The Peopling of India

An understanding of Indian cultural DNA requires us to turn back to how modern humans settled the subcontinent and the challenges they faced in surviving in that part of the world. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the first movement of people outside of Africa, from modern-day Somalia to Yemen, was a beachcombing community that crossed the Red Sea some 80,000 years ago. The fact that the first human colony outside of Africa was in an oasis in the Middle East is oddly resonant with the Old Testament story—perhaps the ancient Hebrews based their account on some tribal memories reverberating from the distant past. Members of this community moved along the southern Arabian shores and the coastal strips of modern-day Iran and Pakistan, avoiding the forbidding deserts to the north before finding a congenial home in the lush conditions of the Indian subcontinent.

Contrary to what one might expect, India—not the Middle East—was the first major staging post for the out-of-Africa humans some 75,000 years ago. The high levels of genetic diversity and the presence in India of both mitrochondrial and Y-chromosome lines not seen in the Middle East and Europe point to India as being the next staging post. Europe and the bulk of the Middle East were populated much later, counterintuitively by a set of eastern movements from India rather than directly from Africa.

The Toba Event

However, just as the first modern humans had arrived in India and moved through to South-East Asia, the world experienced one of the most extreme environmental shocks of the past 2 million years—the Toba eruption. Precisely dated to 74,000 years ago, this super eruption in Sumatra sent a dense cloud of volcanic ash into the atmosphere, triggering global cooling. Because of prevailing winds, the Indian subcontinent was most severely affected. Excavations today across India routinely see evidence of a thick layer of volcanic ash directly attributable to the Toba event—in some areas this layer is several meters thick. In fact, many biologists believe that Toba was responsible for a sharp reduction in modern human populations everywhere. This extent of the global impact is debated, but it's clear that the Toba event was a devastating, ecologically redefining event in the Indian subcontinent—likely to have caused extinction on a wide scale. Genetic evidence backs this up: while India has a lot of diversity, there are certain lines that are present in Southeast Asia and Australasia that are absent in India, indicating a genetic bottleneck.

Stephen Oppenheimer believes India was repopulated from both the west and the east following the Toba event. Uniquely, modern humans advancing into India had one major advantage. Unlike just about any other modern human expansion, with the exception perhaps of Australasia—they did not need to battle and compete with earlier human species. However, the mass extinction also of other animal species meant that the early modern humans in India had to rely almost exclusively on foraging and plant life rather than hunting for their survival. When settled, volcanic ash is surprisingly fertile and plant life returned to the subcontinent fairly rapidly, but animal life took much longer to establish.

The above, of course, only represents the start of the process by which India was populated. The Indian mainland was then populated by a series of movements into the hinterland. Light has been shed on how this might have happened by David Reich and his colleagues, who have to date conducted the most extensive study on the genetic structure of populations spread throughout India.¹ The authors found strong evidence of all Indian populations being descended from two distinct ancient founder populations—Ancestral North Indians (ANI) and Ancestral South Indians (ASI). Although it is not clear when these populations diverged, it is possible that this happened in the distant past—perhaps as long ago as 60,000 years, just 15,000 years after the Toba event. Since then, there have reputedly been many periods when the two populations mixed together.

Virtually all Indian populations have traces of both root populations, with the ANI component varying from 40 to 70 percent. The ANI genetic structure is linked to patterns found in the populations of the Middle East, Central Asia, and Europe. However, this does not mean that the root population for ANI came from these regions; it is much more likely, in the early stages at least, that the regions to the north and west of India were populated by a movement from the subcontinent itself, with later flow backs occurring more recently. ASI genetic structure conversely is unique to India and not found anywhere else in the world. However, even in South India, people have some ANI roots as well. The only community in India whose genetic structure is solely ASI is a tribal community on the Andaman Islands, presumably an isolated group originating from the original founder populations that escaped ANI admixture because of its separation from the mainland.

It is important to note that this split of ANI and ASI happened long before the Aryan invasions into India that are believed to have led to the demise of the Indus Valley civilization. However, there is evidence that there was an increase in ANI and ASI mixing around this period. It is highly likely that this Indus Valley population had strong ANI roots as well. The study also puts to bed the idea of an Aryan-Dravidian genetic divide today, as both populations have a mixture of ANI and ASI, although in the distant past, long before recorded history, there was a north to south separation of populations.

Reich and his colleagues also found that there was strong evidence of genetic distinctiveness and separation in different castes going back thousands of years. The view that caste is a relatively modern invention or even one made acute by colonialism is a popular one; but this study and a number of other investigations now clearly suggest that the genetic separation of castes goes back to the dawn of history in India.² An important point established by the researchers is that in many other parts of the world, such as Africa and Europe, genetic segregation is evident across geography, but in India it manifests itself through horizontal stratification. Populations in India have lived in the same villages for thousands of years with virtually no gene flows between subpopulations. The authors also found that higher castes in India had higher ANI as a proportion of their ancestry, even when they lived in South India. There is some evidence that although it might have existed long before, about 1,900 years ago caste became more genetically fixed in India and the rate of mixing between different populations declined sharply.

The Forces That Have Shaped India's Cultural DNA

There appear to be three distinct forces that have combined with each other to profoundly impact Indian cultural DNA. The first of these concerns the impact of the Toba event with respect to eliminating competitor human species, as well as most other animals from the Indian landscape. The modern humans who settled India did not have to fight their way in, or at the most would have encountered fragmented and limited resistance from other species of humans who survived the extinction event. This was not the case in most other regions of the world. In Europe, for example, modern humans had a 5,000-year ecological battle with Neanderthals for supremacy. I believe that the selection pressure for skills related to fighting and warfare was significantly attenuated by this fact in India. Clearly these pressures would have returned over time as the populations expanded and as people fought for supremacy on the subcontinent—but the early impetus was less acute.

Furthermore, hunting was less available to modern humans as a survival strategy, forcing a focus on plant life. Although it may seem speculative to hang features on to events so long ago, the strong cultural values around nonviolence and vegetarianism that have been, as I will demonstrate later, such distinctive features of Indian cultural DNA through the ages may arise from this fact. In addition, a central feature of Indian philosophical thinking—the unity of all living things and the sanctity of animal life—also perhaps owes its origin to the need to protect the fragile early populations of animal life.

After Africa, India has the highest levels of genetic diversity in the world—something that has likely been an important factor in driving a key and somewhat reprehensible cultural institution in India: caste. Unlike Africa, where high levels of genetic diversity led to vertical separation of communities into tens of thousands of tribes, this diversity expressed itself in India—because of the limited barriers to geographical separation created by the early advent of settled agriculture—much more in horizontal segregation. India, like Africa, is also a high-pathogen environment that experiences the same pressures for tight in-groups and distancing behaviors from out-groups that such threats drive. However, humans in India had to devise elaborate forms of segregation while living in close proximity to each other. Many of the purification rituals and avoidance of contact behaviors within Indian caste life—including the whole notion of untouchability—may well stem from this need to maintain horizontal segregation in a high pathogen environment.

Finally, the combination of the lack of prior human settlers or competitor animal species, when combined with the relatively benign climatic conditions, likely meant that the early humans who colonized India were less challenged than modern humans just about anywhere else, at least for a while. The daily struggle for survival was easier here than many other places. Furthermore, these benign conditions continued for some time as humans enjoyed the lush, subtropical environment with fertile volcanic soil nourished by the clockwork appearance of monsoon rains. This I believe had perhaps the most fundamental impact on Indian cultural DNA out of all the factors mentioned above. The psychologist Abraham Maslow famously suggested that after humans satisfy their basic needs for sustenance and security, they start turning their attention to more uplifting concerns. At least some of the people who settled India were able to move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs more quickly than other human groups and concern themselves more with matters beyond the practicalities of life.

Buddha-like, they could metaphorically go on journeys of enlightenment without putting their lives at risk. India is the only global culture that has put thinkers, priests, and gurus as opposed to rulers, warriors, landowners, or commercial people at the apex of society consistently through the ages. I will argue later that, for both good and ill, many features of India's cultural DNA—such as its predilection for abstract thought, focus on introspection, concern with mastering the body, and neglect of the external environment—stem from this reality. Many of India's gifts to the world, too—such as Ayurvedic medicine, spiritualism, yoga, and the numbers system—also arise from this focus on the internal world of abstraction at the expense of more mundane realities.

Ahimsa

One of the most immediate impressions that visitors to India remark upon is the warmth with which people embrace outsiders and treat one as an honored and valued guest. It is a gentle kindness underpinned by respectfulness, courtesy, acceptance, and empathy. While people can be animated and noisy in their interactions, overt displays of bad temper or aggression are rare. The Indian roads are a case in point. Though anyone who has been there will tell you that they're noisy, chaotic, and something of a free-for-all, road rage is rarer than one might expect given that there is a never-ending stream of provocation for it. In Western countries, frayed tempers and aggression would accompany anything remotely resembling the Indian road system experience. When somebody—usually an outsider—reacts in a bad-tempered or aggressive manner, Indians get visibly discomforted and disturbed.

This abhorrence of aggression—as well as its frequent lack of efficacy—is also evident in business. A senior member of a significant Indian outsourcing company told me a story that exemplifies this point. At one point the Indian CEO had a meeting with the CEO of a significant American client. The American CEO and his entourage flew in big style on a private jet; the Indian contingent mostly went to the meeting coach class. As the American CEO entered, without too much preamble he launched into a tirade about how the outsourcing company was letting his firm down. Every time he seemed to have come to the end of his monologue, he remembered something else which then started him off on another bout of ill-tempered shouting. There was a long silence as he waited for his Indian hosts to react. Finally, the Indian CEO said, “Welcome to India, we are very honored to have you here.” He then looked at his watch. “We have 90 minutes for this meeting and I see we have used up 45 minutes already,” he observed. “Shall we get on to the agenda?” The American CEO, used to his aggressive tactics evoking panicked responses from people, was completely flummoxed by the total failure of his tirade to have any impact. This gentle stubbornness in the face of aggression is not an uncommon feature of Indian culture.

This underlying antipathy toward aggression I believe stems from the Indian concept of ahimsa, which literally means cause no injury—a principle deeply and widely embedded in Indian culture. It not only influences attitudes toward violence, but has also driven vegetarianism to a level not seen in other cultures, and affects Indian attitudes toward sport, negotiations, as well as deep views as to the purpose of business in society and how corporations should conduct themselves. Before exploring these areas further, it is worth appreciating how far back this attitude goes in Indian culture and where it comes from.

The Indus Valley civilization, one of the oldest in the world, dates back to 3,000 BCE. The archaeologists who stumbled across it and unearthed its long-lost remains were astounded by the scale of its large, geometrically formed cities. The cities had extensive public buildings and baths, as well as high-quality plumbing, and seemed to have been well-ordered. Perhaps not all cultural DNA features reverberate through time. As excavations of the Indus Valley continue, it has also become clear that this was a much vaster civilization than originally envisaged, with hundreds of towns and cities stretching from modern-day Punjab in India to the Pakistani Punjab, and all the way down the Indus to the Indian Ocean. However, a puzzling thing is that for such an extensive civilization, there is little evidence of forts or other defensive structures such as walls or moats. Neither is there much evidence in the remains of armaments or much depiction in its art or statues of warfare. It seems that the civilization was characterized by a lack of attention to military matters and was possibly much more peaceful than comparable societies in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

Puzzlingly, the Indus Valley civilization disappeared without trace relatively suddenly. The most widespread view is that it succumbed to pastoral, Aryan invaders from the northwest, who brought a more aggressive form of warfare to the Indian subcontinent. The speed of this collapse might have been due to its neglect of military matters. Another theory is that the so-called Aryan invaders were local inhabitants from neighboring regions who simply toppled a civilization that was in decline due to climactic changes and the desertification of much of its lands. Either way, the successors to the Indus Valley civilization were the creators of India's Hindu culture and traditions. Although more aggressive and warlike—their epics are full of tales of battles between kings and princes—this new culture seems also to have quickly absorbed some pacifistic instincts. One of the most famous texts of the Hindu scriptures is the Bhagavad Gita, a work embedded in the broader Hindu epic, the Mahabharat. The Gita is a sermon given by Lord Krishna to Arjuna just before the start of a crucial battle between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. Arjuna is wracked with doubt and concern about the forthcoming battle, not because he is worried that he might lose, but because he might win:

O Krishna, seeing my kinsmen standing with a desire to fight, my limbs fail and my mouth becomes dry. My body quivers and my hairs stand on end. The bow, Gaandeeva, slips from my hand and my skin intensely burns.… I do not wish to kill them, who are also about to kill, even for the rule of the three worlds, let alone for this earthly kingdom.

Lord Krishna advises Arjuna that he has been caught up in the illusion of the world and that he does not fully understand the nature of living things. Since the soul is eternal, death is not what it seems; it only represents the shedding of the external manifestation of the soul. As a metaphor for life itself, Arjuna is implored to perform his duty and rise to the challenge of the battle, but to engage it in a way that recognizes that neither victory nor defeat matters much. The interesting thing to note here is Arjuna's doubts and unusual reflections on the wisdom of war or violence, certainly depicting sentiments that were alien to other rulers of that time or, indeed, subsequent rulers in Europe, China, or the Middle East.

We find other evidence of the abhorrence of violence as we move on in history. The Emperor Ashoka, who ruled and united much of India from about 269 BC to 232 BC, engaged in a number of wars. His early rule was characteristically violent for an emperor seeking to widen his reach. One of Ashoka's most notable conquests was the kingdom of Kalinga in the east of India, which had hitherto remained unconquered by his predecessors. However, once he had won this war, something unusual happened. He became consumed with guilt and his reflections after the battle of Kalinga are resonant of Arjuna's doubts:

What have I done? If this is victory then what is a defeat? Is this a victory or a defeat? Is this justice or injustice? Is it gallantry or a rout? Is it valor to kill innocent children and women? Do I do it to widen the empire and for prosperity or to destroy the other's kingdom and splendor? One has lost her husband, someone else a father, someone a child, someone an unborn infant.

Ashoka turned his back on violence, embraced the notion of ahimsa and became a Buddhist. He devoted the rest of his time to public welfare, building roads, hospitals, and universities, and sending Buddhist missionaries to all parts of the known world. Ashoka took his nonviolence beyond the preserve of humans; he promoted vegetarianism, outlawed most forms of sport hunting and the branding of animals. He also set up hospitals for animals as well as for his subjects.

It would seem from the above that ambivalence, at the very least, or revulsion to violence, is an important aspect of India's cultural DNA. The concept of ahimsa comes through repeatedly in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain texts. Through the ages sadhus, scholars, and sages have argued about the morality of war in India. Indian history since recorded times, in as much as it touches other parts of the world, is a history of invasion of outsiders into India—from the Aryans at the time of the Indus Valley civilization, to the Greeks, Mongols, and latterly the British. India, for its part, has sent out merchants, scholars, and religious teachers to the world, and made its impact felt through soft rather than hard power. When the British arrived in India they found the conquest of a vast subcontinent thousands of miles from their shores a relatively easy task, requiring only a modest number of British soldiers. When British rule was ended, it was not through violent insurrection. Many Indian liberation movements attempted this, but attracted only limited following. It took Gandhi, with his notion of nonviolence, to touch a chord with some of the deepest instincts in Indian culture to create a distinctive, historically unprecedented, nonviolent movement for change to force the British to leave.

While India, like most other societies, experiences violence at all levels—and can be particularly prone to intergroup, caste, and sexual violence—its culture does seem to be distinctive in how much it agonizes about violence. This attitude goes back to times before Hinduism took root and I believe is ultimately traceable to the impact of the Toba event. As explained earlier, the modern humans who moved into India following Toba did not have to fight other humans as they needed to just about everywhere else. Vegetation was relatively quick to recover, particularly given India's lush tropical climate and the fertility of volcanic ash, but animal life took longer. Nonviolence, with its associated sister sentiment vegetarianism, could well have been a feature of the very earliest human settlements in India following the Toba event.

One might ask from a psychological point of view: What is the fundamental characteristic that underpins ahimsa? Cultures that exhibit high levels of aggression may well require high in-group identification and strong levels of empathy suppression for out-groups. Group identification in India is caste based rather than territorially clannish; when one sees violence in India it is often based on caste or religion. Ahimsa also inherently arises from a holistic long-term orientation to the world, which recognizes the connectedness of things and the eventual corrosive impact of violence, however tempting it may seem in the short term.

This wider notion of ahimsa with respect to long-term orientation seems to have deeply impacted Indian business culture in a number of ways. One is the counterintuitive fact that while Indian businesses can seem (and are) highly commercially driven on the surface, there also exists a widespread view that business needs to think about its wider purpose in society. A McKinsey survey of international executives found (to their surprise) that 90 percent of senior Indian executives feel that business should have a broader societal purpose than simply making profits. The figure for American executives is 40 percent, and only 10 percent of Chinese executives endorse this view.³ A study of Indian executives reported in the Harvard Business Review, involving executives at 98 Indian companies, found that Indian leaders put a much stronger emphasis on businesses having a positive social purpose and looking after their employees, than American leaders do. In fact, they put serving the interests of shareholders at the bottom of four areas of priority, whereas American executives put it first:⁴

Indian leaders have long been involved in societal issues, pre-emptively investing in community service and infrastructure More so than most Western companies, the best Indian companies have a social mission and a sense of national purpose because that helps employees find meaning in their work.

When we were researching companies for our book Meaning Inc., the best global example we could find for a true Meaning Inc. company was the Indian conglomerate Tata.⁵ Companies like Infosys, Bharti Airtel, Max Vijay, and countless others all embrace a positive sense of societal purpose. The roots to this approach lie in the ahimsa DNA theme within Indian culture, an orientation that also leads to an emphasis on the people working in the business. The best Indian companies invest in people and their growth, as well as in creating a culture that embodies humanistic values. The HBR survey also found that twice as many Indian leaders thought that human capital drove business success, compared to American executives. Over 80 percent of human resources executives said that employee development was critical to business success, compared to just 4 percent in the United States. Indian employees expect their companies to invest in their growth.

However, these characteristics are not always evident in all Indian companies where commercial pressures and a hierarchical segregation of people lead to short-term considerations or a neglect of the human agenda. Firms engaged in the day to day struggles of surviving in an emerging economy do not have the same luxuries that Western companies can afford. However, in the long term even such companies would do well to understand that long-term legitimacy and acceptance in Indian society is likely to require them to embrace this core cultural DNA theme. Outsiders, too, can miss the humanitarian core that lies at the heart of many Indian companies, in part because such companies are also commercially aggressive and high performing, as well as operating in an environment where corruption is endemic. However, in order to truly connect with Indian executives—whether in negotiations or as a leader—having a broad, long-term view of business purpose and exhibiting people-centric values, as opposed to charging in aggressively or coldly, helps. Ahimsa—cause no injury—means that long-term partnerships are prized over the narrow pursuit of short-term interests. Displays of ill temper, as in the case of the American CEO cited earlier, diminish the actor in the eyes of the audience, however effective it may be in the short term. India's labor laws are notoriously restrictive for employers who want to sack people, and are a cause of justifiable frustration on the part of many in business. But they do arise from a consideration of wider societal needs. Navigating India's notoriously corrupt bureaucracy can be made easier if external companies are able to articulate a positive social agenda.

The notion of ahimsa also infuses interpersonal relationships, which in India are generally highly respectful, courteous, and positive. However, it can also lead to Indian leaders having a real difficulty in being direct, as well as an internal, but rarely overtly expressed latent criticism, of excessive directness in others. American executives, in particular, can be caught off guard by the lack of directness on the part of Indians and over time learn to pay attention to subtle signs of disagreement. One senior executive said to me, “Unless I get a full and enthusiastic Yes, I know the answer is No.” Statements like “This is interesting,” “I like it,” “Let my team work on it,” or changing the subject all mean that nothing is going to happen. Lack of attention to these signs can mean one constantly lives in a world of unfulfilled expectations as a leader in India. While this can be frustrating for many overseas executives, they can miss the point that this aspect arises from an Indian desire to be kind and not offend others.

On a broader front, the Indian concept of ahimsa can be seen as one of India's great gifts to the world, with other cultures only just now catching up with the idea that might does not equal right. Vegetarianism started as a significant movement in India and has rapidly caught on in other parts of the world. Buddhism, which has expanded to many countries in the Far East and South East Asia, is increasingly attractive to many in the West. Europeans and Americans, who perhaps have a long history of violence toward other races, are beginning to ask the kinds of questions about the rightness of their activities that the ancient Indians posed before their battles many thousands of years ago. On this dimension, India's instincts represent the future. Yet India itself has to nurture this aspect of its cultural DNA as modernity sweeps its society, and perhaps diminishes this traditional value.

However, there are also dangers in being out of sync with the rest of the world—which India can still be to some extent. Since time immemorial, India has been subjugated to invasions; no other culture in the world has succumbed so easily and so often to external aggression. Even recently in post-independent India, driven by Gandhi's ideology of nonviolence and Nehru's concept of nonalignment, India completely neglected its armed forces until it was rudely awakened by an attack from China in 1962. Months before the attack Indians were chanting “India China Bhai Bhai (are brothers),” completely unaware, or in denial of the fact, that forces were building up on their borders. The shock of the Chinese betrayal literally broke Nehru's heart and he died shortly after the humiliating defeat at the hands of China. Shocked into the realities of power in the modern world, India embarked on a massive program of rearmament.

However, the old instincts returned after a decade or two of this. Infrastructure development on the border was neglected, arms procurement slipped, bureaucrats made choices about arms purchases more on the basis of the opportunity they provided for graft than the needs of the country. Desperately needed programs for renewing the armed forces' equipment floundered in the corrupt labyrinth that constitutes India's arms procurement program. Eventually, in 2010, after a series of border incidents, India finally started to rectify this neglect. But it had barely taken a couple of decades for Indian culture to forget the shock of 1962 and for leaders to revert to their internally focused personal agendas and blithe neglect of military matters.

Individual Paths

One of our consultants was working with an American team of a company that was acquired by an Indian-owned group. A senior executive from India was sent over to help turn the business's performance around, as it had been threatened with closure unless things improved. The consultant found the Indian executive to be a talented and incisive individual who had a clear, nonnegotiable view of what needed to be done. He regarded the culture in the American subsidiary as soft, overly focused on consensus, and prophesied the collapse of the business unless it changed. However, the executive had built virtually no relationships with other members of the senior team—and as a consequence his strongly held views, while creating ripples of tension and consternation in almost every meeting, gained only modest acceptance and traction within the business. From the outside our consultant thought that the executive must have been lacking in emotional intelligence and an understanding of how to operate in a different cultural context. However, when he started to work with him, he found that he was highly aware of how others saw him and the impact he was having. He refused to accept that his approach needed modification in any way. Delving even deeper, he found that the executive had undergone a profound process of self-reflection in the past that had led him to develop his convictions about how leaders needed to be in business, to which he adhered with religious-like zeal. It was his own individualized journey, rather than anything he had picked up from mentors or the Harvard Business Review—and he was going to pursue it come what may.

The above story points to a common observation by our consultants operating in India, which centers on the extent to which there are a cacophony of voices and multiple individual agendas being played out within a business. While Indian business culture is highly hierarchical in many senses, a kind of anarchistic individualism can reign at any given level within a hierarchy. While this can lead to a sense of dynamism and creativity, teamwork can often be skin deep and perfunctory. Departments, subunits, or individuals will frequently pursue their own agendas, blithely ignoring collective goals or the common good. When the Japanese firm Suzuki set up manufacturing plants in India, they were completely taken aback—given their own cultural norms—by how difficult it was to get talented and gifted people to show even a semblance of teamwork. A joke started to go around among the Japanese executives: “India is full of talented people and one Indian on his own can be worth 10 Japanese. However you have to remember 10 Indians together are usually only worth one Japanese.” We found in our evaluation of Indian executives that 24 percent had a development need around teamwork and collaboration—a far higher rate than any other region in the world. By contrast, 28 percent of American executives were rated as strong in this area with only 4 percent having a development need.

Many leaders operating in India can get frustrated by the amount of time they are required to spend resolving team disputes that individuals themselves are incapable of working through together. Experienced executives also learn that they need to follow up in detail to ensure that employees implement things as agreed. Otherwise, they run the risk that people simply go through the motions of accepting something before passively and quietly reverting to their original agenda. A survey comparing Indian and American leaders found that 40 percent of Indian executives routinely monitor progress compared with only 17 percent of American executives, and that only 15 percent of Indian executives rarely do so compared to 45 percent of American leaders. Western executives who are used to a more straightforward relationship between collective agreement and action can be caught out by this lack of transparency and follow-through.

India's stance as a country also shows this idiosyncratic tendency. For example, Indian time is not five or six but five and a half hours ahead of GMT—a quixotic choice on the part of Indians that causes great confusion and leads to international calls or meetings often being half an hour early or late. Stubbornly, Indians refuse to march in step with the utterly sensible practice of unit-hour differences that just about every other country in the world observes. When much of the world chose to be either in the Western or Communist camps after the Second World War, India frustrated many global powers by forging the nonaligned movement. Even in many international gatherings today, India's stance can be stubbornly independent—sometimes with validity, but at other times to the point of derailing agreements that most of the global community endorses.

