speaking about independence and family closeness: socialisation beliefs of immigrant indian hindu...
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This article was downloaded by: [Western Kentucky University]On: 17 October 2014, At: 06:13Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
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Speaking About Independence andFamily Closeness: Socialisation Beliefsof Immigrant Indian Hindu Parents inthe United StatesHemalatha Ganapathy-ColemanPublished online: 16 Dec 2013.
To cite this article: Hemalatha Ganapathy-Coleman (2013) Speaking About Independenceand Family Closeness: Socialisation Beliefs of Immigrant Indian Hindu Parents in theUnited States, Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 42:4, 393-410, DOI:10.1080/17475759.2013.843198
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Speaking About Independence andFamily Closeness: Socialisation Beliefsof Immigrant Indian Hindu Parents inthe United States
Hemalatha Ganapathy-Coleman
This paper is based on a yearlong cultural psychological study of immigrant IndianHindu parents in the United States. I examine here their repeated use of two phrases
—“be independent” and “be close to family”—that they articulated as their most val-ued socialisation goals. I argue that although these English terms are seemingly self-evident, the meaning the parents attached to them, in conjunction with their simulta-
neous emphasis on cultural and religious-moral goals, was influenced by the contentencapsulated in the cultural and religious script of Sanskar, a Hindi concept for which
there is no semantic equivalent in English.
Keywords: Indian American Hindu; Immigrant Parents; Beliefs; Independence; Family
Closeness; Sanskar
(Received 14 January 2013; accepted 8 September 2013)
Bilingualism, if not multilingualism, was a fact of life for me in India. As an
urban, middle-class Indian, I frequently conversed with my peers in English, butwe also fluidly switched into Hindi or Gujarati or borrowed words from those
languages to convey something that defied perfect explanation in English. Afterrelocating to the United States, I met many urban, middle-class European and
African Americans who spoke only English. While they perceived me as speakingEnglish differently than they did, I was struck by how differently I thought from
my counterparts. I became aware of my “Indianness”1 as something distinctive andhave no doubt that most immigrants experience this type of revelation. Forexample, despite being fluent in English, I discovered anew that some Hindi and
Correspondence to: Hemalatha Ganapathy-Coleman, Department of Communication Disorders, Counselling,
School and Educational Psychology, Bayh College of Education, Terre Haute, IN 47809, USA. Email: Hema.
� 2013 World Communication Association
Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 2013
Vol. 42, No. 4, 393–410, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17475759.2013.843198
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Gujarati words have no equivalents in English. Settling for a crude translation was
the only option, one that inevitably left me feeling dissatisfied because suchrenderings always fell short of the essence of those ideas. One such word was
Sanskar (adj. Sanskari), which was used by the Indian American Hindu parents inmy study as they discussed their beliefs and approach to childrearing, and which I
analyse in this paper. Roughly meaning “cultured,” it is a complex term that isregularly used by parents in North and West India to convey the characteristics of
an ideal child.From a distinguished line of interdisciplinary scholarship, we know that
language serves to socialise the individual into a particular socio-cultural world-view, for widely shared ways of thinking in a society are preserved in its ways ofspeaking (Gumperz & Levinson, 1996; Humboldt, 1836/1988; Kramsch, 1998;
Lucy, 1996; Sapir, 1949; Sweetser, 1987; Vygotsky, 1934, 1978; Wertsch, 1985,1991; Whorf, 1984; Wierzbicka, 2002, 2005; Wilson & Sperber, 2004). Once
appropriated, language makes possible more organised and integrated forms ofhuman thought, offering the individual new ways of conceptualising the
world. This inventive aspect of language, or “the word’s creative work on itsreferent” (Bakhtin, 1935/1981, p. 282), is enhanced further as it is passed on
intergenerationally or internationally or interculturally. In short, language is apsychological tool that is first learned, and then used to re-imagine the world(Vygotsky, 1978).
