Indian Instincts

by Miniya Chatterji

  References

  Boyden, Jo, and Stefan Dercon. 2012. Child development and economic development: Lessons and future challenges. UNICEF, p. 1.

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

  Engle, Patrice L., and Maureen M. Black. 2008. The effect of poverty on child development and educational outcomes. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1136.1, pp. 243–56.

  Kingdon, Geeta Gandhi. 2005. Where has all the bias gone? Detecting gender bias in the intra-household allocation of educational expenditure in rural India. Economic Development and Cultural change, 53.2, pp. 409–52.

  Lakshmi, Rama. 2016. A spate of suicides highlights the pressures on students in India. Washington Post, 23 January.

  Malhotra, Aditi. 2015. What Indian parents want most for their children. Wall Street Journal, 13 August.

  Poddar, Namrata. 2013. Female infanticide—India’s unspoken evil. Huffington Post UK, 26 April.

  Rogoff, Barbara. 2003. The Cultural Nature of Human Development. (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

  Saha, Devanik. 2016. Nineteen million women in India have given birth to seven or more children. Wire, 10 May.

  Sameroff, Arnold. 2010. A unified theory of development: A dialectic integration of nature and nurture. Child Development 81.1 pp. 6–22.

  Singh, Mahendra Kumar. 2010. 82% rural India still lacks basic amenities. Times of India, 16 November.

  Singh, Rakesh Kumar, and Saket Sundria. 2017. Living in the dark: 240 million Indians have no electricity. Bloomberg, 24 January.

  Wachs, Theodore D., and Atif Rahman. 2013. The nature and impact of risk and protective influences on children’s development in low-income countries. Handbook of Early Childhood Development Research and its Impact on Global Policy, pp. 85–122.

  World Bank. 2013. Poverty and Equity, http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/country/IND.

  7

  Values

  Over and above linguistic, religious and other diversities, we Indians also belong to more than a thousand caste-based communities. We can further be affiliated to various other groups based on kinship, political beliefs, love for a sport, personal wealth, shared interest in spotting Martians on Earth, and so on. An Indian could typically be part of more groups at once than anyone else in the world.

  In light of this, the place for individuality in India is therefore supremely interesting. How do we manoeuvre between societal and individual values and beliefs? If we do manage to balance the two, where does that balancing act lead us? Ultimately, what are our values? These are the main questions I will investigate in this essay.

  As individuals, a particular value might be very significant to you, but unimportant to me, and there might be some values that are crucial to the entire group that you and I both belong to. Further, you might have a certain value that you are—often not consciously—obstinate about, whereas about others you might be more flexible. This creates your own hierarchy of values; it’s as if they are stacked right at the top of your head, and the most important ones make you react with feeling as soon as they are activated.

  For example, if freedom is an important value for you, you will fight when it is threatened, feel despair when you are helpless to protect it, and be ecstatic when you can enjoy it. If you value freedom less, you will be less affected by its presence or absence. This hierarchical structure of values ascertains which beliefs we consider more or less important. And the group that you and I both belong to could demonstrate a completely different hierarchy of values than yours or mine. Ultimately, your actions depend on the strength of your own individual beliefs as well as the flexibility the group practises in allowing individual members’ values to dominate the group’s values.

  This manoeuvring between individual and group values is significantly more so in India, where we put a great deal of effort into retaining our relations with kin and clan. More than people in most other parts of the world, an Indian will be likely to place greater faith in his personal ties with family and community than in the state or other institutions in general. Why?

  First, in India, there are no state-level policies offering significant unemployment dole or health insurance to all. The government does not provide us any substantial social security. And so when the chips are down, we have few options besides relying on kith and kin.

  Second, the implementation of labour laws across all sectors in India is alarmingly weak, and even corporate employers have poor employee protection mechanisms. In the absence of governmental social protection and with the high attrition rates at corporations, private insurance companies in India shy away from offering products such as redundancy insurance, intended to protect an individual from job loss. This is a fairly common insurance product offered by companies in many parts of the world. In case of a loss of employment, it is the family and community that come to the rescue in India.

  Third, politicians gathering votes during election campaigns in India have placed a premium on appeasing the various groups we belong to, and not the needs of individuals. Thereafter, the policy emphasis of the politician in power has also been on communities more than on individuals. The individual is not the focus of the state, and the citizen knows this so well that it adds to the growing deficit of trust in the state among the masses.

  Fourth, this deficit of trust between the state and citizens is further increased by the fact that influential Indians often manage to successfully leverage state resources, police protection, government projects and so on for their own benefit, while the masses are left high and dry.

  There is, therefore, hardly any alternative for Indians but to keep relations with family and traditional community groups strong, so they can be used as fallback options during periods of crisis. The retention of these community ties then becomes a sort of social insurance or a safety network.

