India

by Shashi Tharoor

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  The print media received a tremendous fillip from the post-Emergency hunger for news and comment, and it has not looked back since. Both newspapers and magazines have improved immeasurably since the days when Naipaul and Shils judged them, and though the news columns still devote too much space to speeches and announcements, the feature pages — particularly of the news magazines — offer a range and quality of information and comment unparalleled in the developing world. The problem remains, though, that what is otherwise called the “mass media” is actually the “class media” in its reach and assumptions. But in a country where only a minority reads anything at all, this is not too surprising. The written word may not be “relevant” to half the population, but it is vital to the life and thought of the other half.

  Nonetheless, I couldn’t help noticing, on my last visit to India, that practically everyone I knew in the print media has now gone into television (in some cases in addition to their work for the press). The new India seems to have more TV production companies than fast-food restaurants, though I am inclined to predict that the ratio will reverse itself in the coming years. But I couldn’t turn on the TV or return a phone call from a journalist friend without seeing yet another familiar face on the box, earnestly discussing the Fate of the Nation in sound bites rather than column-inches.

  What does this all mean? Either that we don’t read and write as much as we used to, or that the audiovisual media pays better than print, or that sounding off before a camera takes less time and effort than writing an article, or all of the above. India, or at least the lettered half of it, used to pride itself on its literacy; now it seems we are joining the boob-tube culture of the Western world.

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  Todays India offers its residents more choices than ever — on where to work, but also on what to buy, what to drive, and what to listen to.

  I was struck, after a gap of just eighteen months since my previous visit, by the visibly increased “globalization” of Indian life — the profusion of billboards advertising Western brand names, the multiplicity of vehicles on the roads that were not Ambassadors and Fiats, the advent of a new pop music that owes more to trends in London and New York than to anything out of Bollywood. (Surfing audio channels on Air India, I had to listen attentively to realize that the lyrics I was hearing were in fact in Hindi, or at least primarily so — so American was their sound, their accent, their very intonation.)

  I grew up in an India that was obsessed with swadeshi. National self-respect seemed to require that we made everything we needed here, however badly — from outmoded cars to outstanding colas. Today we seem to have lost our paranoia about foreign goods, and our even greater paranoia about foreign investors. One of the lessons of history is that you can learn the wrong lessons from history; ever since the East India Company came to trade and stayed on to rule, our rulers have seen the shadow of the imperialist behind every foreigner with a briefcase. Now at last we seem to have outgrown such fears, except for the Luddites and troglodytes who smashed Kentucky Fried Chickens premises in Bangalore and the politicians who are still trying to close KFC down in Delhi.

  I am a vegetarian myself, but I can’t for the life of me see what threat is posed by a handful of fast-food outlets aimed at feeding fat Indian chickens to fatter affluent Indians and foreign tourists. If anything, Indian chicken farmers are likely to gain by selling their poultry at dollar-inspired rates to KFC. Those who claim that either their livelihood or their sense of identity is threatened by the presence of a foreign food shop have neither a worthwhile livelihood nor a worthwhile identity to protect. There are thousands of Indian snackeries, with our traditional fast food at a fraction of the price of McDonald’s or KFC; the sheer scale of the challenge makes it extremely unlikely that these “multinational” franchises will drive them out of business. Those who fear and resist them are no better than the buggy-whip manufacturers who protested the invention of the automobile because it would deprive them of their work Time, and the automobile, passed them by. A similar fate awaits the ill-behaved politicized peasantry of Bangalore.

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  One more proof of the double-edgedness of change came during my January 1996 visit to India, when the Asian Age ran a front-page headline screaming “Sushmita to (Un)dress Up for Cup.” The story went on to announce that the former Miss Universe, Sushmita Sen, would be the “major attraction” at the cricket World Cup opening ceremony at the Eden Gardens a month later. Indians are inordinately proud of Ms. Sen, and of her friend Aishwarya Rai, Miss World the same year; the pair gave India the distinction of being the only country to have ever had both the reigning Miss World and Miss Universe at the same time. The paper quoted an Italian, of all people, the chairman of something called Half Moon Image Consultants, as declaring that Sushmita would project “the true beauty of Indian womanhood” while “taking off her clothes.” (How the planned “undressing” would sit with the ceremony’s chief guest, Chief Minister Jyoti Basu, the man who had banned Samantha Fox from Calcutta for fear that she might take off her clothes, was not mentioned.) “I am going to make her look an Indian like never before,” the Half Moon Signore added.

  So, I thought, it has come to this. The world’s most knowledgeable cricket audience needs a firm of “image consultants” (from a land where the only crickets they’ve heard of are insects or cigarette lighters) to manufacture a seventy-five-minute “laser show” before it can launch a cricketing event. The erstwhile capital of Indian culture needs an Italian to make one of its citizens “look Indian.” And the organizers’ notion of advance public relations is to drop teasers about the readiness of a symbol of contemporary Indian womanhood to undress. I thought such things only happened with the full moon, not under a Half Moon.

  If this is globalization, I found myself musing, give me swadeshi any day.

