The Performance of Friendship in Contemporary India

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chapter 10 The Performance of Friendship in Contemporary India

Nita Kumar

Abstract

In this article I try to establish the class, gendered and provincial nature of friendship practices and discourses of ordinary people, such as artisans and workers, as well as making a case for friendship as performative. There is a real history that constitutes elite and non-elite classes in India and their relationships and values. One of these values is dharma or a reasoned intuition of ‘what is appropriate’; another is the idea of enactment or play. I look at my interac- tions with my informants and friends, as well as a variety of other data about them, to argue that their understanding of ‘friendship’ is striking, not in that it permits an individualistic freedom in relationships, but in its elastic assumption that roles are performances. Not only was I, in the field, enacting friendship for ulterior research mo- tives, but my informants, too, were likewise ‘performing friendship.’ Performing friendship was all there was to do.

Introduction

I did not call it friendship in 1980 when I embarked on my research on self- selected, non-kin, relationships in urban India, on what people like to do in their leisure time, and with whom they like to do their leisure activity. Rather than an under-theorization of the research project, this was rather the chosen approach, ethno-methodology, as McKim Marriott and his students called it, which required us to search within a culture for its own linguistic-conceptual categories and definitions.1 ‘Friendship’ did not seem to be such a category. However, research among urban artisans yielded rich data on the leisure practices of a hundred years (1880 to 1980) and specifically on the (unnamed) ideologies of ‘friendship.’2 That these friendship-based leisure practices were

1 See Marriott, India through Hindu Categories. 2 Kumar, Artisans of Banaras.

230 Kumar almost exclusively same-sex practices led to later research on women’s leisure, a parallel world to men’s. That these practices were entrenched in provincial life and reproduced themselves in powerful ways, led to my projects on pro- vincialism, socialization and education. That these histories were difficult to document made me lean more and more on fiction, mythology, media and the arts. In this article I will discuss themes from these many pursuits. Specifically, I will try to establish the class, gendered and provincial nature of the friendship practices and discourses of ordinary people such as artisans and workers, and to make the case for friendship as performative. ‘Performative’—because what I also learned in that first round of research was that if you were to really investigate friendship in urban India, you had to be ready to become a friend of the people you imposed upon, which—upon closer scrutiny—translates practically into: you had to ‘enact friendship’ with your people. As I have reported about some of my previous research elsewhere, I had planned to be a professional researcher collecting information from informants; as it turned out, informants would interact with me only if I would be a sister or a friend to them.3 This was a cultural leap that at first amused me, made me uncomfortable when the notion surrounded me in the field, then stood before me as an intellectual and personal challenge, and finally made me succumb to what I reluctantly admitted was an important research truth that I had to take doubly seriously, as data and as procedure. Why the notion of ‘performance’, however? There is no lack of socialization in my class and background—an upper middle class, modern-educated Indian background—to accepting friendship as normal and desirable. The shock of encountering a demand for friendship in the field provides, as I shall discuss below, important insights into the modern-educated South Asian premises of friendship as compared to the practice in the provinces, in lower classes, and indigenous and vernacular education. The difference, I am suggesting, is partly a class difference and partly a metropolitan/provincial divide, and this could be an unsurpassable difference; the similarity, however, lies in the perception of the role of performance.4

3 Kumar, Friends, Brothers and Informants, was a reflection on these experiments and methodologies. 4 I should add that since Friends, Brothers and Informants, I have made it my methodology to push further what I started in that book: to position myself as partly an informant, much like my subjects of study; to turn the gaze on myself as a modern, educated South Asian subject with a professional agenda but also many well entrenched values; as someone, who, in a double loop, is professionally inclined to value her subjects’ different positions highly, but since she is also her own informant, values both her own and other informants’ positions, thus destabilizing both in her enquiry.

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The Performance of Friendship in Contemporary India 231

Artisans and Their Families

Looking for ‘the people of Banaras,’ I chose working class people as a quint- essential case. Apart from weavers, carpenters, metalworkers, toymakers, em- broiderers, potters and painters, the group also included petty tradespeople such as those who sell food on the streets; small professionals who ply rick- shaws, scooters and boats; and manual laborers. I chose them because they are almost all in professions learnt from fathers and forefathers, continuous in social and cultural reproduction. Artisans and other small professionals in provincial India are not in the least immune from change. A look at their lifestyle practices over the last hundred years already tells us that major agents of change in their lives have been: demography, state and national politics, tech- nology, and education. When we discuss the powerful reproduction of their ideas and practices, including friendship, we are not speaking of some kind of ‘tradition/modernity’ divide. We are speaking of complex changes that in fact do not fit into this divide; one might even say: that fail to fit into what would have been a convenient progress from limitations and scarcity to freedom and choice.5 One could call these artisans and miscellaneous workers ‘ordinary’ (sad- haran) because of their low level of earnings and almost total economic inse- curity, summed up as ‘poverty’ (garibi). They live by piece and do not eat if they do not work, although they have complex support systems that belie the inse- curity in their lives.6 They are almost all unschooled in the formal state school system. In state discourse, they are regarded as ‘backward’ (pichra varg) and often ‘superstitious’ or ‘ignorant’ (ashiskshit, ganwar).7 In all discourse, including their own, they are typically referred to as powerless and without access to political or status networks. These dimensions of their identity are important not only because of India’s spatially and temporally extended configurations, but because my discussion of friendship rests on the idea of a differentiation of people on the basis of income, education, and experience of change. But first, a few words about the etymologies of the terms for ‘friend.’ Ordi- nary people in Banaras use the term mitra (‘friend’) very comfortably. It derives from Sanskrit, and has the implications of closeness, intimacy and utter trustworthiness, closer to ‘soul mate’ than to a mere friend. In popular usage,

