Social Commentary Exhibit A: The Unsociability of Indian Society

[Back from hiatus]

I made friends with more Europeans and Americans last year than with Indians – in Mysore! I have (had) always believed that the cultural differences between peoples are only superficial, and to a large extent I still do, but meeting foreigners who visit Mysore and having face-to-face conversations with them vividly contrasted the behaviors of my own people against theirs and helped me realize how I took some ideas to be universal that aren’t necessarily so. Disillusionment was kicking in, and there’s not another feeling that feels better.

As an Indian, you might be able to relate to many socially awkward situations I can describe, but perhaps none more tellingly than the awkwardness of meeting new people without being introduced and standing there in silence, starting conversations with strangers, or just generally acknowledging the presence of a stranger in the room. We have a hard time smiling at people we see on a regular basis during the morning walk or the guy at the grocery store. Avoiding participating in a conversation between strangers next to us seems a better option than joining it. In short, we are an unbelievably unsociable* people – and we let it disappear into the monotonous landscape of life in India.

But a foreigner visiting India, to whom this unsociable behavior is as foreign as the exotic birds of India, would be understandably puzzled. Taking a historical, and later contemporary, perspective on this, I quote here a renowned 18^th Century explorer, Carsten Niebuhr, a very perceptive traveler, who visited India and made these observations in Travels through Arabia and other countries in the East (1792) [keep in mind that ‘s’ back then was written elongated and almost made to look like an ‘f’]:

That observation, by the way, still rings true in some parts of India. Some smug “upper class” gits continue to delude themselves into believing they are inherently “upper” than the rest of enlightened India. I don’t want to go on too much of a tangent, but a shit-for-brains, rabies-infected doctor of pseudoscience (Ayurveda) had this to say at the 102^nd Indian Science Congress conference, an event that has come under a lot of heat for allowing these revisionist tumors to present their talks at a science conference.

"...Sushruta is asking for credit to be known worldwide as the father of surgery". He argued that sophisticated techniques, such as corrective nose surgery, and the use of scalpels so sharp that they could "split hair", were lost because of the subsequent dominance of "certain religions". Also, he argued, "Buddhism's advocacy of non-violence gained such precedence that even the use of scalpels were considered to be violent and over time, surgery started to be practiced by 'lower classes' and they lost their refinement."

Anyway, getting back to the crux of the issue, Niebuhr’s observations may not be true for the majority of educated India today, but it does seem that our culture's demonstrable unsociability has strong roots in a centuries-old caste system where people were precluded from socializing or fraternizing with members of other castes. As time passed and civil rights movements were brought to bear, these social edifices were demolished to an extent, but the psychological grip they had on the masses wouldn’t disappear. They were too subtle, and too embedded, to be noticed; it’s like a fish asking “what the hell is water?” – the title of a famed commencement speech by David Foster Wallace.

Niebuhr also observed that Indians were very unsociable towards foreigners as well. This I myself witnessed at two different places in Mysore in the last six months. A European woman walked into a sweet store I was at, and the two employees (both male) left in charge of the store, who were serving me at that moment, prolonged serving me as long as they could so they could avoid making eye contact with the European or talking to her, and at one point I heard them murmuring and coaxing each other to take that woman’s order – until she got tired of waiting and asked if they would serve her or not (politely). Another quick incident was at my gym locker room where an American visiting professor of considerable age said hello to the locker room boy, and the boy just stared back at him with a solemn, blank face, not smiling or saying hello in return. Apparently, smiling at strangers is the most intolerable social sin you can commit in the rusting, crumbling relic of a plague called caste system whose trail in the sand people still wish to track.

This entire experience has convinced me to stay abroad, preferably in a less rigid and more sociable European/American nation, for a few years so I can contrast the default behavior patterns we take for granted in India against a different, possibly better way of living and learning. Better later than never, better late than later. But best sooner.

*Unsocial and anti-social are worlds apart. One can be unsocial without being anti-social.

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