Families and Marriage

I feel reluctant to generalize about Indian family life and marriage.  But at least I have some impressions!

First, families are still important to many Indians.  While many young Indian women seem to be marrying later (we've met lots of women college students who aren't married yet, at an age when they likely would have been a generation ago), I think most assume or hope that they will marry someday.  And I think most still expect to have children, though perhaps fewer than their grandparents might have, especially for those who expect to provide graduate education for those children and/or to live in a city where housing is expensive.  As in most places around the world, women getting more education and planning to live in a big city will likely marry later and have fewer children.

On the other hand, my impression is that perhaps most of the women university students we've met probably still live "at home," with their parents.  We've met some mid-20's women who live with women roommates away from family, but that seems less common.  I think single young women are often still seen as needing family, perhaps for economic reasons but also sometimes for reasons of protection or reputation, if they are to be most marriageable.

And it may be difficult to resist the expectation of one's parents to live with them until marriage.  Even for young, educated, "modern" young people, there still seems to be some expectation that parents will be involved in the choice of a spouse, whether in using their networks of relatives and friends to locate possible partners (to be accepted or rejected by their children), or (in the more traditional sense) to actually arrange a marriage.  Some young women hope to convince their parent that a young man they've found or fallen for is suitable (once they've checked out his background); others have said they don't feel they can hold out against their parents' choice once they reached their later 20's.

Such dilemmas are, of course, often the focus of romantic Bollywood films--in which falling for the wrong boy, or simply falling in love, goes against the parents' plans or their wisdom that it's best to marry first, then fall in love with the spouse who is after all best for you as the parents have known all along.  Often, as in "Monsoon Wedding," things end happily when the young bride realizes her own choice wouldn't have worked out, and that she could care for her parents' choice even more; sometimes the conflict can end in tragedy.  The hope and expectation that a big wedding will be the finale remains common, either because of or in spite of family traditions, as we see in the photo of a Big Wedding near where we were living in Delhi:

I think my newest insight about all this is that the logic of arranged marriages has made the most sense in the context of "joint" or "extended" families.  One family we met, for example, includes the older married couple, their son and his wife (who moved into the joint household upon marriage), their two teenaged daughters, and the older couple's still-unmarried daughter who's working as a highly-educated professional.  The role of the senior couple in helping arrange (or assist) the matchmaking makes logical sense if the extended family is actually going to be living together and will need to be a good fit; the young will also be the ones who will care for the aging parents, who in India are still rarely moved into an American-style care facility.

Some of this logic can break down in the long run, especially when highly-educated Indian couples move to Britain or America for professional work and success (not uncommon according to India Calling).  If these "children" establish successful lives abroad, and also raise their own children there, they are unlikely to return to India to complete their end of the implicit bargain to care for their aging parents.

Sharing food is something that seems to gather families together.  This is perhaps not surprising, at least for the few families we spent time with: they appreciated good Indian cooking and food, and could afford it, and enjoyed eating it together, in a way that seems to have largely faded in many American families of a comparable social class who are now "too busy" to cook from scratch or eat their meals together (and of course many middle-class Indian families have a cook).  See the photo below of what started as a last-minute, impromptu, mid-afternoon "lunch" (additional foods and tastes kept getting pulled out of the refrigerator and heated up), ending in a very nice meal (probably enhanced by the family's hospitality to us visitors).  (In deference to privacy, the photo shows only the food and not the family.)

Before I close, I include an interesting note on food.  Two young Indian women, well-educated, in their 20's, mentioned that their parents, especially their mothers, used to feed them.  That seemed ordinary enough--don't moms usually feed their kids?  But they meant something more--that their moms, even when the women were in their teens, would often put nice morsels of food directly into the girls' mouth, by hand.  I asked how that felt, wondering if this might have been embarrassing for them, or perhaps embarrassing to talk about--they were hesitant to answer, and I could imagine they would think we would think they were a little strange.  But one said, softly, "it was nice."  It sounded like a situation of care and intimacy.

And one more note on food and moms and daughters.  I'm back at the Minneapolis airport, the day we are leaving for India.  I'm meeting the parents, who are wishing us a good trip, giving their kids one more hug.  But one mom asks me something special: "Please take care of my daughter.  Keep her safe, and bring her home to me."  She is an immigrant mom, and doesn't yet speak enough English to ask me this directly; her daughter has to translate her mom's request.  She's asking me to make a promise I cannot refuse to make, yet am unsure I can keep--how can I know what may become of us, when we are strangers in a strange land?  But I do promise.

