This course presents some important vignettes of a complex, highly diverse India that is also witnessing unprecedented changes since its formal independence in 1947 from Great Britain. The lectures revolve around social dimensions of change, the continuing influence of ancient texts on contemporary India, political democracy, economic transition from the state to the market, gender relations, India's economic globalisation and changing world view. While one of the objectives is to capture the multifaceted process of change, the course also critically examines some of the tensions inherent in these changes. For example, how does gender inequality play itself out in a changing Indian society, how do the modernist conceptions of art entailing market valuation challenge the more socio-centric values found in South India, what are the politics linguistic identities, and how might India address its myriad development challenges such as poverty and unemployment. No specific prior knowledge is required. However, it would be helpful if students are aware of the socio political dynamics at play in contemporary India and keep themselves abreast with current affairs and debates in the country to fully appreciate the various dimensions and contours if the subject matter in the course. This course is taught in English. View the MOOC promotional video here: http://tinyurl.com/hx8mhxb
7.2 Compartmentalisation & context sensitivity
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From the course by The University of Melbourne
Contemporary India
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From the lesson
The past in the present: traditional art forms in today's India
We will use arts as a lens to look at some of the general transformations in today’s India. The focus in this section will be to negate the modernity/tradition dichotomy and instead argue that traditions in India are constantly changing. These traditions adapt to the prevailing conditions, which present its own complexities. To understand them, specific concepts and tools will be introduced to better explain the realities of contemporary India, which simultaneously remains connected to its ancient past.
Meet the Instructors
Anthony D'CostaProfessor
School of Social and Political Sciences
Welcome back.
Last time we talked about [COUGH] the ideas of
a dominant site of symbol production.
And we also talked about mythopraxis, the way in which mythical versions of reality,
or socially constructed versions of reality, are embedded in everyday,
ordinary routine practices.
And now we're going to talk about a particular form of mythopraxis that has
been recognized and discussed by many social scientists with regard to India.
And that we can summarize these, this form of mythopraxis,
as compartmentalization or contact sensitivity.
So, before we get to, specifically context sensitivity or compartmentalization,
we need to talk a little bit about socially constructed realities.
Socially constructed realities are these communal agreements that we talked about
last time.
That are underneath or underlie routine representations of the real world.
And our ordinary routine practices, our every day activities,
are symbolically represent or
indicate something about the real world that is presumed by our society.
And as I had discussed last time,
the real world as far as globalizing maturity is concerned, is economic.
What is going on in India is that an economic culture is gradually
gaining force, gaining tremendous force actually, in India.
So through the power of mythopraxis,
the representations that are generated by a dominant site of symbol production,
feel so real to the members of the community that they're not even
experienced as symbolic but as natural, universal, and simply common sense.
And here we see an illustration of a wealthy Indian
couple engaged in a completely ordinary activity
of engaging in some sort of a sacred exchange.
A sacred form of economic exchange with a priest in which they are making offerings,
and they're actually donating money to a temple.
And they're making donations to the priest and then the priest is going to do some
things and they're going to be gaining something else.
Rather, this is not a purely, this is not a capitalist form of exchange, but
it's kind of a sacrificial exchange.
Something else is going on here, and this is simply a normal and
routine type of transaction which we might think of as an economic transaction.
But it's not an economic transaction in the neo-liberal sense.
The thing about socially constructed realities is that we,
as human communities, collectively construct these shared realities.
Such as our modern globalizing economic culture, or the languages that we speak.
These are social human constructions.
And then we actively work to pretend as if they didn't.
It seems as though the language has a life of its own.
Even though, obviously, if there wasn't a community of speakers,
the language wouldn't exist and we'd have no life.
It depends on human beings as agents, but
it feels as though the language has a life of its own.
It feels as though the visual language has a life of its own.
It feels as though the culture, the economic culture, has a life of its own.
And so it seems as though these things are just natural,
like they're not something that we're doing.
Where ancient societies tended to socially construct
reality through elaborate kinship systems or religious systems.
Today's globalizing economic culture symbolically
represents reality through quantitative monetary representations of value.
So in this example, here we see a kind of qualitative value being exchanged.
The businessman and his wife are transforming their material values,
which in classical Indian tradition is called artha.
Artha means political economy.
And political economy is a means,
it's a value, it's one of the four ends of life, one of the purusharthas.
It's one of the four ends of life.
But one of the ends of life that it belongs to is the householders stage.
Ultimately, it's to be transcended by the ultimate ends in life and
the ultimate ends of life are dharma and moksha.
The proper codes of conduct for human beings and
for everything in the natural world.
Everything that exists has its own dharma.
And then moksha, freedom, liberation,
liberation from the constraints of context,
liberation from the specific circumstances that we find ourselves embedded in.
So this type of transaction is a kind of economic transaction in which
material values are being transformed into spiritual values, higher values.
