Because I didn’t have an ironed kurta…
We recently had a party, for which each one of us was instructed to “be Indian” with their get up…..well i didn’t have a decent kurta at hand, so instead i decided to write this and take it to the party instead, dressed in white shirt and blue jeans….
What does it mean to be Indian? How can we define Indian-ness, in fact, how do we define tradition? Aren’t the definitions of these terms incumbent on the definitions of their exact opposites? In other words, we define ourselves as what we are not, rather than what we are. We define tradition as something that has past, but we still lay claim to it. Is what we see as India today, not the India in our minds? Why is it that in order to assert ourselves we always hark back to our past, to our history, saying, “We were a great people…?” Is what we are today not good enough? If that is true, then we the present generation of 20-somethings have a serious crisis on our hands. Because we are inheriting this nation as it is today. Isn’t it time we redefined ourselves? Isn’t it time we stepped back and look at ourselves, where we stand today?
Is the common thread that binds us all only in our past? We seem to be dividing ourselves further and further into smaller and smaller bits of societies and communities. Every community looks to ‘exclude’ itself from the others, looking to define themselves as not part of the rest. It seems that we are unable to come together as a nation anymore; we are a people of too many different people, who are growing increasingly intolerant. Is there nothing we have in common anymore? Maybe this is true, but then where is India headed? Can we take a look at her now?
Is wearing Levis jeans, Benetton shirts, and Nike shoes un-Indian? Is enjoying the fruits of worldwide prosperity in a globalising nation a crime? Do we like to define ourselves as everything that is non-global? We only need to look around and see that this definition is far from what the reality around us is. It is up to us, to take a critical look at it, and decide for ourselves what we want India to be. What we think today, shapes what might happen tomorrow, if we keep looking back to define ourselves, we might just get hit by the ‘reality check’ truck.
I am all for tradition, but it should not become a hindrance to a vision for the future, or cloud our sight of the present. Instead of always indulging in an easy exercise of pastiche of well-established, stereotypical images, we might want to look beyond, or rather, what is beneath our noses, the present. Can we examine the lives we are living today, think of not only what India means to us, but more importantly, what we can mean to India. Define who we are today, as a nation. Define Indian-ness today; let us start with that, we the inheritors of this nation.
Haha, I bet they’ll have a lawyer go over the dress code next time they invite you to a party!
Sorry. Brain not running, cannot construct non-facetious response. Will try later.
Okay, it’s 3 AM and I can’t sleep so I thought I’d give this post a more rational and reasoned response like I had threatened I would. Sure, you only wrote this to get out of wearing a kurta like you were supposed to, but some of it is still worth responding to… Or I could just be tossing thoughts into the void here, but that’s fine too.
(Post script: The following comments expresses some rather strong and possibly politically incorrect views, and who knows if I’ll come to regret them later or laugh at the foolish youngster I once was, but heck, I believe most of it now, so I’ll say it anyway. I can see it now: “Ha! Ha! ‘I believe most of it’, he says! ‘I’ll say it anyway!’ Poor foolish youngster,” says future me.)
This is a hard topic to argue about simply because the idea of a “nation” itself is so vague and slippery. After all, in terms of culture and tradition alone, people in Punjab, India have more in common with those in Punjab, Pakistan than Kerala, India. Nevertheless, the notion of “India” certainly dominates any such comparison, far more so than if it were merely a political and economic entity. The nation, and not merely the state, may only be real insofar as it exists in the minds of the people, but even that makes it real enough.
This was probably harder for me as a physicalist to come to terms with than it would probably have been for anyone else. I used to reject the idea that being Indian had any real bearing on my sense of self. Surely that is a purely accidental matter of being born within one set of imaginary borders rather than another? But now I wonder whether such a question is akin to asking whether the idea that coloured pieces of paper and embossed metal disks are valuable is nothing more than an enormous collective delusion. The point being, not all things are concrete that are real, and after all, social constructs do have undeniable inertia and force.
That said, I’m rambling, and I should make some effort towards getting to a point. What is the “common thread that binds us”? It is a shared daydream, an idea of a nation called “India”, because the idea of a nation, shared among enough people, *is* a nation. And for a shared idea to survive, it needs hooks for people to hang on to together. That’s probably why nationalism thrives both in times of war and in prosperity, which unite people through a common enemy or a common sense of hope, and suffers in the absence of such large-scale social forces, as dissatisfied people looking for someone to blame find them in their neighbors or in the local government. As you might guess, I’m not too big a fan of patriotism (I’d rather have people be globalist and humanist than nationalist) but there are good things about it which I’ll come to soon.
