The Age of Kali

by William Dalrymple

  It was not the first time the Karnataka State Farmers’ Association had taken a somewhat assertive stand against what they perceived as an invasion of foreign companies intent on wrecking Hindu culture. The organisation first hit the headlines in December 1992, when it attacked the US agribusiness giant Cargill Seeds. Maintaining that the company was putting India’s seed producers out of business, and (rather more far-fetched) that the company had signed a secret agreement to set up slaughterhouses as part of an international conspiracy designed to wipe out India’s cow population, five hundred angry cowherds stormed in to the Cargill office and tossed filing cabinets out of the second-floor windows. In the street outside they made a bonfire of the files, on to which they tossed Cargill’s computers. Early the following year a Cargill seed-processing unit in a remote Karnataka village was reduced to ruins by a busload of yokels armed with crowbars.

  Nor were the farmers the only protesters. On 1 October 1996, the All-Karnataka Youth Council decided to celebrate Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday by ransacking the newly opened Bangalore Pizza Hut. The Youth Council lobbies for businesses in Karnataka to operate in the local Kannada language, and the attack was a protest against Pizza Hut’s refusal to translate its logo in to the local script. In the event, a full-scale wrecking of the restaurant was narrowly averted when, after a tip-off, a truckload of armed police turned up, bayonets fixed. After this the windows of Pizza Hut became a regular target for nocturnal stone-throwing attacks, despite the deployment of a permanent armed police guard.

  Normally these sorts of Hindu Luddites might be dismissed as just another example of India’s incurable eccentricity, a modern manifestation of the Mahatma Gandhi syndrome. Yet the fact that the protests took place in Bangalore made India-watchers sit up. For although since 1947 India has had an understandable fondness for protectionist isolationism, the one place you would not expect to find any such introversion was Bangalore, which has long prided itself, with some reason, on being the most cosmopolitan city in India.

  Bangalore, for example, was the one town which never removed the British statues from its parks: to this day Queen Victoria, Empress of India, still gazes out benignly over the mêlée of rickshaws and Ambassador cars snarled up at the city’s principal roundabout. With its wonderful parks and botanical gardens, tree-lined avenues and old colonial clubs, Bangalore has always seemed to be a world away from the chaotic muddle of so many Indian cities. Once a favourite retirement destination for blimpish ex-servicemen and elderly tea-planters, it has recently reinvented itself as ‘India’s Silicon Valley’, South Asia’s flagship town for software and high technology. The place still basks with satisfaction in Bill Gates’s much-quoted (though possibly apocryphal) remark that ‘After the Chinese, the South Indians are the smartest people in the world,’ which the intelligentsia of Bangalore understood to be specifically referring to them.

  Moreover, Bangalore is now home to a growing number of highly-skilled Indian businessmen and computer engineers who have made their money abroad and decided to settle back home. In conversations about India’s future, just as Bihar is sometimes presented as a vision of where India could be heading if everything went wrong, so Karnataka, and particularly the area around Bangalore, is held up as what the country could be like in twenty years’ time if everything went right.

  Hence the alarm when signs began to appear that even Bangalore was not immune to the lawlessness and unrest that plague the rest of India. Clearly, something very odd was afoot. It was also something very significant. For if such agitation could take place in a city as cosmopolitan and Westernised as Bangalore, what would be the effects of economic liberalisation elsewhere in the country? After years of hungrily embracing all it could of Western junk culture – imported jeans, disco music, Pepsi, MTV – was the Indian worm finally beginning to turn?

  It seems a little strange now, looking back after the Asian crash and the economic disappointments of the late 1990s, but when the liberalisation of India’s economy began in 1991, there was a real wave of international excitement. India suddenly seemed to be on the point of a spectacular economic take-off.