They're being enlisted in the service of moksha.
These people are wealthy householders.
What can they do to use this wealth in order to leverage it?
To gain some sort of spiritual benefits, some sort of good karma,
something that is going to lead toward their spiritual liberation.
And so this is a kind of economic practice or
an economic transaction that is sacrificial In nature.
And sacrificial economics is very different from neo-liberal, rational,
calculating economics in which you are looking at your various options and
choosing products or goods or services based on price and quality.
Sacrificial economics is a very different sort of thing.
It's based on a qualitative value, a sacred value.
A sacred value that's about transforming the self.
And this is of course, this practice, this kind of economic practice,
is linked to the classical notions of the four purusharthas,
which means the four ends or the four values that inform human life.
Mythopraxis in India tends to use a strategy,
a way of being in the world.
That Milton Singer, back in the 1950s and
60s when he did his famous study on the modernization of India and
in his book When a Great Tradition Modernizes, he described
a kind of practice that he observed that he called compartmentalization.
That ancient India survives into the present.
Because Indians tend to operate, or intuitively practice,
a kind of compartmentalization of their lives.
The modern is a certain context, or a certain compartment.
And in that compartment, you may speak English and you may wear Western clothes
and you may adopt a Western framework and you may engage in various types
of economic transactions that are capitalist in nature.
But in other dimensions of your life, or other domains of your life,
especially the sacred domain.
You operate according to a totally different set of rules,
a different set of expectation, a different set of values.
This sign, for example, is a good example of a kind of compartmentalization or
a context sensitive approach to pricing.
Where you notice that the sign says that if you're an Indian national,
then you pay five rupees to get into this monument, to see this monument.
And if you are a foreigner, not a citizen of India, you'll pay 20 times that amount.
It cost 100 rupees to get in.
So the, this is a typical and rather mundane and
routine example of context sensitivity or
compartmentalization, what compartment you belong to.
Who you are has everything to do with how much something costs.
That is not really the ideal of modernity.
Modernity, the modernist ideal, the neoliberal capitalist ideal,
leans in the direction of context free values.
Values that are going to be universal that are going to apply to everybody
in exactly the same way.
It leans towards homogenization, towards standardization,
towards uniformity, and so the modern ideal,
the neoliberal ideal, would be to charge everybody the same price.
If you go to the store,
things aren't going to cost a different amount of money depending on who you are.
But if you go to a traditional market in India
it may make a big difference who you are.
If you're a well-known customer, if you live in the village, if you've been
doing business with this family for a long time, you may get a different price than
if you're a newcomer who'd just come along and nobody knows you.
So everything is up for negotiation.
Modernity wants to standardize, uniform, and make uniform principles,
and uniform values, and uniform notions of justice and standards.
This has to do with a value that modernity places on abstract universals.
Ideas of justice.
Ideas of equality.
Ideas of fairness, of democracy, that everybody should be treated the same way.
Compartmentalization allows very different real worlds to exist side by side.
And these real worlds really arise from distinct domains of lived experience.
Where, in this image for example, you see these high rise buildings next to a river,
and in these flood plain of the river there are all of these
poor people who are living in makeshift housing,
and that housing is going to get flooded away one of these days.
There are people who are living on the margins.
And you can well imagine that the life experience of the people who live in these
condominiums, that are looking over the river,
that cost a very large amount of money, and the life experience of
the people who are living in these temporary shacks down by the river
bed where they're going to be living a very precarious existence.
These are very different worlds.
The experience of the people living in these different worlds is different.
And so it's no wonder that reality is going to be seen
in different ways depending on these different contexts of life experience.
Is one of these objectively really real?
Modernists would say only one of them is real, and
that's the economic version is really real.
And that all of these people share the same economy, the same economic framework.
So, in the globalizing mythopraxis of modernity,
money is what symbolizes the real world.
And it symbolizes the real world in a purely abstract and
quantitative manner, that is emptied of content, it had no content,
it had no significance, it´s own significance.
The significance is simply quantity.
No qualitative meaning.
No qualitative richness.
So this gives rise to what you might think of as a kind of an accountant's-eye view
of reality that's expressed in mythopraxis by procedures of accountability and
measurable outcomes, and all of the sorts of bureaucratic norms of measurement and
assessment that we're all very much familiar with in the modern world.
These different traditional practices of reality, are,
well, non-modern traditional practices of reality,
are generally considered to be mythology by the frameworks of majority.
That mythology is falsehood, and we as
members of a modern economic culture, and whose identity is rooted in production and
consumption, we know what the real world is.
And others who see reality in kinship terms or sacred terms or
some other terms they are the ones who have myths, not us.
So this helps to explain why South Asian civilization has been so
tolerant of diversity while South Asian civilization has remained in a way so
traditional and so conservative in some ways.
