The Culture label

There has always been too little real respect for freedom in India, I feel. While that may sound like a too-broad generalisation, it isn’t. Its something I’ve observed at too many levels – at home, at work, in the daily interaction with so many different people. As a society, we seem to value order and familiarity more, which we then label under the comforting title 'culture'. Then we hold on to it with both hands, even if that means choking the life out of individual spaces and desires. .

When I was in college and staying at a paying guest house, there was a young girl who came to stay, one evening. Another student, but somehow she seemed younger, more naïve. Not yet eighteen, and married already, with a fake birth certificate produced triumphantly to get the registrar to agree. Straight out of a bollywood pot-boiler, she was actually on the run from her family, having dared to commit that crime, marry someone from another religion. Three months down the line, when I had moved away, I heard that she had killed herself unable to bear the pressure anymore. An overdose of pills, death down your gullet so smoothly. This girl came across as someone exceptionally child-like, and with little maturity to carry off a long-term relationship. Still, I could only wonder, what kind of parents did she have, who thought it was okay to lock her up in her room and beat her, which was what had made her run away in the first place.

There seems to be something wrong with a culture which places so little emphasis on the rights of young people, simply because of a veneration for age. In these days ofcourse, even saying something like this is dicey – immediately, one will be branded that lowest of all things criminal – a destroyer of Indian or Tamizh or whatever culture the protestors feel like safeguarding at the moment. But I don’t believe that belonging to any nationality or state places any obligation on me to defend its excesses. Surely the first sign of rationality or enlightenment is the ability to question. But that is not something we encourage.

In school, while planning for an excursion, a new student dared to ask our class teacher how the money being collected for the trip was being allocated. The student was simply pulled up for his impertinence, possibly to cover up deficiencies in the way the money was really being spent. The attitude was, we are teachers and we know what’s right, you will be told stuff strictly on a need-to-know basis, and again, we decide what you need to know. (Substitute teachers with parents or elders or government servants or people with more money or any such thing which confers status and power and you have more or less the same scenario). We start out at school, from our earliest days, being asked to just obey, be good children, not talk too much, learn by-heart. Very soon, if there are people still asking questions, its inspite of the system, not because of it. Not only does this system encourage us to obey, it teaches us to feel guilty even if we think of disobeying.

I am writing this, simply because all these so-called defenders of morality rising up suddenly, gives me the shivers. I am scared to be living in a country where people still hold unquestioningly that a woman’s chastity is her greatest virtue. I am petrified of living in a country where some people still think that a girl and a boy need to be ‘permitted’ to sit in a park peacefully. We are not questioning it enough, the credentials and motives of these self-styled defenders of the faith. Or atleast, there are not enough questions coming up from the people who matter. If the Tamizh industry at large had spoken up in defence of Khushboo, I doubt there would have been sufficient time and energy to build and burn effigies of each and every actor. Atleast this incident in Meerut got politicians of all hues, including Sushma Swaraj talking.

I think its time we started looking inwards and admit that just because we are Indian, our culture is not necessarily ideal in every aspect. We need to be open to change, and not view ourselves as keepers of some kind of sacred fire that will go out if we don’t keep fanning it every minute. Culture is dynamic and going to move in many different ways, irrespective of whether certain individuals see it that way. Saare jahan se accha and all that is fine, but lets not go overboard and take it too literally!