Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity

by Pavan K. Varma

  The example above is not meant as a comment on Dalrymple’s scholarship. On the contrary, I am an admirer of his writings, in particular The Last Mughal, his book on Zafar and Delhi of 1857. But Dalrymple’s success in India, and the manner in which he is fêted and dined by the Indian elite, is totally out of sync with what a successful writer from India would receive in Britain. Not even Vikram Seth would have so many of the rich and powerful in London vying for his attention. Successful but lesser known Indian authors writing in English would be more than grateful for a passing notice; and as for the talented many who do not write in English, the less said the better. Even profoundly powerful writers like Sunil Gangopadhyaya, U.R. Ananthamurthy and Mahasweta Devi, whose books have been translated into English and published by leading publishing houses, would hardly merit a square inch in the UK papers.

  The status of English as a global language today is largely justified. But it is important to remember that this status is not only about the use of English and its convenience as a means of international communication. It is also about hegemony. Embedded in that hegemony is a deeply entrenched propensity for exclusion, which should concern people for whom English is not their first language. Olabiyi Babalola Joseph Yai, the erudite chairman of the Executive Board of UNESCO, once mentioned to me that his language, Yoruba, spoken by as many as 45 million people in West Africa, is hardly known in a world institutionally dominated by English and French and, to a lesser extent, Spanish. The tragedy is that there are very few avenues open to escape this marginalization in a globalized world. Sarah Kyankya, a young writer and publisher from Uganda, who had come to New Delhi to attend a literary seminar, spoke with genuine anguish about the near insurmountable constraints faced by her courageous but fledgling firm, Fountain Publishers, devoted to children’s books. ‘Our books are automatically considered to be of inferior quality in comparison with competing titles [from the west],’ she said. ‘Few international markets are interested in African folk tales, and none can compete with a global brand like Cinderella … Marketing for an international audience is very difficult; international markets are already flooded with high-quality but cheap publications from the west, and lack of funds makes it difficult to advertise in international journals or attend established book fairs. For lack of other alternatives, publishing in Africa is mostly focussed on textbooks, while the general books sector is heavily dominated by western multinationals.’ So books from the UK and USA dominate shelf space, local literatures suffer and English rules.

  One afternoon in London, a certain David Hillier-King MA, of 9, Talma Gardens, Twickenham, came in unannounced to see me. He was wearing a loud pink tie, a blazer, and maroon corduroy pants. He found it ‘impossible’ to pronounce my name, and when I asked him for his he said it was ‘very easy’: David King, as though my tongue was ordained to embrace his name effortlessly. Mr King, who had some old India connection, said that at one time he tried to learn Hindi. He rattled off a few random sentences in Hindi which I could not understand, and then snorted: ‘And, you know, stuff like that.’ Malcolm Muggeridge, he informed me, had said that ‘the last Englishman lives in India and is brown.’ This banal nugget of information pleased him greatly, and he convulsed with laughter. Noticing a portrait of Nehru, he exclaimed: ‘He, of course, was the biggest brown Englishman of them all!’

  Mr King was a bit of a caricature himself, and certainly his superficial and offensive behaviour was not representative of all Englishmen. However, his comment about the last brown Englishman in India had more than a kernel of truth. One of the most unfortunate and visible consequences of Empire, as we’ve seen before, is the sterile mimicry it bequeaths to its former subjects, and especially to its elite. That mimicry becomes a way of life; in time, it is accepted as the benchmark of social superiority; some are born as brown sahibs, and most of the rest aspire to become brown sahibs. The absurdity, even shame, of this escapes notice, except by foreigners not familiar with the distortions created by colonialism, and now by globalization. The Delhi correspondent of the Sunday Times of the UK was once interviewing me on the lavish birthday parties thrown by the new rich for their children. He mentioned that in one such party in New Delhi, which he and his wife attended, the theme was Noddy, the character created by Enid Blyton. He found it incomprehensible that Indians, who have such a rich repertoire of folk and children’s literature of their own, should celebrate a character that even in Britain is now considered to be somewhat politically incorrect for his attitude to coloured people. His wife narrated a similar experience. She was asked to judge a fancy dress competition at one of Delhi’s elite schools, and there again were several children dressed up as Noddy.

