Final post: What have I learned?

Incredibly, I will be leaving India in two days. That's okay, though, because I think I have reached my naan saturation point.

Results of fieldwork:

Big take-home insight #1: Ambivalence regarding minority politics

I'm very torn about the Gorkha movement, as I am about all the minority-language-group struggles I have been researching. On one hand, if the society around you has defined you in terms of your ethnicity, and discriminates against you on that basis, it seems entirely within your rights to resist that. And if the society around you is full of negative stereotypes about this category that they put you into, it seems natural and warranted that you would want to counter that with a movement highlighting what is good about your ethnicity.

I feel sympathy with these movements because the status quo is so unfair.

Then they go and run around burning the cars of the sons of the people who disagree with them.

So I guess I also feel ethnic identities are ultimately dead ends as a means to build a society. There is not enough room for flexibility and generosity of spirit. All the movements I have looked at always end up being kind of fascist internally and racist externally.

Big take-home insight #2: Lonely Plant is wrong about fare negotiations

Both the Lonely Planet and the Rough Guide I have consulted during my time in India advise you to always negotiate cab and rickshaw fares in advance. This is nonsense.

Remember your basic game theory: at the end of the ride, you are already where you want to go. The driver can either take the fare you offer or get nothing. The bargaining power is on your side.

Therefore, you should NEVER make any attempt to negotiate the fare before the ride. Just get in, stay quiet, and pay what you want at the end of the ride.

I've had tremendous luck with this. If the driver protests and won't take the fare, you set it the money on the dashboard and walk away. (Best to get out of the vehicle before offering the fare). As I've become more bold, I've stopped being bothered when the driver tries to hold initial negotations. Sample dialogue:

Me: "Can you take me to [x place, a measly 20 rupees worth of distance away]?"

Rickshaw driver: "100 Rupees."

Me: "No." [climb into rickshaw and sit down]

Rickshaw driver: "90 Rupees." [climbs into rickshaw and starts engine -- major tactical mistake on his part]

Me: "No."

[Rickshaw driver shrugs, begins to drive. When we arrive at destination, I offer the entirely reasonable 20 rupees and we go our separate ways. This has worked thus far.]

I always offer a reasonable fare. If I were a true economist I would try to offer nothing and see if I could get away with it. But, as you know, economics, the term for which is derived from the Greek for "if I had channeled my mathematical acumen into computer science I'd be a zillionaire by now", is a discipline full of small and bitter people.

My whole plan is, of course, subject to the caveats that (1) you don't want to do this in some dark and deserted place. Fortunately, in India it is never deserted. And (2) you don't want to be so grossly unfair as to bring the wrath of the crowd upon you. But no rickshaw driver is going to run after you on the grounds that you only paid him the normal price, rather than the grossly inflated white person price. And the law isn't on their side because they're supposed to be running the meter and because Indian policemen loath Indians.

Also, you have to have the correct change with you and you have to know the appropriate fare for the place you are going. The latter doesn't take too long to get figured out. But getting change in India is really difficult. I mean, heaven help you if you've just been to the ATM and all you have are 500 rupee bills (~$12). Those you can really only use at a bustling establishment, like a McDonald's or a store being run by Sikhs or Marwaris (they're like the Jews/Chinese people/Lebanese of South Asia). Maybe Gujaratis. But, in general, no one ever has change.

Liet motif of time in India: Poor people's fundamental problem = not enough money.

Big take-home insight #3: India’s identity crisis and the limits of my ability to understand this place

If you want to say something about what India ought to do or what's going to happen to here, you can't get all that far before you have to discuss Hinduism. Because not only are about 80% of the people self-described as Hindus, but also because many of the customs associated with Hinduism—caste in particular—are put in practice by non-Hindus: Muslims, Christians, etc.

But Hinduism is a really hard subject even for Indians. For one thing, Hinduism is really internally diverse, and there is a very politically-loaded debate about what being Hindu actually entails.

