How does one even begin to make sense of a drama as deep and wide as India?
Coming back from a recent trip to India, Im somewhat puzzled by the many contradictory attitudes that India evokes within me. I find that I have a deep love of India thats shot through with frustration and confusion. On the one hand I see India as the home of a great civilization thats still growing and changing, a country imbued with vast curiosity and openness, thats cosmopolitan and rural, thats the home of Bollywood (an unapologetically South Asian phenomenon) and is without a doubt a global power. I love how India flies in the face of received wisdom -- for example Im struck by the fact that both Kerala, one of modern Indias most successful states elected a Communist government in 1957, while West Bengal, one of Indias most culturally sophisticated states, has been run by the Communist Party (India) for twenty-seven long years. These oddities give me a gleeful sense that the laws of the known universe somehow work differently in India. Its not just a bastion for difference but a source of difference. Then on the other hand I see the extreme deference that Indians have for status and power. I wonder at how easily educated Indians are willing to dismiss centuries old belief and knowledge systems as mere superstition. I see a country where the poor are treated like theyre sub-human. I see a country all too willing to step on the powerless in order to succeed at the global game. I feel that the myth of India Shining so feted by both non-Indians and Indians alike is somewhat simplistic. So, how is one to understand India today?
While flipping through Indian cable television it occurred to me that India is now being recognized as an emerging power or world leader or a super-state because she has learnt how to express herself fluently in Western categories. Now we can read Indian writers writing in English, we can watch Indian movies more or less in English (Mira Nair & others), we can watch Indian music videos in Hindi that look like classic MTV videos (world music) and we can watch Indian adverts in Hindi that look like anything you might see in London. At the other end of the spectrum, India is not just fluent in soft power but has also demonstrated her familiarity with hard forms of power; Indian elite engineering colleges are excellent, the Indian software industry is bringing in billions and to top it off India speaks the hyper-elite language of nuclear weapons. Now that India can express herself in a language (or languages) well understood by the West, the West is recognizing India as a power. Prior to that India expressed herself in terms incomprehensible to the Western ear and was seen largely through crude orientalist stereotypes.
Comprehending Indian reality is difficult in part because Indian fluency in Western categories is what our eyes are drawn to. Stories about India are either about the poverty-stricken India of orientalists-past or theyre about how India is succeeding in the things that we ourselves deem to be valuable, for example in technology. Indians themselves encourage and show-off these very same things to non-Indians. Nobody really wants their country to be known for corruption or poverty and it doesnt make sense to show off those things which the West doesnt value or, for that matter, understand. This however leads us to serious distortions in our understanding of India. Pavan K. Varma in his excellent and eye-opening book, Being Indian: The Truth About Why the 21st Century will be India's
The Indian reality is both transparent and opaque simultaneously. What is visible is as much a part of the truth as what remains unseen. Foreigners see what is overt, and conflate it with their preconceived notions of the great Indian civilization. In the process many assumptions evade critical scrutiny, and a great many inferences are either incorrect or partially true. But foreigners can be forgiven their errors. Not so the Indians. Over the years the Indian leadership, and the educated Indian, have deliberately projected and embellished an image about Indians they know to be untrue, and have willfully encouraged the well-meaning but credulous foreign observer (and even more the foreign scholar) to accept it. What is worse, they have fallen in love with that image, and can no longer accept it as untrue.
Interrogating our images of India and penetrating the opaqueness of Indian reality matters, as Varma tells us, because India is much too important today, and its potential far too significant in the coming decades to be held hostage to simplistic myth making. One example of the complexity of the relationship between image and reality is the oft-heard claim that India is the worlds largest democracy. Without detracting from this claim, which is undoubtedly true, a closer look at the functioning of Indian democracy reveals a bloody and somewhat disturbing edge. Of the various models of democracy at work around the world, from the Swiss Cantons to Lees Singapore, Indian democracy surely surpasses all in its raw, bare knuckled brutality.
Suketu Mehta explores this brutality up-close as part of his astonishing and wide-ranging study of Bombay, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. Mehtas account of how democracy in India, at least on one level, functions, makes for chilling reading. He tracks the story of a young Shiv Shena strongman, thug and murderer called Sunil, who also happens to be an entrepreneur running a successful cable business. Sunil was part of the apparatus that helped the right-wing, Hindu nationalist party, the Shiv Shena, gain control of Bombay. Mehta concludes Sunils tale, somewhat wearily, admitting,
Sunil will inherit Bombay, I now see. The consequences of his burning the bread seller alive: when the Sena government came in two years later, he got appointed a Special Executive Officer; he became, officially, a person in whom public trust is reposed He is idealistic about the nation and utterly pragmatic about the opportunities for personal enrichment that politics offers. Sunil, in fact, can be held up as an exemplar of the capitalist success story The fact that a murderer like Sunil could become successful in Bombay is both a triumph and failure of democracy. Not all politicians are as compromised as he is but the ones who arent have to rely on people like Sunil to get elected.
Its in interstices such as these, complex, deeply disturbing and yet dare-we-say hopeful stories, that India reveals herself to us. They can be read in a number of different ways. Varma, for example, argues that democracy has survived and grown in India precisely because it provides people like Sunil a route to power. The millions upon millions of Indians who live in urban slums or who are low in the caste system can see a pragmatic road that leads them clearly out of their current situations. These routes also function as release valves, ensuring that millions of Indians not only have hope but slowly and surely have an increasing stake in the system. Indians, argues Varma, are not democratic by nature, rather theyre deeply attracted to power. Democracy has given Indians an institution that they can work in order to gain personal power. Indians have come to accept democracy, a Western category if there ever was one, on their own terms and for their very own reasons.
Indias fluency, however, in the categories of the West points to a somewhat different destiny than simply being a better copy of the West or even being a true counter-player (as China might be). Indias genius lies in her ability to speak multiple languages. Indians can, and have been, both Indian and Western in a way that Westerners, at least increasingly, are not. To be white and Danish or French, to pick two random examples, means being Danish or French and not Danish-Indian or French-Indian. Ashis Nandy, one of Indias foremost public intellectuals explains how for Indians the boundaries of the self are not as sharply demarcated in terms of belief, faith or identity, categories that the moderns feel comfortable with. Historically, this is how India coped with waves of invaders and with colonialism. In his classic study on the effects of colonialism on the Indian and British psyches, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism, Nandy writes that Indian culture protects itself against cosmologies which are proselytizing, hegemonic and committed to some secular or non-secular theories of cultural evolution by projecting the idea that the Indian is compromising; he has a fluid self-definition, and he is wiling to learn the ways of his civilised brethren unconditionally, provided such learning is profitable.
This ability to live and thrive with blurred boundaries of self, with fluid self-definition, ensures that Indian culture has a certain resilience in the face of the homogenising storm of globalisation. Whereas the French worry and fret about the impact of US culture on their heritage, the Indians lap it up. They take the stuff that Hollywood produces and make it Indian, for Indians, with no fuss. The streets of Mumbai are awash with ten year old street vendors peddling bootleg Harvard Business School Press paperbacks. For Indians intellectual property regimes are an irritant, a barrier to innovation.
This fluidity, resilience and ability to assimilate are reasons why the twenty-first century may well turn out to be Indian. Call it courage or foolhardiness, in its engagement with the world India does not fear becoming not-Indian. Democracy, in other words, has not eaten India, rather India has eaten democracy.