  In fact, the World Cup opening ceremony did prove an unmitigated disaster. The Half Moon plan to make Sushmita “undress” (the Italian had intended, it transpired, to dress her in the flags of all the participating nations, which she would peel off one by one and hand to the respective captains, ending up draped in the Indian tricolor) was abandoned among the general public outcry. However, the lasers went awry, the costumes did not turn up in time (leaving delegations to be escorted by T-shirt-clad damsels whose jeans did not justify their ends), and the Italians made no allowances for the wind that blows in from the Hooghly at that time of year, resulting in a situation for which only one Italian word could apply — fiasco.

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  The term might not have been too inappropriate for the next popular event of global cultural significance (that is, with “world” in the title) to take place in India — the 1996 Miss World contest. After all, with two previous Miss World winners and a couple of close runners-up having come from India, and the national pageants for an assortment of Miss Indias having enjoyed increasing (and uniformly positive) publicity, it seemed quite a coup for movie superstar Amitabh Bachchan when his company won the right to stage the global contest in Bangalore.

  He reckoned without his compatriots’ maddening capacity for opportunistic mischief-making. The contest was immediately condemned by a coalition of radical feminists, Hindu fundamentalists, and Marxist youth as exploitative of women and offensive to Indian culture; as journalists flocked to report their every utterance, some twenty organizations leaped on the bandwagon. (No one, it seems, asked them why their puritan passions had not been stirred earlier, since beauty contests involving Indian women had taken place across the country for decades.) The convenor of the feminist group Mahila Jagran Samiti (Movement to Awaken Women) threatened to immolate herself in protest and to organize a wave of similar suicides by her colleagues. One male member of the Democratic Youth Federation of India, a twenty-four-year-old tailor, actually set himself alight at a bus stand and succumbed to his burns.

  With the militant Farmers’ Association — the same folks who trashed a Pizza Hut outlet earlier — thr
eatening to torch the cricket stadium in which the contest was to be held, more than fifteen thousand policemen and security guards had to be assigned to protect the venue and the contestants. Bachchan was provided two personal bodyguards, a dozen policemen to screen visitors, a bulletproof automobile, and a police escort car; and the eighty-nine beauties found their hotel, the idyllic-sounding Windsor Manor Sheraton, ringed by security personnel drawn from such agencies as the Border Security Force and the Rapid Action Force. Meanwhile, much to the disappointment of those who had bought tickets in Bangalore, the swimsuit section of the pageant was shifted to the Indian Ocean island country of the Seychelles, in order not to further inflame (if the expression may be excused) the sensitivities of the protesters. Soon enough, somebody thought of indulging the national passion for litigation, and the courts entered the fray, ruling with typical stuffiness that the contest could go ahead provided there was “no indecent exposure of the bodies of participants amounting to obscenity and nudity.” The feminists promptly announced they would sneak into the event and set fire to themselves anyway. It is an old rule of the protest business: Threaten the worst; it keeps the media interested.

  The contest proceeded without incident, except for the arrests of a few hundred demonstrators, but the fierce and voluble hostility of the protesters tarnished India’s international reputation immeasurably. The world press wrote of Indian xenophobia, which until recently one might have thought a contradiction in terms. Barbara Crossette, in The New York Times, observed that, in the words of one of the organizers, a “Stone Age mentality” had surfaced. She saw a parallel with situations in which “would-be business investors look on with chagrin as mobs attack foreign-backed projects the country needs badly.” India’s image as a tolerant land of live-and-let-live, a congenial environment for every idea and practice, will not easily recover from the coverage of the Miss World contest.

  This may well have been the protesters’ intent, because their noisy cantankerousness was at least in part aimed at the increasing liberalization of Indian life, of which the Miss World contest was merely a visible (and literal) embodiment. Indian leftists are not all reconciled to the entry of India into the world economy, and a beauty contest provides evocative images of neo-imperial penetration that were a recurrent subtext of the feminists’ agenda. (Their incendiary, if matchless, convenor, a law student named K. N. Shashikala, regularly denounced the “commercialization of women by multinational corporations.”) There is little doubt that the visible evidence of foreign intrusion, from Kentucky Fried Chicken to international brandname stores, can be manipulated by politicians in ways that homegrown evils cannot; it is easier to mobilize people against symbols they cannot touch, to which they feel no affinity, and that can be portrayed as a sign of external dominance of the country.

  But the other objection raised by the protesters was equally troubling, and that was to the alleged contamination of “Indian culture” by an international beauty pageant. The entire point about Indian culture is that it embraces both the burqa-clad Muslim woman and the Bombay model (and former Miss Universe runner-up) who posed nude for a shoe advertisement; that it honors the lush erotic statuary of the temples of Khajuraho, where amatory couples cavort in explicit positions in stone, while frowning on kissing in public; and, what is more, that it accommodates both middle-class prudery and an economic reality that obliges many poor rural women to go about bare-breasted because they cannot afford the cloth to cover themselves. Which version of “Indian culture” does a glittering parade of well-dressed (and occasionally underdressed) foreign women offend?

