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Listening to culture: constructing reality from everyday talk by Nandita Chaudhary. Sage Publicatioins, New Delhi. Pages 235. Rs 320.
Nandita Chaudhary has examined a variety of interactions in everyday life, focussing on the use of language, to draw insights into the structures of Indian culture. Her investigations carry her into many areas. From examining the reports about the icons of Lord Ganesha drinking milk in September 1995 to the efforts of a washerwoman to locate her missing necklace with the help of a Baba to the interchanges between mothers, children and other kinsmen. What is it that people say in their common place communications, what kind of words do they use, which words they avoid using, what kind of words are used to reinforce social bonds and those which are avoided in order to express annoyance. All this is grist to Chaudhary’s academic mill. The premises with which she works are unexceptionable. Culture is not something out there. We are living it. Our everyday interactions, the meanings given to them by us, by others, the meanings which get retained in memory, those that fall off by the wayside only to be picked up later or by others: all this collectively makes up what we know by our culture. The only trouble is that Chaudhary makes these rather simple points in a most convoluted and jargon-ridden language spread over 200 pages. In the end, even she seems to be lost in her own flow of words. "`85the many ways of being, once having been incorporated into individual or collective activity, make fundamental alterations in structure", she concludes. What the structure is and how her study contributes to its better understanding, however, are matters that remain mysterious. In Chapters 5, 6 and 7 though, she does pick upon the works of Oomen, Kakar, Shweder and others to make rather hard-hitting statements about the nature of Indian society and culture. "Modern India cannot be defined in terms of customs, religion or language, it is defined on the basis of a citizenship at one time or another, making the legal definition of the Constitution the only valid one", she says. It is family and caste that are central, she presumes. Her subsequent analysis of conversations between adults and children in different settings are designed to illustrate the dominant themes of childhood in India and the nature of the "person". Indians avoid naming certain kinsmen in the public domain. They prefer indirect speech in many public interactions. The child is intensely socialised into the complicated network of kinship. Serious efforts are made to avoid extremes. Then, her final conclusion, that more research needs to be done. The last could be a self-serving conclusion by one from the academic tribe, as for the rest, I would rather learn it from my grandma than read about it in a book. |
This
book is written in an abominable style to arrive at rather pedestrian
conclusions. Granted that style is a subjective matter, still I think an
author owes it to her readers to write in a simple, lucid language,
especially when she may have insightful things to say, as the foreword
tells us.