Some Final Thoughts About India

This is the last blog post I wrote in India. Unlike the narrative blog entries I posted, this one sums up in a tentative way my thoughts about the country after two visits. It reflects discussions I had with others on the trip, particularly Ross Miller, with whom I traveled alone for the last ten days of my time there. We had many spirited discussions about the issues I cover here, and it's a little difficult at this point to unthread his insights from mine.


It's 1:20 in the morning in New Delhi and I'm waiting at the gate for my 3:05 flight to Brussels and then a connection to Chicago. The new, sleek Terminal 3 here, which handles all international flights, is jarring to return to after everything I’ve seen in my travels around India. It underscores the dramatic division I’ve seen throughout India between the well off and the destitute, the high tech info parks and the slums, new cars sharing the road with carts pulled by bullocks, the slickly dressed businessmen and the wandering ascetics and sadhus wrapped in saffron or white robes with painted faces, a walking stick in one hand and a beggar’s cup in the other. Half the people I’ve seen on this trip could never imagine such a place. The terminal here is vast and gleaming, full of the same shops and restaurants I’d expect to see in Paris, Rome or London. Much of Delhi has changed since the Commonwealth Games (I was last here in 2008) – all of the cows have been moved to the countryside, many of the slums appear to have been cleared out, the new sections of the subway are  sleek and modern, and everything seems a bit more orderly. The new airport is a signal example of these changes, and what they portend for the future. All of the airports we've used are brand new, and the rapid, heavy investment in them is revealing. The older infrastructure -- the road system, the trains, the electrical grid and plumbing systems are in many places in terrible shape, but the airports are twenty-first century, brand new and very efficiently run.

This is no accident, for airports are central to the new, “shining” India. The burgeoning middle class, foreign businesspeople, and tourists, all plugged into the explosive economy of globalization are using the airports, and it seems like India can't build them fast enough. Investment in these airports is understandable, but it vividly dramatizes the class divisions that are so stark in India, for the majority of Indians live in villages or large towns that lack adequate roads, plumbing, sewage treatment facilities, and reliable electrical systems, and many who scrape by in India's cities live in slums, tents near the construction sites they work at, or in terribly cramped and dilapidated buildings. In many, many places India lacks the kind of infrastructure most people in the West in the late 1950's would have expected. Indeed, many people live under conditions that substantially haven't changed since the seventeenth century. India is pouring its money into the airports while the rest of these problems fester. Money follows money while those who have nothing get little attention, locked into lives that would be shocking to most visitors from the West. It seems to me the future of India depends upon the extent to which it acknowledges and then deals with this vast paradox.

I wrote about these problems when I visited India in 2008, but from the more narrow perspective of how the Gandhians my group met with were dealing with the competing demands of villages and cities. Many of the activists, writers, and environmentalists we met with during that trip were committed to Gandhi's critique of modernity. Preoccupied with improving the quality of village life, they were often openly hostile toward the city. For Gandhians the city represents the West, the history of colonization by Britain, environmental pollution, and everything that is wrong with contemporary globalization. While the logic of this position is understandable in both historical and political terms, it seems to me framed in an overly idealistic way that ends up ignoring the realities of social, economic and political life in contemporary India and is therefore counter-productive. To think through the problems of urbanizing India one must get beyond the orthodoxy of a rigid Gandhianism and face a number of ironies, paradoxes, and contradictions related both to economic, environmental, and cultural life in India. In terms of the environment, there's no denying that village life leaves a modest, manageable footprint on the environment, whereas life in India's large cities takes a terrible toll in terms of pollution of every kind (the air quality in the cities is terrible, the heaps of trash unimaginable until you see it). In terms of the quality of cultural and social life, the village has a kind of social cohesion and cooperative cultural structure lacking in the chaos and alienation those new to the city and seeking menial labor no doubt experience (although from what I’ve read corruption in villages is as big a problem as it is in cities). And in purely economic terms, while people in villages live close to the land with little money or modern comforts, there isn’t the kind of destitution here you see in the city (the Indian writer and critic, Ashish Nandy, has made the distinction between poverty and destitution and argues that no one in India's villages experiences destitution – poverty, yes, but it is managed by the social system in the villages and, according to Nandy, no one goes without basic needs). Compared to village life, then, the environmental, cultural, and economic conditions in cities must be shocking. The environment is degraded, there is destitution, and the culture of the modern Indian city must strike the newly arrived villager as fragmented, alienating, and largely meaningless in the context of village life.

