Beyond Rebellion: When People Quietly Leave One World for Another

The most profound departures are not always acts of defiance. Sometimes they are acts of becoming. 

Over the past couple of years, a few seemingly unrelated episodes in Assam have stayed with me.

The daughter of a senior minister appeared among protesters challenging the government. Earlier, a young woman from one of Assam's most respected traditional Vaishnavite families became the centre of a cultural controversy after releasing a music video that many regarded as violating deeply held social norms. More recently, the spouse of a politician associated for decades with the political establishment has publicly expressed views that many interpret as belonging to a different moral and political landscape.

These are very different individuals living very different lives. Their motivations may have nothing in common. Nor is it possible—or fair—to infer those motivations from public appearances alone.

Yet together they raise an intriguing question.

How do people come to inhabit worlds so different from the ones into which they were born?

It is tempting to call this rebellion. That is usually the language we choose. But I increasingly wonder whether rebellion is always the right word.

Perhaps something more complicated is taking place.

Every family, particularly one with a strong public identity, passes on more than property or reputation. It transmits a way of understanding the world. Children absorb ideas about authority, morality, loyalty, success and identity long before they consciously develop political opinions. These assumptions become so familiar that they feel less like beliefs than like reality itself.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu described this inherited framework as habitus—the largely invisible dispositions that shape how we perceive and respond to the world. We rarely notice them because they seem entirely natural. Only when we encounter another way of seeing do we realise that what felt universal was, in fact, inherited.

This is hardly a new phenomenon. History is filled with sons and daughters who departed from the worlds that shaped them. Children of aristocrats became socialists. Descendants of revolutionaries later defended institutions. Military families produced pacifists. Deeply religious households sometimes gave rise to secular thinkers, while committed atheists occasionally rediscovered faith.

Such journeys are as old as civilisation itself.

The question is what kind of journey they represent.

Some are undoubtedly ideological. Some are moral. Others are psychological. Still others may be strategic, shaped by changing political winds, social incentives or personal circumstances. From the outside, these different paths often look remarkably similar.

While thinking about these questions, I found myself returning to a novel that has remained close to me for many years—not only because I admire it, but because I translated it into Assamese.

Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha is often described as a spiritual novel. I increasingly think it is something even more universal. It is a novel about moving between worlds.

One of its most remarkable features is that Siddhartha is not really a rebel. He does not storm out of his father's house. He does not denounce the Brahmins who raised him. His father is wise, honourable and deeply respected. There is no oppression from which he must escape.

Yet he leaves.

Not because the world he inherited is false, but because it no longer answers the questions arising within him.

Modern rebellion usually defines itself against something. Siddhartha's journey is defined by movement towards something.

He leaves the Brahmins. Later he leaves the Samanas. He walks away even from the Buddha, not because he rejects the Buddha's wisdom, but because he realises that enlightenment cannot simply be borrowed from another person's experience. He later abandons wealth, pleasure and commerce before finally discovering the quiet wisdom of the ferryman and the river.

Each world teaches him something. None possesses the whole truth.

Perhaps that is where many contemporary rebellions differ. Too often we congratulate ourselves on escaping one orthodoxy only to embrace another. One ideological tribe is exchanged for its rival. One certainty replaces another.

Siddhartha does something rarer. He carries each world with him. His Brahmin upbringing is never erased. Neither is his experience as an ascetic, a merchant, a lover or a father. Every stage becomes part of a larger understanding rather than something to be denied.

That may be the difference between rebellion and transcendence.

The rebel often seeks to defeat the old world. The pilgrim seeks to understand it before moving beyond it.

Looking back, I wonder whether this is why Siddhartha has remained so close to me over the years. Only now do I realise that many of my own reflections—whether on science, the pandemic, politics or public life—have circled around the same question.

Human beings do not merely change opinions. They come to inhabit different realities.

Perhaps that is the larger lesson behind those seemingly unrelated episodes that first prompted these reflections. They are not really about particular individuals. They remind us that every generation must negotiate its inheritance. Some preserve it. Some reform it. Some reject it. Most do a little of all three.

But the deepest journeys may not be acts of rebellion at all.

They are acts of becoming.

And perhaps the highest form of maturity is not to leave one world in anger, nor to embrace another with equal certainty, but to grow large enough to understand both.