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Yet alongside the literally breathtaking levels of pollution, and the whiskey-brown dust that enshrouds everything from cars to buildings to sidewalks, and the everyday presence of stray mutts, monkeys and cattle, as well as the fumes from nearby trash fires, a visitor can also catch vestiges of tea-caddy British colonialism, as well as dreamlike glimpses of hallucinogenic beauty.
Traveling in India, I was reminded again and again of its extreme contrasts: rich and poor, clean and unclean, modern and traditional. Exit your hotel into the steamy afternoon air, and you’ll find that traffic has come to a halt to permit a slow-moving cow to cross the road. (I once led a workshop attended by more than a hundred CEOs on behalf of a large Indian conglomerate. After spending two hours addressing every conceivable local political issue, I made the mistake of saying, “I think it’s fair to say that there are no sacred cows left—we’ve killed them all,” when my host sternly reminded me of the expression’s very origins.) Some streets, in cities like Mumbai and Delhi, can’t even be called streets as the word is traditionally defined. They are more like very large pathways, made up of mud and puddles, and lined by markets selling fruit and vegetables, or meat or fish that has been left hanging too long, or that is squirming with insects, or that has fallen into a puddle, only to be briskly swept off by the store owner and rehung.
Turn another corner, and underneath the glowing emblems of marketing and industry—Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Vodafone—you may catch sight of a proud, exquisitely costumed Indian family on the third day of a four-day wedding ceremony. Or a couple riding a vintage motorbike, a twist of black tailpipe smoke filling the air behind them. The young man wears the classic business outfit—white shirt and black pants—and holding his waist tightly as they race over ruts and potholes is his girlfriend, garbed in a bright cyan-blue dress, both legs swung over to one side of the bike and gingerly suspended only inches from the wheel. The scooter shudders over puddles, splashing other pedestrians, as dogs bark and chickens chatter and cars honk and pedestrians converse in multiple dialects amid the odors of shit, sweat, animals, smoke and mud.
With a population density ten times higher than in the United States, there is nowhere in India anyone can be truly alone, no sidewalk where you are the only pedestrian, no vistas that do not encompass other human bodies. Up, down, sideways: no matter where you look, men, women and children of all ages are hanging from windows, shouting and gesticulating, and on a nearby rooftop you will suddenly catch sight of two naked people in full carnal embrace.
Literally and metaphorically, India has always been a nation blazing with colors, which is why my first night in Mumbai, the question I kept asking myself was, What do colors mean generally—and specifically, in India? I would find out the complex answer when I carried out Subtext Research inside the homes of Indian consumers, only to come face-to-face with the voluble intragenerational waltz that has long existed between Indian mothers and the women, some as young as 15 years old, who have married their sons.
As anyone who’s been to the movies or watched television knows, the mother-in-law is the classic butt of any number of stale jokes. She criticizes. She dominates. She butts in. She believes she knows best. In the United States, with families more and more geographically isolated, and the concept of multiple generations living together under one roof a relic of the past, the humor around mothers-in-law feels increasingly dated, like watching a comedy show from the early 1960s.
This isn’t true in India, where families are interconnected in ways most Westerners might find hard to fathom. Every year, around 8 million mostly teenaged Indian brides marry young men chosen by their parents. Many don’t have the privilege of meeting their new husbands until their wedding day. The New York Times reports that if these young women balk at the arranged marriage, “Refusals can be met with violence and, sometimes, murder,” adding that in one case in 2014, “a 21-year-old New Delhi college student was strangled by her parents for marrying against their wishes.”4 Once the marriage has taken place, the bride and groom move in with the latter’s family, where they remain until their own sons and daughters come of age, at which time the situation repeats itself.
Having moved in with strangers, a new daughter-in-law is expected to cook, clean and, naturally, provide grandchildren, all under the oversight of her mother-in-law. An Indian mother-in-law sheriffs the household, exerting quality-control regulations over every aspect of domestic life. She knows what foods to buy, and the best recipes and cooking techniques. She knows the right way to hold newborn infants and to coax them to sleep. In some extreme cases, a new bride is forbidden to touch, or even speak in front of, their older relatives. The concept of dowry—where a bride’s family hands over money or jewelry or other assets to the groom’s family as a precondition of marriage—may be formally against the law, but it’s still common in more rural areas of the country.
