As indian said: India is an absolutely huge country, and yes: in some parts of the population stuff like this happens. I believe that poverty is the driving force behind this, though cultural ideals & religious ideas about the role of widows probably has something to say as well. However, nobody wants or likes to throw their old mother out of their homes, essentially sentencing her to a beggar’s life, but sometimes that action is (seen as) the only way to secure the lives of the remaining family members.
I assume this is because in conservative, uber-traditional India, a woman is a lower life-form. Traditional practice ties the identity of a woman to her husband. She ceases to exist as an individual after she gets married. When her husband dies, so does her identity, her worth, her raison d’etre.
For the type of family that turns these women out into the cold, that’s all the excuse they need.
As with all cultural phenomena in a country as large as India there is not just one, primary cause. It is true that parts of “conservative, uber-traditional India” (which is a very difficult demographic to define) seem inherently misogynistic, but I don’t think that that category (i.e. “conservative, uber-traditional”) is a valid description of India at large. The vast majority of Indian women probably aren’t treated any better or any worse than women in most other places around the world. I don’t mean to indicate that there aren’t real problems in India, but I disagree with the notions that a) Indian conservatism/traditionalism is the primary problem here -economic, agricultural, linguistic, religious, etc. issues play their part as well; and b) that women are worse off in India than anywhere else. We’re probably just as bad - we just notice it less.
I think these issues can be traced to the root cause , poverty . It forces poor people to abandon their parents ,sometimes children also.
When there is enough to eat for everyone ,this will not happen. Barbaric custom of “SATI” also is unheard of now ( there was one such incident in early 90s ). I don’t think in any indian culture ( in 20th and 21st centuries)abandoning your parents is a norm.
I’d like to stress something that the others have tried to explain: There is no such thing as a “typical” Indian; there is no typical urban Indian; there is no typical rural Indian. Indian culture is too diverse to be generalized in this way. You will not get any kind of realistic or truthful understanding of Indian society if you take this path.
Life is very different depending on your ethnicity, social background, wealth, etc.
Perceptions of the United States are very complex and varied. You will have a hard time distilling this to an “average.”
Urban Indians walk past lots of things every day, many more things than an American walks past. Walking past a McDonalds is unlikely to engender significant feelings.
McDonalds restaurants are staffed and patronized largely by Indians – there aren’t enough visiting Americans to allow them to run a business. The Indians in the McDonalds are likely to have very different views than those avoiding it.
Christian schools in most parts of India are able to survive largely by attracting Hindu students.
They are Christian churches. I haven’t really seen any “general purpose church” in India. Hindus are willing to acknowledge the divine anywhere, regardless of whether the place is operated by people of a nominally different religion.
This is an extremely misleading way of characterizing the situation in the United States.
This largely comes from my knowledge of Catholic schools in north India – There aren’t enough Catholics or even Christians to keep most Catholic schools in business, so they actively seek out fee-paying Hindu students, and Hindus must compete academically, while Catholics (and other Christians) are often admitted on a discounted fee basis. Hindu students are exempted from overtly Catholic or Christian instruction but are required to attend “morals and ethics” classes in which Catholic/Christian values are somewhat encouraged. If they tried to be too aggressive about Christianity, they would find themselves in trouble financially.
These kinds of practices originated with conditions of scarcity of resources. Economically speaking, women were a burden on a household. Again, you will run in to trouble if you try to take things like this and generalize them to Indian society as a whole.
I fully agree. My response was to Rucksinator’s question about why widows get chucked out given India’s generally close familial ties. Scarcity of resources is a given in any discussion about India. Economic scarcity starts a practice, tradition carries it on. Now it’s more about the fact that those poor women are (a) female and (b) husband-less.
I’m Indian (from India), female and was brought up in a VERY educated, urban, progressive middle-class family. Yet the whole ‘subsume thyself to thine husband’ propaganda has wormed itself into my brain and I often find myself consciously fighting it. It’s fucking insidious.
