V V: An NRI's view of India

NRIs, or non-resident Indians, revisiting home reminds of your first love whom you long to see but dread to see again. What you get is never a balanced picture: it is either a romanticised past that never was or a future that always works. That there are many Indias, warts and all, that can’t be slotted into either category doesn’t seem to cross their minds. Maybe this is because NRIs end up writing for western audiences who want it all in a capsule with no “ifs” and “buts”, something skimmed through without too much fuss. Anand Giridharadas’ India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking (Fourth Estate, Special Indian Price, Rs 499) falls neatly into this stereotype: you see the scene and can foretell the rest, something that resident Indians know all too well but check out all the same to see how far removed from home our NRI cousins have gone.

 

Mr Giridharadas, a correspondent for The International Herald Tribune, wrote his “Letters from India” which provide the basic source for this book with some updates from his recent visits to India. But, unlike other travel writings on India that open with the Golden Triangle – Delhi, Agra, Jaipur – or basically North India, this one begins with Hyderabad or Cyberabad, the twin copy of Bangalore or the emerging software capital of India.

This makes good business sense because not only does it offer something different to Indian readers, but it also touches on the globalisation debate and its impact on local economies: Hyderabad is fast emerging as the next software centre while its hinterland is home to Indian Maoists or Naxalites, who believe in the violent overthrow of state power. These two glaring contradictions of contemporary India with one of the fastest rates of growth (“Shining India” as it is touted) coexist with abject poverty and increasing violence in the countryside, where the land has become a fundamental question in the debate over what India is all about now. The fact that Mr Giridharadas raises it, though tangentially, is a welcome addition to the picture of Inside India that NRIs often talk about.

American reportage usually opens with a leading question that is put to one of the activists of the struggle between the rising middle class and the rural masses. So it is here. What is the fight between local capitalism, which has benefited software engineers, and the rest of the people whose living standards are being eroded by the rising cost of living all about? Isn’t there a price to be paid for development costs and how do activists justify their own lifestyles? Isn’t working for a multinational during the day and a rebel waging revolution at night (or at least advocating it) a contradiction? Here comes the pat answer: “I have to earn my lunch,” the Naxal explains. “I am not a whole-timer for revolution.” The armchair radical lets the cat out of the bag: “I want my cake and eat it too.”

We have known the answers but what makes us carry on reading these questions of the struggle is that the reportage hasn’t been padded up only to feed the western reader.

Mr Giridharadas insists there has been a change since his parents left India half a century ago. But the landscape that has been transformed is within. “The change is in the mind: how people conceived of their possibilities. Indians now seemed to know that they didn’t have to leave, as my father had, for their possible revolution.” No doubt this is true. There are many more possibilities for the rising middle class as professionals in almost every sphere; there is far greater social mobility now than, say, even two decades ago. Infrastructure lags behind, especially in power and transport, but the government has finally woken up to the new challenges posed by the rising expectations of the people.

But any attitudinal change in India has to be seen through the lens of caste that permeates all levels of society and the position of women in everyday life. Has there been any change in the centuries-old habits of thought? Has there been any loosening of social stratification of the Indian society?

Take caste as the primary determining factor of the Hindu society. Certainly, market forces have compelled even the most conservative Hindus to intermingle with other castes for sheer survival, including inter-dining. But caste continues its stranglehold in marriage (most marriages are still arranged on caste and community basis) and, above all, in politics. In fact, caste has been greatly strengthened because of the SC/ST/OBC factor and the clamour for job reservations in the public sector. This has become an abiding feature of the new India that Mr Giridharadas has not fully taken into account.

The position of women is equally ambivalent. At one level, there is a distinct rise of middle class women in professions such as teaching and banking. In rural India, however, they are still exploited and carry the burden of family life with few rights of inheritance.

Mr Giridharadas has seen India through upper-class American eyes with sympathy and understanding. But he misses out on the great urban-rural divide which is the real India. Maybe India is too complex and full of contradictions to put down in a book. But read it all the same.