This last point, about the cultural transformations the city fosters, is worth pausing over. India's culture is profoundly religious (Hindu, Muslim, Jain, Sikh, and Christian) and everywhere in the cities and large towns are temples and shrines. People visit them day and night. But much of the culture here is secular and driven by the kind of materialism associated with globalization. Seen from this perspective, the village seems a much more positive and stable place than the city. But the pull of the city is inexorable because the economic imperative trumps everything else. There is a fundamental poverty (again, using Nandy's distinction) in the villages that I think is simply becoming unacceptable to the younger generation who see what life is like in the cities and in the West on televisions that glow here and there in the villages and draw young people to what the city has to offer. The rhythms of life in the village, and the largely agrarian and difficult work done there, is just not attractive to young people. This all amounts to one big trade off, but it's a trade off the millions ever day streaming into India’s cities seem willing to make, and this kind of thing has been happening around the world for generations wherever modernization takes hold. Traditional ways of life, identity, social and cultural structures, religious practices, styles of cooking, dressing and building are inevitably transformed under the forces of modernization, whether animated by colonial, regional or global forces. On the one hand people improve their economic lives under modernization, but on the other hand traditional identities and ways of living are transformed or erased altogether.

So, while the downside of modernization fueling the growth of Indian cities is clear, modernity draws young people from the village in waves, and that is only going to continue. I've talked to many Indians about this, and they all say the same thing. You can't get the younger generation to stay in the villages to do back-breaking agricultural work for subsistence wages when the city and its opportunities (and its culture) pulls at them for all the reasons I've just rehearsed.  I had an interesting discussion about this with Krishna Pillai, who we stayed with in Kerala for a few days. He explained that so many of the rice paddies along the backwaters of central Kerala have gone fallow because there is no one to work them. Young people simply don't want to do this kind of work. They're interested in jobs in the technology sector, in engineering, or in medicine, and so they reject working the paddies in favor of school and the city. Of course this means that the traditional social and cultural world of the villages around the paddies is changing dramatically, and may in fact be threatened with disappearance altogether. The big industry now in the backwaters of Kerala isn't rice but tourism. Many of the paddies lie fallow. The huge boats that used to ply the waterways piled high with rice have been turned into the kind of houseboats we enjoyed in Kerala, floating homes with two or three air-conditioned bedrooms, a kitchen, multiple bathrooms, a large dining room, and viewing decks, housing that eclipses in quality, space, and luxury, the way most Indians live.

Kerala is a relatively wealthy state, but much of the money comes from Keralans who work abroad in construction or engineering in the gulf states and send money back home that then gets invested in a variety of ways and is supplemented by the rise of the kind of infotech parks like the ones we saw popping up here and there as we drove around Kerala. During one of our drives I saw a large billboard that brought into stark focus the changes I've observed in India. It featured the image of a smiling, young, 20-something man in a clean white shirt and dress pants with a messenger bag hanging at his side, looking out at the far horizon. It was an advertisement for some sort of school, and at the top, in big block, boldfaced letters were the words: Study. Work. Migrate. This, in essence, is the deep structure at work in the new, shining India. Whether the journey of migration is internal or transnational, the trajectory and its effects are the same. Young people go to school, learn English, are exposed to new opportunities in the technology fields, engineering, or medicine and, drawn to work in these areas, they migrate either to the cities of India or abroad, to the gulf states or, like the young man from Bangalore sitting next to me on the plane from Delhi to Brussels, to places like the University of Iowa to earn an MBA and then try to get a job in the U.S. (where he'll earn three times with his degree what he'd earn in India, which still would be a small fortune by the standards of a vast majority of the Indians I've seen on my two trips here).