Focusing on the appropriation and nativisation of English in India, Kachru(1985, 2005) noted that as a result of 300 years of British rule, English—or rather,
the variant called Indian English—is privileged in India over the hundreds ofwidely used native languages (Fishman & Garcıa, 2011; Kachru, Kachru, & Nelson,
2006; Mohanty, 2010; Safran, 1999). On the other side of the world, agenciesand institutions in the United States expect immigrants to use English, the
state-sponsored language, in order to take advantage of social and economicopportunities. Many middle-class immigrant Indians are able to do so because they
can speak fluent English, and are highly educated professionals who are well accul-turated structurally and economically (Khandelwal, 2002; Kibria, 2002). In some ofthe research, language loss has been linked to culture loss, but Wierzbicka (2005)
suggests that bilingual people often remain affiliated to the conceptual world oftheir mother tongue even as they live in two (or more) languages. Although the
change in language can signal enormous shifts in perspective for immigrants, andeven though distinct sets of concepts originating in different languages can clash in
the life of a bilingual individual, “Under certain circumstances, even living withtwo languages can mean inhabiting, to a large extent, a single conceptual world,
with a double vocabulary but a single set of concepts” (Wierzbicka, 2005, p. 8).Building on the scholarship mentioned above, as well as other studies (Goddard,
2003, 2006; Goddard & Wierzbicka, 2004, 2010; Wierzbicka, 1996, 2006, 2010;
Wong, 2004, 2006, 2010), I focus on the language-culture link in a group of 10middle-class immigrant Indian Hindu parents in the United States, who live in
more than one language community. I analyse what certain English words mean to
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these parents, the values embodied in the English words, and how Indian parents
interpret the words differently from European and African American parents. Thecultural psychological study (D’Andrade, 1984, 1999; Shweder, 1996) of Hindu
parents of Asian Indian origin residing in Baltimore, Maryland, that informed thispaper was concerned with the beliefs that parents held around socialisation goals
for their children (Ganapathy-Coleman, 2004). The theoretical backdrop for thisstudy was provided by Super and Harkness’s (1986) notion of the developmental
niche, which proposes that the child’s context comprises three mutually coordi-nated structural components: physical and social settings, customs of childcare,
and the culturally based psychology of caregiving. Here I focus on the thirddimension of the niche, the implicit models (Goodnow & Collins, 1990; Strauss,2005) of child development and socialisation held by children’s caregivers, which
orient parenting practice.
Methods
The methods employed to gain access, over a one-year period, to the beliefs of the
10 parents in this study—who have been given the pseudonyms Hetal, Jalpa,Komal, Lakshmi, Naina, Neeta, Pallavi, Pooja, Raj, and Shailesh—included a
caregiver diary, an ecological inventory to record the various resources available totheir children, several in-depth interviews, and participant observations.2 During
the initial visits to caregivers’ homes, I provided each child’s primary caregiverwith a diary for keeping a detailed record, for one week, of the child’s daily
routine and recurrent activities. I then analysed the entries in the diaries for eachfamily’s recurrent routines and activities in order to customise and personalise an
ecological inventory, which was used to record information about the resourcesavailable to the child, such as co-participants for activities, games, toys, computers,etc. Posing questions such as “What does this mean to you? What do you think it
means to your child?” enabled me to explore the personal meanings that a parentattached to particular recurrent activities. The significance that was ascribed to
those activities was used to infer some tentative themes and implicit ideas thatparents appeared to value and that generally informed their approach to
childrearing. These themes, preserved in the parents’ own words, provided thestarting point for the first in-depth interview, in which I posed questions to obtain
clarity about the themes. On the basis of the responses received in the firstinterview, other aspects of parental belief systems were explored in the next set ofthree interviews, including socialisation goals, factors influencing the attainment of
stated goals, responsibilities of home and school in socialising the child, parents’perceptions of their child’s strengths and needs, and the attributions they expressed
for those perceived strengths and needs. Participant observation, usually at theirhomes, was used throughout the study to recognise contextual concerns that shape
parental beliefs. Over a one-year period, I visited each family six times, spendingbetween one and four hours per visit.
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The parents, who were from various parts of India, mostly used English during
the interviews, supplementing it with three regional languages: Hindi, Tamil, andGujarati, all of which I am fluent in. The socialisation beliefs of these parents
coalesced around four themes, preserved in their own words: “be independent/stand on your own feet,” “be close to the family/family closeness,” “understand
themselves/you understand yourself only when you know your origins,” and “havegood morals and values.” Congruent with Vygotsky (1934), I adopt the perspective
that a word’s inner meaning, which is contextualised and culturally based—notjust its traditional dictionary meaning—is the perfect unit for analysing the unity
of thought and speech. The themes, “be independent,” “be close to the family,”“understand themselves,” and “have good morals and values,” emerged frequentlyfrom the parents from the ecological inventory and during repeated in-depth
interviews. The definitional elements of these themes, as described by the parents,revealed culture-specific beliefs and values. Although the parents did not use these
themes/words directly with their children in my presence, these words and thevalues they encapsulate orient their parenting practice. Sometimes the children
were visibly listening or were within earshot when the parents explained thesethemes to me. The parents also reported what they said or did with their children
to inculcate these ideas. Their claims were corroborated by what I observed duringmy visits and what they had documented in their diaries. For these reasons, thethemes are analysed as cultural keywords in this paper. I focus first on unpacking
two of the English phrases that the parents repeatedly used as cultural keywords inarticulating the socialisation goals they regard as important as they raise their chil-
dren, “be independent/stand on your own feet” and “be close to family/familycloseness,” which they claim ownership of by attaching very particular meanings to
them (cf. Ganapathy-Coleman, 2013). The culturally inflected meanings that theyattached to these seemingly self-evident words, in conjunction with their emphasis
on cultural and religious-moral goals, reflected the influence of Hindu ideology,especially the complex notion of Sanskar, which signifies a cluster of qualities that
mark a “good” child. Due to its distinct socio-cultural history rooted in IndianHindu worldviews, it has no semantic equivalent in English. Even when theparents did not use the word Sanskar, the concept it denoted underlay their use of
various English words and phrases.
