Chapter 1

India: Not What It Seems

ONE NIGHT IN THE LATE 1970S, while attending a student-faculty mixer at Northwestern University's business school, a fellow Indian student and I, fresh off the boat, met a young assistant professor. Derek Smith was himself fresh off the boat to Chicago's shores, but from North Carolina. After a while, when we felt comfortable (a generous flow of wine undoubtedly helped), he remarked, "Boy, you two speak real good English!" Taken aback, I was about to retort, "Well, Indians have been speaking English longer than you Americans!" only to be upstaged by my friend's quicker response, "Some day, you will, too!"

With that one sentence, the good-natured Professor Smith, whose comment was made as a friendly gesture, probably deduced that Indians (1) speak good English, (2) are quick-witted, and (3) have prickly egos. A western diplomat dealing with India during the Cold War years might have concluded similarly. As diplomat Howard Schaffer has noted about the early years of India-U.S. relations, "Washington usually (had) unproductive relations at international forums with Prime Minister Nehru and his assertive and talented Indian colleagues. . . . For many Americans, India seemed to make a practice of biting the hand that might have fed it."¹ Despite constant American attempts to bring India onto its side of the Cold War with generous offers of aid, Indian diplomats regularly rebuffed the United States for no apparent reason other than that the United States seemed patronizing.

Indeed, from an outsider's viewpoint and for many insiders as well, India has for decades seemed to be more preoccupied with its external image than with mustering the will, resources, and collaborations to succeed. There were, of course, isolated successes of global partnerships. A notable one was the Green Revolution, a program for introducing high-yielding cereal crops in irrigated areas. This solved the problem of food security for the urban middle classes but was more than offset by the continuance of deep rural poverty (see Chapter 13). Overall, the outcome was stagnation. As one journalist remarked, "Every time I come back from India, people ask me how India is changing. My reaction is, so far, the same: The phone system is better, the roads are worse, and not much else has changed."

More than thirty years have passed since my encounter with Professor Smith. Since then, (particularly over the past decade) the West has come to know India, but only somewhat. Nowadays, when they interact over the wires or on their home turf, westerners are impressed with Indians' professional skills, technological experience, legal knowledge, and the like. Attracted by lower labor costs, this leads many western businesspeople to consider outsourcing work to India. Yet, when they step off the plane for the first time, often their first instinct is to wonder why they did not take a flight to China instead.

A businessman from Oxford, England, visited Chennai (the capital of the state of Tamil Nadu) some years ago to see if he might set up a copyediting shop. His first reaction upon exiting the airport was that he felt hot. It was over 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit). And it was 3 A.M. The smells of the big Indian city, teeming with people even at that hour, were his next sensations, and they were not pleasant. At that point, he felt like telling his chauffeur to turn back.

However, as the days passed and he met the same professionals with whom he had conversed by phone from Oxford, he realized that a depth of talent was at hand. It made sense for him to set up shop in Chennai, where he now employs 500 copy editors. Apart from their skills, he notes appreciatively that the state bureaucracy neither discriminates against him nor for him. There are no expectations in return for doing business in Chennai. He prefers this to some other parts of Asia, where the infrastructure is specially tailored to foreign investors, but in return the foreign firm is expected to transfer skills or provide subcontracting work to local businesses. And, no surprise, these expectations are usually negotiated through a "must-have" local partner.

And yet visitors to India, as their visits increase in number, usually return home not just impressed but also distressed. Both emotions are caused by how little they really know the country. For instance, many businesspersons returning from Mumbai, the country's commercial center, report that the quality of professional skills excites them even as the slums attached, barnacle-like, to every high-rise building upset them. It is quite different from a visit to China, where the overwhelming impression is of a country united, self-reliant, and uniformly hard at work—and moving ahead as a result.

It is very difficult to get a handle on India because it is a land of heterogeneities and contradictions that are complex enough for anyone, not just an outsider. For example, a first-time visitor to Chennai is sure to be surprised at a uniquely Tamil phenomenon: giant fifty-foot cut-outs of politicians dominate the main thoroughfares of the city, and such politicians inspire nearly godlike devotion.

