Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower (47 page)

We have become an urban species, living in a globe of cities. For the first time in human history, just over half the world’s population now lives in cities. In 1900, only 10 percent of us did; by 2050, 75 percent of us will. There is, properly speaking, a stampede to cities.

Never have we moved so much, so continuously. Economists are grappling with this shift, as are urban planners, demographers, sociologists, anthropologists, civil engineers. But what about the rest of us? What does it mean to the individual human being to go from village to city? What does it do to his or her mind?

Gujaratis like my family have been migrating for centuries to trade—to the East Indies, to Africa, to Britain, to North America. Indians have been in the vanguard of this restless migration—for reasons as varied as colonialism, indentured labor, economic want, or just the unexpected benefit of colonialism: the acquisition of the English language. Increasingly, people like us don’t just go from a village in India to a city in India; we go from a village in Punjab direct to Paris. There is no acclimation station. Within twenty-four hours, a villager from Gujarat is transported—
not to Bombay, but to New York. Jet-lagged, he tries to make sense of the subway, white women in short skirts, the Empire State Building. Everything is different in the city, but the city makes no accommodation for this difference. He is expected to adjust, immediately, even though he has traveled not just through countries but also through centuries.

The attraction of the urban is more successful than the attraction of religion; it is the one thing that most of us can agree on—that we like to live in cities. We are voting with our feet. The greatest mass conversion of our time isn’t to any religion; it is to the cult of the city. The story of the city has prepared the young people in the villages to inhabit the cities; they are no longer foreign to them when they arrive.

And how do we pay tribute for this conversion? How are we tithed? We give up: personal space, homogeneity, and nature. We live in ant colonies and commute in cattle cars. We mingle promiscuously with people unlike us. We walk on the hot concrete and miss the passing of the seasons.

These are huge things to give up. For all our history, for the entire duration of our collective memory, we have lived close to where we grew our food, with our caste, and with large spaces where we could be alone at midday. We flocked to medieval city-forts when we felt threatened in the countryside. When the threat passed, we went home to the land.

The central question of cities in our time is this: Within these enormous, historically unprecedented, and continuously mobile agglomerations of people, how do we form a community? Whom do they belong to, these twenty or forty or sixty million people living side by side, on top of each other?

These city dwellers are not local, not international, not internal, but what I call “interlocal.” The dictionary defines the word as “situated between, belonging to, or connecting several places.” Interlocals can be between the here and the there, belong to both and, most important, connect them all.

The communities of people that move from locality to locality, from village to city, or across countries are not exactly transnational; they owe no allegiance to nations. It is possible to identify yourself—as I do—as an Indian, an American, a resident of Greenwich Village and Bandra, a Hindu, a professor, a writer, a straight male, a father, middle class, a Democrat. All these identities are rooted in the local, the specific. To be a nationalist, you must exclude the international; a nation-state is often defined by what it’s not, like the BJP’s version of Hinduism.

Because of this plethora of identities, I find it impossible to hate or exclude the totality of a human being—because at least some of our identities overlap. If I meet a Pakistani, I may not like the part of him that is a nationalist Pakistani. But I will like the part of him that is a father. I will like the part of him that enjoys a samosa. I will like the part of him that is a brown man.

The trick to overcoming strife is not to melt into any sort of pot but to proliferate our identities. We are composed of many circles, many bubbles, within ourselves. Some are larger, others very small. Some of these bubbles touch, overlap. When we meet another person—when the Mexican busboy from Sunset Park meets the patrician from Park Avenue—a good predictor of whether two disparate people will find a likeness is how many circles intersect.

The interlocal can be quite firmly fixed in his localities. I live in Greenwich Village and Bandra, and I am attached to both of these places. But that doesn’t mean that I am globalized. Being interlocal is also something subtler, finer, than being globalized. It means that I can be a Bombayite Gujubhai and a Jackson Heights homeboy simultaneously. There’s also an international class of rich corporate flotsam, who move among the business hotels and convention centers of the world without ever being conscious of what is local in the cities they move amid.