As far as I can tell, there is a correlation between education, income, and ambivalence about Hinduism and, by extension, Indian history.

I have to mention this ad for Maruti cars (one of two Indian car companies, though now partially owned by Suzuki) about which I could write an entire dissertation. It is the most amazing ad for displaying the ambivalence of upwardly-mobile Indians about India. The slogan is “India comes home in a Maruti-Suzuki” and the commercial is a montage of homecomings (in Maruti Suzukis) against a sentimental song about love of India.

But all the images imply this profound uncertainty about what the customer is supposed to like about India. Is India terrific because it is a rising world power, becoming richer, more modern, and considerably-more-Westernized than many of its post-colonial peers? That is, is India terrific because it is changing? Or was India always a pretty terrific place? Can both of those things be true?

The closing image of the ad, for example, is of a boy (in Western clothes and backpack) hitchhiking with a sign that says “Need to be home for Diwali.” In English. In the background, slightly out of focus, you see the old, rickety bus that he was taking, broken down by the side of the road, with Indian men in traditional garb milling about, unloading some of the baggage. Then a new Maruti-Suzuki pulls up and picks up the boy.

So, the protagonists in the image are these comfortable, middle-class Westernized Indians who hitchhike in English. Yet, this boy, on his way home from the college where he is learning terribly modern stuff, is intent on celebrating a traditional holiday. And a sort of stereotypical, dysfunctional, poor India is there in the background—looking kind of picturesque, actually—but is easily transcended thanks to Maruti-Suzuki.

Indian politics has a lot of references to this ambivalence.

For one thing, India had a famously secular set of founding fathers in the Indian National Congress and the Indian communist parties. They tended to be socialists and Marxists, so many of them were pretty skeptical about God, let alone religion. For that secular founding generation, India’s lessons for the rest of the world were evidenced by its leadership in self-determination of colonized people, the Gandhian model of non-violent political struggle, and non-alignment in the wars of the capitalist, Western powers.

To people who are Hindu fundamentalists, though, the Indian founders' secularism was basically hostility toward Hinduism. It is the case that the Indian constitution and legal code ban certain aspects of what-was-once-considered-Hindu culture, like untouchability. And, over time, socialism, secularism, Gandhian political practice, and non-alignment have all become a lot less popular in India. And there is the uncomfortable fact that the secularists’ version of why-India-is-a-really-awesome-place didn’t have very much to say about India prior to colonization.

There is also a history running back to colonial times where lefty, secularist Indian intellectuals respond to Western critiques of Hinduism by drawing attention to the aspects of Hinduism that look really good according to Western lefty, secularist standards and, particularly, the aspects that seem even better than old-timey Western traditions. For example, the tradition of renunciation of the material world is cited as demonstrating that this is a culture that is less grasping and economically exploitative than the Protestant-work-ethic-of-the-British-and-other-white-folk. A more contemporary example: the worship of goddesses can be cited as proof that Hinduism has better feminist bona fides than the West, female infanticide not withstanding.

In these treatments, aspects of Hindu culture that don't appeal to Westerners are often blamed on foreign influence. People argue the British made the caste system oppressive, whereas previously it was quite fluid, or that the Muslims are the ones that screwed up gender relations.

Yet, even if there is scholarly support for a reading of Hinduism that is not caste-discriminatory, is more gender equal, less racist, etc., the fact is that for millions of Hindus who practice now, those objectionable-to-Westerners aspects of Hinduism are part of their beliefs. I definitely don't have the expertise to say which interpretations of Hinduism are most consistent with the various texts and so on. But it does often seem that traditions and texts are being culled for whatever figures and traditions look right according to outsiders. Finding an "indigenous progressive tradition" is a little oxymoronic if you go looking for that tradition based on a foreign definition of "progressive".