Later, the families having departed, we have gone through ticketing and security and have gathered at our departure gate.  Our departure has been postponed several times, as ice storms descend on the east coast airports where we are supposed to make our connections.  The students get restless, then bored, then hungry, and nearly all eventually wander off to see what sort of airport fast-food might await them.  But the daughter, next to whom I'm sitting, remains, and she rummages around in her backpack for something.  It is the package of food her mom has prepared for her.  She opens it up: "ooh, the sticky rice is still warm!"  And there's dense, chewy red pork too.  She offers me some, and munches away happily on the choice morsels her mom has provided, and the love it contains.  My heart is opening, and we have not yet left Minnesota.  (And yes…we all returned home safely.

Social Justice, Social Service, and Empowerment Projects in India

India has a large and growing middle-class, many of whom have many of the same lifestyle and consumer amenities that would be familiar to many Americans: a comfortable apartment (and sometimes a detached house), often a car (and sometimes a hired driver), sufficient and tasty food (and often someone to cook it--servants are a more common middle-class perk than in the U.S.), relatively engaging work, a college education or more, and enough resources to travel not only within India but out of the country as well (perhaps to visit relatives in Britain, America, or elsewhere).

On the other hand, a large portion of India's people still live in rural villages.  As in most poorer countries, the gap between village and urban lifestyles is is often far greater than you'd find in richer countries (the U.S., Europe).  About half of India's children are malnourished, and many show stunted growth from a lack of nutrition during the critical first several years of life.  People often don't have  running water or indoor toilets, or water that's safe to drink, and these are health issues rather than "only" a matter of convenience.  People may be able to provide for their needs directly (such as by growing food if they're farming), needing less cash, and I think one might be able to get by more satisfactorily in the village than in the city if they were truly poor (where one sees the poor sleeping overnight on the streets on a pile of blankets, or seeking food at charities, or begging).  But being village poor is not easy either.  (And take all this with a grain of salt--our stays were short in each place, and these are my impressions.)

As noted in an earlier posting, many villagers are moving to the cities to seek cash-wage jobs.  A changing climate may make it more difficult to farm reliably, villagers who see images of city life on television or Bollywood movies may be pulled by the excitement or glamour,  and people may want to join relatives who moved to the city earlier.  But most who come do not have enough education (perhaps even literacy) to find more than a day job of manual labor at low pay (a migrant to Delhi has little bargaining power when 600 other migrants arrived the same day he or she did, seeking the same kinds of jobs).  Many do find work, but the city is not a subsistence place--one has to buy so much of what one needs, including materials to build one's one-room house, "squatting" on a piece of empty land in a "slum" which may be adjacent to a fancy high-rise and exist only until those with more clout and resources decide to move the poor away.  Teachers we talked with in some of the schools set up by religious or other NGO groups for the very poor told us that they need to provide two or three meals a day to make it possible for the students to concentrate on their school work and keep them attending; after month-long breaks, some of the children return visibly thinner.

This is a rather long introduction to what I want to actually talk about: the admirable and inspiring efforts a number of religious or educational or other organizations are making to address these issues.  Some of these are in the villages: one-room schools to give young children a better start (and in our experience in these classrooms the children seem excited and engaged), or well-baby programs to weigh and vaccinate babies or encourage women to breast-feed, or programs to empower women to develop small-scale economic projects to add some money to their families' resources.

Some of those projects we visited were in the cities.  We visited "slum" projects, sometimes sponsored by our first two host universities (Madras Christian College and Christ University), including multi-grade schools (much beyond the one-room village schools), or projects in which poor women could learn to make use of recycled trash materials to create crafts for sale.  In the photo below, we see women dismantling the "tetra-paks" (juice boxes) in which perishable liquid foods are sometimes sold in places with less refrigeration.  The materials in these boxes are super-strong, and the women weave them into large carrying-bags (I asked if I could take this photo, and one of the women borrowed my

my camera to take several photos like this herself.)  Women also recycle cement bags, which again have a very strong material that, after being cut and washed, can be fashioned into a variety of purses, wallets, and carrying bags which they can decorate with colorful cross-stitch patterns (a number of our students bought some of these).  Such projects as these provide a place off the street where women can work together, and avoid some of the more heavy or dangerous construction labor that women are sometimes hired to do; their earnings may also bring them a bit more influence within their families.

Village migrants (and the urban poor in general) also face a lot of pressures that take their toll on people's emotions, marriages, and relationships with their children.  We visited a community clinic which offered a wide array of services for minimal charges, such as marriage counseling, teen support groups, individual counseling, life-skills training, health-screening, and so forth.  We heard from a number of their professional staff (see photo below) about their work, and were impressed with their decision to put their clinic right in the middle of a community with needs rather than another location outside the community whose people it would be servicing.  (Small detail: note that this women is

is wearing a traditional "kurta," a modest three-quarter length shirt/dress (to the knees) with three-quarter length sleeves, with a scarf, a common and comfortable outfit for women who aren't swearing a sari.  She she also has short curly hair, perhaps just a personal choice, but one also still-uncommon in southern India where most women have long, straight hair, often parted in the middle, with a streak of deep red vermillion down the part if they are married and observant in that way.)

