Reading Reflection: Culture and Customs of India, Chapter 1: Land, People, and History

I found this chapter to be a good overview of India in several facets from geography, to language, to culture, to history. In my mind, this chapter was probably meant to be mostly background information on India as a whole to give the reader a general base of knowledge before delving into more specific issues later in the text. Therefore, my reactions will mostly likely also be more general than comments on chapters to come. That being said, I did take some specific points from the reading that are worth mentioning.
First of all, I liked how Carol Henderson started out with the acknowledgement that “the West has ignored India’s true nature for a very long time.” This struck me because I realized that this was true for me. When just picturing India, I think of bright colors, women wearing gold body piercings, big temples, unclean butcher shops, and poverty. While these things are at least in some degree present in India, are they big enough to warrant Western society’s…and my view of India being limited to those images? I think not. Henderson does a good job of awakening the reader to this fact early on through several facts that I found interesting: India is the world’s largest democracy, has the largest middle class of any country, and less than half of the population is poor. (although that still sounds like a lot to me)
In the realm of religion, I found it interesting that religions other than Hinduism (Islam and Christianity) are popular among the untouchables, or Dalits, because they offer relief from their oppressed caste status. Religion is also deeply involved in the history of India as a country. This section on history and culture was very confusing to me because it was very dense and the names of places and people are so foreign that it was a challenge to keep them all straight. Therefore, I felt like this is the section of that chapter that I retained the least from. However, I think one of the best points that I did retain from the history section was that through interactions with the British empire, India became to be seen as a culture that was apart from politics and history and was governed by the ancient instead of by the ingenuity of their modern leaders. I feel that this is a valid statement because when the average Westerner thinks of India, they probably do think of ancient aspects and traditions and not the international economic power that India is today. I know that is something I would be prone to do. Through reading this chapter I feel I have gotten a more accurate feeling of India in general, apart from what was before assumptions and false images.