India

by Shashi Tharoor

  Be that as it may — and surely such a dualism can be found in any country? — one area in which Bharat is winning over India appears to be in the naming game. The self-appointed guardians of the Bharatvasis are convinced that the names India has given its cities and landmarks reflect the colonization of a sensibility, a process they are determined to reverse whenever they have the chance. So that Shiva Sena-led government in Maharashtra has renamed the state capital Mumbai, proscribing the use of the word Bombay for any official purposes. This strikes me as the equivalent of a company jettisoning a well-known brand name in favor of an inelegant patronymic — as if McDonald’s have renamed itself Kroc’s in honor of its inventor. “Bombay” has entered global discourse; it conjures up associations of cosmopolitan bustle; it is attached to products like Bombay gin, Bombay duck, and the overpriced colonial furniture sold by “the Bombay company.” In short, it enjoys name recognition that many cities around the world would spend millions in publicity to acquire. “Mumbai” was already the city’s name in Marathi; but what has been gained by insisting on its adoption in English, aside from a nativist reassertion that benefits only sign painters and letterhead printers? The Shiv Sena went one step further and renamed the city’s main railway station, Victoria Terminus, an Indo-Gothic-Saracenic excrescence universally known as “VT” and completely devoid, in everyone’s imagination, of any association with the late Queen-Empress. “VT” is henceforth to be known as “Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus.” Try telling that to a Bombay taxi driver.

  Not to be outdone, the DMK government in Madras, which had, in an earlier spell in office, renamed the state of Madras “Tamil Nadu” (“homeland of the Tamils”), decided that the city of Madras would be similarly renamed. The chief minister had been informed that “Madras” was actually a Portuguese coinage, derived either from a trader named Madeiros or a prince called Madrie (just as Bombay came from the Portuguese “Bom Bahia” or “good bay”). “Madras is not a Tamil name,” announced the chief chauvinist to justify his decision to rename the city “Chennai.” Once again, name recognition — Madras kerchiefs, Madras jackets, Bleeding Madras, the Madras monitoring system — went by the board as “Chennai” was adopted without serious debate. More unfortunately, however, the chief minister has overlooked the weight of evidence that “Madras” was indeed a Tamil name (derived, alternative theories go, from the name of a local fisherman, Madarsan; or from the local Muslim religious schools, madarasas; or from madhu-ras, the word for honey). Worse, he had also overlooked the embarrassing fact that “Chennai” was not, as he had asserted, of Tamil origin. It came from the name of Chennappa Naicker, the raja of Chandragiri, who granted the British the right to trade on the Coromandel coast — and who was a Telugu speaker from what is today Andhra Pradesh.

  So bad history is worse lexicology, but in India-that-is-Bharat, it is good politics. This is not a new development, for names had been changed since soon after the British left. Such Anglicized affectations as “Cawnpore” and “Poona” had become “Kanpur” and “Puné” respectively to reflect the way the names were actually pronounced, and Mysore state had become Karnataka to resurrect the proud tradition of what the British has called the “Carnatic” region. But after fifty years of independence, isn’t it time to start drawing the line somewhere? Was it really necessary for Keralites, who have got ten used to calling their capital Trivandrum in English and Thiruvandooram in Malayalam, to jettison both abbreviated forms for the glory of “Thiruvananthapuram”? Or to insist that Trichur, which is in fact a close approximation of the popular local pronunciation, be re-spelled “Thrissur,” which must have been dreamed up by Kerala’s sole surviving illiterate?

  What’s in a name? Shakespeare asked, and of course the trains will be just as crowded at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus as they were at VT. But are we so insecure in our independence that we still need to prove to ourselves we are free? Is there no comfort, after all, in being able to take places for granted, without the continuing sense that they are still susceptible to being renamed? In parts of India it is customary for a bride, upon marriage, to take on a new name — not just a surname, but a first name — chosen by her husband’s family. It is as if the rulers of Bombay and Madras wanted to show that they were now the lords and masters of these cities, and to demonstrate the change by conferring a new name upon them. For what these aggressive nativists are doing is demostrating that they are now in charge, that the old days are over. They are asserting their power, the power to decide what a thing will be, the power to name — for if one does not have the ability to create, one can at least claim the right to define.