  The question is troubling because, in late November 1996, the self-proclaimed defenders of Indian culture took on one of the greatest figures of contemporary Indian culture, the painter Maqbool Fida Husain. Husain, arguably India’s leading artist of the second half of the twentieth century, is not above painterly opportunism — he shamelessly cultivated Indira Gandhi, and a shoddy mural he has scribbled onto the walls of the Indian Permanent Mission in New York is an embarrassment to his art — but his critics were not taking him on either political or aesthetic grounds. Instead a mob, objecting to a Husain painting of the Hindu goddess Saraswati in the nude, destroyed several of his works at an exhibition in Ahmedabad, outraged in particular that a Muslim artist should have taken such liberties with their faith. The eighty-year-old artists life, and the safety of his paintings in public collections, were directly and explicitly threatened.

  Husain had, in fact, drawn liberally from Hindu iconography in his work, and goddesses and apasaras were among his favorite figures: he had depicted Prime Minister Indira Gandhi as Durga after the 1971 war, and, less controversially, painted a series featuring the film actress Madhuri Dixit as Menaka in 1995. But rather than feeling flattered that a Muslim should have so readily sought inspiration in the Hindu tradition, the fundamentalists challenged his right to do so. “No Muslim has the right to portray our deities any way he wishes,” declared the founder of the Bajrang Dal, which represents the more lumpen of the Hindutva brigades, going on to demand that Husain’s “objectionable paintings” should be immersed in the sacred river Ganga so that they might be simultaneously cleansed and destroyed.

  I am tempted to say, with passion and feeling, that this is not Hindu behavior; indeed, the very fact that the Saraswati drawing most objected to was first revealed to the public twenty years ago, without incident, suggests that most Hindus, left to themselves, would not think twice about it. But what is Hindu behavior these days is not defined by the tolerance preached by Vivekananda. A politicized Hinduism has arisen, which reacts to real or imagined slights the way some Muslims reacted to Rushdie (indeed, all that is missing is the Hindu equivalent of an Ayatollah with fatwa, but, thank God, Hinduism doesn’t have one). The Hindutva leaders are guilty of the worst kind of me-tooism; they have seen governments pandering to the offended sensitivities of minority communities, and they want to show that they can be offended too. In the process they are doing their own faith a disservice. They are dragging Hinduism — as they manifest it — into the mire of an intolerance that is foreign to its very nature.

  Perhaps the only answer is to fight philistinism with culture. The Hindutva leaders should all be sent on an educational tour of Khajuraho. After that, they might consider even the transported Miss World swimsuit contest rather tame.

  * * *

  The two world events are behind us now. Bangalore, increasingly as cosmopolitan a city as Bombay, will be learning a number of lessons from its experience with the feminist fringe. Calcutta will take a long time to recover from the crowd misbehavior that marred the semifinals of the tournament it so grandly inaugurated under the Half Moon. But the gaudy and ultimately disastrous extravaganza at the Eden Gardens failed to conceal what had become increasingly apparent to me in my regular visits to the place I have, for nearly three decades, considered my hometown: Calcutta has become a backwater.

  I write these words in disappointment. When, as a twelve-year-old in late 1968, I first learned of my father’s transfer from Bombay to Calcutta, where his newspaper was headquartered, I embraced the news with great excitement. Calcutta still had the lingering aura of the former First City of the British Empire, a place of importance if no longer of grandeur. It was the bustling commercial metropolis of the jute, tea, coal, and iron and steel industries; more important, it was the city of Eden Gardens, of College Street, of Firpo’s and Trinca’s (and — recalling the whispers of wicked uncles — the Golden Slipper, the acme of all Indian nightclubs). It was the city of the peerless Nobel Prize-winning littetateur and visionary Rabindranath Tagore, of India’s greatest filmmaker, Satyajit Ray, and (in a way that defined the grace of a bygone age) of the patron queen of high culture, Lady Ranu Mukherjee; for juveniles of less exalted cultural inclinations, it had India’s first disco (the Park Hotel’s suggestively named “In and Out”) and, in JS, India’s only “with it” youth magazine. Former Calcuttans still spoke of the brilliance of the Benga
li stage, the erudition of the waiters at the Coffee House, the magic of Park Street at Christmas. Calcutta seemed immeasurably more exciting than money-obsessed, glitzy, second-rate Bombay.

  The excitement faded quickly enough — overshadowed by power cuts, poverty, potholes, pavement-dwellers, political violence, paralyzed industry. But for all its problems, Calcutta still retained, amid the dirt and the degradation, the despair and the disrepair, many of the qualities that had made it important. Sometimes, paradoxically, its worst problems served to enhance its importance — as when the Bangladesh crisis brought refugees, a government in exile, and the world media to the city. Today, ironically, the problems seem fewer: reforms in the Bengal countryside mean that destitute villagers no longer flock to Calcutta for survival, power cuts are rare, and nineteen years of Left Front rule have given the city a measure of political stability unimaginable two decades ago. But Calcutta matters much less to the rest of India than it did when its troubles were greater.