Shaming the new India: impossible?

Shame and Honor cultures vs. Guilt cultures

Shame is a characteristic trait of classical cultures, which employ shame and social ostracism as their primary tools of maintaining social order. World War II era Japan was famously depicted to be a shame and honor society that would never surrender to conventional military force.

Guilt societies rose predominantly on the shoulders of Christianity, though the idea of a society of individuals who fear their conscience and the consequence of their actions either here or in the hereafter is by itself not a Christian invention. Classical Greek tragedies figure shame prominently, but they also chart Greece’s evolution into a guilt society.

India – a shame and honor society

Shame and honor societies are common even today, especially so in the Indian sub-continent where caste, untouchability and honor killings are not uncommon. Rather tellingly it appears that guilt has entered the vocabulary of most Indian languages rather recently judging by the multi-syllable word constructions for the concept. Whereas shame universally is a single syllable construction drawn from either the Sanskrit `Lajja` or the Tamil `Avamanam`, classical languages, both. [0]

Guilt as a working concept is no doubt familiar in India for quite a while, but Indian society has traditionally chosen to rely heavily on shame to maintain social order and morality.

Western influence on Indian governance and institutional correctional practices

The modern Indian state is in large parts a British legacy that appeals to the conscience, and failing that the criminal justice system. The Indian justice system (perhaps rightly and progressively) ignores shame as a correctional or punitive practice [1] even though this flies in the face of historical tradition in India of shaming the guilty in public.

Founding Indian leaders – Nehru, Gandhi and others

An overwhelming majority of the Indian leaders involved in the struggle for Indian independence from colonial powers were Western educated. [2]

Filled with Western ideas and homegrown demands of equality the Indian leaders were of one mind in fighting the evils of the caste system and the existing exploitative social order and even wrote their intentions down in the Indian constitution by guaranteeing the right to equality [The Indian constitution: http://lawmin.nic.in/coi/coiason29july08.pdf]

The moral deficit of capitalist India [3]

The social mobility ball set in motion in the Gandhian age took new momentum in capitalistic India of the 1990s turning major Indian cities into social melting pots. In a globalized age where the world moves towards urban living India doesn’t appear to be that different at first glance despite a phenomenal increase in urban population in the last 20 years with concomitant problems [4].

In the absence of a strict social structure where everyone knows everyone, shame is rendered an ineffective means of social control. The laudable newly liberated upwardly mobile India has in its haste to shed centuries of poverty and social stagnation however also shed it’s ability to shame. Without a deep rooted culture of guilt, India faces a morality crisis where the only recourse is a weak and ineffective law and order system [5].

Rampant urban poverty despite ample opportunity (33% of India in cities generates 66% GDP), rising urban crimes rates due to aspirational greed, self granted affirmative action through crime, corruption at the highest levels are all indicators of a system that is in rapid moral decay.

Solving a crisis of social identity takes decades not years, I’m not sure how modern Indian leaders will solve this problem, but act they must.

Footnotes:

[0] To the Roma (an ethnic group living mostly in Europe, who trace their origins to the Indian Subcontinent) though living as local minorities in mostly Christian or Islamic societies, the concept of lajav (“shame”) is important, while the concept of bezax (“sin”) does not have such significance. (Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shame_society)

[1] The exceptions I know of are in a few civil procedures such as evictions and insolvencies where a town crier is employed to announce the act.

Indian legal town crier in action: video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4AChxeF8C0&feature=player_detailpage#t=97s

[2] The popular opinion in Indian society is that Mahatma Gandhi shamed the British into leaving India through non-violence. One could argue whether this wasn’t the British Catholic guilt in action.

[3] Modern India grapples with the question of a leadership moral deficit in the aftermath of an unbelievable string of high profile cases of brazen corruption and theft by leading Indian politicians and businessmen. [The rotting of New India
- Pankaj Mishra, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/01/rotting-new-india-scandal] [Our moral universe is shrinking, Sonia Gandhi, http://www.deccanherald.com/content/114220/our-moral-universe-shrinking-sonia.html]

[4] http://www.slideshare.net/bmbks321/challenges-of-urban-growth-in-india-by-anumita-roychowdhury

Rural to Urban Migration: A District Level Analysis for India: http://ir.ide.go.jp/dspace/bitstream/2344/729/3/ARRIDE_Discussion_No.137_mitra.pdf

[5] The Indian criminal justice system is very effective on one level, it is for example one of the few countries in the world to allow citizens to access public records as a matter of right under the Right to Information act, 2005. However the larger reality is that it has a case backlog that is staggering, by some estimates as much as 320 years worth. This offers a daunting reality to most Indians that justice will not be served in their life time. Coupled with a prison shortage of equally staggering proportions [Overcrowded prisons in India are hell holes - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/5116332.stm] institutional justice in India appears to be a weak medicine for maintaining social order.

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