INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
Our book is about Indian identity. It is about 'Indian-ness', the cultural part of the mind that informs the activities and concerns of the daily life of a vast number of Indians as it guides them through the journey of life. The attitude towards superiors and subordinates, the choice of food conducive to health and vitality, the web of duties and obligations in family life are all as much influenced by the cultural part of the mind as are ideas on the proper relationship between the sexes, or on the ideal relationship with god. Of course, in an individual Indian the civilizational heritage may be modified and overlaid by the specific cultures of his family, caste, class or ethnic group. Yet an underlying sense of Indian identity continues to persist, even into the third or fourth generation in the Indian diasporas around the world-and not only when they gather for a Diwali celebration or to watch a Bollywood movie.
Identity is not a role, or a succession of roles, with which it is often confused. It is not a garment that can be put on or taken off according to the weather outside; it is not 'fluid', but marked by a sense of continuity and sameness irrespective of where the person finds himself during the course of his life. A man's identity-of which the culture that he has grown up in is a vital part-is what makes him recognize himself and be recognized by the people who constitute his world. It is not something he has chosen, but something that has seized him. It can hurt, be cursed or bemoaned but cannot be discarded, though it can always be concealed from others or, more tragic, from one's own self.
The cultural part of our personal identity, modern neuroscience tell us, is wired into our brains. The culture in which an infant grows up constitutes the software of the brain, much of which is already in place by the end of childhood. Not that the brain, a social and cultural organ as much as a biological one, does not keep changing with interactions with the environment in later life. Like the proverbial river one never steps into twice, one also never uses the same brain twice. Even if our genetic endowment were to determine fifty per cent of our psyche and early childhood experiences another thirty per cent, there is still a remaining twenty per cent that changes through the rest of our lives. Yet, as the neurologist and philosopher Gerhard Roth observes, 'Irrespective of its genetic endowment, a human baby growing up in Africa, Europe or Japan will become an African, a European or a Japanese. And once someone has grown up in a particular culture and, let us say, is twenty years old, he will never acquire a full understanding of other cultures since the brain has passed through the narrow bottleneck of "culturalization".' In other words, the possibilities of 'fluid' and changing identities in adulthood are rather limited and, moreover, rarely touch the deeper layers of the psyche. So, in a sense, we are Spanish or Korean-or Indian-much before we make the choice or identify this as an essential part of our identity.
We are well aware that at first glance the notion of a singular Indian-ness may seem far-fetched. How can anyone generalize about a country of a billion people-Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Jains-speaking fourteen major languages and with pronounced regional differences? How can one postulate anything in common between a people divided not only by social class but also by India's signature system of caste, and with an ethnic diversity characteristic more of past empires than of modern nation states? Yet from ancient times, European, Chinese and Arab travellers have identified common features among India's peoples. They have borne witness to an underlying unity in apparent diversity, a unity often ignored or unseen in recent times because our modern eyes are more attuned to spotting divergence than resemblance. Thus in three hundred B.C., Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to Chandragupta Maurya's court, remarked on what one would today call the Indian preoccupation with spirituality:
Death is with them a frequent subject of discourse. They regard this life as, so to speak, the time when the child within the womb becomes mature, and death as a birth into a real and happy life for the votaries of philosophy. On this account they undergo much discipline as a preparation for death. They consider nothing that befalls men as either good or bad, to suppose otherwise being a dream-like illusion, else how could some be affected with sorrow and others with pleasure by the very same things, and how could the same things affect the same individuals at different times with these opposite emotions?
In more recent times, India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote in his The Discovery of India:
The unity of India was no longer merely an intellectual conception for me; it was an emotional experience which overpowered me ... It was absurd, of course, to think of India or any country as a kind of anthropomorphic entity. I did not do so ... Yet I think with a long cultural background and a common outlook on life develops a spirit that is peculiar to it and that is impressed on all its children, however much they may differ among themselves.
This 'spirit of India' is not something ethereal, inhabiting the rarefied atmosphere of religion, aesthetics and philosophy, but is captured, for instance, in animal fables from the Panchatantra or tales from the Mahabharata and Ramayana that adults tell children all over the country. It shines through Indian musical forms but is also found in mundane matters of personal hygiene such as the cleaning of the rectal orifice with water and the fingers of the left hand, or in such humble objects as the tongue scraper, a curved strip of copper (or silver in the case of the wealthy) used to remove the white film that coats the tongue.
