Some characteristics unite Indians. The most visible is our
opportunism
Why don’t we worship Brahma? We know he’s part
of the Hindu trinity as the creator, but we worship Vishnu, manager of
the cosmos, and Shiva, its eventual destroyer. The answer lies not in
religion, but in culture. But in what way does our religion shape our
culture?
Why don’t we worship Brahma? We know he’s part
of the Hindu trinity as the creator, but we worship Vishnu, manager of
the cosmos, and Shiva, its eventual destroyer. The answer lies not in
religion, but in culture. But in what way does our religion shape our
culture?
Max Weber explained the success of capitalism
in the US, Germany and Britain as coming from their populations’
Protestant faith. This ethic, or culture, was missing from the Catholic
populations of South America, Italy and Spain. Protestants, Weber said,
extended Christianity’s message of doing good deeds, to doing work well.
Industry and enterprise had an ultimate motive: public good. That
explains the philanthropists of the US, from John D. Rockefeller to
Andrew Carnegie.
What explains the behaviour of Indians? What
explains the anarchy of our cities? To find out, we must ask how our
behaviour is different.
Some characteristics unite Indians. The most
visible is our opportunism. One good way to judge a society is to see it
in motion. On the road, we observe the opportunism in the behaviour of
the Indian driver. Where traffic halts on one side of the road in India,
motorists will encroach the oncoming side because there is space
available there. If that leads to both sides being blocked, that is
fine, as long as we maintain our advantage over people behind us or next
to us. This is because the other man cannot be trusted to stay in his
place.
The
Indian’s instinct is to jump the traffic light if he is convinced that
the signal is not policed. If he gets flagged down by the police, his
instinct is to bolt. In an accident, his instinct is to flee. Fatal
motoring cases in India are a grim record of how the driver ran over
people and drove away.
We show the pattern of what is called a
Hobbesian society: one in which there is low trust between people. This
instinct of me-versus-the-world leads to irrational behaviour,
demonstrated when Indians board flights. We form a mob at the entrance,
and as the flight is announced, scramble for the plane even though all
tickets are numbered. Airlines
modify their boarding announcements for Indians taking international
flights.
Our opportunism necessarily means that we do
not understand collective good. Indians will litter if they are not
policed. Someone else will always pick up the rubbish we throw.
Thailand’s toilets are used by as many people as India’s toilets are,
but they are likely to be not just clean but spotless. This is because
that’s how the users leave them, not the
cleaners.
The Indian’s reluctance to embrace collective
good hurts his state. A study of income-tax compliance between 1965 and
1993 in India <Elsevier
Science/Das-Gupta, Lahiri and Mookherjee> concluded that
“declining assessment intensity had a significant negative effect” on
compliance, while “traditional enforcement tools had only a limited
effect” on Indians. The authors puzzled over the fact that “India’s
income tax performance below the average of countries with similar GDP
per capita”.
We do not think stealing from the state is a
bad thing, and our ambiguity extends to corruption, which also we do not
view in absolute terms. Political parties in India understand this and
corruption is not an issue in Indian politics. Politicians who are
demonstrably corrupt, recorded on camera taking a bribe or saying
appalling things, or convicted by a court, can hold legitimate hope of a
comeback—unthinkable in the West.
The opportunist is necessarily good at
adapting, and that explains the success of Indians abroad. We can follow
someone else’s rules well, even if we can’t enforce them at home
ourselves. The Indian in the US is peerless at the Spelling Bee because
the formula of committing things to memory, which in India passes for
knowledge, comes naturally to him. But this talent for adapting and
memorizing is not the same as a talent for
creation.
The question is: Why are we
opportunists?
In his great work Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti
observed that the rewards religions promised their faithful were all far
off, in the afterlife. This is because a short goal would demand
demonstration from god and create sceptics instead of believers. There
is an exception to this in Hinduism. Hinduism is not about the other
world. There is no afterlife in Hinduism and rebirth is always on earth.
The goal is to be released entirely and our death rites and
beliefs—funeral in Kashi—seek freedom from rebirth. Christianity and
Islam are about how to enter heaven, Hinduism is about how not to return
to earth, because it’s a rotten place. Naipaul opens his finest novel
with the words “The world is what it is”, and Wittgenstein < “The
world is all that is the case”> opens his Tractatus
similarly.
Hinduism recognizes that the world is
irredeemable: It is what it is. Perhaps this is where the Hindu gets his
world view—which is zero-sum—from. We might say that he takes the
pessimistic view of society and of his fellow man. But
why?
The
Hindu devotee’s relationship with god is transactional: I give you this,
you give me that. God must be petitioned and placated to swing the
universe’s blessings towards you. God gives you something not through
the miracle, and this is what makes Hinduism different, but by swinging
that something away from someone else. This is the primary lesson of the
Vedic fire sacrifice. There is no benefit to one without loss to
another. Religion is about bending god’s influence towards you through
pleas, and appeasement, through offerings.
Society has no role in your
advancement and there is no reason to give back to it because it hasn’t
given you anything in the first place. That is why Indian industrialists
are not philanthropists. Rockefeller always gave a tenth of his earnings
to the Church, and then donated hundreds of millions, fighting hookworm
and educating black women. Warren Buffett gave away $30 billion, almost
his entire fortune. Andrew Carnegie built 2,500 libraries. Dhirubhai
Ambani International School has annual fees starting at Rs47,500 and
Mukesh Ambani’s daughter was made head girl.
An interesting thing to know is
this: Has our culture shaped our faith or has our faith shaped our
culture? I cannot say. To return to the question we started with: Why is
Brahma not worshipped? The answer is obvious: He has nothing to offer
us. What he could do for us, create the universe, he already has. There
is no gain in petitioning him now.
Aakar Patel is a director of Hill Road
Media