The Performance of Friendship in Contemporary India

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. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi �0.��63/9789004344�98_0�� Nita Kumar - 9789004344198 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 01:52:16AM via free access <UN> 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. Nita Kumar - 9789004344198 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 01:52:16AM via free access <UN> 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 life- style 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. Nita Kumar - 9789004344198 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 01:52:16AM via free access <UN> 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.

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