In addition to school projects, women's empowerment programs, mental and physical health projects, and others, I want to end with our experience at the Sikh Temple in Delhi, right around the corner from the YMCA where we were staying.  (See photo below of the temple.)

This temple has a large hall where each day, all day, people in need of a meal may come to fill up, in half hour shifts, sitting on mats on the floor, facing one another.  (Sitting on the floor in India is common; when Barbara and I visited the Minneapolis Sikh Temple for a memorial service for the six Milwaukee Sikhs murdered in August, 2012, while at prayer by a man who believed they were Muslims--Sikh men wear "turbans"--we also sat on the floor, in rows facing each other, for the meal offered after prayers were offered for the dead.  I couldn't help but remember that, in India, where some might have wondered if we were "safe," we felt more safe than Milwaukee proved to be for the Indian Sikhs there.)

We took our turn eating a lunch where meals were being served, when our turn came up.  Some students worried that perhaps we were eating food meant for the poor, when we could of course afford to pay, but my sense is that it was a place where a variety of people were being offered food regardless of their need or the usual stigma that might attach to someone who "had" to rely on charity.  The food was simple--chick peas (chana), dal (lentils), a little bit of spicy pickle, some potatoes, and flat chapati bread.  Servers went up and down the rows, filling the little compartments on our metal trays, and coming by again, and again, if anyone wanted more.  If one wanted another chapati, you would hold your hands in front of you, palms up, which was (to some of us) the attitude in which we might take communion.  And for Indians, chapati is indeed the bread of life.  And the server,  coming by with extra chapatis, always says, when placing the bread in one's hands, "this is a gift from God."  It felt like we were in more than the usual "soup kitchen," as laudable as those can often be.  We estimated that perhaps 5,000 people were served each day.

But that was only the beginning.  For we were also welcome to serve,  and to do so by working in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, rolling little balls of chapati dough into round flat pieces for cooking on the big metal griddle, washing used trays, cleaning up, or even taking a turn serving the food and passing out the chapatis.   One of our students, who in her other life is sometimes a small-town waitress,

chose to serve food; she's also sorting through what her church heritage means to her now, at this point in her life, and I think found it meaningful to encounter communion in a different way.  In the photo above, which is only half the huge kitchen area, you can see two large metal sheets on which the chapatis are cooked (they are the white disks in the left middle), but there are also vats of dal and chana cooking away.  Half the students and I decided we'd try our hand at making chapatis; two older local ladies were rolling the dough balls, and then tossing them at us so we could use our wooden rollers to try to transform them into something round and flat.  I failed every time; a local woman sat down next to me and turned out a perfectly round chapati, and the secret seemed to be turning the dough a little with each sweep of the roller, but without touching the dough with one's hands, just with a little twist of the wrist.  We enjoyed it, and some of the students even went back a couple days later to make more chapatis.

I better stop here for now.  But I wanted to share some stories of people in India who are working to make a difference in others' lives.  Are their efforts "enough"?  The needs seem overwhelming.  But, may days, what they do is at least enough for those whose lives they touch.

India: Old and New

Our students often see India as a place of contrasts and contradictions, old and new (they are also keeping an India blog if you have the time and curiosity to see what India looks like through younger eyes than mine: indiainterim2014.blogspot.com).  Sometimes this is expressed in terms of what they see as the "real India," by which they often mean the India they expected or hoped to encounter, the "older" or "traditional" India.  They like, and are inspired by, Gandhi's India, less so by the display of military might in the annual Republic Day parade we attended (from tanks up through a fly-over by fighter jets) (how can we put those two things together?).

And, of course, there still is plenty of the "real" India to see: cows wandering the city streets, munching on piles of garbage; auto rickshaws or even bicycle rickshaws for transportation, as well as fancy cars and city busses; round discs of cow manure drying by the roadside, to be used as a fuel for cooking.  There's water it is wise not to drink if one can afford to drink water from plastic bottles instead (as we can: while the "real" India is often scenic, it can also include troubles and inconveniences we Americans prefer to avoid--we'd like not to get sick, to have enough to eat, to have at least warmish water for showers, a significant degree of physical comfort and safety, to know we can get the cash we need from an ATM rather than depending on the kindness of strangers from whom we beg or pester--all of which many, many people limited to the real India do not have.  This "real India" thing is complicated.

