ALSO BY PATRICK FRENCH
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul
Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land
Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division
The Life of Henry Norman
Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2011 by Patrick French
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in Great Britain by Allen Lane, an imprint of the Penguin Group, a division of Penguin Books Ltd., London.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
French, Patrick, [date]
India : a portrait / Patrick French.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59664-2
1. India—History—1947– 2. India—Politics and government—1947– 3. India—
Economic conditions—1947– 4. India—Social conditions—1947– I. Title.
DS480.84.F75 2011
954.04–dc22 2011003921
Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson
v3.1
MG
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
PART I RASHTRA • NATION
1 • Accelerated History
2 • There Will Be Blood
3 • The Centrifuge
4 • Family Politics
PART II LAKSHMI • WEALTH
5 • The Visions of John Maynard Keynes
6 • A Dismal Prospect
7 • Falcon 900
8 • A Quarry Near Mysore
PART III SAMAJ • SOCIETY
9 • The Outcastes’ Revenge
10 • 4ever
11 • Solace of Religion
12 • Only in India
Notes
Acknowledgements
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
In 1997 I wrote Liberty or Death, an account of Indian independence and partition. Almost as soon as it was out, I wanted to do a sequel which looked at India in a new way, for what it was becoming rather than for what others wanted it to be. Some sort of unleashing was taking place, the effects of which were not yet clear, and the country appeared to be passing through epic and long-awaited changes. I was diverted by a biography, though even while I was writing it I was noticing the little revolutions in India, and the historical impulses that lay behind them.
Nearly everyone has a reaction to India, even if they have never been there. They hate it or love it, think it mystical or profane; find it extravagant or ascetic; consider the food the best or the worst in the world. For East Asians, it is a competitor and a source of some of their own spiritual traditions. For Americans, it is a challenge, a potential hub of cooperation or economic rivalry—both countries are diverse and hulking, their national identities strong and to an extent constructed, their populations loquacious and outgoing and admiring of entrepreneurial success. For many Europeans, India is a religious place with a special, undefined message. For the British, it is a link to old prestige, a land interesting mainly in the past tense. For the Pakistanis—the estranged siblings of the Indians—it is a site of threat and fascination.
Public discourse about India is caught in these old ways of looking. Inside the country itself, responses to recent economic progress are often pinned either to earlier socialist instincts against capital and globalization, or on seeing it as a triumphant riposte to past humiliations. The postcolonial outlook—vital in the early years of freedom as a means to take the nation forward, and as an antidote to constant Western assumptions about the restricted destiny of former colonies—has become an intellectual straitjacket which limits fresh thought at a time when something new is happening.
In India I have tried to write about the country both from the inside and from the outside—or from a distance. The information passes through three different prisms. The first is political, the second economic and the third social. The individual stories, calamities, aspirations and triumphs of many people are at the heart of the narrative. Each of the three sections—Rashtra or nation, Lakshmi or wealth, Samaj or society—seeks to answer, in an indirect way, the question: why is India like it is today?
Rashtra is about the birth of a nation. For any country, the moment of conception or formation is vital in explaining what happens later (think of Israel or the United States). In those early days, India was a beacon to Asian and African peoples who were seeking freedom from foreign rule. The dream turned stagnant, as a controlled, statist mindset took over. India was nominally not aligned in the Cold War and the Soviet Union was its friend—but many Indians wished to go West to seek their fortune. New political leaders arose, powered by caste, religion or regional affinity, and politics in India changed, following its own unique conventions and traditions. A handful of families became ever more important; the final chapter in Rashtra looks at how Indian democracy really works, and at the triumph of nepotism.
In Lakshmi, recent economic liberalization is placed in a deeper historical context. Why was international trade rejected with such force and certainty after independence? What makes a new nation prosperous? Why did people raised on a diet of socialism become robustly and even rapaciously capitalist, embracing the idea of economic creativity? Who becomes super-rich, who gets by and who remains super-poor? The rapid growth of the Indian economy was sparked by a near calamity in 1991, when the remnants of the country’s gold reserves had to be sent to Switzerland in a bid to raise cash. There was nothing inevitable about India’s rise, and Lakshmi uses the personal tales of the poor and the rich to explain how it happened.
The third section, Samaj, is more nebulous: it is about broad social patterns, and the characteristics that make India itself. The narrative shows things that might be taken for granted in India—the fact the “untouchable” father of the constitution was not allowed to sit in a classroom, the misconduct of the police and bureaucracy, the role of servants, the genetics of caste, the importance of India’s many Muslims and their loyalty to the national ideal, and the deep and enduring influence of forms of faith. Through looking at the past, and sometimes at quite distant moments in history, the apparent peculiarities and continuing problems of the present can be revealed.
