Socialisation and Individual Freedom

It might seem, given how thoroughly the cultural setting we are born into shapes our behaviour, that socialisation leaves little room for genuine individuality or free will. That conclusion, however, does not follow. Socialisation in practice never produces perfect conformity -- conflicts routinely arise between different socialising agencies, for instance between what school teaches and what home expects, or between the values of home and those of the peer group, and these frictions leave real space for negotiation. More fundamentally, the same lifelong process of interacting with others that shapes our personalities, values and behaviour is also precisely what gives rise to our sense of self-identity and our capacity for independent thought and action in the first place. Socialisation, in other words, is not simply a force that constrains freedom from outside; it is also the very process that makes a free, self-aware individual possible at all.

One place this plays out clearly is in how socialisation is gendered -- boys and girls are very often socialised differently even within the same family and neighbourhood. A well-known account of this contrasts how boys used the street freely, to loiter, play, or test out their bicycles, while girls treated the street mainly as a route straight home from school, and typically moved through it in groups, partly out of a real, learned fear of being harassed or assaulted. The short story 'The Bell' (by Gita Krishnakutty), used in the chapter to bring several of these ideas together, follows a girl visiting her grandmother's temple town who wants to ring the temple bell just as the priest's daughter, Thangam, is allowed to -- and is met with shocked disapproval from the adults around her, since only Thangam's ascribed status as the priest's daughter is treated as entitling her to touch the bell. The story also captures gendered socialisation directly: the girl endures an uncomfortable, elaborate hair-oiling ritual she is embarrassed for her school friends to see, she is escorted everywhere in the temple town though she is used to walking to school alone back in the city, and she is allowed only to watch, never to join, the football game going on nearby. When she does ring the bell anyway, defying the norm, she is punished not through any explicit rule or law but through purely informal, normative sanctions -- a heavy, disapproving silence from the family, and being pointedly denied her favourite snack at dinner. Tak …