Ann Landers famously summed up her view of boy-girl relationships as, “There
are good boys and bad boys, and unfortunately the bad boys are more fun, more
exciting and often appear to be more interesting.” Apparently fretful of the
consequences of this enticing bit of bait, she hastily added, “And in any
boy-girl relationship if any one ever suffers it is usually the girl.”
One wonders what kind of boyfriends Ann Landers managed to land.
Most any Asian parents would approve of her words. They do not have to worry
about the quality of boyfriends because they choose them. In almost all cases,
they choose with one goal in mind: strengthened family power through marital
alliance. The result is often obsessive restrictions on daughterly freedom,
since it is not only the girl who suffers from a trespass; it is her family
via the mechanics of “honor.” Except in a few matriarchal tribes in
Indonesia, Malaysia, and South India, and despite the persuasive alternatives
provided by TV, an Asian girl is still raised to believe submissiveness goes
hand in glove with her sex. A daughter is to become a mother, and her
upbringing is to prepare for that. On one side of the marriage feast her role
is to submit to her parents; on the other to her husband.
Many Westerners do not realize it, but Western child-rearing and
psychological terms are fairly meaningless when applied to Asian behavior.
This is especially true in India, whose cultural theater is far more literate
and antiquarian than the costumery provided by psychology. Forget Freud; the
fundamental myths aren’t the same. Entirely different patterns exist that
explain why Indian parents and husbands think so differently about authority,
security, responsibility, and freedom.
The Indian baby is typically indulged, nurtured, and constantly handled.
Every sound brings a caring response from the whole family. Infants soon
learn that the surest way to get attention is to cry—and later, when they
learn the difference, to say something cute. The result is assurance there
will be a gratifying response to every wish. In the West this might be called
narcissism, but in India it is the natural state of having been born. Boys
are led to feel that they are the center of the universe and deserve to be
there. The mother is all-nurturing and all-attending (Indians term their
country “Mother India” and symbolize their bharat or nationhood with the
sacred cow).
The next baby brings a considerable shock to the first. This typically
happens about the age of three since most mothers breast-feed until then,
partly for nutrition and partly for birth control. Being almost totally
abandoned for a younger sibling is all the more bitter because the child is
simultaneously thrust out into the community — starting with the extended
family at first and then to school — so the mother can devote her full time to
the new one. The child’s specialness evaporates. Clamoring for attention gets
the child nowhere.
The commonest reaction is withdrawal into being alone, which is more
satisfying than the disappointments brought by others. This reaction is
reinforced by — or is perhaps the cause of — Hinduism’s primordial belief that
desire produces suffering. The only worthy goal is to escape desire
altogether. The forest hermit and wandering ascetic are partly childhood
rejection re-engineered into a quest for enlightenment.
Relations between daughters and fathers are even less satisfying than sons
with mothers. Indian fathers/husbands tend to be demanding, not easily
satisfied, critical rather than supportive, remote, and authoritarian. The
punitive downsides for a daughter not submitting to her father are a powerful
force. She might cry around her mother and aunties, but she will not reveal
dissatisfaction around her father. Hence while authority produces escapism in
boys, it all but vanquishes girls.
The historical Indian solution has been escape hatches from reality. If the
parental — and later the marital — world is filled with uncertainties, the
spiritual world must be where one finds peace and bliss. Indian boys mature
yearning for a guide, called a guru, who is nurturing, sympathetic, and
harmonious—everything the father so often is not. The guru is a wise and
kindly teacher who has himself escaped from the world’s turmoil and now
reveals how devotees, too, can find their desired inner calm.
No such luck for the girls. As soon as they are able to carry a water pot or
whisk out the insects, their days are ever longer successions of toil. Given
the elaborate details that accompany so much of Indian taste, be it food or
religious devotion, popular art or the convolutions of family filiality, the
girl is trained to exactly adhere to minutia. She knows she had better learn
well, for after the relatively forgiving apprenticeship under her mother, she
will have to meet the exceedingly rigid, usually waspish, and all too often
brutal, standards of a mother-in-law. The mother-in-law went through this
herself, and now can hardly wait to extract her revenge. Only after the
children are raised and married off does a woman begin to enjoy the fruits of
love — from the children, now parents themselves, who gratefully realize what she
gave them, and from a husband whose years if not his attitudes force him into
co-dependence as his body gets frail and tired.
All this is magnified enormously by the lens of arranged marriage. Most young
people have no idea who their parents (aided by marriage brokers,
astrologers, and nosy relatives) will hook them up with. They do have the
liberty to get to know each other socially and to reject wholly unsuitable
candidates, but by and large they haven’t a clue about each other’s
mannerisms and tastes until they have to live with them. Lucky are the
marriages that follow the idealized path of “growing to love each other.”
