The Janus head of communal attitudes in India
(Previously Unpublished) March 2010 - Contemporary wisdom has us believe that with the rise of our economy and the pressures of globalization and high growth, traditional barriers of caste, community and culture in India are breaking down.
In actual fact the shifts in mindset are more subtle and more continuous than discrete. Traditionally, our feudal identity was our primary self of self and the behaviour codes enjoined on us by the caste or tribe were the default arbiters of all our social interactions. Our caste and faith affiliations at birth determined every aspect of our life, whether it was where to live or work, who our friends were, what we ate and drank, to who we married. Now it appears that these things are a dusty dream, soon to be forgotten in the glorious vision of a progressive, shiny, united, inclusive and growing economy and society.
The problem with this approach is that it links economic change linearly with social change. If this was correct, we should be witnessing in tandem with economic growth, a commensurate drop in conservatism of the extreme kind fueled by feudal tendencies. We should be feeling the whiff of a more open, tolerant and flexible social structure, one that is shedding its inward looking insularity.
But if anything, these voices are getting ever shriller, community based marriages are still the norm, suspicion between communities and faiths in social settings is as strong as ever, and we seem to have more pejorative terms for “other” Indian cultures than ever before. Paradoxically, we are more open and accepting than ever before of these “others” in certain situations, such as the workplace, in our interactions at the marketplace, in the entertainment arena, in the way we dress for the outside world, and in our schools and colleges.
What is happening is that contrary to popular discourse, we are actually raising higher and higher walls of communalism, but they are not between us and the world, they are between our private and public selves. Today, the economic sphere and the opportunities that it has suddenly thrown open are forcing us to leave our prejudices at home if we are to partake of these opportunities. But we have not abandoned these attitudes entirely; we have just shifted them behind walls, where only like minded people sharing the same feudal attributes are welcome. The explosive growth of community based television and that of economic news media, are two sides of the same coin.
The blink and you miss rate of change in the economy has a very small relation to how traditional social structure changes. While economic change is often disruptive and discrete, social change is almost always cautious, continuous and slow. The real social change has come about in our ability to expand the arenas of both our private and public selves to accommodate changes imposed on us. Where earlier restraint characterized our social selves entirely, today we are more strident and confident in our private feudal identity as well as in our public cosmopolitan identity.
While at one level the wall dividing these identities has become stronger, there are significant ways in which the secular nature of the economic discourse is wearing away at feudal structures. It is precisely because of these inroads that the walls get built ever higher. If one inter faith couple elopes, the penalties for all the others multiply.
To conclude, if the current economic trajectory becomes a permanent feature, expect social change, but slowly and incrementally, rather than at the pace of economic change.
In actual fact the shifts in mindset are more subtle and more continuous than discrete. Traditionally, our feudal identity was our primary self of self and the behaviour codes enjoined on us by the caste or tribe were the default arbiters of all our social interactions. Our caste and faith affiliations at birth determined every aspect of our life, whether it was where to live or work, who our friends were, what we ate and drank, to who we married. Now it appears that these things are a dusty dream, soon to be forgotten in the glorious vision of a progressive, shiny, united, inclusive and growing economy and society.
The problem with this approach is that it links economic change linearly with social change. If this was correct, we should be witnessing in tandem with economic growth, a commensurate drop in conservatism of the extreme kind fueled by feudal tendencies. We should be feeling the whiff of a more open, tolerant and flexible social structure, one that is shedding its inward looking insularity.
But if anything, these voices are getting ever shriller, community based marriages are still the norm, suspicion between communities and faiths in social settings is as strong as ever, and we seem to have more pejorative terms for “other” Indian cultures than ever before. Paradoxically, we are more open and accepting than ever before of these “others” in certain situations, such as the workplace, in our interactions at the marketplace, in the entertainment arena, in the way we dress for the outside world, and in our schools and colleges.
What is happening is that contrary to popular discourse, we are actually raising higher and higher walls of communalism, but they are not between us and the world, they are between our private and public selves. Today, the economic sphere and the opportunities that it has suddenly thrown open are forcing us to leave our prejudices at home if we are to partake of these opportunities. But we have not abandoned these attitudes entirely; we have just shifted them behind walls, where only like minded people sharing the same feudal attributes are welcome. The explosive growth of community based television and that of economic news media, are two sides of the same coin.
The blink and you miss rate of change in the economy has a very small relation to how traditional social structure changes. While economic change is often disruptive and discrete, social change is almost always cautious, continuous and slow. The real social change has come about in our ability to expand the arenas of both our private and public selves to accommodate changes imposed on us. Where earlier restraint characterized our social selves entirely, today we are more strident and confident in our private feudal identity as well as in our public cosmopolitan identity.
While at one level the wall dividing these identities has become stronger, there are significant ways in which the secular nature of the economic discourse is wearing away at feudal structures. It is precisely because of these inroads that the walls get built ever higher. If one inter faith couple elopes, the penalties for all the others multiply.
To conclude, if the current economic trajectory becomes a permanent feature, expect social change, but slowly and incrementally, rather than at the pace of economic change.
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