Saturday, March 1, 2008

Social Cooperation in India

Ok, I’m back, and I’ve shaken off the jet lag, finally waking up this morning at a time appropriate to my socioeconomic and employment status.

The story coming out of India for the past few years has been rapid, glitzy growth and the increasing resemblance of cities like Bangalore to Western cities. It is an impressive change, to be sure, and I haven’t ever been to Bangalore, but to my foreign eye, India’s most striking (and thought provoking) physical setting remains its streets.

Before I get any further, let me exclude from this post any discussion of Indian poverty, a book-size rather than blog-size topic. Rather I want to focus on two aesthetic superficialities of the streets in Mumbai: traffic and litter.

The traffic is tough to describe, especially if you are trying to be descriptive and not necessarily pejorative. There are lane markers but no adherence to them. There are traffic lights but my uncle tells me no one follows them once it’s about 9pm. Interstitial space lasts for about one second before an autorickshaw or a scooter carrying a family of four zooms into it. A u-turn may be attempted/made on a major thoroughfare during rush hour and no one bats an eyelash. And all this space-filling and jockeying results, as it only can, in a maddening glacial drift more or less parallel to the street.

And once you finish your soda, out the window. Littering is part of the process. There are piles of rotting, sometimes burning, garbage scattered about the roadside. And the red spots you see all over the sidewalk are pan-stained spittle (pan is spiced chewing tobacco).

These two phenomena point to a lack of certain conventions of social cooperation. Though it is expedient to toss out my litter here in the U.S., I don’t, and for social reasons – i.e. giving a hoot and not polluting – as opposed to trying to avoid a fine. And I won’t cut someone off on the road, or run a red light, for similar reasons (though this convention has a somewhat weaker hold on some of us it seems). There are clearly individualistic safety considerations that come into play when following traffic rules, but we are clearly willing to trade some personal expedience in exchange for more orderly and efficient traffic. These trades don’t happen in Mumbai – or they happen at a much different level than they do here.

This surprises me because it seems to run counter to some of the axioms of Indian/Hindu culture. On the personal and household level, Indian culture (upper/middle class culture, that is) has a nearly zero tolerance policy on dirt. As a rule, shoes are not allowed beyond the doorway. Floors are swept multiple times a day. There’s no such thing as skipping a shower. And most significantly, trash disposal is far more austere than it is over here. An entire family will have a small rubbish bin in the kitchen (like, a gallon or two), and this is the only trash receptacle in the house. The understanding is, keep your trash under control, and please don’t produce that much of it.

There’s less of an analogue to street traffic in a household, but it is worth noting that Indian/Hindu culture generally and traditionally has not had much room for American-style self-actualizing individualism. In Indian life, as opposed to roadways, personal interests and aims do not figure into the decision calculus the way they do here. There are many examples of this, none more potent than that of arranged marriage. I was, in fact, in India for the arranged marriage of my cousin. Now, this post is getting long, and I do have more to say on the topic of arranged marriage, so for now, suffice it to say that the values upheld in Hindu arranged marriage are societal and familial continuity, not whether you’re in love.

Admittedly, I’ve simplified things a great deal. Of course there are some conventions at work in Mumbai traffic, and it is a system that has evolved and, therefore, works. High speeds are nearly impossible, removing a lot of the danger we worry about here. And drivers have coped with unpredictability by increasing awareness.

Again, nothing necessarily pejorative here. Just different, and interestingly opposite of what we’ve got here, where public spaces are relatively more convention-laden and personal life is quite individualistic.

No comments: