Indian Uncles Inc.

A friend recently joked about needing more young people on his team. “The rest of us,” he declared, half joking, “are uncles”. I asked him what he meant. “Uncles hold on to the ‘me’ factor,” he elaborated, a feeling that ‘you cannot reach anywhere without me’, whether it’s at work or in life.

Said friend, let’s call him Samarth, based in Kerala, introspected: “I think it [uncle-dom] starts with a lack of understanding of new beliefs, and then goes into dislike, and then even resentment.” This deteriorates into being ill-tempered and writing off an entire generation as useless. It also springs from “experience and self-proclaimed seniority”.

Samarth and I, both 47, talked about many things: books, movies, our children, technology, and history. At one point in the conversation, I held forth on something, and said that we were better in our 20s than a lot of people in their 20s now. “You’re being an uncle now,” he said, and we laughed, cognisant of our own biases. But uncles are not just men with prejudice. The threat of the ‘Boomer uncle’ (someone who grew up in the 1950s and 60s), as someone who clings to old ideas and rejects new perspectives, runs deeper.

Like when the Film Federation of India’s all-male panel chose Laapataa Ladies for India’s 2025 Oscar nomination. The chauvinistic citation read, “Indian women are a strange mixture of submission and dominance.” Or when a BJP leader from West Bengal allegedly said Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee should ‘identify her own father’ since she went around calling herself the daughter of whichever state she went to. Or when Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy stated last year that the youth must be prepared to work a 70-hour week to boost the economy, and how he himself worked ‘85-90 hours a week’ till he retired.

The saffron uncle

Since 2020, when Mumbai-based journalist Faye D’Souza gave her ‘Uncle, Are You With Us?’ Kommune India talk (you’ll find it on YouTube), the word uncle has featured frequently in public discourse. D’Souza’s talk brought out the politics of the uncle: a fearful, middle-class, middle- to retirement-age man toeing the conservative line because he didn’t have the guts to stand up for the truth. She spoke about men who wouldn’t even forward a video that challenged the government. At one point she asked, “Is the government reading the Constitution? Are you reading the Constitution, Uncle?” But uncles love the status quo, perpetuating the mainstream ideology.

Faye D’Souza | Photo Credit: Vivek Bendre

Today, D’Souza says, “I don’t think uncles have changed. I have changed — I have become more accepting of uncles and feel the need to conflict with them less.” So, she’ll stick to polite conversation at dinner parties, and on WhatsApp groups “roll my eyes in private but stay quiet on the group”. She feels people (who once were more open to calling out such behaviour), post-COVID, have become more protective of the family circle, and hence take on less challenging roles in the public sphere.

“The state imposes control through non-state actors, and uncles are these non-state actors,” says professor Sujata Sriram, dean of School of Human Ecology, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. “The state uses this masculine power to make their voice heard.” And because throwing their weight around is a very strong part of being an uncle, it reinforces the dominant power. Patriarchy and the control that comes with it, are at its heart.

It’s uncle-thought that will make rules about women healthcare workers being only assigned day duty, ‘for their safety’. It’s uncle-behaviour to call up a person and ‘complain’ that their daughter was ‘seen loitering’ with a boy. It’s uncle-emotion to express rage to people within their ‘control’, mostly a family member — never their boss.

It has taken women in public life to call this out. In June 2021, Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra had called then West Bengal governor Jagdeep Dhankar ‘uncle ji’ on X, saying his family members and others close to him had been appointed in the Raj Bhavan. This year, during the Lok Sabha elections, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra compared Prime Minister Narendra Modi to a ‘shaadi waale uncle ji’ (uncle at a wedding) who sits in a corner, gathers people around him, and talks of eye-rolling political conspiracies. This was after the PM had alleged that the Congress, of which Gandhi is a leader, has its eye on people’s earnings and wealth, as well as the gold and the mangalsutras of women.

Comedians, despite the threat of cases being filed against them in the current political regime, are the other set of people to call out uncles (see box). Aditi Mittal says, “It is our constant deference to uncle-hood in our private spaces that has led to the current political state.” She adds that by centring the uncle in the family experience, we move from ‘Uncle aa rahe hain tho ghar pe shorts mat pehno [Uncle is coming home, so don’t wear shorts]’ to ‘Unhone kiya hai tho kuch samaj ke hi kiya hoga [He made this decision, so he would have thought about it before doing so]’.