Results and Discussion
“Be Independent”
When the parents in this study discussed with me the socialisation goals that they
most wanted their children to achieve, they frequently mentioned “beindependent.” The Merriam Webster dictionary’s definition of the word“independent” is “not subject to control by others: self-governing; not affiliated
with a larger controlling unit.” The term is often used in many parts of theWestern world as the prototypical schema for “individuality,” in association with
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the idea of individual autonomy and the concomitant notion of self-actualisation.
By contrast, the parents in this study tended to define independence as asocialisation goal using various combinations of four subthemes that they saw as
interrelated: adherence to a daily routine, discipline, responsibility, and obedience.Although it might be tempting to discuss these four subthemes separately, to do
so would create a set of artificial analytical categories. In order to preserve theintegrity of the parents’ nuanced conceptualisation of “be independent,” I keep the
four subthemes together and elaborate on them below using examples.When Neeta advanced “independence” as a crucial socialisation goal for her
children, she explained:
Independence means you have to have certain self-discipline.… you have to do allthose … daily things.… So I do tell him, … “this is what you have to do duringthat time period,” so [he] plans it himself. There are certain parameters given tothem to work within.… “My goal in my day-to-day is … I have to keep my thingsin a certain place.” Just personal little things … knowing what … to do, how …to do it … that’s very important and helping them recognize those things.… Itmay start off as telling them, “do it in a certain order,” then it becomes part of …what’s important to them … he is doing most of it himself…. We just have to say,“Rahul, are you done?” “Are you ready?” Just like a reminder ….
Raj: … certain aspects of dinner … are always done by them, like setting thetable … and homework … on their own. But we are always involved.
Here Raj and Neeta illustrate how they support the development of independencein their son, which they value as a personal quality associated with a sense ofresponsibility. They conceptualise independence in terms of unprompted obser-
vance of a daily routine. Dinacharya, a Sanskrit word meaning “daily routine,” iscentral to the lexicon of Ayurveda, a system of traditional medicine indigenous to
the Indian subcontinent. Dinacharya—Dina, “day,” plus acharya, “to follow”—isthe Ayurvedic prescription for a balanced daily regimen that is believed to lead to
health and happiness (Narayan, 2010; Vinaya, Aravind, & Tripathy, 2012).Although none of the parents specifically used this term, the emphasis they placed
on a daily routine functionally resonated with it.In addition to references to the daily routine, the parents also frequently invoked
the word “discipline” in discussing the concept of independence. For example,
Neeta said, “You have to have certain self-discipline.” Pallavi clarified:
Independence is that discipline.… They go to school, then they are back, I amhere.… We are doing that together very routinely … food … bag pack-up forschool, then plan … what next, start the homework … they have to study first,they cannot be busy playing … they have to be responsible.
Pallavi similarly situates independence within disciplined adherence to a daily
routine. Another mother, Hetal, explained, “Independence … means discipline,”which she then described:
Discipline is when they come from school, if they want to eat, they can eat inthe kitchen, not in the living room. They cannot go out before I come home …
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when they go out, they cannot touch anybody’s things.… And in [e]speciallydiscipline, both kids have to give respect to elder people.
Like Neeta and Raj, Hetal defines independence as adherence to a prescribed routineand set of rules, but she also strongly emphasises the need to do things at the right
time and place. Such parental directives also communicate the implicit expectationthat the child will comply out of a sense of obligation towards the family. Her expla-
nation of “discipline,” articulated as a series of “can do” and “cannot do” injunctionsthat de-emphasise personal autonomy, highlights the emphasis on action autonomy,expressed through the fulfilment of socially obligated duties (Keller, 2012).