The relationship between Indian daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law, or mummyji, the Hindi word for “honored mother,” is neither exaggerated nor anecdotal. It is such an issue across India that it has given rise to approximately 50 Hindi-language soap operas known as saas-bahu, which can be translated roughly as “mother-in-law, daughter-in-law.” The immense popularity of these television shows across Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh indicates that saas-bahu isn’t a problem restricted to India. Quoted in one newspaper article, Delhi-based journalist Veena Venugopal, author of a 2014 book, The Mother-in-Law, says that saas-bahu “is the one relationship that has gone contrary to the rest of India; it has regressed.”5 Among the most frequent conflicts are how the younger woman dresses (provocative attire is unwelcome), whether or not she works (ideally, she doesn’t), her looks (the bride’s beauty reflects on the mother-in-law, as well as on her son), and whether or not she observes the rules and religious rites of the household (mandatory). Venugopal asserts that saas-bahu disputes have actually worsened over the past two decades. She blames the relationship for social problems ranging from increased domestic violence to the attrition rate of women in the workplace. Saas-bahu can even lead to violence. In 2013, the Economist reported that “of the 12,000 prisoners at Delhi’s sprawling Tihar jail, a portion of female inmates are kept in a dedicated, barracks-like ‘mother-in-law wing.’”6 Most are mummyji, who assaulted their daughters-in-law “in a fit of anger.”7
Some speculate that the mummyji’s oversized power across India is simply a reenactment of the older women carrying out what was done to them when they were young brides, as well as a stark example of what little power females have in Indian culture. Whatever the case, I had no idea that when I flew into Mumbai, I was walking into a war zone.
The shantytowns of Mumbai have been written about at length, but as we will see later, they differ from Brazilian favelas. Corruption in Brazilian favelas is mostly unchecked, with drugs and drug dealers controlling sections of the neighborhoods, and regular police raids replete with machine-gun fire, after which life returns to normal. In contrast to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo, Indian slums are not gunfire zones, nor do they inhabit prime urban real estate. They are crooked, disjointed, improvised settlements, typically slapped together from a mix of plywood, plastic, corrugated strips of metal and cardboard. The walls are thin, the roofs tin, and with some shantytowns boasting a population of a million people per square mile, it can seem as if the homes serve as rooms in one huge, chaotic, snakelike house. The social connection among neighbors is strong, as is the ubiquity of Hinduism, which is less a religion—there is no word in Sanskrit for “religion”—than it is a way of life. It goes without saying that there are no street numbers, which is why having a local Indian guide is a necessity, though even veteran guides occasionally have to rely on a penciled map drawn by a neighbor.
The daughter-in-law is invariably the person who opens the door and greets a visitor. Her mother-in-law waits inside, as she is, literally and symbolically, the proprietor and ruler of the home.
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bsp; Across India, the mummyji I met shared a similar, even classic appearance. Most were physically small, in their 50s and 60s, though they looked much older. Almost all of them wore oversized, not entirely clean eyeglasses with thick lenses. Still it wasn’t the women’s size I first noticed, it was their colorful clothing: dark blues, pale ambers, powdery greens, ocean-blues. From previous work I had done in India, I knew that the concepts of “luxury,” “rich” and “aspirational” are linked to the widespread use of colors, largely because most of India’s milestones, ceremonies and rituals—from births to weddings to deaths—are defined and even dominated by colorful cloths. Color matters in India, and it begins early on in life.
A case in point is the soap brand Lifebuoy, which came to market in England at the turn of the nineteenth century. No longer available in the United States or England, Lifebuoy is still the most popular brand of antibacterial soap in India. The bars themselves are larger than most hand soaps—they are as big as an adult human hand—but far more compelling than its size is Lifebuoy’s signature dark-red color. It’s safe to say that every single Indian child is born and raised with a bright-red bar of Lifebuoy soap, a habit, and a color preference, that is passed along to the next generation. Lifebuoy’s red color contrasts deeply with nature—nothing about the soap could be said to look or feel remotely “natural”—yet one of the strongest national symbols of health in India is that of Switzerland, and the Red Cross, an image used in any number of Indian pharmacies and medical clinics, which may help explain Lifebuoy’s popularity across India. Unilever, which owns Lifebuoy, has tried to release the soap in neighboring markets without even a fraction of the popularity the soap enjoys in India, largely because of India’s singular relationship with color. Lifebuoy’s success soon spread to the packaged goods world. Manufacturers rolled out a rainbow of colors on every pack, the better to attract an entirely new generation of consumers.
It may be hard to believe, but our color preferences often form based on the colors of our bedroom walls as children. A few years ago, a European multinational asked me to help them align the nearly half-a-dozen companies in its portfolio under a single color. It wasn’t simply a question of deciding on red, or yellow, or orange, or green. Every man and woman in the business meeting had their own ideas, or preferences, meaning that I not only had to find the right color but also bring together a dozen senior executives, all of whom believed their color choice was the correct one.
The first thing I did was convince them that our choices, preferences and tastes have their origins in childhood. Over the next week, I asked each board member to write down the colors of the walls of their childhood bedrooms. If they could bring in a photograph, even better. A week later, when we met again, I tacked the colors and photographs onto a PowerPoint presentation. For the next hour, we flipped through the childhood bedrooms belonging to the members of the executive team. In the end, there was a roughly 80 percent correlation between the color each person had chosen to represent the “family” of companies, and the color on the walls of his or her childhood bedroom. Not surprisingly, it turned out to be color that helped me understand why cereal sales were flagging in India.
