India

by Shashi Tharoor

  * * *

  India has the second-largest population on earth, after China, and by all accounts is set to overtake its giant neighbor by 2020. Its population continues to grow at a rate of 2.1 percent, and fertility is just about as high as it’s ever been — while some improvements in basic health care have caused mortality rates to drop appreciably since independence. In the last twenty years the Indian population has grown by a number greater than the entire population of the United States.

  The consequences of population pressure are well known: a mounting challenge to keep feeding a populace expanding beyond the capacity of the food producers to cope with it, and a growing gap between the availability of water, health care, and education on the one hand and the number of people seeking those essentials on the other. Less well known, but equally disastrous, are the ecological consequences: deforestation, the degradation of agricultural land, and a decline in the ability of the land to support the people. The beggars in the streets, the homeless sleeping on sidewalks and rail way station platforms are evidence of a population well beyond what the country can provide for. India’s chronic problems of landless labor, and its continuing tendency to rely on inefficient, laborintensive practices in industry and agriculture, are also reflections of overpopulation. Worst of all, India adds an Australia to its population every year, but it does not have the resources to create what that population would need — another 127,000 new schools, 373,000 more schoolteachers, 2.5 million new houses, 4 million more jobs, 190 million meters of cloth, and 12.5 million quintals of food grain each year.

  Instead, India currently spends over a billion dollars annually on its domestic population-control programs, only a scant $55 million of which comes from foreign sources. India adopted a national population policy in 1952, when it was one of the first countries in the world to do so. But there were powerful reasons for the population explosion. As the sociologist Mahmood Mamdani pointed out, people aren’t poor because they have too many children; they have too many children because they are poor. Children are an asset in a poor family; they are potential sources of labor, and when they grow up they constitute the only social security insurance policy an Indian has. Nor does a poor family have to spend money to educate its children; they can be put to work instead of being sent to school. And since the family is never sure whether and how many of the children will survive to productive adolescence in a land bedeviled by famines, disease, epidemics, and violence, it is wise to have as many children as possible to compensate for those who won’t make it. Such attitudes were compounded in traditional culture by the respect given to the father of many sons, by the low status of women, and by high female illiteracy. People had children because they didn’t know any better.

  So poverty breeds overpopulation and overpopulation breeds poverty (indeed, one can simply say, poverty breeds). How can one deal with it? India has tried pretty much every population-control device, some with less success than others (the failure of intrauterine contraceptive devices in the 1960s, for example, resulted from women suffering bleeding and IUCD rejection but finding no medical officers to attend to them). After the disastrous experiment with compulsory sterilization during the Emergency, the backlash against which brought down the Indira Gandhi government and set back the country’s family-planning efforts by a decade, the government is dealing with population problems across a broad front. India’s basic population policy is still to reduce fertility — not by surgically curbing the production of children (though vasectomy and tubectomy “camps” still flourish, especially in the rural areas) but by improving health, education, and literacy so as to reduce the incentives for people to produce more children. Still, sterilization remains by far the most prevalent method of family planning. And the average age of Indians choosing to be sterilized is in the thirties, when they have already produced more children than was good for them or the country.

  India officially aims at achieving “replacement-level fertility” (in other words, each couple producing only two children, leading to zero population growth) by the year 2000. It is a tall order. The government has been assiduous in promoting family planning, with massive advertising campaigns on radio and television and on public billboards (or for that matter, on the sides of houses and barns in the countryside). The family-planning symbol of an inverted red triangle and the stock image of a happy nuclear family of father, mother, boy, and girl (“we are two, we have two” goes the slogan) are widely familiar across the country (with subtle variances in facial characteristics of the family to correspond to regional patterns). But though consciousness has been raised, action does not necessarily follow. Three times as many women are aware of contraception as use it. Abortions are legal, widely available, and generally safe, but many women do not have the knowledge (or the courage) to avail themselves of the option.