My questions about McDonalds were based on my limited understanding about Hindus not eating beef. It was my understanding that cows were “sacred”. Therefore, I was trying to figure out if a Hindu would look at a hamburger made out of beef the way that I would look at a hamburger made out of human flesh, or the way that I would look at a hamburger made out of dog meat, or the way that I would look at a hamburger made out of a type of meat that I simply didn’t care for. I am trying to understand if the idea of eating beef is so abhorrent that you would find a place that served it to be disgusting.
Also, when I asked about McDonalds, I hadn’t yet looked up whether or not there are McDonalds Restaurants in India. Apparently there are and they don’t serve beef or pork. My previous questions were referring to an American McDonalds that serves beef hamburgers and pork sausage.
Do you mind if I ask you what caste your family belongs to? (I hesitate to ask, because it seems like kind of an offensive question to me, like asking someone their net worth. Is it a delicate subject?)
I spent two and a half months in India last year. If you’re interested in my impressions, I’d be happy to share, with the caveat that I am an American and not an Indian. The longer I spent in India, the more baffling it became, honestly.
Well, my professor asked me how I was going to be able to authenticate you guys as a source, which pretty much means that I cannot use y’all as my primary sources. However, there are four Indians that run a local gas station, and I was able to talk to them this afternoon.
One of them didn’t seem to be sure what caste he was in, and referred me to an older gentleman who could tell me more than he himself could. That other one told me that their ancestors were farmers, and that their caste was Patel. However, he said that the caste system wasn’t really in effect (not his exact words. I’m having some trouble verbalizing the impression that I got from him, but it was that Indians don’t really follow the caste system anymore.) He compared it to slavery in the US, and estimated that it had been about 100 years since the Caste system was really in effect.
This surprised me, based on what I have always heard and what I have read in other threads. However, the wikipedia site on the caste system says “while caste is now seen as anachronistic…”, and one web site said that it was not followed as much in urban areas, but moreso in rural areas still.
I’m in the middle of reading this right now. Any comments on the accuracy of this article is welcome (as are comments of any kind.)
It’s my experience that people generally know what caste they’re a member of, but depending on your circumstances, it may or may not have much of an effect on your life. One of my best friends is Indian, and her husband (who’s also Indian) changed his last name because it reflected his low caste standing. (Although I’ve never asked about her caste status, I know from her anecdotes that her own family background is significantly higher than his.) I think it might have also reflected his origin in Bihar, which is a really poor state, with a terrible reputation for corruption and violence.
BTW, and this is a little off-topic, when my friend applied for her passport so she could come to the US, her passport dude randomly decided that he didn’t like it that she hadn’t taken her husband’s name, so he stuck his last name onto hers. Without her permission or anything. So, imagine his name is John Doe and her name is Jane Smith. Her passport declared her name to be Doe Jane Smith. It ended up causing her massive headaches because it didn’t match any of her other documentation and she eventually had to go to the Indian consulate in Chicago (she was living in Michigan) to get it changed. It was seriously crazycakes. (Oh, and she had had to bribe her mailman just to get her passport in the first place. She said he came to her house every day and told her he had her passport but wouldn’t deliver it until she paid him the equivalent of ~$10.)
Weird story: an autorickshaw driver in Hyderabad once asked me what my caste was. I’m…pretty obviously not of Indian origin. No Indian I’ve ever told this story to has ever been able to make any sense of it.
Several years ago I worked with an Indian couple. They were both a few generations removed from actually living in India. I’m trying to get in touch with them right now.
I think that it might have been a language barrier issue. I went into this “interview” woefully unprepared. (I wasn’t even sure if they were Indian or Pakistani or Iraqi or Egyptian or what. All I knew was that we had once offered them free pizza (cancelled order) and they didn’t take it because they didn’t eat meat.) I didn’t really know the names of the 4 castes. The first guy didn’t seem to recognize the word “caste”, (perhaps because it’s an English word that he’s never had to learn; never needed to know to run a convenience store.) I remembered only the word “Brahmin”, and it wasn’t until I said this that the first guy was like “Oh… you mean …” (and then turned to his friend to explain this strange word “caste”.) Then they referred me to another guy who gave me a lot of information.
