India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

by Ramachandra Guha

  Most stations on All-India Radio played several hours of classical music a day. Saturday night featured the prestigious ‘National Programme’, when a single artist played or sang for a full ninety minutes. Every year the AIR organized a Radio Sangeet Sammelan, a festival of live concerts held in towns and cities across India, whose recordings provided material for a month-long celebration of Indian music over the radio.

  Along with his love of the classical genres, Dr B. V. Keskar also had a particular distaste for films and film music. For the first few years of his tenure, popular music was banned on the airwaves. Fortunately, better sense prevailed and AIR launced a new station, Vividh Bharati, devoted exclusively to film music. The broadcasts soon found their way into millions of homes and attracted commercial advertisements that made the station self-supporting.49

  Without All-India Radio, Indian classical music might not have survived the death of the princely order. But AIR also played a wider role in national integration, by linking popular culture with high culture, and region with nation. The least appealing part of AIR was its news bulletins. These reported all events – national or international – from the perspective of the party in power, the propaganda made even less palatable by the monotonous drone in which it was delivered.

  From the early 1970s television began supplementing radio as a major source of entertainment (as well as propaganda). It was the latter objective which at first predominated, with programming on the state-owned Doordarshan focusing on the government’s achievements while appealing to citizens to grow more food and forge more steel. By the 1980s the channel had discovered the delights of programmes sponsored not by the state but by the market. The Ramayan and Mahabharat serials were trail-blazers here, attracting millions of viewers as well as millions of rupees in advertising. These were followed by soap operas which followed the saga of a family over fifty or more episodes. (An early success was Ramesh Sippy’s Buniyaad, which told the tale of a family from Lahore making a new life in India after Partition.) While viewers were entertained, the state was being enriched; in a mere ten years, 1975–85, the revenues of Doordarshan increased sixtyfold.50

  In the 1990s the airwaves were opened up to private operators. While FM stations sprung up in the cities, the main beneficiaries of this liberalization were television channels. These proliferated at an amazing rate, operating in all the languages of India. By 2000 there were more than 100 private channels in operation, some very specialized, focusing only on sport or business or film or news, others more catholic in their approach, taking in all the above subjects (and some more besides). This was a ferociously competitive market, with a high rate of mortality for new entrants and much poaching of staff. The consumers themselves were spoiled for choice – where once there existed a single state-owned channel, now there was a dazzling variety of alternatives on offer.

  X

  The critic Chidananda Dasgupta once claimed that ‘India’s popular cinema . . . speaks not in the international language of cinema, but in a local dialect which is incomprehensible to most countries in the world’.51 Dasgupta may have been speaking here as a friend and biographer of Satyajit Ray, and for Bengal, whose artistic standards have tended to be different from (or superior to) other parts of the country. In fact, from very early on, the Indian film has also appealed to (and resonated with) audiences that were not Indian.

  A pioneerin this regard was Raj Kapoor, scion of India’s most celebrated film family. (His father, Prithviraj Kapoor, was a celebrated stage and cinema actor; his two brothers, Shashi and Shammi, were notable film stars, a tradition continued by his two sons and their children.) Raj Kapoor was a sort of Indian Charlie Chaplin who played the tramp in self-directed films.52 He formed a memorable partnership with Nargis, a gorgeous beauty with whom he starred on seventeen occasions. When the duo showed up at a premier in Calcutta, they were mobbed by ‘hordes of autograph-hunting juveniles’.53 More surprisingly, they got the same kind of reception in the Soviet Union. When they visited the USSR in 1954 and again in 1956, old veterans of the Czar’s wars lined up to shake their hands, while pregnant ladies told them that they would call their child Raj, if it were a boy, and Nargis, if it were a girl.54

