Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower (38 page)

There is an element of pride also in the way India dictates to the rest of the world in cricketing matters. The Indian fan is today the most important entity in world cricket. He (and increasingly she) drives the sport globally. India gets what it wants in world cricket because people flock to the stadiums to watch a game and millions watch it on television. And while players from across the world come and play in the IPL, the BCCI does not allow Indian players to play T20 cricket in domestic leagues overseas. In cricket, as in no other field of endeavor, India is the world leader. It may have taken us
three centuries, but Indian cricket fans have gone from Culeys to rulers. Today India is to cricket as America is to geopolitics: the undisputed global superpower.

But the extraordinary influx of money has left cricket vulnerable to greed and corruption—as the recent wave of match-fixing allegations attests. The IPL’s sixth season in 2013 was marred by police investigations which led to accusations that players in the multimillion league had tried to squeeze even more money out of the game by fixing matches. Police charged, among other things, that some players used face towels to communicate with bookies, and that not just players but also some team owners and cricket officials were deeply involved. Happily, India’s national team responded to this sudden loss of confidence by winning cricket’s eight-nation mini world cup, the Champions Trophy in England in June, which immediately followed the close of the IPL season. Even so, the implications of the fixing scandal are clear: cricket, now one of India’s largest consumer products, is too big and too rich to be governed by well-meaning amateurs. We need professional managers, rigorous corporate-style governance, and greater transparency.

Above all, Indian cricket must continue to produce competitive teams across all the various formats. Cricket is unique in that it is the only sport played at this scale across different formats. Conditions matter more they do in any other team sport, and home and away are really that. With the resources available, India really has to be number one. India has often achieved the zenith and then slipped. In cricket, we can stand fast. We have come a long way from Cambay.

Mallika Sarabhai

Mallika Sarabhai is an actress, playwright, social activist, choreographer, and acclaimed Indian classical dancer.

In 1997 my mother, Mrinalini Sarabhai, and I found ourselves in the delightful position of being granted honorary doctor of letters degrees by the University of East Anglia. It was the first time the university had ever conferred such degrees on mother and daughter in the same year. As we waited in the dean’s office for the ceremony to begin, an older gentleman with a bushy beard sat facing us. “Are you from India?” he asked. “Yes,” said my mother. “We are dancers.” The man’s eyes brightened. “Ah, Indian dance,” he exclaimed. “I will never forget the performance of the young lady I saw in London, oh, it must have been 1949—at the Piccadilly Theatre. Even today, if I close my eyes, I can see her like a vision. If only I could remember her name . . .” The dancer he remembered was my mother on her maiden classical tour of Britain and Europe. The gentleman, we soon discovered, was the celebrated British novelist John Fowles.

Indian dance traveled to the West long before Fowles saw my mother perform at the Piccadilly. The Bengali dancer Uday Shankar blazed the trail, founding Europe’s first Indian dance company in Paris in 1931. Shankar, who spent much of his youth in London, had no formal training in Indian classical dance. But he was a gifted performer with a knack for adapting Indian dance forms to Western theatrical techniques. In tours of Europe and America throughout the 1930s, Shankar’s
Hindu Ballet
mesmerized audiences with the idea of exotic India. Two decades earlier, the American Ruth St. Denis, who began as a vaudeville “skirt
dancer” and later emerged as a pioneer of modern dance, kindled Western fascination with the mystic Orient with her interpretations of Indian classical dance. St. Denis’s first solo production,
Radha
, staged at Proctor’s Vaudeville House in New York City in 1905 and featuring exotic costumes and a trio of extras recruited from the Hindu community on Coney Island, purported to tell the story of Krishna and his love for a mortal maid.

But my mother’s 1949 tour was the first time truly authentic Indian classical dance had been performed outside of India. And what an impression she made. In France they called her “the Hindu Atomic Bomb”; in Spain, “the Tempest.” Over the next decade, as she toured the world with her dance company, Darpana, people across Europe, North and South America, and Asia got their first glimpse of the riches of Indian art.

