I’m curious what S suggests as alternatives, practical solutions to the myriad issues she presents. Let me rephrase my question in a different way. Given the context India finds itself around (geographical, historic, political, cultural…):

a) how can one go about enabling women to be more independent and the equal power and presence that you’d find in a healthy society? Since that is an ideal not quite reached by any society today, where would S rank India (compared to the leaders, compared to its neighbors…) and what needs to be done next?
b) how can what needs to be done next be done so it isn’t seen as patronizing? After all even well-meaning gestures and actions backed by the best of intentions can be perceived as patronizing by those still simmering with resentments and anger.
c) violence isn’t the monopoly of any gender and it’d be a very biased person to blame any one gender for societal problems. We hear of violence done women by men. Attempts to address that problem (by those well-intentioned) only seem to produce more dogma, ideology, and bias. A better approach, one befitting the situation, is to address violence in the community be it women (victims)-men (perpetrators), women-women, men-men, and men-women. Surely S can’t be denying the innumerable acts of violence perpetrated on women by women in India? what’s being done about that?
d) Virtually all women of Indian origin I’ve met claim to be the maintainers, conveyors, holders, representatives of “Indian culture.” They also claim to be the ones most involved in passing that on to the next generation (male or female). You can hear that, and see it practiced too, in India and elsewhere. So, if that culture has all of those “intolerant” practices S refers to in her comments, why is it that she is not referring to the role of women in perpetuating what is pernicious? Women surely can’t have it both ways: claim the culture is hostile to them, and yet represent themselves as the embodiment of that culture responsible for transmitting it to the next generation.

I look forward to hearing S’s response.

India’s multiculturalism, its “unity within diversity” label was used and deployed by a mostly male, upper-caste nationalist government in the mid 20th century to naturalize a range of serious disparities in the country and to claim to be able to represent a coherent whole.

Calling it tolerant or multicultural, and essentializing the image of the poor working farmer and romanticizing it, has long been a nationalist euphemism of sorts for enormous inequality between regions and peoples.

I agree with you that tolerance exists sometimes in striking ways. This is true of Auroville and of the Jewish community in Kochi. But I suspect that each of those instances need to be studied at a local level before being anecdotally strung together to claim a unified tradition of ‘tolerance’. In India, tolerance comes and goes, now you see it, now you dont.

Nowhere is the lack of tolerance in India more evident, than in the continued misogyny, sexism and inequality faced by Indian women.

Since the early 20th century, the nationalist ideology began to identify itself as “middle class”; that is to say, closer to ‘the masses’ than the British and closer to ’self governance’ than the ‘masses’. Part of their ideology was a patronizing attitude towards ‘helping poor people along’ to development.

Another key part of nationalist ideology since this time was the characterizaton of Indian women as the “bearers of national culture”, virginal, pure and chaste, with an innate drive towards motherhood and towards rearing nationalistic sons.

This ideology has serious consequences in courts, where marital rape is not recognized as an issue. It has serious consequences for those of us young educated girls who live in cities alone, and have to restrict our movements for fear of police harrassment, and who get called ‘whores’ by our neighbours. It has consequences for women who try to get abortions (sneaking out of home when their abusive husbands are at work) and being told by government officials to “bring their husband”. Its not uncommon for officials to chide the woman in an incredibly disrespectful and disempowering manner, “Why are you doing this ma? Do you want to spoil your marriage?”

It is no coincedence that many government programs aimed at empowering women are implemented by mid level bureaucrats who believe that a too-empowered woman “will make a bad wife.”

(Some especially insightful researchers have recently studied marriage as a source of violence. This is not to say women dont love the abusive and sexist husbands they have to settle for. Some of them do. But a lot of them have resentment lurking…others may hate him outright.)

I would caution us against employing the language and metaphors used by Indian nationalist discourse…like nationalist discourse everywhere, it conceals and subsumes some key contradictions that are mainatined by daily practice across the country. ‘Unity within diversity’ gives us warm fuzzy feelings, allowing us to ignore the trafficking, the transgender and female rape, the police violence, the unequal and forced marriages that take place everyday.

Given our laws and sexist judiciary, I think the only way forward is for all of us to support each other and build self esteem and knowledge…until we can begin to say “f*** you” to the city and go about our lives.

These issues have daily significance for those of us girls who grew up here. I went to the US for college, on a scholarship, and returned 2 years ago. I work with sexual minorities and girls in Chennai, around issues of gender and sexuality. I would be happy to provide references for the arguments I have made.

The reason Narendra Modi is so popular in Gujarat is not because of his anti-Muslim stance but because of his stance against religious preferences. As far as Modi supporters are concerned, Muslims should adhere to the same civil marriage laws as Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, etc. and the Hajj subsidies should be eliminated. All preferential treatment towards the Muslims and Christians should be eliminated. In other words, Modi wants India to be more like the United States with equal rights for all and no special treatment for certain religions.

To say that India is intolerant because of Modi is akin to saying that the United States is intolerant because of Governor George Wallace.

