---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Shiva Shankar <sshankar@cmi.ac.in>
Date: Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 11:48 AM
Subject: Caste of millions
To:
'... they will also encounter (in Guha's book) much less well-known and equally distinguished figures, such as BR Ambedkar, the articulate spokesman of formerly untouchable Hindus, or Dalits, and the main architect of India's extraordinary constitution that in 1949 bestowed equal rights upon all its citizens. ...'
'... In these chapters, French potently recreates the experiences of many foreign visitors to India, who, preparing themselves for a vibrant democracy, are disconcerted to encounter its hollowed-out forms: rampant corruption, widespread human rights abuses, degradations of class and caste, and the hatred laced with fear of the very affluent for the very poor. ...'
Caste of millions
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2ecabe4a-24e3-11e0-895d-00144feab49a.html?ftcamp=rss#axzz1BjBObGzP
By Pankaj Mishra
Published: January 21 2011 22:03
Makers of Modern India, by Ramachandra Guha, Harvard University Press, RRP£25.95, 512 pages
The Rediscovery of India, by Meghnad Desai, Bloomsbury, RRP£25, 512 pages
India: A Portrait, by Patrick French, Allen Lane, RRP£25, 448 pages
India is the "most interesting country in the world". Or so the Indian writer Ramachandra Guha asserts in the prologue to his new book Makers of Modern India. You might think Guha would say that: he has written several books on the subject, including India After Gandhi (2007), a history of postcolonial India. But he may be on to something. India is one of the world's oldest continuous civilisations; its diverse communities live in several centuries at once, generating multiple and contradictory narratives. Where else can you find a naked Hindu mendicant pulling a truck with his penis and suave tycoons buying blue-chip companies in the US and Europe, even as militant communists occupy and administer large parts of the country?
Strangely, the notion of India that is increasingly commonplace in the west, which these three books address in different ways, floats well above the singularities, oddities and contrasts that make the country so interesting. According to the west, India is a vibrantly democratic country full of confident tycoons, adventurous entrepreneurs and friendly English speakers, which will counterbalance vaguely menacing China and assist the economic recovery of the west.
For decades, India was seen in the west as poor and spiritual. Suddenly, it appears to be increasingly rich and materialistic. This India 2.0 version is animated, of course, by the demands of the moment, by politicians as well as businessmen desperately looking eastward for expanding markets. Needless to say, it ignores the particularities of India's political and economic reconstruction: for instance, the radical Indian experiment with electoral democracy in a poor and irrepressibly diverse country.
Only multiethnic and newly democratic Indonesia has come close in recent years to matching India's complex conflicts and tensions. Guha enumerates no fewer than five revolutions – urban, industrial, national, democratic, social – occurring simultaneously in the country today. His new book also attempts to locate the intellectual sources of these transformations. Following up on India After Gandhi, Makers of Modern India anthologises the speeches and writings of 19 influential thinker-activists who, according to Guha, had a "defining impact on the formation and evolution of the Indian Republic".
Readers in the west will find some familiar personalities here, including Gandhi himself, Jawaharlal Nehru, India's secular and liberal-minded first prime minister, and Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet and Nobel laureate. But they will also encounter much less well-known and equally distinguished figures, such as BR Ambedkar, the articulate spokesman of formerly untouchable Hindus, or Dalits, and the main architect of India's extraordinary constitution that in 1949 bestowed equal rights upon all its citizens.
As an anthology of Indian political debates, Makers of Modern India makes for instructive reading. But Guha's commentary doesn't quite clarify just how the luminaries included in his book made modern India. These fiercely iconoclastic figures are not easily herded into an official intellectual pantheon of the Indian Republic; many of them might recoil from their supposed handiwork. In any case, India as we know it today is not so much the imperfectly realised dream of its supposed founding fathers as a contingent product of history, which stumbled into existence in 1947 burdened by the original sin of partition.