Aditi Mittal

“The uncle’s way stems from an older man’s perspective that says, ‘We are going to tell you what society expects of you, and we’re going to enforce it’,” says psychotherapist Hena Faqurudheen, who heads the Hank Nunn Institute, a not-for-profit mental health organisation in Bengaluru. One reason for this cognitive rigidity (the inability to adapt to new thought), she explains, is the older education system, which did not allow its students to question. Another, is India’s traditional deference to authority and the male ‘head of the family’.

Hena Faqurudheen

Radhika Vaz

Politics and patriarchy

Shalini Singh, 43, who works in the social sector in Delhi, talks about how uncle-hood is played out on dating apps, especially with married men struggling to “figure out what is happening here; many think it’s a free-sex app”. She notes a “sense of entitlement that comes from low self-awareness”. Their “confidence-booster is money and power from a job or social status or inheritance. There’s a lack of evolution that characterises him”.

Shalini Singh

However, it’s not always just about age. She talks of a friend in his 90s, who, though she did call uncle in the way that most men a generation or two older get tagged, didn’t fit the stereotype. “He wanted to study about climate change,” she remembers, adding that he was broad-minded, spirited, and curious about the world. “He didn’t have those ugly qualities of being tied to tradition,” or living covertly.

As technology takes over lives and women grow more powerful within the household, uncles may feel redundant. A loss of control and a feeling of being unessential may result in many “taking over the neighbourhood watch”, as Sriram puts it, with moral and administrative policing.

Dermatologist Anil Abraham, 61, who through his Instagram account @docanilabe parodies everybody from politicians to “WhatsApp uncles as doctors”, says uncles are boundary-setting men who put everything and everybody firmly in a box. “But they themselves are trapped. They realise they are hopelessly irrelevant and are holding on to dated ideas for dear life.”

Anil Abraham

He jokes that there should be a movie called Uncle No. 1, where all the ‘types’ are explored: the no-filter uncle who doesn’t think before he speaks, the sanskari uncle who is “hanging on to ideas from a Sooraj Barjatya movie”, the pretender uncle who only changed outwardly “and may even sport a tattoo”, the gyan spouting uncle, and the creepy uncle at work who will put his arm around a woman’s shoulder to mansplain.

Gen X and boomer roll call

All uncles are not built alike: they move along a spectrum — call it an uncle-o-meter. The caricatured uncle at his most tolerable is overbearing and pompous, but means no harm. Sriram says that at the opposite end of the spectrum are the sinister uncles who infringe on personal space, making sexual advances to younger women.

Suhani Ranjan (name changed on request), 50, a corporate employee from Chennai, says there are quite a few men in senior jobs who are somewhere in the middle of this uncle-o-meter. Like the head of the HR department in her company, who told her not to put out the fact that she was a single mother. “I asked him why, and he said, ‘Because you look so happy. You don’t conduct yourself like someone who is going through a divorce.’ I informed him it had taken me 20 years and a lot of hard work to get here, but the attitude is that a woman on the brink of divorce should be struggling, and portray herself as a martyr living an austere life.”

Natasha (name changed on request), 23, a corporate lawyer, also talks about how men, playing the role of mentor, will talk about the kind of law she should be pursuing as a woman, ‘because soon you’ll get married and have children’. The most rigid “bully-like atmosphere” though is at family gatherings, where men will hold forth on religion, politics, and the news, imagining that a young woman can never have a perspective, she says.

On the street, she feels the uncle gaze everywhere. “Once, I had called the cops because a man had tried to take my mother’s wallet. This uncle who had nothing to do with the situation came up to me and said that as a young woman I shouldn’t involve myself with the police,” she remembers.

Double standards are more Gen X than Boomer, because men in their 40s and early 50s understand what is expected from them, so play out those roles in public, lapsing into the Boomer-hood of their father’s generation, in private. “It’s the man who will say, ‘See, I know you like to wear a short skirt, but it’s for your safety that you need to cover up’,” she says.

In her 2022 article in Mint Lounge, ‘The tyranny of the Indian uncle’, economist-author Sharanya Bhattacharya says, “Women and oppressed communities are constantly scrutinised when they make demands for greater dignity and equality. Perhaps it is time we placed the Indian Uncle under rigorous sociological scrutiny for his reluctance to credibly supply these.”

Or as comedian Mittal says, “What we should be doing is taking a bite out of uncle authority.”

sunalini.mathew@thehindu.co.in 

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