India

by Shashi Tharoor

  Calcutta’s commercial importance is negligible. A great deal of industry has fled; little new has risen in its place. Some major firms ostensibly headquartered here have in fact moved the bulk of their operations elsewhere, leaving a shell to bear the designation “registered office.” Jute has collapsed as a product of consequence with the development of new synthetic materials; tea is in the doldrums, and while world prices are stagnant, Indian tea is being supplanted in international markets. One of the reasons that “load-shedding” does not regularly plunge the city into darkness is that nothing succeeds like failure: the exodus of major industry has reduced demand for power consumption. Businessmen and professionals alike talk openly of moving. Calcutta has little to offer the rest of the world.

  Culturally, for all its achievements, Calcutta has been reduced to a provincial capital. The city continues to be the custodian of the best of the Bengali tradition, but it no longer produces work that the rest of India looks up to for inspiration. The major innovations in theater, in art, in music, in writing, even in cinema, are taking place elsewhere in India. Calcutta’s intellectual life, including in the pages of its newspapers, does not dominate — let alone anticipate — the national debate. Some of the best Calcutta journalists have left the city; even Bengali editors with everything going for them here prefer to thrive in Bombay and Delhi, and non-Bengalis who made their reputations in Calcutta have chosen to preserve them elsewhere. Calcutta is left with its bhadralok, its Bengali bourgeoisie, who stay not because, but in spite, of what the city offers them.

  Of course all this is not purely Calcutta’s fault; it cannot help the increasing centralization of everything in the capital, and the corresponding desire of many ambitious and talented people to move to where the action is. But the city fathers are responsible for Calcutta’s failure to provide the civic amenities one can take for granted in any other major Indian city — and for the widespread sense that Calcutta, complacently resting on its past laurels, no longer cares whether it matters to the rest of India or not. When a great city collectively loses the desire for greatness, its lights dim in more ways than one. It used to be said that when Calcutta catches a cold, the rest of India sneezes. Today, if Calcutta has a cold, the rest of India looks away — and hopes that the virus isn’t catching.

  * * *

  By contrast, Delhi can now afford to indulge in debates about being too successful. For some years, most of us Indians were ostentatiously proud of our capital city. Its broad avenues, late-colonial architecture, and general air of well-ordered self-importance went well with popular notions of what the nation’s premier city and seat of government should be like.

  When the aging colonial capital designed by Sir Edward Lutyens was given a multi-crore-rupee facelift before the 1982 Asian Games, the new highways, overpasses, and tourist hotels made our Rajdhani presentable as well as patrician. New Delhi, its inhabitants tended to assure impressed visitors, wasn’t like the rest of India. And they meant it as a compliment.

  But today a new stereotype is gaining ground in urban India. The glossy feature pages Indian newspapers have recently sprouted on weekends describe a city of which the thinking Indian writers of these articles are anything but proud. To them, Delhi typifies an India that has lost its soul, the epitome of a new concrete culture of “black money” and five-star hotels divorced from tradition, the arts, or the refinements of the higher life.

  All that was worth cherishing in old Delhi, they moan, has now given way to the overpass and the fast-food counter, both serving hustling transients who feel no sense of belonging to the city and don’t even know the history behind the addresses on their visiting cards. This is not just the sneering of a few highbrow columnists. It is, in fact, a view widely held among educated Delhiites, especially those who have lived in the capital for more than two decades.

  The irony is that the analysis is not new. It was first voiced in the Magadhan-Mauryan period, from the sixth to the third century b.c., when a similar process of social change and urbanization, following major political transformation, also provoked anxious and self-critical debate. The Indian intellectuals of two thousand years ago were similarly torn between nostalgia for an idealized past and self-confident optimism about the triumphs of urban cosmopolitanism.

  Even more ironically, the cosmopolitans are doing rather worse this time around. The major difference is probably the intervening phase of British rule. The British-educated Indians who were, in Macaulay’s words, “interpreters” between them and the masses did not want to train men of action, doers, businessmen, or industrialists who might compete with their mercantile classes. As a result, the minds of Indians were shaped by words, not goals; we are adept at literature and history, but contemptuous of mere striving. No wonder we cannot appreciate a city that places effort and success above ideas and memories.

