Read India Online

Authors: Patrick French

India (6 page)

BOOK: India
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The almost inadvertent end to the first surge of Hindutva came in 1948, when a follower of the movement killed Gandhi. Many of its supporters were imprisoned, and this strand of thinking was excluded from respectable
political debate. The Nehruvian secular line, effectively a fudging of history, became the official view in an effort to maintain a unified society. This approach brought benefits, but also stirred a deep resentment among Hindu nationalists, which would bubble up in future years.

In 1996, I visited Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad. It was a sorry, decrepit place, some way from its founding principles. Even before his death Gandhi no longer provided the core ideas of independent India, and the ashram’s neglect seemed unsurprising. In a nearby shop, I noticed a wall chart called “Top Officials of the World.” It was a little out of date, and showed Margaret Thatcher wearing a glam-rock jacket, and Ronald Reagan covered in at least a week’s worth of stubble, thanks to the haphazard printing process. After that, I began to collect Indian wall charts—some of which can still be found in provincial bookshops and stationery stores. The charts in many ways gave a better idea of the principles of the new nation. My favourite was “An Ideal Boy,” which shows wonderfully evocative, stylized cartoons of an exemplary son of India.

The ideal boy is a chubby-thighed little fellow who gets up early, bathes daily, reads attentively at school and goes for a morning walk in a well-manicured garden, wearing shorts. He “brushes up the teeth,” salutes his parents and “takes meals in time,” his mother hovering shyly over his shoulder and popping a roti on to his plate. The ideal boy is paler than most Indians, and has a definitely Hindu look to him, but I doubt the chart was intended to be sectarian. Matching him on the “Bad Habits” wall chart are some less than ideal boys who play with electricity, tease a dog and purchase fly-blown snacks from a street vendor who, inadvertently I guess, bears a precise resemblance to India’s first president, Dr. Rajendra Prasad. They also fly kites in a dangerous fashion, gamble (though with well-combed hair) and “take law in hands” by throwing a cricket ball through a shop window. On another wall chart, illustrating the law of karma, a naughty boy jettisons a banana skin and promptly slips on it.
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The pious sentiment, the optimism and strong moral ambition of “An Ideal Boy” arose directly from the nationalist project which began in India in 1950 when the Constitution came into force. Many injunctions which now seem amusing were aimed at people who had no experience of behaviour outside their immediate social context, and needed to be shown the way. They would be guided in the etiquette of railway stations, hospitals or
bus stops, or telegraph and postal services. One chart shows “An Individual Family” (mother and father tend a tulsi plant, son and daughter draw water from a well) and “Combined Family” (father sits in a dhoti on a deck chair reading a newspaper, mother squats on the floor combing daughter’s hair, sisters-in-law prepare vegetables quietly, boys do useful deeds). Other charts were aimed at the prevention of disease, in this land where many people were sick and hungry: recommendations included “sleeping on clean bed,” “keep your nails short and clean,” “always breathe through the nose,” “destroy mosquitoes” and “always use latrine.” The last instruction has not always been followed; I once saw a man at a Delhi market pissing against a painted sign which read, in English, “No Person Should Urinate Here.”

The moralizing intentions of “An Ideal Boy” were in their way Nehruvian. Another popular picture shows Chacha Nehru—Uncle Nehru—reading a story to assorted children, who are chosen by their clothing and physiognomy to represent every variety of Indian. His ideas for the future nation were broad. He expected the state to intervene in people’s lives in ways it had never done before in India. Like other postcolonial leaders, he was very ambitious. Nehru’s aspirations ranged from enforcing lasting social change to reforming the holding of agricultural land, from developing an Indian space programme to building giant dams, from the creation of an economic planning commission to the promotion of a foreign policy built on queasy notions of Asian brotherhood. As prime minister, he had a rare ability to take the longer view of the country’s destiny and global status, unconstrained by caste, religion or regional parochialism. This did not prevent him from getting things wrong, but his mistakes were made in the service of a larger idea, grounded in democratic participation.