Indian-ness, then, is about similarities produced by an overarching Indic, pre-eminently Hindu civilization that has contributed the lion's share to what we would call the 'cultural gene pool' of India's peoples. In other words, Hindu culture patterns-which are the focus of this book-have played a very major role in the construction of Indian-ness, although we would hesitate to go as far as the acerbic critic of Hindu ethos, the writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who maintained that the history of India for the last thousand years has been shaped by the Hindu character and that he felt 'equally certain that it will remain so and shape the form of everything that is being undertaken for and in the country.' Here we can mention only some of the key building blocks of Indian-ness, which we will elaborate upon in this book: an ideology of family and other crucial relationships that derives from the institution of the joint family; a view of social relations profoundly influenced by the institution of caste; an image of the human body and bodily processes that is based on the medical system of Ayurveda; and a cultural imagination teeming with shared myths and legends, especially from the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, that underscore a 'romantic' vision of human life and a relativist, context-dependent way of thinking.
We do not mean to imply that Indian identity is a fixed constant, unchanging through the march of history. Indic civilization has remained in constant ferment through the processes of assimilation, transformation, re-assertion and re-creation that happened in the wake of its encounters with other civilizations and cultural forces, such as those that came with the advent of Islam in medieval times and European colonialism in the more recent past. Virtually no part of Indic civilization has remained unaffected by these encounters, be it classical music, architecture, 'traditional' Indian cuisine or Bollywood musical scores. Indic civilization has not so much absorbed as translated foreign cultural forces into its own idiom, unmindful or even oddly proud of all that is lost in translation. The contemporary buffeting of this civilization by a West-centric globalization is only the latest in a long line of invigorating cultural encounters that can be called 'clashes' only from the shortest of time frames and narrowest of perspectives. Indic civilization, as separate from though related to Hinduism as a religion, is thus the common patrimony of all Indians, irrespective of their professed faith.
Indians, then, share a family resemblance in the sense that there is a distinctive Indian stamp on certain universal experiences which we shall discuss in this book: growing up male or female, sex and marriage, behaviour at work, status and discrimination, the body in illness and health, religious life and, finally, ethnic conflict. In a contentious Indian polity, where various groups clamour for recognition of their differences, the awareness of a common Indian-ness, the sense of 'unity within diversity', is often absent. Like the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges' remark on the absence of camels in the Quran because they were not exotic enough to the Arabs to merit attention, the camel of Indian-ness is invisible to or taken for granted by most Indians. Their 'family' resemblance begins to stand out in sharp relief only when it is compared to the profiles of peoples of other major civilizations or cultural clusters. A man who is an 'Amritsari' in Punjab, for instance, is a Punjabi in the rest of India but an Indian in Europe; in the latter case, the 'outer circle' of his identity-his Indian-ness- becomes central to his self-definition and his recognition by others. This is why in spite of persistent academic disapproval, people (including academics in their unguarded moments) continue to speak of 'the Indians'-as they do of 'the Chinese', 'the Europeans' or 'the Americans'-as a necessary and legitimate short cut to a more complex reality.
Our aim in this book is to present a composite portrait in which Indians will recognize themselves and be recognized by others. This recognition cannot have a uniform quality even while we seek to identify the commonalities that underlie what the anthropologist Robin Fox calls the 'dazzle' of surface differences. We suspect that Hindus belonging to the upper and middle castes will see a picture in which they will find many features that are intimately familiar. Others at the margins of Hindu society (such as the dalits and tribals, or the Christians and Muslims) will spot only fleeting resemblances. Even in the case of Hindus, who constitute over eighty per cent of India's population, the portrait is not a photograph. But neither is it a cubist representation à la Picasso where the subject is barely recognizable. Our effort is more akin to the psychological studies of such expressionist painters as Max Beckman and Oskar Kokoschka or, nearer to our times, the portraits of Lucien Freud that use realism to explore psychological depth.
We are also aware that what we are attempting here is an unfashionable 'big picture', a 'grand narrative' that may be regarded with reflexive hostility by many who profess the postmodernist credo. Yes, there is a speculative quality in this exercise of settling on certain patterns of Indian-ness as central. Yet without the big picture-whatever its flaws of inexactness- the smaller, local pictures, however accurate, will be myopic, a mystifying jumble of trees without the pattern of the forest.
