India's hopes and dynasties

The country needs greater social harmony to accelerate economic development

On the second last day of 2021, I reflect in this article if the extreme disparities across India’s social groupings have improved over the past few centuries. Sunil Gangopadhyay won the 1985 Sahitya Akademi Award for a novel in Bengali titled Sei Somoy (Those Days). The novel set in the late 18th to the second half of the 19th century traces the lives of super-affluent zamindars of Bengal who lived in palatial mansions in Kolkata and owned multiple urban and extensive agricultural properties. Sei Somoy describes in moving terms the meagre incomes of domestic servants and peasants as compared to the huge daily and incredibly high expenditures on feasts and weddings incurred by the self-indulgent super-rich classes. This Gangopadhyay novel provides a subjective glimpse of how Hindus and Muslims were impacted economically and educationally by the takeover of Kolkata and gradually the rest of India by the East India Company and later the British crown. The Muslims saw it as a sharp downturn in their standing as rulers and comparatively larger proportions of Hindus used the British ascendancy to widen their intellectual horizons, learn English and improve their economic lot.  

The interaction of the Indian upper classes with the British improved the attitude of a few towards widow remarriage and there was a rejuvenation of learning, including fresh writings in Bengali. The moving away from Hindu practices for some, including becoming adherents of the Brahmo Samaj, had perhaps as much to do with disgust with backward Hindu practices as better career opportunities serving the British.

The references in Sei Somoy to child brides and deaths during their teen years reminded me of Mother India by Katherine Mayo. Mahatma Gandhi is said to have remarked that Mayo’s book was the work of a drain inspector. Notwithstanding Gandhi’s reported remark and even though Sei Somoy is a novel, there was more than a grain of truth in what Mayo wrote about the sufferings of child brides in India. 

Turning to political governance in India, although nearly two centuries have passed since the feudal era in which Sei Somoy is based, even today several major Indian political parties have dynasties at the top. Surprisingly, the dynasts have extremely well-read and articulate toady-acolytes. Several such toadies are well-known authors. Somehow these worthies do not see the glaring contradiction between their intellectual achievements and being sycophants to those who are or were in power. 

Moving on, some popular Hindi feature films do reflect on matters which are of social concern. For example, Mother India and Ganga Jumna, which were released in 1957 and 1961 respectively, did dwell on poverty in rural India. However, these films conformed with the prevailing societal mores. That is, howsoever wretched the lives of the poor or socially marginalised, the honourable thing for them is to stick to the rules of the game framed by the better off. Those who break the law have to perish as did the characters portrayed by Dilip Kumar in Ganga Jumna and Sunil Dutt in Mother India. By contrast, a 2017 Hindi comedy-drama film named Newton provides a more realistic sense of rural poverty and just how farcical voting can become in remote areas of India.

Illustration: Binay Sinha

Turning to current times, it is extremely disturbing to frequently hear about atrocities against women and those living at the fringes of Indian society. For instance, in May 2014 two Dalit underage girls were reported to have been raped and hung in Badaun, Uttar Pradesh. About six years later, on September 14, 2020, a Dalit woman was allegedly raped and murdered in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh. In these two cases, police investigations and judicial processes were mired in controversy. More recently, it was troubling to hear about the shooting of 14 persons in Nagaland on December 4, 2021, by the army. Under the Indian Constitution, law and order is a state subject. While the central government could provide administrative and intelligence support, maintenance of law and order should remain the exclusive responsibility of the state police. In practice, several state governments shy away from shouldering this responsibility. Chief ministers need to be held accountable for maintaining law and order in their states and the central government should not so readily agree to interminable investigations by the CBI or the deployment of the army-para military forces. 

On the subject of violence against women, a potentially useful initiative was the introduction of a Bill in the Lok Sabha on December 21, 2021, to raise the marriage age for girls to 21 years. Of course, raising this marriage age for women does not mean that girls will not be married off at much below 21 years of age. If, in addition, the government were to monitor the appointment of males who marry women below 21 to government, public sector or salaried private sector employment, that should reduce the incidence of such marriages. All things considered, this initiative should be welcome not as a population control measure but as one to enable women to complete their higher education and have a better chance of obtaining formal sector salaried employment.  

One of the principal characters in Sei Somoy named Ganga becomes a Brahmo primarily because of the inhuman treatment meted out to Bindu who is widowed while still a little girl. This extremely bright child bride is denied the right to educate herself and banished to Kashi where she is inevitably raped and exploited by a local strongman. I recommend this novel to those who have not read it for an emotive understanding of the economic exploitation of the poor and religion-based discrimination even in the India of the 21st century. Despite the paucity of political alternatives, as we Indians enter another new year, we need to speak up more about social injustice and hopefully thus promote improved equality of opportunity for better education and employment for the less privileged. 

j.bhagwati@gmail.com

The writer is a former Indian Ambassador, World Bank head of corporate finance and currently distinguished fellow at CSEP