Explaining India to Foreigners

The terror of being asked, "What is your caste?"

Dear Global Jigsaw,

Next month, I will take five friends from Spain on a 10-day trip to India. It's a vacation that has taken a year to plan and there is much excitement as the date approaches. But I find my own anticipation tempered by the confusion that explaining India to foreigners inevitably engenders.

The ancient Greek philosophers referred to a state of aporia, as one where someone is rendered tongue tied, beset with doubt resulting from an internal or logical contradiction. It is when the “intellect is brought to an impasse by its own flawed way of conceiving things.”

And it is this state that I encounter whenever someone asks me about caste or poverty or the Ambanis or yoga. How does one answer these seemingly simple queries? With what proportion of detail, truthfulness, patriotism, defensiveness? Truths are always multiple and often contradictory, but try telling that to people over a canape.

“Tell me about Hinduism,” is amongst the worst offenders. How to explain there is no God in the religion, when the one thing everyone knows about it is that there are multiple and many-headed deities that us Hindus are well-known for prostrating ourselves before? Sometimes I stutter about the Upanishad credo of “neti, neti”- “not this, not that” which signals the fact that it is impossible to talk about the Absolute, since words are by definition limiting, essentializing. But given the blank looks this elucidates, I continue on to babbling about tolerance and living a good life, dharma and karma and accepting all truths as partial. This elicits the approval of the kind of person who claims they are spiritual, but against organised religion. However, it isn’t quite so easy to fob off those more firmly rooted in Abrahamic sensibilities. They want to know whether “Hindus” worship elephant headed gods with many arms or not. But straight answers are not India’s forte.

I am constantly faced with the choice of picking the “good” or “bad” version of every India narrative. There is the whole Hinduism is like an open-source code, peace and love variant. But then there is the Hindutva story, undergird by bigotry and hatred. Should I talk about the lynchings of Muslims suspected of eating beef? Of khap panchayats and honour killings?

Caste is even worse. How I abhor that earnest question, “So, what is your caste?” I could answer lightly with the tempting lie, that is not fully a lie when applied to my own context:

Caste? No one cares about that stuff any more. Not in the cities anyway.

It’s a fact that I grew up entirely blind to caste. No one had ever asked me up front what my caste was, and nor had it ever occurred to me to ask the question of anyone else. Of course I realized later that this had to do with the rarefied social circle I inhabited, coupled with the fact that my surname announced my caste background even before I could open my mouth.

Or, should I subject them to a soliloquy on the pernicious politicisation of caste that has certain groups in India lobbying to be labeled lower caste than they had traditionally been, in order to access sops from the state? Or maybe I should detail the continuing brutalities of upper-caste policing of caste boundaries that include the most heinous incidents of rape, arson and murder.

When I take my friends to India there is a level at which I want them to return with the tourist-brochure version of colour, hospitality, monuments, tigers, and spicy curries. There is the temptation to cocoon them from public spaces with their filth, crush and contamination. To bundle them from picturesque venues to high-end restaurants in air conditioned cars.

When I examine the underlying basis for this desire, I discover it is shame. Shame at my own privilege. And also shame that “my” country is like a suppurating sore compared to the healthy body of First World nations. Somewhere there is an internalised colonial hangover with its pernicious hierarchy of civilized nations. And the latter does not include cultures where you can’t kiss in public, but you can piss in public.

Mixed in with this shame is indignation. Even when it comes from a place of good intentions or honest curiosity, the naïveté of First Worlders can be difficult to swallow. In their tendency to feel pity for, or horror at, poorer countries there is an unacknowledged sense of superiority, of riding a moral high-horse; a lingering whiff of the White Man’s Burden. There is little understanding of the roots of inequality in the world. There is an erasure of the consequences of colonialism. And ultimately, a focus on the horrors of far away lands is often an easy way to avoid examining the grim realities of their own “developed” societies. Underlying even “innocent” statements there is often a pernicious sense of their culture being the idealized norm against which the rest of the aberrant world is judged.

But then there are the facts. Step out into the open in Delhi on a winter’s day and the air will smell of burning plastic. It is nigh impossible to walk anywhere between the potholes, stray dogs and displaced macaques. Dust, open defecation, banana peels, exhaust pipe fumes, paan spit, smokestacks and chemical effluents are but some elements of the individual-industrial-vehicular pollution complex that have India’s cities drowning in a cesspit of filth. Shoeless children sit outside five-star hotels in the biting winter cold or searing summer heat. Large billboards with the visage of Narendra Modi smiling beatifically line the roads. For all the country’s GDP growth and global CEOs, India’s cities are dystopian.

At the heart of the problem of talking about India to foreigners are several contradictions. There is the tension between wanting people around the world to love my country, because I love it, and wanting them to know the truth, which is often ugly. There is the conflict between feeling embarrassed by the reality of India’s failings but feeling complicit in those failings if choosing to dissemble. There is the desire to refute stereotypes, but the problem with stereotypes is that there is often a large kernel of truth to them, and yet truth without context can lead to false impressions.

xxxx

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I am away at the Jaipur Literature Festival next week, so will be on break. You can expect the next post in the first week of February.

Hasta pronto,

Pallavi