Malcolm Charles

Introduction to Anthropology
Section 2
September 24, 2014
A Comparison of Two Cultures Ideas of Family and Dating
Recently, I was fortunate enough to be able to conduct an interview with a beautiful
young woman, whom I shall refer to as Ms. Padukone. Now, I had been friends with Ms.
Padukone for a while before this, so setting up the interview itself was relatively easy;
furthermore, I knew that she would be the perfect person to interview when I discovered that my
topic would require someone whose native culture is not American, for Ms. Padukone was born
and grew up in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. So, I notified Ms. Padukone, via text message, of
the time frame with which I was given to work and the topic of the interview I was requesting to
conduct with her; I was going to ask her about her culture of origin and her experience of
American culture. Ms. Padukone sent me a text message back saying that she would be able to
meet with me that upcoming Sunday, and I could interview her over lunch. So, on Sunday,
September 21, 2014, Ms. Padukone and I met for lunch at the Catherine Burrow Refectory here
at Rhodes College, where I conducted the interview, which lasted approximately 25 to 30
minutes.
From my interview with Ms. Padukone, I learned that, in India, the whole concept of
family is quite different from what it is in America; furthermore, I was made aware that dating is
much more stigmatized in India than it is here in America.
First, I learned that the entire family concept is viewed very differently in India than it is
here in the United States. In the United States, parents generally raise their children until around
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the age of 18, at which point their children move out and make something of themselves on their
own, be it college, a job, or what have you. Then, later in life, when their children have
established themselves in the world, and the parents have grown old, it is a widely accepted
practice for their children to place the now elderly parents in some institution to live out the
remainder of their lives and die. It is extremely different in India. In India, parents still raise their
children, but they never really expect them to leave the house really. They are not and do not
really prepare for them to leave, even when going to school and working in their adult years,
many Indian families children continue to live with their parents as adults, or if their children
did move out to make something of themselves, there is something akin to an unwritten and
unspoken agreement that the parents will move into their childrens home where they will pretty
much switch roles for the remainder of the parents lives; that is, their now adult children will
take care of the parents until they die. In fact, Ms. Padukone not only informed me of this, but
also told me that she shares personal affinity towards this area of cultural difference between her
native India and the United States of America; back home in India, her parents still, to this day,
want her to return home and live with them and go to school in India. Moreover, in India, the
family as it is thought of there, includes what Americans refer to as their extended family; that
is, their immediate family along with aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, et cetera. Ms.
Padukone was, once again, able to confirm this with me on a personal level; back in Mumbai, her
grandparents own a condominium in which not only her grandparents, but also their children
now adultstheir grandchildren, along with various cousins, and brothers and sisters all live.
Secondly, in India, dating and sex are both heavily stigmatized; for instance, Indian
movies have just now started to include kissing scenes in them. Sex is apparently an extremely
stigmatized topic in and of itselfMs. Padukone proposed that this could be a result of the more
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rigidly outlined gender roles that continue to exist in Indian society. In Indian society, the whole
topic of sex itself is not really discussed openlyit is very hush-hush, almost as if sex was
something like a secret that you were not supposed to tell anyone. The way that it was explained
to me by Ms. Padukone in my interview with her was for me to think about talking your parents
about your sex life and multiply that by like three or five. That being said, there is a significant
difference between the way of life and thinking between those who live in rural India and those
who live in metropolitan India. According to Ms. Padukone, those people who live in rural India
generally clingfor lack of a better termto the more traditional of Indian cultural beliefs,
systems, and practices. In her experience, those families that live in rural India are the ones that
are most inclined to continue to practice arranged marriages.
She proposes that this practice of arranged marriage as well as the influence that gender
roles continue to have in her native culture as two possible contributors to the stigma that is
placed on dating in Indian culture. The way that Ms. Padukone explained it was that due to the
practice of arranged marriage in India, there is no real reason for dating because you do not need
to be searching for someone with whom to fall in love, for your parents are picking your future
spouse for you. This is in contrast to here in the United States where arranged marriages were
never a significant part of our culture to begin with; In America, dating is pretty much an
accepted practice and is seen as the normal process by which someone single searches for and
eventually finds someone with whom they fall in love and to whom they get married.
The influence that gender roles continue to have in her culture of origin, is another factor
that Ms. Padukone suggested could be contributing to the stigmatization of dating in Indian
society. Regardless of whether or not one belongs to a family that still practices arranged
marriage, Indian society as a whole still features gender roles in their culture; that is, in India, it
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has been a long held cultural belief that women are subservient to men in society. That being
said, in her native culture, there are certain things that a woman is supposed to learn how to do,
such as how to clean and how to cook; additionally, the time that many women in America would
use to begin to date, Ms. Padukone informed me that many women in India watch and learn how
to cook and how to clean properly from their mothers, which they actually have time to do
because of the fact that they dont need to date due to their parents searching for a spouse for an
arranged marriage. So, essentially, those members of Indian society who continue to practice
arranged marriages, whom according to Ms. Padukone are still quite plentiful in number, gender
roles and arranged marriage themselves seem to have developed, whether intentionally or not, in
such a way that the cultural construct of gender roles helps to supplement or augment if you will,
the other cultural construct of arranged marriage and vice versa; that is, the time freed up for
women by the fact that they are not dating due to having an arranged marriage is perfectly suited
for the development of young women into what traditional Indian culture viewed as proper
adult women, who knew how to properly cook and clean and raise children.
So, through the interview that I was able to set up with a friend of mine, Ms. Padukone,
who was born and raised in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India, I gained invaluable knowledge and
insight into a society whose culture is completely different from my own. Also, on a more basic
anthropological level, I gained my first experience conducting an interview with someone for the
purpose of using the information given to me to act as a major contribution to an academic paper
that I was to be writing. For all of this and much more, I would like to once again say thank you
to Ms. Padukone for her time and willingness to be interviewed.

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