One place we've encountered what we think of as the real India are the several farming villages in which we've spent time (such as the one described in an earlier posting, a Dalit or Untouchable village celebrating the annual harvest or Pongal festival).  Here we're arriving at a different village (in the photo to the left), greeted by a lot of children excited about who we might be.  We get a chance to walk a woman's fields as she shows us her millet plants, and we are invited into her home, full of an extended family, for hospitality and some food.  But, as noted before, it's not clear whether, in the long run, traditional village life is
viable.  There's less water available for the fields, and the rains have been less predictable, meaning that farmers can't always rely on a harvest, or the income that it might have one provided.  We're told that 600 rural villagers move to Delhi (already around 12 million people) every day, 4,000 a week.  Yet if the farmers eventually leave the land, who will grow the food people need?  Will the children whose classrooms we spend time in, once they have access to more education, want to move to town for the kinds of work, or excitement, available there?

We also enjoy the remnants of earlier Indian civilizations which we've been visiting more often once we were in Delhi and Agra, such as the Taj Mahal or the tomb above with green parrots.  But note that the script on the monument is in Arabic (or Persian/Urdu) lettering, so both the Taj and this monument are not part of Hindu India, but Mughal India (which started in the early 1500's and lasted for several centuries).  Is the "real India" only Hindu (as it was more easy to believe in Southern India), or also Muslim?  And what about the Buddhist heritage (a faith born here as a branching from Hinduism), or the Sikhs (whose temple we so much enjoyed doing service work in), or the Jains (whose dietary restrictions are the most strict of all, sometimes indicated on cafe menus as "safe for Jains to eat").  Or the Christians--early on we visited the Church of St. Thomas ("doubting Thomas"), who did work in India in the first Christian century (52-72) in Madras/Chennai, long before missionaries reached pagan countries like Norway.  Is India all these things?  Are generalizations possible?  

Or, as with this design in the ceiling of a lovely Mughal (Muslim) tomb, do we simply wonder at each piece of India as we find it?  (This is about fifty feet across, high above us.)

Still, there is a "new, modern" India emerging.  In spite of now having almost as many people as China (1.2 billion versus 1.3), India has been growing economically in recent years, less fast than China, but faster than the U.S. and Euro-zone countries.  We could see this when we spent much of a day at InfoSys, one of the first high-tech companies begun in India by Indian scientists and engineers in the 1980's, with only $250 in working capital.  We began our visit in their meeting hall, full of any communications technology you could imagine (see photo below).  

As befits our course focus on psychological issues and human development, we met for a while with Human Resources people; a third of their employees are women (likely higher than you'd find in high-tech firms in Silicon Valley?), and they have strict policies against sexual harassment. If a woman's husband is transferred, they try to find comparable work for her in one of their other locations nearby.  They provide transportation for women to ensure they get home safely. 

Their campus is quite large ("Electronic City"), with grass, trees, lots of water, a workout center, a large library, smooth streets, nice places to eat--everything that we think a "modern" city would need, and a clear contrast with the "real India" we encounter every day.  To the average Indian living on the streets, and sleeping on the sidewalks overnight (whom we see if we go out early in the morning), this would seem like utopia.  We might find it less interesting than the older India (too much like ourselves?) but many Indians, if they had the education to become part of InfoSys, might find it idyllic.

Here we are, for the almost-daily "group photo" while being guided around the InfoSys campus, by an older man who's wearing identification badge #00004, the fourth employee in the company's history.

Our group is also sometimes drawn to modern malls.  They are clean, they have familiar food courts (if with unfamiliar foods from both Northern and Southern India), they have large stores in which we as shoppers are less "encouraged" to buy than at a street-seller's stall, there are multi-screen movie theaters with stadium seats (featuring Bollywood films in several different local languages, usually without English subtitles--but we can still usually tell the bad guys from the good).  You can buy an inexpensive kurta (long shirt worn outside one's pants), get some inexpensive food at the food court, all in a place that's familiar enough to feel safe and comfortable.  One of the more fancy malls we visited is shown below; we noted that in the more culturally conservative South, most girls and women even in "modern malls" were wearing kurtas or saris (but boys and men were rarely wearing traditional clothing).  

Having said all this, I don't want to leave the impression that our students liked experiences that were familiar and safe the best.  They enjoyed them, and I think they're now part of India as well, with its growing middle class and very wealthy 1%, but they found their immersion in the "real India" usually more meaningful, the things they are more likely to remember.  They have liked being with little kids, often from urban slums (the term used in India) or rural villages, who are excited to learn, adorable, and funny.  They have been inspired by our visits to social justice or empowerment projects for women, or by making food for those waiting patiently in the Sikh Temple for the next seating (more on these in the next posting).  

And this is perhaps enough for this entry.  Except…whoops, I almost forgot the tribute, in flowers, at the huge annual flower show in Delhi (in January!  we're not in Minnesota anymore!), to India's latest proof of modernity--the successful launch of a deep-space rocket, a very complex task that only a really "developed" country can usually achieve (I remember China making the most of their own launch when we were there in 2004, as well).  See photo below!