India, 1962–81

I am writing this section the day following the assassination of Indira Gandhi, and India is unexpectedly and unusually prominent in the attention of the American public. In 1962, when I first visited India, it was a land almost invisible to Americans; it still is. I have been there four times now, for visits ranging from six weeks to nine months. I have taught for at least one term at three Indian universities and have lectured at many others. I have lived for periods from two weeks to five months in several major cities—Delhi, Patna, Bangalore, Calcutta. Though I have done some research and writing in connection with India, it has been peripheral to most of my work. And though some of my scholarship has been concerned with problems of national development, that too has been a minor theme. Most of my studies have been located in the United States.

Yet my experience in India has had a major personal and intellectual impact on me. I first came to India armed with the concepts of American social science. These, following a line from Durkheim through Parsons, were couched in the discourse of modernization with its clear movement from community to society, tradition to modernity, caste to class. India defied the efforts to be seen through such prisms. An aphorism I learned later, when living in Japan, puts the matter well. In India no one trusts the institutions to work because they know that socially organized life is fragile and will disintegrate. One acts to protect oneself and one's interests because social institutions cannot be trusted to sustain themselves. In Japan, there is the same sense of the fragility of social life but there is also the belief that if everyone works at it and helps sustain one another's roles, the social organization can be upheld. Americans are not worried about social organization being destroyed because they know that it will be replaced by a better one.

The culture shock that came from living in a provincial city in India was more than the usual experience of people going from one country to another. What accentuated it was the sense of illusion, that whatever was true today, or true at the level of public rules, or true of one region, was not necessarily a good guide to what might happen in the immediate setting. The intellectual shock was the realization that the concepts I had learned bore little relation to the observations I made. Community and society, tradition and modernity, caste and class, and democracy and autocracy were so far from ideal types that it was illusory to use them as contrasts in anymore than a literary, allusive sense. India was so

big, so diverse, and had been a civilization so long that it humbled the casual visitor who expected a transformation to the American ideal within a decade.

But India did something else. It made me skeptical of much that I had learned in sociology and hence restored some freshness to my thinking. I found that economic man was not dead, that paradox was everywhere (the caste system adapted well to the egalitarianism of political democracy), and that tolerance of diversity was not a mark of Western modernity, nor were Westernization and traditional India as incompatible as I had believed. India was exotic—startlingly different and even frighteningly its own culture. It could not be understood or explained with the concepts in my bag. But if that was so for India, I realized how much it was also the case for America whenever I stopped to look without the blinders of theory. That skepticism toward conceptualization has not left me. Later periods of living in India, Japan, and England have substantiated it.

Pitirim Sorokin once wrote that probably the last thing a fish realizes is the fact that it lives in water. Only when taken out, gasping on the beach, does it recognize water. Like much of what I am writing about, the sense of one's culture as a tangible context forming the necessary basis for understanding is less a series of provable, logical ideas than a series of felt, believed, and acted-on assumptions. Our tacit knowledge sits on that bedrock. It is less ideology than myth.