Indian Instincts Read online

  MINIYA CHATTERJI

  indian instincts

  Essays on Freedom and Equality in India

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Introduction

  PART I: INSTINCTS

  1. Survival

  2. Evolution

  3. Exploration

  4. Procreation

  PART II: ANCHORS

  5. Love

  6. Parenting

  7. Values

  8. Nationalism

  PART III: TRAPPED IN OUR OWN MAKING

  9. Democracy

  10. Religion

  11. Corporations

  PART IV: CHAOS

  12. Money

  13. Decibels

  14. Aesthetics

  PART V: CONCLUSION

  15. Freedom

  Footnotes

  Introduction

  1. Survival

  2. Evolution

  3. Exploration

  4. Procreation

  5. Love

  6. Parenting

  7. Values

  8. Nationalism

  9. Democracy

  10. Religion

  11. Corporations

  12. Money

  13. Decibels

  14. Aesthetics

  15. Freedom

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  For Chirag

  Introduction

  During the course of writing this book, I became a parent. I watched with amazement as my baby boy, fresh out of my womb, learnt the need and technique of suckling, for surviving in his new environment. I found that he was not endowed with any primordial instinct to suck on my breast, but he learnt. Thus began his journey, wherein he would use his rational faculty to learn skills to survive in this world.

  Survival is a primordial instinct, but most of our instincts or the spontaneous behaviours that we display are not innate. In fact, to deny this is to accept that a person’s character is inherited, which is the basis of every xenophobic argument. Instead, I believe that instincts are a ‘spontaneous rationality’ (or irrationality) developed by our cognitive faculty in response to the environment. And the development of this rationality is volitional—we must want it, nurture it, and learn how to use it.

  Thus, there is no predetermined ‘Indian instinct’. In India, our spontaneous behaviour is a rational (or irrational) choice under the overwhelming influence of politics, ambition and religious fervour in the environment.

  In every era and everywhere, governance structures—tribes, kingdoms, nation states—were created to provide resources such as food, shelter and safety for the people. Now, in India, we are besotted with the latest news, views, analyses and Twitter wars on party politics instead of the resources the state must provide. We created the concept of corporations and jobs so that we could earn ourselves a comfortable life, but it turns out that often the first half of our life is overpowered by the quest for building a curriculum vitae for a job, and thereafter by the inimitable 24/7 Indian corporate culture. Similarly, we invented religion as a framework by which to lead our lives, yet blinded by our faith we kill each other. A recent survey gives India a high rank in terms of religious hostility, putting it in the company of Syria, Nigeria and Iraq.1

  This is why a certain hypothesis has haunted me for several years—that we are willingly entrapped in the institutions of our own making, having abandoned the rationality to realize that we have lost sight of the reasons these institutions were set up in the first place.

  The central theme of this book is that, in India these institutions—the government, corporation, religion—have often become sources of the problem, increasing economic inequality and curbing our free will. It is to this environment that we Indians respond, sometimes with rationality and sometimes without. The fifteen essays of this book hold up a mirror to what we have thus become.

  This book is not one that could have been written merely sitting at my study desk. Instead it is a consequence of taking on life’s adventures. For this, I thank my parents and my brother for supporting three decades of my unlikely choices. I thank Chirag for sweeping me off my feet—this book is because of him, for him. Thank you, Naveen, for your friendship and for giving me wings in India. Laxman and Rajshree, thank you for your generosity. Sayem, thank you for showing me life. Neelini, I am grateful for your edits. Milee, thanks for your friendship, advice and patience.

  Part I

  INSTINCTS

  1

  Survival

  Almost 200 years ago, the Swiss-born natural historian Louis Agassiz invented the premise for every xenophobe’s favourite argument. He said that the three major human races—Whites, Asians and Negroes, as he liked to categorize them—had risen independently from separate ancestral lineages.1 This would mean that a person with a particular skin colour belonged to an altogether different species from someone with a different skin colour. ‘The brain of the Negro is that of the imperfect brain of a seven months’ infant in the womb of a White,’2 Agassiz declared.

  As a professor at Harvard University, Agassiz was one of the first to propose that Earth had endured an Ice Age, but he also used his public stature as a scientist to ‘prove’ racism. It was the era of scientific racism, which meant that there were others such as Samuel George Morton who used various so-called ‘scientific’ methods to ‘rank’ human races.3 Despite these contentious claims, or perhaps because of them, Agassiz acquired fame, and at the time of his death in 1873 he was considered America’s leading scientist. There is even a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts; an entire Swiss mountain; the Harvard zoology museum he founded; and a public school named after him.4

  Fortunately for us, Agassiz’s argument was debunked by his contemporary from the other Cambridge, in the United Kingdom—the academic Charles Darwin. Darwin suggested—now famously—that all of us had descended from one common ancestor in Africa.5 ‘We are all one family, in that sense,’ he said. Needless to say, Agassiz detested Darwinism.6

  But Darwin had actually spoken about apes, not modern man. Moreover, if we go back far enough, we will see that humans share a distant common ancestry with every living thing on Earth, including bacteria and mushrooms. Therefore, it might be more relevant to find out what happened after the first exodus of apes from Africa took place sixteen million years ago. Many apes left for South-East Asia to evolve into gibbons and orangutans, and the ones who stayed on in Africa evolved into gorillas, chimpanzees and humans.7

  So what happened after that? How did humans not only survive in Africa from that point onwards, but also go on to inhabit the rest of the world? And if we all have descended from that one human in Africa, why do we talk about race? Why do we believe that people belonging to specific nationalities, religions and ethnicities display common characteristics, and that each such community is different from the others?