5 Sen, Development as Freedom; Jeffrey, Jeffrey, and Jeffrey, “‘A Useless Thing!’.” 6 See Biswas-Diener and Diener, “Making the Best of a Bad Situation.” 7 The state discourse derives from, and in turn influences, elite discourse about ‘backward- ness’; see Srivastava, Constructing Post-Colonial India.

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232 Kumar particularly in songs, it can be transformed to meet or mitwa. The other terms for ‘friend’ are derived from Persian, such as dost or yar, and are not heard in the same contexts. My guess is that their frequent usage in film and songs dia- logue8 makes them associated with younger people and a looser set of values, with an intangibility that makes local people in everyday practice uncomfortable. This is significant because objectively speaking mitra, dost, and yar, as well as slightly more regional terms such as bandhu (‘friend’ in Bengali, but used in Hindi also) or more specific terms such as sathi or hamsafar (compan- ion, fellow-traveller) all mean the same thing. They do not properly refer to any kind of kinsman or ascribed relation, or lover or spouse, or other erotically and romantically charged roles. Interestingly, all the terms for friend can be used for people in those other roles as well. A lover could be described as a true friend by using any of these terms. This is not common and happens when the intention is to elevate the romantic or erotic relationship to a higher plane, to emphasize that it is not just about sex or even love, but is based on a compatibility of souls, a mutual and joyful recognition of a twosome made for each other. I am using only eth- nographical observations; the same idea is developed by other scholars with a focus on films.9 Then there is a marriage ‘made in heaven.’ This can be a relationship that is doomed from the beginning, and is idealized in inverse relation to its possible consummation. It is often a same-sex relationship, if judged by the gendered pronouns its script deliberately employs, with the caveat that the masculine gender of pronouns, in Urdu and Hindi, stands for both male and female people if desired.10

What is the dharma or Role of a Friend?

Of course, this leaves begging the question of what people do mean when they say “friend,” since the English term itself is a subject for scrutiny. To understand the characteristic property of friendship in small-town India, we have to evoke the concept of ‘property’ itself. How does one recognize a property or attribute of any action or relationship? As I find it spelt out at high

8 The use of yar and dost for the most intimate of friends can be seen in the films Naya Daur (The New Era), Janzeer (Chains), and Namak Haram (The Traitor). Needless to say, these are merely representative, so large is the fund of Bombay Hindi films from which I am drawing. 9 See particularly Vanita, “The Romance of Siblinghood in Bombay Cinema.” 10 Russell, “The Pursuit of the Urdu Ghazal.”

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The Performance of Friendship in Contemporary India 233 textual levels and echoed orally, and as observable in action at several levels, the term for a property or attribute in Hinduism is dharma. Usually translated as “code of conduct” or “duty” or “religion,” dharma is a given by birth to some extent: thus the dharma of a leaf lies in its leaf-ness, that of water lies in its specific properties as water; the value of a horse arises from its being a horse and no other kind of creature.11 The dharma of all creatures, living and non- living, is their essence. The essence is formed and recognizable through action and being. In this lies the shiftiness of the concept. The action changes if the context changes: the leaf, the water, or the horse, in contexts where some new action is called for, are the less the (previous notion of the) leaf, the water, or the horse. They are something else, with the dharma arising from their new action-in-context, maybe with the dharma of some other (more familiar) thing or creature. With less drama, contexts shift all the time: to have more than one dharma is a familiar state of affairs. A friend, then, is a person with the dharma or contextualized action of a friend, but with overlapping dharma in other contexts. (S)he is likely to be a parent or child, a crucial dharma in its own right; a professional worker, perhaps in a hierarchy in the work place; of a certain age and in particular hori- zontal and vertical relationships; of a certain sex and family. The dharma of the various roles possible is not textually elaborated, and neither is the dharma of friendship, but arguments about each of them echo and re-echo in all kinds of places. In the epic Mahabharata one of the central characters, Yuddhishtar, is called Dharmaraj, or the very lord of dharma, someone who can decide on the right conduct in any convoluted relationship. Thus there is in the epic the dharma of the king, the upper caste prince, the teacher, the student, the gam- bler, the winner, the loser, the older brother, the younger brother, the mother, the son, the wife, the hermit, finally, the human master of a dog. Where is the friend? There are pragmatically forged allies, enemies, people buying and sell- ing loyalties or born into them. Since everyone, almost, in the Mahabharata is related to each other, an important basis on which they can forge alliances is the recognition of friendship or enmity.12 Except at the end of the epic, when Dharmaraj Yuddhishtar is about to ascend into heaven. He pauses because he is being followed by a dog for some time (as can often happen in the streets of India). This dog wishes to ascend with him and is not going to be allowed to. Yuddhishtar pauses, wondering

11 My preferred discussions are in Hiriyanna, Outlines of Indian Philosophy; and Marriott and Inden, “Caste Systems.” 12 Pargiter, “The Nations of India”; see Doniger, The Hindus, Chap. 11.