Study. Work. Migrate. This, of course, is central to what we call globalization, a contemporary word for the effects of development and modernization in places like India that have been going on and accelerating since the rise of the Mughal Empire and then the imposition of the British Raj, a profoundly double-edged epoch of domination which paradoxically altered India in negative ways but which also provided the means for it's great leap into the twentieth century (a railway system, democratic political and social institutions, English, etc.). Each of these are profoundly problematical, of course, for the rail system was designed by the Brits to get booty out of the country rather than to move people around in it, the rise of English as a dominant currency of power serves as a kind of exclamation point for the continued dominance of the West in India that has marginalized the power of indigenous languages and people, and democratic and social institutions are rife with corruption. In spite of all this, political democracy, it seems to me, has been remarkably successful here in structural terms, even if imposed from without on a culture whose entrenched caste system seems absolutely alien to it. Indeed, this is the great miracle of democracy in India, at least according to many of the commentators I've been reading, that the founding fathers of India, Nehru and the untouchable Ambedkar most prominent among them, were able to turn an India whose population was made up of a diverse set of religious groups historically committed to an entrenched caste system into a democracy, a system basically alien to the historical structures that determined social, political, and economic life here prior to the twentieth century.

However, one should not confuse the structural success of the democratic system of “one-man-one-vote” with economic democracy, for India’s vast poverty and uneven modernization belies the idea there is anything close to such a thing here. One’s impression of how wealthy India is, how dramatically its economic profile is changing, will largely depend upon where one goes in India.

If you come looking for the new, shining India in places like Gurgaon (the new New Delhi) or in Bangalore you'll find it. But these pockets of development and modernization (hooked as they sometimes are to free-standing off-the-grid contemporary housing developments) are small islands of wealth in a vast sea of impoverished towns and villages, and the dilapidated housing and slapdash commercial structures that dominate India. I don't make this observation simply to be critical of India, a country I love. It's just a simple fact that the India journalists like Tom Friedman write about is a tiny sector of a vast country where most people reside not in the twenty-first century but in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, or early twentieth centuries. Ashish Nandy, in an interview with Christopher Lydon, has observed that India is one of the few countries where one can choose to live in any century, but this way of underscoring the wonderful diversity of India tends to elide the fact that people do not so much choose to live in these earlier epochs as find themselves locked into them. They have no choice. Surely there are many people living in villages who want to be living there. Some of them no doubt want no part of the towns and cities linked to modernity in India, but all over India in my travels I've observed people clearly trapped in living conditions most people would escape in a minute if they could. There are systematic and deeply institutionalized reasons for this kind of entrapment and they won't go away without a systematic and institutionally mobilized effort on behalf of the government. As I note earlier, the more India's wealth (and the wealth from abroad pouring into India) gets funneled to the already well off, invested in the tech sector, airports, and gleaming shopping centers for the upper middle class and business elites, the longer India will be putting off dealing with its vast underclass and the ruined infrastructure that houses them. It's hard for me to see how shining India can emerge as a real power in the twenty first century if it does not address these problems. At the same time, of course, it can't stop modernization at the top end. The two projects have to happen simultaneously.

Here's where I think commentators like Friedman are getting things profoundly wrong, trafficking in reductive, overly positive, blinkered thinking about India and, by extension, about globalization. Most of the places I've seen on my two trips to India simply don't register in Friedman's version of India. It's still the case that around 75 percent of Indians reside in agricultural villages with little resources, off the grid of modernization. And I haven't visited a city or large town in India where a significant portion of the population don't live in slums, on the street, or in substandard housing, and where the streets and walkways are clogged with roving animals of all kinds whose feces is everywhere. Indians are amazingly entrepreneurial, and so the villages, towns, and cities are a vast and complicated network of shops, repair stalls, and street vendors jumbled together with speeding scooters, motorcycles, auto rickshaws, and cars. But here one encounters a blanket of pollution that dirties the air, and the excrement of animals (and occasionally people) litters the street. These scenes are less frequent in large cities like Delhi where there are blocks and blocks of modern facilities and organized commerce and traffic, but in small cities like Varanasi and Jaipur and in towns all around the country what I've just described is often the norm. The economic miracle that is India in the eyes of Friedman and many other commentators writing about twenty first century globalization simply does not exist in huge swaths of the country. An accurate, nuanced, honest view of India needs to take this failure of economic democratization into account. It isn't at all clear to me, either, that the so-called rising tide is going to lift all boats without systematic state intervention, massive investment in infrastructural development that puts the impoverished population to work building roads, railway systems, and making over the electrical and plumbing grids (something we need to do in the U.S., as well). The future of India belongs to it's youth, who are moving through India's educational system into the kinds of jobs that will make them far better off than their parents, but they can't all be doctors, engineers, and software developers. Some will have to rebuild the country's infrastructure and enter the service sector. I've been struck traveling around India by how many children don't seem to be in school. There appears to be a whole lost population of destitute kids out there, most dramatically captured in the little beggars who, at the behest of their parents swarm the streets in some areas, but also by kids everywhere who are just hanging around their parents as they try to eke out a hardscrabble living together.