He resisted any challenge to the Constitution. An attempt by President Rajendra Prasad in 1951 to take away power from the prime minister was blocked. Prasad said that he intended to rely on his own judgement when deciding whether to sign bills into law. His legal argument was specious, and Nehru at once referred it to the attorney-general and another respected lawyer. Their response was clear: the president’s position was analogous to that of “a constitutional monarch in England” and any move to alter it would “upset the whole constitutional structure envisaged at the time when the Constitution was passed [and] make the President a kind of dictator.” Prasad’s move inadvertently strengthened the Constitution by clarifying the law and establishing the precedent that power rested with the prime minister and the cabinet.
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Nehru made a point of consulting Parliament, and refused to give
peremptory orders. When his cabinet colleague Amrit Kaur requested him to intervene on a particular matter, he refused. “What you are asking me,” he said to her, “is that I be a dictator. You have come to the wrong person.”
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Unlike other world leaders, he did not seek personal wealth. In his later years, he was supported and advised by his widowed daughter, Indira Gandhi, who became his official hostess. Living in a house formerly occupied by the British military commander-in-chief, Nehru attempted to pull the new rashtra together. Edifying measures were taken to emphasize the unity within the nation’s diversity. He would start each day by seeing flocks of random visitors, some with petitions or grievances, others lobbying over policy, some just come to catch a glimpse of the new ruler. Refugees camped on his lawns and by his gate, and he did not send them away.

Nehru’s premiership lasted nearly seventeen years, until his death in 1964. By the end, many things were unravelling. His devotion to insular socialist planning had not brought prosperity, and the country’s share of world trade had halved. His government failed to introduce mass education or to enforce land reforms; the Portuguese colony of Goa was annexed at gunpoint; troops were used against the Nagas, a tribal people in the north-east who wanted to secede and had been fighting to establish a sovereign state. The Congress organization was dividing into factions and being challenged at the ballot box—in 1957 a communist administration was elected in the state of Kerala. Gone was the austere glamour of the freedom movement; the Congress uniform of white khadi, or homespun cloth, had become the vestment of a new ruling class. Nehru had colleagues who were mediocre, and in some cases corrupt. When powerful regional politicians like Pratap Singh Kairon in Punjab misused power or embezzled money, he tended to do little. When he did intercede, as in Kashmir—where the leader, Sheikh Abdullah, was imprisoned on dubious charges of conniving with Pakistan—Nehru still somehow managed to retain a personal link. At Nehru’s cremation, a weeping Abdullah would stand by the pyre and throw flowers into the flames.

After Nehru’s death, the democratic structures he had put in place came right: he had refused to groom or nominate a successor as prime minister, but it took Congress MPs only a week to choose a new leader, by consensus. He was Lal Bahadur Shastri, a small, impressive, scholarly man who had been born to a poor family in the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, or what was known from 1950 as Uttar Pradesh.

•   •   •

Were the ideas of Jawaharlal Nehru and the founders too ambitious? Was India really a nation, or a collection of diverse peoples who had been thrown together under British rule, and granted independence? More than six decades later, there are 7 billion people living on the planet. Nearly 1.2 billion of them are Indian. So every sixth person walking on the earth is Indian, and a fair few more are ethnically or culturally Indian (though if you are Pakistani or Bangladeshi, you may not want to hear this). Is it right to ascribe unity and similarity to so many different people? Is it fashionable to do so? Is it possible to say that a nightworker in a call centre in Karnataka, an elderly Sikkimese princess, a displaced Adivasi, or tribal, from Madhya Pradesh, a deposed Rajput maharani, a Mizo craftsman on the Burmese border, a thrusting Punjabi garment exporter, a Malayali nurse, a magistrate from Kashmir, a Tamil Brahmin chef, a rock star from Meghalaya, a Gujarati stockbroker, a Musahar (a hereditary rat-eater) from Bihar, an eye surgeon from Thiruvananthapuram, a thriving Marwari businesswoman, a farmer from Karnataka, an Assamese tea picker, a lecherous Pahari politician, a Maoist revolutionary from Chhattisgarh, a languid Maharashtrian cricketer, an Ollywood (the Oriya-language version of Hollywood) actress and a Bengali painter-cum-civil servant have anything in common?

The prevailing intellectual convention, arising from the academic straitjacket of poststructuralist theory, multicultural incomprehension and general postcolonial angst, is that it would be wrong to make deductions based on group identity or nationality. To say the French are arrogant, the Japanese inscrutable or the Germans Germanic is unacceptable, even if there is a discernible element of truth in each of these assertions. In the same way, deductions about different Indian communities tend to be made in private rather than in public, but few, even within the communities themselves, would deny their accuracy.