THE HIERARCHICAL MAN
THE HIERARCHICAL MAN
On an article titled 'Where rank alone matters', the well-known Indian journalist Sunanda K. Datta-Ray writes that the gratification of three hundred million middle-class consumers, the 'new brahmins', does not lie in their being consumers in a global marketplace but in being 'somebody' in a profoundly hierarchical society. Retired judges, ex-ambassadors and other sundry officials of the Indian state who are no longer in service are never caught without calling cards prominently displaying who they once were. India is not a country for the anonymous, he concludes. You must be somebody to survive with dignity, since rank is the only substitute for money. He could have added that India also provides by far the largest number of aspirants for the Guinness Book of Records. The Indian ingenuity in finding ever new fields for setting records (and we are not talking about the well-known ones for the longest fingernails or the largest moustache) is remarkable, amusing, and oddly touching. Commercially astute British and American publishers of biographical dictionaries and compendia of 'Who's Who'-a lucrative branch of vanity publishing-have discovered that India provides the biggest market for people wanting to be included in such publications which are then prominently displayed in the living room of their homes.
The need to be noticed, to stand out from an anonymous mass, is, of course, not uniquely Indian but a part of the narcissistic heritage of all human beings. What makes this phenomenon particularly ubiquitous-and poignant-in India is that a person's self-worth is almost exclusively determined by the rank he (alone or as part of a family) occupies in the profoundly hierarchical nature of Indian society. If the perception of another person has first to do with gender ('Is this individual male or female?'), followed by age ('Is he/she young or old?') and by other such markers of identity, then in India the determination of relative rank ('Is this person superior or inferior to me?') remains very near the top of subconscious questions evoked in an interpersonal encounter. Indians are perhaps the world's most undemocratic people, living in the world's largest and most plural democracy.
The deeply internalized hierarchical principle, the lens through which men and women in India view their social world, has its origins in the earliest years of a child's life in the family. Indeed, a grasp of the psychological dynamics of family life is vital not only for understanding Indian behaviour towards authority but also in a wide variety of other social situations.
The Indian family: large and noisy, with parents and children, uncles, aunts and sometimes cousins, presided over by benevolent grandparents, all of them living together under a single roof. There are intrigues and secret liaisons, fierce loving and jealous rages. Its members often squabble among themselves but remain, in most cases, intensely loyal to each other and always present a united front to the outside world. The Indian family-animated with such a powerful sense of life that a separation from it leaves one with a perpetual sense of exile.
This is the 'joint' family of Bollywood movies which, social scientists tell us, has never been a universal norm. It is also untrue that the large joint family is found more often in villages than in cities; studies tell us that it is more common in urban areas, as also among the upper landholding castes, than in the lower castes of rural India. Economic reasons, especially the high cost of urban living space, are certainly a reason why the joint family survives. Contemporary nostalgia at the supposed withering away of the Indian family with the increasing pace of modernization could well be misplaced; the prevalence of joint families may be increasing rather than declining. It is important to note that irrespective of demographic changes and the desire of many modern middle-class couples to escape the tensions of a large family and live on their own, the joint family remains the most desirable form of family organization and has a psychic reality independent of its actual occurrence.
What is this 'joint' family that is so much a feature of an Indian's inner landscape, even in places and social strata where it is not the dominant form of family organization any more? As an ideal type, a joint family is one in which brothers remain together after marriage and bring their wives into the parental household. It is governed by the ideals of fraternal loyalty and filial obedience which stipulate common residence and common economic, social and ritual activities. In addition to this core group, there may be others who are either permanent or temporary residents in the household: widowed or abandoned sisters and aunts, or distant male relatives, euphemistically called 'uncles', who have no other family to turn to. In practice, of course, brothers and their families may not share a common kitchen or may live in adjacent houses rather than in a single residence, or a brother may have migrated to the city in search of economic opportunity. Yet even in cases of many families that appear 'nuclear' in the sense that they are composed of parents and their unmarried children, a social and psychological 'jointness' continues to operate. When a brother moves to the city, for instance, his wife and children frequently continue to live with the village family while he himself remits his share to the family income; or, if he takes his family with him, they return 'home' as often as they can. Even in the upper and upper-middle classes, it is the psychic reality of the joint family which makes them take it for granted that they can visit and live for weeks, if not months, with their adult married children who are working in distant parts of the country or even outside India.
