Lessons from Kargil

EVERY society is intensely concerned about the way its children grow up and every generation has definite views about the way the next generation should be brought up. Key social institutions, such as family and school, are constantly engaged in the process of shaping and training individuals to adapt to the values and expectations of the given society. This is the process sociologists and social psychologists call "socialisation". Competing perspectives on socialisation have emphasised either the role of nature or that of nurture, while the increasingly dominant position in socialisation research is the "interactive" model which suggests that basic genetic predispositions must be nurtured within the family so that the child's potential is realised. The contributions in this volume adopt the interactive model which, as the editor points out, is appropriate for the ethno-theories of child development in India.

Krishna Kumar, in an innovative use of the autobiography in social science research, discusses the role of colonialism as a historical agency of socialisation. In an analysis of Two Under The Indian Sun by Jon and Rumer Godden, an account of growing up in an English household in eastern India during the period of the First World War, Kumar explores the world of the two little girls within the confines of a colonial bungalow. Through the relationship between the children of the colonial master and his servants, we see that the latter served not only as playmates and adult companions to the former, but also as informants and interpreters of the strange and often bewildering world outside. The essay demonstrates how socialisation and accretion of cultural meanings are significantly related to the historical context. In another methodologically creative paper, Gayatri Chatterjee analyses the role of nursery rhymes in the socialisation of children. Examining the Bengali chhara as part of the "myth-making apparatus" of the community, she shows how these verses combine imagination, fantasy and nonsense to construct complex narratives about society and culture.

Two articles deal with language socialisation in the multi- lingual Indian environment. Understood as a dual process - "socialisation through the use of language and socialisation to use language" - language socialisation in India assumes special significance as children grow up surrounded by family, friends, teachers and the media speaking simultaneously in different languages. Ajit Mohanty et al map out the various stages of development in multi-lingual socialisation that an Indian child passes through. Initially, the child learns to differentiate between different languages and gains social awareness of languages in use (for example, by recognising context-specific choice of language). Gradually, by the time the child is seven- years old, he or she assigns functional roles to languages and gathers higher-order competence to make appropriate linguistic switches in different contexts. Nandita Chaudhary empirically examines how early communicative interactions between family members and the young child help in socialising the child. Such familial routines provide rich cultural information from which the child constructs a coherent social order.

In one of the more thought-provoking articles in the volume, T. S. Saraswathi explores the familiar questions of whether there is a distinct stage of adolescence in India between childhood and adulthood. Arguing that adolescence is "the invention of a technological, industrial society that is marked by a discontinuity between childhood and adulthood", she attempts to show through empirical research, that the concept of adolescence is both gendered and class-based. She finds that except in the highest socio-economic groups, the lives of girls are marked by child-adult continuity, with limited freedom and options and oversocialised into a patriarchal culture. In the case of boys, those in the lower socio-economic strata, because of the compulsion to earn before they learn, can ill-afford the luxury of adolescence or even late childhood, the play stage. In contrast, middle class boys live under a high degree of parental control, in a competitive academic environment, and are motivated by high career aspirations. Their continued material and emotional dependence on parents suggests a delayed adolescence into early adulthood. The class of children who really enjoy a distinct adolescent phase in their lives are those from the upper classes. Greater freedom to experiment, relative freedom from parental supervision, access to personal transport, and a disposable income that enables them to indulge in consumerism are some of the factors that allow upper class children in India to enjoy the kind of adolescence experienced by the Western middle classes.

The gendered nature of socialisation discussed briefly by Saraswathi is more fully explicated in the section on "Gender Perspectives", clearly the most critical part of the book. Sex- selective foeticide, female infanticide, dowry deaths and low female literacy rates in India are only the more obvious and visible indicators of gender inequities in a patriarchal society.

Individual as well as institutional insensitivity to gender issues is often a function of gendered socialisation.

Kamala Ganesh, however, resists the representation of girls and women, the primary subjects of gendered socialisation, as passive victims, and asserts that they are "active agents who attempt to shape their immediate realities". By examining socialisation within patrilineal kinship, she suggests that the structural lags and ambivalences in the Indian structure allow women to "bargain with patriarchy", negotiate a position for themselves as acting subjects. Sudha Bhogle's essay examines gender roles in the Indian context, with particular emphasis on the role of culture in the development of gender identity. She discusses the influence of Indian (Hindu) culture on gender identity and gender role behaviour.

Bhargavi Davar, in the perceptive article, offers a "feminist proposal" on mental distress. Her main thesis is that women suffer more mentally for the moral burden that carry in inter- subjective situations that produce a high degree of stress. She suggests that the moral-affective aspect of women's identity is cultivated from childhood through process of socialisation. This process provides them with psychological traits that make them more vulnerable to mental distress.

Nandini Bhattacharjee's highly readable ethnography of gender socialisation in a primary school highlights the continuities between socialisation into gender roles within the family context and gender socialisation through schooling. The last section of the book includes three applied perspectives on socialisation by medical and mental health professionals as well as by child development experts.

This volume emerged out of a symposium in 1995 on "socialisation in the Indian setting" with participation from scholars in child development and allied disciplines. It is a significant contribution to the existing literature in India on cross- cultural and developmental psychology. Many of the contributors to the volume not only provide competent reviews of recent trends in contemporary theory and research in the field, but also exhibit their own methodological inventiveness and theoretical and inter-disciplinary acuity.

VINOD PAVARALA

Culture, Socialisation And Human Development: Theory, Research And Applications In India, edited by T. S. Saraswathi, Non- fiction, Sage, p. 438, Rs. 495.

Indian Review Of Books

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