A focus on the individual at the expense of the wider group is also apparent in many other areas of life outside of business in India. When the legendary Indian batsman Sachin Tendulkar played his last test match, there was virtually no interest in the country about the Indian team's performance against the West Indies; everyone was solely preoccupied, to the point of irrational fixation, by how many runs Tendulkar might get. When batsmen before him in the order were given out, incongruously and confusingly for the bemused West Indian team, the Indian crowd cheered wildly, as this brought closer the appearance of their idol. The first question an Indian parent will typically ask their cricketing son after a game is, “How did you do?” My Australian wife says it is always, “Did your team win?” in her country. Indian cinemagoers are predominantly drawn by the prospect of seeing their heroes on screen, with the quality of the film often being a secondary consideration. As a consequence, it is not uncommon for Indian movie stars to be involved in dozens of films simultaneously, their mere presence being what is required for box office success. In politics, too, people will often follow individuals, even as they leave parties or undertake radical about-turns in their ideologies.

Yet there is another aspect to this individualistic focus in Indian society. The other side of the coin is a tolerance of diversity. Societies strongly focused on teamwork, such as Japan or Australia, typically exhibit a much lower tolerance of difference and consequently feel much more uniform. India on the other hand is a mind-boggling kaleidoscope of diversity where everyone can have a say and a voice. For example, there are more than 2,000 ethnic groups and over 150 languages spoken. Newspapers in the country are published in close to 100 different languages, and radio programs are broadcast in 70 different tongues. No other major culture in the world, with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa, has as much ethnic, linguistic, or genetic diversity as India. This diversity is expressed in a multitude of voices on any topic you care to name. Many recent works on India, such as V. S. Naipaul's India: A Million Mutinies Now⁶ or Amartya Sen's The Argumentative Indian focus on this essential theme in Indian culture.⁷

The tolerance of difference, with its associated predilection for individual paths, has deep roots within Indian DNA. One manifestation of this is the obvious point that Hinduism is the only major polytheistic religion in the world. Polytheism is a natural expression of the Indian instinct of letting differences coexist rather than trying to shoehorn things into some common framework of belief. In my experience you don't necessarily even have to be Hindu to show this plurality. My mother, a Sikh, was entirely comfortable putting up pictures of Hindu gods, or random spiritual figures that had caught her attention, without in any way feeling that this contradicted or diluted her commitment to Sikhism, a monotheistic faith.

Psychologically, the core belief that drives this inherent tolerance of different paths is the quintessential Indian view that the same underlying reality can be manifested in many different and potentially contradictory ways. All versions and interpretations of reality are acceptable because there is an underlying unity to all things at the core. Polarities and contradictions are easily acceptable to the Indian mind, and some of the deepest philosophical works in Indian culture play to this sense of contradiction. Such contradictions are not just evident in Indian culture; they also exist within individuals themselves. From experience, this can make Indians somewhat opaque and difficult to read in spite of their surface warmth and enthusiasm. An Indian is able to shed psychological clothing more easily than people from other cultures perhaps because of the underlying tolerance of difference and acceptance of paradox.

This aspect of Indian cultural DNA likely arises from an orientation toward perceiving rather than doing. The benign Indian environment that allowed Indians to move quickly up the Maslow hierarchy meant that the equation between being and doing was tilted more in favor of the former in the Indian environment. The perceiving orientation allows one to accept the world, get underneath it, see basic patterns of unity, and appreciate the potential value of different paths. The doing orientation naturally requires one to simplify the world, to narrow its boundaries, and to make choices rather than to observe. This forces closure of thinking, reduction of paradox, and a desire to enforce some kind of uniformity. While Indian culture is highly regimented in some spheres, there is a much greater tolerance for individual paths in other respects. This leads to opportunities as well as problems in business. When the fear of hierarchical power is removed, Indian executives can be vociferous, creative, and dynamic. However, organizations can only reap these benefits by encouraging leaders to allow this diversity of opinion to emerge. Otherwise, the default tendency within Indian culture for ritual and horizontal hierarchical rigidity—which will be discussed later—can take over.

Indian business culture can be suited to creative industries such as filmmaking, design, publishing, or pharmaceutical research. However, organizations have to adapt in areas that require strong teamwork. It is more important in India than in many other cultures to create a common sense of organizational purpose and to continue reminding people of it. Concerted effort to build teams and alignment across departments is also more necessary in India than some other regions. In the absence of this, individuals can focus inordinately on their own roles or how particular responsibilities will look on their CV at the expense of just doing what is necessary to achieve a collective goal. Incentive schemes that are too focused on the individual can exacerbate this tendency—something that the Indian education system, with its emphasis on rankings, also magnifies. In our experience, companies in India benefit much more from focusing reward on group performance.

This is also true at a national level; without an overarching sense of unifying purpose, activity in India can lapse into disconnected chaos. One governmental department can launch an initiative only to be stymied by another. Political parties can fracture on an individual's whim, and decision making at the national level can become paralyzed by multiple agendas being pursued by a plethora of parties or factions within them. Even bribing officials can be a more arduous and inefficient activity in India. Global executives will often say that at least in China you know you will get what you have illicitly paid for when you bribe someone. In India, even when you think you have got the right person, a multiplicity of minor and major characters can emerge out of nowhere and do their bit to block your path, with each having to be bought off individually. After the collapse of India's nonalignment stance, the failure to create a common and compelling sense of national purpose in the world is the root cause of many problems in the social and political life of the country.

Yet for all these issues, India's tolerance of diversity is one of its greatest potential gifts to world culture. In 2004, after a general election in India, a Muslim president swore a Sikh prime minister into office to head up a predominantly Hindu country because a Catholic woman—Sonia Gandhi, who had won the election—did not want the post. There is no other country in the world in which one could remotely imagine this kind of scenario unfolding. While nations in the West pride themselves on their openness, the idea of a Muslim president anytime soon in a Western democracy is implausible. An inherent tolerance of diversity is a tremendous strength of Indian culture and something that our globalized society needs to learn from and embrace.

Inner Directedness

In 1888, a young Mahatma Gandhi was sent by his family to study law in London. The British Empire was at its height and in many senses London was the center of the world—not just with respect to political power, but also culturally and economically. The young Gandhi must have been overawed by this move from a far-flung, predominantly rural backwater of the empire to the very center of power. Focused and determined, even as a young man, Gandhi's initial instincts were to do everything possible to integrate into and be accepted by British society. He quickly ratcheted up huge expenses by going to the finest tailors and by trying to be seen in the right places. He even went as far as to take elocution lessons and learn ballroom dancing. However, sensing reticence and resistance on the part of the British he met, Gandhi did something that Indians are more prone to do than many others: He flipped to a polar opposite stance and made a conscious decision to drop the gent-about-town image and return to his Indian roots. He writes of his experiences of London in his autobiography Experiments with Truth. As has been pointed out by the writer V. S. Naipaul, what is interesting about Gandhi's narrative is a complete absence of any descriptions of the enormous city that stood at the center of the vast empire. There are no references to London's buildings, its cultural life, or people. Rather, Gandhi's account of his life in London revolves primarily around his struggles to keep the promise that he made to his mother about staying vegetarian, details on how his body reacted to the new environment, and musings on his inner life—with virtually no reference to the pulsating, grand city into which he had been catapulted.

Fast-forwarding to modern India, one of the most common criticisms that businessmen and other visitors have about modern India is how appalling the infrastructure is, and the generally poor quality of the environment. Even when it comes to world-class monuments, blithe neglect of the surroundings can cause a jarring experience. Visitors to the Taj Mahal are typically shocked by the dowdiness of Agra and the incongruity of such a breathtaking monument being surrounded by derelict buildings, uncared for fields, and pothole-strewn roads. This neglect seems particularly unfathomable given the importance of the monument to India's tourist industry. People who visit Banaras, a spiritual center for Hinduism on the banks of the Ganges, are often shocked by the dirtiness of the water and the general filth that exists in this sacred city. Indians are blindly able to put up with a lack of quality in their external environment that many other cultures simply would not accept.