The point we wish to make here is that most Indians spend the formative years of their life in family settings that approximate to the joint rather than the nuclear type. Even grown children who nominally live alone or in a nuclear family make long and frequent visits to members of the joint family. Not only do families get together to celebrate festivals, but people also prefer to go on vacations or on religious pilgrimage in the company of other family members. The ideals of fraternal solidarity and filial devotion are so strong that a constant effort is made to preserve the characteristic 'jointness' at the very least in its social sense. Anyone who has been surprised at the heavy traffic in an Indian city on a late Sunday morning only needs to remember that many of the men, women and children, dressed in their best clothes and precariously perched on scooters, or crammed into buses and small Maruti cars, are on their way to visit family members living in other parts of the city.
In part, the demography of childhood in India reflects Indian marriage patterns. Leaving aside the urban middle and upper classes where the marriageable age has been increasing, most couples marry in adolescence when they have neither the economic nor the psychological resources to set up an independent household. Separation from the joint family, if and when it does take place, comes later, when their own children are well into the middle years of childhood. Thus it is not surprising that uncles, aunts and cousins, not to mention grandparents, figure prominently in the childhood recollections of most Indians. They occupy a much greater space in the inner world of Indians than is the case with Europeans and Americans growing up in nuclear families where it is only the mother and the father (and perhaps also the siblings) who cast such a long shadow on their emotional lives.
More than any other factor, then-the recent high rate of economic growth, the improvement in the status of previously oppressed sections of society and even the strength of religious belief-it is the family, and the role family obligations play in the life of an Indian, which is the glue that holds Indian society together. Of course, the flip side of the coin is-and there is always a flip side-that this focus on the family as the exclusive source of satisfaction of all one's needs also reflects a continuing lack of faith in almost every other institution of society. The result of this is often extreme divisiveness, a lack of commitment to anyone or anything outside one's immediate family.
In a country without large government programmes of social security, unemployment compensation and old age benefits, the family must give temporary relief when a man loses work, a young mother is ill or monsoon floods destroy the harvest. If we exclude the rising middle class and the very small upper-class elite, it is the family that provides the only life insurance most Indians have. Naturally, then, in the imagination of most Indians a man's worth and, indeed, his identity are inextricable from the reputation of his family. How a man lives and what he does are rarely seen as a product of individual effort or aspiration, but are interpreted in the light of his family's circumstances and standing in the wider society. Individual success or failure makes sense only in a family context. 'How can a son of family X behave like this!' is as much an expression of contempt as 'How could he not turn out well? After all he is the son of family Y!' is a sign of approval.
Psychologically, an individual derives much of his self-esteem from myths that ascribe to his family some kind of distinction or prominence in the past or exaggerate its importance in the present. His closest ties, often including even friendships, will not be outside but within the family. As a Hindu proverb puts it, 'A mustard seed of relationship is worth a cartload of friendship.' These special relationships within the extended family are a major source of support needed to go through life and constant affirmation of a person's identity.
It is not as if family interactions and obligations have been static. Hindu nationalist writings and some women's magazines are full of alarmist stuff about the Indian family being under attack by forces of Western modernization. Many of the changes have to do with the rise of individualism and the role of women in urban areas, to which we will come back later. Family obligations too are changing. Thirty years ago it was taken for granted that a man would look after a cousin or a nephew if he came and stayed with him for many years of schooling which was not available in his home town or village. Most middle-class families will now hesitate to put themselves out to the same extent. Yet, while there has certainly been a contraction of family obligations, they have not disappeared; one may not feel as obliged to look after a distant aunt but there is no question of not looking after the emotional, social and financial needs of an aged parent. All in all, the Indian family remains distinctive (and distinctly conservative) in its views on marriage, parenthood and the web of mutual responsibilities and obligations within wider ties of kinship.
Unshakeable solidarity between brothers as one of the highest ideals of family life can lead to consequences that may appear odd to a 'modern sensibility' which looks upon the husband-wife couple as the fulcrum of family life. For instance, a man will often tolerate the adulterous relations of his wife with his brother-in the upper classes, mostly by feigning ignorance; the poorer sections of society dispense even with this fig leaf. Thus a cook from the hill state of Uttaranchal once came to his employer asking for leave to go to his village since his wife had just given birth to a son.
'But how can your wife bear a son when you have not been to your village in the last one year?' asked the employer. 'How does that matter?' replied the man. 'My brother is there.'