Take a popular email that has been doing the rounds:

BENGAL

1 Bengali = poet

2 Bengalis = film society

3 Bengalis = political party

4 Bengalis = two political parties

TAMIL BRAHMIN

1 Tam Brahm = priest at the Vardarajaperumal temple

2 Tam Brahms = maths tuition class

3 Tam Brahms = queue outside the U.S. consulate at 4 a.m.

4 Tam Brahms = Thyagaraja Music Festival in Santa Clara

MALAYALI

1 Mallu = coconut stall

2 Mallus = boat race

3 Mallus = Gulf job racket

4 Mallus = oil slick

GUJARATI

1 Gujju = share-broker in a Mumbai train

2 Gujjus = rummy game in a Mumbai train

3 Gujjus = Mumbai’s noisiest restaurant

4 Gujjus = stock market scam

In each case, the depiction is close enough to reality for the stereotype to work: the artistic and disputatious Bengali, the clever, superior Tam Brahm, the Malayali from Kerala with its rivers and coconuts now transplanted to a job in the Gulf and the canny Gujju are all figures from Indian life, whether in the workplace or in a movie. These are only the stereotypes relating to particular states, rather than to more closely defined social, ethnic, religious or caste communities. There are further examples cited in the chain email, but to ensure this book is not burned on the streets of Patna or Lucknow, I will leave out the entries for Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

One more:

3 Punjabis = assault on McAloo Tikkis at local McDonald’s

Any member of a community may be distinct, but the wholesale effect of involuntary group identity is stronger in India than in most other countries. This is caused by two things: the fact that, until recently, marriage outside your community was difficult and unusual, and the absence of substantial immigration. There has been no large-scale migration to India for around 500 years, since the arrival of Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur’s armies at about the time the first Europeans were peopling America. Protected geographically by the sea and by the Himalayas, Indian society managed to remain intact to an extraordinary degree during the colonial period. This caused, inevitably, a measure of integration or understanding between the existing communities. In the days of British rule there was little settlement
except on a temporary basis, and social restrictions about eating, as well as the barrier of purdah (which had by now been borrowed by Hindus from Muslims, in the same way that caste had been borrowed by Muslims from Hindus), meant the opportunities for quotidian social interaction between Indians and Europeans were severely limited. Barriers of race, religion and culture, as well as their own national sense of identity and exclusivity, made the British less likely than earlier conquerors to be subsumed into India. Some wore local clothes and took a native mistress, but this did not amount to any sort of assimilation. At the start of the twentieth century, there were around 1,500 British executive officials in India, in addition to a much larger number of military officers and soldiers, and they existed in a separate world of dances, polo and the club, described in Kipling’s short stories. After independence, apart from a small number of missionaries, tea planters and business people, the Europeans went home.

Traditions that are today identifiably Indian are rooted in a very distant past. Nearly a thousand years ago, the Muslim polymath Al-Biruni travelled through India and wrote a brilliantly perceptive account of the world and the systems of thought he encountered,
Kitab Tahqiq ma li-l-Hind
, commonly known as
The India
. Originally from Central Asia, Al-Biruni noticed the concentration on philosophy and mathematics, the emphasis on the purity of fire and water, the throwing away of earthen plates after use and the avoidance of touching between communities; he commented on the Hindus’ religious flexibility, observing that “at the utmost, they fight with words, but they will never stake their soul or body or their property on religious controversy”; he recorded their “hideous fictions,” like the notion that god could have a thousand eyes; he observed that Hindus “sip the stall [urine] of cows [during rituals], but they do not eat their meat,” and that men wear earrings and “a girdle called yajnopavita [the sacred thread, worn by the higher castes], passing from the left shoulder to the right side of the waist … In their meetings they sit cross-legged. They spit out and blow their noses without any respect for the elder ones present.”
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When the emperor Babur wrote in his diary in the 1520s that Hindustan had “innumerable and endless workmen of every kind … a fixed caste for every sort of work,” or that women “tie on a cloth, a half of which goes around the waist while the other is thrown over the head,” he could have been writing about rural north India now.
56
The recipe for kulfi used by the wife of the emperor Jahangir, Noor Jehan, is the same as the recipe used today. The mricchakatika, or little clay cart, is a common child’s toy (you pull a string to make the cart roll along, and it gives a tuk-tuk-tuk sound), but
Mricchakatika
is also the title of a Sanskrit play dating back to 200
BCE
, a play which Nehru was reading when he flew above the carnage of Punjab in 1947.

BOOK: India
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