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  In doing so they are profoundly disloyal to the religion they claim to espouse, which stands out not only as an eclectic embodiment of tolerance, but which is also the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. All ways of worship, Hinduism asserts, are equally valid, and religion is an intensely personal matter related to the individual’s self-realization in relation to God. Such a faith understands that belief is a matter of hearts and minds, not of bricks and stone. The true Hindu seeks no revenge upon history, for he understands that history is its own revenge.

  The Hindu zealots who chanted insultingly triumphalist slogans may have helped incite the worst elements on the Muslim side, who allegedly set fire to a railway carriage carrying temple campaigners (though one inquiry suggests the train fire may have simply been accidental); in turn, Hindu mobs have torched Muslim homes and killed innocents. As the courts deliberate on a solution to the dispute, the cycle of violence goes on, spawning new hostages to history, ensuring that future generations will be taught new wrongs to set right. We live, Octavio Paz once wrote, between oblivion and memory. Memory and oblivion: how one leads to the other, and back again, has been the concern of much of my fiction. As I pointed out in the last words of Riot, history is not a web woven with innocent hands.

  * * *

  As the twenty-first century began with India’s computer scientists and software engineers bringing investment and employment to the “Silicon Plateau” around Bangalore, and with the likes of Bill Gates helping convert the medieval city of Hyderabad into a hightech “Cyberabad,” the question began to be asked in India: can we become a world leader? What makes a country a world leader? Is it population, in which case India (with 1.1 billion people in 2007) is on course to top the charts, overtaking China as the world’s most populous country (with 1.6 billion) by 2034? Is it military strength (India’s is the world’s fourth-largest army) or nuclear capacity (India’s status having been made clear, if not universally recognized, with a series of nuclear explosions in 1998)? Is it economic development? There, India has made extraordinary strides in recent years; it is already the world’s fifth-largest economy in PPP (purchasing-power parity) terms and continues to climb, though too many of its people still live destitute, amid despair and disrepair. Or could it be a combination of all these, allied to something altogether more difficult to define — the power of example?

  In answering this question, India must determine where its strengths lie as it seeks to make the twenty-first century its own. Much of the conventional analyses of India’s stature in the world rely on the all-too-familiar indices of GDP, impressive economic growth rates, and our undoubted military power. But if there is one attribute of independent India to which observers have not perhaps paid enough attention, it is a quality which India would do well to cherish and promote in today’s world: its “soft power.”

  “Soft power” consists of those attributes that attract and persuade others to adopt the country’s agenda, rather than relying purely on the dissuasive or coercive “hard power” of military force. What does this mean for India? It means giving attention, encouragement and active support to the aspects and products of our society that the world would find attractive — not in order directly to persuade others to support us, but rather to enhance our country’s standing in their eyes. Bollywood is already doing this by bringing its brand of glitzy entertainment not just to the Indian diaspora in the US or UK but to the screens of Syrians and Senegalese—who may not understand the Hindi dialogue but catch the spirit of the films, and look at India with stars in their eyes as a result. (An Indian diplomat friend in Damascus a few years ago told me that the only publicly displayed portraits that were as big as those of then president Hafez al-Assad were those of Amitabh Bachchan.) Indian art, classical music and dance have the same effect. So does the work of Indian fashion designers, which has begun to dominate the worlds runways. Indian cuisine, spreading around the world, raises our culture higher in people’s reckoning (the way to foreigners’ hearts is through their palates). When India’s cricket team triumphs or its tennis players claim Grand Slams (so far only in doubles); when a bhangra beat is infused into a western pop record or an Indian choreographer invents a fusion of kathak and ballet; when Indian women sweep the Miss World and Miss Universe contests, or when a film like Lagaan claims an Oscar nomination; when Indian writers win Booker and Pulitzer prizes; when each of these things happens, our country’s soft power is enhanced. And when some Americans speak of the IITs with the same reverence they used to accord to MIT or Caltech, and the Indianness of engineers and software developers is taken as synonymous with mathematical and scientific excellence, it is India that gains in respect.

  But it is not just these material accomplishments that enhance our soft power. Even more important are the values and principles for which India stands — above all our precious pluralism, which used to be widely admired till the barbarous mobs at the Babri Masjid and the goondas of Gujarat devastated both their victims and the country’s image. India must reclaim its true heritage in the eyes of the world. Our democracy, our thriving free media, our contentious NGOs, our energetic human rights groups, and the repeated spectacle of our remarkable general elections, all have made of India a rare example of the successful management of diversity in the developing world.

  After the elections of 2004 Sonia Gandhi resolved the existential dilemma by winning election as the prime minister-designate of the ruling coalition and then renouncing the office in favor of another. The sight in May 2004 — in a country 81 percent Hindu — of a Roman Catholic leader (Sonia Gandhi) making way for a Sikh (Manmohan Singh) to be sworn in as prime minister by a Muslim (President Abdul Kalam) caught the world’s imagination and won its admiration. No strutting nationalist chauvinism could ever have accomplished for India’s standing in the world what that one moment did — all the more so since it was not directed at the world.