Both Gandhi's nonchalance about the London environment and the above observations about India today illustrate a significant theme in Indian cultural DNA that might be termed inner directedness. More than any other culture in the world, Indian culture developed early on an emphasis on the inner workings of humans, coupled with an enormous parallel neglect of the external environment. Inner directedness arises fundamentally from deep-seated beliefs about humans' relationship with nature. Compared to other cultures, the Indian instincts around their environment is to accept it for what it is and to withdraw from it as much as the demands for everyday survival might allow.

This orientation has had a strong impact on Indian philosophy. The central task for humans in India's dominant religions is to go into themselves, reach for higher levels of insight and consciousness, and to see beyond the obvious forms with which the external world presents itself. In as much as an individual has to act in the world, it is done with a view to performing one's duties or, as the Bhagavad Gita extols, tempered with a philosophical detachment from the rewards that action might yield. It is this inner directedness that also leads to Hinduism putting Brahmins, the introverted pursuers of intellectual and spiritual values, at the very apex of its social pyramid. Warriors, whether they are kings or ordinary soldiers, those who engage in commercial enterprise, till the fields—or anyone who does something of practical value—are all subservient to those who detach themselves from the world.

This inner directedness also expresses itself significantly in terms of an introverted, intellectual orientation within Indian cultural DNA. There is a predilection for abstract, intellectual enquiry and debate. Indians are also great talkers. Many significant Indian intellectual contributions to the world revolve around abstract ideas or concepts. Indians invented the zero, chess, many areas of esoteric mathematical enquiry, as well as the world's main “becoming” faiths—that is, religions that focus on elevating an individual's consciousness as a route to a higher reality. India's extensive system of Ayurvedic medicine, which goes back tens of thousands of years, and yoga also reflect this inner directedness. By way of illustration, Chinese thought, as we shall see later, is much more externally oriented, practical, and concrete and has in the past enabled China to lead the world with respect to a range of inventive technologies such as the compass, paper, and gunpowder, to name but a few.

This inner directedness also leads to certain particular qualities with respect to Indian intellectual enquiry. When one looks at the pattern of Indian philosophers and thinkers over the ages, one is struck with how little regard there is for collecting systematic data from the world or testing out ideas in practice compared to other cultures. Rather, the focus is on intuitively playing with ideas and concepts. As writer Amaury de Riencourt observes, this gives Indian thought certain clear characteristics.⁸

The valuable writings of Indian culture belong either to the realm of startling and brilliant poetry, of oceanic epics such as Ramayana and the Mahabharata, with their colossal jumble of fantastic tales and their appeal to wild imaginations—or to the brief, stinging Sutras, flashes of lightning over which disciples ponder endlessly and which appeal to pure intuition. But, by Greek or Western standards, Indian philosophical rationalism is extremely weak, and often the logical thread in Indian thought is so tenuous as to be non-existent.

This pattern of thinking explains a paradox that business leaders from other countries experience in India. At one level, Indian leaders are highly analytical and numerate. As I will argue later, this arises from another distinct feature of Indian cultural DNA. However, outside the world of numbers, Indian thought is highly intuitive, broad, and unstructured. Freed from the constraints of being tethered to the external world, Indian thinking has the ability to roam free and wide. When combined with high levels of numeracy, this can be powerful in terms of developing creative strategies that have commercial edge. However, like the Sutras, such strategies can come out of the blue and often with limited reference to external data or a clear chain of logic. Indian leaders can find the process of justifying their thinking to skeptical and data-driven global executives somewhat tedious and unnecessary. Steve Jobs, who traveled to India as a young man and developed a strong attachment to Zen Buddhism as a result, had this to say about how the Indian intellectual tradition had influenced him:

The people in the Indian countryside don't use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my view.

However, as always there is a downside to moving up the Maslow hierarchy and neglecting the realities of the external world to focus on internal, intuitive exploration. As a result of this approach, many practical things in India just do not work. In fact anything practical that does not require the application of process or ritualistic thinking—such as effective infrastructure, high-quality buildings, or modern agricultural practices—can be something of a hit or miss affair. The industries in which India excels are often in the thinking spaces, such as IT, pharmaceuticals, or film. China beats India hands down when it comes to manufacturing. Steve Jobs found this lack of practicality to be true as well. While the Indian intellectual tradition pulled him in and gave him a way of looking at the world that he embraced for the rest of his life, the blithe Indian neglect of the fundamentals of life also led him to develop dysentery. He became seriously ill, going down in weight from 160 pounds to 120 in barely a week.⁹

The inner directedness also leads to another feature of Indian psychology: a stubbornness born of a tendency to judge ideas through one's internal belief system rather than with reference to the external world or others' views. Our consultants report that Indian executives are some of the most resistant to feedback when it does not accord with their self-beliefs compared to executives from just about anywhere else. In particular, they can engage in elaborate intellectualization and justification when their self-image is challenged. There is an odd contradiction here: Indian executives are highly concerned about how others see them, but become very self-defensive if presented with a mirror that does not accord with their internal image or how they want to project themselves. In particular, a lack of awareness about how others might see them is not uncommon. In our research, 34 percent of Indian executives had a development need around self-awareness, the highest percentage out of all global regions. This compared with 13 percent for European executives, 19 percent of Americans and 16 percent for Chinese leaders. Even when they accept feedback on a point, many Indian executives can tend to build up an elaborate intellectual facade around why the issues raised are not important or indeed constitute some kind of inverted strength. Persistently questioning any ratings that are even mildly negative is also not uncommon.

This introverted bias toward judgment of things is also present on a wider level in Indian culture. For decades after independence, many Indian leaders, economists, and intellectuals remained self-satisfied and complacent about the economy's performance, oblivious to the strides that Far Eastern and Latin American countries were making with a different model. More positively, while Indians are partial to global brands—as are many people from less developed countries—they are less overawed by them than people are in, say, the Far East. Chinese culture is highly tuned to best practices elsewhere and will copy anything that seems to have merit, sometimes slavishly or unthinkingly. Indians are more inclined to pursue their own path in a proud, but also somewhat complacent, manner.

Horizontal Stratification

If you visit a senior business leader or government official in India, you will be struck by the number of junior officials, drivers, runners, tea makers, and other assorted helpers that hover around that individual, for the most part not doing very much until the very specific task that they are responsible for is invoked. If you ask for a drink, the senior official will more than often ring a bell or shout impatiently for someone to deliver it, even if the act of ordering help involves more effort than simply walking to the fridge a few yards away. Sometimes you will see a complicated chain of command spring into action for even a menial task such as moving a desk or a painting. If you try and do any of these things yourself—or worse, commit the faux pas of asking the wrong person to do it—you will often get the sense that you have ruptured the natural order of the universe. One senior executive who gently tried to tell his driver that he did not have to leap out of the car to open the door for him every time he wanted to get out, was surprised when the driver burst into tears, saying, “But Sir, that is my job.” To be sure, many of the extreme manifestations of this cultural phenomenon are now in decline and some executives even complain about the old sense of service, or more accurately servitude, being eroded.

This phenomenon, of course, mirrors the institution of caste in Indian society, something that has been a feature of the Indian landscape from time immemorial. Over its long history, Indian society has developed an elaborate system of trade-guild like structures whose membership is genetically determined. However, unlike ordinary trade guilds, they also specify a bewildering range of other issues—such as how you address people, patterns of ritual and worship, where you are permitted to live and, of course, your marital options. There are literally thousands of hierarchically organized castes and the whole system has been the cornerstone of Indian cultural DNA for thousands of years. Modern, democratic, urban India is for the first time seriously challenging this institution, through national quotas and a myriad of individual battles and acts of rebellion; but it's not so easy to toss the weight of history away. Horizontal stratification still remains an important aspect of Indian cultural DNA.¹⁰

Speculations as to the origins of caste have suffered from the Indian neglect of recording their history in any great detail—itself an offshoot of the Indian tendency to regard worldly matters as relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of things. As we saw earlier, David Reich and his colleagues established that caste in genetic terms has been fixed in India for thousands of years. More detailed research indicates that while there was more mixing in the population some 4,200 to 1,900 years ago when the ANI and ASI populations mingled, caste became relatively fixed after that period. Indeed, it seems likely that the origins of caste may go back to the spread of settled agriculture in India, which pulled tribes together. While the current caste system was elaborated as Hinduism took hold around 1500 BCE, the architects were almost certainly building upon existing patterns of social segregation in India prior to the invasion.

Why did Indian society, more than any other existing culture, create this highly developed sense of horizontal segregation? The first point to note is that next to Sub-Saharan Africa, India has the highest levels of genetic diversity in the world. This is a reflection of the fact that India was the next staging post for the out-of-Africa exodus. And like Africa, India is also a high-pathogen environment. As argued earlier, this combination in Africa likely led to geographical segregation—with literally thousands and thousands of tribes living in a state of wary distance from each other. In India, the predominantly subtropical environment allowed agriculture to spread more easily and India developed some of the world's earliest settled civilizations. Geographic separation was rendered difficult in such circumstances, so the societies were forced to move to horizontal segregation.

In fact, the whole notion of purity and impurity is central to the edifice associated with caste. Most of the more extreme caste distinctions also relate to activities that are considered polluting in some way—such as jobs involving contact with animal or human waste, dealing with dead carcasses, or various cleaning roles. The whole notion of untouchability involves elaborate limits around where certain castes are allowed to eat and gather, including the banning of any physical contact, as well as elaborate purification rituals that need to be performed if defilement occurs. These strictures seem, at one level, bizarre, but they start to make sense if viewed through the lens of genetic distance and the avoidance of infectious disease in a very high-pathogen environment. I believe these were almost certainly the early forces that uniquely came together in India to set an unusually rigid approach to horizontal stratification in motion. Later, of course, it was built upon and became a social construct that justified and preserved elite domination and economic exploitation.

In any case, whatever the reasons for the origins of caste—or whether it arose during the spread of agriculture or following invasions from ANI-dominant populations—there is little doubt that it has been a feature of Indian cultural DNA for millennia. The thousands of subcastes, or Jatis, that have arisen mean that certain families and communities have perfected specific arts and performed the same roles in society for generations. Many of the incongruities and contradictions of Indian society arise from the fact that the country is a collection of tens of thousands of minicommunities, each with their own predilections, mores, and ways of being.

In business, especially modern multinational companies, the sense of caste that exists within village society is vanishing, and at one level the Indian workplace is rapidly moving to being caste blind. However, Indians cannot so easily shed cultural baggage that has been around for millennia. A keen sense of hierarchy is deeply embedded in Indian culture. You see organizations developing and observing a very finely tuned pecking order, as well as rigidity around duties and roles. Companies quickly develop their own elaborate caste systems, which specify an intricate hierarchical order, tight role definitions, and determine issues such as who can approach or sit with whom and how you are expected to address people. Executives have to work at injecting flexibility and openness into such systems.

Sycophancy and exaggerated outward respect for seniors is also part of the furniture in Indian corporate life and can make it difficult for executives to get a sense of what people are truly thinking or even going to do. This leads to another problem that is perhaps one of the biggest surprises for Western executives—the “yes, sir” surface culture. Executives seeking to explain something or offering instructions on a task will typically get a compliant “yes, sir.” However, they find with experience that this does not necessarily denote understanding or agreement—it's just a way of showing hierarchical respect. The underlying independent mindedness of many Indians means that they may happily pursue their own path after saying “yes, sir.” Alternatively, people may have no idea what you are talking about but project agreement and understanding as a way of saving face or projecting respect. After a while, many executives learn to check for understanding and put in place more extensive processes for following up on things than they might do in other environments.

Beyond the above considerations, there is also another more substantive point around how the whole notion of business fits into the caste system. The broad caste associated with business, the Bania, is relatively low in the Indian caste hierarchy and certainly lower than the Brahmins, the priests, and thinkers, or the Khastriya, the rulers and warriors. The elite tended to see commerce as an activity to be tolerated rather than a worthy calling in life. Furthermore, there is a tendency to view such revenue-generating activity as an opportunity for other nonproductive castes to extract their cut. This idea—that those who are productive have a duty to sustain the priests and thinkers—goes back a long way in Indian history. The Bhagavad Gita, a sublime and philosophically profound central text within Hinduism, has significant sections that focus on the duty that members of society have to provide material goods for the priestly castes. In these sections, the profundity evaporates and is replaced by admonitions of barely disguised self-interest.

This is one of the deeper reasons for the exceptionally high levels of difficulty associated with doing business in India, as well as the fact that Indian officials have taken corruption to the level of a fine art. Too many of the elite in India feel they have a right to something that it is the duty of productive members of society to provide for them. When combined with an inherent predilection for ritual, this deeply rooted tendency leads to businesses encountering a plethora of bureaucratic obstacles, unfathomable delays, and constant shifting of the goalposts.

However, while the caste system does create issues for businesses in modern India, it also creates certain opportunities. Historians who have examined the institution through Indian history often comment on how much fluidity it has despite surface rigidities. The pecking order and status of castes can change over time, sometimes radically. This seems paradoxical given the evidence cited earlier of virtually no gene flow between castes. However, this contradiction can be resolved by recognizing that, while people are tied by birth to their caste, where that caste stands in society is open to change.

With economic growth, modern India offers huge opportunities for castes to change their status or occupations and this has been seized upon enthusiastically. The tight social bonds and mutual trust that exist within the Jatis creates an environment for disseminating learnings and practices between members and for subcastes to move rapidly into areas of business and corner that segment. Journalist S. Gurumurthy sees castes as operating as “open-air business schools,” giving a strong competitive edge to communities. Whole areas of business can be dominated by a subcaste that has moved into an activity, sometimes by accident.¹¹ The Gounder community in Tamil Nadu has in this way built a formidable presence in the international knitwear business. According to Gurumurthy, there are thousands of subcastes that have created niches in a whole host of areas, ranging from trucking and digging wells to various forms of trading. These communities operate on the basis of high levels of mutual trust and cooperation, sharing of resources, and rapid learning from each other. In his book India's New Capitalists: Caste, Business, and Industry in a Modern Nation, author Harish Damodaran describes a myriad of castes that are on a journey from fields, bazaars, and offices to modern industrial enterprises.¹²

This phenomenon is not just an internal affair to India. Subcastes acting as trade guilds can shape global industries as well, as the Hasidic Jews who once dominated the international diamond trade found to their surprise. From a standing start, within a few decades from the 1980s, over 90 percent of the trade they had historically controlled came to be dominated by the Palinpuri Jains and Parsis, both tiny communities from India. These communities were mirroring the strengths that allowed the Jews to become a significant force within the industry in the first place—just more intensely. More recently, the Kathiawaris have also rapidly moved into a prominent position in international diamond trading and polishing—the surprising thing is, they were tilling fields only a few years ago.

Within India, but also within Indian communities outside of the country, whole areas of business can come to be dominated by small, tightly bound groups. Once established, anyone trying to burst into these areas is essentially up against a system whose members have been tied together by blood for generations. Outsiders seeking to do business in this context can often fail to understand the forces that are at play. Investing substantial time in building relationships with key members of such subcastes is essential for any meaningful engagement. Executives also learn that there is no substitute for face-to-face contact in order to break into these established circles. In fact, this is one of the main implications of Indian society being a collection of thousands of tightly bound microcommunities—you have to spend time building relationships and trust through personal contact before you can be let through the door, otherwise India will always feel paradoxically like an unfathomable set of fast changing, but nonetheless closed systems.

Mathematics: The Art of the Hindus

Srinivasa Iyengar Ramanujan was born in 1887 to a poor Brahmin family in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. In his early schooling, he showed good abilities in mathematics, coupled with a complete lack of discipline with respect to other subjects. In spite of his talent, he avoided school—his family had to enlist help from the local police to make sure he attended. His mathematical skill enabled him to receive a scholarship at a government college. However, once there, he could only focus on mathematics and failed most of his other subjects, which led to a prompt withdrawal of the scholarship. Discouraged, he ran away from home and enrolled in a college in Madras but failed his degree, again because he only focused on mathematics. Ramanujan's life at this point consisted mostly of avoiding starvation and just existing from day to day. He sought clerical work and eventually found a job in a government revenue department. He was encouraged by the deputy collector there to continue his interest in mathematics and did so virtually entirely on his own steam and without any formal training. While working as a clerk, he developed insights and proofs in a range of mathematical areas that he recorded in a characteristically idiosyncratic and unconventional manner.

At the age of 25, Ramanujan drafted letters to three Cambridge University professors—H. F. Baker, E. W. Hobson, and G. H. Hardy—detailing some of his work. They were among the leading mathematicians of the time. The first two returned these unusual looking papers from a clerk in a far-flung corner of the empire without comment, possibly not having read them at all. Luckily for Ramanujan, his letter to G. H. Hardy arrived just as he was having breakfast and, with nothing else to do, he paused momentarily to look at the contents. He was immediately intrigued by the unconventional and creative nature of the theorems and proofs that Ramanujan presented. Perplexed, he asked a colleague to take a look, who also expressed amazement at the depth of the mathematical insights. They concluded that while Ramanujan was in all likelihood a charlatan who had plagiarized someone else's work, they had possibly stumbled upon a man altogether of “exceptional originality and power.” Intrigued, they wrote back to Ramanujan and invited him to Cambridge. This invitation, to put it mildly, was a left-field development for Ramanujan's parents, who were disbelieving and thought the whole thing some kind of joke or scam. They forbade him to go but after much argument, he eventually persuaded them that the offer was genuine and set sail for England.