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234 Kumar whether to abandon the (by now) faithful dog and find his own destiny, or prove loyal to his values and stay with the dog. He decides on the latter course, saying, “Whoever comes to me from fright or from disaster or from friendship—I never give him up.” At which he enters heaven, acknowledged as truly the Prince of Dharma in being true to a friend. The dog changes into his real form, dharma himself. That is, Yuddhishtar could not leave behind dharma, but dharma, the dog, was nothing else but his friend, someone who had been true to him.13 In provincial India, unschooled people speak of their duty as lying with their friends, and of friends as lasting their life long. Ordinary people in India speak the vocabulary of the epics with no hint of grandiosity or self-conscious- ness. An informant, well below the poverty line and illiterate, tells me, “Bhai, ab mitra ka sath to dena hai” (“No matter what, one has to be true to a friend, doesn’t one?”). For my informants, the power and function of the epics is equal to that of the media. Similarly in the other Hindu epic, the Ramayana, Rama is set up explicitly as a role-model son, husband, student, brother, prince, warrior, and—friend. Be- cause he is exiled and travels over the territories of South Asia, he finds himself in the company of those not related to him and not his subjects. They are a het- erogeneous group and the only relationship they can have with him is that of friend or enemy. The asuras or demons are his enemies. The others, monkeys, bears, birds, sages, tribal people, villagers, boatmen, are his friends. They say explicitly, in turn, “Rama is my friend,” or “There was never as good a friend as Rama.” He provides succor and relief to them in their troubles, and they in turn save him in his hour of darkest grief. The overwhelming message of the epic is that mothers and fathers betray you, siblings prove of varying loyalty, a subject is only beholden, and a teacher is a god-like revered guide, but the real work is done by the unattached friend. The worlds revolve because of the charm, magnetism, irrepressible attraction of one being for another, as in Sugriva or Hanuman for Rama, and vice versa; as in Guha, the lord of forest tribes, who ponders, “Rama is my friend. Who is Bharat?”14 Again, all the other relationships are discoursed upon explicitly. That of friendship is the subtext, giving life and breath to the whole story. The metaphor it uses is also striking: people recognize Rama as a friend because they can sense that he is out of the ordinary; they do not quite know he is a god, but their instincts tell him his friendship is special. One then remembers that god- hood is not a special category in Hinduism, but is continuous with humans:

13 Buck, Mahabharata, 363–66. 14 Buck, Ramayana, 119; see also 85, 87, 88; also Doniger, The Hindus, Chap. 9.

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The Performance of Friendship in Contemporary India 235 seniors, teachers, protectors are all close to gods, and—one realizes—so are friends.15

Masti: The Pleasures of Solidarity and the Pleasures of Solitude

While we perceive India to be permeated through and through with hierarchy, judging by Dumont’s elegant analysis, and observing that hierarchy is surely practiced, the question of rank versus individual identity, as Marvin Davis argues, is complicated16—partly because of our own limited abilities to maneuver between the practices of dharma. When you are in certain kinds of receiving or giving relationships, the hierarchy merges into other dharma, of colleague, fellow citizen, gurubhai (someone who learns from the same teacher or preceptor), pattidar (shareholder or neighbor), and simply peer.17 The term dharma is rarely used in these contexts, but the description of the importance of non-hierarchical relationships is given in endless ways. More accurately, the irrelevance of hierarchical relationships is articulated. Thus, one of my most surprising findings was that, cutting across caste, class, profession, age and regional-linguistic background, was the rhetoric in the city of Banaras of being a ‘Banarasi,’ or a citizen of Banaras. Such a person has a clear code of conduct that he shares with all others who identify themselves in the same way. It is largely a voluntary identification, and partly one inherited from one’s forefathers. It consists of an identity that is largely male and adult, that consists of a philosophy of life, that could be called non-dualistic; a belief in certain lifestyle practices and in the values of mauj, masti, phakkarpan (freedom, carefreeness, eccentricity) in the conduct of one’s time. Within this rather large set of thousands of people who are comfortable with each other because they share the same values and practices, calling each other bhaiya! and guru! (literally, “brother,” and “teacher,” but rhetorically, ‘dear, respected friend’) there are many subsets. What do friends do together? There are those who picnic together, those who go for long walks or drives together, those who hang out and eat pan or bhang (betel and cannabis) or chew tobacco together, those who enjoy specific activities such as making music, or taking part in annual theatricals such as the Ramlila performances. It should be noted again that these groups are not caste based, and may cut across class

15 See Davis, Rank and Rivalry, Introduction, esp. 3. 16 Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus; Davis, Rank and Rivalry. 17 Just two representative ethnographies are Parry, Caste and Kinship in Kangra, and Neuman, The Life of Music in North India.