The magic of those performances lingered for decades. In 1994, when I myself performed in Central America, part of a tour sponsored by the Indian Council of Cultural Relations, I encountered many people who vividly remembered my mother. In Lima, Peru, we stayed in a cavernous residence belonging to the Indian embassy. Civil war raged and the sol seemed in freefall against the U.S. dollar. Just before our first performance, an elderly couple asked to see me outside the green room. They had brought with them a record that had been produced for my mother’s tour in ’49, bearing the distinctive flourish of her signature on the jacket. Was I related to her? When I said I was her daughter, they grasped my hands and held them, their eyes wet, and told me they had never experienced such beauty as her performance.

Throughout that tour, I had many similar experiences. In Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas had agreed not to bomb cultural institutions in their uprising against the government, I performed at the Rubén Darío Theater. An old gentleman took me by the hand, walked me to a green room, opened the lock with great care, and showed me the armchair where my mother had rested between matinee and evening performances. In
Mexico City, a senior journalist gave me an Aztec earring. “Your mother enchanted me, and I gave her a bangle,” she said. “You make her proud, so I have come to give you this.”

The West’s fascination with Indian culture surged in the 1960s, thanks partly to the brilliance of two Bengali classical musicians: Ali Akbar Khan, the sarod virtuoso, and the sitarist Ravi Shankar. Ravi, Uday’s younger brother, had learned to dance and to play various Indian instruments as a teenager while touring with the
Hindu Ballet
at the age of thirteen. He later abandoned the tour to study the sitar in the classical manner under strict tutelage of Allauddin Khan, chief musician to the maharaja of Maihar. Of course, in popularizing Indian classic music in the West, Shankar had a little help from his friends, John, Paul, George, and Ringo. George (Harrison, that is) was so taken with the sitar that in 1966 he traveled to Srinagar to spend six weeks studying with Shankar, after which he famously used the instrument to record “Norwegian Wood.” In the last frantic years of the ’60s, Shankar toured with the Beatles, recorded with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, composed a Hollywood movie score, and performed at the Monterey Pop Festival and, in 1969, at Woodstock. Shankar and Akbar opened music schools in California, and both went on to spend most of the rest of their lives in the United States. This was the heyday of flower power, and Indian music seemed a good pathway to nirvana.

In those years, several Indian classical dancers, including Indrani Rehman, Ritha Devi, and Janak Khendry, also made their homes in the West, where they did most of their performing and teaching. The painters P. Mansaram and Natvar Bhavsar created new forms with influences from the United States and Canada. Indian art gained recognition and developed a following. And yet, as the Summer of Love gave way to Altamont and the Manson murders, Indian music, dance, and art suffered from association with the counterculture and lost their hold on the imagination of Western baby boomers. By the late ’70s, Indian dance and music appealed mainly to niche audiences—Indophiles already in love with or studying the country, recalcitrant flower children still grooving to ragas, and pot-smoking hippies wearing
Bandini
T-shirts sold for a
song on the streets of New York and Los Angeles. In the mainstream of Western consciousness, India languished and came to be perceived once again as the land of the cow and the poor.

Revival has come slowly. One source of support came from the Indian diaspora as it spread to every country of the world. As more and more Indian students took up residence in Western universities, universities began to show more interest in India. In the United States and Europe, many leading universities introduced or expanded Indian or South Asian programs. Western interest in “things Indian” received an enormous boost when the world-famous theater director Peter Brook decided to produce the great Indian epic the Mahabharata for a world audience in late 1984. Brook had had a cult following across the world for more than four decades, and his plays sold out wherever they were produced. He was considered the twentieth century’s greatest theater director. For him to take up the most complex of all Indian epics, and to want to produce it for all humanity, with an international cast, brought a frisson of expectation among theater lovers the world over. If Brook was using an Indian epic as his magnum opus, perhaps there was more to India than the cows.