So! One of the usual reasons trotted out for maintaining tradition and culture is that it gives you, as an individual, a sense of belonging, of knowing where your roots are. Somehow, that’s never really held much sway over me. This may have something to do with my never having been interested in the mainstream “Indian” preoccupations like Bollywood, religion, cricket and Mughlai food. But I never felt very deeply about being “Indian” as such; I always figured I could move anywhere in the world and, as long as I knew the language and had a few friends and the opportunity to do fun things, I’d be happy enough… and two years in the United States has done little to convince me otherwise. (To be honest, I can’t wait to get back to Delhi in two weeks, but that’s only because I miss family and old friends, not anything to do with “India” per se!)
Now there’s always the possibility that I might end up in a mid-life crisis suddenly realizing that there’a a large hole in my soul and self-identity which can only be filled by an all-out embrace of everything traditional, but at this point I don’t see it happening. Besides, one has to consider whether the idea of devotion to the traditional being “good for you” or for its own sake is prevalent because it benefits the individual or society at all, or merely because it maintains the institution of the traditional status quo. After all, it’s almost a Darwinian tautology that social structures survive not on the basis of how beneficial they are to their adherents, but on how well they convince their adherents to preserve and enlarge the structures themselves.
All right, so now have I established that I’m a radical anti-establishmentarian without a whit of regard for our glorious tradition and culture? Well, not quite, I’m just trying to deconstruct the usual arguments for preserving the culture of one’s heritage before I can pose my own. There is one reason I can see that’s very pragmatic but at the same time decidedly detached from the accident of one’s birth, and that is simply this:
Homogeneity is harmful; diversity is valuable.
I think this relates to the most important concern on most people’s minds who worry about kids not caring for Indian traditions. The fear is that the next generation will adopt all of Western culture wholesale (shirts, jeans and all) and in the process forget all that is our own (kurtas, for instance). Of course, realistically this is not going to happen in a single generation, but the possibility is there that Indian culture will over time slowly but surely die out, replaced piece by piece by imported Americanisms unless we do something about it. Detaching this scenario from nationalistic bias, we would see the rich social and cultural variations of the world lost, taken over by the American socio-econo-cultural hegemony. I don’t think I have to establish that this is clearly a bad thing. There’s already a Starbucks on every street in the US; we don’t need one on every street in the world. We need lots of different people to do lots of different things and talk to each other, because diversity stimulates creativity and exploration and a broader understanding of ourselves.
Now, the doomsday scenario I just described is obviously not going to happen. That’s the thing with doomsday scenarios: they’re used to get people excited about not letting them happen, and so they eventually never come to pass, and it’s easy to point and laugh at the ridiculously overblown fears afterwards, but it’s hard to say whether it would have all worked out fine had the banner never been raised. And in any case, they’re useful as signposts in the mental landscape, saying “DON’T GO HERE”, or at least, “You’d better be very very careful moving in this direction”.
Holy shit, this has been a long comment. It might even be longer than your post! Well, I’m just wrapping up now. What was my point? Ah yes. Why should we care about our culture and tradition, which is really all grounded in the past, and might it not be holding us back? Well, the thing about culture is that we *have one*, and though a lot of it may not be relevant or useful, a lot of it probably is. Things like classical music and philosophy are undeniably valuable and, while rooted in tradition, certainly don’t have to stagnate right there. The choice between being stuck in the past and dropping everything to move forward is a false dichotomy.
Even if I were to consider myself a humanist first and last and an Indian merely by accident, I would still have a good reason to support Indian culture. Am I to consider it superior to most, simply because I was born south of an imaginary dotted line? Certainly not. Do I have an inherent duty to support *Indian* traditions as opposed to, say, Peruvian or Lebanese or even American culture instead? Well, maybe, maybe not. Why then should I care about being Indian and preserving Indian culture? Simply because it is of immeasurable value not just to us but to the world, because it is right here in front of us, and because the Peruvians and Lebanese and Americans are busy taking care of their culture, so if we don’t take care of that which is Indian, who will?
god damn it… i spent way too long writing that comment
wow….umm….u did spend way too long!!!…hehe….will respond shortly….have to think about this one!
if you think it’s taking up too much space on your blog i’ve reposted it at http://www.cs.unc.edu/~narain/personal/blog/2008-06-anti-nationalist-and-proud.html so you can delete the comment and replace it with the link if you like