  It was an affirmation of an ancient civilizational ethos in a new political era—taking India from midnight to beyond the millennium.

  April 2007

  1

  A Myth and an Idea

  India,” Winston Churchill once barked, “is merely a geo graphical expression. It is no more a single country than the Equator.” Churchill was rarely right about India, but it is true that no other country in the world embraces the extraordinary mixture of ethnic groups, the profusion of mutually incomprehensible languages, the varieties of topography and climate, the diversity of religions and cultural practices, and the range of levels of economic development that India does.

  And yet India is more than the sum of its contradictions. It is a country held together, in the words of its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, “by strong but invisible threads. . . . About her there is the elusive quality of a legend of long ago; some enchantment seems to have held her mind. She is a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive.”

  How can one approach this land of snow peaks and tropical jungles, with twenty-two official languages and twenty-two thousand distinct dialects (including some spoken by more people than speak Danish or Norwegian), inhabited in the first decade of the twenty-first century by over a billion individuals of every ethnic extraction known to humanity? How does one come to terms with a country whose population is nearly 40 percent illiterate, but which has educated the world’s second largest pool of trained scientists and engineers, whose teeming cities overflow while four out of five Indians scratch a living from the soil? What is the clue to understanding a country rife with despair and disrepair, which nonetheless moved a Mughal emperor to declaim, “If on earth there be paradise of bliss, it is this, it is this, it is this . . .?” How does one gauge a culture that elevated nonviolence to an effective moral principle, but whose freedom was born in blood and whose independence still soaks in it? How does one explain a land where peasant organizations and suspicious officials attempt to close down Kentucky Fried C
hicken as a threat to the nation, where a former prime minister bitterly criticizes the sale of Pepsi-Cola “in a country where villagers don’t have clean drinking water,” and which yet invents a greater quantity of sophisticated software for U.S. computer manufacturers than any other country in the world? How can one portray the present, let alone the future, of an ageless civilization that was the birthplace of four major religions, a dozen different traditions of classical dance, eighty-five political parties, and three hundred ways of cooking the potato?

  The short answer is that it can’t be done — at least not to everyone’s satisfaction. Any truism about India can be immediately contradicted by another truism about India. The country’s national motto, emblazoned on its governmental crest, is Satyameva Jayaté: “Truth Always Triumphs.” The question remains, however: Whose truth? It is a question to which there are over a billion answers — if the last census hasn’t undercounted us again.

  But that sort of answer is no answer at all, and so another answer to those questions has to be sought. And this may lie in a single insight: the singular thing about India is that you can only speak of it in the plural. There are, in the hackneyed phrase, many Indias. Everything exists in countless variants. There is no single standard, no fixed stereotype, no “one way.” This pluralism is acknowledged in the way India arranges its own affairs: all groups, faiths, tastes, and ideologies survive and contend for their place in the sun. At a time when most developing countries opted for authoritarian models of government to promote nation-building and to direct development, India chose to be a multiparty democracy. And despite many stresses and strains, including twenty-two months of autocratic rule during a “state of emergency” declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975, a multiparty democracy — freewheeling, rambunctious, corrupt, and inefficient, perhaps, but nonetheless flourishing — India has remained.

  One result is that India strikes many as maddening, chaotic, inefficient, and seemingly unpurposeful as it muddles through into the twenty-first century. Another, though, is that India is not just a country but an adventure, one in which all avenues are open and everything is possible. “All the convergent influences of the world,” wrote E. P. Thompson, “run through this society: Hindu, Moslem, Christian, secular; Stalinist, liberal, Maoist, democratic socialist, Gandhian. There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or East that is not active in some Indian mind.”

  That Indian mind has been shaped by remarkably diverse forces: ancient Hindu tradition, myth, and scripture; the impact of Islam and Christianity; and two centuries of British colonial rule. The result is unique, not just because of the variety of contemporary influences available in India, but because of the diversity of its heritage.

  Many observers have been astonished by India’s survival as a pluralist state. But India could hardly have survived as anything else. Pluralism is a reality that emerges from the very nature of the country; it is a choice made inevitable by India’s geography and reaffirmed by its history.

  One of the few generalizations that can safely be made about India is that nothing can be taken for granted about the country — not even its name, for the word India comes from the river Indus, which flows in Pakistan. That anomaly is easily explained, for what is today Pakistan was part of India until the country was partitioned by the departing British in 1947. (Yet each explanation breeds another anomaly. Pakistan was created as a homeland for India’s Muslims, but throughout the 1970s and 1980s there were more Muslims in India than in Pakistan.)

  So the Indus is no longer the starting point for a description of India’s geography, which underpins the national principle of variety. Instead one might start with the dimensions of the country. India is huge; it is the world’s seventh largest country, covering an area of 1,269,419 square miles (3,287,782 square kilometers). It is also the second most populous nation on earth, with an estimated 2007 population of over 1.1 billion against China’s estimated 1.3 billion, but with its population — which grows annually by 13 million, equivalent to a new Australia every year — projected to overtake China’s within three decades. Another indication of the immensity of India is the length of its coastline (3,533 miles, or 5,653 kilometers) and its land frontiers with its neighbors (9,425 miles, or 15,168 kilometers).