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236 Kumar and profession, more rarely linguistic and regional divisions. They can overlap and keep changing in constituent body. The group of friends is called samaj (‘society’), or sangh or dal or toli (‘group’). Such a group is highly valued, because it is structured and to have structure in your life is a positive thing, the opposite of falling into bad company, idling your time away, or, nowadays, being stuck to television or computer. As Reed-Danahay argues for rural France,18 the friendships that character- ize identity in the pre-modern city of Banaras are themselves responsible for making the people of Banaras content to stay on in the city. Nothing is more characteristic of the city than to see groups of men sitting on benches on the sides of street, drinking tea and talking. They sit for hours, apparently inspired by total contentment. Equally characteristic of the city are its open drains, congested traffic, pollution, poor electricity and water services, and a significant shortage of jobs. When asked why they do not migrate out, the people of Banaras claim there is an apnapan in the place, a feeling of belonging, whereas in other places people seem paraya or outsiders. The terms for friendship are not directly used but the discourse is one of being an integral part of a group of compatible people, happily divided into subgroups, each engaged in a chosen activity for its own sake. In this culture of celebratory friendship, there are some lines that are drawn, making the rhetoric even more emphasized. The first is of class. Landed gentry, millionaire businessman and the neighborhood rickshawalla (rickshaw puller) will all tell you what it means to do “Banarasi” things in this benign city, and their accounts will be identical. However, they do not actually do anything together. The lives of the rich and the poor correspond, but as parallel lives, not intersecting with each other. The second is religion: less important than class but a mutually accepted difference, much as nature and politics collide to produce for Aziz and Field- ing in another period.19 Hindus and Muslims claim the same pleasures in their lives—walks, picnics, music, visits, festivals—but they play them out sepa- rately in parallel worlds. This is less important than class in that I have known

18 Reed-Donahay, “Friendship, Kinship and the Life Course in Rural Auvergne.” 19 Forster, A Passage to India, 293: “‘India shall be a nation…and then,’ he concluded, half kissing him, ‘you and I shall be friends.’ ‘Why can’t we be friends now?’ said the other, holding him affectionately. ‘It’s what I want. It’s what you want.’ But the horses didn’t want it—they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion…they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices: ‘No, not yet,’ and the sky said, ‘No, not there.’”

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The Performance of Friendship in Contemporary India 237 artisans or businessmen of different religions to get together, but never the rich and the poor to mix. The most important line of division of all, however, is gender.

The Gender of the Friend When walking in provincial India, one regularly encounters males, typically young, walking or standing together with their arms entwined around each other, sometimes hugging or touching, often holding hands as they walk. Women, though much less visible on the streets, behave similarly among themselves. All young informants rhapsodize about the importance of the friend. When they do so, even though a gender-specific question has not been asked or implied, they mean, “friend of the same sex.” If asked about a possible friend of the opposite sex, the response would be, “Oh, I/we don’t have any.” This is an involuntary response that does not even need completion of the question, and is accompanied by no readable facial expression (‘innocence’), partly because there is no guilt—they do not in fact have friends of the other sex—but largely because if they do have boyfriends or girlfriends, these are possible to have only as long as they are secrets. In provincial India, cutting clean across classes, young people do not date, do not have open relationships with the opposite sex, and do not admit to having boyfriends or girlfriends. This is more than just ‘tradition,’ in the sense of a control on the individual even while society is changing and individuals are struggling to be freer in their lives. The practice of same-sex friendships is an old-fashioned thing, but it is also curiously a modern thing.20 Three of the most popular and smartly produced recent Bombay films about elite, modern protagonists, have three young men as friends in each case: Dil Chahta Hai (Longings), Three Idiots, and Zindagi na Milegi Dubara (You Only Live Once).21 Clearly, the example set to other modern young people is that of a practice that is not merely pleasurable, it is natural. Dil Chahta Hai is set in modern-day Mumbai and focuses on a major period of transition in the lives of three young friends. The film was praised for its portraying contemporary Indian youth as cosmopolitan and urban. The upper- class characters, living in lavish houses and wearing designer clothes, visit art exhibitions and performances of Western opera. The film apparently was no success in non-urban areas. Even in my provincial town I was told by several informants that they could never enjoy movies like that because the lifestyles

20 See Vanita and Kidwai, Same-Sex Love in India; also Vanita, Same-Sex Love and Eroticism. 21 Dil Chahta Hai (Longings), 2001; Three Idiots, 2009; Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (You Only Live Once), 2011.

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238 Kumar depicted were too metropolitan. These elite urban youth nevertheless sing the same refrain as their provincial counterparts:

Do your thing! Our longing is That these beautiful days should never pass We should never be without our friends We keep talking our hearts out the whole day The days pass in dancing, the nights in singing Time should pass in total carefreeness (masti) We should find sheer happiness all the way.

