Abstract
In the cycle of generations, youth is recognised as a bearer of fresh energy, and the individual so confirmed tests the vulnerability, strength, integrity and possibilities of the adult society to assess what the society would make of, ask of and allow himself or herself. The mutual sizing up is also accompanied by mutual plea (by both youth and adult representatives) for being recognised as individuals whose potentials are needed by the order that is or will be. Within the setting of psychosocial evolution, youth’s endeavours in the existing system have the power to confirm what is worthwhile and reform the rotten in the image of a new reality. No longer is it the task of only the old to teach the young the meaning of life. The young, too, by their actions and responses tell the old whether life as represented by the old and presented to them has meaning. In the human youth, fidelity is expressed in the alternation of affirmation and repudiation of social institutions and cultural traditions which reflect aspects of parental attitudes and interests.
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Notes
- 1.
Notwithstanding the individual variations, the Father (as a symbolic figure) introduces the son to the productive and economic ethos of the social order. By guiding the son through the tasks and goals of becoming an adult member of the society, the father derives the emotional satisfaction of seeing his way of life being continued. The stronghold of the ideal of generational solidarity in Indian culture is borne out by the popular Hindu belief that the father can be reborn as the son’s son and the son might once have been the father. Thus, the son through identification with the father’s roles, habits, interests and skills comes to duplicate rather than replace the father.
- 2.
In the story of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god, the mother Parvati goes for bath and stationed Ganesha, her son, at the door, telling him not to let anyone in. When her husband Shiva wants to enter, Ganesha, unaware of Shiva’s true identity, tries to stop him. Angered by Ganesha’s impudence, Shiva cuts off his head. Later on coming to know about the identity of Ganesha from Parvati, Shiva repents and replaces his head with an elephant head. He also confers on Ganesha various powers and privileges. Thus, the Ganesha story ends not with Oedipus fate of tragic acceptance of the exile from the mother and submission to the superego demands represented by the fathers, gods and fate. Rather his story ends with his restoration and a new beginning in which relations between parents and child are reconciled. Iconographically, he is more often represented with his father, or father and mother together, and seldom with his mother alone (Courtright 1985). In the myth, when Ganesha comes to understand that Shiva is his father—a recognition he acquires only after receiving a new head from the father—he is given the primacy of place before all the gods and accepts his role as the Lord of Obstacles, become a yogi and a dancer (like his father). In the epic Mahabharata, Bhishma, the first son of Shantanu, renounces both kingdom and his reproductive sexual life so that his father may marry a fishergirl and continue his sexual/reproductive life. Bhishma, lifelong celibate, lives on to become the most revered old man of the epic, warrior and wise man. In the Ganesha’s myth, the father’s aggression is directed to the son because of the father’s jealousy of the intense mother–son bond which excludes the father. In the tale of Bhishma, the father needs the son to renounce his sexual prowess and vigour so that he could prolong his life of pleasure.
- 3.
It is important to note that for both men and women when certain potentials like achievement orientation and competitive motivation etc. are overdeveloped at the cost of others, it might bear fruit in the role of the worker but it creates conflict in the life tasks of intimacy and parenthood. For conjugality and parenthood to loose at least some of its unnecessary forbidding aspects for both sexes, there has an emotional ecology in which there is freer inter-identification between sexes in everyday life. The future of having more whole and complete persons lie in reclaiming and integrating the feminine, the loving-nurturant parts of our psyche with the masculine propensities.
- 4.
The danger lies when confused parenting, unsure of its own inner authority, abdicates too quickly when challenged by the growing individual. The search of youth is not for all permissibility, but rather for new ways of directly facing up to what truly counts. When this search ends, the oscillation between what is right and wrong is stemmed. To clarify the wavering of their own conscience, they must challenge the conscience of the individuals in parental and authoritative positions. This calls for all the firmness that adults can muster; what is at stake is not their professional stature but inner authority. The temper tantrums of the child exemplify the severe test to which the parents’ tolerance and disciplining technique are put to. When the response of the confused and impatient parent is to give in—comply—to the demand of the child, it replicates in the personality make-up of the child, a pattern of being unable to tolerate frustration and ‘giving in’ to his or her impulse. If this pattern of relationship was to extend itself by continuity into the arena of adult living, then the family also becomes a consumption unit where the other becomes an object of manipulation/extraction, for seeking gratification, and not as a counterpart to be cherished in a mutually fulfilling, reciprocal relationship.
- 5.
This is in line with the findings of Keniston’s work (1968) which emphasise the relative solidarity between the political activists and their families and fail to support the popular view that student political activism in general is a form of rebellion against parental values.
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Bansal, P. (2012). Youth in India: Identity and Social Change. In: Youth in Contemporary India. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-0715-3_20
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