This may seem like an extreme example, but only because it was explicitly stated. The situation itself is not as uncommon as we would suppose. For a time in Indian social history, the erotic importance of the husband's younger brother-in the sense that he would or could have sexual relations with his elder brother's widow-was officially recognized in the custom of niyoga. The custom goes back thousands of years to the sacred Rig Veda, where a man, identified by the commentators as the brother-in-law, is described as extending his hand in promised marriage to a widow inclined to share her husband's funeral pyre.
Though the custom gradually fell into disuse, especially with the prohibition of widow remarriage (it still survives in some communities), the psychological core of niyoga, namely the mutual awareness of a married woman and her younger brother-in-law as potential or actual sexual partners, is very much alive. In psychotherapy practice, middle-class women who are on terms of sexual intimacy with a brother-in-law rarely express any feelings of guilt. Their distress is occasioned more by his leaving home or his impending marriage, which the woman perceives as the end of her sensual and emotional life.
An Indian's sense of his relative familial and social position is so internalized that he qualifies, in Louis Dumont's phrase, as the original homo hierarchicus. The internalization of hierarchy coincides with the acquisition of language. There are six basic nursery sounds, a universal baby language used by infants all over the world with only slight variation from one society to another. These 'words' are repeated combinations of the vowel sound 'ah' preceded by different consonants-'dada', 'mama', 'baba', 'nana', 'papa' and 'tata'. Infants repeat these or other closely related sounds over and over, in response to their own babbling and to their parents' modified imitations of their baby sounds. In most Western countries, only a few of these repetitive sounds, for example, 'mama', 'dada' or 'papa', are recognized and repeated by the parents and thus reinforced in the infant. In India, on the contrary, just about all of these closely related sounds are repeated and reinforced since each one is a name for various elder kin in the family whom a child must learn to identify with the position that he or she occupies in the family hierarchy. Thus, for example, in Punjabi, ma is mother, mama is mother's brother, dada is father's father, nana is mother's father, chacha is father's younger brother, taya is father's elder brother, masi is mother's sister, and so on.
This transformation of basic baby language into names for kinship relations within the extended family is characteristic of all Indian languages. It not only symbolizes the child's manifold relationships with a range of potentially nurturing figures in the older generation but also emphasizes the importance of the child's familiarity with the hierarchy of the family organization. Indians must learn to adapt to the personalities and moods of many authority figures besides their parents quite early in life. Whether the highly developed antenna that makes an Indian almost anticipate the wishes of a superior and adjust his behaviour accordingly should be called 'flexibility' or 'a lack of a firm sense of self' is a cultural value judgement we are unwilling to make. The fact remains that such early experiences in an extended family and the child's early knowledge of when to retreat, when to cajole and when to be stubborn in order to get what he wants also make an Indian a formidable negotiator in later business dealings.
Regardless of personal talents or achievements, or of changes in the circumstances of his own or others' lives, an Indian's relative position in the hierarchy of the family, his obligations to those 'above' him and his expectations of those 'below' him, are immutable and lifelong. Already in childhood he begins to learn that he must look after the welfare of those subordinate to him in the family hierarchy so that they do not suffer either through their own misjudgement or at the hands of outsiders, and that he is reciprocally entitled to their obedience and respect.
Since young people in Indian families generally receive a good deal of attention and nurturance from the older generation and maintenance of family integrity is valued higher than an unfolding of individual capacities, a young Indian neither seeks a radical demarcation from the generation of his parents nor feels compelled to overthrow their authority in order to 'live life on my own terms'. This is in stark contrast to the West where 'generational conflict' is not only expected but considered necessary for the renewal of a society's institutions and, moreover, is considered (we believe erroneously) to be a universally valid psychological truth. In India, it is not the rupture but the stretching of traditional values that becomes a means for the young person to realize his dreams for life. It is telling that in spite of their fascination with sport and cinema stars, and the omnipresence of these celebrities in advertising, the primary role models for a large majority of Indian youth are from the family, most often a parent.
