The article begins ‑‑

 

 

 

 

At first glance, this is an innocuous enough beginning; it is apparently nothing more than a statement of what should be obvious:  Since we aren't Indians, we can't expect to have a spontaneous understanding of the day‑to‑day details and cultural feel of Indian women's lives.  But although the language is superficially amiable and straightforward, the writer's claim that she wants to provide us with "Indian stories, as textured and contradictory as the country itself" cannot be fully understood without first identifying who exactly she's saying this to and how this audience is likely to respond to the phrase "Indian stories, as textured and contradictory as the country itself."  The truth of the matter is that the vast majority of Wallach's American readers bring to her article a limited pre‑knowledge of India.  At best, they possess a vague impression of India as an over‑populated nation plagued by economic stagnation, mass malnutrition, periodic political assassinations, and a curious religious tradition that includes both weird gurus with funny names and Mohandas Gandhi, who is considered by many western India‑lovers to have been a modern saint.  Once we realize this is the knowledge with which most of the article's readers begin, it's easy to see how the phrase "Indian stories, textured and contradictory as the country itself" reinforces the old colonial idea of India as a contradiction‑riddled, chaotic place ‑‑ "textured" and colorful maybe, but definitely different (read: less advanced) than the U.S.

 

Wallach furthers this view by writing from the perspective of an educated outsider who, having entered a strange environment, gropes for meaning among people who are by and large not equipped to provide it ‑‑

 

 

 

 

Wallach's choice of the prospector image is fitting.  Just as westward expansion in the 19th century United States was characterized by gold hunters whose search for good fortune drove them to forcibly occupy lands that belonged to other people, the misnamed American "Indians," so Wallach's quest for gold also occurs among Indians ‑‑ but thousands of miles away in another country.  The gold Wallach seeks is those few Indian women "with sufficient objectivity to describe what they personally experience and feel."  The vast majority of Indian women are apparently, from Wallach's perspective, so sunk in a stunting collectivity that they're incapable of seeing themselves as unique or worthwhile individuals. 

 

It's impossible to read Wallach's assessment of the Indian personality without questioning how she arrived at her conclusions.  The idea that so few Indians possess "sufficient objectivity" to talk intelligently about their lives is a simpleminded notion that accepts unquestioningly western definitions of objectivity and clear-mindedness. 

 

Fortunately, however, it's not inevitable that a westerner approach India in such a culture‑bound way.  That this is so is illustrated by the work of writer and psychiatrist Erik H. Erikson. 

 

At the beginning of Gandhi's Truth, his biography of Mohandas Gandhi, Erikson discusses some of the differences between the Indian way of looking at the world and the western way of looking at it.  In part, Erikson bases his premise that there are differences on his evaluation of the results of a psychological experiment that was done with children both in India and the west.  The experiment entailed giving the children toy figures, then asking them to use the toys to invent an imaginary scene or scenes that they thought particularly interesting.  Erikson believes the experiment's outcome revealed a difference in the psychology of the Indian and western mind.  But unlike Wallach, Erikson doesn't imply that such a difference exemplifies the "contradictory" nature of Indian society.  Instead, his tone suggests that what we are exposed to are two distinct, but equally legitimate, ways of experiencing reality.

 

 

 

 

Erikson proceeds to say that the Indian child's "exciting scene," in comparison with the easily identifiable scene created by the western child, is submerged in a larger totality and is therefore more difficult to find.  The Indian child's scene is

 

 

 

 

But whereas Wallach views such a lack of "individual" orientation as a deficiency (i.e., a lack of "objectivity") that prevents Indians from fathoming their own individuality and therefore stops them from "breathing life into" their accounts of their personal histories, Erikson views the Indian orientation less judgmentally.  He senses in the Indian orientation a view of the world in which life's "significant moments" aren't experienced as isolated from each other in the same way that they are in the west, but are rather experienced as being "embedded in a moving sea" of other equally dominant moments.   Because such an approach to reality confounds our western‑scientific sensibility, which encourages us to dismantle reality into little "knowable" pieces (i.e., an atom, an individual person, etc.), the westerner often feels disoriented by the Indian worldview.  Erikson himself confesses that he feels "a trace of sensory and emotional seasickness" when confronted with India and the Indian sensibility.  Yet he resists the temptation to judge Indian culture as intellectually lacking.  Instead, he suggests that the Indian personality, unlike its western counterpart, is more able to see itself as part of an "over‑all configuration" of events, individuals, etc.  He further suggests that far from representing a lack of objectivity, as Wallach argues, the Indian view realistically reflects the teeming, multidimensional quality of life "on the street or at home."  Although Erikson does not go so far as to suggest that the Indian way of seeing is preferable to the western way, neither does he suggest that the western way is preferable; he's impartial.  Consequently, Erikson's conclusions about the differences between Indian and western ways of viewing the world are less restricting than Wallach's. 