Even more interesting: These politicians come from lower castes and are representatives of parties that are composed of and supported by lower castes. It is proof of the state's progress against a long history of caste discrimination. Symbolically, it is as if the upper castes, after decades of oppressing the lower castes, must acquiesce to passing by at the feet of the lower castes as they drive through Chennai's high street, Anna Salai.

This is a fascinating development given the general failure of public action and politicians to remove caste separation in the rest of India. It was one of the first things that the businessman from Oxford observed about Chennai. Yet, had he visited some of the more rural areas of Tamil Nadu state, he might then have been particularly distressed by the common phenomenon of the two-glass roadside café. In such a place, since untouchables are outside the Hindu caste system, they cannot drink from the same glass as a caste Hindu. Therefore, separate glasses are kept for the two groups.

This seems inexplicable considering the cut-outs of lower-caste politicians, until one understands that Tamil Nadu leads the way in a disturbing recent development, that of majoritarianism (see Chapter 2). Majority groups (in this case, castes at the lower end of the caste system) have been uniting to ensure the exclusion of other groups (in Tamil Nadu's case, both the upper-caste Brahmins and the untouchables) from civic and political life. So an outsider's cursory glance would reveal the triumph of lower-caste members, but a deeper look reveals a more complicated picture.

Similarly, the perception of poverty is misleading. A much-quoted World Bank statistic is that 80 percent of Indians get by on less than two dollars a day—and 35 percent on less than a dollar. These figures make it appear as though India is a nation mired in deep poverty. The image it projects is of a country where rural labor is mostly landless and indebted, and urban labor is mostly involved in primitive services such as housecleaning and driving the cars of rich employers. Yet this, like many statistics, hides as much as it reveals.


POOR, EXCEPT FOR THE CELL PHONE

While I was on a speaking tour of India in October 2006 organized by the U.S. Department of State, I stayed in the beautiful city of Varanasi on the Ganges River. Our posh five-star hotel charged rates that seemed in line with booming India at $130 per night. When the hotel charged me an additional Rs.760 ($17 at the time) for the one-hour, ten-mile ride to the airport in the hotel's taxi, I was only mildly surprised. However, when I asked the driver what he earned, and he replied that he earned the equivalent of $20 a month as salary, my interest was aroused—especially when it emerged that he made two round trips a day, on average, during the year (more during the peak season), each time bringing a return passenger by the inbound flight.

The hotel obviously has a profitable business model! But I was as interested in the driver's budget management. Pushing him a bit on this, I discovered that he earns a few hundred rupees in tips as well, and owns two acres of fertile land (along with his brothers). Including his wife's salary as a teacher, the family of four (including a son, age eleven, and a retired parent) earns $56 per month. Adjusted for purchasing power differences, which makes the rupee roughly five times more valuable than the official exchange rate of Rs.45 to the dollar at the time of writing, the family earns a little over two dollars a day per person.

This puts the driver in the privileged position of being in the top 20 percent of income earners in India! Yet, as he noted, the family barely makes ends meet, and it saves nothing. He is constantly managing debt taken for various purposes, both for the farm and for personal expenses. His biggest worry is also their biggest expense: their son's education. This takes up nearly a third of the family's income. Monthly tuition at an English-speaking school about three miles from their village is five dollars and transportation to and from doubles that. Another five dollars a month goes to hire an English-speaking tutor to help the child with his studies, a necessity because neither parent speaks English. He worries that someday he might not be able to afford to educate his son in English. Yet, he notes he would still be able to afford some luxuries like a cell phone if the hotel had not already given him one.

A few days later, the driver's remark about his cell phone was on my mind as I checked into a hotel in Indore, a poor town of roughly two million inhabitants in the state of Madhya Pradesh. With 60 million inhabitants, Madhya Pradesh is India's seventh largest state by population and the second largest by area.

Aware that by late 2006, Indians were purchasing more than six million cell phone connections a month—exceeding China's rate of about five million—I was eager to see if small towns were as keen on cell phones as the big cities.