Once a visitor is inside an Indian home, a few things become immediately apparent. The daughter-in-law may have been the one to greet you at the door, but once you take a seat, she sits there quietly, saying nothing, unless she is called upon to speak, at which point she shyly volunteers a few words. (Even in homes where the saas-bahu relationship was apparently serene, I’d say almost all could best be described as “love-hate.”)
The larger point is that conversation starts and stops with the mother-in-law. Early on I understood that unless I was able to establish a rapport with her, the chances were good that I would never hear the truth about anything. Which is why I came into the house armed with two fail-safe conversation points: tea and Bollywood movies.
Tea, of course, is a given. A host always offers a cup of tea to a visitor who, in turn, is expected to compliment its taste or flavor, though figuring out what Indians mean when they shake their heads—the motions range from up and down, side to side, quick and vigorous, tilted to the right, tilted to the left, one nod, two nods—can be a science by itself. In some cases, praising the tea I was offered brought me nowhere—the mothers-in-law, stingy with their smiles, nodded at the compliment. That’s when I rolled out my second strategy, this one inspired by my work in North Carolina for Lowes, where I’d borrowed a character from the Back to the Future movie franchise.
Before arriving in India, I’d watched anywhere from between 70 to 80 Bollywood movies. The term Bollywood refers to the Mumbai-based Hindi language film industry and the films under its umbrella, which are shot using an assortment of dialects from mixed Hindi to Urdu. Some Bollywood films are mythical and romantic—Mughal-e-Azam, for example, chronicles the love between a prince and a courtesan—while others, like Lagaan, which chronicles the efforts of a small Indian village banding together against colonialist rule to play cricket, are fiercely nationalistic. Speaking generally, most Bollywood films are lighthearted and tend to illustrate a serious cultural theme in a lightly comedic fashion.
India is a film-obsessed country, and Bollywood films serve as crucial reference points for the population. And not just a small or even a majority demographic, either, but literally 100 percent of all Indians. The work I do depends on establishing trust as soon as possible, and I knew that if I could come up with a well-known fragment of dialogue from a Bollywood movie that a mother-in-law was bound to have seen when she was a teenager, I stood a better chance of creating cordiality.
I was relieved to find that, thanks to the Bollywood films, the mothers-in-law gradually softened to my presence in their homes. It was now time to ask permission—because I’d been informed that a visitor must always ask formal permission—to engage with the daughter-in-law. It was only when I managed to physically separate the two women that the truths underlying their relationship became clear.
As the mother-in-law took me into the kitchen, telling me what techniques she used to make her tea taste as flavorful as it did, my assistant remained in the sitting area with the daughter-in-law. As I continued conversing with the older woman, my assistant began politely interrogating the younger woman. I was now free to ask the mother-in-law what her true feelings were about her daughter-in-law, while in the next room my assistant did the same, but in reverse. By interviewing the two women, 20 years apart in age, I was able to engage in an intimate investigation of the world as two generations of Indian women perceived it.
I eventually steered the subject to food, and food preparation. Who does the cooking in your household? was the question that I asked most often. It wasn’t a trivial question, either, considering that the answers I received would determine whether the breakfast cereal should target the mothers-in-law or the daughters-in-law.
Unfortunately, this proved to be a contentious issue. Both the daughters-in-law and the mothers-in-law claimed that they were in charge of the kitchen.
Even for someone who tries to make his living from his powers of observation, there are some obvious things I fail to pick up when I visit consumers’ homes. Remember I usually find myself in an unfamiliar country, where I’m forced to take stock of new faces, new climates, new rulerships, new complexions, new ways of dressing, new customs of behavior. In the Russian Far East, after all, it had taken me a few visits to even notice the refrigerator magnets and the role they played in consumers’ lives. In India, I found myself bypassing a piece of small data so commonplace in Indian kitchens it was easy to overlook.
In close proximity to the stove inside every Indian kitchen I visited sat a spice box. In most cases, it was an enclosed, airtight round metal container, similar to a Western cookie tin. It opened to reveal half-a-dozen smaller containers of the most common Indian seeds and powders used for flavoring both sweet and savory dishes. The seeds include cumin,
black mustard and fenugreek, while the powders are coriander, turmeric, red chili pepper and garam masala, which is a blend of cinnamon, cardamom, cloves and pepper. The colors are so vivid and otherworldly, the yellows so dramatically yellow, the greens so profoundly verdant, that they can’t help but capture a visitor’s attention.
It was a small data, but at the time it made little sense to me. The mothers-in-law seemed proprietary about the stove and the oven. Many described the signature dishes they liked to make—the same dishes, it turned out, they had cooked for their own children when they were young. Ten or twenty feet away in the living room, my assistant was getting another story entirely. To hear Indian daughters-in-law tell it, they were the ones in charge of all the household cooking, as well as the ones who went shopping, and decided what to buy for their infants.