In other arguments that I have made for the provincial-metropolitan difference, I have emphasized the more utilitarian philosophy of the metropolitan elite. The term masti with its connotations of imbalance, eccentricity and abandon is used as a marker of identity by the people of Banaras, from high to low class, and of all ages. Curiously this movie about the most elite kind of young Indians also has them wish: “Masti mein rahe duba duba hamesha sama” or that their lives be immersed in masti. In their role modeling in the film they certainly act no different to their provincial counterparts.22 In countless other films, there is a range of friendships from bantering com- raderie in Three Idiots to the homoerotic love of Dosti (Friendship) between two boys, to the homosociality of the pair in Sholay (Embers) and in the res- urrected Dosti: Friends Forever. The relationships between girls and young women are similar if less blatantly depicted in other films.23 As an ethnogra- pher, I would claim that these same-sex contexts and characterizations are a (romanticized, glamorized) picture of lived-in life in provincial India. The song on friendship (ye dosti: ‘this friendship’) in the film Dosti states and re-states that the friendship is permanent, that the two friends are in reality one, that they will die for each other, and meanwhile share everything in life together— in the most rhetorically grandiose ways (“Our food and drink is together; our life and death is together”). This is the veritable anthem of same-sex friendship in India, more representative because it says the same thing (with no particular eloquence, only power in its musical composition and delivery, most would say) as do scores of other film songs and film dialogues. Let us look at

22 There is no dearth of references to masti in the lyrics of the sizeable Bombay film indus- try’s songs. Many of these references are to heterosexual contexts, as in the film Parvarish (Ward). 23 See films Mere Mehboob (My Beloved), and Chaudhvin ka Chand (The Full Moon).

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The Performance of Friendship in Contemporary India 239

performance or performativity to understand the position of such same-sex relationships within society.

Performance as an Interpretive Tool

I suggest that the seeming conundrum of the high evaluation given to friendship in a hierarchical society is of the same type as the prevalence of homosocial relationships in a gender-divided society. In both cases the idea of performance would help us understand what is going on. In a powerful article Osella and Osella (2003) interpret flirting and friendship in Kerala to be best understood through the lens of ‘cultural competence.’ They say:

What we are arguing for, then, is the need to develop, as ethnographers, a better feel for the game, and especially for those parts of it which are rife with ambiguities and ambivalences. While it may be true that difference leads almost inevitably to hierarchy…hierarchy thus constructed is sometimes recognized by subjects as social, artificial and as something which can be subverted and reversed. While much has been written about this possibility among subordinate or subaltern groups, in this article we have dealt with the possibility of this vision appearing especially strong among young people in India, who may not yet be fully absorbed into the doxa of caste and gender… What young people’s friendship and romance do, it seems to us, is to point the way towards other possibilities which are also strong but still seriously under-theorized within Indian society: ambiguity as a value and, related to this, flexibility or indeterminacy as a value.24

Strong as the authors’ arguments are, it seems to me that to properly theorize ‘ambiguity’ and ‘flexibility or indeterminacy,’ the literature on non-hierarchical practices and the several levels of operation of dharma must be included, as is not done by them. This literature shows precisely that Indians explain their actions as context-sensitive and take for granted the absence of fixed univer- sals. I would say that what is under-theorized is the relationship between hierarchical practices and those of contexts in which egalitarian practices such as friendship prevail. Osella and Osella call this ‘subversion’ or ‘reversal.’ But the brunt of their own essay tells us to interpret with a lighter hand than the analytical terms subversion and reversal warrant. My own data from Banaras

24 Caroline Osella and Filippo Osella, “Friendship and Flirting,” 203.

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240 Kumar makes me claim that people find no precise conflict between their hierarchical practices and those that produce equality or solidarity, and that the Osella’s own insights of the importance of performance and playing a game have to be pushed further. People in Banaras play at masti or a carefree immersion in friendship scenarios. It is likely that they equally play at the performance of hierarchical scenarios.25 Certainly the body language of people in Banaras makes performativity seem the norm. When a younger man meets his senior, he typically bends down and touches the feet of the elder. That is, he ritually makes the gesture of bending down, rather than actually bending down, touching some part of the body, typically a knee, of the older person, rather than the feet (as normatively decreed). Often the hand is then put dramatically to the heart. If a physical distance separates the two, the younger person will simply put his hand on his heart and bow deferentially. This is deliberately, creatively performative. Its full scope is revealed when we notice that friends or peers who are equal, act out the hierarchical scenarios for the sheer pleasure of it. Thus one will greet the other, “ka guru?” (“well, my master?”). Or one will bow and murmur a deferential greeting. The script seems to be, “We are typically expected to perform hierarchy. Fine. Here’s some more hierarchy.” Never is the hierarchy known to be taken seriously enough to be commented upon, argued over, or agonized about. It is not that it is not important, it is play, and kept within control by typically being exaggerated performatively. The same performativity characterizes gender hierarchies and the intimacy of same-sex friendships. In mixed sex scenarios, women defer to men unless the women are older, and even then men always assume the superior air of the preoccupied breadwinner. Women’s friendships, whether one to one or in groups, are as free and self-regulating as men’s are. No permission for women’s friendships is required; indeed, there is an air of the sacrosanct about them that persuades men to keep a distance. It is not that they are secret; they are private, just as men’s are. Do they compensate for the lack of other freedoms or the lack of power in women’s lives? Of course they must, and so do men’s friendships compensate for their lack of power.

25 See Cohen, “Holi in Banaras” for an inspired discussion of what I am calling ‘performance’ and he calls ‘play.’ His article makes the broader point that I am making here about the central importance of same-sex relationships, and remains one of the nicest pieces on homosexuality and homosociality in India. For ritual reversal as performance and play, see Marriott’s classic “The Feast of Love.”