  In India, thousands of diverse local communities are defined by the conviction that there is something unique shared among the people of a particular community. We assume that we must naturally display some characteristics of the community to which we are connected by blood and heritage.

  This belief among Indians—that we display a set of settled characteristics because of our membership by birth to a certain community—has far-reaching and varied effects on our thinking about ourselves and about others. It gives some of us a sense of mystic belonging to a community. We might believe that our behaviour can’t be helped since our mannerisms were predetermined by birth as per that community. We might even forcefully emulate some of the community’s established characteristics to feel divinely connected to it. This could also mean that we are left with hardly any place for choice or individuality.

  For example, a Gujarati is supposed to be
entrepreneurial by blood. Now, if a young Gujarati boy is told this from the day he can distinguish language from random sounds, that is likely to be the ambition he will grow up with—emulating the characteristics of his fellow Gujarati business wizards, and feeling a sense of community bonding. Similarly, when a Parsi or a Sindhi meets another Parsi or Sindhi for the first time in any corner of the world, there is often an immediate sense of familiarity and trust between them. The bond between two members of the same community is often accompanied by a willingness to help the other out. To cite another example, the cultural cliché is that Bengalis are good at the arts, that they make good writers, musicians, painters and so on. How does that cliché affect a young Bengali child in Kolkata in terms of the education she or he receives and the expectations from the community? When this child grows up, she or he can probably leverage the instant ‘community bond’ with fellow Bengalis in creative fields to land a similar job.

  I had no such luck. I am a native Bengali speaker, but my Hindi language skills are just as good. My family does not belong to the business or academic community, yet I belong to both. In fact, even though I am an Indian by nationality, I also feel like the offspring of at least two more of the eight countries I have lived in for education, work and love. However, I do share an immense liking for sweets with most of my fellow Bengalis.

  These differences as well as similarities which I share with the various communities that I am supposed to be a part of ‘by birth’—Indian, Hindu, Brahmin, Bengali—were what made me first wonder about the origins of such supposedly shared characteristics. Has the idea of ‘community characteristics’ been forced upon us?

  My father was a pilot in the Indian Air Force, and every three or four years, I moved with him, my mother and my younger brother from one military camp to another in various far-flung regions of India. We lived in Agra in Uttar Pradesh, Jorhat in Assam, Chennai in Tamil Nadu, Dehradun in Uttarakhand, and in many other big and small towns. I changed nine schools across five states. The medium of instruction at each of them was in different languages, and we were taught several interpretations of India’s history and culture. Perhaps because of this kind of upbringing, I did not develop the specific characteristics I was supposed to have inherited at birth. But living among various other communities in India made me more curious than ever about the truth of these clichéd ‘community characteristics’ within the remarkable diversity of the country.

  I was a voracious reader—a habit inculcated in me by my mother who, given my father’s peripatetic vocation, had taken to teaching high school English in every city we lived in. There was no Internet in those days, not even a landline telephone in most of the places we lived in. Moreover, I was a child and my access to the world was limited by the restrictions of each place my father was posted in. And so I tried to find the answers to all my questions about human diversity in books.

  The books I found on the subject could be divided into two broad categories—historical and anecdotal. However, in both kinds, the respective authors only presented their own perception of our origins; none of them could give an adequate explanation in scientific terms.

  Initially, I found oral histories interesting, but they were specific to distinct communities. When I was a pre-teen, palaeoanthropology provided me details of fascinating possibilities about our ancestry, but none that I could consider scientific. Later, I found that reading about human morphology—the practice of digging up and studying bones and skulls—was even more interesting. I learnt about Carl von Linne, a Swedish botanist who, in the eighteenth century, categorized about 12,000 species, and eventually coined the term homo sapiens, or ‘wise man’ in Latin.8 In the post-Darwinian era, von Linne declared that humanity was divided into different categories—Africans, Americans, Asians, Europeans, and a blatantly racist category he called ‘Monstrosus’ in which he included deformed people and imaginary folk like elves! When I read about this, I was tempted to conclude that we must have no concrete details about our ancient past for von Linne and others to consider such obtuse possibilities about our origins.

