In fact, a great deal of scientific research has been done on the psychology of curiosity that challenges Das’s and Al-Biruni’s suggestions. Some absolutely fascinating research on curiosity was conducted in two ‘waves’ of intense academic activity amongst psychologists. The first wave, in the 1960s, focused on curiosity’s underlying cause. Psychologists speculated about why people voluntarily sought curiosity-inducing situations such as mysteries and puzzles. Some interpreted curiosity as a primordial drive and viewed it as aversive, predicting that people would want to minimize curiosity rather than seek it out. A few others—a limited number of researchers in fact—examined the situational determinants of curiosity. The first wave of curiosity research subsided before the situationalist revolution in psychology could even take off. The second wave began in the mid-1970s and concentrated on the problem of measuring curiosity.8 Can we correlate levels of curiosity with individual characteristics such as age, gender, origin and IQ? The researchers of the second wave conducted several experiments, but every attempt to cross-validate the curiosity scale with an individual’s other traits failed. This means we cannot determine if specific profiles of people are more or less curious than those of others. We cannot say that people of a certain age group are more curious than others, or that all women are curious while men are not. We cannot, therefore, make the sweeping statement that all Indians are disinterested, incurious and have a ‘know-it-all attitude’.
There are, of course, several other approaches to curiosity studies, but they all seem to point to the same conclusion—that the adage ‘curious by nature’ cannot be true. For instance, another commonly studied aspect of curiosity is the dichotomy between state and trait curiosity. ‘State curiosity’, in academic literature, refers to the curiosity aroused by a particular situation. ‘Trait curiosity’ refers to the general capacity or propensity of a person to experience curiosity.9 At the core of this discussion is the question: do situations make people curious or are some individuals just more curious than others? Does the situation in the pre-migration country of potential migrants make them curious about living in a new country, or is it just their ‘innately curious nature’? After experiments, it was concluded once again that there was no curiosity trait per se in people—it was the environment that people lived in that made them curious. For example, an environment of mental stimulation at school can make a child curious about the world. The condition of slavery can evoke curiosity about freedom. A state of deprivation, say, in a dictatorship, can catalyse a revolution based on citizens’ fascination for what they do not have. A country in which life is full of great hardship can make its citizens curious about what lies beyond and perhaps cause them to leave.
Why did I leave India many years ago?
When I was all of nineteen, my parents found their daughter’s groom-to-be via a newspaper advertisement and a few photographs. I had met the boy twice.
The first time was at a dinner that my parents pleaded with me to attend. I found my parents’ dream boy to be soft-spoken, and I noticed how he combed his hair with a neat parting on the side. He embodied the very definition of an ideal match in India—Bengali like me; Brahmin by caste, like me; an engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), India’s premier engineering school; a management graduate from IIM, another great Indian institution. And as if this seemingly made-to-order curriculum vitae for marriage was not good enough, I was told that he worked in a large global investment bank, and lived in Tokyo.
He was really lovely, and so, when our parents left us to talk in private for a few minutes, I told him I was not interested in marrying him, or anyone else, for that matter. I also told him I had a boyfriend who was Muslim, and that my parents were enormously paranoid about the outcome of that relationship. I explained to him that a few months ago, they had kept me locked up at home for days and prohibited me from going to university until I agreed to never meet my Muslim boyfriend again. But of course we continued to. The boy nodded his head at what I told him, and we returned to join our families at the dinner table. Pleased with myself for having closed this case, I never gave that evening another thought. The entire incident had just seemed very bizarre to me and I felt it was best forgotten.
A year later, I met the same boy for the second time due to the persistence of my father, who paid me a surprise visit at JNU, picked me up and dropped me off at a restaurant, where I found that the boy was waiting to meet me. Five minutes into the conversation, this boy gathered that I had not been told the news. So he gently informed me about our engagement which was to take place that evening. Rushing out of the restaurant, I took an autorickshaw to go home.
Robert Butler, in his book Curiosity in Monkeys, writes that monkeys kept in a colourless, shielded cage learnt to discriminate the colour of the window that would afford them a glimpse of what lay outside.10 He compares this trait to that of humans who, like most animals, can be powerfully motivated by the situation they are in to explore outside that realm.
On my way from the restaurant that afternoon, I