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The Performance of Friendship in Contemporary India 241

In my research on the leisure world of women in Assi, a southern neighborhood of Banaras city, I found that women lacked economic and political power, and so did most men.26 Their lives were parallel, and they did not in- tersect. Men and women enjoyed similar leisure activities, each within groups of friends of the same sex, and they used the outside and the inside as their respective domains. Each had a similar vocabulary, joking, playing, teasing, resting, and provoking in turn, and each professed to not know much or care about the other. Since this is so much at variance with the mixed-sex scenario of gender hierarchy, we should best look at both as performance. Indeed, it is tempting to suggest that the hierarchical actions are the staged performance, and the same-sex actions are the behind-the-scenes pre-and-after-reality. But a ‘stage’ is our outsiders’ metaphor. Perhaps, more accurately, the people are not themselves aware of a tension or a difference and feel equally comfortable at the performance of the more normatively hierarchical, and the less acknowledged egalitarian, roles.

The Scholar’s Middle Class Experience

When I appeared in Banaras in 1981 for my first round of research, I consid- ered myself to be a creature of the modern world, with plenty of egalitarian relationships built up through the exercise of free choice and agency. I was taken aback to discover in the field then, that the ordinary working class and poor people I was studying were freer, happier and more generous with their friendships than I was. There are three separate points here that I wish to discuss. One is the experience of the elite educated classes over four generations, as seen through the lens of myself as subject, from the ages of ten to now, but chiefly ten to twenty. The second is a middle class–working class (and the overlapping metropolitan–province) difference in values. The third, which I am going to relate to the second point, is the scholar–informant relationship versus friendship. When I was ten and eleven, I lived with my grandparents in Allahabad, north India. That is when I realized what it meant to be friendless. Earlier, I had had as many friends as I wanted—so it seemed to me. Now, my nana and nani were not happy if I ever wanted to go to a friend’s house or invite a friend over. But the begging of them to let me do so and being so categorically refused made me realize that there was something at the bottom of this friendship business. What could it be?

26 Kumar, “The (No) Work and (No) Leisure World.”

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242 Kumar

My grandparents (born ca. 1902 and 1907) were highly educated and professionally very well placed. They lived in large bungalows, spoke English, and were well read and travelled. At the same time, they were openly ‘traditional’— ritualistic, spiritual, hierarchical, old-fashioned as recognizable through their clothes, food, and lifestyle. In other words, they were this interesting mix of traditional and ‘modern’ that much of the literature, especially older literature, on South Asia agonizes over.27 They would have said that their ideas of friendship were similar, that is, both traditional and modern. They were obliged to have their little granddaughter lead a protected life, guarded moment by moment in her activities, and taught no-nonsense rules about the basic values of middle class existence. She was also sent out to a modern school where she independently made friends. This was enough of a chemistry of the ‘traditional’ and ‘modern.’ For her to want to spend time with these friends out of school was to over-weigh the independent in the balance their class was comfortable with. As a scholar today I recognize this balance perfectly. A study of the educated classes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India reveals how each generation was comfortable with letting the younger generation learn in new ways and experiment with the hitherto unknown up to a point.28 Largely by intuition, the older generation decided when a limit had been reached and then withdrew their permission with experimenting further with the new—which includes the new, free friendships based on association in the school. The assumption, with impressive perspicacity, is that children and youth of course learn as much from peers as they do through formal curricula, and therefore this learning must be monitored. My grandparents’ approach to friendship, hurtful as it must have been in those raw years to the girl I was, gave me excellent data for understanding the modernizing dilemma of adults when children always seemed to be histori- cally one step ahead of them. My parents (born in 1924 and 1931) exemplified in their lives how it was all right to have friends of all castes and regional backgrounds, as long as there was a professional or social status match. They were in one of the all-India public services, and among their closest friends were not only other administrators, but businessmen—a clear example of the partnership of the ruling class with capitalists that Marx writes about. The administrators had education and

27 See Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes; Shils, The Intellectual between Tradition and Modernity. 28 Kumar, The Politics of Gender, Chap. 2.

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The Performance of Friendship in Contemporary India 243

power; the businessmen had money. Both had status, but of complimentary kinds. What they had in common was the desire to have a good life and they could achieve this by hanging out together. I was thrown in with children from these families and could not make a single friend. But my parents swore life- long attachment to their business friends, and I remember seeing these ‘uncles’ and ‘aunties’ around for decades. Thus there was Mr Singhania in Kanpur, with steel mills; Mr Sabarwal in Varanasi, with a transport business; Mr Neotia in Calcutta, in diverse production; Mr Garg in Meerut, in trade; and my dear ‘Ashok Uncle’ or Mr Agrawal in Gaziabad, producing linens; to say nothing of Ganpat Uncle or Ganpat Rai Vaid in Lucknow, a cement manufacturer. All were businessmen, and when I mention their specializations as I do here, it is because I cannot get over the childhood hilarity with which the businesses were associated for me. Somehow I must have been taught to not respect ‘business.’ All my uncles and aunties were very close to us for decades, but all they seemed to have in common with us was that they and my parents had randomly decided to swear friendship with each other. There were no common tastes. There were no shared habits. Being business people, they consumed wildly, compared to us. I remember Mrs Garg buttering toast lavishly at the dining table, chiding my mother for being ‘stingy.’ Her husband bought a tin of chocolates for me, something we would never buy, and teased me about not wanting more. The aunties of this class all wore expensive chiffons and looked totally different to my simply, elegantly dressed mother with her single chain of pearls and no glittering gold. The uncles were smart but too attuned to eating and drinking, especially sugary soft drinks that we never voluntarily consumed, and hard alcohol that they drank in a different way to how the male adults of my family drank. At Ganpat uncle’s house I had the most belly-bursting meals of my life, and understood vividly what pushing food onto the guest’s plate in gestures of Indian hospitality meant, realizing, again, that it was ‘Indian’ but not ‘us.’ I feel like putting inverted commas around these ‘friends’ because although my parents claimed they were their friends, I sensed all through my childhood that something was up. They were not people my parents would confide in. They were not those they loved or trusted. They admired and liked many things about them and were not hypocritical in their professions of pleasure in their company. But—from a child’s perspective—I was never taught to regard them as intimate to our family. They were all banias, or different kinds of trading and commercial ‘castes,’ and some were Marwaris, or the business class of Rajasthan, now settled all over India. I say this in a professional way; the term ‘caste’ or any allusion to it was never made in my family. Even obliquely, the child that was me was never