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  One point at which the two Indias converge is in the process of celebration. Festivals and melas define our need for escape, and India has more of them than any other country; we also take more time off, with a choice of forty-four official holidays for a variety of religious and secular occasions, ranging from Republic Day to Id-e Milad, the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed. The birthdays of Guru Gobind Singh, Guru Ravidas, Maharishi Valmiki, and Mahatma Gandhi are also legitimate excuses to have a day off, as are the ascensions of Buddha, Christ, and Mahavira of the Jains, as well as the Hindu festivals of Mahashivaratri and Ganesh Chaturthi, in honor of the gods Shiva and Ganesh respectively. Throw in the Parsi New Year and the Shia Muharram, and you can see how secularism has deferred to religion, to the benefit of the indolent of all faiths. But of course the secular harvest festival of Dusshera, Onam, and Vaisakhi, the festival of lights (Deepawali), the spring festival (Holi), and the day of brotherhood (Raksha Bandhan, when women tie colorful rakhees to the wrists of their brothers, who are thus pledged to protect them) are celebrated too. Add to all these the 104 weekend days, annual leave, casual leave, compassionate leave, and sick leave, and it is perfectly possible for a government employee to work a third of the days on the calendar and legitimately collect a full year’s salary.

  Of all the various ways of measuring the relative underdevelopment of nations, from GNP tables to the Human Development Index, the one that I would like to see conducted is the Holidays Index. My theory is that the poorer the country, the more holidays it gives itself, and the more festivals it conducts. But is it that we are poor because we have so many holidays, or that we have so many holidays because we are poor? Festivals and melas, mass gatherings of the many united around a common event, are the holiday events of the poor; the rich have no shortage of opportunities to enjoy themselves by themselves, whereas the poor have few outlets and pleasures other than communal ones. So poor countries need more holidays and public festivals than rich ones do, to give people the chance to amuse themselves. For an Indian villager a day at the local mela is his opera ticket, tennis tournament, and beach vacation rolled into one — and in celebrating it he experiences some of the happiness that Thomas Jefferson told us it was the duty of government to allow him to pursue.

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  One sign of the way in which the new economics of post-reform life in India has changed things can be found in an institution that is surprisingly directly affected despite having nothing to do with liberalization — the Indian army. The army has resolutely refused to let down its standards, but in the new India it’s hurting. In a land where there are usually a hundred viable candidates for every job, the army is suffering from a shortage of officers. A colonel in the Paratroop Brigade told me that instead of the twenty-two officers he should have had to run his battalion, he had only ten. One of his majors, a bright and self-confident flier, freely confessed his intention to take his skills into the burgeoning private sector. There was a time when service to the nation was rewarding in every sense, including the material; but as our economy has opened and grown, our soldiers, diplomats, and administrators are finding themselves the poor cousins of the businessmen, bankers, and television talkshow hosts of the new India.