Finally, there is the vexing question of religion and its place in contemporary India. This is a topic Ross and I found ourselves kicking around often during our ten days together after the larger group left for home and which I'm still trying to sort out for myself (so the thoughts that follow are very tentative). One of the miracles of democracy in India, as I pointed out earlier, is that it has been forged around its religious diversity.  While the caste system, though officially outlawed, is alive and well and works against the realization of economic democracy, it's remarkable the extent to which political democracy has taken root in a land dominated by Hindus but populated as well by Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, and Christians. This is of course the case in the United States as well, where the key to democracy has always been the separation of church and state. This same separation in India largely accounts for the success of political democracy in India, but the cultural world of religion here is, in strikingly obvious ways, far different than in the United States. In India religious devotion is woven into the everyday fabric of life in ways you don't see in the United States. This is the case in spatial as well as experiential terms. Where in the United States towns and cities are neatly dotted with churches, synagogues, and mosques, India has temples, shrines, and altars everywhere which serve what seems like the Indian propensity for constant worship. They run from huge buildings to small altars built around trees or just taking up a few square feet in the middle of a shopping street.

In India if you're a Hindu you don't go to church on Sunday. You visit temples and stop at altars every day and evening. There is a constant flow in and out of these places, and a small army of what often seem like self-appointed priests, sadhus, or ascetics who tend to altars and small temples or inhabit the larger ones, setting up their own small shrines within the temples.
Hinduism in this way is a constant presence. It's a central part of the visual culture of every village, town, and city (whether an altar built into a banyan tree or a full blown mega-temple like those we visited in Tamil Nadu). The iconography of the gods is everywhere, on walls, doorways, shrines and altars. I wrote earlier of Varanasi that the whole city is a temple, and this is in fact often the case in many of the larger towns I've visited. It was certainly true in Rajasthan. The main streets and shopping bazaars of Jaipur and Udaipur are dominated by the visual culture of Hinduism. These images, altars and temples are seamlessly integrated into the commercial sections of town, so people can flow in and out of temples as they flow in and out of shops. And the larger temples are the center of a remarkable culture of pilgrimage marked by a kind of ecstatic fervor rarely seen in the U.S. I witnessed these pilgrimages during both of my trips to India. When these pilgrims merge with the daily population of temple visitors (both local and those who have swarmed in from around the country to visit the great temples of Tamil Nadu and elsewhere) you have the kind of spectacle I described in my blog posts, a mixture of ecstatic devotion, carnival, and theater. There is a boardwalk quality to some of the larger temples, where hawkers in stalls selling religious souvenirs, devotional items, or just a blessing compete for every pilgrim and tourist rupee they can get. Everything is sold in the temples, and they are populated by commercial vendors as well who chat you up and end up trying to get you to visit their shop across the street or around the corner. It takes you awhile to figure out that the fantastically dressed and decorated sadhus in and around temples, with their elaborately painted faces, striking decoration, and smoky altars, while they may be devoted to their religious practices, are also trafficking in a kind of commercial theater carefully calculated to make a living off both the locals and tourists. It's often clear that they are dressed up to get your attention, competing with one another in dress and decoration to get you either to allow them to bless you with a bit of ash on the forehead or have you take their picture so that they can then demand payment (such photos are often openly solicited).