  The intelligentsia decry New Delhi as a parvenu city. It was created by those who had lost everything in the partition of the subcontinent — men and women of the Punjab, Sikhs and Hindus uprooted from the land that had been the home of their ancestors for countless generations, rejects of history who had to carve out their own futures. They worked and struggled and sweated to make it. They were unencumbered by the baggage of the past, for the past had betrayed them. They succeeded — and as a result of their efforts, they created the first truly postcolonial Indian city.

  So people who had trudged across the frontier as refugees today drive shining Marutis across overpasses; people who had lost their houses now sup in five-star hotels. But instead of applauding them, educated Indians tend to curl their refined lips in scorn. The crass materialism of the archetypal Delhiite is sniffed at, his lack of culture ridiculed, his ignorance of history deplored. Literate India laments the transformation of a Delhi that was once a byword for elegant poetry, Mughal manners, and courtly civilization.

  Delhi may indeed have had its attractions, but it was also a moribund place steeped in decay and disease, ossified in communal and caste divisions, exploitative and unjust. Today’s New Delhi — not the musty bureaucratic edifices of government, but the throbbing, thriving agglomeration of textile factories and cycle-repair shops, industrial fairgrounds and film studios, nightclubs and restaurants — is a city that reflects the vigor and vitality of those who have made it. It provides and reflects a stimulus, unfamiliar to the Indian intelligen tsia, of enterprise and risk-taking; its people are open and outward-looking. They may have forgotten their history, but they remember their politics. They may not know why, but they know how.

  New Delhi has enshrined performance and effectiveness as more important measures of human worth than family name or pedigree. If, in the process, it has also placed a premium on vulgar ostentation rather than discreet opulence, so be it. The new rich could not have run the old clubs, so they built the new hotels. The “five-star culture,” for all its vulgarity, is more authentically Indian than the “club culture” it has supplanted, a musty relic of proto-colonial dress codes and insipid English menus.

  It is true, of course, that New Delhi lacks a coherent cultural focus. Its very structure of disaggregated “colonies” ensures that the capital is really twenty townships in search of a city. But if Calcutta symbolizes urban Indian civilization, thank God New Delhi is not civilized. The capital epitomizes development as Calcutta epitomizes culture; it is not a city indifferent to the basic needs of its citizens. Nor is it lacking in creative endeavor. Today, fueled by the money and the people that have poured into the city, there are more plays, exhibitions, and concerts on any single day in New Delhi than anywhere else in India. It was not so two decades ago.

  New Delhi is also a cosmopolitan society in the international sense. We have always been an overly self-obsessed people, and the autarchic and protectionist years since independence have increased our self-absorption to an alarming degree. Four decades of restrictive economic policies have drastically reduced, in other cities, the frequency of routine contact and interchange between India
ns and foreigners. New Delhi is the one place in India where this is still possible and Indians of every class can benefit from relating to the outside world, and seeing themselves in its eyes.

  Throughout Indian history there has been a link between urbanization and prosperous development, because cities were centers of contact with the outside world. This urban openness and economic energy lay behind the importance of the ports on India’s western coast. With the advent of jet travel, geography is no longer determinant; the “coast” may move inland. New Delhi is India’s contemporary equivalent of those port cities of a bygone age — bustling, heterodox, anti-ritual, prosperous. For all its inadequacies, it is a symbol of a country on the move, the urban flagship of a better tomorrow. It has led India into the twenty-first century, even at the price of forgetting all that happened in the other twenty.

  * * *

  It was Calcutta, however, and not Delhi, that featured in the Hollywood film City of Joy. If Calcuttans had had their way, however, the film of City of Joy, based on Dominique Lapierre’s 1986 best-seller about poverty and piety in this Bengali city, might never have been made.

