It is significant that the topic under discussion at the Indo Caribbean Cultural Centre this week has been about family responsibility for the elderly in the Indian Diaspora. Speakers from Trinidad, Guyana, New Zealand and South Africa participated in this important think-tank. Each discussed how the landscape is rapidly changing to the detriment of society.

There is a widely held perception among non-Indians that members of the Indian community, among other attributes, hold their aged in high esteem. Indeed there are strong elements of truth in this perception. In the past we traditionally displayed reverence for the aged by genuflecting at their feet, asking for their blessings, and valuing their good counsel.

No wedding ceremony could begin without their blessings.

In the old Buddhist tradition, the presence of an elder in the family home was regarded as being a blessing in itself. I recall the days when we would fight to have a grandparent of the family reside with us thus designating that home in the larger family structure as being the most important one where all the family functions would occur. However, the times have changed dramatically and with it the status and treatment of our ageing parents.

There have been several incidents in the Indian community recently that have alerted us to the realisation that there is widespread abuse of our aged. Anecdotal evidence is growing by the day confirming our suspicions that all is not well in a community that was once held in high esteem.

Today it is fast becoming a universal trend to regard the aged as a problem, so much so that we allocate a period of time to acknowledge their presence among us in the form of a national or international week of the aged. How sad is it that we now should relegate our parents and grandparents to an obligation to be fulfilled in such a mechanistic way. '

Like everywhere else in the world, India behind its façade of strong family ties is beginning to crumble under the rising number of elderly people, who are unwanted by their children and we are no exception to this in South Africa.

The horrific story of a 76-year-old Indian couple, who jumped to their death from the 8th floor of a plush apartment building in Mumbai shocked the nation into the reality of the sorrowful plight of the aged in India. In the early hours of a Sunday morning, a watchman on the night-shift stumbled on the bodies of Vasudev and Tara Dalal and alerted the household.

The couple had apparently climbed out of a window and flung themselves on the flagstones eight floors below. A suicide note found in the husbands pocket read: “We are ending our lives because of constant abuses and harassment from our son and daughter-in-law."

Many of today’s ageing parents hold their 40-something children more in fear than in the expected glow of filial love. For as long as parents have property and assets in their name, they may enjoy an honourable existence. But as age brings on illness and frailty, the loss of independence makes them vulnerable to exploitative children whose main concern is focused on inheriting the family jewels and wealth.

When the plunder has successfully occurred, the nightmare of neglect, abuse and abandonment occurs. Many a story has been told of son and daughters usurping family properties through false pretensions. Getting ignorant parents to sign away all their assets under threat is a common occurrence.

Much of parental suffering is borne in silence. Nobody, least of all a father or a mother, would like to openly air their deeply-personal problems to all and sundry. Moreover, there is the fear of reprisal compounded by the insecurity of old age. But persecution finds its own idiom and may not only arise from a changing value system between the generations. Instead one needs to understand how demography and socio-economic changes have contributed to this current situation.

Historically, the break up of the extended family system was fast tracked by the Group Areas Act in the grand scheme of separate development. This governmental intervention forced people overnight into nuclear units in sub-economic housing thus causing widespread havoc among established families.

Women’s emancipation into the world of work also combined to create new tensions of dual career marriages, thus changing traditional expectations of them. Added to this, changes in the pace of life, mobility, pressure of work, cost of living, crass materialism and wide generational differences have all impacted on the nature of human relationships. Technological advancements have also seriously contributed to a widening gap between old and young.

Instead of the old reverence that communities had for wisdom gained from the aged through their knowledge, today information is valued over wisdom. Instead of reverence, the aged are devalued by the young for their inability to negotiate technology. Instead of the aged teaching the young, the reverse has now become a truism. When an old person has to ask a young child how to work the cell phone or the computer, the overt respect rapidly dwindles into a constant source of irritation.

On account of these forces beyond our control, geriatric research confirms that in all societies, globally respect for the elderly is dying out and that elderly people must learn to be more self reliant. As the first world economy and the information age move us further towards “nouvelle individualism” and crass materialism, the value of dependents rapidly diminishes.

I overheard a woman’s response to a question about the health of her aging relatives to which she replied with anticipated relief: ”Two gone, one more to go."

These tendencies will manifest in micro families with no provision for the aged. Since even children will be viewed as an unnecessary burden for the highly-emancipated couple of the future, the status of the elderly will be relegated to various levels of institutional care.

In South Africa, the Department of Social Development is attempting to intervene to stall the trend towards costly government-subsidised institutional care. Instead, it is urging a move towards community-based care by placing the responsibility squarely back on the shoulders of family and community and attempting to re-entrench a value system of the past. But in doing so, it has to offer proper statutory protection against the abuse of the elderly.

In the dynamic cycle of life the infant cannot exist without its parent, who nurtures and sustains it and conversely when the parent becomes the infant in need of care, it is the moral responsibility of the child to take care of the parent. These are universals that will remain unchanged despite all other forces around us. The challenge in our lives is to recognize those universals and to respect their intrinsic virtues.

elderly abuse

Reverence to relegation: the plight of the elderly in the Indian Diaspora