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  The army has taken a tragic toll in casualties in counterinsurgency operations over the past t
wo decades (starting with its “peacekeeping” efforts in Sri Lanka, which went so sadly awry) and in the Kargil war of 1999 and this may have diminished its appeal. Or perhaps not — for we, as a nation, have become appallingly blasé about violent death. Indians are a people with great reverence for human life; we celebrate birth and infant survival in a host of rituals, acknowledge obligations to even distant relatives, and mourn visibly and publicly when death takes a loved one way from us. Yet we live today with a daily human toll that should be shattering: for years we woke to headlines telling us that thirty a day were killed in Punjab, five or ten in Assam and Kashmir; today Punjab in calmer, Kashmir still tense. At least a hundred others elsewhere in the country lose their lives every month in riots, caste conflict, or election violence. Despite the relative calm of the 1996 elections, in which “only” seven people died, we do not seem to be able to exercise our democratic rights without spilling blood. And natural (or, if often man-made, at least nonpolitical) disasters compound the misery. To take the period of just over a year preceding the writing of these words (from August 1995 onward), the litany of disasters becomes a dirge. If I were to ignore the dozens of deaths in buses driving off roads, collapsing buildings and bridges, and laborers poisoned by adulterated food or illicit drink, I would still be left with a horrific list: five hundred railway passengers were killed in an accident at Firozabad near Agra in August 1995; some seven hundred (mainly primary-school children) were incinerared in a fire in an enclosed space at the local school in the northern town of Mandi Dabwali in December 1995; another hundred were crushed in stampedes at Hindu pilgrimage sites in north India in July 1995; nearly seventy died after eating at a canteen in the textile town of Bhiwandi, near Bombay, in August 1996; and more than two hundred died of cold and exposure after avalanches disrupted the annual Hindu pilgrimage to the holy cave of Amarnath in Kashmir the same month (ironically the first time in some years that the state’s Muslim insurrectionists, who has attempted to disrupt previous pilgrimages, has allowed them safe conduct). In one horrendous week in November 1996, 351 aircraft passengers were killed in the worlds worst midair collision, just off Delhi, and some 2,500 (plus countless others rendered homeless) by a cyclone that ravaged Andhra Pradesh state.

  But India goes on. When they speak of political violence, sophisticated journalists and senior officials claim, at least in private, that the country is big enough and resilient enough to cope indefinitely with a couple of “Ulsters.” As for the other tragedies, even parliamentarians content themselves with expressions of outrage, the award of cash compensations to the families of the victims, and the launching of yet another inquiry whose report will be filed routinely like the hundreds that have preceded it on the official shelves. Foreigners see our acceptance of these quotidian deaths — many of which now rate only a few column inches on the inside pages of most newspapers — as confirmation of Indian “fatalism.” As an Indian I ask myself what this daily hemorrhage is doing to the quality of the national blood. Why do the deaths of Indians not result in more changes of policy, of procedure, or of personnel? Why must we accept that some loss of life is “inevitable,” rather than oblige those who order our lives to be accountable and reward them when they do take successful precautions? I fear that our willingness to live with random and frequent death is damaging our collective psyche in ways whose lasting harm we may come to see too late.

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  In death, as in life, we are not individuals. The family is the quintessential Indian social unit. We are neither individualists in the Western mode (India is not hospitable terrain for “atomic man,’’ since India is not a society in which atomized individuals can accomplish much) nor are we capable of the self-sacrificing ecumenism that idealistic communism demands. Instead, we operate within the cocoon of a family unit, not necessarily nuclear, which generates our most vital support (practical, material, psychological) and the most important of our social duties and obligations. The family may involve parents, children, and their spouses; decreasingly common, but still prevalent, is the extended “joint” family spanning several generations and several branches of the family tree — uncles, cousins, and in-laws all living together or nearby and relating to each other as in a nuclear family

  Sometimes the notion of “family” extends more broadly to a clan or a caste group, or even to friends and neighbors in a village. I cannot remember a time, growing up in India, when there wasn’t a young man from either of my parents’ villages in Kerala — sometimes not even a close relation — living in our flat while my father arranged for him to have some professional training and got him a job. That was in the nature of things in our society; it was expected that my father, as one who had done well, would help others to get their start in life. India is not a welfare state — the government provides little to its unfortunates — but it is a welfare society in which people constantly help each other out, provided they feel a connection that justifies their help.

  Unfortunately, our sense of community largely stops there. Very few Indians have a broader sense of community than that circumscribed by ties of blood, caste affiliation, or village. We take care of those we consider near and dear, and remain largely indifferent to the rest. There are Indian charities, both religious and secular, but their work barely scratches the surface of the problems of the people as a whole.

