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SOCIETY

Changing social and cultural mores

Change is difficult to identify in India, even when it seems to be visible all around us. To my mind, the reason for this is that ancient civilisations are effortlessly complex; they are the end-product of centuries of cumulative experience, added layer upon layer to a receptive template. Their signposts can, therefore, be very deceptive. What appears to have changed may quite well be a decoy for what has not. The treacherous dialectic between what is visible and what rema ins hidden is never-ending for a people who view the cycle of time in thousands of years, not seconds or minutes.

There can thus be no comprehensive mapping of changing social and cultural mores in India. What can be stated, perhaps, is that the country is going through a definitive phase of transition, wherein the certitudes of the past are being interrogated by the imperatives of the present and the temptations of the future. But even in this process, there are no watertight compartments. Tradition and modernity co-exist in fascinating ways in our country. Young techies on the Infosys campus in Bangalore call Narayana Murthy by his first name in a simulated environment that seeks to flatten entrenched traditional hierarchies, but rarely invoke this egalitarianism at home in dealing with their elders or wives or servants.

The Indian mind, I have often said, is akin not to a cupboard but a chest of drawers: pull out one drawer and you can find a computer keyboard in the hands of a person apparently happily in congruence with the 21st century; pull out another drawer and the same person could be effortlessly in sync with some obscurantist ritual dating back to a thousand years ago. Both aspects co-exist, without any overt sign of stress or tension. As a species, Indians are arguably the most well-adjusted and harmonious schizophrenics in the world.

Given this, how do we judge what has changed 60 years after 1947, as we stand on the threshold of a new millennium? Perhaps one methodology is to take a few key areas as sample studies, and attempt to gauge — and understand — the flux going on within. Entire books can be written on each of these, but I will, on a random but illustrative basis, touch upon three specific areas for this purpose: caste, gender, and religion.

Caste still retains its primeval hold in India. The matrimonial advertisements in major newspapers are meticulously arranged in accordance with caste, and electoral arithmetic is very much, even today, a sum of caste calculations. In the countryside, caste wars are not uncommon, and for a great many number of Indians caste remains a primary source of identity and belonging. And yet, change is afoot in the way in which caste loyalties operate. In urban India, inter-caste marriages are far more frequent than earlier. In the commercial world, where productivity and merit have primacy, caste loyalties are invoked much less than before. Most important, the democratic empowerment of Dalits has in a sense stood the caste system on its head. If Mayawati can become the Chief Minister of India’s most populous State on an avowedly pro-Dalit platform, the power equations, which were always the signboards of the caste system, are pointing in an entirely new direction. It is no wonder that some ‘high caste’ aspirants are willing to forge their birth certificates in order to benefit from reservations for the ‘lower castes’. The caste system exists, but its asphyxiating hold is loosening, and in many areas the ground is being cut from under its centuries-old structure.

India is still very much a male-dominated society. A male child has primacy in most households, and female foeticide is still being practised at alarmingly high levels. The practice of dowry is pervasive, even if many educated boys put the blame on their parents while happily enjoying its benefits. But more girls are going to school and to higher educational institutions than ever before, and a few among them, who have tasted economic freedom, are unwilling to quiescently allow the old attitudes to prevail. Moreover, a silent revolution, unnoticed largely in the urban salons of the well-to-do, is unfolding in the rural areas where the compulsory reservation of 33 per cent of all seats in panchayats — one of the highest such reservation levels in the world — is quietly empowering an entire generation of women.

To any foreign observer, religion has a very overt presence in India. Places of religious worship dot the landscape. Indeed, according to one survey, there are more temples in the country than there are toilets. But although we need to remain vigilant about the dangers of communal provocation, it is my sense that more and more Indians are unwilling to make their religious beliefs become a cause for social strife and violence. They are not abjuring religion — in fact the frenetic pace of urban life has given birth to an entire spectrum of new-age gurus beatifically beaming their panaceas from television. However, more Indians — especially from the middle class — are seeking to swim away from the islands of religious exclusiveness towards the opportunities of the secular mainstream. For them the seductions of the material world are as important, and they are impatient with any dislocations that distract them from their upwardly mobile aspirations. Not surprisingly, the membership of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is actually falling; and the most conservative madrasas have quietly begun classes in computers and English. Kirtan sabhas retain their attraction, but the latest twist in the Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki type of sitcoms or the Sa re ga ma contests are, if anything, more absorbing. And this is not only the case with urban India for there are close to a hundred million cable TV connections in the rural areas. A few fundamentalists may claim religio-cultural sanction in order to harass romancing young couples or protest against vibrating condoms, but they have only a marginal nuisance value as Indians begin to admit that they are willing to accept, if not enjoy, the still coy but increasingly bolder promiscuity of Bollywood and the media.

The important thing to understand is that India cannot be seen in categories of black and white. There is a rising tumult below its traditional features, and an unchanging serenity underlying its dialogue with the modern world. It depends on what you see, or even more important, what you cannot.