THE CIVILITY CODE

In today’s turbulent atmosphere, I would like to recall how I was brought up, much like many others across Indian communities.

- RENUKA NARAYANAN

My elders, born in the late 1920s, disdained and discarded caste distinctions and many old taboos, especially about food, because the conditions that led to those distinctions no longer applied as we branched off into nontraditional professions.I was brought up first by my mother and then by my paternal aunt, both independent working women. My mother, a treasured child raised by progressive parents, was quietly subversive though she observed the Savitri Vrat and the Varalakshmi Puja with grace.

My father’s sister was a rebel, outside the pale of organised religion from an early age, having seen the cruelty of orthodoxy at close quarters. She eventually left the Communist Party of India too in protest after the Soviet Union invaded Hungary, though she abided by the better principles of the Left movement up until her dying day.

Besides holding responsible jobs, both women were curiously alike in key ways. I was taught the habit of prayer by my mother and did not hide it when I began to write on religion and culture, which inevitably led to scorn and suspicion from some quarters. But both my mother and my aunt viewed religion as a private matter. They made it clear that there was an inner world and an outer world, the latter mediated by strict codes of citizenly behaviour.