In spite of rapid social changes in the last decades, an Indian continues to be part of a hierarchically ordered and, above all, stable network of relationships throughout the course of his life. This complex, relationship-based pattern of behaviour also manifests itself in work situations. Although intellectually the Indian professional or bureaucrat may agree with his Western counterpart that, for instance, the criterion for appointment or promotion to a particular job must be objective, a decision based solely on the demands of the task and 'merits of the case', emotionally he must still struggle against the cultural conviction that his relationship to the individual under consideration (if there is one) is the singlemost important factor in his decision. And among the vast majority of traditional-minded countrymen-whether it be a trader bending the law to facilitate the business transaction of a fellow caste member, or an industrialist employing an insufficiently qualified but distantly related job applicant as a manager, or the clerk in the municipal office accepting bribes in order to put an orphaned niece through school-dishonesty, nepotism and corruption are merely abstract concepts. These negative constructions are irrelevant to the Indian experience, which, from childhood on, nurtures one, and only one, standard of responsible adult conduct-namely, an individual's lifelong obligation to his kith and kin. Guilt and its attendant anxiety are aroused only when individual actions go against the principle of primacy of relationships, not when 'foreign', different ethical standards of honesty, equity and justice are breached.
Although family relationships are hierarchical in structure, the mode of relationship is characterized by an almost maternal behaviour on the part of the superior, by filial respect and compliance on the part of the subordinate and by a mutual sense of highly personal attachment. We meet this kind of a superior-king, father, guru-in school textbooks where, in stories depicting authority situations, the ideal leader is a kind of benevolent patriarch who acts in a nurturing way so that his followers either anticipate his wishes or accept them without questioning. He receives compliance by taking care of his people's needs, by providing the emotional rewards of approval, praise and affection, or by arousing guilt. High-handed attempts to regulate behaviour through threat or punishment, rejection or humiliation, lead less to open defiance than to devious evasion on the part of the subordinate.
Another legacy of Indian childhood in superior-subordinate or leader-follower relations is the idealization of the former. The need to bestow maana on our superiors and leaders in order to partake of this magical power ourselves is an unconscious attempt to restore the narcissistic perfection of infancy: 'You are perfect and I am a part of you.' This is of course a universal tendency, but in India, the automatic reverence for superiors is a widespread psychological fact. Leaders at every level of society, but particularly the patriarchal elders of the extended family and caste groups, as also religious and spiritual leaders, take on an emotional importance independent of any realistic evaluation of their performance, let alone an acknowledgement of their all too human weaknesses. Charisma, then, plays an unusually significant role among Indians and is a vital constituent of effective leadership in institutions. In contrast to most people in the West, Indians are generally more prone to revere than admire.
It is not as if Indians are not sceptical of authority figures. Indeed, their cynicism towards leaders, especially political leaders, is often extreme. It is only that when an Indian grants authority to a leader, his critical faculties disappear in the waves of credulity that wash over him. The granting of authority is involuntary in the case of family and caste leadership during childhood. It may be voluntary-to gurus of various hues, for instance-in situations of acute personal crisis or distress, the reason why, for example, healers of the most varied kind flourish in the country. The effectiveness of these healers may be less because of their particular healing regimens and more due to the unconscious vital forces that the healer's charisma mobilizes in the patient in service of a cure.
Do these patterns of family life, especially those connected with the hierarchical ordering of relationships, extend beyond the home into other institutions like university departments, offices, political parties and the bureaucracy? The evidence suggests that they do. Authority relations in the Indian family provide a template for the functioning of most modern business, educational, political and scientific organizations.
First, there is a strong preference for an authoritative, even autocratic (but not authoritarian) leader who is strict, demanding but also caring and nurturing-very much like the karta, the paternalistic head of the extended family. The organizational psychologist Jai Sinha has called this type of leader the 'nurturant-task' leader who is strict in getting the task accomplished and tries to dominate the activities of his subordinates. He is, however, not authoritarian but nurturing in the sense of being a benevolent guide to his subordinates and someone who takes a personal interest in their well-being and growth.
Among the subordinates, on the other hand, there is a complementary tendency to idealize the leader and look upon him as a repository of all virtues, an almost superhuman figure deserving of their faith and respect. Even in the upper echelons of modern business organizations, among senior managers with exposure to Western business education and practices, the influence of Indian culture on their perception of top leadership has not disappeared. The CEO of a modern company here is the recipient of far greater idealization than is usually the case in the West. This is a potential strength of Indian organizations and has many advantages, such as a greater esprit de corps in senior management and a higher degree of loyalty and commitment to the organization. It can also lead to a work ethic and performance that is much more than what a leader might reasonably expect in most European and North American organizations. Yet idealization, that great construct of human imagination which allows one to conceive with the conviction of a known fact a more perfect and valuable reality than what exists, can also distort the perception of leadership. The Indian leader is thus often deprived of critical feedback from the senior people of his organization that could help him develop more effective leadership practices.