 

Wallach's attempts to interview Indian women display a cultural thick-headedness that is typical of the naive colonial interviewer.  For instance, she doesn't understand that the Indian woman's apparent inability to communicate "concretely remembered scenes" of a personal nature may not indicate a lack of self‑awareness, but may rather be a symptom of something entirely different:  a sensible reluctance to open up to an outsider whose mission in interviewing her isn't clear.  Without entertaining such a possibility, Wallach generalizes about the Indian woman's lack of individuality.  Her pontifications tell us less about India than they do about the preconceptions that retard the west's ability to understand India.  In the final analysis, Wallach brings to her cross‑cultural endeavor all the accuracy of the hallucinating schizophrenic who "sees" a reality entirely of her/his own making.  This is exactly what the imperial worldview is:  cultural self‑delusion masking as universal insight. 

 

Kamalbai who lives in Vijaynagar knows nothing about Wallach's discovery that Indian women are incapable of talking concretely about their lives.  Therefore, Kamalbai is free to ignore the implications of writer's insights.  Consequently, Kamalbai speaks in detail about her life.  One incident that particularly distresses her is the choice she made a number of years ago, when she wasn't yet 30 years old, to have a hysterectomy.  She made the choice, she says, because she already had two children and was pregnant with a third.  In a meditative voice, she comments, "That was enough, I thought."  But as it turned out, after giving birth to her third child and after the hysterectomy was performed, her only daughter died.  Kamalbai was heartbroken; and n her grief for the dead child yearned to get pregnant again and have another daughter.  Only then did she find out that the hysterectomy, which she thought was a reversible procedure, wasn't reversible.  "I wanted to have a daughter," she says now, still sad about the tragedy that befell her years ago. 

 

If Wallach had been more relaxed, if she had roamed India with less cultural aggression and more intellectual tentativeness, she would have discovered a simple fact:  that although India is indeed a different society than the United States, with different customs and styles of behavior, the potential for communication between westerner and Indian is possible on a far broader scale than Wallach suggests.  In Vijaynagar alone, the tiny village where I have spent much time, there are more people living in one hut who are capable of intelligent self‑analysis than Wallach claims to have located in all of India.  Unfortunately, Wallach's ignorance is no personal quirk; it's a continuation of the old colonial slanders concerning India's supposed lack of modernness.  Whether born of intellectual laziness or calculated design, such a misreading of reality serves an imperial purpose.  From a western perspective, a nation of people who can't "objectively" analyze themselves is a nation mired in a psychological torpor, and such a torpor is destined, so the argument goes, to keep that country economically and culturally underdeveloped, which means that the country won't be a leading force in global affairs.  Such an attitude provides the perfect rational for the west's arrogant assumption that for a nation like India to survive into the future it must rely on western guidance.  The westerner thinks:  India may possess a pleasantly exotic culture and a few centers of modernity, but as a nation it is held back, unlike we in the west, by a fundamental incompetence when it comes to dealing with the contemporary world.

 

All such talk about competence and incompetence is superfluous.  The only relevant fact is this:  that during the period of colonialism, the west brutalized and exploited the economies, cultures and natural resources of the developing world to such a degree that countries like India are still teetering from the initial colonial assault and are also, often in subtle and not‑immediately‑visible ways, still in economic bondage to the western countries that had once colonized them in more traditional ways.

 

This is our imperial heritage.  It permeates our culture and contaminates our ability to understand the developing world. 

 

None of us is free of this contamination.  Neither liberalism nor conservatism will liberate us.  Only a radical analysis will.  The American people must find a way to detach ourselves from the stranglehold of the ideologies put forward by the nation's dominant cultural experts, political leaders and business executives.  Only by freeing ourselves in this way can we eradicate the manifest destiny and white supremacy ideas that saturate all our domestic and foreign‑policy institutions.  If we don't do this, our future in a changing world will be fraught with problems that are worse than anything we have yet seen.