  The Noddy anecdote is but one example of how we Indians continue to remain in thrall to all things English. There are a million others all around us. The hair-cutting saloon to which I go in Vasant Vihar is called ‘Oxford Cut’. Having failed to make the connection between the much-sought-after academic citadel in England and hairstyling skills in India, I asked the owner why he had chosen this name. His answer was honest: ‘I attract many more of the elite with this name.’ The walls of the saloon have big blow-ups of men with stylish haircuts. All of them are popular icons from the west. Only western pop music plays here. Sometimes, early in the morning, when the saloon has just opened, one can hear Indian music. The owner likes to begin the day with bhajans, but quickly changes over to the kind of music he thinks his patrons would like to hear.

  More than sixty years after India gained independence, a half-page ad in a leading daily for a housing complex in Mohali, near Chandigarh, reads: ‘MAYFAIR—Premium English Styled Apartments: Welcome to a lifestyle that’s distinct, distinguished and definitely English in style.’ This too would probably befuddle a foreigner. Why would Indians, with their very different climatic conditions and social traditions, buy homes that will be ‘definitely English in style’? But they do, and make property developers rich, so that every Indian city and small town on the rise has apartment complexes that mimic western building designs and have names such as ‘Regency Park’, ‘Westend Greens’, ‘Trinity Towers’, ‘Princeton Apartments’, ‘Silver Oaks’, ‘Parkwood Glade’, ‘Charmwood Estate’. The list is endless.

  The dominance of cricket in Indian sports is another example. Cricket was introduced to India by the British. From the very beginning it had an elite status, patronized by the colonial rulers and their most flamboyant hangers-on, the maharajas and nawabs. ‘In fact, there was,’ writes A. Bimol Akoijam, a scholar from Africa, ‘an uncanny similarity between the consolidation of colonial power and growth of cricket in South Asia.’1 Today, India is marginalized in every other sport except cricket. Almost all the stars in the Indian sporting world are cricketers (and even when the class composition of the Indian cricket team has changed, with the best players coming from small towns and the middle or lower middle classes, they soon become Anglicized twenty-first-century sahibs). Players of other games languish for lack of money and infrastructure, but the top cricket players are enormously rich. The ‘gentleman’s game’ left behind by the British has captured the Indian imagination like no other sport. We still stick to our precious colonial legacy, happy to get one or two medals, if at all, at the Olympics. But the irony is that the former rulers themselves have moved on. Football, not cricket, is the most popular sport in England today.

  Cultural asymmetry thrives on the absence of interrogation. In that absence, reflexes from the past continue mindlessly. Why, for instance, should our leaders end their banquet speeches by raising a toast to the visiting dignitary? Indian government norms do not allow for the serving of alcohol on such occasions. A toast with a glass full of apple juice is, to say the least, unnecessary, especially since the practice is neither ours nor universal. (In fact, Wikipedia finds it so hard to understand this that it lists the Indian version of the toast as ‘Aish Karo’—‘Enjoy’!) Public rituals should reflect one’s own culture and history. It would be perfectly in order if
a formal banquet speech by an Indian leader ended with a prayer for the long life and prosperity of the guests.