  European sociologists have often emphasized that the flourishing of what they call ‘traditional’ community ties, with kith, kin and clan, for instance, is not a characteristic of a ‘modern’ society. According to the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, in such traditional cultures, there is little individuation.1 He explained that as a society becomes more complex and modern, individuals play more specialized roles and become more dissimilar in their experiences, interests and values. However, as we know, Indian society is distinctly reliant on community bonds and affiliations. In India, we do not operate alone. By this token, then, are we pre-modern?

  I find it extremely problematic to assess Indians’ ‘modernity’ on the basis of a Western framework of analysis. This was what was done by orientalist British writers such as William Jones, Henry Colebrooke, Nathaniel Halhead, Charles Wilkins, and philosophers such as John Stuart Mill. This is problematic because the context of European thinkers such as Durkheim, a century and a half ago was characterized by the advent in western Europe of industrialization and the birth of capitalism, with no democracy. Modernity in Europe, therefore, primarily meant technological progress, individual specializations and profit, sans the feeling of shared nationhood. In India, on the contrary, we fought against the British, and established democracy fifty years before we began to embrace capitalism. There was no place for individual entrepreneurship in India for almost fifty years after we won our political freedom. The free market did not exist and, till the 1990s, we were not thinking much about things like beating the competition and making individual headway for profit. The inversion of the sequence of events regarding democracy and capitalism in India, vis-à-vis Europe, has altered the trajectory of social evolution here.

  Today we have Indians who, in their writings, also measure India from the Western perspective of modernity. Many contemporary Indian writers in English cater to the international interest in the ‘darker side of India’. In a study on contemporary orientalist writings in India, Lisa Lau and Om Prakash Dwivedi write:

  The production and consumption of Indian writing in English takes place within a distinctly postcolonial framework, and clearl
y re-Orientalism and Orientalism permeate this industry at all levels, and in no insignificant degrees.2

  But to understand India and its values, we need to look at India from an Indian perspective. We need to inspect our own social history in cities and villages. Without boxing ourselves into separate tranches of ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’, we must assess, in the Indian context, what our affiliations to communities means to us. Even if we agree that traditional clans and culturally determined communities wield substantial influence on how we think and act, this cannot make us ‘pre-modern’ by Europe’s standards. Rather, let us then find out what those influences are that our family and communities wield on us. In what way does the society around us influence our individual values and beliefs?

  There are several villages located around the Jindal Steel and Power Group factories in the Raigarh district of Chhattisgarh in central India. About two years ago, at dawn, a stroll along the main roads encircling the villages offered me a view of at least a hundred bare buttocks in a row. Men, women and children sat on their haunches with their backs turned towards me, defecating. Walking further, I discovered that the local waterbody—essentially the reservoir of a small dam—was spotted even more profusely with naked bodies performing intimate ablutions. The same water, I knew, was used for drinking and cooking.

  This was as saddening as it was baffling, because, according to the district administration, this specific village was covered in the government’s Open Defecation Free States programme. Under this scheme, families had been granted Rs 12,000 each by the local municipal authorities, with which they were to construct toilets in their homes.3

  ‘Why are you not using the toilet at home?’ I asked a four-year-old who was on his way home after finishing the big job.

  ‘My mother told me to go outside,’ he replied shyly.

  I followed the little boy to identify his home, and then returned later the same day to speak to the boy’s family.

  A woman in a brightly coloured sari, perhaps in her late twenties, opened the door I knocked on. I introduced myself meekly as an employee of the Jindal Group, not knowing how she would react to my sudden visit. I added that I wanted to speak to her for her opinion on a sanitation project we wanted to do in her village.

  She said her name was Dhoopwati4 and welcomed me into her brick house, offering me a seat in a living room whose walls had been plastered with mud painted a bright shade of pink. She left me to fetch a glass of water. Looking around, I saw that the house had a similar layout to the others I had visited on earlier occasions—the entrance was small and led to a narrow corridor, where shoes and slippers were removed before entering the rest of the house. A few rooms were located on both sides of the corridor, including the small living room where I sat. The kitchen was large, occupying the most prominent part of the house next to an open courtyard.

  As I sat waiting for Dhoopwati to return, I noticed a 2-foot wide chamber constructed of sheets of asbestos across the courtyard.

  After some polite talk about the village and her well-being, I pointed to the asbestos contraption and asked, ‘What is that?’

  ‘It is a toilet,’ she said.

  ‘Can I go and see it?’ I asked, to which she nodded her head in agreement.

  Four narrow cement steps led to a door clasped with a rope to the rest of the structure. Inside the chamber, there was a hole in the floor.

  ‘Where is the flush?’ I asked.

  ‘What is a flush?’

  ‘How does everything get drained out?’

  ‘Oh, we don’t use this,’ Dhoopwati explained. ‘The government told us to make this, and gave us some money,’ she went on. ‘But in our culture, we cannot have toilets in the house. So we do not use this.’

  ‘Why can you not have a toilet in the house?’

  ‘Chhi chhi, it is dirty. It has to be far away from the house. Here we cook food that we eat,’ she said, pointing to the large, majestic kitchen of her home.