  We did not have a television at home, but my father would tell me about his travels to other countries. He had friends in Russia—the manufacturers and engineers of the Russian AN32 airplane that he flew—who would visit our home. At that time we lived in far-flung Assam, in the north-east of India. So strong was the Russian influence in our family that my younger brother was named Sasha, meaning ‘little boy’ in Russian. My father often travelled to Egypt and Muscat as well—for aircraft fuel—and he would come back with photographs and stories from those lands. Our home was full of the memorabilia he picked up from abroad; he even added significantly to my book collection. Through the gift of knowledge that my father gave me, I realized India was just a microcosm of the world, populated by many different types of people. The scope of my curiosity expanded from India to the diversity of the people of the world.

  As I grew up, my curiosity gradually made me look for answers in the scientific discoveries of the time. I found in Agassiz’s research, for example, that between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago, Earth was frozen. The ice caps were expanding as a result of a worldwide catastrophe that had occurred because of a monumental change in climate. Cold deserts in Africa expanded, sea levels everywhere dropped, prey became rare in the drought, and hunters desperately searched for food. But humanity, on the verge of extinction, was miraculously saved by a massive leap of development in the human intellect. In order to survive, a small group of humans living in the severely cold and parched Africa 50,000 years ago were able to think the unthinkable—they had the idea of leaving Africa forever. It was assumed that these earliest humans probably did so on foot, walking over frozen lands along the coast. It was the primordial survival instinct of humans in the Ice Age that kept our species alive.

  For a long time, scientists tried hard to find proof of this journey, but archaeologists were unable to unearth any evidence of the route taken by the first humans out of Africa.

  The answer was found in our own DNA by genetic scientists. Studies showed that the first modern humans left Africa in two distinct evolutionary migrations. The first wave apparently walked eastward along the coastline to reach Australia. The second wave was more successful—they moved northward to populate the Middle East, Asia, Europe and the Americas. As each group of people broke away to found a new community, like branches of a tree, it took along a sample of the parent population’s genetic blueprint.9

  So when did the first human from Africa reach India? And if we do indeed share one origin that lies in Africa, how did we end up looking and sounding so different from each other? What about all the communities in India? Is there any scientific basis for their different characteristics?

  These were the questions that led me to talk to population geneticist Professor Ramasamy Pitchappan a few years ago. It had been a few months since I returned to India after fourteen years of living across the world, and I soon picked up my personal inquiry into the origins of India’s diversity that had intrigued me as a child. I had read online about the Genographic Project, a formidable ten-year global collaborative study started in 2005 that had conducted an advanced DNA analysis of various indigenous communities around the world to find our origins. I tried to contribute to the global project by purchasing their gene kit online. It would be shipped to me in India, and I would use it to contribute a sample of the skin of my inner cheek and send it back so that my DNA and ancestry could be analysed. However, I was informed that it was forbidden to send genetic information and related material out of India. I was disappointed, but not disheartened, and continued to pursue my quest. Within days, I found that the Genographic Project had an India director—seventy-year-old Professor Pitchappan—who had researched more than 12,000 blood samples from ninety-one tribes and 129 castes in India for their genetic compositions.10 I was excited beyond words.

  I got in touch with the professor, first through email and then phone calls. He was frien
dly and gave me his time, patiently explaining how DNA is a manual of life itself. It is in our blood and all other cells, coordinating our life processes, strung together in pairs of forty-six chromosomes in an incredibly long sequence. If laid out, the DNA of a person can stretch from Earth to Moon and back 3000 times.

  ‘Because of its length, when it is inherited, DNA is prone to developing certain glitches in its sequence similar to “copying errors”,’ he explained to me on the phone. ‘These copying errors are called mutations—we all have them.’

  ‘Copying errors?’ I asked.

  ‘You heard right—copying errors!’ he confirmed.

  He explained that this is how with each new generation the chromosomes get chopped up and reordered, making each baby a unique combination of its parents.

  ‘Each generation inherits the X and Y chromosomes from the mother and the father respectively, right?’ I asked.

  ‘Correct. But the Y chromosome, in fact, does not get reordered in every generation,’ he said. ‘And so the Y chromosome is the key to our history, since it passes unchanged from father to son. If, once in an evolutionary blue moon, a genetic mutation does occur, that mutation too gets passed on in the Y chromosome to the next generation.’

  ‘Okay, so in this way, every male progeny collects the genetic mutations of his ancestors?’

  ‘Yes, the collection of these mutations in our DNA writes our ancestral history.’

  The professor’s research was done in his laboratory at Madurai Kamaraj University in Tamil Nadu, the southernmost state of India. I had learnt from what I had read about the Genographic Project that at this laboratory he painstakingly distilled blood samples to extract DNA, from which he traced Y chromosome mutations to find the ancestral trail to several communities and tribes in India.

  In one of our conversations, he told me how one morning twenty years ago he heard from an old friend, fellow geneticist Spencer Wells from the University of Austin in Texas. Wells told him that he was looking for the route that the first human migrants had taken when they left Africa in the Ice Age about 60,000 years ago. So far, some of the major theories in genetic science held that the first migrant group from Africa reached Australia and much later the second migrant group walked northward to the Middle East, Europe, America and Asia.11 But Wells was interested only in the first group. He wanted to know how they had travelled the entire distance to faraway Australia. Astonishingly, there were no archaeological traces of any such journey on that route.