Indore's inhabitants earn their living in the myriad small industries and services typical to urban India. Manufacturing is small-scale and low-tech: textile powerlooms, brick making, pipe manufacturing, and so on. Because Madhya Pradesh is the country's primary producer of soybeans, soybean trading dominates Indore's service sector.

With the exception of a handful of government buildings and hotels, there are no buildings more than six stories high in Indore. My room on the top floor of the Sayaji Hotel—the city's best, though similar in quality to a typical roadside inn off a U.S. interstate—provided a panoramic view of the city. Like other such towns in India, small homes and small offices radiated along streets in disorganized spokes from the railway station (the heart of most Indian towns). The streets were crowded and dirty. There were plenty of tin-roofed shacks on view, reminding me of the real India outside my air-conditioned room—where a supplementary generator supplied daytime power because the power grid was down for eight to ten hours a day. Three decades earlier I had visited Indore as a management trainee. It was little changed, except for being more crowded.

There was, however, one significant change in Indore as well as in other small towns I visited: Two years earlier, five-story buildings dominated the landscape; today cell phone towers are everywhere. I counted fifteen towers from my hotel room.

A few days earlier, driving on a pockmarked road through some of India's poorest areas, the road was as notable for its potholes as for its cell phone towers. These twenty-meter-high structures rose above the landscape every quarter mile or so, marking distance and celebrating technical progress. They are a modern reminder of the massive kos minars on the Delhi-Agra Road—distance markers from the last great road-building effort in India about a half a millennium ago during the Mughal Empire.

If cell phone affordability is a measure of economic change, it is hard not to conclude that something dramatic is happening throughout India, something that the statistics of poverty are not showing.


DEVELOPMENT VIA A SERVICES ECONOMY

Another aspect that makes it difficult to compare India with other countries is the fact that it is developing via a new path. China, for example, has been growing through massive industrialization. This is the same route to development taken earlier by most other countries. India, by contrast, has globalized by professionally training select people and offering their services to the world. If it succeeds by spreading the method to the rest of the economy, it would be the first case of a country developing via a revolution in the services sector rather than in manufacturing.

It would also be a rare case of success by a former colony. Ever since Britain's industrial revolution in the late eighteenth century, globalization has been almost exclusively a western phenomenon, occurring in countries that were colonizers, not colonies. The two significant exceptions to western success were Japan in the late nineteenth century—but it was a colonizer—and China in the late twentieth century.

It has been particularly hard for former colonies to globalize. Some small ones, such as Singapore and Taiwan, succeeded by determinedly forgetting both their colonial heritage and their precolonial identities and moving on. But larger ones, such as South Africa and Indonesia, have struggled to develop economically through globalization. This is in large part because the recovery of their precolonial identity was a priority. Because the erstwhile colonizers were from the West, there was a natural distaste for western models of development. There was a feeling that "if we ape the West with its promarket and protrade models of growth, why bother to have become independent?"

India is no exception. Perhaps the biggest difficulty in knowing India is the absence of a national identity.


A NATION'S IDENTITY

India's struggle has been harder because of the problems of deep-rooted poverty and illiteracy. A nationally agreed-upon sense of identity behind which all can pull together to get a nation moving is difficult in such circumstances.

The first leaders of an independent India were the educated urban elite, including Mahatma Gandhi. While fighting for the creation of a nation, these leaders realized they did not know the 80 percent of the country who lived in the villages and on whose behalf they were fighting to gain independence. They were equally aware that it was not just that the elite did not know the poor. Even the poor would be hard-pressed to indicate their identity. As Gandhi put it, "Those in whose name we speak we do not know, nor do they know us."

In the absence of a national identity accepted by a majority of its population, independent India's early leaders felt that the fledgling country could fall apart. Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India's first prime minister, often worried about the "fissiparous tendencies" that could undo the nation. Nehru saw such tendencies in every organ of the state, from politicians and the judiciary to nonofficial organizations such as labor unions and other such public bodies (civil society).

Little wonder, then, that Nehru's chosen model of development was based on tight control. We shall have more to say on this in Chapter 2. Suffice it to say here that the Nehruvian model failed to deliver on its promises of prosperity. Worse still, it created vested interests that perpetuated themselves in an endless spiral: a poorly educated citizenry was fit only for employment in the bureaucracy, or babudom, as it was called. This, in turn, created the institutions that produced an unfit citizenry.