  Not very far to the east, the Asian ‘tiger economies’ were growing at a sensational rate, and many observers believed that India was set fair to follow in the tracks of Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. Already, it was pointed out, India was the seventh industrial power on earth; and out of its population of nine hundred million, so it was claimed, over a hundred million had incomes and lifestyles comparable to the average European. Sniffing a new market about to open up, Western bankers and industrialists began flocking in droves to set up branches in the Indian business centre of Bombay, whose real estate quickly doubled in price. Even Sotheby’s moved east.

  Since then, however, the enthusiasm has waned dramatically. The reforms which were started with such gusto in 1991 had more or less run out of steam by 1994, leaving many of the country’s biggest economic problems still unsolved. As this became apparent, analysts began to be less ambitious in their projections for India’s prospects: ‘We’ve all come to realise that India, far from being a tiger, is in fact a lumbering great elephant,’ I was told by one Western diplomat. ‘India is a huge country, and it moves very slowly and ponderously.’

  ‘India’s main difficulty,’ says Kito de Boer, the director of the Indian branch of the international management consultants McKinsey & Co., ‘is that Nehru went to Cambridge at the time Fabian socialism was the dominant ideology.’ That particular British legacy, he maintains, was every bit as damaging as any plundering of the country by wicked imperialists that may have taken place in the preceding centuries. Britain’s parting kiss to India, believes de Boer, left the country floundering in a Fabian quagmire of uncompetitiveness, protectionism and big government, a legacy which it may yet take decades to shake off.

  ‘At Independence in 1947 this huge agrarian nation set off in a burst of enthusiasm led by LSE-trained economists who planned a semi-Stalinist economy based on steelworks and five-year-plans. India’s hugely inefficient public sector is still larger than the private sector, and it continues to lose money hand over fist. Most of the nation’s money is not being spent on things which will make the next generation wealthy – schools, roads and so on – but on subsidising loss-making public industries: the government currently spends as much on subsidising oil prices as it does on health and education combined. In 1950 India had the strongest economy in Asia. Now it has one of the slowest-growing and most uncompetitive. And while other countries in Asia roll out the red carpet to attract investment, India has a tendency to roll out the red tape.’

  Statistics back this up. In 1950 India had a 2 per cent share of world trade; fifty years later that slice has sunk to 0.8 per cent. Even Vietnam attracts more foreign direct investment than India. China, which should be India’s closest rival, currently attracts nine times as much foreign exchange.

  Yet for all this, there are visible signs of change, particularly in the south and west of the country, where the great bulk of foreign investment is now being channelled. Here, after forty years of attempting to be self-sufficient – forty years of shoddy goods and shortages – everything is suddenly available: German cars, Japanese computers, American jeans, even imported disposable nappies (unknown in India as recently as five years ago). Where ten years ago there was only one abysmally boring black-and-white state-run television channel, there is now a cacophony of over forty glossy satellite channels offering everything from CNN and Baywatch to Channel V, a home-grown Indian version of MTV which plays an odd mixture of Anglo-American rock music and Hindi film songs: one minute it’s Madonna in very little but a cast-iron bodice, the next it’s Amitabh Bachchan in flares chasing Rekha round a 1970s Bombay rose garden.

  Equally, the raucous but slightly monotone Indian press of the 1980s has given way to a startling variety of glossy magazines, some covering the Bombay catwalks, others holding forth on the best way to surf the Internet, others still offering the new rich advi
ce on which model of Mercedes to choose. There is even an Indian version of Cosmopolitan bringing the female orgasm to the newsstands of South Asia for the first time.

  In some of the favoured areas, growth is very fast indeed; and nowhere more so than Bangalore, which has almost quadrupled in size in the last twenty-five years. Since Western software companies started arriving in the city ten years ago – attracting in the process a wave of highly skilled expatriate Indian software engineers to return home to work for them – the Bangalore streetscape has altered beyond recognition. The city now has the only supermarkets in the subcontinent, and a shopping mall modelled, so proud Bangaloreans will tell you, on one in Los Angeles.

  ‘These are luxuries unknown even in go-ahead Bombay,’ said one student who offered to show me what he claimed was ‘India’s first all-glass elevator’. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘Bangalore is our model town. It is number one place for comfort in India.’

  One aspect of this is the dazzling variety of pubs on offer, most of them bizarrely themed: some are dressed up as pseudo-Wild West saloons, others as wannabe NASA space stations. There is a Baskin Robbins, a Wimpey, and of course the Pizza Huts and Kentucky Fried Chicken parlours, which despite the attacks are both in great demand. Notwithstanding the undeniable excellence of Bangalore’s own South Indian cuisine, the siren call of Kentucky Dippers, Zinger burgers and chicken tikka pizzas has proved irresistible. Every day returned Indian expats form long queues outside the Pizza Hut, patiently waiting as long as two and half hours to be served. Once inside, you find yourself surrounded by baseball hat-wearing computer nerds speaking in uniquely Bangalorean Indo-American accents.

  ‘Actually, Meera, this ain’t nothing at all compared to Pizza Hut we are visiting in Santa Barbara. You can’t get real pepperami here. And there are no fries …’

  ‘Tarun, have you seen Mission: Impossible? Really cool movie, yaar?’

  ‘Yaar. Actually not bad. But Tom Cruise: what a schmuck! I am thinking Brad Pitt is much better.’

  ‘Hey, Naveen, have you heard? Sunil has a preview of Windows 98.’

  ‘Wow! But I thought Sunil was an Apple-freak.’

  ‘Actually no. He has a new Pentium Compaq with 1.4 gigabytes of hard disk and thirty-two megabytes standard RAM.’

  ‘TFT?’

  ‘TFT and MMX.’

  ‘Golly! I must be looking …’

  The same Indo-American hybrids can be found in abundance at Bangalore’s silicon nerve centre, Electronic City, which lies fifteen miles along rutted roads from the town centre, out towards the Tamil Nadu border. Here the most successful of the home-grown software companies is Infosys, which seems to be entirely run by Indo-American Brahmins. On my visit the finance director had just returned, smeared in sandalwood paste, from offering a ten-hour puja at his ancestral temple in Goa, but this did not stop him rolling out a series of state-of-the-art spreadsheets showing the company’s ever-growing profit margins and expansion plans. The old Brahminical astronomical disciplines and learning, he explained, trained the mind to understand mathematics and computing; the old learning had formed the seedbed for the new.

  During my tour of Infosys, I found five computer programmers – all Brahmins – reading an e-mail from Goldman Sachs, one of their many clients in New York. Apparently if a New York company has a computer glitch towards the end of the day, they send an e-mail to Bangalore and go home for the evening. The Brahminical computer boffins at Infosys sort out the problem during the New York night, and when the bankers return to their desks in Manhattan the following morning they find their computers fully operational. The programmers at Infosys are now little cheaper than their First World counterparts; instead they find work on the basis of their abilities and their location, at the opposite end of the world time zone from America. Infosys may be the most successful of the Bangalore software companies, but hundreds of others are equally sophisticated, and they are flourishing too.

  Quite how far the new Bangalore had moved away from its immediate hinterland was made horribly clear in mid-October 1996, when it was announced that the 1997 Miss World contest was to be held there.

  The state government and the city’s hotels immediately welcomed the move, but no else did. Within weeks an unlikely coalition had formed in protest against what was seen as the ultimate foreign cultural invasion. Feminist suicide squads formed, promising to immolate themselves if the ‘degrading’ pageant went ahead. Hindu fundamentalist organisations such as the RSS and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (which masterminded the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya in 1992) joined hands with their sworn enemies the Muslim Jamaat-i-Islami to decry what they saw as an assault on traditional Indian morality. Closing ranks to defend the chastity of Mother India, the right-wing Hindu BJP stood on the same platform as the (supposedly) left-wing and secular Congress Party.

