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  Christmas did not mean a great deal to me and my largely nonChristian classmates at our Jesuit school in Bombay, except that, for those of us of a theatrical bent, it provided the excuse for our Christmas play.

  Our school, Campion, was, like its eponymous Elizabethan martyr, a Catholic institution, one of many through which the Jesuits fulfilled their considerable talent for educating the privileged of the Third World. It was a not wholly successful vocation, for the Jesuits were uncomfortably elitist and the elites enthusiastically Jesuitical. But perhaps because of its academic limitations, Campion encouraged the idea that there was more to school than studies. It offered a variety of extracurricular activities that helped you to find yourself outside the classroom even if you had lost yourself inside it.

  Foremost among these was the stage. There were frequent opportunities for participating in what was called (with no pun intended) interclass dramatics; and Campion offered, uniquely, optional after-school instruction in drama from one of the most talented, vibrant, and experienced figures of the Bombay stage, Pearl Padamsee — born Jewish, married first to a Hindu and then to a Muslim, a small, bouncing bundle of barely repressed energy who transformed several classloads of self-conscious, awkward schoolboys into confident, compelling actors and directors. Pearl’s classes were great fan, and they also led to bigger things — not just drama competitions at school, but extravagant public productions in overflowing Bombay theaters where people with no connection to Campion paid for standing-room-only tickets to watch us perform.

  Inevitably, theater at Campion sometimes taught us about matters that had nothing much to do with the theater. One instructive occasion came when a bunch of us seventh graders were to perform in that staple of Catholic schooling, the Christmas play.

  On this occasion the play, a longish one-acter, was called The Boy Who Wouldn’t Play Jesus, and had been written by an American with a social conscience. It was unusual in several respects, including that it was meant to be performed by schoolchildren; the cast were to portray themselves in the course of rehearsing a Christmas play. All is good-natured chaos until the hero, a good hamburgers-and-root-beer American kid, decides that, as long as there’s so much suffering and injustice in the world, he won’t play Jesus. So he leads the cast off the stage and into the audience, collecting funds for — remember, this was a 1960s American play — the hungry children of Bombay.

  So here we were, privileged Bombay kids, performing The Boy Who Wouldn’t Play Jesus (with me in the title role). The play was written to be easily adapted to any group of children, for they were all to use their own names and “be themselves,” but Pearl took the adaptation process a stage further. We too would protest injustice and suffering by refusing to play Jesus; but the issue that roused the Indian cast of Campion’s Christmas play, that prompted them to walk into the aisles shouting slogans, would not be India’s starving but Vietnam’s.

  This was 1967, and the Vietnam War was a favorite theme of the anti-American left, but Pearl was no radical, and Campion no training ground for revolutionaries. She had no political message to deliver to the audience of parents, teachers, and VIP invitees in our seething hotbed of social rest. All she was trying to do in changing the script was avoid offending Bombayites.

  Eleven years old at the time, I gave it no more than a passing thought. We were all aware of the change from our cyclostyled scripts, and I believe we all thought it was justified: after all, we were children of Bombay and we weren’t starving, were we? It was only very much later that I realized what I had lent my innocence to. It was the Christmas after the Bihar famine, when thousands had lost their lives to hunger less than a day’s train ride from Bombay, and massive infusions of food aid were being shipped in to keep Indian children alive. But we, insu lated in the security of our Campion existence, and too young to pay attention to the front pages of our parents’ papers, remained unaware of our own people’s plight.

  We could have changed “Bombay” in the script to “Bihar” or even “Calcutta,” and the play might have had a startling relevance to its audience. But a pointed reminder of the reality outside our ivoried bower would only have proved embarrassing to our distinguished well-wishers. We needed an alien cause—popular with the educated class we were being trained to join, but far enough from our daily lives to cause no discomfort — to provoke our carefully rehearsed outrage.

  And so we stepped off our Bombay stage in accordance with our script, refusing to play Jesus out of solidarity with starving children in Vietnam. We declaimed a Christmas message of caring and compassion to our largely non-Christian audience — a message they were meant to understand didn’t really apply to them.

  It was, I suppose, another Jesuit compromise between conviction and conformity, another sort of Christmas message. It showed how the Christian gospel could be propagated in a largely non-Christian world without endangering its votaries or undermining their vocation. The play was a huge success; the enthusiastically applauding parents, with hardly a Catholic among them, made record donations to the school fund. Perhaps that was ultimately the play’s vindication. Or perhaps, more simply, that is how Catholic schools the world over ensure that they will continue to have Christmases to celebrate.

  So India’s minorities have found their own ways of adjusting to plural India. In turn, India absorbed them: the widespread calls for Soma Gandhi to take over the Congress reflect not merely the political penury of those making such appeals but the eclecticism of Hindu India, into which this Roman Catholic would be seamlessly incorporated just as Hinduism itself has incorporated so many deities and external influences over the millennia. In such a culture the acceptance of difference is not difficult because cultural self-definition is remarkably elastic and absorptive. And yet I do not wish to underestimate the risk that Hinduism can pose to the pluralism of which it is the best example. Paradoxically, I saw this risk at close hand, not in India but in that unlikely hotbed of Hindu chauvinism, the United States.

