Indians are not private and do not understand the right to privacy. So goes a myth that possibly emerged in lobbying circles during the years when India was trying to enact a data protection law. Over those 15 odd years, this was repeated so frequently in policy submissions, conferences and consultations that it gradually gained acceptance, including in boardrooms. It now has the tendency to derail the effective implementation of India's data privacy law in both public and private organisations.
Therefore, it is important to examine this assumption through a historical lens, drawing on the societal, cultural, and linguistic clues that India, as a civilization, offered regarding personal boundaries, dignity, and the ethics of intrusion.
One common argument often used to justify this myth is that Indian languages lack an equivalent of the English word “privacy”.
This is based on a misunderstanding of how Indian languages conceptualise personal boundaries.
In Sanskrit, the term svakarya conveys something personal, a matter belonging solely to oneself. The same idea exists in Malayalam as svakaryatha, in Tamil as ‘thaniyuramai’, and in other Indo-Aryan languages as ‘vyaktigat’.
Meanwhile, the Sanskrit word rahasya suggests secrecy, and antara or antaraṅga indicates something internal, intimate or part of the inner life. Similar words across multiple Indian languages refer to inner secrecy, confidentiality, etc. They have existed for centuries, long before any Western articulation of privacy, that certain things are not meant for public consumption.
It is also important to note that the English language itself does not have an ancient or ‘pure’ word for privacy.
The etymological roots of ‘privacy’ originate from the Latin term privus, meaning ‘to oneself’ or "pertaining to a person’s own domain”. Therefore, the argument that Indian languages lack a precise word for privacy overlooks the context of linguistic evolution.
Another common misconception is that Indians do not value privacy because of our limited physical space. We live in crowded cities and multigenerational households, and we commute in packed trains and overflowing buses, leading some to believe that privacy is unimportant to us.
However, privacy is not solely about physical separation; it encompasses several aspects, including informational privacy, bodily privacy, psychological privacy, communicational privacy, decisional privacy, and more. If members of multigenerational households did not have personal secrets, Indian soap operas would have been devoid of content.
Privacy is also interpersonal. One may choose to reveal salary information to a potential employer but may prefer to hide it from a colleague. One will disclose medical history to a doctor but not to their neighbour.
Privacy is relational and contextual, and we get the right to choose who to reveal that information to and when. This is not a Western construction; it is how any human behaves every single day.
Historically, we have always valued privacy, as shown by our epics. Rama eavesdropped on his citizens to gauge public sentiment, which is justified as a king’s duty to monitor the populace.
However, the epic makes it clear that breaching privacy can lead to grief, moral conflicts and tragic exile.
Likewise, violations of bodily and informational privacy are prevalent throughout the Ramayana, including the abduction of Sita and issues surrounding Agni Pariksha, among others.
The Mahabharata also offers cultural insights into privacy, ranging from secrets to vows, including Karna’s birth secret, Kunti’s mantras, and Draupadi’s disrobing.
It assigns severe consequences to each privacy breach, including death, loss of reputation or insults. Additionally, the Mahabharata addresses mental privacy through tapas, emphasising that the inner self must be protected from intrusion. Disturbing a sage’s meditation is regarded as a serious offence.
These ideas are not just confined to mythology. Modern Indian popular culture has consistently affirmed privacy as a fundamental value. The classic film ‘Anand’ explores the right of the protagonist to selectively share personal medical information, while Kal Ho Na Ho addresses the right to endure suffering in solitude.
The film 'Pink' highlights a woman’s right over her choices and her autonomy in decision-making, whereas Masan presents a contemporary tragedy driven by the fallout from unwanted exposure.
These films emphasised the importance of privacy, reached broad audiences, resonated throughout India, and became embedded in our pop culture.
Finally, even before the landmark constitutional recognition in the Puttuswamy case, India had a long, dispersed yet unmistakable privacy jurisprudence.
The right of a pardanashin woman to spatial privacy was acknowledged as early as the 1890s. Post-independence, privacy jurisprudence emerged as a check on the state's excesses during law-and-order exercises and later evolved to address medical confidentiality, restraint in reporting private facts, bodily autonomy in narcoanalysis cases, and telephone tapping.
There are at least twenty Indian judgments addressing privacy-like rights across various High Courts and the Supreme Court, even before the Puttuswamy case. This clearly indicates that the Supreme Court did not merely invent the right to privacy as a spectrum of rights but formally unified the privacy jurisprudence that has developed over the last 50 years, rooted in India’s civilizational values.
While many forms of right to privacy are accorded only constitutional protection, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act codifies certain aspects of the right to informational privacy. It requires organisations to take informational privacy seriously, something society already perceives intuitively.
Unless organisations in India abandon the myth that Indians are not private when implementing our new data protection law, they may be in for a surprise.
Nikhil Narendran is a Partner at Trilegal.