  One figure is particularly revealing. India extends 2,009 miles (3,214 kilometers) from its mountainous northern border with China, in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, to the southernmost tip of the mainland, the rocky beach of Kanniyakumari (formerly Cape Comorin). Indeed, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, also Indian territory, are hundreds of nautical miles farther to the southeast, in the Bay of Bengal, which flows into the Indian Ocean. India thus stretches from 38 degrees north latitude, well above the Tropic of Cancer and on a line with Atlantic City or Denver, Colorado, to 7 degrees above the equator, the same as Freetown, Sierra Leone, or Addis Ababa. Few countries on earth extend over so many latitudes.

  Looked at longitudinally, the distances are only slightly less imposing. From west to east, India’s western frontier with Pakistan, in the marshes of the Rann of Kutch, is 1,840 miles (2,944 kilometers) away from the thickly wooded hills of northeastern Assam, on the country’s border with Myanmar (Burma). In between, the country of Bangladesh is embraced as an enclave between the Indian state of West Bengal (from which it was partitioned in 1947 as East Pakistan) and the northeastern states of Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Tripura.

  The country’s four extremes represent four dramatically different types of ecological systems, but there are still others within the subcontinent they enclose. These range from the Thar Desert of Rajasthan in the northwest, covering about 8 percent of India’s land surface, to the lush alluvial plain of the Ganga River basin; and India also has the largest area in the world covered by snow and ice, outside the polar regions.

  While the Himalaya mountains allowed a distinctive civilization to flourish in their shadows, they are remarkably penetrable. A number of passes, some more difficult than others, have allowed curious scholars, intrepid traders, and ambitious invaders to bring their own influences into India. If the phrase “ethnic melting pot” had been coined two thousand years ago, India would have had a fair claim to the tide. The “indigenous people,” around 1500 B.C., were probably dark-skinned Dravidians, with aboriginals of Negroid stock in many forests. Then came the great wave of Aryan migration from the Central Asian steppes. The Aryans were pale-skinned and light-eyed nomads whose search for a new homeland branched into three waves, one stopping in Persia, one sweep continuing on to Europe as far as Germany, and the other descending into India. (This common heritage explains why the Nazis in Germany used a variation of the swastika, an Aryan religious symbol still revered by Indian Hindus.) That was not all. Over the centuries, India witnessed the mingling of Greeks, Scythians, and Parthians; Mongols, Huns, and Chinese; and an assortment of mercenary warriors from Central Asia, Iran, Turkey, and even Ethiopia. As they intermarried with each other and with the local population, the Indian melting pot produced a people with a variety of skin colors and every physiognomic feature imaginable, as a look at any Indian cricket, hockey, or soccer team will confirm.

  Immigrants, invaders, and visitors, whether their intentions were warlike or peaceful, usually made for the Gangetic plain, the fertile stretch of land that gave birth to the Indo-Aryan civilization over three thousand years ago. The people of “Aryavrata,” the Hindi-speaking national heartland, serve as the stock image of the stereotypical “Indian.” But there are dramatically visible differences among those who live within this “cow belt,” as urbanized anglophones derisively call it, and further differences between it and the farmlands of what remains of the Indus’s tributaries in the northwest of India. To the east, the Ganga flows to the sea in Bengal, part of which is now the independent state of Bangladesh. Beyond Bangladesh rise the hills and valleys of India’s northeast, most of whose people are physically shorter and have Mongoloid features akin to their neighbors in Southeast Asia
. The seven states of the northeast — the “seven sisters” — embrace a wide diversity of cultural strains, from the tribal traditions of the Nagas and the Mizos to the mainstream Hinduism of Manipur, home of a major school of Indian classical dance. The people range from Bengali migrants in Tripura and Assam to the Christian hill folk of Nagaland, whose official state language is English; from anglicized tea planters to aborigines with bones through their noses. Tourist brochures usually call the northeast “picturesque,” the kind of euphemism that accurately suggests both charm and underdevelopment.

  But diversity does not end with the northern latitudes. The aged and weatherbeaten peninsula of the Deccan is host to an India of darker shades, hotter food, more rapid speech, and rounded scripts; there is Dravidian pride and a rich overlay of Sanskritic high culture. On both sides of the inverted southern triangle, coastal Indians have for millennia looked beyond their shores for trade and cultural contact with other lands. In the west, traces have been found of contact across the Arabian Sea with Iraq, Yemen, and East Africa going back three thousand years. Jews persecuted in the Babylonian conquest of Judea in the sixth century B.C. and Zoroastrians fleeing Islamic rule in Persia in the eighth century A.D. found refuge and established flourishing communities. Travelers ranged from Saint Thomas the Apostle in the first century A.D., who brought Christianity to the lush southwestern state of Kerala, to the Portuguese sailor Vasco da Gama in 1492, who took away calico (so named for the port of Calicut, where he landed) and spices. The enclave of Goa on the west coast was ruled by Portugal till 1961, and that of Pondicherry in the southeast by France; they still bear a different cultural character from the surrounding states.