Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower (40 page)

But this fever is mild in comparison to the madness that infected the earlier generation of India’s urban middle class—the romance of socialism that spawned the dark ages of planned economy and the suspicion of foreign corporations, which destroyed the great republic for decades and denied India’s poor the opportunity to leap beyond their circumstances. That earlier romance was consummated without a trace of irony by the beneficiaries of socialism’s extraordinary inequities.

A few female acquaintances now join the three friends. The Accountant poses a question to the Line Manager that involves the word “diaphanous,” confident that the Line Manager will not know its meaning. The Accountant lets out a triumphant snicker. The Director of Strategy laughs, too, to confirm that he knows the meaning of the word. The Line Manager finds himself once again on the receiving end of the humiliation that passes for friendly banter. Fortunately for him, their reunion comes to a sudden end. The Director of Strategy spies a pretty woman who had spurned him in college. He walks swiftly, his enormous buttocks bouncing. He heads not toward her but to his wife, whom he hugs and kisses in the hope that the other woman will be seared by the sight.

At other social occasions, the three friends have often sung the common
middle-class lament—that India’s greatness has been squandered by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, which has remained at the helm of the country for decades. How tragic that India’s political leadership should be handed down from one generation to the next as if it were some family heirloom. And yet the three friends themselves are beneficiaries of their own families. Their parents invested huge sums to provide them with the unfair advantages that insulate them from the vast majority of boys and girls their own age—not unlike the way the Gandhi dynasty has promoted its own.

They are a part of India’s inheritance economy and thus effectively recessionproof. Their lifestyle and spending choices reflect their own professional successes less than their success in cultivating the affections of their parents. In return, their parents exercise an extraordinary level of control over their lives. The Accountant remains in terrified awe of his father, just as he was in college. Should his father call him in the middle of dinner, the Accountant will rise in a half stand. He still thinks of the girl he once dated but had to stop seeing at his father’s command.

The bar has filled with happy patrons. Waiters scurry here and there with silver trays. Waiters in India know how to show servility. They cast themselves as shadows because that is what is expected of them. The three friends consider this proper hospitality: The shadow comes with a tray, the master accepts its offering or flicks it away. The West will never understand true hospitality. The indignities of egalitarianism and the rituals of hospitality cannot go hand in hand. In a world that is not feudal, how can there be hospitability? If you want to see the three friends really suffer, you have only to observe them at a good New York hotel. “Where is the service?” The confidence and flamboyance of the hotel staff in New York will be interpreted by our three friends as “too much attitude.” There are hierarchies all over the world, but in India they are clearly defined. That is what makes India a middle-class paradise—the clarity of the lines.

But there is trouble in paradise. While two decades of economic reforms have favored the old seasoned, highly educated urban middle classes more than any other class, there are new economic castes today
created by real estate booms and the drip-down effect of massive political corruption. Expensive restaurants in India are confusing places. The refined must share the space with the uncouth. Owning a BMW is no longer evidence that one is literate. And the government’s modest rural employment program has reduced the pool of cheap factory hands, drivers, and house help, raising the wages demanded by those available for hire. “Lowly” Indians have forgotten their place. Maids talk back. Drivers quit their jobs when spoken to rudely, especially by women.

And a new law passed by the government has breached the greatest fortress of the Indian middle class: schools. The law requires all private schools to reserve seats for students from “economically weaker sections.” The parent groups at several schools tried their best to resist, with at least one of them even declaring in writing that they fear their children will be infected by the diseases of the poor. Another concern was that the children of the poor would be constantly reminded of their inferiority—by the comparative shabbiness of their clothes, the poor quality of their footwear, the swarthiness of their skin, or their inability to take gifts to birthday parties. A woman in the bar had a nervous moment when she took her little daughter to a birthday party and the girl asked an impoverished classmate why her mother was dressed “like a servant.” Despite the cruelty of such encounters, the fact is that thousands of impoverished children today find themselves in schools they could not have otherwise attended—schools that are helping them make the leap into territory that was once strictly out-of-bounds.

The three friends, with their modest gifts, got through their lives competing against very few to achieve their beautiful lives in India. Their children will not.

But for now the paradise stays. And there is much laughter in the bar.

Vishakha N. Desai

Vishakha N. Desai is president emerita of the Asia Society and special adviser to the president of Columbia University, where she is a professor.

In their all-consuming focus on economic development, are Indians missing the forest for the trees? A hundred years from now, what will Indians see as their unique contribution to the world? A century on, the world won’t think much of the “India story” if it is just another saga of economic upsurge, especially if that saga culminates in the civilization’s largest tangle of sprawling megacities, environmental degradation, and depletion of water tables across the entire subcontinent.

Can’t we imagine another, better legacy?

In searching for a better India a hundred years hence, it helps to look back a hundred years into our past. As the twentieth century dawned with India chafing under British rule, a young Western-educated lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi stepped forward with a powerful new idea about how to liberate India from imperialism. Gandhi’s call for nonviolent struggle inspired Indians and non-Indians alike. Drawing as much on indigenous Indian concepts and traditions as on Western intellectual thought, Gandhi’s unique approach to fighting for freedom made it possible for oppressed peoples everywhere to demand their rights without demonizing their oppressors. When India gained independence in 1947, the world looked to India—not because it was rich or economically advanced but because of the uniqueness of its message. The world saw India as more than just another emerging market; it expected India to do great things.