The interlocal migrant, on the other hand, is keenly aware of his immediate physical surroundings and conducts commerce with them. He may be defined by his locality, but he is not limited by it. He plays a role in connecting the places he travels between. It is hard for the interlocal to conceive of going to war on behalf of his locality, unless it’s for a soccer game. America and India might conceivably go to war, but Jackson Heights could never go to war against Andheri, or the Upper East Side against Malabar Hill. That is because they are too alike and contain a large population of interlocals, who bring news of the humanity of one to the other.

There is a difference between being interlocal and translocal. The former implies connection, the formation of a bridge. The latter involves flying over. Someone who is interlocal does not travel
above
localities, transcend them, or flit about from place to place. He traverses
between
localities. He is keenly rooted in each to varying degrees.

To be interlocal is to be grounded. You may feel very much at home on the Lower East Side of New York, as well as in your parents’ community in Florida, as well as in your aunt’s home in Bandra. You may not even be conscious of nationality when moving between these very different places. But you are acutely aware of the texture of the neighborhoods; you have certain transactions with the people around you, you know where to eat, where to shop. You feel a strong allegiance to these places, but it is an open, even promiscuous sort of allegiance that allows for multiple, heterogeneous belonging. You can be an interlocal and a patriot—but, unlike the usual definition of patriotism, you can feel patriotic toward more than one country.

Interlocals bring news of food and music to the localities they travel between. Thus, in Jackson Heights, my family became aware of pizza, tacos, and falafel. And when we went back to India, we cooked it for our relatives, so that they could relish it, too. In multiple ways, interlocals enrich the places they connect.

The interlocal also lives in a state of longing. When he is in one of his localities, he dreams of the other. This makes him restless. He cranes his
neck and looks at a flock of birds and his heart stirs. As a result, interlocals often live in a state of continuous transit. The villager who moves to the city doesn’t just stay there. He migrates back to the village when necessary, stays to seed his ground (his farm, his wife), and then migrates back when there is need of money. The villagers who come to the city do not forget the village. They bring village rhythms, trees, roosters, gods with them to the city. The slums of the developing cities are interlocal communities: villages in the city.

The new interlocals are part of the cities and city borders they move to, without totally surrendering themselves to the new places. They feel no inclination to be fully an “American” or a “New Yorker” like previous migrants were under pressure to do. Their children might, to varying degrees. But even the children retain strong ties to the countries or cities their parents were born in. The children, too, are interlocal and better equipped for the twenty-first-century world. Where is home for them—for me?

I am one of the tribe that Stalin and then Hitler called “rootless cosmopolitans.” We have always been the target of hostility by nationalists, since we don’t have one overriding loyalty that can be exploited. But we are growing in number, every day, every year. My notion of home now—this geographically dispersed entity—will increasingly be home for all of us in the years to come. Most of my friends travel in this orbit. I meet people in New York this week whom I saw in Bombay last week and will see in London next week, but I am unlikely to ever run into them in St. Louis, Lucknow, or Liverpool. I do not live in America but I do live in New York. I am of the twenty-first century: a city dweller, a megalopolis dweller. I can move easily between Paris and New York and Bombay, but I am not at home for long in Fargo or Gorakhpur or Tours.

The first and third worlds are distributed over the cities of the world, and in each one, they live side by side. There are people who live in Malabar Hill as they do on the Upper East Side or in the Eighth Arrondissement; in each of these cities, their neighbors are the universal fraternity of the poor. There are sections of Harlem that have a higher infant mortality
rate than Bangladesh. The distance between Malabar Hill and the Dharavi slums, or between the Upper East Side and gritty East New York, is much greater than between Malabar Hill and the Upper East Side.

