Third, politicians gathering votes during election campaigns in India have placed a premium on appeasing the various groups we belong to, and not the needs of individuals. Thereafter, the policy emphasis of the politician in power has also been on communities more than on individuals. The individual is not the focus of the state, and the citizen knows this so well that it adds to the growing deficit of trust in the state among the masses.
Fourth, this deficit of trust between the state and citizens is further increased by the fact that influential Indians often manage to successfully leverage state resources, police protection, government projects and so on for their own benefit, while the masses are left high and dry.
There is, therefore, hardly any alternative for Indians but to keep relations with family and traditional community groups strong, so they can be used as fallback options during periods of crisis. The retention of these community ties then becomes a sort of social insurance or a safety network.
European sociologists have often emphasized that the flourishing of what they call ‘traditional’ community ties, with kith, kin and clan, for instance, is not a characteristic of a ‘modern’ society. According to the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, in such traditional cultures, there is little individuation.1 He explained that as a society becomes more complex and modern, individuals play more specialized roles and become more dissimilar in their experiences, interests and values. However, as we know, Indian society is distinctly reliant on community bonds and affiliations. In India, we do not operate alone. By this token, then, are we pre-modern?
I find it extremely problematic to assess Indians’ ‘modernity’ on the basis of a Western framework of analysis. This was what was done by orientalist British writers such as William Jones, Henry Colebrooke, Nathaniel Halhead, Charles Wilkins, and philosophers such as John Stuart Mill. This is problematic because the context of European thinkers such as Durkheim, a century and a half ago was characterized by the advent in western Europe of industrialization and the birth of capitalism, with no democracy. Modernity in Europe, therefore, primarily meant technological progress, individual specializations and profit, sans the feeling of shared nationhood. In India, on the contrary, we fought against the British, and established democracy fifty years before we began to embrace capitalism. There was no place for individual entrepreneurship in India for almost fifty years after we won our political freedom. The free market did not exist and, till the 1990s, we were not thinking much about things like beating the competition and making individual headway for profit. The inversion of the sequence of events regarding democracy and capitalism in India, vis-à-vis Europe, has altered the trajectory of social evolution here.
Today we have Indians who, in their writings, also measure India from the Western perspective of modernity. Many contemporary Indian writers in English cater to the international interest in the ‘darker side of India’. In a study on contemporary orientalist writings in India, Lisa Lau and Om Prakash Dwivedi write:
The production and consumption of Indian writing in English takes place within a distinctly postcolonial framework, and clearly re-Orientalism and Orientalism permeate this industry at all levels, and in no insignificant degrees.2
But to understand India and its values, we need to look at India from an Indian perspective. We need to inspect our own social history in cities and villages. Without boxing ourselves into separate tranches of ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’, we must assess, in the Indian context, what our affiliations to communities means to us. Even if we agree that traditional clans and culturally determined communities wield substantial influence on how we think and act, this cannot make us ‘pre-modern’ by Europe’s standards. Rather, let us then find out what those influences are that our family and communities wield on us. In what way does the society around us influence our individual values and beliefs?
There are several villages located around the Jindal Steel and Power Group factories in the Raigarh district of Chhattisgarh in central India. About two years ago, at dawn, a stroll along the main roads encircling the villages offered me a view of at least a hundred bare buttocks in a row. Men, women and children sat on their haunches with their backs turned towards me, defecating. Walking further, I discovered that the local waterbody—essentially the reservoir of a small dam—was spotted even more profusely with naked bodies performing intimate ablutions. The same water, I knew, was used for drinking and cooking.
This was as saddening as it was baffling, because, according to the district administration, this specific village was covered in the government’s Open Defecation Free States programme. Under this scheme, families had been granted Rs 12,000 each by the local municipal authorities, with which they were to construct toilets in their homes.3
‘Why are you not using the toilet at home?’ I asked a four-year-old who was on his way home after finishing the big job.
‘My mother told me to go outside,’ he replied shyly.
I followed the little boy to identify his home, and then returned later the same day to speak to the boy’s family.
A woman in a brightly coloured sari, perhaps in her late twenties, opened the door I knocked on. I introduced myself meekly as an employee of the Jindal Group, not knowing how she would react to my sudden visit. I added that I wanted to speak to her for her opinion on a sanitation project we wanted to do in her village.
She said her name was Dhoopwati4 and welcomed me into her brick house, offering me a seat in a living room whose walls had been plastered with mud painted a bright shade of pink. She left me to