  Director Roland Joffe was quoted as saying he had an easier time making The Killing Fields on the Cambodian border and The Mission in the jungles of Colombia than filming City of Joy in Calcutta. His crew were subjected to a variety of forms of vocal protest, ranging from editorials and lawsuits to demonstrations and (in one episode) bombs being thrown on the set. A Bengali reporter covering the picketing died after allegedly being beaten up by two of Joffe’s assistants. The courts kept the crew’s cameras idle for part of the spring, before allowing restricted public filming on holidays.

  Calcutta is no stranger to cultural controversy: its citizens once rioted and burned trams to protest a Paris writer’s expulsion from the Cinémathéque Française. On the face of it, City of Joy’s troubles seemed to confirm India’s reputation for thin-skinned hypocrisy. The protesters were angry about the film’s focus on the city’s despair and degradation; the filmmakers point out, not unreasonably, that these do exist. Calcuttans dreaded yet another depiction of poverty, prostitution, and urban squalor unleavened by any acknowledgment that their city has for more than two centuries been India’s cultural capital, a metropolis of art galleries, avant-grade theaters, and overflowing bookshops, whose coffeehouse waiters speak knowledgeably of Godard and Truffaut. The filmmakers retorted that that may well be true, but that’s not what their film is about: it’s about poverty and suffering and death — all of which can be found in good measure in Calcutta’s slums — and about the resilience of the human spirit in the face of tragedy. They see their work as a tribute to Calcutta, a city of misery that is nonetheless a city of joy. Those who want them to turn their cameras on the other Calcutta, Joffe says, are only trying to camouflage the painful reality.

  Perhaps — but whose reality? Lapierre’s book was ostentatiously burned by some among those he wrote about, the residents of the slum of Pilkhana. Even those who do not condone the violence and extremism of some of the protesters sympathized with their objections. The way they tell it, the book was bad enough; with the film, Calcutta will become the favorite pinup of the pornographers of poverty. Westerners are going to munch popcorn in air-conditioned theaters as they stare at flickering images of dying Indian babies. This seemed to them a new kind of voyeurism, which has no interest in the totality of the Calcuttan reality, only in that part of it which titillates the Western conscience. And don’t forget the risk of racism: in the book and in the film, they argued, the Indians would be shown as poor wretches who need cinegenic whites to give them succor. Calcutta doesn’t matter for itself; in the book, it is merely the backdrop for the beatification of a Polish priest and the self-realization of an American doctor (played in the film by Dirty Dancing’s Patrick Swayze).

  The more thoughtful of the Calcutta protesters argued that they would have no problem with a different film on the same subject. They are proud of Indian directors, like Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, and Mrinal Sen, who have made vivid and convincing films on Bengali poverty. Neither Lapierre nor Joffe, those protesters pointed out, feel the same empathy. Worse, by focusing on Western protagonists, they implicitly deny the dedication and sacrifice of thousands of Calcuttans — rich, poor, and middle-class — who have devoted their time and their resources to helping their fellow citizens. Even Mother Teresa couldn’t have achieved a fraction of what she has done without her overwhelmingly Indian legions of volunteers and nuns, none of whom happen to look like Patrick Swayze. Indians are struggling, with dignity and selflessness, to overcome their own problems. The book and the film, they suggested, do them a disservice.

  It was a persuasive case, passionately argued by Calcuttan intellectuals, among them my wife. And yet I found myself deeply ambivalent about it. As an Indian, I don’t particularly relish what Lapierre did in his book; I am reminded of Mahatma Gandhi, sixty years earlier, calling the American traveler Katharine Mayo’s Mother India a “drain-inspectors report.” As a writer, though, I was troubled by my Calcuttan friends’ implicit condoning of censorship; they seemed to be saying to Lapierre and Joffe, “This is our poverty, you can’t depict it.” I could not accept that, any more than I can accept the suggestion that Peter Brook had no right to make his version of our epic, the Mahabharata.