At Cambridge, once people had gotten used to Ramanujan's unusual path into the institution, his genius was quickly recognized—and the self-taught revenue clerk without any significant qualifications to his name became the first Indian to be elected a fellow of Trinity College. In a short space of time, he produced a prodigious volume of work covering mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continuous fractions. G. H. Hardy, his mentor, considered his work to be in the same league as the best mathematicians in history. His methods were, however, characteristically Indian: highly intuitive and often lacking in systemic written proof or rigor. Sadly, his prodigious output was cut short at the age of 32 after he contracted tuberculosis. He died in 1920, but over the years the depth and profundity of his mathematical thinking has increasingly been recognized and appreciated by mathematicians the world over.

Extraordinary as Ramanujan's story is, it is an expression of an underlying feature of Indian cultural DNA. Mathematics is an area where a certain section of the Indian population has precocious talent; there is a comfort and feel for mental arithmetic and commercial/financial reasoning culturally. This theme has wide and deep implications for how business is conducted in India, how Indian executives operate, as well as the areas of natural strength for the Indian economy. Before discussing these, it is helpful to explore the nature of this attribute.

It's easy to notice the extent to which an interest in mathematical enquiry has endured through the entire period of recorded history in India. This is unlike other cultures, such as the Greeks or the Arabs, where it flourished for defined periods, when the circumstances were right. Ancient Vedic culture, the Jains, and a string of notable mathematicians through the ages right up to the present illustrate this interest. In the recent past, from 1300 to 1632, the Kerala school of mathematics made significant advances with respect to the series expansion of trigonometric functions and anticipated many of the developments in calculus several centuries before it was formally advanced by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz in Europe. In fact, many scholars feel that it was the infusion of ideas from the Kerala school through the spice-trade routes into Europe that laid the basis for the formal development of calculus in Europe.

We can perhaps gauge the depth of the Indian contribution to mathematics from the fact that the number system the world uses today is of Indian origin. The simplicity of expressing every possible number using 10 symbols including a 0, with each symbol having both an absolute value and a value dependent upon where it is placed, seems obvious now. However, this was an insight that eluded most world cultures, including the Greeks and the Romans. The Greeks may also have borrowed their earliest mathematical ideas from the Indians. Pythagoras is credited with launching this aspect of Greek and Western thought. However, several centuries before Pythagoras, around 800 BCE, the Indian mathematician—and likely priest—Baudhayana notes the following in one of the Sulba sutras, appendices to the Vedas, concerned with the construction of religious altars: “The rope which is stretched along the length of diagonal of a rectangle makes an area which the vertical and horizontal sides make together.”

Every schoolchild would recognize this as Pythagoras's theorem. To be historically accurate, we should now perhaps start calling it Baudhayana's theorem, as there is also a numerical proof of the result in the Sulba sutras. In his work, Baudhayana also enumerates a number of Pythagorean triples, as well as providing the formula for the square root of 2. It is now known that Pythagoras traveled extensively, including to Mesopotamia, where he might have absorbed Indian influences. But following his travels, Pythagoras more or less morphed into being culturally Indian. He started wearing unusual non-Greek white tunics and trousers, embraced the Hindu idea of the transmigration of souls, and became an ardent vegetarian. He created an order focused on philosophical, mathematical, and theological enquiry, as well as the pursuit of ascetic discipline, very similar to countless similar orders in Indian culture at the time. In fact, Pythagoras's views were so out of place with the local values at Croton, where he based his new order, that eventually locals stormed the Pythagorean sanctuary, set fire to the buildings, and killed virtually all of his disciples. Pythagoras may also have perished during this attack, but more likely managed to escape and subsequently died in exile.¹³

However, the Indians were far less systematic than the Greeks in writing down proofs or collating their knowledge. Brilliant and penetrating insights were captured in small and pithy statements and just left there for whoever might want to pick them up. Ultimately, it was the Arabs who were responsible for taking what they called “the Hindu system of reckoning,” and a multitude of other Indian mathematical insights, to the rest of the world. The introverted nature of Indian mathematical enquiry is also illustrated by the historical Arab word for mathematics, Hindisat, which literally means the art of the Hindus. The other point to note is this strength is only evident in select Indian populations.

The mathematical strength of Indian cultural DNA, however, expresses itself today in some tangible and practical forms. One is struck when doing business in India by the extremely high levels of financial and commercial dexterity that people display. I have found that Indian executives expect a high level of financial fluency in all business leaders and are quietly dismissive of those who do not display these skills. Many Indian executives feel they can run rings around, in particular, Western executives when it comes to financial negotiations. “It's bewildering how fast they can work things out and you find you have given away things that you just didn't realize at the time,” one executive said to me. Others can become confused by the complexity of the commercial arrangements that Indians put in place. “You have to be careful you count your fingers when you shake on a deal,” a German leader laughingly said to me.

For this reason, Indian DNA was always going to be well-suited to something like the IT industry, in which the country is now a recognized global leader. In Tamil Nadu, the birthday of Ramunjan is celebrated on December 22 as IT day. Bill Gates once remarked that south Indians were perhaps the sharpest people that he had encountered with respect to intrinsic IT capabilities. Microsoft now has an Indian CEO. It is easy to see why underlying mathematical capability, when coupled with the Indian propensity for memorization and ritualistic thinking discussed later, would combine to give the country a natural advantage in a sector such as IT. You do not need high levels of industrial infrastructure, investment, or even reliable supplies of energy—all traditional areas of weakness in India—to succeed. You just need a laptop and a mathematical mind. There was a tendency initially to see India's success in IT as purely down to cost advantage and focus on the activities at the lower value chain within IT. However, global companies are increasingly finding that Indian workers are adept at the highest and most cutting-edge areas within IT. Something like one third of the people who work within the IT sector in Silicon Valley are of Indian origin, and a very high proportion of Silicon Valley firms owe their origins to Indian founders.

More generally in international business, Indian executives gravitate toward roles in finance or IT. Business strategy firms also have a large number of Indians and a number have led such companies, including McKinsey. The combination of deep numerical skills with a natural facility for conceptual thinking is well-suited to strategic consulting. The banking industry also is a place where one sees many Indians, as well as people from other cultures with strong trading and commercial skills, such as the Middle East. A number of global banking institutions, such as Citibank and Deutsche Bank, have had Indian CEOs. “Quants” inhabit the most esoteric areas of investment banking; applying arcane and complex mathematical models to investment and pricing decisions. This is an area of banking where Indians are massively overrepresented.

Ritualistic Thinking

The American documentary film Spellbound popularized the Scripps Spelling Bee contest. The contest involves contestants being asked to accurately spell a bewildering range of rarefied words from the English language. One of my American colleagues recently asked me, “What's going on with Indians and the National Spelling Bee competition?” Apparently since 1999, 11 of the 15 winners of the contest have been Indian-Americans. In the 2013 final, out of the top 10 places, Indian-Americans took eight. This is a vast overrepresentation given that the community constitutes barely 1 percent of the American population. The obvious explanations for this center on the high educational levels of Indian-Americans, as well as Indian versions of Tiger Mums pushing their kids relentlessly. But Chinese-Americans, with real Tiger Mums, show no such overrepresentation on the Spelling Bee, so something else must also be going on here.

The answer to this puzzle lies in the oral tradition of religious transmission in Indian culture. The Vedas, the sacred texts of Hinduism, comprise a vast encyclopedic series of hymns, chants, epic poems, as well as profound philosophical treatises. Just to get a sense of scale, the Mahabarat, an oceanic epic poem, which constitutes a fraction of just one section, is, at 1.8 million words, 10 times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined. It is commonly accepted that the Vedas started to be compiled around 1500 BCE, but some scholars suggest an even earlier date. The ancient Indians, faced with the challenge of submitting this dense body of work to the next generation, decided that oral transmission was the only viable method—in part because the melodic hymn-like nature of many sections could not be faithfully conveyed in writing. While there are written records of the Vedas dating from 500 BCE, the culturally preferred method was, until a few hundred years ago, oral transmission. You might wonder how this kind of transmission worked across thousands of years and with text as frighteningly complicated as the Vedas. The ancient Indians were aware of the problem of textual corruption and assigned certain groups the task of transmission from generation to generation. Those involved in this gargantuan exercise developed elaborate mnemonic methods to ensure that the sacred verses were never ever corrupted. For example, over 10 different styles of recitation were developed. The Pada method was the most straightforward and involved learning the texts in their natural order. Another method was the Jata where one learned the words paired together, but then also recited the paired words in reverse order. Other recitation methods were even more complex. Families across the subcontinent were given texts that became their religious duty to transmit without fault or error.