  Tying family-planning services into rural health clinics as part of integrated health care is one effective method of overcoming resistance to it. Even something as simple as rural electrification has an impact on population growth—give people other things to do in the dark, and they might not make quite so many babies. But the most successful programs are those in states with high female literacy rates, as in Kerala, or where women play important roles in society—again as in Kerala. An educated woman demands and receives better care for herself and her sick children, ensures better standards of personal and domestic hygiene, has more say in running her household, and is more resistant to cultural pressures to produce large numbers of children. The best contraceptive is education.

  * * *

  India has made only uneven progress in educating its population. Whereas most districts in Kerala, following the introduction of free and compulsory education by an elected Communist government in 1957, have attained 100 percent literacy, the national literacy level still hovers around the halfway mark; the current figure is 52 percent. The traditional explanation for the failure to attain mass education is two-pronged: the lack of resources to cope with the dramatic growth in population (we would need to build a new school every day for the next ten years just to educate the children already born) and the tendency of famlies to take their children out of school early to serve as breadwinners or at least help at home or on the farm. Thus, though universal primary education is available in theory, fewer than half of India’s children between the ages of six and fourteen attend school at all.

  Despite the plausibility of the usual explanation, some critics have suggested that the real reasons are more sinister: that there is, if not an actual conspiracy, a set of attitudes among the country’s decision-makers that militate against extending the benefits of education to the ignorant masses. Too much learning, these critics point out knowingly, would undermine the social order, put ideas of clerical jobs into the heads of peasants, and disrupt the hierarchical Indian society that the elite really wants to preserve. “Illiteracy,” says American journalist Barbara Crossette, an adherent of this view, “insures that the masses will remain powerless.” I find this theory excessively cynical, but it is possible that my instincts are shaped by my experience of Kerala, and that such an explanation might be valid in less enlightened parts of India. But national policy is undoubtedly in favor of education, or at least of promoting literacy. As a child at school, I remember being exhorted to impart the alphabet to our servants under the Gandhian “each one teach one” program; and many of us were brought up on Swami Vivekananda’s writings about the importance of education for the poor as the key to their upliftment. But it is true that progress has still been inexcusably slow, and that Indian politicians are all too quick, as Mrs. Gandhi was, to take refuge in sharp rejoinders about not drawing the wrong conclusions from the illiteracy figures. Education, Mrs. Gandhi would often say, was not always relevant to the real lives of village Indians, but India’s illiterates were still smart, and illiteracy was not a reflection of their intelligence or shrewdness (which they demonstrated, of course, by voting for her).

  Fa
ir enough, but Kerala’s literate villagers are smart too. Literacy has made significant progress in recent years, and current figures place it at over 60 percent. But this figure is contestable, since it includes some whose only claim to literacy is that they can sign their own names. The numbers of those who can read a newspaper or fill in an official form are undoudtedly lower. In the Information Age, rampant illiteracy remains a serious handicap in a race that India has no choice but to run.

  The saddest aspect of India’s literacy statistics is the disproportionate percentage of women who remain illiterate. More attention to improving the lot of Indian women in general, empowering them to make decisions about such matters as reproduction and family expenditure, and improving their access to health care, would undoubtedly have benefited Indian society as a whole, notably by reducing the country’s population. But not just that: freeing India’s ordinary women from millennia of subjugation would have liberated for the country the productive talents of half the population, which for millennia have been left to languish exploited, abused and taken for granted, but all too rarely fulfilled.

  (Kerala is, as usual, an exception. It is one of the few states in India where women outnumber men. The 1991 census counted 1,040 women for every 1,000 Kerala men; the all-India figure, a reflection of the neglect of girl children, was 929 women per 1,000 men. In 2001, the state of Punjab reported 793 female births tor every 1,000 male ones; it was not much better in neighboring Haryana, at 820 girls born for 1,000 boys. Of 13,400 abortions conducted at a Delhi clinic in 1992-93, 13,398 were of female fetuses. In Kerala, female life expectancy exceeds that of males.)