The most prominent political defense of Hinduism against political secularists is Hindutva, often called Hindu fundamentalism; the movement developed as a response to Christian missionaries. But Hindutva, too, is often transparently over-compensating in its attempts to present itself as valuable according to outsiders’ standards. The most extreme example I know is the claim that the Vedas contain the secrets of quantum physics and nuclear weapons.

Basically, I think Hindutva still contains a lot of culling of Hinduism according to what will make India seem more impressive to foreigners, but with a unique take on what outsiders allegedly find inferior in Hinduism. Whereas India's founding fathers were very concerned with the negative views of caste, for example, Hindutva is quite concerned by the view, which the Muslim Mughal kings and the British colonialists shared, that Hinduism isn't very manly. So Hindutva is really hostile to a lot of the androgeny in Hindu tradition, and plays up the myths and traditions that surround men and military conquest. Not to mention the claim that Hindus have always secretly known how to make WMDs.

Now, it is possible that I am overstating the extent to which debates about Indian culture and Hinduism are shaped by defensiveness against Western standards; that could be a function of my own prejudices and tendency to overstate the importance of the West. If one believes, for example, that there is something inherently sensible about the equality of all humans then maybe the secularists’ rejection of caste doesn’t have to be categorized as Western-informed. But Indians do talk a lot about this problem of being seen as inferior.

Here, I have to mention my other favorite part of the Maruti Suzuki ad, at the risk of belaboring the point. An older gentleman is waiting impatiently outside his beautiful house, which is a sort of sleek, Nordic design, the sort of house Ikea would sell, if it sold houses. His wife stands nervously in the background. His grown-up daughter arrives (in a Maruti Suzuki), looking a bit sheepish. Then, out of the driver’s side of the car emerges a young man, who walks up to Dad, smiles and holds an arm out to shake hands. (NB: he offers a handshake. He does not fold his hands and make a little bow). Mom and Dad are immediately excited to see their daughter has brought home a future son-in-law, and all delay (which was definitely not any fault of the reliable yet affordable Maruti Suzuki) is forgiven.

The most notable thing about this young man is that he is wearing a Sikh turban. The Dad is not. Maybe the family isn’t Sikh. Or maybe their daughter has actually found someone to marry who is more devout than her parents. The marriage is thoroughly modern: it clearly wasn’t arranged, their daughter is apparently off living her own self-actualized life. Her beau is obviously Westernized, what with the handshake and the button down shirt he is wearing. And, yet, he’s completely at home in Indian tradition and, in fact, maybe even better able to integrate it into his identity than the future-in-laws.

Such is the promise of the future generations of India, which will be both more and less Indian than their parents. While still driving Maruti Suzukis.

Now, this is where it gets really weird for me:

I think that the process of trying to justify Hinduism and Indian culture to outsiders is demeaning and not necessarily helpful to India's national project.

But I'm not a cultural relativist. So I pretty much share the view that the good points of Indian society are the ones that look good by my lights (pro-female, universal equality of people, acceptance of homosexuality, etc.). And my wishes for India subscribe pretty much entirely to a Western leftist's teleology: get rid of arranged marriages, castes, excessive use of cardamom in desserts, and so on.

I don't think, as an outsider, I could ever develop a critique or view of Indian society that was more informed by its internal truths than by me trying to find my own values within Hinduism and other Indian traditions. I can’t pretend Indian society doesn’t seem really screwed up to me, but I also believe the conversation about this alleged screwed-up-ness is one to which I can't contribute very much, if at all.

Which, in turn, does make me think my ability to ever recommend or predict where India is concerned is pretty limited.

But I already have my whole second book—about this Maruti-Suzuki commercial—mapped out. So that should get me through to tenure.

In conclusion...

I have met one big goal with this fieldwork: I had no hypothesis about why some language groups get states and others don't when I arrived here. And now I have some hypotheses, which I think I can clarify and test. And I know a lot more stuff about India.

I've also become not-too-bad at cutting my own hair, had a chance to live with my younger sister again, and had fun writing this blog. So thanks for reading it.

xox
B (soon to be not in India)