In making these observations I don’t mean to be sacrilegious. It’s simply a fact that everything is for sale in many of the temples of India. The sadhus are there out of devotion, I'm sure, but also to earn a living, and the temple grounds are full of people who want you to pay them to be your “guide” or simply to watch your shoes while you walk barefoot across the temple stones. The other day in Udaipur I spent a long time just sitting in the main temple leaning up against a pillar watching people come and go and taking in the rich feeling of the place. I found myself quite moved, and ended up leaving a large donation in the box used to collect money for the disabled and indigent. When I left the main altar and went to get my shoes a nice man approached me and said, with real sincerity, that I seemed particularly moved by my visit, unlike the typical tourist. He was right, and I told him, yes, I was. He continued to talk with me as I walked out and down the steep steps to the street, and then, sure enough, he broke off our conversation to tell me he had a shop down the street where he sold miniature paintings, and he began to insist I pay a visit. The whole encounter was orchestrated, his words calculated to ingratiate me to him so that I'd feel obligated to buy something from his shop.

Such spaces, of course, are not limited to Hindus, for nearly every town and city has its mosques and its Jain and Sikh temples where the same kind of commerce takes place (and where horribly disfigured people roll on the ground begging for money). Everything related to religious devotion at these sites is for sale. The devoted and the tourists alike are hit up at every turn, and its just something you put up with in a culture where everyone is trying to make a living under difficult circumstances. I found myself pretty inured to it, able for the most part to walk the shopping bazaars and temple sites and just ignore all of the hawking. Indeed, the religious culture, both as spectacle and as devotion, is one of the big draws of India. We come to see the temples and the mosques and to experience the religious faith and fervor that swirls in and around them, and to experience the spectacle of this world. But what role does all of this play in India's attempt to modernize? In the United States secular modernity seems to have no problem developing while significant portions of the population embrace religious beliefs many secularists or non-believers find bizarre and backwards, so why can't the same thing be true of India? Or are its ancient religious cultures a drag on modernization, and who is in the privileged position to be able to make that judgment? Of course this may simply be a problem for the outsider. How do we reconcile the seeming disparity between a profoundly devoted and institutionalized belief in the supernatural with economic and material modernization and the development of political democracy? How does the outsider reconcile the holiness of cows, the public burning of dead bodies, the frenzy of ecstatic pilgrims, and the kind of animism that seems at the core of Hinduism with India’s call centers, burgeoning hi-tech industry, gleaming new airports and shopping malls? Are they compatible, or will India’s striking religious culture have to change if modernization is to take hold all across India?

Take the case of Varanasi, where this tension is dramatic and the paradoxes of modernization are most apparent. The Ganges is the holy river of India, the mother of India, really, and a vast resource of great historical significance. People come to Varanasi from all over the country to bathe in its waters and cremate their dead. But the river itself is dead, turned into a vast cesspool by the very people who venerate it. It's hard not to see both the historical and the modern city of Varanasi as a victim of the very religious devotion that made it significant in the first place. Not only is the river polluted but so too are most of the streets, which are covered in cow feces, soaked with polluted water and sewage, and strewn with trash. The air is polluted by the riot of vehicles zipping through its streets, and the infrastructure is as dilapidated as any place in India. To make Varanasi a really livable place -- which is to say, a safe and sanitary place -- the river has to be cleaned up (a vast new sewage system is being built to redirect sewage away from the river), but how do you do that and still allow for the cremation of bodies on its shore and the burial of others directly into the water from boats? How do you keep the streets clean and sanitary and still allow cows to roam free because they are sacred? In Varanasi religion is both the life blood of the place but also seems at times like its worst enemy, and for this reason the seeming contradiction between traditional religious practices and modern economic development here seems stark, symbolic of a problem the whole country faces. This is a global problem, of course, this clash between tradition and modernity. What makes India perhaps the most interesting nation in the world is that the clash between tradition and modernity here is so dramatic, that it takes place on such a grand and complex scale. Everything going on in the world is going on in India, and how it comes to terms in both practical and existential ways with the tension between its religious traditions and its secular, political, and economic aspirations will be intriguing to watch.