Five rules to successfully debate India

Rule one. India is not a country, it is a continent.

The diversity of languages, religions, cultures, climates, histories, social relations, economic opportunities and legal frameworks in India is a multiplication by x of what we have in Europe. And Europe, from an American or a Chinese perspective, is already a chaotic combination of Babel and a Greek labyrinth. Who do call when you want to speak to the European Union, was Henry Kissinger’s famous question. Applied to India, that lamentation would become: no matter which Indian you call among the 1.2 billion inhabitants, you will always have another India on the line. Of everything that is true about India, the opposite is true as well. In short: India is unknowable, incomprehensible and undescribable.

This basic, timeless wisdom is proclaimed by the very authors, pundits or cultural philosophers who, once they have convinced you of their deep insights, will do exactly what they have declared to be impossible. They, of course, are capable of knowing, comprehending and describing India. And they will gladly oblige to do so for you.

Rule two. Don’t forget to mention 1947.

This rule is established by the second sentence in Salman Rusdies classic Midnight’s Children: ‘…I can not escap the date: I was born on 15 August 1947 at the stroke of midnight, the precise instant of India’s independence.’ Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the poet who became a Pakistani poet at the sound of that midnight gong, called what should have been the dawn of freedom ‘this leprous brightness, this dawn which reeks of night.’ Independence signified in the first place the experience of a traumatic partition of the Indian motherspace, when hundreds of thousands or maybe up to two million people died as victims of a violent religious cleansing in Bengal and Punjab. When it was all over, 8 million refugees from Pakistan ended up in the new nation called India.

The partition morphed into the first war between brothers, neighbours and former friends in the higher altitudes of contested space. Which later led to three more wars and many more quasi confrontations. The permanent state of cold peace between India and Pakistan complicated the numerous other external challenges to come. The short and humiliating war with China in 1961. The Bengal insurrection in 1971, that transformed East-Pakistan –with decisive Indian help- into the new nation of Bangladesh. The troubles and tribulations in Sri Lanka and Nepal. The difficult balancing excercises in Afghanistan and Burma. And last but not least, the perennial threat of fragility within the Indian Union itself. 

Kashmir, Punjab, Assam. Arunachal Pradesh, Travencore, Hyderabad. There seems to be forever one or the other part of India that feels out of place within the union, though in the end the federal, secular and democratic nationstate remains one and alive. Still, the mirror in which Mother India regards herself continues to crack into ever smaller states and territories, defined and struggled for on the basis of language or ethnicity. While we speak, the procedure to create Telangana as the 36th state of the union is in full swing. To do that, Andhra Pradesh will have to be partitioned. That state was created in 1956 by merging Andhra –which was created in 1953 by separating it from Madras- with Telangana –which was partitioned off Hyderabad. Publishers of maps love India.

But whatever debate you are having about external threats or internal dissent, you will always have to refer to 1947: not the independence, but the Partition, the violence, the quest for communal cohesion on the basis of religion, ethnicity or language.

Rule three. Talking about India requires deep knowledge of local spices, smells and exotic vocabulary.

When debating the diversities of rule one, you compare them to the garam masala –the spicy mix of cardamon, cinnamon, clove and black pepper- that ama uses to flavour up the balti chicken pasanda. At least, if ama is not brahmin or South-Indian, because in that case she would have to replace the chicken with malai kofta and aloo paratha, vegetarianism obliges. Whatever the case, you should always make clear you are aware that Indians refer to their country as Bharat, rather than India, the name that was bequated to the nation by the Indus, the river that feeds agriculture and life in the estranged brother-nation of Pakistan.

It is the smell of a gathering monsoon, the colors of spices as they are displayed in perfect cones, the sounds of hindipop and classical karnatic music, the stench of abject poverty and lingering litter; it is the difference that attracts us to India.

The pinnacle of difference, the subject of our categorical rejection as well as eternal fascination, are casts or jati, or when we refer to it as a coherent system of social stratificaton, varna. Sophisticated India travellers know, from their thorough study of the Lonely Planet, that the incredible diversity of casts can be summarized under four main categories: brahmins, kshatriya’s, vaishya’s and shudra’s. Plus, of course, the outcasts or harijans as Gandhi called them, who in recent decades gathered political strength under their own dalit denomination. Plus, not to forget, the adivasi, often translated as tribals or indigenous people: communities that lived so deep in the forests of Central India that they completely escaped integration into the system of social stratification.

Casts, says dr. S.N. Balagangadhara from the Comparative Cultural Studies department of the University of Ghent, are a Western narrative. In his recent book Reconceptualizing India Studies he argues that this colonial construction, as is often the case in a colonial context, was internalised by Indian intellectuals, who since then affirm the existence of oppression of dalits by brahmins. Professor Balu, as he is known in Ghent, refuses to abide by that shared conviction. Not because he can prove that these casts or the oppression do not exist, but because there he finds no theory clearly defining what casts are, who brahmins are, nor how all these social realities would have been functioning throughout India and through the centuries as a uniform and describable system. He would like to stem the exotic Indomania and all the spicy theories about India it has produced since the heydays of the British East India Company, with silence.

The only exception he seems to allow on that gag order, would be for his own theory, that is not about India but about the Western theory about India. That, he says, we can know, describe and argue with.

Rule four. It is the poverty, stupid.

