Step Across This Line (20 page)

A number of different styles of work are evolving: the Stendhalian realism of a writer like Rohinton Mistry, the author of two acclaimed novels,
Such a Long Journey
and
A Fine Balance,
and of a collection of stories,
Tales from Firozsha Baag;
the equally naturalistic but lighter, more readily charming prose of Vikram Seth (there is, admittedly, a kind of perversity in invoking lightness in the context of a book boasting as much sheer avoirdupois as
A Suitable Boy
); the elegant social observation of Upamanyu Chatterjee (
English, August
), the more flamboyant manner of Vikram Chandra (
Love and Longing in Bombay
). Amitav Ghosh’s most impressive achievement to date is the non-fiction study of India and Egypt
In an Antique Land.
It may be that his greatest strength will turn out to be as an essayist of this sort. Sara Suleri, whose memoir
Meatless Days
is, like Bapsi Sidhwa’s
Cracking India,
a visitor from across the Pakistani frontier, is a non-fiction writer of immense originality and grace. And Amit Chaudhuri’s languorous, elliptic, beautiful prose is impressively impossible to place in any category at all.

Most encouragingly, yet another talented generation has begun to emerge. The Keralan writer Arundhati Roy has arrived to the accompaniment of a loud fanfare. Her novel,
The God of Small Things,
is full of ambition and sparkle, and written in a highly wrought and utterly personal style. Equally impressive are the debuts of two other first novelists. Ardashir Vakil’s
Beach Boy
and Kiran Desai’s
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard
are, in their very unalike ways, highly original books. The Vakil book, a tale of growing up near Juhu Beach, Bombay, is sharp, funny, and fast; the Kiran Desai, a Calvino-esque fable of a misfit boy who climbs a tree and becomes a sort of petty guru, is lush and intensely imagined. Kiran Desai is the daughter of Anita: her arrival establishes the first dynasty of modern Indian fiction. But she is very much her own writer, and welcome proof that India’s encounter with the English language, far from proving abortive, continues to give birth to new children, endowed with lavish gifts.

The map of the world, in the standard Mercator projection, is not kind to India, making it look substantially smaller than, say, Greenland. On the map of world literature, too, India has been undersized for too long. Fifty years after India’s independence, however, that age of obscurity is coming to an end. India’s writers have torn up the old map and are busily drawing their own.

March 1997

India’s Fiftieth Anniversary

[
Originally commissioned and published by
Time
magazine
]

There are really only two ways of arriving at your fiftieth birthday. You can (1) do it defiantly—by thumbing your nose at Father Time, throwing the mother of all parties, and announcing your intention of growing old disgracefully; or, (2) you can deal with it grumpily—by pretending it isn’t happening, hiding your head under the pillows, and wishing the day would just go away. On the occasion of my own recently completed half century, my inclinations led me unequivocally down route 1. Now it’s India’s turn; but though the fiftieth anniversary of the end of British rule is being loudly trumpeted around the world, India herself, while not entirely ignoring the event, is reacting with a halfhearted, shoulder-shrugging sourness, a certain category 2 lack of celebratory spirit that has raised many international observers’ eyebrows. You get the feeling the lady wishes she had lied about her age.

Indians have always been less susceptible to anniversary-itis than Westerners. The annual Republic Day (January 26) parades, popular with visitors to India largely on account of the participation of glamorously caparisoned elephants, have been mostly ignored by the locals. Independence Day itself (August 15) is also traditionally a lackluster affair. Ten years ago, on the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Raj, I was at the Red Fort in Delhi, filming the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s speech to a crushingly indifferent nation. The audience was so unimpressed, in fact, that very large numbers of people simply walked away while Rajiv was still speaking.

The Indian governing elite has long been wary about sanctioning public resources for mere display. It is believed that the public would disapprove of money wasted on, for example, fireworks displays, when it could be used for much-needed irrigation schemes. Against this, one could argue that the Indian public’s estimation of their leaders has fallen so low, because of recent corruption scandals and endemic inter-party bickering, that it’s hard to see how a little fun would make things worse. And there aren’t actually any special proposals for worthy new schemes on the table.