  * * *

  To explore that, we will go abroad in the next chapter. It is worth stressing again that only an all-inclusive pluralism will guarantee the survival and success of the Indian nation. India’s minorities will succeed if they see themselves as Indians first and minorities second; and this will happen only if the India that grants them membership is an India in which they see themselves as equal in every respect to those of the real or imagined majority.

  One way of making pluralism work in practice as a force for progress rather than confrontation is to harness its diversity for common endeavors. The way in which different communities have come together for “secular” ends — whether in ecological movements like the Himalayan agitations against deforestation, or in the social work of Baba Amte, or in the cinema industry of Bollywood — points to the potential for cooperative rather than divisive mobilization. Where members of different communities, according to evidence gathered by Harvard professor Ashutosh Varshney, are used to working together in civic associations like unions, clubs, or business partnerships, communal riots either do not occur or are rapidly defused. It is when groups have stayed apart, and failed to interact in secular activities, that their communal identities prevail; the lack of brotherhood guarantees their “otherhood.” And then conflict, hatred, and violence erupt.

  The existence of consent — not just to be ruled, but to strive together with other communities — is crucial to my understanding of nationhood; a nation’s existence, Renan said a century ago, was a daily plebiscite. Two decades before Renan, a British historian and politician enunciated what at the time seemed a self-evident proposition. “A state which is incompetent to satisfy different races condemns itself; a state which does not include them is destitute of the chief basis of self-government,” wrote Lord Acton in 1862. His words remain just as true of India today as they were of the British Empire then.

  6

  NRIs

  “Never Relinquished India” or “Not Really Indian”?

 
On August 6, 1993, some fifteen thousand largely Indian expatriates assembled at the Washington Hilton and the Omni Shoreham Hotel for a “Global Conference” grandly titled “World Vision 2000.”A glossy brochure promoting the conference described it as “a grand effort to bring [together] youths from across the U.S.A. and around the world” to “deliberate on the Vision of Wholeness for the future of life on our planet.” Under a blazing headline, “Look Who Is Comming [sic] to the Global Conference!” one could find, in boldface, the names of President Clinton and the Dalai Lama and, in more modest type, Bill Moyers and Carl Sagan. Careful scrutiny, however, revealed that these luminaries had — no surprise — not actually accepted their invitations. And that those “dignitaries and spiritual leaders” who were in fact going to “guide the Global Conference” represented — surprise, surprise — most of the pantheon of India’s Hindu extremist fringe.

  For this seemingly innocuous event, it turned out, was not just another idealist, woolly-minded potlatch of the let’s-preach-to-the-youngsters-to-keep-their-minds-off-sex-and-drugs variety. You could have been fooled, though, by the ersatz glossiness of the brochure, on which the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol shared covers with a suitably Saganesque depiction of the cosmos, and whose elaborate registration instructions were complemented by alluring photographs of “the inside of a room at the five-star Omni Shoreham Hotel” (complete with a postcoital Caucasian couple in bathrobes). The “Global Conference” was timed for the centenary of the appearance at Chicago’s World Parliament of Religions of the brilliant Hindu humanist Swami Vivekananda, and its breathless blurbs sought to appropriate his luster. But its organizers had no claim to the all-embracing tolerance and wisdom of the late sage. They were the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, whose “Vision” (their capital V) extended most famously so far to the destruction of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya in northern India in December 1992, an act that unleashed violence and rioting on a scale not seen in India since independence.

  The VHP, which enjoyed the rare distinction of being considered more extremist than the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the party of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, has made something of a specialty of incitements to hatred. Under its benevolent auspices during the Bombay pogroms of January 1993, Muslims were abused, attacked, turned out of their homes, deprived of their livelihoods, butchered in the streets. Its more articulate sympathizers have expressed admiration for Hitler’s way with inconvenient minorities. This was the happy crew of moral and spiritual guides to whom fifteen thousand Indian émigré youngsters, some no doubt inveigled by the prospect of hearing the Dalai Lama and the president, entrusted their Washington weekend. When the brochure proclaimed “a variety of high quality programs to raise the awareness of human beings about their future directions,” one’s natural tendency to yawn was replaced by a shudder down a slowly chilling spine.

  Washington was certainly an unlikely setting for a celebration of Hindu fanaticism. And yet it was not such an improbable venue after all. For there seems to be something about expatriation that breeds extremism. The American ethnic mosaic is full of imported bigotry, from the Muslim fundamentalists who have been trying with commendable ineptitude to blow up New York, to Miami’s many incarnations of Attila the Cuba-Hun. Indian Americans have done their best to compete with these Fidelios of the foreign fringe. A coven of well-heeled Hindu professionals from Southern California swamped newspapers in India with a post-Ayodhya advertising campaign designed to counteract the bleeding-heart “pseudo-secularism” of the appalled liberals like myself who published denunciations of the destruction of the mosque and its aftermath. The ads — a farrago of a historical half-truths calling upon Indians in India to “awake,” for otherwise “India and Hindus are doomed” — were merely the latest evidence that exile nurtures political extremists. The “Global Conference” therefore continued in a hoary tradition.

  The strident chauvinism of these American Hindus is, after all, only one more installment in a long saga of zeal abroad for radicalism at home. We have already had expatriate Sikhs pouring money, weapons, and organizational skills into the cause of a “pure” (tobacco-free and barberless) “Khalistan”; Irish Americans supporting, willfully or otherwise, IRA terrorism in Northern Ireland; Jaffna Tamils in England financing the murderous drive for “Eelam” in Sri Lanka; and lobbying groups of American Jewry propounding positions on Palestinian issues that are far less accommodating than those of the Israeli government itself (at least in its Rabin and Peres incarnations).

  The irony of political extremism being advocated from distant ivory towers of bourgeois moderation is only the most obvious of the contradictions of this phenomenon. The more visible Khalistanis of North America may have carefully regroomed their beards and thrown away their cigarettes, as enjoined upon them by the Sikh scriptures, but they derive sustenance almost entirely from clean-shaven expatriate coreligionists largely unfamiliar with the prohibitions and injunctions of their faith. And the Hindu chauvinists of Southern California flourish in a pluralist melting pot whose every quotidian experience is a direct contradiction of the sectarianism they trumpet in the advertisement pages of newspapers in India.

  The explanation for this evident paradox may lie in the very nature of expatriation. Most of the contemporary world’s emigrants are people who left their homelands in quest of material improvement, looking for financial security and professional opportunities that, for one reason or another, they could not attain in their own countries. Many of them left intending to return: a few years abroad, a few more dollars in the bank, they told themselves, and they would come back to their own hearths, triumphant over the adversity that had led them to leave. But the years kept stretching on, and the dollars were never quite enough, or their needs mounted with their acquisitions, or they developed new ties (career, wife, children, schooling) to their new land, and then gradually the realization seeped in that they would never go back. And with this realization, often only half-acknowledged, came a welter of emotions: guilt at the abandonment of the motherland, mixed with rage that the motherland had somehow — through its own failings, political, economic, social — forced them into this abandonment. The attitude of the expatriate to his homeland is that of the faithless lover who blames the woman he has spurned for not having sufficiently merited his fidelity.

  That is why the support of extremism at home is doubly gratifying: it appeases the expatriate’s sense of guilt at not being involved in his homeland, and it vindicates his decision to abandon it. (If the homeland he has left did not have the faults he detests, he tells himself, he would not have had to leave it.) But that is not all. The expatriate also desperately needs to define himself in his new society. He is reminded by his mirror, if not by the nationals of his new land, that he is not entirely like them. In the midst of racism and alienation, second-class citizenship and self-hatred, he needs an identity to assert — a label of which he can be proud, yet which does not undermine his choice of exile. He has rejected the reality of his country but not, he declares fervently, the essential values he has derived from his roots. As his children grow up “American” or “British,” as they slough off the assumptions, prejudices, and fears of his own childhood, he becomes even more assertive about them. But his nostalgia is based on the selectiveness of memory; it is a simplified, idealized recollection of his roots, often reduced to their most elemental — family, caste, region, religion. In exile among foreigners, he clings to a vision of what he really is that admits no foreignness.

  But the tragedy is that the culture he remembers, with both nostalgia and rejection, has itself evolved — in interaction with others — on its national soil. His perspective distorted by exile, the expatriate knows nothing of this. His view of what used to be home is divorced from the experience of home. The expatriate is no longer an organic part of the culture, but a severed digit that, in its yearning for the hand, can only twist itself into a clenched fist.

  * * *

  India is probably the only countr
y in the world that not only has given official recognition to its expatriates, but has even devised a formal acronym for them. NRI, or Non-Resident Indian, is a term that, over the last decade, has found a firm place in the national vocabulary, though it is yet to be reflected in any dictionary. And NRIs as a breed have been granted an extraordinary range of special concessions by the government of India, ranging from privileged rates of interest on their hard-currency deposits in Indian banks, to exclusive housing colonies, to the opportunity to import Hollywood films onto India’s screens. As the nation’s economists look for solutions to India’s balance-of-payments difficulties, there is only one point on which both government and opposition seem to be agreed — that a vital element in any equation will be the well-heeled, and still patriotic, NRI, one for whom the acronym could well mean “Never Relinquished India.”

  Non-Resident Indians have certainly come a long way since the days when Indian prime ministers sanctimoniously urged them to be loyal to the foreign countries in which they had settled. As late as 1974, an Indian foreign minister told Parliament that “overseas Indians,” as they were then known, had chosen to live abroad and so were responsible for their own condition: the government of India had no obligation toward them. But since then New Delhi has developed expectations of its NRIs, and a reciprocal sense of obligation, too, has followed. Today NRIs are seen as people on whom the motherland — and its elected representatives — have a legitimate claim. It is a claim willingly conceded by many NRIs; for every extremist or secessionist abroad, there are a dozen who continue to demonstrate a remarkable degree of interest in, and commitment to, the land of their birth (or of their forebears).