Being Indian
Contents
* * *
ABOUT THE BOOK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY PAVAN K. VARMA
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
MAP
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION: Image versus Reality
POWER: The Unexpected Triumph of Democracy
WEALTH: The Myth of Other-Worldliness
TECHNOLOGY: Success in the Shadows of the Past
PAN-INDIANNESS: Violence and the Power of Accommodation
EPILOGUE: A Critical Equilibrium for Take-Off
NOTES
INDEX
COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
COPYRIGHT
About the Book
In the 21st century every sixth human being will be Indian. India is very close to becoming the second largest consumer market in the world, with a buying middle class numbering over half a billion. It is in the top ten in overall GNP. Yet at least 200 million Indians remain desperately poor. Illiteracy rates are high. Communal violence is widespread; corruption endemic. Brides are still tortured and burnt for dowries; the caste system has lost little of its power and none of its brutality.
How are we to make sense of these two, apparently contradictory, pictures of India today? And how can we overcome the many misconceptions about India that are fed by the stereotypes created by foreigners and the myths about themselves projected by Indians? In Being Indian, Pavan Varma, whom the Guardian has called ‘one of the country’s most perceptive writers’, demolishes the myths and generalisations as he turns his sharply observant gaze on his fellow countrymen to examine what really makes Indians tick and what they have to offer the world in the 21st century.
‘A well-researched and urgent inquiry that is informed as much by allusions to Hindu mythological texts as it is by a knowledge of current affairs and popular culture.’ New Statesman
About the Author
A member of the Indian Foreign Service, Pavan K. Varma has served in Moscow, in New York at the Indian Mission to the UN, and as High Commissioner in Cyprus. He has been Press Secretary to the President of India, official spokesman for the Foreign Office, and is currently director of the Nehru Centre in London. His other books include translations of Hindi poetry, a study of Krishna, and the widely acclaimed The Great Indian Middle Class.
Also by Pavan K. Varma
The Book of Krishna
Ghalib: The Man, The Times
Yudishtar and Draupaid: A Tale of Love, Passions and the Riddles of Existence
Krishna: The Playful Divine
The Great Indian Middle Class
With Renuka Khandekar
Maximize your Life
BEING INDIAN
INSIDE THE REAL INDIA
PAVAN K. VARMA
For my mother, Shakuntala,
who passed away a little before
this book was published,
with love and reverence
Mushquilen mujh par padin itni
Ke aasaan ho gayeen
So many hardships came my way
That they were all resolved
Mirza Ghalib
Preface
HARIDWAR, WHERE THE Ganga descends from the Himalayas and enters the plains on its long journey to the sea, is a holy city for Hindus. Thousands of pilgrims visit it everyday. Amidst the hustle and bustle of piety and prayer, a few men can be seen standing even in winter on bare feet in the shallows of the icy river. They have a transparent glass pane in their hands, and spend the day looking through it at the fast-flowing waters. Their unblinking eyes speak of a concentration perhaps greater than that of the throngs of devotees nearby. But their purpose is different: not prayer, not moksha, not salvation for a departed soul. Their attention is focused on the coins on the river bed, which they trace and scoop out expertly with their feet.
India is a difficult country to characterize, and Indians not easy to define, especially today when they are in transition, emerging from the shadows of history into the glare of a globalizing world. This book is an attempt to try and understand who we really are, in the context of the past, and the framework of the future. The task is fraught with dangers. India is too big and too diverse to allow for convenient cover-all labels. To every generalization there is a notable exception. For every similarity there is a significant difference. I would like, therefore, to apologize in advance for anything in this book which hurts the sentiments of some, or appears to be contrary to their perception about themselves. My only consideration has been to paint as truthful a portrait as possible, but I accept that truth is not universal and could have notable exceptions. I must mention too that I have on occasion used the word Hindu and India interchangeably. This is not motivated by any chauvinism, but only because such a large majority of Indians are Hindus. In any case, there are traits which are decidedly Indian, and are applicable to all Indians, irrespective of their religious beliefs.
India appears to be on the threshold of take-off today, but the reasons for this have to go beyond the euphoria of the current ‘feel good’ wave. In analysing a people who have been in the crucible of history for millennia, no picture can be starkly black or white. Not everything can be right and not everything wrong. The challenge is to draw a balance sheet calculated on the foundational strengths of a people, and to essay the argument that in spite of the obvious weaknesses, the strengths will prevail. Culture, history, and the structure of society play a vital role in this calculation. So does the innate resilience of a people, and their aspirations and ambitions. In our case we must also take into account our inexplicable talent to muddle through, the ability to convert weakness to strength, and, of course, luck.
This book has been researched for several years, but I wrote it mostly when in Cyprus on diplomatic assignment. The beautiful island provided both the setting and the distance to write on a subject so close to my heart. I must express my deep gratitude to David Davidar, now with Penguin Canada, for having first suggested the idea of this book. I am greatly indebted to my agents Malcolm Imrie and Martina Dervis who kept faith in this book, and to Ravi Mirchandani, my editor, the best any author could hope to have. A word of thanks is due too to Cassie Chadderton at Random House. I am also very grateful to William Dalrymple for his friendship and support, and to Bhiku Parekh, Usha Parasher, Rohit Khattar and Salman Mahdi, for theirs. My family is practised now in bearing up stoically with my writing preoccupations. My late mother, with her deep knowledge of Indian culture, was a very willing point of reference. My son Vedanta, and my daughters Manvi and Batasha, often doubled as research assistants, as did their friends, of whom I cannot but mention Rishabh Patel. I am, as always, especially grateful to my wife Renuka for her patience and emotional support, and her views on so many aspects of this book.
Chapter One
INTRODUCTION
Image versus Reality
THE PURPOSE OF this book is to attempt a new and dramatically different inquiry into what it is to be an Indian. Such an inquiry is especially relevant today, not only for India, but also to the world as a whole. In the twenty-first century every sixth human being will be an Indian. India is likely to emerge as the second largest consumer market in the world, with a buying middle class numbering over half a billion. The Indian economy is already the fourth largest in terms of purchasing power parity. It is in the top ten in overall gross national product. The world’s largest democracy is a nuclear power, convinced of its right to become one of the permanent members of the UN Security Council.
Moreover, significant changes are sweeping across the subcontinent. With more degree holders than the entire population of France, India is finding new recognition in the field of information technology. Software exports are expected to top
US $50 billion in a few years. The Indian diaspora is, after China’s, the second largest in the world. Indians have emerged as the richest immigrant community in the USA, and are a growing and increasingly affluent presence in many other countries, including the UK and the Gulf states. Whether the world wants to or not, it will be difficult not to interact in many more ways with Indians in the new millennium. It is important, therefore, to understand, with much greater clarity and honesty than before, what it is to be an Indian.
Such inquiries in the past have been greatly handicapped by two factors. The first is the stereotypes through which foreigners see India. The second is the self-image that Indians seek to project about themselves. Foreigners usually gape or gulp when in India. The sheer variety of the auditory and visual experience overwhelms them. Many examples can be given of their reaction, but one will suffice to illustrate its slightly hysterical tone. Mark Twain wrote this after his visit to India at the end of the nineteenth century: ‘This is indeed India! The land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty—of genii and giants and Alladin lamps, of tigers and elephants—the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great grandmother of tradition . . .’1
During the colonial period perceptions were distorted by what Edward Said has referred to as the ‘Orientalism’ of the West. The Orient was the unfamiliar ‘other’, its people a strange ‘them’ set against the known ‘us’. For most Englishmen, India provoked either broad-brush euphoria or condemnation. The country was seen as irrevocably fragmented or spiritually transcendent, hugely ungovernable or simplistically self-reliant, venal beyond redemption or blissfully unmaterialistic, impossibly opaque or wonderfully ancient and revealing. In tandem, Indians were incorrigibly lazy or surprisingly diligent, horribly superstitious or remarkably evolved, disgustingly servile or always rebellious, amazingly talented or transparently imitative, greatly cultured or despairingly poor and, basically, just far too many. British scholarship was good on specifics, such as the description of flora and fauna, and the writing of gazetteers. But specifics were often effortlessly stretched into less well-researched generalities. The German Sanskritist F. Max Müller, who spent a lifetime studying Hindu philosophy, argued with great intensity that Indians were also very honest.2
Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership of the freedom struggle, his personal commitment to communal harmony, and his choice of ahimsa or non-violence as the strategy to defeat the British, created a new image of Indians as a tolerant and non-violent people. The long innings of Jawaharlal Nehru as the first Prime Minister of India conjured up another vision of millions of democratic Indians struggling to make the transition from tradition to modernity. Yet the visible diversity of the land, and the complexity of its cultural traditions, continued to bedevil accurate or deeper understanding. The noted economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who lived in India and was a friend of Nehru’s, once famously described India as a ‘functioning anarchy’. Decades later he was to admit that he had said it only to ‘attract attention’.3
The economic reforms of 1991 and the testing of a nuclear weapon in 1998 gave a little more substance to the Indian dot on the radar screens of geopolitical strategists and economic analysts, especially in the West. The Economist invoked the image of an awakened elephant, finally lumbering to its tryst with the marketplace. Stephen P. Cohen wrote a well-documented work wondering whether India would one day emerge as a major power or remain forever ‘arriving’. But such existential doubts are hardly preponderant in the minds of less ‘scholarly’ visitors who, alas, do not come in the numbers the Indian tourist department would like them to. Those who do, mostly come to discover an ancient culture and find it in the extraordinary monuments that are strewn carelessly across the land. They have read about spiritual India, and see it in the soaring pinnacles of the temples of South India and in the devotees taking a dip in the Ganga in Varanasi. The diversity of food and dress devours the reels in their cameras. They buy handicrafts at cheap prices as evidence of the incredible exotica they have been promised. They find modern India in the English-speaking Indian and the high-rise buildings in the metropolises. The tout who cheats them is proof of the essential corruption of underdeveloped economies. The filth and poverty is nauseating but is hazily attributed to the timeless other-worldliness of spiritual India. Some time is spent in arguing how a nation which professes to be non-violent can explode a nuclear bomb. But soon the visit is over. The visitors return home, wondering how such a vast country has held together, and how its poor and ill-clad hordes have succeeded for so long in remaining a democracy.