  Such issues may appear to be small, but the reasons why they continue to exist are substantive. The purpose here is not to mechanically reject what is western and always insist on what is indigenous. But rituals should not persist merely because they did so in the past when the choice was not ours. One aspect of asymmetry is that those who colonized the world have had the luxury of preserving their own ceremonial rituals, while destroying or changing those of their subjects. For anyone conscious of this loss, there is a certain exhilaration in seeing a ceremony unfold as part of an authentic and uninterrupted tradition. I once had the opportunity in London to accompany our envoy when he went to present credentials to the Queen. We travelled in horse-drawn royal coaches from his residence at Kensington Palace Gardens to Buckingham Palace. The horses were a magnificent grey; the coach was covered in velvet, with the royal seal on both sides; the coachmen wore red overcoats and black-and-gold tophats; our escort, the chief of protocol, known as the Vice-Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps, was dressed in a nineteenth-century black costume with gold braid and an elaborate hat, and a sword in gold scabbard at his waist. On alighting at the porch, the ‘porte cochere’ at the centre of a large quadrangle, we were escorted up the steps of the Grand Entrance where the Equerry in Waiting received us and led us through the Grand Hall, past the Marble Hall, to the Bow Room, buttressed by the ‘1855’ and ‘1844’ chambers. Her Majesty the Queen awaited us in ‘1844’. Pages in traditional dress opened the door and then we were ushered into the royal presence, and we bowed as we had been instructed—‘one bow on entering the Presence, walk forward to the Queen, make a second bow or courtesy and shake hands with Her Majesty’, who, I noticed, was wearing white gloves. The Bow Room overlooked a beautiful lawn on which ducks waddled about; inside, the palace was replete with marble busts and portraits of royalty. On our return to our high commissioner’s residence, the horses were fed, as per custom, apples and carrots, and the coachmen were given glasses of champagne.

  For the colonized, in contrast, almost no public ceremony has an authentic and uninterrupted tradition. Nothing is as it originally was, or could have been without the colonial interregnum.

  History, of course, cannot be reversed. But its consequences need to be appraised, more so in areas which have been left largely uninterrogated. The process of appraisal and, even more importantly, of reappropriation, is especially important in the globalizing world of the twenty-first-century when the perils of homogenization are conveniently glossed over. All cultures have a specific context; they may be open to outside influences, but cannot be substituted with another, and if any such attempt is made, the results can be tragic. If either vision or vigilance is lacking, the process of globalization can co-opt, control and impoverish without the victim realizing this. Unlike the open conquests of past empires, the globalization of today is subtle, relentless, incipient, intrusive, imperceptible and all-pervasive. This is not to demonize every aspect of that process. Nor is it possible to reject the fact of a globalized world. However, there can be no denying that globalization is not a neutral phenomenon. It unfolds in an unequal world, where some countries have far greater influencing power than others. As Bhikhu Parekh writes: ‘Globalization, of course, primarily originates in and is propelled by the West, and involves westernizing the rest of the world … the fact remains that western culture today enjoys enormous economic and political power, prestige and respectability. Its interactions with other cultures occur under grossly unequal conditions and those at the receiving end often find it difficult to make autonomous choices.’2

  Autonomy is not about blindly rejecting outside influences. It is about making rational choices, so that we don’t become willing accessories to our ‘deculturization’. In Budapest, there is an octagonal square, not far from the Danube. Earlier it was famous for restaurants specializing in different facets of Hungarian cuisine; today, the traditional restaurants have closed shop; they have been replaced by McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut. No one quite knows how and when this complete transformation happened. Looking out from the window of a hotel in Beijing one can be forgiven for thinking it is Chicago. The skyline is overwhelmed by tall skyscrapers indistinguishable from any American city. The traditional Chinese hutongs have been razed to the ground, lost forever. In the pursuit of the new and the modern defined in western terms, Chinese authorities have unleashed a wave of urbanization that has done, according to a senior Chinese minister, ‘as much damage to the country’s traditional heritage as the Cultural Revolution’.3 In the build-up to the 2008 Olympics, an army of western architects were brought in to create the Beijing of the future: the Olympic site was planned by American architects; the ‘bird’s nest’ stadium was the brainchild of a Swiss architect; the new international airport was designed by an Englishman; and the television headquarters was created by a Dutch.

  Co-option is not about the absence of choice; it is about the invisible pressures that allow choice to be exercised only in a certain way. The Chinese authorities had the choice to refashion Beijing or Shanghai in a manner that created the new while preserving the old. But, co-opted into the western notion of progress, they were unable to make an autonomous choice about what to borrow and what to retain. The result is that one of the oldest and most sophisticated civilizations in the world could well end up having, as another high-level Chinese functionary lamented, ‘a thousand cities with the same appearance’.4 By contrast, London has preserved its historic central district, as have Paris and many other European cities.