This conservative traditional practice in South Asia
is not based on any kind of static
endurance of something in the past that is simply continuing into the present.
It's something that is adapting to newly
emerging domains of value by compartmentalizing them.
So that one, the old can simply exist side by side with the new.
This compartmentalization is nicely illustrated by the links between the four
aims of life, which are kama, artha, dharma, and moksha.
Dharma being your kind of religious duty and responsibility.
But kama is pleasure, sense pleasure.
It's one of the aims of life, but
it belongs to the house holder stage, not to the student stage, and
in childhood you're not supposed to be dedicating yourself to sensual pleasures.
Particularly, kama has to do with sensual pleasure,
as you're all familiar with the Kama Sutra and
ideas about the value related to sexual enjoyment.
But the Kama Sutra is really about aesthetic pleasure in general,
about the pleasures of the senses.
In your early childhood, you're supposed to be studying and
not worrying too much about sense pleasure.
In the householder stage, that's when you
are supposed to be dedicating yourself to sensual pleasures, as well as artha.
Artha means political economy, it means power and prestige, and prosperity, and
money, and good name, all of that sort of thing.
These are things that are relevant to the householder stage.
But ultimately you're supposed to transcend the house order stage
in the last two stages of life, retirement, and then renunciation.
And in those stages of life, you're dedicating yourself again to dharma and
specifically The Dharma, or the responsibility or
the duty of achieving Moksha, liberation from the wheel of birth and death.
From Karma, from being born in this world again and again and
suffering life over and over again.
So these different values are compartmentalized,
they seem to be contradictory.
That you're supposed to be detaching yourself from the world on the one hand,
but then you're suppose to be engaged in central pleasures and enjoying life and
pursuing money and wealth, on the other hand.
The way that these contradictions exist side by side,
is because they are compartmentalized.
You do this during your pursuit of power and pleasure and money and
all of that in your householder stage.
And then later on in life when you retire from the world, that's when you seek
detachment and when you seek to transcend the world in the last stage of life.
So in this kind of way, and this is just an example of the way in which various
kinds of ideological contradictory values, and the systems that represent those
values, have been able to pragmatically exist side by side.
And this is how Hinduism and Buddhism,
Indian tradition in general has been recognized,
has been well known to be supremely tolerant
of all sorts of different ways of looking at things,
all sorts of different practices, all sorts of religious practices.
So, we find that there are different, two different economic contexts
that we can talk about, at least two economic contexts in India.
One is a kind of traditional economic context or
political economy that's based on the ideas of Artha, and
prosperity, is one aspect of Artha that's symbolized by the goddess Lakshmi.
She represents the wealth and prosperity and
value, but it´s qualitative value.
This is not money, this is not an amount of credit,
this is not anything that can be digitized.
This is a kind of qualitative value, and
in a spiritual sense and in a concrete sense.
Fertility for example, is the basis of the prosperity of the family because it's
what the prosperity, the fertility of the plants, the fertility of the animals,
the fertility of the family, the fertility of children, all of these things.
And then crops and jewels,
all of these tangible things that are considered to be the things of value.
This is what Artha means.
This is what prosperity means.
Today, Lakshmi as a symbol of qualitative values, of these fertility related
basis of wealth exists side by side along with abstract monetary symbols.
So in this part of the lecture we've briefly considered how realities can be
socially constructed, and how in traditional India different realities,
diverse realities, have been able to flourish side by side,
simply juxtaposed to each other, without harming each other.
People can have very different points of view, different religious practices,
different frameworks, because people have a lot of different life experiences.
And it's simply expected that there are going to be lots
of different values pursued, and the same person
is expected to pursue different values at different times of life.
Then the economic part of life is only to be,
is primarily to be pursued during the house holder stage of life.
It's one of four stages.
It's the longest of the four stages, but it's only one of them.
So all of these different values, even though they may conflict with each other,
they may be in direct opposition with each other,
the spiritual value of detachment is exactly in opposition to the idea
of pleasure and the pursuit of money, and good name, and all of that sort of thing.
But they exist side by side because they exist in different compartments or
different contexts of life.
You simply move on from the economic values to a higher value,
a spiritual type of value in the last two stages of life, in retirement,
and then the last final stage of life of Sanyasa, or detachment from the world.
And these are just routinely practiced, people take them for granted.
So we've already looked at this, and now we're going to consider briefly
how the unversalizing impulses of globalizing modern economic culture
are putting severe strains on this context sensitive form of
mythopraxis in the modern economic world,
the modern economic culture, those symbols are universal symbols.
Money and the values are homogenizing.
They are standardizing.
They are universalizing.
They tend to want to express themselves in universal codes of various sorts.
So, I'm going to be looking at the contemporary fade of of traditional Indian
art forms in order to illustrate this larger point in this next lecture.
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