Sometime before I came back to Bombay, I had stopped thinking of the city as home. Home is not a geographically intact entity; it is where my people are. My map of home is composed of a living room in New York, a bedroom in Paris, another in Bombay, and a long-locked storeroom in Calcutta. I shuttle between these cities, to the houses and apartments of my friends and relations, and I am equally comfortable in all of these well-known spaces. The country outside these rooms is kept at bay; the furnishings and the routines of these rooms resemble each other. In all these cities, I have Colombian coffee in the morning, an Indian vegetarian lunch, and pasta and wine in the evening. If any component of this entity is missing, I long for it. But it is no longer an anguished longing, especially since the birth of my sons. Most of the time, home is pretty much wherever they happen to be.

I went to Bombay to find out if I could go home again. After two and a half years, I knew the answer: cursing it, complaining about it, hating it passionately sometimes, wanting to go back to America all the time, yes. I could live there and be accepted back into the country in every significant way—as an Indian, a Bombayite. They push you out, but they also pull you in. And, having made that discovery, having established that to my satisfaction, I was free to leave again—with confidence, once more into the world. I can be cosmopolitan because I know that I am Indian.

And so I came back to New York, twenty-three years after I first stepped out into the lobby of JFK Airport, with the knowledge that I will always be moving to and fro. I can live neither in New York nor in Bombay,
but in a personal hybrid of both. I have decided, or the decision has been made for me, that I am going to live a distributed existence. I will not choose. I assert, with confidence, with pride, that I am not rooted in any one city. I refuse to live in one room. My home has many rooms. My home is a palace; it is Earth.

Ahmed Rashid

Ahmed Rashid is a journalist and the author of five books, including
Taliban
and
Descent into Chaos.

Although the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent deprived India and Afghanistan of a common border, the two nations remained close to each other all the same. Both countries cast a wary eye on the newly formed nation of Pakistan; whenever Afghan king Zahir Shah felt too much pressure from his southern neighbor, or from Iran on his western border, he would hop on a plane to Delhi. There he would be received rapturously, reminding everyone in the region that Afghanistan had powerful friends and that India could exert influence well beyond its borders.

Delhi squandered this influence by supporting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. India was the only state in the region and the only democracy in the world to support the Soviet-backed Afghan communist regime in Kabul. The mujahideen fighters who toppled that regime had been funded by the CIA and the Saudis, and armed and trained by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. They bore little goodwill toward India. Delhi closed its embassy at the height of the civil war in the Afghan capital. When the Pakistan-backed Taliban captured Kabul in 1996, they made clear that Indian diplomats were not welcome back. Pakistan celebrated the severing of the link between India and Afghanistan as a great strategic victory.

Treating Afghanistan as another battleground in their long-standing rivalry has served neither Pakistan nor India well—and especially
not Afghanistan. At the end of 1999, Pakistani and Kashmiri terrorists humiliated and enraged Delhi by hijacking an Indian Airlines plane and flying it to Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. India had to release several dangerous militants from jail in order to get the passengers freed. After the World Trade Center attacks and fall of the Taliban just two years later, India retaliated by cozying up to the new, Western-backed government in Kabul.

In the decade since, India has given nearly $2 billion in aid to Afghanistan—substantially more than richer donors such as China or Saudi Arabia have offered. The money has been spread out among all Afghan ethnic groups from the Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks of the Northern Alliance—India’s traditional friends—to the majority Pashtuns in the south, homeland of the Taliban. India has provided planes for the national airline Ariana and buses for mass transport in Kabul. Its most visible project is a new parliament building in Kabul costing over $125 million; its most popular is a midday meal program for two million Afghan schoolchildren.

Pakistan’s military faces an Afghanistan friendly with India again, and an India deeply entrenched in the Afghan government, military, and economy. Indians train the Afghan army. Indian contractors have built seven hundred kilometers of roads, worth a quarter billion dollars, throughout the country. Once, all of Afghanistan’s imports and exports had to flow through the Pakistani port of Karachi. Since 2001, Iran and India have built an alternative road network that connects Afghanistan to the Iranian ports of Chabahar and Bandar Abbas on the Gulf. More than 60 percent of Afghanistan’s trade and imports now travels on this route, as does an ever-increasing flow of goods from Central Asia.