Globally, India is now sometimes portrayed as having a competitive edge over more sluggish developed countries that have abandoned thrift, given up on saving and refused to postpone gratification. Values that are embedded in an Indian way of life appear to have an unexpected relevance. A friend, Niranjan, forwarded me an email. It caught the idea that people like himself had a distinctive way of operating, and their lateral approach presented them with a new advantage. Like other Indians, Niranjan was taking pleasure in the possibility that the citizens of his country were highly motivated, and no longer perceived only as the victims of famine or superstition:
An Indian man walks into a bank in New York City and asks for the loan officer. He tells the loan officer that he is going to India on business for two weeks and needs to borrow $5,000. The bank officer tells him that the bank will need some form of security for the loan, so the Indian man hands over the keys of a new Ferrari parked on the street in front of the bank. He produces the title and everything checks out. The loan officer agrees to accept the car as collateral for the loan.
The bank’s president and its officers all enjoy a good laugh at the
Indian for using a $250,000 Ferrari as collateral against a $5,000 loan. An employee of the bank then drives the Ferrari into the bank’s underground garage and parks it there. Two weeks later, the Indian returns, repays the $5,000 and the interest, which comes to $15.41.
The loan officer says, “Sir, we are very happy to have had your business, and this transaction has worked out very nicely, but we are a little puzzled. While you were away, we checked you out and found that you are a multimillionaire. What puzzles us is, why would you bother to borrow $5,000?”
The Indian replies: “Where else in New York City can I park my car for two weeks for only $15.41 and expect it to be there when I return?”
Ah, the mind of the Indian!
With its overlap of extreme wealth and lavish poverty, its mix of the educated and the ignorant, its competing ideologies, its lack of uniformity, its kindness and profound cruelty, its complex relationships with religion, its parallel realities and the rapid speed of social change—India is a macrocosm, and may be the world’s default setting for the future.
PART I
RASHTRA • NATION
1
ACCELERATED HISTORY
IN LADAKH the air is thin and dry, and it is cold even when the sunlight burns you. Tashi Norbu could remember how, in 1948, Buddhist monks in their dark red robes had built an improvised, rocky airstrip near the monastery in Leh. Out of the sky came a buzzing metal shape, a Dakota aeroplane carrying India’s new prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. It landed in a cloud of dust.
“We had never seen a car or a motor vehicle at that time,” Tashi Norbu said, sitting above his apricot orchard, speaking in a Tibetan dialect. He was an old man, an expert in medicinal herbs, water diversion and the correct way to shoot a bow and arrow. He wore a long brown robe secured with a lime-coloured sash, and on his head he had wedged a homburg.
“There were no roads in Ladakh. A plane lands from the sky, you can’t imagine … All the local people put their hands together and prayed to the plane, we were all praying.”
Ladakh is a mountainous region by the borders of Tibet, China and Pakistan. In the rush of history, it might have ended up on the wrong side of the line; but it is in India. It feels like the remoter parts of Tibet, though without the Chinese influence. By a quirk of history, Ladakhis follow Tibetan Buddhism, having avoided the waves of Muslim invasions that changed the traditions of their neighbours. Geographically inaccessible, the region preserves an ancient way of living. The present, powerless King of Ladakh’s lineage dates back an incredible thirty-eight generations to 975. His family lost their influence more than a century ago, and he lives in a little hilltop palace.
Tashi Norbu thought of himself as a Ladakhi above all else. “As children, we hadn’t heard about India. We didn’t know who the Indians were. We knew they were ‘gyagarpa,’ people who came from the plains, but it was not until I grew older and saw a map that I understood how big India was. Some things changed after independence: a politician came to visit us from Srinagar in Kashmir, but we didn’t know what that meant, whether he was a religious leader or a king, or what.
“I can remember when I first saw the Indian army using kerosene! I couldn’t believe the flames, how easily they could make them. They told us we could buy kerosene in Leh if we sold eggs. We would take the eggs, carry them like a baby while crossing the [Indus] river, sell them to a trader, buy the kerosene, and carry the kerosene back to the village.
“Pandit Nehru told the chief lama he should become a leader, and the lama said since we were in a mountain region he would rather be a worker. He handed a shovel to Nehru, who began digging! They took some photographs of it. Yes, I am content to be with India. We would never have got along with Pakistan, because they are Mohammedans and follow different customs. As for China, it is communist; you have to take permission for everything you want to do, and you can’t speak your mind. In India you can speak your mind, so I’m happy to be with them.”1
Ladakh is about as far north as you can get in India. The modern nation created after independence was implacably diverse, culturally and geographically.
Tamil Nadu is more than 1,500 miles south of Ladakh. It is a different kind of world. While Ladakhis are wiry, with narrow facial apertures—a small nose, mouth and ears and slit eyes, perhaps in response to the icy, windy climate—Tamils usually have a wide sprawl of a face, in keeping with the southern lushness. The land is rich with vegetation, paddy fields and mango trees, and the view from the coast is filled with fishing boats, long painted skiffs with curved prows, catching kingfish. Young men dive low for stone fruit—giant blue-green mussels, which they pluck off the rocks.
