While I have met several Indian citizens abroad during foreign travels before, my interactions with them were restricted to a few weeks of travelling together only and thus not substantial enough to form any lasting perspectives on cultural differences.
But after moving to Canada, I’ve had the opportunity to interact with them on a more day by day basis where our cultural and linguistic similarities push us closer together under the “South Asian” umbrella.
For the most part, the people of both countries seem pretty much the same on a surface level and there’s not much cultural difference to talk about. The people from Lahore and Karachi in Pakistan tend to bond faster with Indians due to big city life acclimating them to Indian mindsets thanks to media boom that happened in Pakistan during the Musharraf era that flooded the country with Indian channels and content.
But Pakistan is not only Lahore and Karachi, and I think the core difference between both nations in terms of culture stems from their political culture for the most part, as the politics of both countries shape their respective citizens and the different state of the governments of both countries impacted their citizens differently.
India, for the most part, has had a more successful run in the nation-state project historically which has allowed nation wide parties to develop, strong institutions to emerge and a national citizen identity to evolve over the long decades of electoral politics that somewhat faded away the borders of ethnic, tribal and clan based identities over a period of time (not entirely though, with caste and religion sticking on).
Pakistan on the other hand, has had a somewhat troubled and murky political history with out state often being at violent odds with certain segments of it’s citizenry, ethnic lines hardening rather than softening and a troubled nation state project that has not yet produced the all-inclusive and all encompassing, effective public institutions needed to dissolve older, historical ethnic and linguistic identities.
In a nutshell, due to the absence of an effective nation state project, clan and tribal identity still holds sway in Pakistan to a much stronger level than India and this influences the behavior of Pakistani citizens to a significant degree. Perhaps not so much in the upper middle class, urban citizens but certainly outside of it. Our civil military clashes have also ensured that no nation wide political party has emerged and lasted long enough to forge a national identity thanks to our military’s constant cutting down to size of strong civilian led setups.
Personally, I am something of a mixed mutt with half of my family from Pashtun tribal clans who had become educated urban dwellers over time and the other half from Punjabi settled, farming class that contributed members to the military.
Pakhtun-Baloch and North Pakistani cultural identities are for the most part foreign to India and its hard to explain the social and behavioral differences that Pakhtuns have with Indians for the most part. But I’ll give it a shot anyway because looking back, it’s surprising how much the culture and politics of the families at the micro level and the state at the macro level influenced my upbringing and behavior.
Due to the nation state in Pakistan being an ineffective public service provider, wracked with corruption and patronage politics, public institutions dominated by particular ethnicity, power sharing being unequal within the broader context of the state and regional political autonomy being constantly challenged by a hegemonic center: The state is something to be viewed with suspicion as a Pakistani. All you can trust are your blood, your clan, your tribe and your brethren.
This is to an intensity that sometimes perturbs and disturbs foreigners but we carry it on our back wherever we go: A suspicion of the state and a strong pack loyalty.
India, due to its more developed economy, politics and stable society has grown into a metropolitan, internationalist feel that has reduced the emphasis of citizens on clan and tribal politics (with some exceptions). The “Indian citizen” is actually a thing with citizens of the state associates themselves with the Indian nation state project and allowing it to define their primary identity. So their behavior and cultural dynamics with each other are far more relaxed and at ease than Pakistanis.
Nowhere is this more apparent than when I moved to Canada. It’s the locals themselves here who will tell you the more striking aspect of the differences between Indians and Pakistanis.
Educated upper-middle income urban dwellers from Pakistan are fairly the same as educated upper-middle income urban dwellers from India and local Canadians are hard pressed to tell them apart for the most part.
But since I’m not from that category, my differences in culture from those of Indian immigrants are easily spotted.
For one, Pakistanis in general are somewhat harder to befriend than Indians at first. We are fairly reserved and cautious with strangers and have a thicker shell to crack. This stems from our broken politics back home where we don’t view each other as fellow citizens but with who is “us” and who is “them”. Are you in my pack or not? Can I count on you or not?
It’s like we are always preparing for a fight that never seems to break out.
But Pakistanis flex HARD for their friends. If you manage to get through our thick, hard outer shell, you have a blood bond with us for life.