In an afterword to the Dutch edition of Kamala Markandaya’s novel A Handful of Rice, Ranajit Sarkar describes the three categories of urbanites who populate the story: (1) ‘unscrupulous black marketeers, smugglers and hoarders who enriched themselves at the expense of the poor and desperate’, (2) ‘those who became rich in a so called decent way… they simply don’t notice the poor, they don’t consider them as entirely human and are completely indifferent to the misery of those less fortunate than themselves’, and (3) ‘working class people who accept their fate and are content in life’.

Is does not require a big stretch in the imagination of the average European to see poverty as the central tenet of what India actually is. For as much as the country can appear as exotic, spiritual or democratic, at the end of the day it is poverty that emerges as the characteristic that resurfaces time and again in the old stories missionaries told us, as well as in the more contemporary versions deliverd by development workers or seasoned backpackers.

What is far less known, is the fact that this poverty is largely of European manufacture. Before British war ships blasted off the colonisation of South Asia in 1757, India was one of the most prosperous regions in the world, according to none less than Adam Smith. The average wages of textile workers were higher than what their counterparts in industrialising Europe earned at the time. ‘The competitivenes and quality of Indian exports was a cause of concern for native European manufacturers, and in Britain in particular, before the establishment of British rule in India, there were several acts of Parliament prohibiting the wearing of Indian textile products’, write Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen in their 2013 study An Uncertain Glory. India and Its Contradictions. It was, in other words, colonisation itself that produced India’s poverty.

The past two decades, India reemerged on the international scene as an economic powerhouse, with yearly gdp growth that was lower only to China’s. The Mittals, Ambani’s, Tata’s, Singhs, Nilekani’s and Premji’s became household names, not only in the financial supplements but in the gossipy lifestyle sections of global media as well. The rapidly expanding wealth of the country did not reach the hundreds of millions of poor, however. ‘Within a perimeter of 500 meters, with the place where I stay as the center, you find an income difference of one to a billion. That is not sustainable’, says Mukesh Ambani, president of Reliance Inc., in Mira Kamdar’s Planet India.

The “place where he stays” is Antillia, a private tower of 27 extra high ceilinged floors, in the center of Mumbai. Six hundred employees work hard to make life as smooth and comfortable as possible for the extended Ambani family. Antillia has been designed to withstand earth quakes up to a magnitude of 8 on the scale of Richter. Whether the American architects and the Australian engineers made the building resistent to the rising tide of dissatisfaction about the inequality he refers to and the presistent poverty, is unknown to us. ‘The history of world development offers few other examples, if any, of an economy growing so fast for so long with such limited results in terms of reducing human deprivations’, according to Drèze and Sen.

Poverty continues to be India’s stumbling stone. When the hindu-nationalist party BJP went into elections in 2004 as the ruling party presiding over unseen economic expansion, with the slogan India Shining, they learned that the hard way. The poor majority voted them out of power because they had seen nothing but more hardships from all the booming, growing and glittering of this new economy. When the current governement, led by Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi’s Congress Party, will face the electorate next year, they also will most likely be judged for the lack of social mobility for the 350 million Indians surviving below the poverty line. For your information: the poverty line as defined by the Indian government is 32 rupee per person per day in a city and 26 rupee in rural areas. Early september 2013 one euro was traded against 87 rupee.

Rule five. Queuing is for losers.

British colonialism has left many traces in India, such as railways, the prestige connected to a job in civil service, a professional armed force and, not least, the English language. Indian writers have been among the most creative and successful in Her Majesty’s tongue. Queuing, though, does not belong to the heritage of the British Raj, even though it is honed and lived to perfection as a central art of public lif in the British Isles. In India, everyone has a specific reason to jump the queue.  Old ladies because they are old, men of importance because they are important, rude lads because they are paid by the other categories to take the priority lane for them. Those who just wait for their turn, are still queuing.

The phenomenon is observed far beyond ticket windows or train doors. In the economy, for instance, the powerful jump straight to the sources of profit, with no regard for the intermittent steps of social and ecological rules. Civil servants jump sraight to the higher salary they feel they deserve, by making their clients grease their palms. Small farmers, adivasis, landless, dalits and slum dwellers are forced to stand by and watch how the powerful first serve themselves, and how they take or destroy the people’s land, forrest and water in the process.

Seventy percent of the 1.2 billion Indians, though, is fed up with being pushed aside by the sharp elbows of the rich or their goonda’s. We see resistance growing, in the dramatic shape of more than a hundred thousand suicides among farmers. We see the non-violent resistance of large peasant movements who throw the power of their numbers into the democratic balance. We see the armed resistance of naxalites and their vulnerable adivasi communities in Central-India –the most important threat to national security according to Prime Minister Singh. Those who wish to see, see resistance. Those who still peddle the fatalism theory with tired karma and dharma arguments, should head out immediately and buy themselves a guide to the actually existing India.

Will Europalia India (the cultural event in Brussels spanning four months and bringing hundreds of performances, exhibitons, screenings and debates to the European capital) be that reliable guide to the real, unknowable India? We are not so sure. The hold of the department of cultural diplomacy within India’s ministry of Foreign Affairs on the programme has been to strong for that, I am afraid. What we do know for sure, is that Europalia will provide us with a clear and comprehensive insight into the image India wants to present of itself to the rest of the world. That will guarantee a rich, fascinating and engaging programme, but not necessarily one that represents the real country the festival is about. Luckily, to make the indispensable reality check, we can rely on the Western media with their established tradition of providing analysis and reporting from Bharat. Can’t we?

www.europalia.eu