  At a more trivial level, it is common to find sumptuous luxury apartments in buildings that are filthy, rotting, and stained, whose common areas, walls, and staircases have not been cleaned or painted in generations. Each apartment owner is proud of his own immediate habitat, but is unwilling to incur responsibility or expense for the areas shared with others, even in the same building. My mother once asked her “sweeper-woman” in Delhi to sweep the stairs of her building as well. The woman, who would have been paid extra for the chore, was astonished at the request. “But why should you, madam?” she asked. “The stairs don’t belong to you.”

  The attitude is also visible in the lack of a civic culture in both rural and urban India, which leaves public spaces dirty and garbage-strewn, streets potholed and neglected, civic amenities vandalized or not functioning. The Indian wades through dirt and filth, past open sewers and fly-specked waste, to an immaculate home where he proudly bathes twice a day. An acute consciousness of personal hygiene coexists with an astonishing disregard for public sanitation.

  Not surprisingly, India is home to many of the world’s most polluted cities. The air in Calcutta or Delhi is all but unbreathable in winter, when exhaust fumes, unchecked industrial emissions, and smoke from countless charcoal braziers in the street rise to be trapped by descending mist and fog. A French diplomat friend, undergoing a routine medical check after serving three years in Calcutta, was asked how many packs of cigarettes he smoked a day. When he protested that he had never smoked in his life, his doctor told him to try another excuse; three years of breathing Calcutta air had given him lungs resembling a habitual smoker’s. A visiting Australian environmental official told a Calcuttan friend that if Brisbane reached a tenth of the Bengali city’s pollution levels, every factory in town would be closed down.

  As a result of such unchecked pollution, respiratory diseases are rife in urban India. Factories belch noxious black clouds; effluents pour untreated into rivers; sewage systems reek and overflow. Nature conspires with dilatory sanitation workers: Surat, a thriving Gujarat City of traders, mill workers, and diamond cutters, suddenly hit the world headlines after fifity-two cases of plague were diagnosed there in 1994. And of course, deforestation and overcultivation take their own environmental toll on rural India. Though the Chipko Andolan (which urged rural women to hug trees to prevent their being cut down by rapacious contractors) has had an impact in the forested hills of north India, environmental consciousness remains limited elsewhere across the country, despite some examples of positive action, such as the cleaning up of Surat by its municipal commissioner and the environmental rulings of the Supreme Court’s “Green Judge,
” Justice Kuldip Singh. Governments pass regulations, then regularly ignore them. Meanwhile, more and more cars reach India’s congested roads, more poisons and toxins flow into our water and air, and more small factories open up that do not meet pollution-control standards. But they will never be closed down, because unemployment is a greater political danger than lung cancer.

  A 1996 World Bank study estimated that air pollution killed more than forty thousand people annually in the six Indian cities it had surveyed, including 7,500 in Delhi alone. The capital has more than a reported four million vehicles and many thousand factories, which add some two thousand tons of pollutants each day to the air above the city. When the Australian cricket team played there in November 1996, the manager said the air was so unfit to breathe that his players’ performance was affected. With respiratory illnesses, cardiovascular diseases, and lung ailments all caused by pollution, the total health costs for the country resulting from illnesses caused by pollution were estimated at 340 billion rupees ($9.7 billion), some 4.5 percent of India’s gross domestic product. Ecologist Anil Agarwal looks at these figure starkly: they mean “that the entire economic growth for the year is being wiped out and development has taken place solely at the expense of the environment.”

  This dismal picture, coupled with lax pollution-control measures and corrupt enforcement of environmental regulations, reflects the sad state of the Indian ecology in the last years of the twentieth century. This does not, however, prevent politicians from using environmental issues to delay major developmental projects, as witness the hue and cry over environmental objections to the Cogentrix power project for electricity-starved southern Karnataka. The fact that, without the Cogentrix project, Indians would have to use far more polluting methods to obtain a fraction of the energy required does not seem to trouble the “green” politicians unduly. If the choice is between being polluted and poor and being polluted and prosperous, I have no doubt that most Indians would be happy to choke and splutter all the way to the bank. It would be best, of course, if we could achieve prosperity without pollution, but that goal seems, for now, an elusive chimera.