It was British imperialists who gave continent-sized India its political cohesiveness and built most of its administrative structures; their hasty departure and the bloody creation of Pakistan determined postcolonial India's trajectory more enduringly than the ideals of Gandhi or Nehru, which are derided, if not forgotten, in India today. Gandhi's preoccupation with rural economies and grassroots social reform was ignored by his own disciple Nehru, who invested disproportionately in heavy industries and top-down modernisation.
Other noble dreams of collective emancipation and glory, too, were compromised by the many exigencies of postcolonial nation-building. The colonial state, with its aloof bureaucracy and repressive apparatus, was retained, and radical new institutions of universal adult franchise and social welfare uneasily grafted on to it. Not surprisingly, torture and extrajudicial execution remain as commonplace a feature of contemporary India as free and largely fair elections, and the red-taped state still struggles to provide effective education and healthcare.
The hierarchies underpinning India's older cruelties of caste and gender have also survived the egalitarian proclamations of the constitution; universal franchise has yet to lead to a civil rights revolution. Dalits are still being lynched and raped by upper-caste feudal lords, and thousands of women burnt to death for bringing insufficient dowries, even as Dalit and female politicians move into the highest offices in the land. Indeed, Ambedkar's battle against the inequities of the caste system has had the strangest afterlife.
Beneficiaries of en bloc voting by previously subordinate groups, a generation of low-caste leaders has now enjoyed political power in India's most populous provinces. Accused of corruption and incompetence, they have ended up advancing group claims and identities rather than individual rights for all. The most conspicuous of the new profiteers of caste is Mayawati, the Dalit chief minister of Uttar Pradesh's 180m citizens. She has amassed a great personal fortune; her penchant for solitaire diamonds and huge statues of herself has further undermined the state's investment-starved economy.
Why has democracy enshrined rather than effaced caste divisions in Indian society? Meghnad Desai, Labour peer and professor emeritus at the London School of Economics, argues in his new book The Rediscovery of India, an opinionated but always interesting history, that India is a "modernised conservative society" rather than the "modernist rational one" of Nehru's dream. If liberal democracy based on the rights of the individual has shallow roots in India, this is at least partly due, Desai claims, to Nehru's post-partition all-consuming obsession with India's national unity and territorial integrity.
Desai grew up in post-1947 India; he has an instinctive understanding of the imperatives of postcolonial consolidation that greatly constricted decision-making in the early years of the Indian republic. Deploring the isolationist economic policies of Nehru, he is, nevertheless, alert to the political context in which they were formulated. He describes persuasively how the proud Indian resolve to create a self-sufficient industrial economy turned into an unhealthy aversion to international trade.
Desai is aware, too, of the political turmoil unleashed by India's now globalised economy: how by distributing its benefits narrowly, it expands the population of the disenchanted and the frustrated, often making them vulnerable to populist politicians. He describes how the corporate group Tata was forced to relocate its original factory for Nano cars by a politician (all set now to be the next chief minister of West Bengal) cannily exploiting the fear and despair of farmers, who could not see an "alternative to cultivation during their lifetime".
Old narratives about India are defunct, Desai argues. But then the new ones, especially those circulating in the west, often obscure more than they reveal. Never mind that more desperately poor people – 421m – live in India today than all of sub-Saharan Africa, and that nearly half of the country's children suffer from malnourishment. The new western accounts of India speak of the tycoons of Bangalore and Mumbai; they hail an India rising, finally, to the consumer capitalism that is apparently the summit of human civilisation, if not the terminus of history.
Patrick French's book India: A Portrait, subtitled The Intimate Biography of 1.2bn People, is the most eloquent restatement yet of this thesis. It applauds Indian democracy – Mayawati comes in for special mention – but the book's true heroes are the Indian entrepreneurs who liberated themselves from Nehru's old protectionist economy and who now seem ready to emancipate the rest of India as well.
Interviewing these businessmen, French is strikingly able to individualise them, illuminating large sociopolitical shifts in the process. Still, French, an acclaimed literary biographer of Francis Younghusband and VS Naipaul, is never more engaging than when he ventures into ordinary Indian lives.