  Raj Kapoor’s breakthrough film was Awara, released towards the end of 1951, in which he played a lovable rogue forced by family circumstance to turn to a life of crime. The reviewer in an up-market English-language newspaper wrote sniffily of the ‘stilted artificiality’ of the film, of how its ‘continuous contrivance for effect’ had ‘shatter[ed]realism in the story and rob[bed]the picture of its most essential quality’.55 But the masses flocked to it nonetheless. And not just in India. When the film’s scriptwriter visited the Soviet Union, he discovered that ‘all bands and orchestras were playing tunes from this film, Russian and Ukrainian and Georgian teenagers were singing the Awara songs in chorus, and one met people who boasted that they had seen the film twenty or thirty times. In the whole history of the Soviet cinema no film had ever won such popularity, and no film or stage star had won such renown in so short a time’.56

  Hindi films have been popular across Africa, in the Middle East and in Southeast Asia. An anthropologist doing fieldwork in a Malay village had to take his respondents every week to the nearest cinema to see what they simply called ‘a Hindi’.57 And in Japan the films of the Tamil star Rajnikanth were, for a time, all the rage.

  Less surprising has been the popularity of Hindi films in countries that share the same broad culture. An American tourist in Pakistan found that in both public buses and private homes, the music that was most likely to be heard was Hindi film music. Pirated cassettes abounded, as did pirated DVDs of the latest films, which were officially banned in Pakistan to protect the domestic film industry.58 Further to the west, in Afghanistan, music of all kinds had been banned by the Taliban. But when that regime fell, it was reported that the briskest business was done by barbers who cut beards and by vendors who sold photos of Indian film stars. Songs by Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammad Rafi once more blared out of Kabul homes. More daringly, young men and women were inspired by Hindi films to choose their own life partners, in violation of family custom and tradition. A court in Kabul was besieged by cases brought by such couples, who pleaded that they be allowed to marry without the permission of their parents.59

  More recently Hindi films have found a market in western Europe and North America, this chiefly comprising what are now substantial and wealthy communities of diasporic Indians. In 2000 as many as four Hindi films featured in the top twenty releases in the United Kingdom that year.60 Three years later Time magazine reported that the worldwide audience for Indian films comfortably exceeded that for Hollywood – at 3.6 billion, it was a whole billion greater.61

  In view of this growing audience overseas, and in keeping with changing mores within India, film characters and themes were undergoing subtle shifts. Western clothes were now more common and ‘love marriages’ more acceptable. The vamp had been rendered redundant, since the heroine was now no longer pure and virginal but capable herself of intrigue and seduction. And the films themselves indulged in the unabashed celebration of wealth. In the past, even if the hero was not poor or unemployed, he tended to identify with the downtrodden. Now, however, it was ‘a party of the rich’, with the audience ‘invited to watch, from adistance’.62

  In the first year of the millennium a wax image of Amitabh Bachchan was unveiled at Madame Tussaud’s waxworks in London. This was a greater honour than being chosen ‘actor of the century’ by the BBC, in a poll biased by frenetic mass voting by Indians. Still, it was not Bachchan but some younger Indians who were emerging as the face of the industry in its new, globalized phase. One was the actress Aishwarya Rai, a former Miss World celebrated by Julia Roberts as ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’. Rai made the cover of Time magazine’s Asian edition, served on international film juries and was wooed by prominent Hollywood directors. A second was the actor Shahrukh Khan, the most successful ‘hero
’ of his generation, whose speaking and singing tours across Europe and North America were wild hits, attended by thousands from the ethnic Indian, Iranian, Afghan and Arab communities and by a growing number of Caucasians as well.

  Another international success was the composer A. R. Rahman. A child prodigy who composed his first film songs when he was not yet in his teens, Rahman first made a name in Tamil cinema before moving on to score Hindi films. His training (courtesy of his musician father) was in the classical Carnatic style, which he was adept at blending with rhythms and instruments from other parts of the world. In 2002 Rahman was invited by Andrew Lloyd Webber to compose the music for his Bombay Dreams. After that musical’s success in the West End and on Broadway, the Indian was commissioned to co-write the music for the first major stage adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, a production whose budget was £27 million, one-tenth of this being the fee of the composers. Then, in 2004, Rahman was invited to conduct the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, whose first conductor had been Sir Edward Elgar.63