In 1913, just as Gandhi was gaining recognition for his ideas, another
great Indian thinker, Rabindranath Tagore, won the Nobel Prize for literature. The Nobel selection committee hailed the great Bengali poet, the first non-European ever awarded that honor, as “a new genius to the world.” Tagore’s message of bringing humanity together, overcoming barriers of chauvinism, jingoism, and cultural ignorance, won him admirers around the world. He celebrated the coexistence of multiple cultures—Hindu, Muslim, and British—championing the notion that India’s heterogeneity was essential to the nation’s identity and its unique place in the world.

Gandhi and Tagore were Indian thinkers with universal souls. Their ideas inspired, and were inspired by, the world, and were at the same time deeply rooted in the Indian tradition. These great men were open to inspiration from all sources and were passionate about projecting their message beyond India. They foresaw a modern India in a global context—a nation proud of its heritage but not a slave to it, an active member of the community of nations with something important to contribute.

Were Gandhi and Tagore with us today, they would be delighted to see that contemporary India is a flourishing democracy and remains a unified nation. Gandhi, in particular, would take comfort in the knowledge that in this century far fewer Indians suffer from hunger than in the last. But surely he would be dismayed that hundreds of millions of Indians remain illiterate and live without adequate shelter, health care, or access to clean water. He would applaud citizens’ protests against government corruption and mistreatment of women. But he would be saddened that his message of nonviolent resistance is often misused in the pursuit of narrow special interests rather than to advance the greater good.

Tagore, meanwhile, might lament that the heterodox, multilayered identity of India is neither nurtured within India nor projected abroad. Both of these great men from India’s past might wonder: What does India stand for today?

President Barack Obama posed a similar question at a White House briefing I participated in prior to his 2010 trip. “How does India see itself in the world?” he asked, and “Why does India’s vision feel somewhat murky compared to China’s?” I replied that Indians and non-Indians
have focused on India’s recent economic takeoff, which is barely two decades old. In political terms, India remains a young country; its sense of national identity is still evolving. But in historical terms, Indian identity has its roots of cultural traditions and philosophical ideas dating back thousands of years. This rich, multilayered history engenders a strong sense of the Indian self, always defined in relation to the family, community, the larger world, and the cosmos beyond. In today’s India, I explained, neither the political nor the educational leadership has made a concerted effort to project an Indian identity combining the richness of its millennial traditions with its maturing political reality and its recent economic progress.

So how can India combine its millennial cultural and philosophical values with its modern political cohesion and contemporary economic success to create a cogent message for itself and the world? If we are to cultivate the Gandhis and Tagores of our own time, we must refocus national priorities on matters ranging from education to cultural infrastructure.

One problem is that in today’s India, whether in meetings of the national planning commission or discussions around the family table, education is equated primarily with jobs and material prosperity. India’s most promising students are expected to seek degrees in mathematics, science, or commerce. They are rarely encouraged to study history, philosophy, or our remarkable cultural heritage. In fact, recent reports suggest some of India’s most prominent universities are closing their philosophy departments. This trend leaves me aghast and should be of deep concern to India’s educational leaders. The liberal arts and the humanities should be accorded a place of prominence and prestige in national curricula at all levels, including—indeed, especially—on the campuses of the Indian Institutes of Technology, rather than dismissed as an irrelevant academic
backwater upon which we set our weakest students adrift. India cannot hope to fashion a unique modern vision—a vision that combines the material and the spiritual, the rational and the intuitive, the self and the community—without the active engagement of its best and brightest students. We must inspire our sons and daughters to seek a deeper, more rigorous understanding of their extraordinary cultural and intellectual inheritance.

That objective can’t be realized without significant changes in government policy and current spending priorities. India, with one of the world’s oldest and richest civilizations, devotes barely 0.02 percent of its annual budget to preserving and promoting its culture—a pittance compared to France, Britain, and Japan. While some argue cultural preservation is a luxury developing nations can ill afford, India’s budget for culture lags far behind that of China. In 2012, China spent $2.5 billion on cultural services, an increase of 20 percent from the previous year. China’s central government allocates 0.125 percent of its annual budget to cultural services, excluding funding for free admission to cultural facilities and spending on digital libraries. Former Chinese president Hu Jintao proclaimed cultural development a top priority and pledged to build one hundred new museums in the coming decade. If India is to take matters of culture as seriously as China, India’s government must raise cultural spending to a level at least comparable to that of China, not just for the maintenance of monuments and administration of museums but also to train personnel and produce and distribute educational materials for the nation’s schools. The government must also explore innovative methods to support the recent emergence of private museums in India, encouraging public-private partnerships and thereby infusing a new spirit of entrepreneurialism into the cultural realm.

There is an economic dimension to this as well. By increasing its emphasis on culture, India’s state and central governments will create new jobs, ranging from museum management to tourism and archaeology. We are finding all sorts of ways that traditional Indian practices of building, healing, and conserving can be applied to modern fields of endeavor as diverse as architecture, public health, and environmental preservation.
More important, a stronger cultural infrastructure will foster a renewed sense of Indian identity.

The millennial civilization of India offers many gifts with relevance for our time. In all materially advanced societies, there is a deep yearning to find answers that go beyond creature comforts. The global popularity of yoga, ayurveda, and Indian spirituality suggests that the world is ready to receive a more holistic message from India. What we need now is not so much a romantic re-creation of the past but rather a rigorous study to adapt the best of the old traditions to modern times.

Indians are justifiably proud of their economic progress and political resilience. But as Gandhi and Tagore knew so well, economics and politics alone cannot satisfy deeper longings in the human soul. It is time for India to reimagine its identity, rejuvenating its millennial wisdom and combining it with current material development. India can then assume its rightful place among the world’s great nations, not simply because of its economic prowess but also by virtue of its vision.