Shocked by a press report about a menial labourer called Venkatesh, who had been chained to his place of work, he travels to south India to interview him. He is appalled by the living conditions of workers constructing a fancy condominium in Bangalore. A visit to Kashmir brings him face-to-face with the everyday brutality of India's military occupation of the valley. In these chapters, French potently recreates the experiences of many foreign visitors to India, who, preparing themselves for a vibrant democracy, are disconcerted to encounter its hollowed-out forms: rampant corruption, widespread human rights abuses, degradations of class and caste, and the hatred laced with fear of the very affluent for the very poor.
More reportage of this kind would have anchored India: A Portrait, which flits distractingly between journalism, history, analysis, bold prophecy and large generalisations. Unfortified by first-hand experience, French too often succumbs to the overworked templates of foreign journalists in India. Corruption in India, he concludes quaintly, is caused by "poverty and social imbalance". But the recent Commonwealth Games fiasco and subsequent scandals reveal how some of India's most prominent businessmen, politicians, bureaucrats and journalists together plunder such national resources as land, oil and gas, and mines.
Though surprised by the resurgence of militant communists today in a vast swathe of central India, French foregoes any close examination of the scramble for precious commodities or of the accelerated dispossession, in recent years, of forest-dwelling tribal peoples and farmers alike. Nearly 800m Indians still depend on agriculture for a living. Yet the quiet catastrophe in rural areas – the poisoning of cultivable land, spiralling debt, and the suicides of tens of thousands of farmers in recent years – is absent from India: A Portrait.
French does talk at length to a man with a farming background but the latter turns out to be an employee at a California-style vineyard. The member of a poor tribal community, he leads French into upbeat speculations about the "democratisation of wine drinking" in India. But the collapse of water tables is a more pressing concern for hundreds of millions of Indians in rural areas, who are very far from imitating the consumption patterns of middle-class Europeans and Americans. The task of even adequately educating India's large and growing youth population is daunting enough, not to mention creating labour-intensive jobs in manufacturing and services and making urban economic growth environmentally sustainable.
India: A Portrait generally avoids these larger challenges confronting India today. Like many recent accounts of the country, it is suffused with the mystical faith that a small but "dynamic" Indian minority of producers and consumers will somehow accomplish social as well as economic change. French hails shampoo sold in cheaply priced sachets as a "a major feat of democratisation", since previously poor people can "now aspire to the pleasure of having shiny hair and softer skin".
But cheap beauty aids are unlikely to compensate India's impoverished for a heavily privatised healthcare system that, according to a new report in medical journal The Lancet, pushes 39m Indians below the poverty line each year. The unilinear discourse about the boisterousness of Indian markets and democracy – one that excites audiences at Davos and Aspen – cannot easily accommodate any potentially complicating facts.
Thus, French's admiring account of Mayawati's rise skips over the allegations of corruption, persecution of other low-caste groups and her manic self-love. One misses, too, in India: A Portrait, urban-oriented though it is, any quickening sense of India's popular middle-class cultures.
This is a pity. For there is an India that is indeed rising, reflected most gaudily by billionaire businessman Mukesh Ambani's new 27-storey home in Mumbai as well as Mayawati's statues of herself; these are aspiring as well as already privileged new classes with inordinate cravings for wealth and fame, and very fragile self-esteem. Some of the best literary writing about India in recent years – Suketu Mehta's Maximum City, Aravind Adiga's Man Booker-winning The White Tiger – has plunged us into this teeming universe of Gatsbys and Babbitts with euphoric desires, resentments and fears. French's book heralds without really describing India's own jazz age – the particular exuberance, tawdriness, cruelty, and melancholy that continue to make India, if not quite how its "makers" saw it or its new western admirers predict, the most interesting country in the world.
