If you belch, you're Indian!

Think of every cliche you've experienced""and experience""in India. That fair people are somehow cleaner than those who're dark-skinned, that Westerners are a nasty lot for their ablutory habits (they don't wash you know where!), that love marriages are doomed to disaster, that personal cleanliness leaves no room for similar tidiness in public spaces, that mythic attributes of family bonds (Ram and Sita; Ram and Lakshman) needs must triumph even when the reality is something altogether too dark to shed family light on.

At a superficial (but deeply entrenched) level, these are among the minuscule things that define us as Indian. More even than perhaps DNA, it is the way we think, eat, live, dress, socialise, talk, buy and consume that sets us apart from the others, creating the Indian persona among a global people.

In India, caste and community hierarchies are next only to the rungs of gender and profession, and a person's visiting card is a giveaway of his/her religion, caste (if Hindu), roots (in some cases even the name of the village/town from which he/she traces ancestry), exact designation (even someone who has stopped working might write "retired CA" or "ex Judge", and not only on a visiting card but also on the name plate outside the gate of the house, or on the car number plate) and a wedding card is sometimes a resume of the family that traces antecedents back to several generations. This sense of the past and belonging creates notions of purity of bloodline and sense of khandaan that is uniquely Indian. And yet, an Indian abroad is often just that""not Rajasthani/Rajput/Shekhawat /Ugrawat with a gotr that any pandit will use to decide lineage from virtually the origin of mankind""carrying his identity but with no one to show it to.

Nor is this creation of identity limited to the outside space; in homes, every relationship""and therefore relation""is well defined through one's way of addressing family elders. There is a name for an elder sister-in-law and a younger brother-in-law, for a maternal grandparent and a paternal grandchild, for an elder sibling and a younger one, so outsiders will not mistake the likely influence of each individual in a family within that hierarchy.

If these generalisations are unfair in a country with so many different physiognomies, tongues, influences and aberrations, it is equally hard to explain why a seemingly isolated (from mainstream India) Mizoram with its very distinct culture and society hooks on nightly to the dramas of Ekta Kapoor's television soaps in a language (Hindi) that is alien to it.

If anything, what the authors miss out most visibly on is the role that television and, more importantly, cinema plays on Indian minds and lives, acting almost as much as a bonding factor as the Indian family. (Or, for that matter, cricket, which is not so much a sport as a religion in India, and one of the few Indian properties that is not at the mercy of caste or creed.) Nor"" given that they explore modern mindsets""do the authors search for the Indian in his workspace who aspires for the topmost posts but is rarely openly aggressive, preferring instead a subservience that is part of a deeply ingrained feudal spirit that looks up to any person in any position of authority. That they recognise this trait, though, is in evidence in their observations in the manner in which Indians both look up to and abhor politicians.

Among the more important things the authors address are aspects of sexuality, of aspects of differences between Indians and Westerners ("Americans characterise a person with abstract, generic words like 'good', 'nice', while the Oriyas use more concrete, contextual descriptions like 'he helps me', 'brings sweets', etc"), and on the Hindu-Muslim conflict, they say: "What we would like to believe (that is, hope) is that we are moving towards an era of recognising Hindu-Muslim differences rather than pursuing their chimerical commonalities. That we are moving towards a multicultural society rather than a 'composite' culture. Such multiculturalism is neither harmful nor dangerous but necessary since it enables different religious groups to deal with the modernising process in an active way rather than withdraw in lamentation at the inequities of modernisation or endure it as passive victims."

The question of identity is not an easy one to crack, especially given contemporary influences on a deep-rooted culture like ours. Suffice it to say, should you want to emit rude bodily noises, it's okay because it's Indian.

THE INDIANS
Portrait of a People

Sudhir Kakar and Katharina Kakar
Penguin/Viking
Price: Rs 395; Pages: 226