  I cannot accept the notion that the suffering of the Third World’s underclass is not a fit subject for First World filmmakers. On the contrary, I believe it is vital to get the media of the haves interested in the problems of the have-nots. I was aware that, in aiming at a Western audience, Joffe would frame his story from the perspective of the outsiders, just as Candice Bergen got more footage in the film Gandhi than a dozen Indian figures with a greater claim to a share in the Mahatma’s life. The Indian poor, I was convinced, would be the objects of Mr. Joffe’s lens, rather than its subjects; City of Joy would be less their story than Patrick Swayze’s. Like the Calcutta protesters, I resented that, but unlike them, it is a price I was willing to pay.

  I argued that I would be willing to risk a bad, even exploitative, film in defense of the principle that Joffe has as much right to make a film about India as I have to set my next novel in America. And — just as Candice Bergen’s presence helped get Gandhi’s message to a vast new audience — I knew that Joffe’s film could do far more to make the West’s rich aware of the East’s poor than the more authentic films of Third World directors, which won’t garner any Academy Awards or reach a fraction of the audience that I expected City of Joy to. For those two good reasons, I appealed to the Calcutta protesters: You have made your point; let us now give the filmmakers a chance to prove that they have one worth making.

  When I saw the finished film (in a largely empty New York theater), I discovered my assumptions had been completely wrong. I wasn’t just mistaken: the outcome was the opposite of what I had so knowingly imagined. Far from moving mass audiences and sweeping the Oscars, City of Joy didn’t do well at the American box office; its message of compassion failed to reach a new audience, and the film nearly sank Patrick Swayze’s career. But the movie did, to my surprise, humanize its Indian characters: the rickshaw-puller played by Om Puri is as much the hero of the movie as Patrick Swayze’s American doctor or Pauline Collins’s Irish nurse. I don’t know if the Calcutta protesters influenced this treatment, but the film certainly showed up their protests as misguided. Perhaps the city would have had a larger box office if they had found a way to put Candice Bergen in it after all.

  * * *

  Whenever Indian food is mentioned, the non-Indian says with a knowing nod, “Ah yes, curry.” Unfortunately, though, there is no such dish. “Curry” simply means any dish with a gravy, and there are several hundred of those in each of the many styles of cooking that make up Indian cuisine.

  Food is, of course, no exception to the golden rule of diversity that applies to all things Indian. The variations between different styles of Indian cooking are far greater, to Indian
palates, than the differences between, say, French and Italian cuisine would seem to a European. In India those distinctions emerge from a variety of factors: geography (regional traditions), climate (the availability or absence of certain foods, oils, and spices), and religion (communal preferences and taboos). And within each of those is the rampant individualism of all Indian life, that basic principle of improvising within broad basic rules that applies to everything from Indian classical music to Indian political conventions. Each individual cook varies the ingredients and methods of each dish, so that no two Indian dishes of the same name actually taste identical. This is a far cry from the idea of sprinkling a spoon of “curry powder” into a pan to make a dish “Indian.” “Curry powder” does not exist in India: instead there are some forty different major spices and several dozen other seasonings from which an Indian cook chooses each time, varying the quantity, proportion, order, and method in which each is used. The idea of a standard mixed powder for all purposes would be greeted with horror in an Indian kitchen.

  The list of cultural, regional, and religious variations is extremely long. Some are a result of history: the north, with its recurrent experience of invasion from Persia and Central Asia and several centuries of Muslim rule, was inevitably influenced by Persian, Afghan, and Central Asian cuisine. The resultant style of Indian food, “Mughlai,” is what is usually found in Indian restaurants around the world. (Indeed, some regional Indian cuisines can be found in no restaurant at all; until one opened in 1996, you would have been hard pressed to find a Bengali restaurant in Calcutta, the capital of Indian Bengal, perhaps because it was assumed that anyone who had acquired a taste for Bengali cuisine could always go to someone’s home to indulge it.) But if Mughali food is what most people think of as “Indian,” it has, to an Indian palate, almost nothing in common with the rice-sam-bar-and-coconut cuisine of the relatively uninvaded south.