  Remarkably enough in the circumstances, India’s middle-class women have excelled in professions other societies traditionally reserved for men. There have been Indian women doctors, engineers, lawyers, editors, chief executives, airline pilots, and, most famously, a woman prime minister, well before such positions opened up to their female counterparts in the Western world. When I was at school in the late 1960s, as feminist consciousness was beginning to rise in the West, an international survey of sexism (though they didn’t call it that) was conducted in high schools around the world. Respondents were told a story that ended in a riddle: A man is driving with his father and has a serious accident. The father is critically injured and rushed to the hospital; the man, who is uninjured, is waiting anxiously outside the operating theater when a white-coated surgeon strides out, embraces him, and weeps, “My son, my son.” The question was, how could this be? The man’s father was injured and being operated upon. How could the surgeon then say, “My son, my son”? The answer, of course, is that the surgeon was his mother. Indian students, in a country whose first woman doctor graduated in the 1890s, had little problem with the riddle: over 90 percent of them got it right. Respondent in the West were stymied: whereas in Sweden some 30 percent answered correctly, in the U.K. only 12 percent of students got it right, and in the United States the figure dropped to around 5 percent. The students (including girls) weren’t stupid; they simply couldn’t conceive of a woman surgeon, whereas educated Indians had grown up seeing women doctors their whole lives. The irony is that these same Indian men have come to maturity in a society that still allows the majority of its women to waste their lives in housewifery or social subjugation.

  * * *

  Galloping modernization has done little, however, to dampen enthusiasm for that traditional Indian institution, the arranged marriage. Parenthood in India still implies a responsibility for getting your offspring wedded respectably, particularly if the progeny in question is female. Growing urbanization and the displacement of families by the processes of economic development have, however, made it less easy to rely on traditional village or clan networks to find a suitable spouse. Thus was born the matrimonial advertisement, that uniquely Indian updating of a millennial social practice, re-created in the atomized world of the popular newspaper, and translated across the barriers not only of culture but of language. Whereas the jaded West has its own “lonely hearts” personals in which “DWM” (divorced white male) seeks beautiful well-proportioned female for music, companionship, and unmentionables, India’s matrimonial ads are placed by anxious parents whose intentions are entirely honorable. As an index to current preoccupations, though, they offer a window not just into Indian middle-class society, but also into the innovative contributions modern India has made to the evolution of the English language.

  “Correspondence invited from educated, charming, U.S.A./Canada settled girls for Punjabi Arora industrial production engineer” reflects the inevitable aspiration for NRI-hood among India’s upwardly mobile professionals, though the degree of precision about the advertiser’s subcaste (Arora) suggests that “U.S.A./Canada” values have not yet sunk very deep. “Caste no bar” says the well-worn phrase advertised by the enlightened; but equally typical is “South Indian Brahmin father seeks compatible match for computer professional son,” which could as well read “non-South Indian Brahmins need not apply.”

  Other codes are equally conventional. Males of any age remain, like Peter Pan, always “boys,” even when they are gingerly described as “mature” or “fifty-three,” but women over twenty-five descend from girls to “spinsters” and rarely presume to demand much from their prospective mates. The women are always “fair-complexioned” and “beautiful.” If the color of their skin tends more to Naomi Campbell’s than Claudia Schiffer’s, they are described creatively as “wheatish,” a particularly Punjabi coinage that combines the notin of brownness with the robustly positive associations of the north’s premier agricultural crop. If she is also “homely,” this does not mean, Occidental dictionaries notwithstanding, that she is plain or bad-looking, merely that she is good at housework and is not a restless soul constanly seeking to be out of the house. (Most men looking for a bride through the matrimonial columns of a newspaper are likely to be looking for a “homely” girl.) Desirable females who have graduated from (or at least attended) missionary schools are advertised as “convent-educated,” though in these days of inflationary advertising tariffs, that can be abbreviated to “convented.” Similarly, a college graduate is “degreed,” and if she is “convented, degreed,” you can overlook the fact that she is also “wheatish-complexioned” and/or not “homely.” The ad might also assure you that she is “from status family,” which carries with it both pedigree and connections. Dowries, nominally illegal, are never sought or offered openly in the ads, but a prospective bridegroom declaring “girl only consideration” is not just stating the obvious, but assuring the intended bride’s family that no other considerations, especially pecuniary ones, will intervene.