Countless are the moments I empathized with my Bombay neighbor’s wife who
wept not just grievously but in soul-baring agony under the slights and
insults of a husband who even by Indian male-forgives-male standards was a
dork. She was 73. This had been going on all her life. She knew no one would
care. Until I came along untouched by local traditions, she gnawed herself
near to death with it.
So how to square all this with the supremely self-assertive twentysomething I
recently saw jaunting down the Colaba Causeway in Bombay wearing a
SUPER-tight tee-shirt emblazoned with, “I’m the girl your mother warned you
about!”? How to square it with the Indian women’s magazines like Femina and
Verve; Indian fashion designers like Hemant Trevedi, Ravi Bajaj, Anamika
Khanna, and Suneet Verma; and Indian writers like Anees Jung, Anita Desai,
and even Shoba De, all of whom cut no cloth from either the polyester bolt or
the Kanchipuram loom? How to square it with the young women who opt for
career instead of husband. Or who, like a gay Delhi artist I know, looked
away from my eyes when I suggested she let go of her denial and seek a woman
she could love, and finally whispered, “God I’m so glad someone finally said
it.”
What happened on this behavioral railway from the anterior to the present
tense?
In Indelible Imprints we meet twelve women riding those rails. All are middle
class to middle upper crust. They span from 43 to 87 years of age — no
tee-shirts in this lot. Some of the fathers were quite the notables — the
artist K. K. Hebbar; Shuksampatrai Bhandari, the compiler of first modern
Hindi dictionary; Bimal Roy, an early maker of art films. Some fathers were
quite successful in their careers, others not. The daughters are all
educated, some of them abroad. Yet an extended quote from Shyamala Ramayya
Raman’s remembrance “Mixed Signals” hints just how little these meant:
“There never was a consideration that marriage was a union for the flowering
of each partner for the good of the newly created joint unit. It was
unilaterally expected that no matter how well the girl was educationally
endowed, she was there for the convenience of the ultimate decision-maker—the
man. It takes about twenty years into such marriages to realize the unequal
nature of the relationship and all the heartache that it entails.”
A sentence by Mannu Bhandari in “My Eyes Brim Over” says myriads about
marriage in the India of these women’s upbringing: “In 1944, right after she
passed the Matric [i.e., got her high-school diploma], at the age of sixteen,
my sister was married off; the following year both my brothers, who had
finished their Master’s degrees, got married.” Boldface between the lines we
can read that the parent chose the spouses, but the daughter was perceived as
a burden shed and the sons as assets gained. Why waste money educating a
daughter who only leaves to support another home?
Each story reveals that the teller was accorded a sense of individuality
above the norm. What have they to say about their fathers not as figures but
as real people?
For one, each father radiated just enough psychic ancestry to march his
daughter through tradition before her footprints faded into the present. They
were almost all born in the early years of the 20th century; all but one of
the daughters were born in the period 1931-48. His was a forward-looking
time when many were drawn to Gandhian ideals of selfless love of country. Yet
it was a political, not behavioral, future. The fathers controlled everything
from the household finances to the amount of education a daughter would
receive. Mannu Bhandari hints how her father was split between tradition and
modernism: "Despite his modernism, he was totally a tradition-bound father,
overbearing and commanding, a man of refinement but, nevertheless, a
patriarch who distanced himself especially from his daughters." Despite all
this, he was proud when she joined a protest movement against British rule.
One doesn’t sense the air would have been so cozy around the house had Mannu
unfurled the flag of feminism.
Like many others of the authors' in the book, Mannu's father rarely
revealed feelings of affection. She relates a childhood unfathomable to those
who don’t comprehend the Asian value that the female be dyspersonal: “Every
family had half a dozen children who grew up with each other in their own
world, separate from the adults....” The sense of lofty apartness cultivated
by so many fathers in this book was replied to in kind: Iqbal Monani’s
mother “never referred to him except as ‘your father.’”
The recipe of paternal aloofness inevitably served up the taste of ideals
gone rancid: “Living with my father at the time was a Shah Saheb, one of the
wolves-in-saints’-garb, whom my parents, particularly my mother, fell prey to
from time to time. The wretched man made advances to me and I was too
embarrassed to tell Abba [Father]. Sometimes I wonder how Abba never noticed.
I was not yet fifteen and spent the vacation in a turmoil of distress.”