  Over the next few weeks, I visited thirty more families in Dhoopwati’s village, and another fifty families in the surrounding five villages. Each time, I made the highly unusual request of investigating their toilets, if they had one at home. Maintaining a photo diary of the toilets I visited, I compared my list to the government records for toilets built under the Open Defecation Free States scheme. Many of the toilets I saw were just shanties built over a hole in the ground. I discovered several addresses mentioned in the official records that did not actually exist in the village. And in most cases, I observed, the villagers still went out of their homes to urinate and defecate. I also visited a public toilet that had to be unlocked for me, as it had not been used since its construction several years ago.

  In one village, the local sarpanch, a lady, had taken an iron-fisted approach. She had laid down the rule that anyone who saw another villager defecating in the open would whistle aloud in public, and report the case in the weekly village council meetings. The offender would be fined Rs 1000. The sarpanch explained to me angrily that the non-usage of toilets at home was not so much a matter of discomfort as of culture.

  By this time, I had started evaluating the benefits of using the resources of the Jindal Group to build toilets in these villages. At the time of my investigation, 45.3 per cent of rural households in India did not have toilets.5 It was indeed important to build them, but I realized that the hygiene challenge was not one of infrastructure alone.

  I asked villagers their reasons for defecating in the open, and heard many stories about their perspective on hygiene and ‘dirt’. Bodily excreta, including hair and spit, was considered so dirty that it needed to be removed to a place outside the house. This place could even be just outside the house, but never inside. There were specific people assigned to deal with the ‘dirt’—barbers who performed tonsures and disposed of the hair somewhere far away, sweepers who cleaned the house, only to dump the waste on the street outside. How could they defecate inside the house?

  I found that they applied the same principle of ‘dirt’ to people as well. Certain classes of people were considered too dirty to be in physical proximity to oneself. Each community, no matter how ‘low’ in status it was relative to other groups, found another community or person to be even lower and hence dirtier. These classifications were also reflective of a deep bias: that people of different castes and communities were ‘naturally’ different because they were made of different substances. One’s body needed to be protected from the inferior substances.

  It occurred to me that even today, in urban settings, it is common for elite and even middle-class households to have separate vessels from which cleaners and maids eat and drink, and large homes definitely have a separate maid’s toilet. In many parts of India, different communities and castes eat separately. Inter-caste marriage is definitely a big taboo almost all over the country. Why? Because in all these cases, the ‘inferior’ person’s bodily substances—saliva, remains of excrement, semen—must not enter our body and ‘pollute’ us.

  Eventually, the Jindal Group did start to construct toilets in Chhattisgarh, and they also conducted a large number of workshops with women so that they would take responsibility for their maintenance and use. Women, we found, were the agents of change in the families and if we put them in charge of improving hygiene and influencing beliefs, we would stand a greater chance of success in our endeavour.

  Meanwhile, my observations in these villages reminded me of conversations I had had about fifteen years ago with the formidable Indian sociologist Dipankar Gupta.6

  I got the chance to spend a few days with Gupta when he was visiting Paris, where I was studying at that time. Gupta and I were both residing at the Maison de l’Inde in Cite Universitaire, an area in the south of Paris dedicated to lodgings for students and academics. We took many memorable strolls in the campus. Gupta’s primary research had been about social stratification in India and at that time he had just released a book on India’s ‘mistaken modernity’.

>   Gupta said that he felt that there was a general confusion among people between ‘contemporaneity’ and ‘modernity’. Consequently, those who argued in favour of ‘multiple modernity’ even considered Taliban-like forces modern because they were contemporaneous and used sophisticated machines. He thought that true modernity must be measured by people’s values towards equality in society. According to him, modernity was about how people related to other people. And he felt that the caste system—even though it has been largely dismantled7—had left its legacy of extreme inequality embedded in us. He showed me what he had written in his book:

  The caste theory of personhood is extremely biological . . . It holds that substances routinely expelled from a person’s body are polluting and dirty, even to the person concerned . . . There is some similarity between this and racism, but . . . in a racist society, there is no stricture that forbids a white person from engaging a black cook.8

  Indeed, because the basis of the stratification of Hindu society (about 80 per cent of the Indian population today) as illustrated by the caste system was so biological that the remnants of it have percolated down to the core belief systems that exist even today. Now, they are manifested in our attitude towards ‘dirt’ and all those we consider ‘dirty’. It is worth mentioning here that the list of people we Indians consider dirty is stupefying: menstruating women, sick persons, widows, sweepers, people who have been assigned a lower caste at birth and so on. I have written in an earlier chapter of this book about our practice of equating socio-economic inferiority with the physical state of being ‘dirty’.9

  The toilets in the Chhattisgarh villages I visited were perhaps an extension of the notions of ‘pure’ and ‘dirty’ in the caste system, which is also manifest in our values. We consider ourselves ‘pure’, and there is always someone from a different community, or a person perceived as being lower down the social or economic hierarchy who is considered ‘dirty’. And from this inferior or dirty person we must keep a physical distance. As Gupta noted, such a physical separation among people based on perceived biological inequality is unique to India.