What is extraordinary about this whole endeavor is that when the British arrived in India and heard about this characteristically unpragmatic Indian tradition, they assumed that over such an expanse of time the text must have become highly corrupted. This was not an unnatural assumption given the elaborate game of Chinese whispers that the Indians had played with the Vedas across thousands of years. To their astonishment, however, across the whole of India, they found the Vedas had been faithfully transmitted with barely a handful of errors. Furthermore, they found that written reproduction had corrupted the text much more than the near faultless oral tradition. Huge swaths of the Indian population throughout the ages were involved in this task. In 2003, UNESCO proclaimed that this extraordinary cultural feat represented “a masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity.”

Indian cultural DNA is strong on disciplined memorization and learning. The Spelling Bee as a task pales into insignificance when one considers the feat achieved with the Vedas. When one sees the Indian education system in operation, one is struck by the emphasis on rote learning—sadly, at the expense sometimes of critical thinking. When I arrived in the UK as a seven-year-old, I was unable to speak a word of English. However, I surprised my teachers considerably by my power to recite multiplication tables all the way up to the 15 times table. I had only spent a year or so at an Indian school but quickly learned that unless you wanted to risk disgrace—which at my school entailed being forced to squat on your desk in a humiliating posture while holding your ears—you knuckled under and learned what was put before you. The intense effort and application that Indian students put into rote learning for exams is stupefying. If anything, things have gotten worse as the competition to get into elite institutions has intensified. A whole industry consisting of cramming colleges, study aids, and cheating practices has arisen to cope with the intense race of getting into the top subjects and colleges.

There is another point to be made about the history of oral transmission associated with the Vedas. While there are many parts of the Vedas that contain searing philosophical insights or fantastically imaginative allegorical tales, large sections are devoted to complex hymns and chants, as well as intricate rules of ritual. Much of the cultural effort associated with preserving the Vedas was oriented toward rigidly transmitting these strictures for ritual and worship. The idea was that individuals should absorb these rules uncritically and enact them with precision and fidelity. The recitation of verses was and is today primarily an exercise in recapitulation; virtually no attention is given to the verses' meaning. Certainly it is anathema to critique or question what is being uttered.

This essential element likely leads to two facets of Indian cultural DNA that color organizational culture and the way business operates—one of which is a lack of critical thinking. Students are taught to memorize and recapitulate rather than question and interrogate. While India produces 5 million graduates every year, less than 5 percent are deemed to be employable in international organizations, and only 50 percent employable anywhere because of this gap in critical thinking.¹⁴ In spite of the effort that Indian students put into their studies, Indian pupils are virtually at the bottom of the league in international comparisons of critical thinking.¹⁵ These results also illustrate the picture of excellence at the top, tailing off sharply as one gets to other levels. Following a procedure in business life is psychologically akin to following a religious ritual. The casualty in this is the practical relevance of the procedure to the achievement of end goals. Rather the ritual or behavior is seen as an end in itself. One does one's piece and it is left to others to ensure that everything fits together. The other side of the intellectual ingenuity and argumentation that occur at senior levels in Indian business is the equally strong desire for clear processes and a slavish adherence to rules, which gets more accentuated the lower one goes. The level of direction people expect and require in India can disorient Western managers or Indians who have been educated in environments that encourage initiative more. Even in areas of strength for India, such as programming, the penchant for procedure means that while replication is near faultless, international customers often complain of poor work because of a narrow or literal interpretation of the brief rather than people thinking more broadly about the purpose of the request.

This lack of critical thinking also means that many Indian executives are less good at questioning or developing new ways of working, or changing a system, as opposed to operating within one. Change in the way things are done can take time and there can be psychological resistance in Indians to altering established procedures once they are put into place. Indian executives need to be trained to develop the muscle for driving and envisaging change at a broad level. This also applies to the country more broadly. Indians can be highly successful minorities in other countries' systems, but find it harder to create a framework for national success. The default is always to fall back on what is in place already as opposed to critically examining its relevance to current realities.

The penchant for ritualistic thinking and pedantic detail is also the psychological building block for another very obvious part of Indian cultural DNA, which is the mind-numbingly high levels of procedural delay and bureaucracy anyone conducting business in the country encounters. Something as simple as buying a train ticket in an Indian train station can quickly become a Kafkaesque exercise, requiring the negotiation of various arcane layers of bureaucracy. Doing anything official in India typically involves dealing with frustratingly rigid and unerringly unempathetic officials who pass you around from one desk to the other. Tasks like opening a bank account or retrieving a birth certificate can take months, often requiring several visits and endless reserves of patience. Bureaucracy is a trait in many high power, distant environments in Asia and Africa, but it reaches its own very distinctive levels in India. A recent survey found that India was by far the most bureaucratic across a number of Asian countries, getting a score of 9.41 out of 10 for the level of hurdles put in the way of people.¹⁶

The extreme slowness with which certain things happen in India—particularly anything involving the government—also arises in part from this ritualistic mindset. Indian courts set the world record for the slowness with which cases are processed. For example, there were 31 million cases pending in 2013, which would require over 300 years to clear at current rates.¹⁷ It can take decades to hear a simple case of property ownership in an Indian court. In many walks of life, Indians operate as if time is of no consequence. The process for military procurement, for example, can take decades as detailed rules and protocols are laid down and then slavishly followed. Negotiations can all too frequently get bogged down in mysterious detail and often fail, even when a deal has been agreed upon, due to procedural wrangling.

Unless India addresses these issues around critical thinking and the efficiency of its systems and processes, it will always be competing with one hand tied behind its back. Oddly, some things such as decision making in business can happen fast, and the country is changing rapidly on many dimensions. However, in areas where the ritualistic mindset takes hold, the drag is palpable and exacts a severe economic price.¹⁸

Looking Ahead

The Indian psychological orientation toward thinking, talking, and perceiving, as well as for internal focus, is something that is of increasing relevance as other parts of the world also move up the Maslow hierarchy. It is not a coincidence that Buddhism, yoga, and vegetarianism find fertile ground in some of the most forward looking and advanced areas of the world. India's inherent instincts around diversity and nonviolence also represent themes that other cultures could learn and build upon. In business, India's strengths in IT, pharmaceutical research, and finance could enable the country to do to these high-value sectors in the global marketplace what China has done to manufacturing.

However, many of the weaknesses in the Indian psychological tradition mean that the country will always walk on feet of clay, neglecting the practical realities that are necessary for a strong foundation for success, whether in business or society. Looking outward rather than inward, developing the capacity for critical thinking, and controlling the Indian instinct for ritual and bureaucracy will be necessary in a faster-moving world. Many of these issues have served in the recent past to bring India's natural rate of growth down when it should really be leaping ahead of China's. Frustrated, many Indian businesses often choose to seek their fortunes abroad.

Critical to India moving forward is the need for people to look at themselves and the society around them in an open and honest manner. The Indian instinct to sweep uncomfortable truths under the carpet means that problems are only ever addressed when they get serious. Once a partial fix has been achieved, there is a tendency to revert to an inward-looking complacency. Overcoming this tendency will be necessary if the country is to move forward on a consistent basis rather than the more usual pattern of fits and starts.

Fortunately, the open and vociferous democratic culture of India means that many of these issues are increasingly being surfaced and confronted. State and national governments are being judged much more on performance than ever before. The idea of caste-based parties simply banking votes from their members is also fast changing. The cultural handbrakes that have held the country back are slowly but surely being released. There is a renewed emphasis on cleaning up the environment, tackling corruption, addressing India's appalling infrastructure issues, and making it a hub for manufacturing. These initiatives are rightly challenging many aspects of India's cultural DNA that need to be tackled. Going against the grain in this way will not be easy and will require persistence. However, if this process continues, the country has every chance of becoming what it has been for much of world history—one of the dominant economic powers on the planet.