No doubt such dysfunctional television families reflect the changing mores of the new liberalizing India. But if they loom larger than life, they do so in only one sense of the term. In size and reach, soap opera families are smaller and less demanding than the families most Indians think of as our own.
The family, after all, is the bedrock Indian social unit. We Indians are as self-seeking as anyone else, but we are not individualists in the Western mode: India is not hospitable terrain for “atomic man,” since India is not a society in which atomized individuals can accomplish very much. To get anything done in India we require other people — allies who see their interests as ours. Such allies are most readily found within the cocoon of a family unit, which generates our most vital support, practical, material, and psychological, as well as the most important of our social duties and obligations.
But we define family more liberally than the rest of the world. We are, after all, the only country in the world where even the taxman recognizes the extended joint family spanning several generations and several branches of the family tree, living together in an arrangement legally known as the “Hindu Undivided Family.”
Sometimes the notion of “family” extends more broadly to a clan or a subcaste or even to distantly related neighbors in a village. I cannot remember a time growing up when there wasn't a young man from either of my parents’ villages in Kerala, some related to us in ways I couldn't fully understand, living in our flat (and sharing my bedroom) while my father arranged for him to have some professional training and got him a job. That is in the nature of things in our society; it was expected that my father, as one who had done well, would help others get their start in life. India is not a welfare state in that the government provides little to our unfortunates, but it is a welfare society in which people constantly help each other out, provided they feel a connection that justifies their help.
Belonging to the family carries with it a complex web of entitlements and obligations, not least monetary. Our culture, with some exceptions, treats family income as commonly accessible, family expenditure as commonly undertaken, family meals as meant to be shared. The broader the definition of family, of course, the more the merry number who feel they have a right to partake of the family's assets.
This level of sharing does not, however, make India fertile ground for the idealistic ecumenism of the socialists. Despite the socialist rhetoric of our political class since independence, we are a society unfit for socialism. Very few Indians have a broader sense of community than that circumscribed by ties of blood, caste affiliation, or village. We take care of those we consider near and dear, and remain largely indifferent to the rest.
Which means that not everything about our family structures is innocent. Amid the many transformations of globalization overtaking our society today, I sometimes wonder if our traditions conspire with modernity against our general well-being. For instance, is the Indian commitment to family a threat to the environment? If the question seems preposterous, let me explain.
At a trivial level, it is common to find sumptuous luxury apartments in buildings that are filthy, rotting, and stained, whose common areas, walls, and staircases have not been cleaned or painted in generations. Each apartment owner is proud of his own immediate habitat but is unwilling to incur responsibility or expense for the areas shared with others, even in the same building. My mother once asked her “sweeper-woman” in Delhi to sweep the stairs of her building as well. The woman, who would have been paid extra for the chore, was astonished at the request. “But why should you, madam?” she asked. “The stairs don't belong to you.”
This attitude is also visible in the lack of a civic culture in both rural and urban India, which leaves public spaces dirty and garbage-strewn, streets potholed and neglected, civic amenities vandalized or not functioning. The Indian wades through dirt and filth, past open sewers and fly-specked waste, to an immaculate home where he proudly bathes twice a day. An acute consciousness of personal hygiene coexists with an astonishing disregard for public sanitation.
Not surprisingly, India is home to many of the world's most polluted cities. The air in Kolkata or Delhi is all but unbreathable in winter, when car exhaust fumes, unchecked industrial emissions, and smoke from countless charcoal braziers in the street rise to be trapped by descending mist and fog. A French diplomat friend, undergoing a routine medical check after serving three years in Kolkata, was asked how many packs of cigarettes he smoked a day. When he protested that he had never smoked in his life, his doctor couldn't believe him: three years of breathing Kolkata's air had given him lungs resembling a habitual smoker's. Delhi is hardly better. When the Australian cricket team played there in November 1996, the manager said the air was so unfit to breathe that his players’ performance was affected.
As a result of such unchecked pollution, respiratory diseases are rife in urban India. Factories belch forth noxious black clouds; effluents pour untreated into rivers; sewage systems reek and overflow. Despite the tree-huggers of the Chipko Andolan, deforestation and overcultivation take their own environmental toll of rural India. Environmental consciousness remains limited. Governments pass regulations, then regularly ignore them. Meanwhile, more and more cars reach the congested roads, more poisons and toxins flow into our water and air, and more small factories open up that do not meet pollution-control standards. But they will never be closed down, because unemployment is a greater political danger than lung cancer.
With respiratory illnesses, cardiovascular diseases, and lung ailments rife, the total health costs for the country resulting from illnesses caused by pollution are estimated at some 4.5 percent of India's gross domestic product. In other words, more than half our country's annual economic growth is being wiped out by pollution, and development is taking place largely at the expense of the environment.
This dismal picture, coupled with corrupt enforcement of environmental regulations, reflects the sad state of the Indian ecology in the first years of the twenty-first century. This does not, however, prevent politicians from making environmental issues an opportunistic excuse to delay major developmental projects. If the choice is between living poor in a “green society” and being prosperous in the midst of general pollution, I have no doubt that most Indians would be happy to choke and splutter all the way to the bank.
Which is why — to return to the beginning — the new soap opera families are both relevant and irrelevant to our real lives. For, given our basic social underpinnings, the triumphs and travails of a television family can seem both familiar enough to Indian viewers to engage us, and distant enough to entertain. Meanwhile, the real damage they do, in leaving Indians indifferent to the welfare of the broader environment in which their families function, takes place offscreen.
11. Cricket's True Spiritual Home
I HAVE OFTEN THOUGHT that cricket is really, in the sociologist Ashis Nandy's phrase, an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British.
This might seem a preposterous notion, in keeping with the characteristic acuminations of that mischievous scholar, whose wispy beard and twinkling eyes have revealed a capacity both to astonish and to provoke. And yet it is an entirely defensible idea: Nandy found the perfect words to express something I have been arguing since childhood. Everything about cricket seems to me ideally suited to the Indian national character: its rich complexity, the infinite possibilities and variations that could occur with each delivery, the dozen different ways of getting out, are all patterned for a society of infinite forms and varieties. Indeed, they are rather like Indian classical music, in which the basic laws are laid down but the performer then improvises gloriously, unshackled by anything so mundane as a written score.