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244 Kumar taught that there were castes, nor did she ever overhear even by chance any mention of them. I know that if I were to ask my mother now at the age of eighty, she would deny knowledge of, or interest in, caste. At the same time, she would make clear, as she succeeded in transmitting to me all my life, that there were fundamental differences among people and there was an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’ Why, if these particular friends of the business class were so different in their habits and tastes, did my parents not have friends of their own tastes and habits? They did have service colleagues who had the exact same lifestyle as they and very similar backgrounds. But perhaps there were too many similari- ties. Perhaps you cannot make friends among a pool of peers who are also in different ways your rivals and competitors. Perhaps it is difficult to be close to those who you know, so to speak, in and out, and can see through completely. Perhaps, in a caste-based, kin-based society, that is also a modern and mobile one, you are destined to remain friendless, because some are too close to you through kinship or professional collegiality, and others are too distant to you because of a different socialization and cultural diversity in the society. In the third generation, I (born ca. 1950) learnt from my school and college experience that by the sixties and progressively since then, the educational site was the prime determinant of friendships. There was no ‘tradition–modernity’ dilemma any longer, and the distance between professionals, service people and business people was getting eroded into irrelevance. It was not that the school was itself becoming stronger. It had to rely heavily on the media and on global processes but it worked together with them to forge the most salient identities and relationships. In school and college, my friends had nothing to do with their backgrounds. My inner group consisted of a Bengali Brahman, a Punjabi Khatri, an East Uttar Pradesh Brahman, a West Uttar Pradesh Muslim, a Goan Christian, a Parsi, and myself, a Uttar Pradesh Kayasth. None of them was male, perhaps due to the college being an ‘all-girls’ one. After college, however, I did make alliances that were ‘profitable’ for me in a parallel way to my parents. If their interest was in status and culture, mine was in writing-publishing status and cultural curios- ity. My friends, for whatever this moderately introspective analysis is worth, were varied in class, religion and nationality, because such were the people who satisfied my hunger to feel a member of a larger world. Finally, in the fourth generation of my daughters (born 1981 and 1986), their experience was colored by the fact that they spent their time in India in small cities and what I call ‘the provinces.’ Visiting the metropolises meant to feel being totally left out of the social circles of even their closest cousins. Every single person was dedicated to his/her circle of friends, and conversations were,

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The Performance of Friendship in Contemporary India 245 with painful exclusiveness, about who did what to whom and with whom.29 Exactly as in the provinces, with far greater snobbishness, and of course igno- rance of the uncomplimentary parallelism with the provincial, metropolitan friendships were old and set, exclusionary and defensive. The metropolitan ones were replacements of kin relations; the provincial ones were extensions of them.30

The Elite Scholar and the Provincial Working Class Informants

There were no educated classes in Banaras like the one I came from. It felt good to be a stranger; the contrast made the research data stand out in its lucidity without being distorted by preconceptions and over-determined roles. But I was an Indian, and what was striking was the seeming incommensurability of the gap between myself, the Indian who was an educated scholar, and the Indians I met, who were uneducated informants, even while civilization and nation are supposed to be the prime determinants of identity. The idea and the workings of the nation is a tremendously important topic in its own right; for the purposes of this article, the important question is: what were the differences in the ideas of friendship between me, a veritable normative subject of Indian intellectual and educational history, and my artisans, the indigenous working classes, the other subjects of Indian history? The ideas of friendship common to the artisans interviewed for this study had been forged in their holistic philosophy of work and leisure, of dharma and masti or duty/pleasure in activities and people for their own sake. I docu- mented this and thought that it was extraordinary in its power over the imagi- nations of people and their choices. But the real extraordinariness and power of it did not hit me until it impinged on my own research very centrally. My professional observation of their lives was rendered by each one of them, one by one, as a profound gesture of friendship with them. I had to be a part of their lives and families or there was nothing between us. The friendship demanded involves a situation where you do not merely re- cord their friendships but act out a friendship to justify your very presence in their midst. I had never learnt to be a friend with those—how to put it—that I had had one-sided relationships with so far, that is, with poor, uneducated,

29 As Sara Suleri describes it hilariously in her matchless Meatless Days, 142. The book itself is a peerless passionate narrative of friendship among siblings in Pakistan. 30 See Vanita, “The Romance of Siblinghood in Bombay Cinema” for how the sibling extends into a friend, and vice versa.