One could, therefore, wish for a touch more subcontinental hoopla as the big five-oh comes around. In India, such plans as have been unveiled range from the conventionally tedious (members of the Indian National Assembly will listen to recordings of speeches by the founders of the nation, Gandhi and Nehru), to the shoestring amateur dramatics of “restaging” the passing of the 1942 Quit India Resolution in Bombay, to the plainly bizarre—viz., the apparently serious proposal that the anniversary be marked by erecting a statue of Gandhiji (clad, no doubt, only in his legendary loincloth)
in Antarctica.
And in Pakistan—after all, it’s Pakistan’s fiftieth anniversary, too—even less is promised; according to the Pakistani High Commission in London, the Nawaz Sharif government has decided to “celebrate humbly.” Pakistani politicians are not noted for their humility, so this is, in its way, something of a first.

Fifty years ago, Mr. Nehru, taking office as India’s first prime minister, described Independence as the moment “. . . when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.” The explanation for the nation’s present unwillingness to throw its
Nehru topi
in the air lies in the subsequent battering administered by history to that newly liberated soul. If, in August 1947, many Indians had idealistic hopes of a great new beginning, then August 1997 is suffused by the sense of an ending. Another age is ending: the first age, one might say, of the history of post-colonial India. It has not been the promised golden age of freedom. The prevailing mood is one of disenchantment. Private citizens and public commentators alike readily provide a long, convincing list of reasons for this disenchantment, starting with the dark side of Independence itself; that is, of course, Partition. The decision to carve a Muslim homeland, Pakistan, out of the body of subcontinental India led to bloody massacres in which over a million Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims lost their lives. Partition has poisoned the subsequent history of relations between the two newborn states ever since. Why on earth would anyone want to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of one of the century’s great tragedies?

Like many secularist Indians, I would argue that Partition was an avoidable mistake, the result not of historical inevitability or the true will of the people but of political antagonisms—between Gandhi and M. A. Jinnah, between the Congress and the Muslim League—which gradually turned Mr. Jinnah, originally a strong opponent of the idea of a separate Muslim state, into its most ardent advocate and eventual founder. (Of course, the divide-and-rule tactics of the British did nothing to help.) My own family, like so many of Muslim origin, was cut in half by Partition. My parents opted to stay in Bombay, and so did my two uncles and their families, but my aunts and their families went to West Pakistan, as it was called until 1971, when East Pakistan seceded and became Bangladesh. We were lucky, escaping the worst of the bloodletting, but our lives were defined and shaped by the frontier separating us. Who would celebrate the descent of the Iron Curtain, the building of the Berlin Wall?

The period after Partition gives rise to a further, familiar litany of woes. The nation’s great social ills have not been cured. Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s famous slogan,
Garibi Hatao,
“Remove Poverty,” was an empty promise; India’s poor are as poor as ever, and more numerous than ever, thanks in part to her son Sanjay’s hated forcible-sterilization campaign during Mrs. G.’s mid-1970s period of dictatorial “emergency rule,” which set back other efforts at birth control by more than a generation. Illiteracy, child labor, infant mortality, the privations imposed by casteism on those of lower or no caste, all these great questions remain unanswered. (The placing of a garland of shoes, an old Indian insult, around the neck of a statue of the Dalit or Untouchable leader Dr. Ambedkar recently led to days of rioting in Bombay.)

Ancient violence takes on new forms. The practice of burning brides for their dowries is on the increase. There is terrifying evidence that ritual child sacrifice is being practiced by some followers of the cult of the goddess Kali. Communal violence erupts regularly. Terrorists advocating a separate Sikh state plant bombs in the Punjab, and terrorists advocating Kashmiri separatism abduct tourists in the beautiful Valley. Large-scale bloodshed has been seen in Meerut, in Assam, and in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, after the destruction by Hindu nationalists of the Babri Masjid, a mosque believed by some to stand on the birthplace of the Hindu deity Lord Ram.

My hometown, Bombay, for a long time believed itself immune to the worst of India’s communal evils; a series of explosions in 1993 destroyed that myth, giving proof that the idealisms, the innocence, of the first post-Independence age had been blown away, perhaps forever—and doing so in the heart of that great metropolis which contains all that is best and worst in the new, modernizing India, all that is most dynamically innovative and most hopelessly impoverished, most internationally minded and most narrowly sectarian.