While recognising the supportive role of the parents, Pallavi also brings theattribute of responsibility (“ … they have to be responsible”) into her definition of
independence. However, as Hetal speaks about not touching other people’s belong-ings, she inserts other qualities—such as integrity, exemplified in self-control and
respect for what belongs to others—into her conceptualisation of her chosen value,independence as discipline. Then, by incorporating the notion of deference to
elders, she highlights the idea of age-based authority and parental obedience.Age-based authority is an essential ordering principle in Indian society, legitimised
by the fact that age places the adult naturally above the child in terms of not onlyphysical maturity but also knowledge and experience (Kakar, 1981). All this meansthat in Hetal’s personalised understanding, the concept of independence as disci-
pline is interlocked with several other related values, such as self-control, personalintegrity, and deference for age, all of which converge to enable one to do the right
thing at the right time in the right way.Naina additionally stresses the role played by parents in socialising a child into
this quality:
Independence is about discipline … if certain rules are set by the parents at home… how to do things in timely fashion, or how to respect or how to obey theelder people … how to talk to people, how to learn manners … those are waysyou can teach discipline. (My emphases)
Similarly, Neeta clearly stated, “So I do tell him, … “This is what you have todo.”” In Naina, Neeta, Pallavi, and Hetal’s view, children learn independence when
parents set and enforce certain rules, however small, at home. What the parentssaid they believed in and did in childrearing was also visible in their practice. They
often interrupted the interviews to issue directives or conduct check that kept theirchildren on track with the various routines and activities they had chronicled for
me in their caregiver diaries.In contrast to these immigrant Indian Hindu parents, when European American
parents speak of independence, they do not talk about the ability to follow a daily
routine. They talk instead about being secure with oneself, independence inthought and action, realising one’s full potential, and personal autonomy (Wong,
2004) as constituting the essence of independence while African American parentsdefine it in terms of children’s ability to “think for themselves” and “be a leader,
not a follower” (Ganapathy-Coleman, 2004).
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For the Indian American Hindu parents, the inculcation of independence in the
child paradoxically requires that they initially maintain a high degree of controlover their child’s day-to-day life. They provide structure by establishing a clear
daily routine that they support initially through explicit directives, “This is whatyou have to do.” Telling the child exactly what to do, when, and how, eliminates
confusion and leaves little to chance. Later, they continue to reinforce adherenceto the daily routine and the rules of discipline, responsibility, and obedience by
means of more indirect verbal reminders (“Are you done?” “How should you greetan Indian aunty?”) and supervision. According to Pallavi, a child who is on the
verge of achieving the goal of becoming independent needs no verbal directionand only minimal support; the mere symbolic presence of a more competentindividual is sufficient: “He’s about to get independent, but he likes someone next
to him.” For the parents in this study, the objective was for the daily routine, andthe other qualities that make up the concept of independence, to develop from
being chiefly driven by the parents (“it may start off as telling them”) to beingsymbolically refereed (“he likes someone next to him”) to being completely self-
governed by the child (“It becomes part of them”). That is, the ultimate goal is forthese qualities to transform from social or interpsychological processes to appro-
priated intrapsychological functioning or inner speech (Vygotsky, 1978). Whenasked how her son is doing with regard to being independent, Hetal said, “Whenhe wakes up in the morning … I do not have to tell anything.… Because he know
that.… That has become his routine.” Relative to Raj and Neeta’s son, for Hetal’sson, a formerly interpsychological process had already transmuted into intrapsy-
chological mental functioning. Once this happens, it might be said that the goal of“independence” has been attained.
Overall, the Indian American parents who participated in this study displayedvariations in their understanding of independence. But they all tended to define
independence in terms of discipline and responsibility, as seen in the ability toobediently follow one’s daily routine, which is socially obligated, without being
externally prompted. They socialised their children into this goal predominantly bycreating a routine for the child that they supported through direct strategies suchas explicit instructions as well as more indirect approaches like reminders.
We could present their conceptualisation in universally comprehensible words orNatural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) (Goddard & Wierzbicka, 2010; Wierzbicka,
1972), or as a cultural script through the following formulation:
When someone says something like “I want you to be independent,” that means:I want you to know that it is good to do some thingsyou know what these things areI want you to know when to do these thingsI want you to know where to do these thingsI want you to know how to do these thingsI want you to know who to do these things forI want you to do these things when you have to do them
because you know you have to do themnot because I say to you, “I want you to do them now.”
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However, in order to preserve the uniqueness and cultural specificity of what they
were originally trying to communicate (Shweder, 2013), we could say that in usingthe words “discipline,” “routine,” “responsibility,” and “obedience” to explicate
the keyword “independence,” the attitudinal message that these immigrant Indianparents appeared to be trying to convey to their children was,
I want you to be independent. By that I mean that I want you to perform yourdaily routine, on your own, in a disciplined and responsible manner. I thinkyou will do this because you want to obey your parents, whom you respect, andbecause you should, as a member of a community.
The elucidation of the term “independence” by this group of parents resonates
with Mines’s (1994) contention that among many Indian parents, autonomy isconceptualised in relation to responsibility. This theme is also consistent with
Keller’s (2012) idea of communal psychological autonomy, which combines actionautonomy, or the capacity to perform an action in a responsible manner, and
psychological autonomy, as exemplified by the “self-contained child” (p. 13).Although the parents in this study used the English phrase “be independent” to
convey a goal that they value for their children, when they explained the expres-sion, they framed it in terms of a different knowledge of the world than we might
assume. Their emphasis on disciplined adherence to a daily routine characterisedby ethical acts is one of the strands of Sanskar, an idea to which I will return.Sanskar derives from the word Samskara, which broadly denotes rituals that
demonstrate the rules of conduct that a disciplined individual must follow(Radhakrishnan, 1948; Srinivas, 1998). The parents demonstrated a similar
dynamic appropriation of words from English to offer a different sense from thatsuggested by their abstract meanings in their use of “family closeness,” another
socialisation goal they emphasised as crucial in this study.