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246 Kumar working class people. I had never questioned their skills in their own tasks, and their sweet personalities, but had also held an implied faith in their relative passivity otherwise. It was ironical that the anthropological project of taking their subjectivities seriously turned around to my being aggressively taught by them of their agency, not their passivity. Their exercise of agency and control in our relationship provided the very vocabulary for it, and resulted in an ironic defeat for me, and a victory for them. I did not succeed in transforming them into my ‘informants’ without first graduating into their ‘friend’ and ‘sister.’ Let us look at the possibilities of performance again. I am certain that my informants could not not understand my professional project of investigation of a topic, albeit the unease that all of us might well imagine accompanies the vision of yourself being situated as a ‘topic.’ They could understand the profes- sionalism of it. But because it concerned them so closely, they were reluctant to comply with the project’s expectations. The project had its own vocabulary, its preconceived questions, its obvious premises, its inability to meander from certain paths. It had role-playing that only the scholar had decided on. She was clearly the arbiter of who would play which roles. As we proceeded, this is what happened. Mohan Lal, a brass smith and cop- persmith, who was fascinating to me because of his theatre interests and his group of actors who performed plays, got tired of my empty questioning and invited me home for meals and the festival of Holi. I was adopted as a family member thenceforth and everyone breathed easier. Markande, a young stone worker, bindery worker and artisan at miscellaneous crafts, began to call me his older sister and to behave with the deference of a younger brother. His parents and grandmother adopted the appropriate kin relations. This made my task so much simpler that I willingly acceded. Shaukat Majid was no brother. He became a good friend thanks to his abil- ity to joke and critique, and shed many friendly reflections on my task. He, together with dozens of others, then went out of their way to ‘befriend’ me in every way. I want to emphasize that this was not just niceness and helpfulness. That I was used to. This was an attitude that I was not used to, accompanied by an articulation of love (prem, mohabbat) and oneness (apnapan), protective- ness, and teasing such as I had had no chance to know before when it did not emanate from me. The scholar, it should be reported, performed her part well. She was able to grapple with the challenge and emerged as the sister and friend of scores of new kinspeople and friends. Later, with distance, the doubt crossed her mind: did she merely playact the gestures of friendship? After all, the project did get completed, she left, she was rewarded for it, and her interest in the people waned with time.

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The Performance of Friendship in Contemporary India 247

But this thought itself was revelatory of the nature of the friendship. It was not necessary that she should worry about playacting versus something more ‘real.’ There was nothing more real than the performance. Of all the roles they could play, my informants had chosen the ones to their taste, and played them perfectly. If the scholar was aware that she was performing friendship, she was right on track, because that is what she had been required to do. That is what they were doing as well. Performing friendship was what there was to do.

Conclusion

In this discursive journey through the lower classes of the provincial city of Banaras, then through the scholar’s own middle class experiences, and their mutual construction of each other, what stands out is that there is a real history that constitutes elite and non-elite classes, primarily through economic change and education; that renders some cities provincial and more indigenous than others; and includes the strong impacts of the media and consumerism. What stands out equally is that the construction of friendship for unschooled people remains an exercise in imagination because of the underlying philosophies of dharma and play which emphasize the sensitivity to context in the interpretation of normativity. I am not claiming, of course, that all unschooled people in provincial In- dia, through their own practices, can come up with a discourse of friendship that would have the weight of a Ramayana or a Mahabharata, allowing them to pursue dreams and resolve problems. Some imaginative representations are more powerful than others. Power resides in some structures more than in others. The understanding of friendship by ordinary, provincial Indians is fascinating, then, not because it permits an individualistic freedom in relationships. It is striking because it works on the infinitely elastic assumption that relationships and roles are performances. This does not lessen the pain or deprivation of poor people. But it convinces people that they have agency and makes them act with power for whatever that is worth. As for the scholar, me, and the elite group of Indians she (I) represent/s, much research still needs to be done on their/our discourses of friendship. I hope to have touched the surface and to have awakened others, as I got awakened myself, to the potential of the subject. The understanding and application of performance that lies at the heart of Indian value-systems is certainly something for the elite to learn from the people, especially in the increasingly hollow, unartistic world that is the globalizing India.

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Films

Chaudhvin ka Chand [Full Moon]. Directed by Mohammad Sadiq. Guru Dutt, 1960. Dil Chahta Hai [Longings]. Directed by Farhan Akhtar. 2001. Dosti [Friendship]. Directed by Satyen Bose. 1964. Dosti: Friends Forever. Directed by Suniel Darshan. 2005. Janzeer [Chains]. Directed by Prakash Mehra. 1973. Mere Mehboob [My Beloved]. Directed by Harman Singh Rawail. 1963. Namak Haram [The Traitor]. Directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee. 1973. Naya Daur [The New Era]. Directed by B.R. Chopra. 1957. Parvarish [Ward]. Directed by S. Banerjee. 1958. Sholay [Embers]. Directed by Ramesh Sippy. 1975. Three Idiots. Directed by Rajkumar Hirani. 2009. Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara [You Only Live Once]. Directed by Zoya Akhtar. 2011.

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