Pankaj Mishra is author of 'Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tibet and Beyond' (Picador)
From: Shiva Shankar <sshankar@cmi.ac.in>
Date: Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 11:48 AM
Subject: Caste of millions
To:
'... they will also encounter (in Guha's book) much less well-known and equally distinguished figures, such as BR Ambedkar, the articulate spokesman of formerly untouchable Hindus, or Dalits, and the main architect of India's extraordinary constitution that in 1949 bestowed equal rights upon all its citizens. ...'
'... In these chapters, French potently recreates the experiences of many foreign visitors to India, who, preparing themselves for a vibrant democracy, are disconcerted to encounter its hollowed-out forms: rampant corruption, widespread human rights abuses, degradations of class and caste, and the hatred laced with fear of the very affluent for the very poor. ...'
Caste of millions
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2ecabe4a-24e3-11e0-895d-00144feab49a.html?ftcamp=rss#axzz1BjBObGzP
By Pankaj Mishra
Published: January 21 2011 22:03
Makers of Modern India, by Ramachandra Guha, Harvard University Press, RRP£25.95, 512 pages
The Rediscovery of India, by Meghnad Desai, Bloomsbury, RRP£25, 512 pages
India: A Portrait, by Patrick French, Allen Lane, RRP£25, 448 pages
India is the "most interesting country in the world". Or so the Indian writer Ramachandra Guha asserts in the prologue to his new book Makers of Modern India. You might think Guha would say that: he has written several books on the subject, including India After Gandhi (2007), a history of postcolonial India. But he may be on to something. India is one of the world's oldest continuous civilisations; its diverse communities live in several centuries at once, generating multiple and contradictory narratives. Where else can you find a naked Hindu mendicant pulling a truck with his penis and suave tycoons buying blue-chip companies in the US and Europe, even as militant communists occupy and administer large parts of the country?
Strangely, the notion of India that is increasingly commonplace in the west, which these three books address in different ways, floats well above the singularities, oddities and contrasts that make the country so interesting. According to the west, India is a vibrantly democratic country full of confident tycoons, adventurous entrepreneurs and friendly English speakers, which will counterbalance vaguely menacing China and assist the economic recovery of the west.
For decades, India was seen in the west as poor and spiritual. Suddenly, it appears to be increasingly rich and materialistic. This India 2.0 version is animated, of course, by the demands of the moment, by politicians as well as businessmen desperately looking eastward for expanding markets. Needless to say, it ignores the particularities of India's political and economic reconstruction: for instance, the radical Indian experiment with electoral democracy in a poor and irrepressibly diverse country.
Only multiethnic and newly democratic Indonesia has come close in recent years to matching India's complex conflicts and tensions. Guha enumerates no fewer than five revolutions – urban, industrial, national, democratic, social – occurring simultaneously in the country today. His new book also attempts to locate the intellectual sources of these transformations. Following up on India After Gandhi, Makers of Modern India anthologises the speeches and writings of 19 influential thinker-activists who, according to Guha, had a "defining impact on the formation and evolution of the Indian Republic".
Readers in the west will find some familiar personalities here, including Gandhi himself, Jawaharlal Nehru, India's secular and liberal-minded first prime minister, and Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet and Nobel laureate. But they will also encounter much less well-known and equally distinguished figures, such as BR Ambedkar, the articulate spokesman of formerly untouchable Hindus, or Dalits, and the main architect of India's extraordinary constitution that in 1949 bestowed equal rights upon all its citizens.
As an anthology of Indian political debates, Makers of Modern India makes for instructive reading. But Guha's commentary doesn't quite clarify just how the luminaries included in his book made modern India. These fiercely iconoclastic figures are not easily herded into an official intellectual pantheon of the Indian Republic; many of them might recoil from their supposed handiwork. In any case, India as we know it today is not so much the imperfectly realised dream of its supposed founding fathers as a contingent product of history, which stumbled into existence in 1947 burdened by the original sin of partition.