When I arrived in Canada, a Pakistani friend of mine drove all the way to the airport to pick me up, had me stay at his place for 3 days, got me a place to stay of my own on Kajiji, set up my bank account and cell phone, gave me 2 months worth of rent money, got me a job, set up my SIN number, showed me how to get to school, showed me how to use public transport, got my credit card set up, helped me when i got into trouble once, showed me how to pay taxes….actually the list is pretty long so I’ll stop here. But I had an incredibly soft landing in Canada because of the Pakistani pack mentality. We go out of our way for each other if we have to.
Hell, I was the same.
In my class, I was cautious and reserved around everyone from the start. That was just the Pakistani nature I bought with me back from home. I didn’t care whether you were local, Indian, Pakistani, East Asian or what ever. I was slow to make friends and slower still to network and connect with people.
But what friends I did make, I considered part of my pack.
There was an Indian girl in my class who was having a hard time finding a part time job to meet her living expenses. Her attempts to ask other Indian students about job was met with them advising her where to apply, how to apply as well as other useful tips.
But when she asked me, and because I considered her a friend, my dynamic went straight to the Pakistani tribal-clan pack mentality.
I printed a dozen copies of her CV and went around my near by market handing them out. Then I went to my old boss and badgered him till he hired her. When she didn’t like the job after 2 days of working there, I went to another friend and badgered him till I got her a work from home, online job.
It would have been a serious red flag in a Pakistani context if I had done anything less.
Being Pakistan, you’re only as safe or as strong as the rest of your pack. It’s something that influences the way we arrange our children’s or our own marriages. The way we talk and behave with each other. Who we ignore and who we bleed for. In an era of a weak state, a tyrannous military, ethnic violence and other heady maelstroms of chaos, the only thing a Pakistani can rely on is their pack to protect them against the violent tides of our country.
You don’t JUST ask Pakistanis for a favor. You ask them to fight for you. Pakistan is not an easy country to live in, given our near anarchic state of affairs at times in the government. Which is why citizens flock to the clan and tribal mentality everywhere to defend themselves. The lucky ones go abroad. The unlucky ones form packs. And this is in no way restricted to Pashtun or even ethnic lines in general. Sects like the Ahmedis and Ismailis and Shias form their own packs. The Mohajirs of Karachi form their own. The Pashtun refugees living as IDPs form their own. And so on.
In this maelstrom of violence, uncertainty and chaos, we have only God and Blood. And since our God shares no blood with mortals, we share each others. Our relationships with each other have an intensity and expectation of reliance built into them that are hard to explain to outsiders and definitely set us apart as cultures from India.
Some might mistake it as “the family oriented nature” of south Asia. This is a simplification. Quite often, the most bitter divisions exist among families. Our relationships with each other are based on who can act as a substitute for public services that the government has failed to provide. Or who can allow access to public resources. I mentioned that urban, upper-middle income Pakistanis tend to bond more easily with Indians and Canadians and integrate easily into life abroad and part of the reason is that they have shed their tribal/clan mentality for a long time thanks to better access to state services and resources in the upper-middle income urban areas of the Pakistani state.
I would not say that this pack-mentality is proving to be a advantage in Canada. In fact, its something that I’m having to unlearn slowly.
Recently a friend of mine, asked me to see if i could find someone in the airline industry to provide him some advice how to tailor his career towards the airlines business. Not only did I take him to meet someone I knew in the airlines business but I also pressed the other guy till he agreed to let my friend use him as a reference and get some good insider leads on current job openings as well.
Similarly, when another friend of mine asked me for a link up with someone in the healthcare industry, I tracked down a director in the healthcare sector and set up a meeting between the two.
You might think that my friends would have been pleased with the end result but they weren’t. One was uncomfortable in how much I was doing for him because his cultural context had a stigma in asking help from others in a friendly social circle. The other was unhappy because I seemed to have done more than she asked for.
It was a good education in how the Pakistani tribal/clan mentality does not work when transported to the 1st world.
Canada’s relationship and social matrix is far more relaxed, self reliant and dependent on the state than Pakistan has ever managed to achieve. Family relationships, friend circles and business networks all exist under the guarantee of public services from the state so citizens are less dependent on each other.
When you know the state’s police forces will provide you protection, the healthcare system will give you free care, the government will educate your children in as affordable a manner as possible, you have democratic representation of your interests in the government, the military stays in the barracks and so on: You become less reliant on your family and friends for help. The state takes on that responsibility. The state becomes a replacement for the clan and the tribal institutions of old.