  Like anything composed and set in type by human hand, matrimonial ads are also prone to producing howlers, and I have spotted a few in my random perusals over the years. “Wanted a simple-minded bride,” is an oft-repeated classic, but what is one to make of the family looking for a “housebroken groom” or the one that seeks “a broad-based boy”? The father who offers his “innocent divorcee daughter” is not suggesting that she is a wide-eyed simpleton, or even just that she was not the guilty party in the divorce; instead, he is signaling clearly that her marriage was never consummated, for “innocence” is a euphemism for virginity whenever the candidate is of an age or situation to be suspected of having lost hers (just as the request for an “understanding” mate seeks a man who will forgive such a loss). I doubt, though, that the liberal family declaring, at the end of its ad, “caste, creed, no bras” was really looking for a feminist who had burned her underclothes. Indian newspapers are as prone to printer’s devils as matrimonial advertisers are to clichés.

  * * *

  The lowly place of women in India goes back to the Manusmriti, the codes laid down by the venerable lawgiver Manu some three thousand years ago. But not all of India’s ancient legacies are iniquitous. While some of the more extravagant claims by Indian chauvinists about the achievements of the ancient Hindus — such as that India invent
ed flying vehicles and hydroplanes around 2000 b.c., or anticipated the Darwinian theory of evolution — have been understandably ridiculed, there is evidence to suggest that extraordinary insights into atomic theory and into the physiological (and alchemical) properties of mercury existed in ancient India and were lost in later times. There is no doubt at all about the accomplishments of the astronomer Aryabhatta, who proved that the earth is round and revolves around the sun, a thousand years before Galileo was censured for arguing the same; about Bhaskaracharya’s understanding of gravitation a millennium before Isaac Newton; about the invention, credited largely to Gritasamada, of the zero and the entire system of decimal numbers (which was learned by the Arabs and thence reached the West, giving the world “Arabic numerals.”) The Arabs themselves referred to mathematics as Hindsat, “the Indian science.” Nor do scholars contest India’s claim to have produced the first surgeon, Susruta, whose methods (and tools) of surgery, including plastic surgery and prostheses for amputees, pioneered the field; to have given the world quadratic equations and trigonometry; to have set out the principles of grammar and phonetics; to have raised questions of philosophy and psychology in the Upanishads a thousand years before they had occurred to anyone in the West; and to have developed an imaginative literature, from the animal fables of the Panchatantra to the sophisticated dramas of Kalidasa, that inspired — according to the Chinese scholar Lin Yutang — Aesop, Boccaccio, Emerson, Goethe, Herder, Hesse, Schopenhauer, and the Arabian Nights.

  Where has this inventive tradition disappeared in today’s India? The leading citizens of the land of Susruta travel abroad for major operations. There is no recent scientific discovery of consequence ascribed to a resident of India; Indians have won Nobel Prizes in the sciences only after emigrating and acquiring American passports. The last Indian mathematical genius, the ineffable Ramanujan, died in the 1920s. Our “cutting edge” achievements are in fields pioneered by others, from missile technology to software development. Are we, the heirs to that extraordinary tradition, doomed to be a nation of secondhand imitators, building upon the ideas of others? I do not believe so, but perhaps that is because I do not want to believe it. Looking around today’s India, though, there is little doubt that the explosion of creative energy one does see is confined to the realms of theater, music, clothing design, and literature. Indian minds are undoubtedly grappling with major scientific challenges, but they are doing so in Chicago or California, not Calcutta.