  The Karnataka farmers and the Kannada language chauvinists, not to be outdone, continued their agitations, unloading a trailer-load of cow-dung outside the showroom of one of the Indian sponsors of Miss World, the consumer electrical-goods company Godrej, coating the interior, the exhibits and even the staff with dollops of slurry. Soon afterwards, a small home-made bomb ‘about the size of an orange’ was thrown at the electrical transformer controlling the lighting of the stadium where the pageant was due to be held. The transformer was undamaged, but a large crater was left in the asphalt nearby. By the end of October strikes, marches and demonstrations were taking place in Bangalore on an almost daily basis.

  The day I flew in to town, the South Indian papers contained little news that was not in some way linked to the rapidly escalating protests. The Deccan Herald announced on its front page that a thousand commandos of the élite Indian Rapid Action Force were to be drafted in to guard the Miss World contest after ‘the leader of a rural populist activist group had threatened to torch the venue of the show which he described as an example of “cultural imperialism” ’. In another part of town, ‘a group of noted women artistes have expressed their support for the beauty contest. The artistes feel that the protests are nothing but silly and ridiculous exercises. “These protesters are an insecure lot who cannot face the world,” remarked Arundhati Nag, the noted theatre artiste.’

  On its op-ed page, the Hindu ran a full-page feature linked to the Kentucky Fried Chicken protests. It was entitled ‘Vegetarianism – Ideal Choice’: ‘Scientific investigations have firmly established that vegetarian diet is far better and ideal for one’s health and environment protection,’ claimed the writer, V. Vidyanath. ‘South American forests have been cut down to grow cattle for hamburgers. Some outstanding personalities such as such George Bernard Shaw, William Shakespeare, Percy Shelley and Isaac Newton were vegetarians. To preserve health and environment, the people should prefer vegetarian diet.’

  All this seemed, at first, to be a quite spectacular overreaction. Miss World may be tacky and tasteless, but surely only in India could anyone threaten to commit suicide over such an issue. Kentucky Fried Chicken may not be gourmet cuisine, but it surely takes cultural oversensitivity to a new extreme to regard fast food as an insult to the national honour. Yet when you begin to talk to people in Bangalore, you come to realise that beneath the xenophobia and the nationalism there lies a very reasonable fear of progress, a genuine disorientation in the face of massive change.

  Until the early 1990s, Bangalore had been a sleepy, well-to-do city, remarkable only for its botanical gardens, cool climate and excellent racetrack. Everything changed overnight when the city gained the reputation of being the cradle of India’s high-tech revolution. Foreign investment and personnel poured in at a quite extraordinary rate. Unemployed migrant workers followed quickly on their heels, and what had been known as the Garden City suddenly found itself ringed with stinking shanty towns. Because of this unparalleled immigration, between 1971 and 1996 Bangalore’s population jumped from 1.7 million to over six million, making it one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. The pressure on land grew, causing h
ouse prices to rise stratospherically, increasing by 50 per cent per annum throughout the early 1990s. As pollution grew worse and the city’s green spaces began to disappear, the average temperature rose by several degrees every year.

  Such hyper-development obviously leads to massive strains. The government of Karnataka, which had proved adept at attracting foreign investment, soon showed itself to be wholly unable to cope with the massive expansion it had helped to generate. Suddenly there was never enough electricity; some weeks power was totally absent. It was the same with water, which was usually available in the taps for less than an hour a day. In summer it often disappeared completely for whole weeks at time.

  Everywhere the old colonial bungalows began to be pulled down and replaced by towering office-blocks. In a feeble attempt to keep the roads from clogging, the city’s glorious green roundabouts were all bulldozed. Bangaloreans were horrified by what was happening to their once beautiful city. The writer and historian T.P. Issar, who published a book on the city’s architecture at the end of the 1980s, told me that his book is now of only archival value: 95 per cent of the buildings he described and illustrated less than ten years ago have now been pulled down.