When the Indian national flag was chosen at independence, a tricolour of saffron, white and green, Ashoka’s wheel of dharma, or law, was placed at its centre. The emperor Ashoka had united the subcontinent before the birth of Christ, but even his kingdom stopped advancing when it reached the south. The southern tip of India, perhaps more than any other place on earth, has an unbroken chain to the ancient past. There have been caste wars, the usual comings and goings of power, with one imperial dynasty replacing another in earlier times, but no invasion. European traders—British, Dutch, Portuguese and French—had all pursued their interests forcefully over the centuries, but the society had retained its own earlier forms. It would be as if the religion or culture at the time of the pharaoh Amenhotep III, who ruled Egypt in the fourteenth century BCE, had survived in snatches in the everyday life of modern Egyptians.
The noise of central and northern India can at times drown out the subtlety of the south, which has been so vital in determining the country’s present status. On the edge of Chennai or Madras, it can be so luxuriant and humid and quiet that you feel as if you are in another land; but it is just another face of India, with the tinkle of bicycle bells and the echoes of a temple the only distraction. Saravankumar, a professor, described it to me this way: “The identity we have here goes right back to the first century, to the Tamil poem Puram 183. I would say my Tamilness comes from the language.”2 I could understand what he meant, and could see—or hear, on the street and in the home—how the high-speed, bubbling Tamil tongue was part of the environment. So while the north had its upheavals, the south went on forever.
The nation can be triangulated in many ways: it is all India. Far across to the east, about 1,750 miles from Chennai and the same distance from Ladakh—up near Burma, Bhutan and Bangladesh—lies Meghalaya. It is a hilly and rainy state, a kingdom with rushing waterfalls, tropical forests and unexpectedly successful rock groups. The people look different from Tamils or Ladakhis, and follow their own traditions.
Take just one tribe in Meghalaya as an example, the Khasi people, who are more than a million strong. Their language bears some connection to Khmer, which is spoken in Cambodia. They are a matrilineal society: their family name comes from the mother’s side, and the last daughter in the family to leave the family home is the custodian of all ancestral property. The Khasi religion is not connected to any other faith and emphasizes a belief in one supreme god, U Blei. In their creation myth, the Moon (which is male) and the Sun (which is female) stand symbolically for the divine presence. The Khasis have a covenant with their deity—who is the dispenser, the maker, the giver, the creator, the divine law. They believe in the concept of “iapan,” or pleading with god for everything they need, and are very sure about how they came to be on earth—by descending a golden ladder from the mount of heaven’s navel. What they are not sure about is how exactly man came to be created by god.
As Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, a Khasi, explained to me in perfect English: “Although we believe we were created by god, we also think that it is not the business of humans to know exactly how. As I said, the Khasis believe in one supreme god, who is formless, or rather whose form man cannot even begin to imagine, for that is forbidden. A Khasi does not believe in idol worship, since he must not conceive the appearance of god. We do not have a place of worship since our religi
on is private and familial. True worship takes place in one’s heart, or at one’s family’s hearth. Because of this, the Khasi religion remains largely unorganized, and it is completely lacking in missionary tendencies. This is because a Khasi believes his god is also the god of the Hindu, the Muslim, the Christian, and of all other people. His motto is, therefore, ‘Ieit la ka jong, burom ia kiwei’—‘Love one’s own, and respect others.’ As for me, I will always prefer my own religion to any other because it’s the only religion that I know which does not believe in hell’s damnation. The Khasi universe is two-tier—heaven and earth—and there is no room for hell.”3
Each of these disparate places was part of the nation that was born in 1947.
When the British gained control of the subcontinent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they often preferred to rule through a local potentate. They did not make a lot of converts to Christianity. By propping up client rulers and giving them imperial baubles and titles, they could secure influence at minimum cost. This strategy of containment succeeded until the early twentieth century, when a new class of Indian nationalists, stirred by ideals of liberty and democracy, used peaceful mass resistance to campaign for an end to foreign rule. The Indian National Congress had been established in 1885 by English-speaking professionals who wanted a greater involvement in government. Under the creative guidance of Mohandas Gandhi—the Mahatma, or “great soul”—the Congress became a popular movement of liberation from the British empire.
While this new political force challenged imperial control and promoted itself as the true voice of India, many Muslims, who made up nearly a quarter of the population, felt excluded by the largely Hindu idiom in which it operated. The Muslim elite, which still retained much of its influence after the decline of the Mughals and the rise of the European powers, was not attracted by what Gandhi represented. Many felt that for all the talk of inclusiveness, the Congress leadership was made up largely of Hindus from the higher end of the caste system who would, if India became independent, undermine the security and status of Muslims. With their homespun khadi clothing, their emphasis on Hindi rather than Urdu as the national language of India, their big rallies and their belief in profound social reform, the Congress leaders seemed like a threat. The Congress-run provincial governments which took office in parts of India in the 1930s were presented as the heralds of a new “Hindu Raj.”
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