It was British imperialists who gave continent-sized India its political cohesiveness and built most of its administrative structures; their hasty departure and the bloody creation of Pakistan determined postcolonial India's trajectory more enduringly than the ideals of Gandhi or Nehru, which are derided, if not forgotten, in India today. Gandhi's preoccupation with rural economies and grassroots social reform was ignored by his own disciple Nehru, who invested disproportionately in heavy industries and top-down modernisation.
Other noble dreams of collective emancipation and glory, too, were compromised by the many exigencies of postcolonial nation-building. The colonial state, with its aloof bureaucracy and repressive apparatus, was retained, and radical new institutions of universal adult franchise and social welfare uneasily grafted on to it. Not surprisingly, torture and extrajudicial execution remain as commonplace a feature of contemporary India as free and largely fair elections, and the red-taped state still struggles to provide effective education and healthcare.
The hierarchies underpinning India's older cruelties of caste and gender have also survived the egalitarian proclamations of the constitution; universal franchise has yet to lead to a civil rights revolution. Dalits are still being lynched and raped by upper-caste feudal lords, and thousands of women burnt to death for bringing insufficient dowries, even as Dalit and female politicians move into the highest offices in the land. Indeed, Ambedkar's battle against the inequities of the caste system has had the strangest afterlife.
Beneficiaries of en bloc voting by previously subordinate groups, a generation of low-caste leaders has now enjoyed political power in India's most populous provinces. Accused of corruption and incompetence, they have ended up advancing group claims and identities rather than individual rights for all. The most conspicuous of the new profiteers of caste is Mayawati, the Dalit chief minister of Uttar Pradesh's 180m citizens. She has amassed a great personal fortune; her penchant for solitaire diamonds and huge statues of herself has further undermined the state's investment-starved economy.
Why has democracy enshrined rather than effaced caste divisions in Indian society? Meghnad Desai, Labour peer and professor emeritus at the London School of Economics, argues in his new book The Rediscovery of India, an opinionated but always interesting history, that India is a "modernised conservative society" rather than the "modernist rational one" of Nehru's dream. If liberal democracy based on the rights of the individual has shallow roots in India, this is at least partly due, Desai claims, to Nehru's post-partition all-consuming obsession with India's national unity and territorial integrity.
Desai grew up in post-1947 India; he has an instinctive understanding of the imperatives of postcolonial consolidation that greatly constricted decision-making in the early years of the Indian republic. Deploring the isolationist economic policies of Nehru, he is, nevertheless, alert to the political context in which they were formulated. He describes persuasively how the proud Indian resolve to create a self-sufficient industrial economy turned into an unhealthy aversion to international trade.
Desai is aware, too, of the political turmoil unleashed by India's now globalised economy: how by distributing its benefits narrowly, it expands the population of the disenchanted and the frustrated, often making them vulnerable to populist politicians. He describes how the corporate group Tata was forced to relocate its original factory for Nano cars by a politician (all set now to be the next chief minister of West Bengal) cannily exploiting the fear and despair of farmers, who could not see an "alternative to cultivation during their lifetime".
Old narratives about India are defunct, Desai argues. But then the new ones, especially those circulating in the west, often obscure more than they reveal. Never mind that more desperately poor people – 421m – live in India today than all of sub-Saharan Africa, and that nearly half of the country's children suffer from malnourishment. The new western accounts of India speak of the tycoons of Bangalore and Mumbai; they hail an India rising, finally, to the consumer capitalism that is apparently the summit of human civilisation, if not the terminus of history.
Patrick French's book India: A Portrait, subtitled The Intimate Biography of 1.2bn People, is the most eloquent restatement yet of this thesis. It applauds Indian democracy – Mayawati comes in for special mention – but the book's true heroes are the Indian entrepreneurs who liberated themselves from Nehru's old protectionist economy and who now seem ready to emancipate the rest of India as well.
Interviewing these businessmen, French is strikingly able to individualise them, illuminating large sociopolitical shifts in the process. Still, French, an acclaimed literary biographer of Francis Younghusband and VS Naipaul, is never more engaging than when he ventures into ordinary Indian lives.
