Confused by the Indian Head Nod?
The bodylanguage equivalent of ‘Yes’ (head nod) and ‘No’ (head shake) – is the same in India as in Norway, Ireland and most other Western cultures. However, in India you also often see a half-nod-half-shake, and this is the nod that confused me time and again when trying to shop at markets in India, and more recently in Sri Lanka. While I had been told it means ‘Yes’, I was never 100% sure when my questions were answered with this side-nod, perhaps because to me, from my Norwegian/Irish perspective, it is somewhere in-between a yes and a no.
So in the hope of learning the true meaning of the half-nod-half-shake, or side-nod as I like to call it, I spoke to Kaushik Shanmugam from Chennai in South-East India. Though he reckons the side-nod might have different interpretations elsewhere in India, this is his use of it…
You tilt your head back slightly and you do a slow shake of the head, it means that you are skeptical. You are not fully convinced, but you will give it a go.
Here in India we do not like to say no. We are nice people, and don’t like to say no for an answer. So we give this slow side-nod, it implies that we don’t really want to do what you have asked us to, but we will do it for you.
A faster side-nod implies that we are more optimistic about it, the slower the nod, the less optimistic we are about it.