At the end of Nehru's rule, Indians had as little a sense of national identity and purpose as when his rule began. Nehru's rule failed to create an identity for India because it perpetuated poverty. Indira Gandhi, his daughter, who ruled for the longest period of any ruler in independent India, also had to face the uncertain identity of India. She would often ask Indians to remember Nehru's vision of a country that ought to be united in order to remain free. Her model of development was an intensified version of Nehru's socialist state.

Under Mrs. Gandhi, the state decayed further, plumbing new depths of control and corruption. An extreme example was the forced sterilizations (vasectomies) of over a million mostly minority and low-caste villagers during the period from 1975 to 1977 (the so-called Emergency). This was the lowest point in India's postcolonial experience. Yet, and oddly, through it, India finally began to discover an identity.

Mrs. Gandhi called for elections after the Emergency, believing that the electorate, particularly the illiterate rural voters, would vote her back as they always had. When, instead, they voted her out, it marked the first time that rural voters had taken the lead.

Thereafter, in no election could the rural voter be taken for granted. In all subsequent elections, the urban voting pattern has been more heterogeneous than the rural pattern and urban turnouts have been lower. As a result, the rural vote determines the outcomes. Thanks to its extreme suffering at the hands of leaders it had elected, rural India found a collective voice through the vote.

This is not to conclude that India now has an identity. Instead, it is to conclude that an identity for India cannot exclude rural India, which accounts for more than two-thirds of its population. Finding its voice and, more important, the discovery that the rural voice is collective and unified, is a critical step in that process.


THE ENGLISH OF INDIA

Perhaps nowhere is the struggle to create a unified country better exemplified than over language. The Varanasi taxi driver's son's education raises the family's standard of English. Even if his family must stop his English education at some time due to a lack of funds—something that his father constantly worries about—his destiny cannot be the same as his father's, for his life has already been permanently changed by this education.

The Indians' knowledge of English is a legacy of British rule. Their love for the language is less easy to explain. Indians have a love-hate relationship with most things British. It is common for public speakers to proclaim that various aspects of civic life—bureaucracy, the railways, the post—are throwbacks to British times, implying both that the systems were bad even in 1947, yet that they remain irreplaceable.

One clear proof of India's love of English is the liveliness with which it is used: Hindi is mixed with English seamlessly, showing the malleability of both tongues. English words are translated into Hindi as they sound, as in the sentence, "Sauce pass karo," which asks the listener to pass the sauce. The reverse occurs as freely. Many Indian words, as a result, have entered standard English, and many more will do so. This has been happening for centuries, at least since the time of Queen Elizabeth I, when traders carried both exotic products and their names across borders. Words of Indian origin, such as calico, chintz, and gingham, were already part of British vocabulary by then. The average metropolitan dweller of Mumbai or Delhi dreams in a mixture of English and Hindi.

A thriving literature by Indians writing in English seems destined to extend its influence beyond Indian shores, although many of the best-known—writers such as Amitava Ghosh and Salman Rushdie—produced their best work after migrating west. But many, such as Pankaj Mishra, whose Butter Chicken in Ludhiana remains the classic introduction to small-town India, lived and did their best work in India. One of the country's best poets, Nissim Ezekiel, lived in India. Stand-up comics thrive on the possibilities of punning between Hindi and English. For example, in one joke, Colonial Officer A tells subordinate Colonial Officer B: "Simkins, this is a peepul tree" (peepul is the local name of a type of fig tree sacred to Buddhists), to which the response is, "Yes, sir, I hear it is very popular."

Yet many worry that if all Indians speak only English, they might as well never have become free in the first place. The state buys this viewpoint and emerges with policies that are inconsistent with popular usage. On the one hand, India has twenty-two official languages, one of which, Sanskrit, is not spoken. On the other hand, the official list does not include English, which is the most widely used language at the federal level and is permitted for the purpose of official communication across states and links the country. The most widely spoken official language, Hindi, differs from another official language, Urdu, only marginally in its vocabulary. Neither is as widely spoken as an unofficial language, Hindustani, a mix of Hindi and Urdu vocabulary, written in the Hindi script and based on their common grammar.