So, is it considered rude to just ask somebody what their caste is? I’ll have no problem asking my completely Westernized, several generations removed, former co-workers what caste they are, (and I’m interested to know if they know, how far apart they are, and if it mattered at all when they first met in NYC), but many of the questions that I thought of on the spot seemed disrespectful in my head. Besides asking about caste, I hate starting a question with “Do you believe…”, because that, to my mind, implies “Do you believe in this silliness that I know to be a myth…”
I asked him if he believed that cows were reincarnated humans, and I felt like an ass for asking it. (His response, BTW, was very insightful. He stressed that his belief, which might not necessarily be the same as other Hindus, was that: Early in your life your mother gives you milk. Then, cows give you milk. So he respects cows just like he respects his mother. But other people eating beef doesn’t bother him. He just chooses not to out of respect for the cow that gave him milk like his mother did.)
McDonald’s in India doesn’t sell beef products – their “McBurger” is made of goat (“mutton” in Indian parlance). They also sell chicken.
But plenty of Indians don’t eat goat or chicken either.
And there are restaurants that do sell beef, aimed primarily at Muslims, tourists, or the upper class.
Indians in urban are constantly having to deal with the idea of people around them eating things that they themselves consider abhorrent.
Some people eat anything. Most Hindus avoid beef. Muslims avoid pork. Some Hindus avoid pork and beef. Even more Hindus avoid most meat, but eat fish and eggs. Many Hindus avoid all animal flesh and eggs, but eat dairy. “Pure vegetarians” avoid animal flesh, eggs, and onions and garlic, but consume dairy. Jains avoid animal flesh, eggs, and any root vegetable.
Indians always have to be comfortable with the idea that the person next door will be eating something that they consider uneatable.
There are groups of Hindutva agitators who have made it their business to make trouble over “anti-Hindu” behaviour, but they are a distinct minority.
Indian-Americans are more comfortable talking openly about caste because it has very little effect on our lives. Indians in India do not ask strangers about their caste. First of all, because they generally already know each other’s caste. Second, because openly talking about caste (with a person outside of your caste) brings the focus on caste differences. Discrimination based on caste is illegal,b ut there are many people who still suffer the consequences of generations of caste discrimination. And, believe me, caste prejudice still exists, even among people who are otherwise educated – among these people, caste prejudice generally falls along the broad lines of Brahmin-other high castes-low castes, rather than specifically one caste versus another caste.
Are those numbers the price in rupees? 22 rupees for theMcAloo Tikki? When my co-workers went to India about 7 years ago to train the outsourcing company’s employees, I think the exchange rate was about 50 rupees to the dollar. They would pay their employees 10 rupees per hour (instead of $10 per hour in the US). And these were college educated Indians earning 10 rupees per hour.
So, if my numbers and math are correct, (Of course, wages may have gone up significantly in the last 7 years) one of those employees have to work for 2 hours to earn enough money to order off the “Happy Price Menu”. And McDonalds would only be getting the equivalent of 40 to 50 cents per item. (I guess the overhead would be lower in India than in the US).
Um, well, it’s still ~50 rupees/dollar, but 10 rupees an hour would be an appallingly bad wage. You could make more (a LOT more) panhandling. I think you’re dropping a zero or something somewhere.
Was 10 purees per hour an appallingly bad wage 7 years ago? My information or my memory might be faulty. Can you give me some approximate wages for doing tech support, or working a McDonalds, or teaching at a Christian school?
I would consider 10 rs/hour as pretty bad. I remember when an Indian friend of mine had some buildings made on some of his property, the absolute lowest ranked among the workers were paid around 65 rs/day (or night). This was basically unskilled labourers in a very poor region of India (eastern UP/Bihar/Jharkhand).
I imagine that working at McD or tech support in Mumbay would pay a whole lot more than that.
