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July 21, 2005

How different are they really?

India came of age as I was growing up there in the 90s. Three pivotal moments stand out in my memory as having had particular significance to Indian society. The first was when our current Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, then finance minister (approximately Secretary of the Treasury, for you U.S.ians) opened up an antiquated socialist economic system and paved the way to globalization, thus allowing American products to be sold in Indian markets with greater ease. The second, around the same time, was when the Gulf War began and cable channels started beaming it and American television shows directly into Indian living rooms. A few years later, the Internet became accessible to Ashok Kumar, the Indian equivalent of John Doe according to Wikipedia. American culture, which had heretofore been beheld with a mixture of suspicion and fascination because so little of it came through, was flooding through the airwaves and encouraging a glamorous shop-till-you-drop consumerist attitude.

India had opened up. The air was infectiously electric with the thousands of possibilities that lay before the numerous starry-eyed youth. Of course, the sudden flood of American culture was not universally greeted with optimism. A band of culture vultures, claiming to guard true Indian culture against onslaught from evil Western culture, sprang up to warn the younger generation against aping American culture too literally. The extremists claimed American culture was so different from Indian culture that adopting it would necessarily mean the end of Indian values as Indian society knew it. The moderates among them prescribed a syncretic approach to the young generation and advised them to combine the best of the two cultures. I was encouraged to examine the postulates of both sides critically and choose my own path. I continued to think about which aspects of American culture to integrate into my life after I started living in the U.S. My observations and thinking led me to believe that aside from economic conditions, which influence Indian and American societies in vastly different ways, Indian and American cultures are really not all that different.

For starters, they're both highly idealistic and romanticizing cultures. Indian culture exalts people who have apotheosized human values such as love, pride and valor. India has had traditions such as sati, where a widow would jump into her dead husband's funeral pyre so as to join him even in his death. Then there is the much-idealized tale of Anarkali, a courtesan in the Mughal court of Akbar ('The Great'), who accepted a fate of death by being walled-in for the sake of love. Indian movies, especially in the mid-to-late 90s, were idealistic (sometimes sickeningly so) tales that revolved around family and the sublimation of individual desires and aspirations to the will of the family. We find a similar idealistic bent in the United States as well. The U.S. was born as a result of an experiment in democracy. In a significant departure from the feudalistic and royal traditions of old, for the first time, one document, the U.S. Constitution, was revered as the foundation of the country, to the point of almost being worshipped. A lot of American idealism springs from the fact that allegiance to the U.S. was fundamentally tied to believing in the idea of the U.S. After World War I, Woodrow Wilson worked enthusiastically to advance the ideal of an international organization, the League of Nations, where problems between countries would be resolved in peace. That experiment, however, failed to hold its own against the harsh realities of the interwar period. The role of the woman as a homemaker was idealized to such an extent in the U.S. that by the time feminism hacked it to pieces, it was no surprise. U.S. educational institutions are full of fraternities and sororities, organizations that are held together by nothing more than a few commonly held ideals. American romantic comedies are always received well by the American crowd, no matter how improbable their ending would be in real life.

Indian culture and American culture are both highly individualistic cultures. American culture is well known for its strain of rugged New World individualism, possibly inspired by the Iroquois nation. Indian culture, at first glance, doesn't encourage a devil-may-care, independent attitude. So what individualism am I talking about here? I once read an interesting article on Sulekha.com, whose thesis was that Indian culture is also fiercely individualistic not at the level of the individual, but at the level of the family. The whims of the individual are usually subject to censure by the elders, who represent the best interests of the family in the abstract. However, outside of a family, a docile, uncompetitive attitude is discouraged. Individual members of a family are driven along just as much to compete and glorify its name as individual high-achievers are in the United States to achieve personal glory. I have since lost the reference to this article, but I would be infinitely grateful if anyone could point me to it. We see examples of this drive for family glory even in the millennia old epic Mahabharata, whose plot revolves principally around family rivalries.

As somewhat of a corollary to their idealizing nature, Indians and Americans both live in a culture that encourages excess. The over consumption of contemporary American society, especially when contrasted with historically low incomes, is a well documented fact that leads to America's gaping trade deficit. This idea is expounded upon endlessly by the likes of Thomas L. Friedman and Stephen Roach. Americans seem to have absolutely no problems living hand to mouth from paycheck to paycheck, while simultaneously accumulating tons of credit card debt. Indian society too has historically encouraged stretching every last rupee one has well beyond reasonable means. Indian literature has an abundance of stories of men taking on ridiculous amounts of debt and slaving away for generations to repay it if only it would mean weddings and dowries of acceptable grandeur for their daughters. Indian cuisine and American cuisine also share a common thread of richness and excess. The sweeter Indian sweets are, the better. The more ghee that is used to make these sweets, the better. Similarly in the U.S., desserts try to bring together superlatives of every conceivable sort together. Deep-fried candy-bars, ultra-decadent brownies served à la mode with thick chocolate fudge and Ben and Jerry's ice-creams that combine three or four different flavors in one scoop are all the rage. The modern European esthetic of light, flufffy cakes and minimalistic desserts wouldn't fly very well in either middle America or India. As foods continue to get richer in both cuisines, the public health problem posed by various cardiovascular epidemics will be of epic proportions. The obesity epidemic in America has the impending diabetes epidemic in India as its companion.

Indian culture is therefore similar to American culture in many important ways that do not immediately meet the eye. So far, it has escaped some of the distinctive ills that plague American society, such as high divorce rate, crime, extraordinary litigiousness and unabashed consumerism. I am not entirely sure how, but I believe it is because the Generation Me of Indian society, which values individual needs over everything else and craves instant gratification, had not been born yet. Indian popular culture had and continues to have significant elements of middlebrow commentary, driven by the conviction that culture, education and high art are good for one's character. In contrast, American pop culture, as reflected in numerous contemporary magazines, has grown to be anti-intellectual, bland and excessively obsessed with celebrity lives. Times are changing rapidly in India though. India's Generation Me is being cultivated by relentless advertising on cable television targeted at the world's largest middle class. The improving economic conditions of Indian society and the birth of India's Generation Me might lead to Indian society's latent similarities with American society being actualized in the form of the same ills that trouble American society. However, Indian culture has been around for a lot longer than American culture and has seen several periods of affluence and decadence similar to the present day in U.S. Hopefully, it will prove to be resilient enough to come up with a creative and distinctively Indian way of avoiding these problems.

Posted by Vishy at July 21, 2005 11:02 PM

Comments

Posted by: Stephen at July 19, 2005 08:27 PM

Posted by: Vishy at July 20, 2005 02:29 AM