None of these impressions is entirely off the mark. The Indian reality is 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 only 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 that they know to be untrue, and have wilfully 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 this image, and can no longer accept that it is untrue.
The image has been created by a quantum leap of logic, an ideological sleight of hand that derives an untenable ought from an undeniable is. India has been a parliamentary democracy since Independence in 1947; therefore, Indians are undeniably democratic by temperament. Several important religions were born and flourish in India; therefore, Indians are essentially spiritual in their outlook. People of different faiths have found a home in India; therefore, Indians are basically tolerant by nature. Mahatma Gandhi defeated the British by relying on ahimsa; therefore, Indians are peaceful and non-violent in temperament. Hindu philosophy considers the real world as transient and ephemeral; therefore, Hindus are ‘otherworldly’ and un- materialistic in their thinking. India has nurtured a great deal of diversity; therefore, Indians are of an eclectic and catholic disposition.
India is much too important today, and its potential far too significant in the coming decades, to be held hostage to this simplistic myth-making. There was reason, perhaps, in 1947 to encourage such myths. Serious doubts about the survivability of the newly-independent nation hung ominously on the horizon like August monsoon clouds. The polity was fragile. Partition had severely bruised the hope of communal harmony. The unity of the country could not be taken for granted. In such situations, all nations indulge in myth-making to bind their people together, and India’s need was, if anything, greater than most. But what was expedient for a fledgling polity soon became the conscious—and enduring—deceit of an entire nation. Since myths often contain a kernel of truth; it took some time for even the astute observer to notice the disjoint between the embroidery and the fabric. But the issue is far more serious than merely criticizing the pretensions of professional image-makers. The imperative today is to understand that this deliberate distortion has been—and is—detrimental to India’s long-term interests in at least two very important ways: one, the choice of appropriate policies and programmes to tap the real genius and strengths of the Indian people, especially in view of the new challenges ahead; and, two, the projection of a more accurate appraisal of India, and the Indian people, for a global community poised to become more involved with both.
To effectively demolish the untruths of the past requires courage, because it is tantamount to questioning the dogmas of the modern state. Too much, however, is at stake for the task to be postponed, or pursued in a perfunctory or less than rigorous manner. The situation demands an intellectual solvent that cuts through the woolly-headed posturing of our make-belie
ve world, and compels us to ask some foundational questions. Why was the Indian elite, the end product of 5,000 years of civilizational continuity, colonized so easily by the British, to become the model children of Macaulay? Was it our non-violent nature that allowed invaders to conquer us repeatedly, or was it our willingness to accept, and even collude with, the more powerful? Why do Indians prostrate themselves so abjectly before the rich and the mighty, and why are they so indifferent to the suffering of the weak and the poor?
In spite of the glaring inequities of its socio-economic system, India has not had a violent revolution either in the lead up to Independence or later. Is this also evidence of our intrinsically non-violent nature, or does the answer lie elsewhere? Why has a nation, which had Mahatma Gandhi as its towering role model of rectitude, become so unbelievably corrupt so quickly? Do we really devalue the end in favour of the right means, or are we only concerned with the end result, whatever the means employed?
The Hindus practised untouchability against the largest numbers of their own faith, and were (and are) practitioners, as part of the caste system, of one of the world’s most rigid systems of exclusion. Do they then really have a claim to be called tolerant? If not, why has secularism survived in India, and why can we expect it to strengthen in the years ahead? Can a people who are so cannily attuned to the validity of hierarchy and ‘status’, and the ordained inegalitarian order of things, be considered democratic by temperament? If not, why has parliamentary democracy survived, and even flourished, in India? Can a people, whose educated members may beat a domestic servant to near death, blind undertrials to extract a confession, or burn wives for larger dowry, be considered essentially non-violent in their make-up? If not, then why did Gandhi’s strategy of ahimsa succeed, and why did the revolutionary fervour of such independence leaders as Subhash Chandra Bose or Bhagat Singh find so few followers?