“Be Close to Family/Family Closeness”
A primary socialisation goal for all 10 parents, illustrated with many examples, was
for their child to have a close relationship with his or her family, which theycaptured in the phrase “be close to family” or “family closeness.” Closeness was
defined as spending time with the family, especially “doing things together,” andbonding with everyone, including members of the extended family
(Ganapathy-Coleman, 2004). Hetal explained what she means by “family closenessby keeping family relations”:
Like … sometimes we go to my brother-in-law’s house to spend the night so atleast they can know … the relation between us…. At least once a month we goouting, like in science center … sometimes the Baltimore Zoo, different places.
Although Hetal highlighted their planned family outings to places with educationalvalue, such as the city zoo, it emerged clearly during the interviews that the visits
to the home of her brother-in-law had greater affective significance for her than
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their solo outings as a nuclear family. She went on to talk about how she and her
husband make it a priority to help other members of the extended family invarious ways (e.g. financially, by providing advice on various topics) so that their
children can learn by example that helpfulness towards family members is naturaland expected. By her own admission, the routine visits to relatives were
time-consuming, but Hetal considered them worthwhile because they cementedfamily ties in a foreign country for her children. Neeta and Raj also spoke of peri-
odic visits with Raj’s mother, who lived with Raj’s brother and his family a fewhours away, as well as ritualised visits with their son to a popular fast food restau-
rant on Sundays. Thus, for Neeta, Raj, and Hetal, there was a systematised or pre-dictable element to fashioning family togetherness.In contrast, Pallavi, Naina, and Komal characterised family closeness and quality
time in terms of unplanned moments of conversation, joy, physical closeness, andplayfulness. When asked for an example of family closeness as a socialisation goal,
Pallavi said:
I am sitting, like, and then [he is] telling what happened in school … teasing, howhe responded and how he was feeling huuurt … what should he have done, na,was he right in his reaction …? And so it’s more like maximum talk at bedtime …when they should be closing their eyes, their life story comes out.… Many times,with older one, I have laughing session. We’ll be rooolling (laughs heartily).
For Pallavi, quality time is epitomised by a psychologically safe environment that
allows for uninterrupted, open, one-on-one conversation, disclosure of emotionalvulnerabilities, counselling to resolve difficult situations, and shared spontaneous
laughter when she puts her children to bed.Neeta also spoke of family closeness, invoking evenings spent reading together
or playing tennis, board games, or Scrabble, and how her son participates eagerlyin helping her to cook.Naina demonstrated the idea of family closeness with two examples of shared
activity: spontaneously joining her children to watch a movie with them, andlooking at family photo albums together and reminiscing over the parents’ past. “I
just … watch whatever movie they are watching and we giggle and joke.… Some-times we go through photographs and show them this is how I looked when I was
that and how I looked when I was this.” Here Naina tells us how she uses the timespent watching a movie to bond with her sons. Then she mentions looking at
family photographs with her children, explicitly invoking the indexical, or“this-has-been” quality of photos. She thereby offers us a glimpse into her use ofthe activity of looking at family photographs as an avenue for affiliating her
children with their parents, not as the people they are now, but as the people theyonce were. Viewing these photographs enriches the present by offering moments of
togetherness. It simultaneously paves the way towards the future in two ways. One,it creates anticipation of everything that was yet to come in the lives of the young
selves of their parents. Two, it creates in them an expectancy for themselves rightnow, as children who will become adults one day, like their parents. Roland Barthes
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(1980) called this the “future anterior” sense of photography (p. 96). By connecting
the past, the present and the future, photographs thus construct a coherentnarrative, through pictures, of the family (K. Coleman, personal communication,
January 2, 2013). Family bonding becomes multi-temporal.Komal also invoked movie/television watching to illustrate family closeness, but
her notion of family closeness was slightly different. She talked of how her daugh-ter cuddles up to her in a big chair in the family room, playing with her hair and
gazing admiringly at her. She concluded with, “….gosh, they are too much, theywon’t leave me alone (laugh)!” Komal thus casts family closeness in terms of time
spent together in playful physical proximity, and her awareness that her daughterconsiders her a role model. For her, the act of television watching is subsidiary tothe rich significance of the mother-child encounter itself. Komal’s complaint “They
won’t leave me alone!” actually celebrates the sacrifice of privacy in childrearing.In contrast with most of Pallavi, Hetal, Raj, and Neeta’s examples, in which
interpersonal encounters within the family unit were planned as purely mutuallyoriented, Naina and Komal’s illustrations of episodes of family closeness were
characterised by an initial external orientation. That is, the family encounteroccurred initially in the context of watching a movie or perusing family photo-
graphs together or cooking together in Neeta’s case, but those activities were onlya pretext for emotionally connecting with one another.According to Komal, respect for the parents is the prerequisite for everything else,
I think first of all they should learn to respect their parents in order to bondwith the family. That is number one … then you can really … listen to them,and they can listen to you … to form that bond.