  One who would have gloried in Rahman’s success was his fellow Tamil S. S. Vasan. Back in 1955 Vasan had pleaded with an audience of puritans in Delhi to abandon their ‘prejudice against film-men’. ‘Recreation and entertainment’, he argued, ‘are almost as important as food, clothing and shelter.’ If ‘public men work for the good of the public’, said Vasan, then ‘showmen do, as a matter of fact, work for the pleasure of the public’.64 At the time both parts of the statement were true, for the public men then active included Jawaharlal Nehru and B. R. Ambedkar. Fifty years later only the latter part holds good. Where public men now work mostly for private gain, the ‘showmen’ of India – among whom we must include singers and composers as well as actors, and women equally with men – still work creatively for the pleasure of their ever-growing public.

  Epilogue

  * * *

  Why lndia Survives

  The Sikhs may try to set up a separate regime. I think they probably will and that will be only a start of a general decentralization and break-up of the idea that India is a country, whereas it is a subcontinent as varied as Europe. The Punjabi is as different from a Madrassi as a Scot is from an Italian. The British tried to consolidate it but achieved nothing permanent. No one can make a nation out of a continent of many nations.

  GENERAL SIR CLAUDE AUCHINLECK, ex Indian army C-in-C, 1948

  Unless Russia first collapses, India – Hindustan, if you will – is in grave danger of becoming communist in the not distant future.

  SIR FRANCIS TUKER, ex Indian army General, 1950

  As the years pass, British rule in India comes to seem as remote as the battle of Agincourt.

  MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE,broadcaster and author, 1964

  Few people contemplating Indira Gandhi’s funeral in 1984 would have predicted that ten years later India would remain a unity but the Soviet Union would be a memory.

  ROBIN JEFFRET, historian, 2000

  I

  IN ITS ISSUE FOR February 1959, that venerable American magazine The Atlantic Monthly carried an unsigned report on the state of Pakistan. General Ayub Khan had recently assumed power via a military coup. What was missing in Pakistan, wrote the correspondent, was ‘the politicians. They have been banished from public life and their very name is anathema. Even politics in the abstract has disappeared. People no longer seem interested in debating socialism versus free enterprise or Left versus Right. It is as if these controversies, like the forms of parliamentary democracy, were merely something that was inherited willy-nilly from the West and can now be dispensed with.’

  The Atlantic reporter believed that ‘the peasants [in Pakistan] welcome the change in government because they want peace’. He saw law and order returning to the countryside, and smugglers and black-marketeers being putin their place. ‘Already the underdog in Pakistan’ is grateful to the army, he wrote, adding: ‘In a poor country ... the success of any government is judged by the price of wheat and rice’, which, he claimed, had fallen since Ayub took over.

  Foreign correspondents are not known to be bashful of generalizations, even if these be based on a single fleeting visit to a single unrepresentative country. Our man at the Atlantic Monthly was no exception. From what he saw – or thought he saw – in Pakistan he offered this general lesson: ‘Many of the newly independent countries in Asia and Africa have tried to copy the British parliamentary system. The experiment has failed in the Sudan, Pakistan and Burma, while the system is under great stress in India and Ceylon. The Pakistan experiment [with military rule] will be watched in Asia and Africa with keen interest.’

  Forty years later the Atlantic Monthly carried another report on the state of Pakistan. Between times the country had passed from dictatorship to democracy and then back again to rule by men in uniform. It had also been divided, with its eastern wing seceding to form the sovereign state of Bangladesh. And it had witnessed three wars, each one initiated by the generals whom the peasants had hoped would bring them peace.

  This fresh Atlantic report was signed, by Robert D. Kaplan, who is something of a travelling specialist on ethnic warfare and the breakdown of nation-states. Kaplan presented a very negative portrayal of Pakistan, of its lawlessness, its ethnic conflicts (Sunni vs. Shia, Mohajir vs. Sindhi, Balochi vs. Punjabi etc.), its economic disparities, and of the training of jihadis and the cult of Osama bin Laden.