Akash, I think you owe the issue you raised more attention. Haven’t Indians and Indian culture treated foreign religions and people better than they treat their own? That comment you made about a local woman not being affronted by the dress or demeanor of Westerners could be contrasted by how Indians take liberties with, even abuse, other Indians in ways that they won’t with non-Indians. That is something–i.e., granting those outside one’s own liberties that aren’t given one
s own–that I haven’t quite seen in any other culture or country.

We need to understand better the nature of indian multi-culturalism (indic pluralism?). I think it is also present in realted forms in SE Asia – Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and so on. It is quite different from US or French multi-culturalism, these are western models with their own histories and dynamics. So there is some similar and some different examples of this phenomenon out there.

The topic deserves study from a practical point of view – what are the strengths of indic pluralism, ,what are its weaknesses, how can it be taken forward/modernized and so on.

All four of my grandparents came to America in the early 1900’s from eastern Europe. Although they had all lived within a 50 mile radius of one another in their home country, they only met (and married) in NYC’s immigrant ghetto, the lower east side of Manhattan. Two families were different kinds of immigrants. My father’s parents were Ukrainian peasants who accidentally lived in New York. My mother’s parents were the “new American aristocracy” who accidentally happen to have been born peasants in Ukraine. I grew up in my mother’s parent’s home and they prepared me for life as an active and successful citizen of their new country.

To my father’s parents, I was never Ukrainian enough, never enough respectful of the old ways, and never fluent enough in the language of Ukraine. To my mother’s parents, I was never fluent enough in English, never cosmopolitan enough, never erudite and scholarly enough, and never hard-working enough.

My mother’s parents and their daughter and grandson became involved in the local communities and organizations, across religions, ethnicities, and geographies, always striving to be part of their respective developments. My father’s parents were less so, having settled into a community of slavic, eastern European immigrants of like mind, remaining there for their lifetimes.

When I see immigrants in the US today, I wonder to which end of the continuum they will gravitate, to which set of my grandparents will they be more akin. I confess my own bias. I expect that new immigrants – of any culture – will make best efforts to become part of their new home, to understand it, work at being accepted, and work with new groups to improve and develop it.

The US is often referred to as “the melting pot”, but I think it is more the case that we are a “Cobbs Salad”, composed of individual chunks and groups rather than a smooth homogeneous bisque. Still I prefer my muticultural US (especially as a born and bred New Yorker) to the more structured cultural classes of many Europeans. Nor is the US innocent as we still have the same debates as the EU about what it means to be “an American”. These debates center around language, around law, around religion, and around acceptance.

However, I close with the idea that tolerance is quite more easily practiced in an already multicultural society than in a more homogeneous society. Changes in the former are merely one of degree whereas changes in the latter are one of kind. Tolerance in either requires an act of will but is much more difficult in the latter.

For one I grew up in the same area at the same time and
could give a very different account of local “tolerance”. I
have lived in India now for 30 years so I feel I can
comfortably give my point of view.

For most part the people with a dress sense not sensitive to the local norms are the tourists. Most westerners who settle in India make the effort to wear appropriate clothing and respect the culture. Also on the beaches nowadays you will find many Indians in pretty much the same westernized dress style.

Where is mention of the caste system still prevalent in
India? A system I would hardly call tolerant and
integrating! In many villages the Dalit community are still
physically segregated from the others. In what other country is the word “untouchables” still used today to describe a section of people?!
(http://ibnlive.in.com/news/dalits-segregated-walled-off-
in-madurai-village/64511-3-1.html)

Akash says he lives in an area that “has absorbed a
disproportionate number of Western immigrants over the last
few decades”. Where is that different from the communities
of Indian and other nationalities being absorbed in the USA
the UK and Europe? Which by the way are much larger in numbers than your 1000 odd foreigners settled in and around Pondicherry! Where
in India do you have a “Little Italy” or a “Chinatown”.
Many parts of big cities in the west have become
totally transformed into areas where shops, restaurants
even the language on the streets are all from one
particular culture.

Politics? Mrs. Sonia Gandhi is the only western person in Indian
politics and she has got no end of grief for it. The USA on
the other hand has many Indians in all levels of politics
and the judiciary.
(http://www.deshvidesh.com/Current_Issue/Desh-
Videsh_November_2009/indiansinusplitical.html)
I have been here for 30 years and can not vote, or be part of the “system”. I have numerous Indian friends settled in the west who get naturalized and integrated in to the system after just a few years (right to vote, work, social security etc…).

In conclusion I think it is far too soon to say that India has a tradition of tolerance .What remains to be seen is how tolerant it will remain when the immigrant populations start reaching the numbers they have in the west.

This is just one farmer’s personal observation, and does not make sense to me. If you grew up in a hot place like Vijayawada, you will know how quickly the food rots whether in olden days, or modern days. Generally, aging people opine that their younger days were better. I remember my school days when my mother made us eat left over unrefrigerated rice from the night before. It was pretty rotten then as it would be now. We used to make that rice more palatable by adding butter milk, and Andhra pickle. It was a quick breakfast and gave us instant energy. Centuries ago, the Europeans did the same thing when they did not know refrigeration. They used to take spices from India and add to their rotting meat to mask the smell of rotting.
I am sorry I must disagree with your farmer’s opinion about his rotting rice.