The state's second response has been to try to legislate a national language, a purified version of Hindi, stripped of its Persian/Urdu vocabulary and primarily influenced by Sanskrit. On the one hand, such purification is impractical and inelegant because the grammatical structure of Hindi is firmly rooted in a global heritage that includes Sanskrit, Semitic, and European languages. The result is an uncomfortable mix of Sanskrit words and Hindustani grammar. It is, however, slowly gaining currency, at least in north India, under state patronage. On the other hand, a majority of Indians do not speak Hindi. Further, it is still the case that for most citizens and certainly for the more than 35 percent who are illiterate, the Sanskritized version of the language is unusable. Hearing a newsreader on the government-owned channel present the news in Sanskritized Hindi can be a disconcerting experience; the more popular private channels do not even attempt it.

It would be a mistake to assume that integration into a common, "national" language around some variant of English or Hindustani will be a gradual, peaceful, and culturally enriching task, requiring many non-English speakers to learn English. In fact, such a national language is unlikely in the near future. This is not for want of trying. At various times in the past decades, language has been seen as a key tool for identity creation. For instance, both Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi tried to enforce the use of Hindi nationally, leading to anti-Hindi agitations and even suicides by protesters.

Hence, language is one aspect of identity that India must face and work through. How urgently India must face this issue is a topic of speculation. Politicians nowadays argue that the nation should focus on economic development first. Perhaps taking a cue from China's single-minded pursuit of GDP growth, they argue that it is the new form of identity building. Their argument is that a rising tide, as it is said, lifts all boats. It also renders harmless the debris at the bottom of the ocean floor. Given a continuing economic boom, the Varanasi taxi driver's son should be able to complete his English education. Then, he can make choices about his future (including choosing which language to speak)—choices his father never had. For the moment, this strategy appears to be working.


IDENTITY AND PLURALISM

Religion in India is another contested area of identity. The average westerner may not realize how religious Indians actually are. Nearly every Indian follows some religious rituals, even in the most developed cities. In Mumbai, during the October Dussehra festival, for example, it is impossible to find a car whose front end does not have a marigold wreath placed on it, a sign of worshipful respect for the forces of good that the car represents. Even locomotives and machinery of all kinds have the wreath placed on them, although I have not observed it on the noses of aircraft, perhaps because they might scare the pilots.

This might make it appear as if the external dimension of worship is the important one. But nothing could be further from the truth. For every external act of faith at a public festival or in the temple, there are millions more observed, with equal devotion, at home, be it the worship of one's personal deity or the supplications on the prayer mat. Some westerners see yoga as a religious practice. However, far from being a type of worship, yoga is viewed as an outcome of a religious principle: A healthy soul requires a healthy mind and body.

What happens when different beliefs collide, as they must when beliefs are so firmly held? Well, the earth must shake, at least a little. Indian history has several examples of clashes over beliefs. Lives have been lost, particularly in conflicts between Hindus and Muslims, even if, in the grand scheme of things, religion more often teaches tolerance and produces harmony.

India, then, has many identities, even as it acquires new ones—all of them evolving at different rates. Many will be influenced by globalization. For instance, the recent history of developing countries suggests that globalization, far from removing nationalistic feelings, strengthens them. This may happen to Indians and may help the country manage its identities that will always differ from one another due to language and faith. It is also possible that globalization will lead to a more aggressive nationalism that does not tolerate such differences.

Before it can move ahead, India must face its identities and decide on those it wishes to retain and promote, those it can suppress for the moment, and those it must change. Though no easy task, it is also necessary because—like many of the smaller Asian countries—Indian culture could crumble in the melting pot and unifying forces of globalization. Some do not see this as a bad thing, given the problems India has faced with managing its conflicting interests. But in such a heterogeneous society, in which economically weak segments are also those with distinct cultural or ethnic identities, there is a risk that they may lose from globalization. If so, they may rebel and subvert the collective will to succeed.

© 2008 Rafiq Dossani.
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