India is a land
of myriad traditions. Each town or village has its own traditions and rituals
often associated with deep history. Some rituals find themselves bounded in
space of caste or region while some expand into multiple geographies and psychographics.
With passage of time, some experience the Darwinian survival while many fall by
the wayside to the vagaries of evolution. Some find themselves taking a rebirth
on account of many factors, incidental or deliberate. As the people move across
regions and countries, they take their traditions and rituals with them thus
giving them a new lease of life. In recent years, India has seen an explosion
of sorts with respect to revival of many traditions and in unexpected
geographies and demographics.
There are many
reasons for the same some of which would be useful to be decoded. Firstly, it
has to deal with internal migration and cross cultural marriages. As people
marry across castes and regions, the traditions find themselves intermingled
between the two regions. Therefore, a north Indian traditions probably gets
acceptance in the south and vice versa. Similarly an east Indian tradition
might find resonance in the west Indian context following inter-region and
inter-caste marriages. Yet these would be small in number to result in a
widespread acceptance or in more particular wherein a tradition’s roots itself
might get lost and instead get associated with some other region.
As many Indians
moved abroad mainly due to the IT revolution and like, there was need to build
up community bonding. The festivals which are numerous to be counted and
various rituals and rites now began to be celebrated and followed in these
distant lands. Indian communities when settled abroad are small in number when
viewed caste or region wise but substantially cumulative when observed
community wise. There might very few belonging to a particular caste or region
and they might further might not even be located at a single or nearby places. In
such circumstances, a caste or region specific ritual or tradition or
celebration might not sustain. This however applies to each of the region or
caste specific elements. It is in this context, that communities bonded by a
feeling of common nationality will join together and celebrate. As they evolve
and move out into different places and at times return to India, these rituals
and celebrations follow them.
Further, the
Indian community bondness also serves as a signal to the host country
population. To any host country, the traditions or rituals moreover, given the
Indian idiosyncrasies associated, will appear to be novel and thus generates
interest. This interest will definitely be exploited as signal of the community’s
uniqueness. In fact, marriages in India are becoming steeped in more tradition because
of the Facebook effect. The Indians when they go back to their work places abroad
can showcase it as something deeply ritualistic and steeped in tradition thus
playing to the novelties of those countrymen and women. This signalling to an
external audience while creating a sense of attention and interest unwittingly
plays a role in revisionism of Indic culture and tradition. This gets extended to dress as Indian dress
gets a lease of life and novelty in the Western world.
Within the
domestic territory, as modernization descends with greater force, this does
pose questions on the roots where the Indians would have come from. There is an
apprehension that in zeal to embrace modernity and all that accompanies it, the
trade-off is apparently a sacrifice of traditions. Therefore, a conflict emerges
within over modernity-tradition balance. Thomas Friedman termed it as the
battles between the longing for Lexus without sacrificing the Olive Tree. More
appropriately, I n the Indian context, it was VS Naipaul who diagnosed it
perfectly. He called the Land of Million Mutinies. These mutinies are not just
on the surface but at every sub-surface level within the community as also
within each individual or within the family. He argued as Indians were exposed
to the modern way of living, there appeared tendencies to disassociate from the
culture or the roots. Yet this appeared transient. The civilization might have
been wounded, yet beneath each layer of the civilization lay a longing for those
cultural significations that enabled the survival of the civilization in the
first place. Naipaul argued that while Indians did not want to let go off the
benefits and might be in some ways as recent scholars argue on woke culture.
Indians were disposed towards woke but at the personal level, maybe an
atonement of that, it becomes deeper and more religious. The simultaneous woke
and religious traditions seem to battle out everyday in daily life with what
Naipaul termed the Million Mutinies.
Alongside these,
the entertainment industry too has made its contribution in a significant way. The
reasons for their contribution are hardly their personal feelings for the
religion or their mission zeal to revive Hindu culture. Their considerations
are commercial and linked to their self-interest of survival and personal
benefit. Entertainment industry both film and television function on the
implied demand uncertainty. There is certainly demand for entertainment
products but there is uncertainty over a demand for specific entertainment
product or genre. So when an extended marriage video becomes a theme for a
movie and it becomes a hit, it is all but natural that others follow suit in
adopting to similar theme. When a classical saas bahu story becomes a hit or
novelty, it is again natural for other producers to follow suit linking to a similar
theme. In fact, formula films in the movie or television industry arise owing
to the same. As more and more emerge from the genre, it will create its own
cultural message however unintended it would be. In the television industry, as
the channels mushroom, there is paucity of supply. They have to keep occupied the
audience for extended periods of time. One outcome would be sort of stretching
a serial if it is popular and commands a large audience. This creates a paucity
of content for those serials if they have stretch longer. Given the endless
festivals in India each year, associating the celebration with the soap opera
is perhaps the best alternative. There are low opportunity costs and the
benefits would be people getting to see the intricacies of traditions and
rituals of other regions, castes and communities. As these gain popularity,
there would without doubt a tendency to adopt these festivals, rituals and
celebrations in their own local community thus a catalyst for the diffusion of
the cultural practices. The demand-supply mismatch in one industry becomes an
unintended cause for cultural diffusion somewhere else.
As one dissects
these causes, they need a deeper engagement with each of these causes. In
economics, it is just not the unintended consequences that are important but
equally important are unintended consequences. The current revival of cultural
revisionism is an externality arising out of the various causes none of which
were explicit attempts to promote Indic causes. The actions were perhaps an
outcome arising out of self-interest but the externalities turned out to be
very different. Yet, though the promotion of Indic interests was least in their
mind, these economic agents can be considered to be catalysts for the revival. To
borrow from Adam Smith’s phraseology, they might be the disguised invisible
hand that perhaps unwitting leads to collective Indic betterment.
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