Shocked by a press report about a menial labourer called Venkatesh, who had been chained to his place of work, he travels to south India to interview him. He is appalled by the living conditions of workers constructing a fancy condominium in Bangalore. A visit to Kashmir brings him face-to-face with the everyday brutality of India's military occupation of the valley. In these chapters, French potently recreates the experiences of many foreign visitors to India, who, preparing themselves for a vibrant democracy, are disconcerted to encounter its hollowed-out forms: rampant corruption, widespread human rights abuses, degradations of class and caste, and the hatred laced with fear of the very affluent for the very poor.
More reportage of this kind would have anchored India: A Portrait, which flits distractingly between journalism, history, analysis, bold prophecy and large generalisations. Unfortified by first-hand experience, French too often succumbs to the overworked templates of foreign journalists in India. Corruption in India, he concludes quaintly, is caused by "poverty and social imbalance". But the recent Commonwealth Games fiasco and subsequent scandals reveal how some of India's most prominent businessmen, politicians, bureaucrats and journalists together plunder such national resources as land, oil and gas, and mines.
Though surprised by the resurgence of militant communists today in a vast swathe of central India, French foregoes any close examination of the scramble for precious commodities or of the accelerated dispossession, in recent years, of forest-dwelling tribal peoples and farmers alike. Nearly 800m Indians still depend on agriculture for a living. Yet the quiet catastrophe in rural areas – the poisoning of cultivable land, spiralling debt, and the suicides of tens of thousands of farmers in recent years – is absent from India: A Portrait.
French does talk at length to a man with a farming background but the latter turns out to be an employee at a California-style vineyard. The member of a poor tribal community, he leads French into upbeat speculations about the "democratisation of wine drinking" in India. But the collapse of water tables is a more pressing concern for hundreds of millions of Indians in rural areas, who are very far from imitating the consumption patterns of middle-class Europeans and Americans. The task of even adequately educating India's large and growing youth population is daunting enough, not to mention creating labour-intensive jobs in manufacturing and services and making urban economic growth environmentally sustainable.
India: A Portrait generally avoids these larger challenges confronting India today. Like many recent accounts of the country, it is suffused with the mystical faith that a small but "dynamic" Indian minority of producers and consumers will somehow accomplish social as well as economic change. French hails shampoo sold in cheaply priced sachets as a "a major feat of democratisation", since previously poor people can "now aspire to the pleasure of having shiny hair and softer skin".
But cheap beauty aids are unlikely to compensate India's impoverished for a heavily privatised healthcare system that, according to a new report in medical journal The Lancet, pushes 39m Indians below the poverty line each year. The unilinear discourse about the boisterousness of Indian markets and democracy – one that excites audiences at Davos and Aspen – cannot easily accommodate any potentially complicating facts.
Thus, French's admiring account of Mayawati's rise skips over the allegations of corruption, persecution of other low-caste groups and her manic self-love. One misses, too, in India: A Portrait, urban-oriented though it is, any quickening sense of India's popular middle-class cultures.
This is a pity. For there is an India that is indeed rising, reflected most gaudily by billionaire businessman Mukesh Ambani's new 27-storey home in Mumbai as well as Mayawati's statues of herself; these are aspiring as well as already privileged new classes with inordinate cravings for wealth and fame, and very fragile self-esteem. Some of the best literary writing about India in recent years – Suketu Mehta's Maximum City, Aravind Adiga's Man Booker-winning The White Tiger – has plunged us into this teeming universe of Gatsbys and Babbitts with euphoric desires, resentments and fears. French's book heralds without really describing India's own jazz age – the particular exuberance, tawdriness, cruelty, and melancholy that continue to make India, if not quite how its "makers" saw it or its new western admirers predict, the most interesting country in the world.
Pankaj Mishra is author of 'Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tibet and Beyond' (Picador)
--
Palash Biswas
Pl Read:
http://nandigramunited-banga.blogspot.com/
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