On Culture

What is culture? How does it come into existence? How does it grow? How does it spread, or sustain?

I would like to draw a distinction between two types of culture – historical culture and experiential culture; and historical culture is merely experiential culture that used to exist at some point in the past but doesn’t anymore. It has receded into the “collective memory” of the society and lives on through stories, legends, oral traditions and, if they are lucky enough, artefacts. Note that if it is still alive through any customs that are followed in the present, it becomes a part of the experiential culture.

Experiential culture is exactly what it sounds like – culture that is experienced – whether through food, clothing, rituals, festivals, music, art, customs, dance forms and so on. It is something that happens in the here and now.

It could be claimed that “historical culture” as laid out above is, in fact, flawed since we are always affected by our past culture even if it may not live on in our daily lives – after all doesn’t it affect our thoughts and behaviour, however subtly, merely by occupying some portion of our consciousness?

Notice, though, that there are a few ways in which we interact with our cultural history. Let’s remember that culture keeps mutating, changing forms or evolving into something different. What, then, really counts as historical?

Certain cultural practices die out with time, for example Sati. For centuries considered as a part of Indian culture where the woman in a marital relationship “always belonged” to her husband, with time new ideas around the autonomy of women arose and swept this ritual aside – it is now a part of our historical culture and not experiential culture.

But notice how we engage with the idea – we certainly think about it in the present, horrified at how the woman had to sit with her husband on his pyre and sacrifice herself, but we take this ritual as a lesson around how society progresses and throws away older systems that impinge upon new ideas that arise in it, in this case that of one particular but important dimension of gender equality. We think of it with some sombreness and even relief but it doesn’t affect our current experiential culture, at least not directly. Its absence lives on in the form of a larger idea of gender equality, but the ritual in itself, and only by itself, doesn’t affect any experiential aspect of our present life. It only lives on in the lesson it taught us.

Let’s now talk about the opposite case, where a cultural element dies not because there was something inherently wrong with it, but simply because other systems arose that replaced it. Well, to be technically correct, we may not always be able to make normative judgements about cultural elements, and even when we may, it will generally be possible to find both positive and negative aspects in it; so, to be clear, what I am referring to is an overall assessment of that element as something that was in net positive or negative, both in its contemporaneous context and in the context of our present.

Let’s take the case of one of the major systems of education in ancient India – the gurukul pratha. Under this system, children from a young age were sent to a residency program under a sage who not only imparted them academic knowledge but also social values and principles. It meant the children were under his tutelage and led a disciplined life from their childhood which held them in good stead later on in their lives. To be accurate, this system hasn’t completely vanished and lives on in how education is imparted in modern Buddhist monasteries.

Did the gurukul pratha fade away as a result of any social backlash on how it wasn’t aligned with new ideas that were arising in medieval India? Absolutely not. Then what happened? Over time, noticeably during the Gupta empire, more institutionalised centres for learning started to come up or get consolidated, including universities like Nalanda . This gradual shift continued for many centuries until the first major impact came from the influence of Islamic systems of education with the rise of the Delhi Sultanate in the early 13th century. This continued during the period of the Mughal empire from 1526 to the middle of the 19th century, by which time the second major, and most devastating, impact came with the introduction of Macaulayism and the Woods Despatch of 1854, which officially ushered in Western education in India.

So cultural elements rise and fade with time, and there can be a complex interaction of a whole range of factors which decides which aspects stay and which disappear.

Let’s switch the prism and instead of looking at the past, turn our glance to the future.

Think of any museum that you have gone to and the objects that you may have looked at. The very fact that you are seeing them now, means someone in the past took the pains to preserve them for future generations. But how did they decide what to save and what to discard? Keep in mind that preserving any kind of artefact over long durations of time (more than a few decades) requires exceptional care and, importantly, finances. Barring cultural artefacts that could make it to the present without human intervention (like partially corroded items from the iron age or bronze age, or a shipwreck that dumped items into the seabed which got preserved due to low oxygen levels), any item that has made it to the present (Egyptian mummies, paintings, sculptures and so on) needed an intentional act at some point in the past. Some person or entity at that point felt it was important enough to be preserved.

What does that mean? Could that person foresee the importance of that thing for future generations? Or did they simply preserve the thing that was most important for them at that point of time? It can be difficult to ascertain, but it was most likely a combination of the two. In that sense, through that very choice, they were moulding a certain part of the future culture of their society.

Could they have known, though, how it would affect the future generations? The answer is no, they were only trying to do something that they felt was important, even necessary, at that point of time.

And so it happens. When we look into the future, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to gauge what will be important for the society at that point. All we can do in the here and the now is to try to preserve the things that we think are important so that it may be possible for our future society to be able to interact with and learn from what we have now. It is our message, our echo into the future.

Culture is not preserved in one day. It takes centuries. But the first act starts in this moment, and if we try to do something now, and build systems with the hope that they can save and sustain those symbols for centuries, then we may be able to bequeath a rich cultural heritage to our future generations.