  Kaplan quoted a Pakistani intellectual who said: ‘We have never defined ourselves in our own right – only in relation to India. That is our tragedy.’ The reporter himself thought that Pakistan ‘could be a Yugoslavia in the making, but with nuclear weapons’. Like Yugoslavia, Pakistan reflected an ‘accumulation of disorder and irrationality that was so striking’. Kaplan’s conclusion was that ‘both military and democratic governments in Pakistan have failed, even as India’s democracy has gone more than half a century without acoup’.1

  Kaplan doubtless had not read the very different prognosis of Pakistan offered in his own magazine forsty years previously. What remains striking are the very different assessments of India. In 1959, the Atlantic Monthly pitied India for having a democracy when it might be better off as a military dictatorship. In 1999 the same magazine thought this very democracy had been India’s saving grace.

  Two years later the Twin Towers in New York fell. As attempts were made by Western powers to foster democracy by force in Afghanistan and Iraq, India’s record in nurturing democracy from within gathered renewed appreciation. When, in April 2004, India held its fourteenth general election the contrast with Pakistan was being highlighted by Pakistanis themselves: ‘India goes to the polls and the world notices,’ wrote the Karachi columnist Ayaz Amir. ‘Pakistan plunges into another exercise in authoritarian management – and the world notices, but through jaundiced eyes. Are we so dumb that the comparison escapes us?’ ‘When will we wakeup?’ continued Amir, ‘When will we learn? When will it dawn on us that it is not India’s size, population, tourism or IT industry [that is] making us look small, but Indian democracy?’2

  II

  In those elections of 2004 some 400 million voters exercised their franchise. The ruling alliance, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, was widely expected to win by a comfortable margin, prompting fears of a renewal of the ‘Hindutva’ agenda. As it happened, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance defiedt he pollsters and came to power. The outcome was variously interpreted as a victory for secularism, a revolt of the aam admi (common man) against the rich and an affirmation of the continuing hold of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty over the popular imagination. In the larger context of world history, however, what is important is not why the voters voted as they did but the fact that they voted at all. Ever since the 1952 elections were described as the ‘biggest gamble in history’, obituaries have been written for Indian democracy. It has been said, time and again, that a poor, diverse and divided country cannot sustain the practice of (reasonably) free and fair elections.

  Yet it has. I
n that first general election voter turnout was less than 46 per cent. Over the years this has steadily increased; from the late 1960s about three out of five eligible Indians have voted on election day. In assembly elections the voting percentage has tended to be even higher. When these numbers are disaggregated they reveal a further deepening. In the first two general elections, less than 40 per cent of eligible women voted; by 1998 the figure was in excess of 60 per cent. Besides, as surveys showed, they increasingly exercised their choice independently, that is regardless of their husband’s or father’s views on the matter. Also voting in ever higher numbers were Dalits and tribals, the oppressed and marginalized sections of society. In northern India in particular, Dalits turned out in far greater numbers than high castes. As the political analyst Yogendra Yadav points out, ‘India is perhaps the only large democracy in the world today where the turnout of the lower orders is well above that of the most privileged groups.’3

  The Indian love of voting is well illustrated by the case of a cluster of villages on the Andhra/Maharashtra border. Issued voting cards by the administrations of both states, the villagers seized the opportunity to exercise their franchise twice over.4 It is also illustrated by the peasants in Bihar who go to the polls despite threats by Maoist revolutionaries. Dismissing elections as an exercise in bourgeois hypocrisy, the Maoists have been known to blacken the faces of villagers campaigning for political parties, and to warn potential voters that their feet and hands would be chopped off. Yet, as an anthropologist working in central Bihar found, ‘the overall effect of poll-boycott on voter turnout seems to be negligible’. In villages where Maoists had been active for years, ‘in fact, election day was seen as an enjoyable (almost festive) occasion. Women dressed in bright yellows and reds, their hair oiled and adorned with clips, made their way to the polling booth in small groups.’5 Likewise, in parts of the north-east where the writ of the Indian state runs erratically or not at all, insurgents are unable to stop villagers from voting. As the chief election commissioner wryly putit, ‘the Election Commission’s small contribution to the integrity of the country is to make these areas part of the country for just one day, election day’.6