A child who respects his or her parents is more liable to listen to them when they
share their insights about school, relationships, and standards of behaviour. Whena child respectfully listens, the parents reciprocate by listening to the child to make
them feel understood, and to provide support and/or praise. Active mutual listen-ing creates mutual trust, and nurtures a sense of self-worth in the child, Komal
added, “You make it rewarding … creating more positive attitude than negative.…Listen to them more often so they feel like … someone is there.” Conversely, if a
child has no respect for their parents, these potentially mutually rewarding interac-tions never blossom, and the child will not be close to the family. Thus, Komalidentified the parents as the catalysts who create a close parent-child bond, while
also acknowledging the bi-directionality of the process. Hetal and Neeta alsoemphasised the importance of parents as role models in teaching children about
family closeness with the extended family through regular visits. Hetal argued, “Ifyou don’t teach the children, they will grow up and say, “My parents did not do
this, so why do I have to? I will not.” The parents hoped that if they demonstratedkin-keeping behaviour and incorporated it into a system of recurrent activities,
rather than merely talking about it, their children would understand the impor-tance of maintaining family ties and sustain the relationships that their parentshad worked so hard to maintain.
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In my broader study, European American parents conceptualised family
closeness primarily as family-as-refuge, which they cast in terms of the emotionalsecurity that children derive from the family (Ganapathy-Coleman, 2004). African
American parents emphasised good parent-child communication, but they alsohighlighted the vital importance for young boys of having relationships with older
male family members who can serve as role models and advisors. Family closenessas articulated by the Indian American Hindu parents included the importance of
emotional security and open communication, as emphasised by EuropeanAmerican and African American parents, but it also explicitly and much more
frequently and vividly incorporated the bright dimensions of laughter, the moredemonstrative aspects of love, and fun-filled time spent together.In general, when these Indian American parents were asked to explain “family
closeness’’ as a goal that they valued, they defined it in less didactic terms thanthey did the goal of independence. Family closeness was built strategically on a
foundation of respect for parental authority, compliance, mutual regard, and theidea of the parents as role models. Even so, they characterised their goal of
family closeness’’ in terms of shared planned and unplanned activities leading tolaughter, love, conversation, and togetherness with the immediate and extended
family. As a cultural script, their idea of family closeness’’ could be tentativelyframed as:
I want my child to think something like this:
My father, mother, brothers and sisters are part of something
I want to be part of this same thing
because of this, I want to be with them often
I want to do things with them often
I want to feel something good with them often
I know it will be good for me.
The attitudinal message they conveyed to their children was,
I want you to be close to your family. By this I mean we should spend timetogether working, laughing, playing, talking, and helping. I think you will beclose to your family if you listen to your parents with respect and love and ifthey listen to you.
As Wong (2004) observed about Singapore culture, among the immigrant Indian
parents in this study, too, the family, not the individual, was the basic unit of thecommunity. Family closeness among Indian American Hindus is marked by a kind
of ‘oneness.” By contrast, in European American families, no matter how close thefamily is, the members are still individuals. Viewed strategically, closeness and rela-
tional proximity within the family gave parents a chance to have more influence increating the conditions needed to foster independence and a sense of responsibilityin their children. In addition to the stressing of independence in routine, this
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emphasis on parental authority, filial respect, and closeness to the family is another
strand in the concept of Sanskar.The parents in this study appropriated the English terms “independence” and
“family closeness,” by using them as cultural keywords and defining them in waysthat incorporated some of the values encompassed in the concept of Sanskar, and
not in ways that are consistent with typical English uses. I will examine thisconcept more closely in the next section.
Sanskar: Independence, Family Closeness, and Cultural and Religious Goals
Besides emphasising family closeness and independence, the parents in this studyunderscored how important it was for their children to learn about their cultural
origins and their religion, Hinduism. In the cultural and religious socialisationgoals of the Indian parents, belief in the immanent greatness of ancient Indian
civilisation was always foregrounded (Ganapathy-Coleman, 2013). The emphasison “Indian” culture and Hinduism is also prescribed by the concept of Sanskar.Furthermore, the parents in this study disapproved of and rejected many elements
of “American” society for their children. This included the preoccupation theyperceived with what they saw as selfish individualism, the alleged acquisitiveness
and material wastefulness of life in the United States, and the lack of family unityas inferred from high divorce rates, low parental involvement, and “American”
children’s apparent disrespect of their parents.Naina talked at length about these worries, but it was only in a later conversa-
tion that she specifically used the term Sanskar, as she spoke about the qualitiesshe wanted her sons to develop. Jalpa, in contrast, explicitly used the word from
the beginning, as did Shailesh, and Hetal, who said of some children in her neigh-bourhood, “They don’t have good Sanskar.” While Shailesh said that teachingSanskar to children is important, Jalpa wanted her children to have friends who
had Sanskar; she ranked being Sanskari highly as a socialisation goal for herchildren, which she elaborated as “always telling the truth, not harming anyone,
being helpful, and being respectful of elders.” Emphasising the learning of Sanskaras an important socialisation goal in her scheme, Pallavi remarked simply, “Being
Sanskari is to have values.”As I analysed the significance of their particular combination of socialisation
goals—independence as disciplined, responsible, and obedient adherence to aroutine, family closeness as doing things together, and “Indian” cultural andHindu religious goals—it appeared that the parents had been making unspoken
references to the traditional concept of a Sanskari child all along. In fact, five outof the 10 parents explicitly invoked the term.
In a study of Hindu parental ethnotheories conducted among nearly 100middle-class Gujarati parents, the participants listed being Sanskari as one of the
most important characteristics of a “good” child (Saraswathi & Ganapathy, 2002).Being Sanskari involved social values, such as being respectful and obedient
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towards parents and other elders and being family-oriented, and personal-moral
values such as being truthful, humble, religious, trustworthy, modest, sincere, andkind (Misra, Srivastava, & Gupta, 1999). Sanskar is a difficult term to define
because of its many-faceted meaning. It comes from the Sanskrit word Samskara,which refers to the codified Hindu lifecycle rituals or sacraments (e.g. the
marriage ceremony) that symbolically transform an individual from a biological toa culturally and socially integrated being (Kakar, 1981; Radhakrishnan, 1948;
Srinivas, 1998). It is also related to the word Sanskriti, signifying cultural heritage.Used widely, particularly in northern and western India, Sanskar etymologically
carries the sense of “cultured” and “upbringing.” It is also considered to be synon-ymous with ethics, which are typically viewed as learned or received from parentsand other elders in one’s family through direct teaching, rule setting, and role
modelling. It is not uncommon for an individual who is badly behaved, illmannered, disrespectful towards elders, or immodest, or who seems to have a poor
understanding of right and wrong, to be characterised as lacking in Sanskar.Equally, a person who is courteous, well mannered, obedient and respectful
towards elders, knowledgeable about cultural mores and religion, modest, sincere,and truthful, and who generally adheres to a high ethical and moral standard, is
said to have excellent Sanskar.Thus, as a word in the domain of values, Sanskar fuses a wide range of social,
personal, cultural, and moral qualities into a single concept. And because it has no
semantic equivalent in English, it resides within a rich set of uniquely conceptua-lised social, personal, moral, and cultural-religious qualities, often emerging only
indirectly in the English utterances of the parents. The concept of Sanskar wasarticulated in two steps by the parents in this study. First, the terms “indepen-
dence” and “family closeness,” which conveyed two valued socialisation goals, wereascribed distinctive meanings that resonated with the idea of Sanskar; the aspect of
obedience that underlies the conceptualisation of both independence and familycloseness resonates with the ideal (Sanskari) child. Second, the meanings they
attached to these two terms were combined with socialisation goals in the areas ofculture and religion to more fully convey the notion of Sanskar, whether the termwas used explicitly or not.
There is no doubt that the experience of immigration changes at least someaspects of previously held cultural concepts. Yet, even as these parents used English
to communicate the socialisation goals that they valued for their children, thenotion of Sanskar informed their conceptualisation of those goals. Although not
all of the parents used the term Sanskar, and not all of the ideas that merge tocreate the concept were brought up, the parents wove together the threads of this
complex, culturally privileged concept through their use of various English wordsand phrases. They operationalised its core ideas in the socialisation goals theyvalorised for their children and which they used through speech and embodied
practice to socialise their children into their version of the cultural construction ofa “good” child. Sanskar is an idealised Hindu cultural script for conduct that is
often communicated intergenerationally through language that conveys
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ideologically saturated worldviews (Bakhtin, 1935/1981) and through its deliberate
incorporation into the daily routine.The parents in this study socialised their children into their conceptualisation of
a Sanskari child by setting and enforcing a routine that included planned andspontaneous events of family togetherness, daily prayer, and purposeful fortnightly
visits to the Hindu temple to mingle with other Indians. This regularity signalledto the children both the cultural centrality of these activities and the importance
of the values they embody. In participating in these routines, children learned, atthe ground level, the whats and hows of the activities while imbibing the values
contained in them (Bourdieu, 1990; Bruner, 1990). The parents anticipated thatonce they had inculcated the system of dispositions inherent to the concept ofSanskar into their children through routinised practice, it would become habitual
so that the thoughts and actions inherent in it would be spontaneously reactivatedin similar situations in the future.
