While the world was expected from US President Barack Obama, it was his wife and first lady Michelle Obama who provided those essential warm, spontaneous moments, which made for great television, and quite frankly warmed the general public to the high-powered couple.

In that, Mrs Obama follows in the footsteps of several other first ladies in American history who have provided the perfect foil of grace and charm to their high-powered husbands. Who can forget the Kennedys? visit to France, where John F Kennedy famously declared that he was ?only the man who accompanied Jackie to France.?

Having said that, the question of whether any Indian first lady or even a first ?husband? (we have had women heads of state and government) can have a similar role arises. There are two problems with this question. One is of course the peculiar cultural situations of both countries and secondly, nobody has frankly felt a lack till now, to seriously address this question.

Let?s get to the second part first. Our first Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru had, as his official hostess his daughter Indira Gandhi, who had a certain charm, but was not so central to his job as Prime Minister. Subsequently, when Indira Gandhi herself became Prime Minister, she was her own hostess and the question never really arose.

For a brief while, Rajiv Gandhi?s tenure saw a telegenic family take centrestage, a beautiful wife and dimpled good looking children completed the picture of the Indian Camelot before it all came crashing down with Bofors and later Gandhi?s brutal assassination. Atal Behari Vajpayee was famously a bachelor and remained one throughout his political career. Informal photo-types in his tenure were limited to his Manali mountain hide-out or lake cruises in Kerala?s Kumarakom, writing poetry with his adopted family and a legion of male factotums.

As a country, however, have we really demanded much of our first ladies? We appear to be quite happy to have them in the background, and find them quite dispensable to the real job of running the country. The key to this is quite clearly the fact that Indian kinship systems never privilege the marital relationship over that of blood.

In Indian families, husbands and wives, till very recently were expected to maintain a public distance, and within the house, occupy different spaces, coming together only on religious or social occasions for a mainly segregated contact. Modern living may have shrunk that distance, but the mindset of a feudal patriarchy where women are neither seen nor heard in the public, political space occupied by men is rampant.

American kinship systems, on the other hand, as elaborated by US sociologist David M Schneider, offers the opposite view of US society. In his book American Kinship and Marriage, he states unequivocally that the pioneer, migrant character of US society has led it to privilege the marital relationship and the family that emanates from it as central to society, rather than the bond between parents and extended family links. Investing more in the family you make rather than the one you may have to leave behind.

The American President?s family is expected to be the ideal family type. The country?s divorce rates may be sky-rocketing, but it wants in its leader?s family an encapsulation of the ideal American family. Where a wife is helpmeet and a very verbal and visual presence in the husband?s career.

It may be a while for an Indian first lady to dance a jig with children or even playfully exhort students to ask her husband ?tough questions?. It will take a larger social change in Indian society before that can really happen.

nistula.hebbar@expressindia.com