  Formerly colonized and economically poor nations are, of course, co-opted far more easily. But the need to be vigilant about the preservation of one’s culture can worry the rich as well. In Tokyo, the president of the Japan Foundation, an official agency devoted to the promotion of Japanese culture, told me that many Japanese children now consider it ‘backward’ to eat food with chopsticks. This matter seemed to concern him greatly, because the use of chopsticks is such an intrinsic part of Japanese culture, and something intangible but exceptionally important would be lost if the next generation in Japan is inured to fast food western eateries at the cost of its own cuisine and eating habits. In Russia, a leading academic spoke to me about how the children of the new elite are losing their knowledge of Russian literature. Many of them are now sent to expensive boarding schools in Britain; they speak better English than their parents but have not read—and do not wish to read—Pushkin, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy.

  Young, educated and city-dwelling Indians display a new confidence about themselves and the culture to which they belong. But confidence cannot be a substitute for knowledge, nor can bravado hide the fact that they are culturally adrift. In a random survey I carried out among the young in New Delhi, no one could give me a line-by-line meaning of the country’s national anthem! Those whose knowledge about their own culture has been reduced to tokenism are co-opted that much more easily, for they have lost the intellectual apparatus to make independent choices. In such situations, there is either thoughtless resentment or unthinking mimicry. The former leads to a chauvinistic rejection of anything from the west—as many goons show us every year on Valentine’s Day in some Indian cities—and the latter, as Malavika Singh, publisher of the respected journal Seminar, puts it, results in ‘a strange breed of imitative western culture that is rootless and anarchic in our social context, growing like a weed across this land’. She laments that ‘success in contemporary India is symbolized by the traditional being abandoned and replaced by the worst, most pedestrian end of western culture. When Indians in the towns and cities of this land ape everything phoren because that makes them believe they have arrived, they do it carelessly, much like the manner in which they use and speak the language, English.’ In this process, baithaks give way to rexined drawing rooms; ceramic or plastic replaces thalis; western-style attire is preferred to traditional wear; and indigenous de
signs are devalued for mass-produced western forms. It is true that some of these choices are dictated by functional and economic reasons; but it is also true that people believe that to change in this manner is a sign of progress and modernity. Sometimes, those who are westernized by heritage and choice—and are invariably the elite—deliberately reverse the trend by doing flamboyantly ‘desi’ things, as clear tokenism to prove their ‘Indianness’. Those aspiring to be like them, still unsure about whether they have ‘arrived’ fully, then mindlessly copy these ‘desi’ affectations as well. The result is aesthetic kitsch, testimony to the cultural superficiality of both. The cultural pretensions of the affluent, especially, rarely fool the foreign observer. An American acquaintance of mine told me how a particularly well-heeled host, after spending the evening pontificating about the importance of indigenous traditions, spent all his energies at dinner trying to eat his roti-sabzi with a knife and fork!

  I recall with amusement the reaction of some ambassadors in New Delhi when I told them that I eat Indian food with my hands. We were sitting at dinner at an Indian home; the host had, predictably, put a knife and fork next to each plate. I put them aside and announced that I would eat with my hands, which I had washed before coming to the table. This was the way Indian food should be eaten, I said, but I would happily use a knife and fork if the food was western. The ambassadors nodded in agreement and promptly broke rotis and puris with their hands.

  Interaction on the basis of equality can occur, but only if those who are denied it are aware of the process, and are willing to protest. The alchemy of globalization is such that western nations and societies manage to project an image of superior ethics and authority even while they dissemble and display double standards themselves. It is as if they can lay down the rules for ‘civilized’ and ‘progressive’ behaviour but need not follow these themselves. For instance, Salman Rushdie’s gratuitous satire on the Prophet in The Satanic Verses was supported and hailed in the west as an example of freedom of expression. But the same yardstick is rarely, if ever, applied when Jesus is displayed in a derogatory manner. Here’s Bhikhu Parekh, again: