Megxit = South Asian Culture
By Komal Grewal & Nadia Karmali
Warning — This article is an opinion piece by the authors and in no way a reflection of all South Asian Families.
While the whole world seems to have lost their marbles in January 2020, on Harry and Meghan stepping down as ‘senior members of the Royal family,’ it got me thinking a lot on the enforced responsibilities that come with being a child of a South Asian family.
Being from a South Asian family myself but having been born in the US and raised in the UK, I felt I could shed some light on this topic. When someone is born into a South Asian family, regardless of which country they are born in or brought up in, there are certain roles that this child will have to fulfill, regardless of what they as an individual might want or feel.
- You must respect your parents, even if your parents are mentally unstable or abusive.
- You must take care of your parents in old age, even if you don't have space or money to do so.
- You must never speak back to your parents, even if you are more mature or educated than your parents.
- You must always agree with your parents, no matter if you know better or not.
- You must get married, otherwise, what would people say, and then who would produce the grandkids.
- You must marry someone your parents approve off or blatantly just pick out for you.
- You must marry someone from your community/religion, because what would people say otherwise.
- You must have children, otherwise, what will people say.
- You must always be polite, otherwise, it will reflect badly on your parents.
- You must always respect elders, it's in our culture, and if you don't it will come back to your parents.
- If you're a man, you must make a lot of money, enough to take care of your whole family with this money.
- If you’re a woman, you must marry into a family that’s better off than yours is, so your husband can take care of your whole family.
- You must be either male or female and love someone of the opposite sex because there are only 2 genders, and you definitely cannot love someone from your own.
- You may have to live in a joint family, so the wealth can stay in the family.
- You may have to endure emotional/physical/mental abuse and not speak up about it, because well if it happened to someone else from your community, it must be ‘normal.’
- You may have to work in the family business with no regard for what you as an individual want to do.
Reading the above statements it sounds as if being South Asian is a cult, please sign on the dotted line to make your membership permanent. But wait, there aren’t any rules or regulations that are really discussed with you, just the knowledge that comes out of what you see and the rare tidbit of information your parents feed you.
How truly is any of this fair, when we are now living in the 21st century and due to globalisation, the internet and the access to education, people can get so much information from all over the world, but yet South Asian children are still expected to behave the same way as their parents did when they were kids.
Or maybe there are other psychological factors involved, such as if the parents suffered abuse, they inflict the same abuse on their kids, or maybe they don't know any other way of parenting, because it’s ‘normal’ to them.
And what happens when the kids are born and raised in other countries and adopt a new way of thinking but are still expected to adhere to the old ways.
How is any of this fair and in the long run is anyone truly happy? Marrying the wrong person could lead to having affairs or resentment towards your parents or being stuck in a job you hate (family business) could result in a lack of communication with your parents or motivation to work hard.
So what is the solution? Isn't it high time that the individual self is also acknowledged so that a person can truly reach their full potential?
However, there can be another way to look at it. What if, instead of looking at South Asian cultures and values as something that is tying us up in chains, we can also look at what these traditions are there for. There are extremes of course on all sides, but is there no middle ground? Maybe if we look at the reasons our parents and society think these rules are necessary or should be followed we can reach a happy medium. Let’s go back to the rules in question.
1. You must respect your parents no matter what because they have brought you in the world and kept you alive until you can have a say in your upbringing.
2. You must take care of parents in their old age, as they took care of you when you were vulnerable and defenseless and perhaps because they are your parents and deserve love and care from their loved ones in their last days.
3. You must never speak back to your parents but that does not mean say, stay silent but calmly state your case because speaking back only causes issues to rise not to get resolved.
4. You must always agree with your parents until you are old enough to be sure that standing up for yourself is the right thing to do and are ready to deal with the consequences.
5. You must get married is something I truly cannot explain other than it is an antiquated institution that is hopefully going out of style. The quicker the better.
6. You must marry someone your parents approve of. Well in most cases if you marry someone they don’t approve of you will lose family or create severe divisions within it that your marriage might not be able to survive, unless you are fine being alone, in which case masaltov!
7. You must marry somebody from your community/religion. In our parent’s generation, these things were simply not done, but in ours, it depends wholly on the two people involved. Love can battle all sorts of things apparently.
8. You must have children only if you want to because at the end of the day you will have to clothe feed and love them. If one of these is not something you can do please do not procreate. Again going out of style.
9. You must always be polite. Yes!!! Please!!! Thank you! Can we not remember when people were polite instead of hiding behind tweets and insulting people who have done more with their month than they have done in their life? A little more politeness would be nice to see.
10. You must always respect elders because that experience that they have may come useful later and you don’t want to piss them off for no reason. Also, because elder people are usually better with insults for some reason.
11. If you are a man you must make a lot of money. The idea was that the parents would spend all their money on their children and survival, which meant the child would then be like an investment. In today’s day and age, a parent who does not take care of their own retirement is usually penniless and alone.
12. If you are a woman you must marry off into a family better off than yours or at least the same level because your parents love you and do not want to see you in financial difficulty or to have to worry about money matters. They want you to be treated like the “princess” you are to them.
13. You must love and marry someone of the opposite sex. It was unspeakable a generation ago and now there are gay pride parades in Mumbai, the progress is slow and unfortunately, sex and gender are not spoken of which needs to be severely addressed. Like the fact that women need pads, for instance, is an important biological fact but there are many young girls in India who are made to feel ashamed of their period.
14. You may have to live in a joint family and if you can then hats off to you! Children get a better benefit from having their grandparents at home and their cousins as well. It makes for a more fun childhood and the sentence is “it takes a village to bring up a child” comes to mind. The joint family becomes their village and takes the pressure off the parents. However, living with the in-laws can cost you a one way trip to a mental asylum.
15. You may have to endure emotional/physical/mental abuse and not speak up about it. Don’t speak up. Scream it out! This is something South Asian women have decided is the norm and unless you speak or you scream they will continue. We all see people who might not be treated equally in their marriage. This is not just a South Asian problem. This is a problem that was created centuries ago by some man who called women the “weaker sex” and we believed him. No human being should ever feel they have the right to abuse another. No human being can judge a person who has survived the abuse.
16. You may have to work in the family business whether you want to or not because the business is a part of your family’s legacy. It is the blood, sweat, tears, hours, sacrifices, compromises that were made for you and if you are not lucky enough to have a sibling willing to do it, you might have to sacrifice so that the aforementioned sacrifices were not in vain. It is a choice. If you say yes, you might regret it but if you say no, there is no going back.
If we cannot accept the above, then perhaps the old ways are dying or perhaps we should look at where the new ways are taking us. Do we want to be a part of a society that does not respect elders? Do we leave our parents, walk out the door and not look back at the heartbreak we cause? The Asian traditions are steeped in respect. Respect for our elders and respect for each other. It seems like we should not be fighting about the former but fighting for the respect that each human being should deserve as a basic right.
Maybe there is a way to balance the individual needs and wants and co-exist in South Asian society at the same time. The South Asian community has definitely evolved from where it was to where it is today. The time of inviting a zillion people to a wedding is definitely dying!
So maybe there is hope still. Let's see what the future has in store.
