Beware the Guardians of "Culture"

Pramod Muthalik, Valentine's Day Non-Appreciator

We didn't know it until later, but when Rachel and I had breakfast in Mangalore on January 19, we were next door to the scene of a crime - one that would turn out to be among the biggest domestic news stories during our time in India.

The previous day - a few hours prior to our arrival in town - a mob of "activists" from a Hindu extremist organization called the Sri Ram Sene had forced their way into Amnesia, a bar on Balmatty Road (Mangalore should not be confused with Bangalore, where we are now, though both are cities in Karnataka). In an act that the Sene's leader Pramod Muthalik later described to the press as a "spontaneous people's uprising" against something called "pub culture," the Sene thugs herded the bar's female patrons into the center of the room, beat and sexually molested a number of them, and attacked male patrons and bar staff who attempted to come to their defense.

The Sene - apparently a hitherto obscure fringe organization - followed up on their attack with a further series of nasty publicity stunts, including (allegedly) the abduction of the daughter of a member of Kerala's Legislative Assembly, the young woman having committed the sin of sitting next to a male Muslim friend on a bus, as well as a splashy threat to roam around Bangalore on Valentines Day, abducting and "forcibly marrying" couples who are found expressing affection (incidentally, it's interesting how in India, as in Thailand, Valentine's Day is seen as cutting edge and politically controversial). All in all, it's been a heady few weeks for Muthalik and his followers.

The Amnesia attact was not just an assault on middle class pub goers, but an exercise in enforcing a system of "social control" (the term is Muthalik's) of women that runs through every caste and class in India. This dynamic is well understood by liberal Indians, among whom there has been a considerable backlash against the Sene's actions - including the "Pink Chaddi" campaign, which encourages people to send women's underwear to Muthalik as a form of mocking protest. Press analysis - including, for instance, in The Hindu newspaper - has discussed how extremists like those in the Sene use the defense of "culture" as a weapon with which to control and oppress women and the poor - a practice that is of course not confined to India.

Still, not everybody seems to get it. An investigator from India's National Commission of Women (NCW) blamed the pub management and the female pub-goers themselves for the attack (though the NCW later distanced itself from her report). And the Karnataka state government, controlled by the Hindu nationalist BJP party, has bent over backwards to avoid a confrontation with the Sene, preferring instead to attack the media for "sensationalizing" the pub attack and other stories.

If history and tradition are the wells that nourish cultural conservatives and their radical cousins, India's right-wingers have a vastly deeper well from which to draw than do America's - making the task for India's progressives all the more difficult.

All this helps explain why I am so skeptical about the common travelers' obsession with finding the "real" India. I don't like the prejudices - however well-intentioned - lurking behind such sentiment, and I think it amounts to a denial of a country's capacity for progressive change.

And for all its extraordinary lines of continuity, India's history is full of enormous ruptures - social, political, technological, religious, and cultural. The changes are as constitutive of India as are the traditions.

The people who try hardest to deny this fact, in every era, are the ones with the most vested interest in pretending that things are as they have always been - and thus as they always will be. But even a modest interest in the prospects of the oppressed requires a willingness to accept that every country can, and must, change. It requires a certain tolerance for heresy, blasphemy, "watering down," confusing and upsetting debates over values and morality, experiments in political correctness and experiments in giving offense, urbanization, bastardization, bowdlerization, modernization, and even - sometimes - that old boogeyman, "Westernization."

Every place is a "real" place, because every place is a part of human reality - including the reality of change, for better and for worse. I think I finally understood this when we were living in Bangkok, which seemed so far away from whatever it was that was supposed to be "authentic" in Thai culture. Half the population of the country lived in Bangkok, I realized. If Bangkok is not the "real" Thailand, then half of Thailand is an illusion.

Ultimately, the ones living in an illusion are those who think that they can keep a lid on social change and the desire for emancipation. So here's wishing a very happy and kissy Valentine's day to Pramod Muthalik and the Sri Ram Sene - and if Rachel and I end up getting forcibly married on Saturday, I guess we'll just look at it as a chance to get hitched yet again.