When it opened at the Avignon Festival in July 1985,
The Mahabharata
, with me the only Indian in the cast, became the most talked of production of the decade, if not the century. It pulled in audiences who had no interest in India or its arts. Over the next five years, performing it hundreds of times in countries as diverse as France and Japan, transforming spaces like airport hangars and flower markets into venues for the twelve-hour epic, this production brought a new India to people and created a general interest in India and its arts and literature that no presentation by an Indian had ever before generated. Here was an India that was not exotic but universal—a profound and philosophical narrative
that could be the story of all humankind—in a production that preserved essentials of Indian culture without fetishizing it. Audiences were taken into a deeper, truer India. Today, twenty-eight years later, the film and TV versions generate the same excitement and lead people to seek a deeper exploration of India and its arts than the occasional documentary on the drought or plague shown in the West.

The opening of India, post-1990, has seen a tsunami of collaborations, cross-cultural exchanges, tours, workshops, and concerts not only in the performing arts but also in the textile arts, design, sculpture, painting, and installation art. The Indian diaspora has produced world-renowned artists with a more global sensibility, working out of different corners of the world. The diaspora, wealthy and increasingly influential, has also ensured the growth of Bollywood, its music and dancing, with important universities now teaching Bollywood dancing. Major museums regularly present known and unknown arts, with the Musée d’Orsay shining the spotlight, for the first time, on our rich autochthonous culture. Fashion, both haute couture and prêt-à-porter, reflects many Indian strands, and our own homegrown designers are dressing the stars and the commoners alike. The growing clout of the diaspora and the continuing search for the “real and pure” on the part of Western artists, along with the rising economic prowess of India itself, have seen that these trends are financed and kept alive.

Is that enough? In the West, for many hundreds of years, the arts, especially the performing arts, were essentially entertainment. In India, for two thousand years, the arts have been rather a mirror of our lives, a medium to make us more humane, more cultured. The performing arts have spoken of what is central in life: what is good or bad, how to resist the false values of a mirage-creating world, how to remain true. They have, in fact, been the mediating, interpretive side of our philosophy, simplifying, for the uneducated or the uninitiated, the true values and meaning of life. Sculpture, as in the erotic friezes in Khajuraho, teaches us that the body is but a means to a higher self; folk music teaches rites of passage; the lyrics in the songs of dancing speak of the need to let go of the externals and focus on the essential to find the core soul; and ancient
wall paintings help us realize that we need to look beyond what our eyes perceive to see the truth.

As Indian art has become a global phenomenon, Indian artists seem to have lost, for the moment, this core aspect of the arts as a socializing influence, as a centering force of life. Indian art, too, has become merely entertainment rather than the language of introspection. My mother, in her work
Memory Is a Ragged Fragment of Eternity
in 1963, attempted to bring back this relevance of art as a reflection of reality by speaking of the scourge of violence against young brides and dowry deaths. At Darpana, we continue to do so. In our arts, we have the possibility of becoming a beacon in a lost and unhappy world. India must find this core again.

Viswanathan Anand

Viswanathan Anand is India’s first chess grandmaster and since 2007 the reigning world chess champion.

I was about six when I was first asked why I wanted to play chess. I replied, “to become world chess champion.” I had only the vaguest notion of what becoming a world chess champion meant, but it seemed like a cool line. What I did understand was the bemused laughter the line elicited from grown-ups. It was a knowing put-down: “Don’t children dream the most impossible, laughable things?” On one occasion I remember being asked, “Do you really think an Indian can be a world champion? Ever?”

When I began playing in chess tournaments in the early 1980s, the holy grail of Indian chess was to become a grandmaster. India had a few international masters, and there had been Indian players who had beaten world champions. But our nation had yet to produce a grandmaster. That wasn’t surprising: In those days, it was virtually impossible to find good chess books in India, and few Indian chess players were able to travel beyond India to see firsthand how the game was played.