Everything is Cultural.

Part 2 of the Indian-Collectivism Essay Series 

Developing a cultural, intergenerational and traumatic attunement towards Indian people and predicaments.

Written by Alekhya Velidanda

The engine of the Mumbai local chuffs as it comes to a halt in the station. Inside, dabbawalas wait eagerly to deboard and deliver little steel towers of lunch- dabbas- to corporate husbands. In Ritesh Batra’s picture of unconventional love in The Lunchbox (2013), Ila  cooks up delicious meals to rekindle a dead romance with her husband. A mess-up in the delivery route leads to her food ending up in the arms of an accountant-widower. The two become each other's confidantes, communicating via dabba. 

Seven years after Lunchbox’s release, US President Donald Trump is welcomed by Modi in what I can only describe as an opulent cultural khichdi. Namaste Trump was a hundred-crore-rupee Indian welcome that was spent on dances, music, museums, hotels, walls, tours and speeches. 

We don’t joke about Indian hospitality and warmth. It finds space in the smallest of dabbas and fills up even the largest of stadiums. It is our cultural canon. “Guest is God” is a dominant Hindu dictum that is woven into the way the people of this subcontinent orient themselves to their community.  

When you zoom out, you begin to see just how often your identity, body and actions can be contextualised by cultural codes.  American obesity isn’t acultural; it comes from nuclear houses having to resort to convenient food choices in the absence of family and community-made meals. The success of Hijab boutiques is not acultural; it reflects a public embrace towards traditional and modest values. Lending your savings to a family member is not acultural; it is an act of brotherly nourishment that is coded into your social roles. Your house-help avoiding eye contact with you is not acultural, it is a learned response of your mutual casteism. The shame and fatigue you feel after a heated confrontation is not acultural; it is a socialised embarrassment for violating collective principles. We find generational imprints of togetherness (collectivism) and separation (individualism) everywhere. The very fabric of our being is cultural and social. 

I’ve had hundreds of cultural stories walk into my therapy office. People enter, greet me, settle in and point me towards an emotional injury they’ve been enduring. These cultural stories are almost always masked as individual ones. They show up as anxiety, depression, arguments, attachment styles, low self-worth, self-entitlement and workplace politics, to name just a few. They come so thickly concealed that on their surface you wouldn’t notice anything cultural about them. 

Five years ago, Dr Joy DeGruy sat down with AJ+ to discuss the outlines of what she labelled “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome”. She pointed out an example of African-American parenting that showcased how Black parents express that they're proud of their children: “I denigrate them, to protect them”. The parent, removed two or three generations from slavery, still feels compelled to de-commodify her son in the hopes of keeping him close to her and improving his chances of survival. 

 If I were to repackage this denigration as “humility” or "restraint", I could find something similar in Indian families too. Upper-caste, middle-class parents seem to share an unequal relationship with their domestic help. They make active efforts to hide major displays of wealth when they come for work. It wouldn’t be uncommon for them to instruct their children to not eat or bring out expensive toys for the duration that the staff is working at home. What they justify as humility reflects a deeper unconscious conflict between oppressor guilt and caste-preservation which they take great efforts to prevent from arising into consciousness. 

Humility and restraint will walk into your therapy room in the embodiment of a seemingly acultural client. How likely would you look at their gender, age, birth order, caste and oppressive position to make sense of these long-standing dynamics?

Both you and your client likely come from the same culture. At the very least, you both identify with the entity of being “Indian”, and with that, comes certain shared cultural experiences and assumptions. These are deeply embedded in our unconscious, which stores all knowledge of cultural practices, roles, images, ideals and emotions.  In this series, I point frequently to what Sudhir Kakar calls the “Hindu world image”, a largely unconscious way of organising thought, action and experience, established and absorbed during the earliest stages of infancy, and pervasive even when the collectivist Hindu man walks into a modern individualist space. 

When you visit your family for a meal, you leave your slippers out the door. You make sure to greet the elder members. If you’re female, you check on what’s being made in the kitchen and offer help. The younger kids are beckoned by the grandparents and uncles to have a seat by their side. They check in on how the kids’ studying is going. They offer proverbs and wisdom around how hard work leads to financial success. Lunch begins and everyone compliments the food. The host downplays these compliments, telling you that it was just a simple dish she threw together. You best believe that you’re leaving there with a box of leftovers, sweets or goodies from uncle’s outstation work trip.

We don’t obey these practices mechanically, as if they were written on a checklist. Instead, they feel more natural and implicit to us. Our cultural unconscious helps us contain this hypothetical event in as a plausible reality. 

This unconscious goes everywhere we go, including when we show up in therapy with deep and painful emotional wounds. In modern psychotherapy training, there isn’t a systematic effort to developing an eye towards this cultural part of us. This is why many of us, as both visitors and conductors of therapy, deal with the surface of troubles and fail to look deeper. Count me guilty. 

I have a few proposals, as we go forward. Firstly, we need to understand that culture is often at the centre of how we navigate quite literally everything. Our traditionalism or urbansiation speaks in every gesture, reaction and decision. Secondly, we need to truly know our cultures. This comes with the painful task of casting our judgements aside and reflecting on how and why our societies have established themselves in certain ways. Thirdly, we would need to find the humility to recognise that each individual has a different way that they want to relate to their culture, even when they feel oppressed by it. It may seem nonsensical or contradictory to you, but their cultural truths are not yours to decide. 

I’m a stranger to my Indian culture, and I no longer want to be. 

Hello! If you’ve come this far, let me know! Your feedback and readership mean a lot to The Trade of Therapy. TOT strives to create illustrative and critical content that helps our new age of urban thinkers understand their inner and outer worlds. 

Up next, we will be exploring the Western misconceptions of Indian collectivism, and its implications in psychotherapy.