the runk, is at its maximum in this region (the least is in Nordic Europe, that is, Scandinavia). Irrespective of his educational status and more than in any other culture in the world, an Indian is a homo hierarchicus. This is the case even when the modern Indian manager—usually middle-class, college-educated—wishes that it was not so and, as we shall see below, consciously aspires to a reduction in the power distance.
The second dimension on which South Asia stands out in the 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.) 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.
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). We have seen that the habit of solidarity with the family group and later with members of one’s caste is inculcated in early childhood and is regarded as one of the highest values guiding individual lives. This solidarity has the many economic advantages of informal networks that are based on trust rather than contractual obligations. We have already talked of the high esprit de corps when people working in an organization regard themselves as a ‘band of brothers’ and idealize the leader-father. The danger, of course, is of ‘in-groupism’, which makes collaboration with other, ‘out’ groups in large organizations difficult, if not impossible.
This snapshot of Indian leadership practices says little about the changes taking place in modern urban families which will invariably have an impact on Indian institutions. The GLOBE study confirms that what younger managers in India most dearly wish for is a reduction in the power distance between the leader and the led.14 We believe that leadership on this dimension is indeed in a state of transition. It is not a coincidence that the desired reduction in psychological distance between the leader and the led is congruent with the changes taking place in the father-son relationship in the middle-class family. Let us elaborate.
In traditional India, the father entered his son’s life in a big way only in the later years of the boy’s childhood. In the early and middle years, the relationship between the two was (and in large parts of the country continues to be) marked by formality and perfunctory daily social contact.15 In older autobiographical accounts, fathers, whether strict or indulgent, cold or affectionate, are invariably portrayed as distant. The father’s guiding voice, a prime element in a man’s sense of identity, was diffused among the voices of many older male family members and his individual paternity muffled.
The reasons for a traditional father not taking a demonstratively active role in the upbringing of his son are not difficult to fathom. A traditional father operates under the logic of the joint family. This demands that in order to prevent the building up of nuclear cells within the family that can destroy its cohesion, a father be restrained in the presence of his own child and divide his interest and support equally among his own and his brothers’ children. Moreover, as we shall see later in the chapter on sexuality, many a young father was embarrassed to hold his infant child in front of older family members since this fruit of his loins was clear evidence of activity in that particular region.
The second ideology impinging on traditional fathers in India (and in common with other patriarchal societies) is of a gender-based dichotomy in parenting
roles and obligations. That is, decided notions of things that men do in the household and others that they don’t. Playing with or taking care of their infants is not what fathers do, their major role lies in the disciplining of the child. 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.’
Of course, behind the requisite façade of aloofness and impartiality, a traditional Indian father may be struggling to express his love for his son. Fatherly love is no less strong in India than in other societies. Even in ancient religious and literary texts, a son is not only instrumental in the fulfilment of a sacred duty but has often been portrayed as a source of intense emotional gratification.16 Older autobiographical accounts often depict the Indian father as a sensitive man and charged with feelings for his son which he does not openly reveal. Thus in Autobiography of a Yogi, Yogananda describes meeting his father after a long separation: ‘Father embraced me warmly as I entered our Gurupur home. “You have come,” he said tenderly. Two large tears dropped from his eyes. Outwardly undemonstrative, he had never before shown me these external signs of affection. Outwardly the grave father, inwardly he possessed the melting heart of a mother.’17
One of the more striking changes associated with modernity and the rise of an urban middle class is the active involvement of fathers in bringing up their infant and little children.18 Given the intensity and ambivalence of the mother-son connection in the Indian setting, the need for the father’s physical touch and guiding voice, his support and often unconscious encouragement for the son’s separation from his mother has always been pressing. Modern, generally urban and educated, fathers have begun to provide this early emotional access to the son, not only attenuating the overheated quality of the mother-son bond, but also laying the foundations for a less hierarchical and closer father-son relationship. The early experience of having fathers who are no longer distant and forbidding figures, who are available to both sons and daughters, often as playmates, will, inevitably, change notions of the desirable power distance in institutions and the expectations that young Indians will have of their leaders.
The Inner Experience Of Caste
Second only to the family as a pervasive social dimension of Indian identity is the institution of caste. Although the usage of the term ‘caste’ is problematic (it derives from the Portuguese casta—‘race’, ‘descent’), the term has entered English and other European languages as an expression for the horizontal segmentation of Indian society. Actually, the term ‘caste’ refers to not one but two institutions: varna and jaati. Varna (literally, ‘colour’) is the ancient division of Hindu society into the priest (brahmin), warrior (kshatriya), tradesman (vaishya) and servant (shudra) classes—in that order of ranking—which is encountered in the Vedas and other founding texts of Hinduism. This fourfold classification is still used to locate a person in the wider social space, as when political commentators speak of mobilizing the brahmin, vaishya or the backward castes (as the shudras are now called) to vote in a state election.