Other fathers were honest enough about their maleness to give their daughters
some genuinely sage advice. Shyamala Ramayya Raman’s “Mixed Signals” is a
beautifully written piece describing in part her grandfather's influence on
the education of her father. He in turn was fiercely protective — indeed overly
so. Yet he encouraged her to nourish her intellect, take up public speaking,
debating, painting, and even driving an automobile (unheard-of until fairly
recently — and then heard very well indeed, as testified to by the legions of
young women on motorbikes who give Bombay’s taxi drivers a real run for the
money to the next stop light!). Shyamala describes the lecture delivered by
her father on the institution of marriage the day after the wedding:
“My father sat me down and told me that marriage was an imperfect institution
at best. Therefore, I should not be totally trusting of my spouse; I should
always maintain separate financial accounts and develop interests of my own.
... It is strange that he said this to me because he certainly did not allow
my mother to have her own finances, or for that matter to develop her own
interests. On he contrary, he stifled many of her interests and never allowed
her to reach her full potential This is still the norm with many of he men in
my family.”
Irascible mixes of authority versus love, feudal versus modern sensibilities,
self-centeredness versus solicitude, male conceits neither gall nor pudding.
What’s to make of these fathers — and much more to the point, not the
daughters of the women in this book, but today’s daughters?
In the India of Indelible Imprints, nearly all marriages were arranged by the
families in cahoots with matchmakers and astrologers. Today only about
seventy percent are. Younger Indians — urban dwellers almost all — more and more
insist on partnering their own way. The divorce rate in India is still less
than two percent. This sounds lovely to the religious set, but in fact hides
many very unhappy marriages that should have ended long ago. Women are
rebelling, and the rounds are being lobbed by novelists and magazine
editors.
Over the last three decades, India’s women writers have moved away from
etching the traditional enduring, self-sacrificing wife toward the complex,
conflicted woman searching for identity. Compare the servile, suffering
unidimensional women in Kamala Markandaya's Nectar in a Sieve and Meera
Mahadevan's Shulamith to the three-dimensional yet still traditional women in
works by Chitra Fernando, Anita Desai, Kamala Das, Sara Suleri, and Anees
Jung. These new heroines assert themselves no matter what marriage and family
rules say. Chitra Fernando's Three Women and Anita Desai's In Custody portray
women who achieve their individual worth by breaking through the suffering
that traditional society dictates to them. Kamala Das' My Story and Sara
Suleri's Meatless Days describe the educated woman's search for identity and
meaning in autobiographical form, and Anees Jung's Unveiling India: A Woman's
Journey and Peace in Winter Gardens do it in autobiographical and
ethnographic form.
India isn’t the Taj Mahal and the beggars and the cows any more. Research
organizations chart India’s social development by looking at what and how
much people are purchasing, what they do on holidays, how they adorn their
homes. There is an India out there that is almost totally unseen by tourists
with guidebooks in their hands, despite its staring them in the face even
more ubiquitously than the famous old monuments. It is the India that started
hardly a decade ago via selling soaps and toiletries by brand name on
television, billboards, and in glossy magazines; proceeding upward to basic
foods, branching into motorbikes and household appliances and decorator
bathroom fixtures and fashionable clothes; and now — advertisements for
low-cost divorces.
Still swathed in old merits and scorning those new, the old ways of India are
inexorably becoming specks of dust hovering in the air as a great migration
now masses and begins to move beneath. The rise of the middle class is
dramatically altering the self-image of women — as it has all over Asia.
Depending on how one defines the term, between fifty and a hundred million
Indians are “middle class”. They are becoming the most influential opinion
makers in India because of the number of educated, worldly members in the
ranks of the media. Forget the Bangalore tech revolution, which is in reality
a bonanza of cheap brains for the West. The real revolution in India is the
names on the mastheads of the popular magazines and the doors of TV
production studios. These make the middle class, and the middle class is
becoming a critical mass. Its values are not godmen and grandfathers, but
mediagenicity, substance, ideas, realism, unsentimental truth. India’s
political elders are seen as feudal materialists who have neither sense of
justice nor true belief in the old culture. Young Indians sum up their
leaders with a quip: Yesterday All Over Again.
Whatever India’s future, its urban middle classes are using economy and the
media to desanctify the sacred cow. Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru would
be appalled to know how much more attractive these things are than the
idealistic socialism they thought was the surest way to perpetuate Indian
civilization.
Bindu Desai’s “Papa on the Swing” ends on a note as touching as the end of a
good novel, “The swing fell from its hinges that day. The shuffle of the
right foot being dragged, the open window, the familiar figure on the swing
at home — all gone.”
One could say the same for times past in time future all over India.