And then there’s corruption. In my novel
The Moor’s Last Sigh,
a character offers his definitions of modern Indian democracy (“one man one bribe”) and of what he calls the Indian theory of relativity (“everything is for relatives”). Like most things written about India, this looks like an exaggeration but is actually an understatement. The scale of public corruption is now almost comically great. From the Maruti scandal of the 1970s (huge sums of public money disappeared from a “people’s car” project headed by Sanjay Gandhi) to the Bofors scandal of the 1980s (huge sums of public money went astray from an international arms deal that besmirched the reputation of Rajiv Gandhi) to the 1990s attempts to fix the movements of the Indian stock market by using, naturally, huge sums of public money, things have been going from bad to worse. Dozens of leading political figures, including the last Congress prime minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao, are under investigation for corruption. And then there is Laloo Prasad Yadav, chief minister of the state of Bihar (one of the poorest parts of India), who has been charged with involvement in Bihar’s so-called Fodder Scam, a swindle involving the diversion of, yes, huge sums of public money to support the rearing over many years of great herds of wholly fictitious cattle. More than $150 million is alleged to have vanished in a scheme that even the immortal Chichikov, anti-hero of Gogol’s great scam-novel
Dead Souls,
could never have invented.

It would be easy to continue in this vein. There is the rise of extremist Hindu nationalism, the decay of the Civil Service on which Indian democracy has depended for so long, and the tendency of the coalition supporting the minority Indian government of Prime Minister I. K. Gujral to fragment. Bits of it have been breaking off with distressing frequency—the Yadav faction has gone, and the Southern DMK party has also threatened to leave the coalition—and the government survives only because nobody really wants a general election; nobody, that is, except the militant Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the largest single party in Parliament, presently excluded from power but likely to win even more seats next time around, and thus be harder to gang up against. And, if you’re old-fashioned, you can complain about the effect of MTV culture on Indian youth, and if you’re a sports fan you can lament India’s lack of world-class athletes.

And yet I do feel like celebrating. The news is not all bad. (For example, the election of India’s first Untouchable president, Mr. Kocheril Raman Narayanan, will perhaps result in an assault on the worst excesses of casteism.) Above all, however, I want to extol the virtues of the most important thing that came into being on that midnight fifty years ago, the thing which has survived all that history could throw at it: that is, the so-called idea of India. I have spent much of my adult life thinking and writing about this idea. At the time of the last bout of anniversary-itis, in 1987, I traveled all over India asking ordinary Indians what they thought the idea was, and whether they found it to be a valuable one. Remarkably, given India’s size and diversity, and Indians’ strong regional loyalties, everyone I spoke to was entirely comfortable with the term “India,” entirely certain that they understood it and “belonged to” it; and yet, when one examined the matter more closely, one saw that their definitions differed radically, as did their ideas of what “belonging” might entail.

And that multiplicity, finally, was the point. In the modern age, we have come to understand our own selves as composites, often contradictory, even internally incompatible. We have understood that each of us is many different people. Our younger selves differ from our older selves; we can be bold in the company of our lovers and timorous before our employers, principled when we instruct our children and corrupt when offered some secret temptation; we are serious and frivolous, loud and quiet, aggressive and easily abashed. The nineteenth-century concept of the integrated self has been replaced by this jostling crowd of “I” ’s. And yet, unless we are damaged, or deranged, we usually have a relatively clear sense of
who we are.
I agree with my many selves to call all of them “me.” This is the best way to grasp the idea of India. India has taken the modern view of the self and enlarged it to encompass almost one billion souls. The selfhood of India is so capacious, so elastic, that it manages to accommodate one billion kinds of difference. It agrees with its billion selves to call all of them “Indian.” This is a notion far more original than the old pluralist ideas of “melting pot” or “cultural mosaic.” It works because the individual sees his own nature writ large in the nature of the state. This is why individual Indians feel so comfortable about the strength of the national idea, why it’s so easy to “belong” to it, in spite of all the turbulence, the corruption, the tawdriness, the disappointment of fifty overwhelming years.

Churchill said India wasn’t a nation, just an “abstraction.” John Kenneth Galbraith, more affectionately, and more memorably, described it as “functioning anarchy.” Both of them, in my view, underestimated the strength of the India-idea. It may be the most innovative national philosophy to have emerged in the post-colonial period. It deserves to be celebrated; because it is an idea that has enemies, within India as well as outside her frontiers, and to celebrate it is also to defend it against its foes.

July 1997