So Canadian relationships between people lack that kind of intensity and expectation that Pakistani relationships do.
India, due to its longer period of stability, stronger public institutions and increasing reliance on the government has shed the vestiges of old clan/tribal identities more than Pakistan has. So Indians tend to associate fine with the Canadian relationship matrix once they immigrate here. Pakistanis from urban, well off environments as well.
But Pakistanis in a more general sense tend to hold on to the clan/tribe mentality. Once we arrive here as immigrants, we are harder to befriend because we consider the price each relationship imposes on us. A friend is not just someone you add on Facebook or say hi to in the office everyday.
A friend is one for whom you must be ready to spill blood: either your own or their enemy’s. A friend is one who can call you at 2:00 am crying for help and you’ll walk through a blizzard to their house. A friend is one you’ll give your bed to when they can’t meet rent while you sleep on the floor.
They are your clan, your tribe, your blood. And at the same time, you expect them to do the same for you. Your own prosperity and safety is intimately tied to theirs and if they were to fall, you are next in line.
We must weigh the price and cost each friendship imposes on us because we must be ready to meet the needs of our friends no matter what the cost. But once you have the title of friend, you can expect anything from us. Trust me, we go our entire lives sometimes not even giving the title of friend to our first cousins we share blood with, if we don’t consider them part of our pack.
It’s a symptom of growing up in Pakistan. The state has not yet developed, modernized or stabilized enough to act as an institutional substitute for the older, more ancient institutions of the tribe and the clan. The failure of the state at the macro level influences our relationships with each other at the micro level. We cannot call the police to defend our homes when ethnic riots take place. We cannot treat our children in hospitals whose fees we cannot afford or whom the government strips of funds to pay their cronies.
Our relationships, our clans, our tribes are the institutions we turn to fulfill the gap between the states resources/public services and our needs.
And herein lies the most noticeable difference in Indian and Pakistani cultures, a difference that has it’s roots in the political history and developmental differences of the Indian and Pakistani states.
Pakistanis are more clan/tribal oriented than Indians on average. Our state has not met our needs to a sufficient enough extent for us to be able to rely on it, so we rely on our clans and tribes instead.
In Canada and other foreign countries, this means that we carry over our Pakistani clan and tribal mentality more often. We are harder to befriend not because we are unfriendly, but because to us, friendship is both a burden and a deeper gift than can be understood in the 1st world mentality.
Our relationship is something that can be relied on to a much much more deeper extent than traditional relationships in the developed nation context where the state meets its citizen’s needs. Calling someone a friend in a Pakistani sense is a price for us, for we must now be willing to do a lot for that friend if they ever fall in trouble. We start preparing for your wars the moment we call you a friend. But we also expect you to do the same for us.
We measure you and your worth before calling you a friend. And let you measure ours as well. Our friendships are not relaxed affairs where we catch up on weekends to chat at a bar or a restaurant.
We ask ourselves questions like “can I care for his children if something happens to him?”. Or “can I fight for him when he gets into trouble with someone dangerous?”
These are questions shaped in the anarchic nature of the Pakistani state. Where citizens have learned to rely on their kin, their blood and their clan more than the state.
It translates badly into Canada, where the state is an effective arbitrator and citizens rely on it to fulfill their needs, thereby reducing their reliance on each other. Every Pakistani who moves here has to go through the process of slowly unwinding, relaxing and becoming more at ease as they learn to understand that the state here is not like the state back home. While not perfect, it is far more capable of meeting our needs and acting as a substitute for the clan/tribe/pack that we are used to relying on. That we need to expect less from friends and reduce the barriers for entry into our friend circle as well. A polite no thanks or a polite refusal to a request should not be death knells to our relationships with each other.
And slowly and steadily, we learn that the entire country we immigrated to and now call home, is to be slowly and steadily trusted as part of our pack, our tribe and our clan.
A typical Pakistani tribal meeting in the Northwest, where the coordination and pooled resources of the tribe serve as a force multiplier for citizens who are deprived of public services and state resource:
Image source: https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2017/8/25/the-case-for-an-afpak-fata
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If we cannot meet again in this life,
Let it be so that we care and help each other
By all means in all our future lives
Like a mother loves her only little child.
-Last Quatrain, Chinggisid Prince Tsoktu’s rock inscriptions (1624) in west-central Mongolia