Since Indian institutions are markedly hierarchical, collaborative teamwork across levels of status and power proves to be difficult. Decisions tend to be pushed upwards and the top leadership must often intervene in organizational processes. More than in most Western cultures, the legacy of Indian family and childhood ensures that the quality of leadership becomes pivotal for the success or failure of an institution.
The difficulty in working in teams is compounded by the cultural obstacles to giving or receiving negative feedback. With the preservation of relationships as the primary principle governing their actions in interpersonal situations, Indians find it difficult to say a frank 'No' to requests they are unable or unwilling to grant. The refusal has then to be interpreted from the words in which the rejection is couched ('Let's see' or 'It's difficult but I will try', and so on), and from the tentative tone of voice and cautious body language. One has to exercise the same kind of judgement when asking for directions on an Indian street. The man who might not have an idea of the right directions but nonetheless proceeds to guide you to your destination is not only saving face by not admitting to his ignorance but also hesitates to introduce any negative vibes in the fleeting relationship that has just come into being.
The absence of a democratic mode of functioning in Indian institutions is not resented as long as those in leadership positions develop a close personal relationship with the led. In fact, effective leaders in India, both in the workplace and in the political arena, place great emphasis on the building and cultivating of relationships. This, as we have seen above, is consistent with an Indian's experience from his earliest years where he has learnt that the core of any social relationship- in family, caste, school or at work-is caring and mutual involvement. What he should be sensitive to (and concerned with) are not only the goals of work that are external to the relationship but the relationship itself, the unfolding of emotional affinity.
As in the extended family, where favouritism has to be avoided to maintain harmony (for example, in the ideology of a joint family a father should not be seen as favouring his own son above the sons of his brothers), people in Indian organizations develop almost paranoid abilities in detecting signs of a leader's favouritism toward selected subordinates. Not that they are particularly troubled by nepotism-as long as they are the intended beneficiaries. Most accept that people in authority will make a distinction between their 'own people' and those who are not in the same privileged position. They have a sneaking sympathy for a senior politician's incredulous reaction to a journalist who questioned the appointment of the politician's son to a high post within his party: 'Who else will I appoint? Your son?' If there is one 'ism' that governs Indian society and its institutions, it is familyism.
Given the strong need for nearness to the superior, to be considered 'his man', what is galling for an Indian is being excluded-or the feeling of being excluded-from a charmed circle that enjoys the superior's favour. The result of this, almost always, is a good deal of hidden anger and passive aggressive behaviour. Effective leaders in Indian institutions are thus constantly on their guard against any impression of favouritism, because it can cause serious damage to the morale of the institution.
Some of the values that govern Indian institutional and work life have been empirically demonstrated by the GLOBE research project, which surveyed over seventeen thousand middle managers in various industries in sixty-two societies. In this project, the sixty-two countries were grouped into ten cultural clusters: Latin Europe, Germanic Europe, Anglo Europe, Nordic Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Confucian Asia, Anglo (outside Europe), Sub-Saharan Africa, Southern Asia and Middle East.
Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness) research project, which surveyed over 17,000 middle managers in various industries in sixty-two societies.12 In this project, the sixty-two countries were grouped into ten cultural clusters: Latin Europe, Germanic Europe, Anglo Europe, Nordic Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Confucian Asia, Anglo (outside liurope), Sub-Saharan Africa, Southern Asia and Middle East.
If one looks at South Asia, where India is by far the largest country, this cultural cluster stands out prominently in three of the nine dimensions of the study. South Asia has the greatest power distance, that is, the degree to which the culture's people are separated by power, authority and prestige. In other words, the difference in status between the chief executive and the office peon, the raja and the runk, is at its maximum in this region (the least is in Nordic Europe, that is, Scandinavia). Irrespective of his educational status and more than in any other culture in the world, an Indian is a homo hierarchicus. This is the case even when the modern Indian manager- usually middle-class, college-educated-wishes that it was not so and, as we shall see below, consciously aspires to a reduction in the power distance.