The parents also socialised their children into the goals they valued throughdirect, verbalised injunctions about what to do or say and what not, through role
modelling, and by employing particular terms and concepts (such as discipline andSanskar) to represent the goals that guided their parenting. The term Sanskar is
saturated with ethnocultural, religious, and ideological meaning, as are other wordsthat capture facets of the concept. Their occasional explicit use of Sanskar issignificant, in that it demonstrates how a culturally shared word can act as a
repository for a set of valued social and cultural dispositions that the family as aninstitution can use in socialising children. An individual who has been socialised
into such culturally valued dispositions is marked as a member of that social andcultural group and becomes able to participate fully in it, now and in the future.
Concluding Remarks
Most of the parents in this study were sufficiently fluent in English to know thegenerally accepted meanings of the words they used. But in attempting to convey
the essence, in a different language, of a cultural ideal that they wanted to socialisetheir children into in a transnational context, they had developed specific internal
word meanings that assimilated those words into their particular conceptualsystem, reminding us that “meaning is the word viewed from the inside”
(Vygotsky, 1934, p. 244).Repeated conversations with the parents about the meanings of their utterances
oriented me to their unique, culturally suffused conceptual horizons, directing me
away from a decontextualised understanding of the words they used so fluently tocharacterise their socialisation goals. The results from my study denaturalise
the pragmatics of English by showing how a group of immigrant Indian parentsappropriated the English words they chose to use by refracting them through the
prism of the “Indian” worldviews and conceptual categories that informed theircultural heritage. In doing so, they turned linguistic signs into cultural signs,
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offering distinctively multivoiced3 and hybrid utterances that captured the ever-
changing, deeply contextualised nature of word meaning. Even as they participatedin the totemism of English as a dominant language, they redefined its use by infus-
ing it with their own culture, demonstrating its functional diversity as a signallingmode.
Drawing from the French psychologist Frederick Paulhan, who distinguishedbetween a word’s “sense” and its “meaning,” Vygotsky (1934) noted, “A word’s
sense is the aggregate of all the psychological facts that arise in our consciousnessas a result of the word. Sense is a dynamic, fluid, and complex formation, which
has several zones that vary in their stability. Meaning is only one of these zones ofthe sense … in different contexts, a word’s sense changes” (p. 276). In comparisonwith European American, or African American parents, very different associations
were activated for these Indian American parents when they used words such as“independence” and “family closeness.” Sufficiently accurate decoding and
inferential comprehension of the terms they used required not only more linguisticinformation, challenging Grice’s (1975) conversational maxim of quantity, in
which he recommends that no more information be provided than is strictlynecessary, but also an understanding, from the inside, of the cultural text and
context and the conceptual representations that they provided. The particular con-ceptions that the parents held shaped their actions, as seen in the routines andactivities they encouraged their children to participate in, and the words they used
to characterise the goals into which they wanted to socialise their children. Thecombinations of particular usages of words, routines, and activities likely serve to
socialise the children of these parents, over a period of time, into cultural beingswith specific construals of the world that bear the imprint of their heritage culture.
By using the words “independence” and “family closeness” in very particularways, in wanting “Indian” culture and Hindu religion for their children, using the
word Sanskar and rejecting selected elements of “American” culture, the parents inthis study created the ideal Indian child, the Sanskari child, within the language of
their adopted country. In doing so, they demonstrated their consciousness of thelaws and patterns that govern their conception of what they consider the most“Indian” forms of thinking and being.
The writing of this article was made possible by the undisturbed time and insti-tutional support offered by a Visiting Professorship at the Ontario Institute for
Studies in Education at the University of Toronto during 2012–13. Thanks are alsodue to Jock Wong, Editor of the special forum, and to the anonymous reviewers
for their helpful feedback.
Notes
[1] I use the terms “Indian” culture and “Indianness,” conscious that India is a diversenation-state and that there is no single “Indian” culture.
[2] This study utilised the methodology of the Baltimore Early Childhood Project (ECP), alongitudinal project (1993–1998) undertaken at the University of Maryland, Baltimore
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County, by Robert Serpell, Linda Baker, and Susan Sonnenschein (2005). The ECP exam-ined distinctive patterns of socialisation and parental beliefs in different socioculturalenvironments and how these variations impact children’s academic performance. Thebroader study that informed this paper compared the parenting beliefs of Asian Indian,African American, and Anglo American parents in Baltimore, Maryland (Ganapathy-Coleman, 2004). Here, the focus is on the beliefs of Asian Indian parents only.
[3] I use the term “multivoiced” because these parents have “rented” (Bakhtin, 1935/1981)the English language and imbued words with cultural meanings learned in India,requiring me to interpret/generate meaning from them in a transnational context.
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