However, caste today almost always refers to jaati, which is caste in all the immediacy of daily social relations and occupational specialization. The jaati system is made up of more than three thousand castes. The hierarchical order of these castes is not static but changes from village to village and from one region to another, although one of the brahmin castes will almost always be at the top of the pecking order. Here, we will talk of caste only in the sense of jaati.
Essentially, jaati is a social group to which an individual belongs by birth. And although this is now rapidly changing, a jaati member would usually follow his caste’s traditional occupation. His marriage partner even today, in nine cases out of ten, will belong either to his own caste or to the sub-caste group from which he is permitted to choose a spouse. It isn’t surprising, then, that besides hierarchy, the restriction of the marriage partner to one’s own caste is the second pillar of the caste system. Except in ‘modern’ Indians, a person’s closest friendships too are with members of his own caste. His relations with members of other castes are more formal, governed as they are by unwritten codes prescribing and proscribing relationships between castes.
Although families of a particular caste may live together in the same village, the caste itself extends beyond the confines of any single village. A large, prominent caste may have millions of members and extend over considerable geographical territory, making it a very desirable group for politicians for the purpose of electoral mobilization. In fact, in militantly heightening caste identities Indian democracy may be the third, new pillar, after endogamy and hierarchy, which props up the institution of caste.
Just as the family is the primary foil for a child’s budding sense of identity, caste is the next circle in his widening social radius. The caste’s values, beliefs, prejudices and injunctions, as well as its distortions of reality, become part of the individual’s mind and contents of his conscience. It is his internalized caste norms that define ‘right action’ or dharma for the individual, make him feel good and loved when he lives up to these norms, and anxious and guilty when he transgresses them.
Since an individual’s anxiety may also reflect the latent concerns of his group, knowledge of an Indian’s caste, its aspirations and apprehensions, enriches the understanding of his identity formation. For instance, a person’s violent outrage provoked by an ostensibly minor slight may not only be the result of an individual problem in ‘managing aggression’, it may also have its source in a historical resentment shared by his caste as a whole and passed down from generation to generation as part of his caste identity.
If marriage and kinship are its body, then hierarchy is the soul of caste. The ranking of a caste in the social order, and thus the capital of narcissism available to a person for belonging to a particular caste, is generally according to the criteria of purity vs pollution.1 A caste is ranked high if its way of life is judged to be pure, and low if it is considered to be relatively polluted. A brahmin is the purest (although there will be gradations of purity in the many brahmin castes) and an untouchable, the dalit (literally, ‘oppressed’), the most polluted. Although the rankings in between these extremes in a particular village may be bitterly contested, with a caste claiming a purer way of life than what has been ascribed to it, it is generally agreed that purity and pollution are determined by the caste’s way of life, in which its diet (for instance, whether vegetarian or meat-eating) and its traditional occupation are the most important elements. Occupations that put the person in touch with death or with bodily substances (the sweeper, the washerman, the barber, the tanner, the cobbler) are considered the most polluted.
The preoccupation of the caste system with high and low has been associated with suffering and humiliation for several millions through the centuries. As the Marathi poet Govindraj puts 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.’2 The hierarchy is so fine tuned that even a low caste will always find another caste that is inferior to it, thus mitigating some of the narcissistic injury suffered by it at being seen as inferior. Thus, for instance, ‘among those lowest scavenging sections which remove night soil there is still a distinction: those who serve in private houses consider themselves higher than those who clean public latrines.’3
Caste hierarchy and its associated discrimination are not solely Hindu phenomena. Dumont has noted that no religious movement in India that has opposed caste has ever been successful in the long run.4 Although not as widespread or harsh as in Hinduism, the hierarchical principle embodied in the caste system has also put its stamp on the social practices of other religions such as Islam, Christianity and Sikhism which have greater claims to egalitarianism. For instance, in the state of Goa, the term ‘brahmin Catholic’ is commonly used for a person of high status in the Christian communi
ty. 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.
One of the major reasons for very few upper-caste Hindus converting to Islam or Christianity over centuries of Muslim and British rule has to do with the strength of their caste identities. 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. In contrast, a large number of untouchables converted to Islam, Christianity and, since the 1950s (with the sensational conversion of the dalit leader B.R. Ambedkar), to Buddhism in order to escape the discriminatory practices of the caste system.