The second dimension on which South Asia stands out in the international comparison is humane orientation, that is, the degree to which people are caring, altruistic, generous and kind. The lowest here is Germanic Europe. Closely related to humane orientation, although as its opposite, is assertiveness, the degree to which the culture's people are assertive, confrontational and aggressive. Here, next only to Scandinavia, South Asia is the least assertive culture; Germanic Europe and Eastern Europe, in that order, are the most aggressive and confrontational. Combining humane orientation with a high power distance produces the kind of Indian leader we have discussed earlier: authoritative but not autocratic, sometimes despotic perhaps, but generally benevolent.
South Asia also scores the highest on in-group collectivism, that is, the degree to which people feel loyalty toward such small groups as their family or circle of friends. Scandinavia, followed by Germanic Europe and North America, scores the least. We have seen that the habit of solidarity with the family group and later with members of one's caste is inculcated in early childhood and is regarded as one of the highest values guiding individual lives. This solidarity has the many economic advantages of informal networks that are based on trust rather than contractual obligations. We have already talked of the high esprit de corps when people working in an organization regard themselves as a 'band of brothers' and idealize the leader-father. The danger, of course, is of 'in-groupism', which makes collaboration with other, 'out' groups in large organizations difficult, if not impossible.
This snapshot of Indian leadership practices says little about the changes taking place in modern urban families which will invariably have an impact on Indian institutions. The GLOBE study confirms that what younger managers in India most dearly wish for is a reduction in the power distance between the leader and the led. We believe that leadership on this dimension is indeed in a state of transition. It is not a coincidence that the desired reduction in psychological distance between the leader and the led is congruent with the changes taking place in the father-son relationship in the middle-class family. Let us elaborate.
In traditional India, the father entered his son's life in a big way only in the later years of the boy's childhood. In the early and middle years, the relationship between the two was (and in large parts of the country continues to be) marked by formality and perfunctory daily social contact. In older autobiographical accounts, fathers, whether strict or indulgent, cold or affectionate, are invariably portrayed as distant. The father's guiding voice, a prime element in a man's sense of identity, was diffused among the voices of many older male family members and his individual paternity muffled.
The reasons for a traditional father not taking a demonstratively active role in the upbringing of his son are not difficult to fathom. A traditional father operates under the logic of the joint family. This demands that in order to prevent the building up of nuclear cells within the family that can destroy its cohesion, a father be restrained in the presence of his own child and divide his interest and support equally among his own and his brothers' children. Moreover, as we shall see later in the chapter on sexuality, many a young father was embarrassed to hold his infant child in front of older family members since this fruit of his loins was clear evidence of activity in that particular region.
The second ideology impinging on traditional fathers in India (and in common with other patriarchal societies) is of a gender-based dichotomy in parenting roles and obligations. That is, decided notions of things that men do in the household and others that they don't. Playing with or taking care of their infants is not what fathers do, their major role lies in the disciplining of the child. As a North Indian proverb, addressed to men, pithily puts it: 'Treat a son like a king for the first five years, like a slave for the next ten and like a friend thereafter.'
Of course, behind the requisite façade of aloofness and impartiality, a traditional Indian father may be struggling to express his love for his son. Fatherly love is no less strong in India than in other societies. Even in ancient religious and literary texts, a son is not only instrumental in the fulfilment of a sacred duty but has often been portrayed as a source of intense emotional gratification. Older autobiographical accounts often depict the Indian father as a sensitive man and charged with feelings for his son which he does not openly reveal. Thus in Autobiography of a Yogi, Yogananda describes meeting his father after a long separation: 'Father embraced me warmly as I entered our Gurupur home. "You have come," he said tenderly. Two large tears dropped from his eyes. Outwardly undemonstrative, he had never before shown me these external signs of affection. Outwardly the grave father, inwardly he possessed the melting heart of a mother.'
One of the more striking changes associated with modernity and the rise of an urban middle class is the active involvement of fathers in bringing up their infant and little children. Given the intensity and ambivalence of the mother-son connection in the Indian setting, the need for the father's physical touch and guiding voice, his support and often unconscious encouragement for the son's separation from his mother has always been pressing. Modern, generally urban and educated, fathers have begun to provide this early emotional access to the son, not only attenuating the overheated quality of the mother-son bond, but also laying the foundations for a less hierarchical and closer father-son relationship. The early experience of having fathers who are no longer distant and forbidding figures, who are available to both sons and daughters, often as playmates, will, inevitably, change notions of the desirable power distance in institutions and the expectations that young Indians will have of their leaders.