The Silent Negotiations of an Indian: A Cultural Unconscious

Part 4 of the Indian-Collectivism Essay Series

How Indian paparazzi, colonialism and psychotherapy shed light on the conflicts between self and other.

Written by Alekhya Velidanda

I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I watch paparazzi videos on Instagram, but I’m going to cushion my pride by telling you that they appear organically on my feed. I’ve seen quite a bit: the sexualised peering, the cursing, the violation of privacy, the pushing and shoving. It’s a grisly industry, in my opinion.

You’d naturally assume that celebrities would employ every measure to keep the paparazzi at a safe distance, and they often do- but to my surprise, I’ve noticed a curious thing within the Indian entertainment industry. Actors greet the paps with pizzas and mobile phones. They warmly welcome the photographers and even make billable advertisements with them. They invite them to special venues and make wilful appearances in front of the camera.

What is going on? Aren’t we all silently on the same page about the paparazzi being pesky and gross?

I’m aware that appearing approachable and friendly is important when you’re building a public image, but having lengthy chats and calling the paparazzi by their first name makes for such an intriguing relationship. It makes me wonder whether there’s a silent social negotiation taking place. It might sound something like this: “I don’t like their presence in my life, but if I treat them with kindness and welcome them as guests, I’ll have them on my good side and be on with my day”. The celebrity starts by catering to the public’s desire to look into their private lives, but they do this in small doses to actually preserve those same privacies in the long run. 

I can’t think of a better analogy to describe just how palpably unique it is to live in an Indian collectivistic society. I will elaborate on this, later.

Why do we consider Indian societies to be collectivistic? Across South Asia, we see that family and community are seen as the central blocks of social structure. Religions, surnames, castes, sects, gotras, and denominations have divided people's identities even from a pre-Partition era. Someone’s well being and success is often defined by their family-of-origin, their family-of-marriage, the children they have and even their religious and community participations. 

To me, that sounds bleak and extremely bitter, and I’ve often needed to remind myself that collectivism isn't just about being answerable to and defined by your family and community. It also happens to be our saving grace. 

We depend on our communities in trying times. Take, for instance, the generations of women in the family who come together to help in raising the children; Communal festivities that provide everyone in the neighbourhood a full plate of food during auspicious times; The men of the house who cover each other's finances to maintain the economic stability of the household. Community is indispensable for our basic survival. It’s often understood that people will give the shirt off of their backs to help you in your time of need. This isn’t a kind of support that we find as frequently in more individualistic societies. 

Community is frustrating, and yet it is a core need. This keeps us in a perpetual conflict with the world around us.  There are hundreds of moments each day where any person will have their internal needs come in conflict with the social and familial norms. Often, we don’t wish to act in ways that necessarily show our allegiance to the family. 

As a psychotherapist, believing that your Indian clients behave like passive agents in all their situations is quite a reductive understanding of their Indian-ness, and this part of our cultural analysis is seldom discussed. To always live a life in service of other and bigger needs is to cause a death of one’s self. These conflicts exist just as much for Indian celebrities with their paparazzi, as they do for everyday laymen like you and me. Put simply, the traditional Indian family asks us to serve and perform, and we make delicate negotiations to balance our personal selves against our relationships. 

For a wife who is growing increasingly unhappy with her husband’s alcohol consumption, she confronts a major conflict within herself. How does she hold onto her anger while also respecting the family hierarchy of her husband as the head of the household? She may navigate many options. She could stay silent and continue to fulfil her domestic duties, believing that it is not her place to comment on his actions. She could endure her anger silently with the hopes that her patience now will grant her the “right” to eventually confront him. She could apologetically and timidly ask her husband to stop drinking, citing the wellbeing of her children. She could more confidently assert herself and keep at an intentional distance until he changes his actions. She may sleep in a separate bed to make her intentions clear, but still cook and clean for him per usual. 

Here, we see collectivist behaviours that conceal individualist intentions. We see individualist behaviours concealing collectivist intentions too. We notice extreme individualism and extreme collectivism- either completely submitting to the demands of her husband or completely sticking to her needs. We also see a mixture of both existing at the same time. 

Consider this: It isn’t that the “passive Indian woman” subsumes herself under the entire structure of her family during any moment of conflict. Instead, she chooses to fulfill and gratify her needs while smartly staying within the compliant frameworks of the family system. This is an exercise of agency that we haven’t otherwise explored in psychotherapy. It is broader, more nuanced and more grounded in collectivist formats. She seeks to complete her motivations and aspirations while also avoiding having to challenge the patriarchal structures that exist around her. 

Well, why does she have to tip-toe in her agency? Why is she not loud and proud and assertive? We forget that she exercises agency by choosing to stay within the good sides of her family. We forget how she borrows from a cultural meaning system that often values belongingess over  individuality. An English-speaking and Western-influenced therapist with a reversed value system has no claim over the rightness or wrongness of this arrangement of meanings. 

I feel enraged by many of these choices. In the past, I would have been quick to think that she’s not putting her foot down enough, and that she’s simply letting her husband step all over her. My mind jumps into the role of an activist, and I can no longer sit in my seat as a psychotherapist who’s showing up for her, not at her. You too might be tempted to “show her” how she has more agency than she thinks she does. 

We’re quite naive to think that resistance is valid only when it’s done in the hyper-individualised Western performances of visibly raged action. This types of resistance can be fatal, incomplete and misinformed, when it’s recommended within a misaligned cultural backdrop. In a system that demands so much from the nurturing mother, the working husband, the chaste daughter and the dutiful son, the people develop secret and private selves that are constantly checking the social terrain and deciding their social safety. There’s a lot of individualism that’s masked and  “forbidden”, and it exists under a veil of seemingly collectivistic actions. This a witty kind of negotiation that’s never explicitly taught to anyone, and yet we catch onto this manner of living quickly. 

We engage in actions that appear one way on the surface, but can often have different intentions. The woman with the alcoholic husband is always negotiating between her personal capacity and the capacity of her husband, from whom she requires love, intimacy, resources, shelter and other senses of family purpose. Whichever way she may choose to respond in that situation is valid, and can always be understood well if we are curious enough about her emotional context. Its “legitimacy” and “healthiness” are not for you to decide. What may seem to you as passive compliance may well be an active and empowered decision taken to protect her safety, to maintain the status quo, to preserve her collective identity, or to seek her own needs in the long run. She displays an immense capacity to adapt herself and survive in a collective world. 

Psychotherapists adopt colonial outlooks when they demand their clients to respond to oppression or conflict in visibly permormative ways that are normalised in the West. They identify with the coloniser when they enforce a binary of “valid” and “invalid” ways to do things. They subconsciously urge their clients to co-conspire against an Indian collectivistic culture for their own ideological gratification. 

Today, there’s so much chaos within Indian family structures. We’ve injected centuries of modernisation in a span of decades. We house traditionally large joint family systems as well as millions of nuclear family systems in cities. The power structures in societies are constantly revising themselves. We are dealing with a baffling cocktail of collectivist roots in new individualist settings. The implications for that almost always show up in the therapy room. Our clients’ reactions to stress often have a cultural understanding and a collectivist-individualist negotiation that legitimises the way they chose to react. 

Are you, much like the coloniser, and much like the paparazzi, granting yourself unlimited access and judgement over your clients’ minds, feelings and actions? Where does decolonial thought begin for you? A culturally-informed way of living goes beyond just “knowing” the rituals and norms of your land. It comes from finding acceptance for your clients’ embodiments of these same cultures. 

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 unspoken negotiations the unspoken and hidden deceit that perpetuates patriarchal ideology.