Oh God, save me from my friends, followers and flatterers: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India is a 2011 biography of Indian political and spiritual leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Lelyveld and published by Alfred A Knopf, Harper Collins | Pages: 452 | Rs. 699

“Oh God” God”, Gandhi once said, “save me from my friends, followers and flatterers”. It’s remarkable how Gandhi—someone who seems to transmit a clear, direct message, whose life seems to follow a defined parabola, whose place in history we are sure we know—continues to surprise and unsettle. In his own life, he went through a parade of identities, and so too in his afterlife. But it’s not just that each age will have it’s own Gandhi.

There is something deeply discomfiting about the life as it was actually lived—before it was tidied up by his self-appointed friends, followers and flatterers into a Life that now apparently requires protection by our politicians.

Gandhi appeared to embody harmony and unity, yet his own life consisted of anything but those qualities—often impulsive, inconsistent, conflictual, fragmented. He would launch political initiatives like satyagrahas and civil disobedience, then abruptly end them; he would establish communities and ashrams, and move on; he would win the leadership of the Congress, and then retire to spinning and toilet cleaning; he would enter into intimate friendships, then turn away. He insisted that his own life and action was of a piece with his thought and principles—yet repeatedly they pulled in different directions.

So it is common to search for some unifying thread to his life: something that can explain the eccentric shape of a life at once monumental and elusive to the naked eye. Some have delved into psychology, some look to religion and ethics, others to political opportunism. Joseph Lelyveld, in his new portrait, hopes to find it in Gandhi’s fundamental feeling for the lowliest—and he wants to show that such empathy wasn’t a natural stance for Gandhi, but one won (and only ever partially) through his experiences—and which required Gandhi to struggle with his own prejudice-bound self.

That emphasis leads Lelyveld to focus his intellectual energies on the twenty-two years that Gandhi spent in South Africa. Those years, Lelyveld claims, were formative, taking Gandhi to the belief—well-founded, but never quite as well-founded as Gandhi himself liked to think and put about—that he could see the world from the bottom up, that he could fathom as few others the needs and hopes of the most oppressed, and that he had therefore an unquestionable right to speak for them.

Lelyveld, a former senior journalist and editor with the New York Times who has done stints in both South Africa and India, ought to be well-placed to bring news of Gandhi’s time there, and the first third of his book, devoted to Gandhi in South Africa, is by far the most illuminating and worthwhile.

Worthwhile for two reasons. Lelyveld shows in a more thorough way than before Gandhi’s deeply ambiguous, struggle-filled efforts to deal with religion, caste and race in South Africa. What Gandhi experienced in South Africa, through his close encounters with the Muslims, lower castes and indentured labourers of the Indian community, and more incompletely through his more distant relations with Africans (whom he largely excluded from his struggles to win rights), would serve as the psychic material out of which he forged his distinctive universalism—a universalism rooted in the claims of the minority and the marginal.

Don’t reduce a deep, intimate friendship and Gandhi’s experimentalism to the cosiness of a gay relationship, warns Sunil Khilnani.

The second reason is that this book helps us to better understand the steps by which Gandhi came to experiment with and ultimately dispense with that bedrock of any—and especially Indian—society: the family. Gandhi treasured domesticity, but despised the family. He came to see the family as the channel through which were transmitted the poisons of caste segregation, religious intolerance and material possessiveness—the entrapments of purity and property. Breaking the family’s monopoly over domesticity was perhaps Gandhi’s most socially radical move—and it was only possible for him to do this in South Africa. There, he could discover new forms of domesticity—with individuals, couples, communities.

In 1904, Gandhi met Henry Polak, an erudite 21-year-old Johannesburg editor, who discussed Tolstoy with Gandhi and introduced him to the work of John Ruskin—which immediately inspired Gandhi to set up Phoenix Farm, his first experiment in communal living. His own family, Kasturba and their four sons, drove him batty—and even before Phoenix Farm got going, Gandhi had invited Polak into his household. A couple of years later, Gandhi would himself walk away from Phoenix, leaving behind his wife and children, to move in with Polak and his young wife—the first of a procession of inventive menages that Gandhi would create for himself.

The oddest—and yet in some ways most direct—of these domestic try-outs was the almost two years he enjoyed with Hermann Kallenbach, a ‘muscle Jew’ from East Prussia—gymnast, athlete, successful architect and wealthy bon viveur. Gandhi closed down these last two of his companion’s activities, but not before Kallenbach’s wealth was used to purchase the 1,000 acres that became yet another communal laboratory, Tolstoy Farm. Before the farm, the two men lived together in several properties of Kallenbach’s, and for a while also in a tent.

For anyone who has read Gandhi’s letters to Kallenbach (unfortunately we don’t have Kallenbach’s—Gandhi destroyed them), full of playful teasing (Gandhi, ‘Upper House’, always addressed his partner as ‘Lower House’), anyone who has seen the careful way in which Kallenbach preserved everything and anything to do with his time with Gandhi, it is impossible not to conclude that this was indeed an extraordinarily deep and loving friendship. It clearly involved physical intimacy—though whether related to reasons of health, or to passion we shall never know. Gandhi had by this point adopted celibacy, and he imposed it upon Kallenbach—though with what rigour we also cannot know.

It’s actually rather wonderful to notice these things about Gandhi. It confirms him as one of the greatest experimentalists that India has ever produced, experimenting with truth, in pursuit of truth, in a way that was more radical than perhaps any Indian before or after him. It seems absurd to reduce Gandhi’s profound and vast existential experimentalism to the cosiness of a gay relationship—as we’ve done, ahead of reading Lelyveld’s book and led by the suggestions of a sour British historian-reviewer.

Friendship is the crucial word here. For what we can see is how, for Gandhi, friendship would become the highest form of human relationship—a bond devoid of instrumental aspects, purely voluntary, and between equals: compelled neither by legal contract nor instinctual passion. In later life, it was friendship that Gandhi insisted on as the basic political relationship—one that could convert the enmities of religion, inequalities of caste, or injuries of imperialism, into mutual human recognition. It was friendship that Gandhi sought with Jinnah, Ambedkar and Mountbatten—as well as with those more intimate with him.

His interest in celibacy, though usually explained in terms of his interest in Brahmacharya, was not merely about abstinence: it was about abstinence in order to enjoy the pleasures of disinterested companionship, friendship.

Gandhi was prone to infatuations—after brawny Lower House, in later life it would be more ethereal creatures like Esther Faering and Saraladevi Chaudhurani. But at the end of the day—as his letters to Kallenbach and to others display, letters concerning what Gandhi perhaps mock-solemnly called the ‘food question’, which detailed precisely how many nuts he had eaten, how much milk he’d consumed, and railed against ‘full-mealers’—Gandhi was more interested in his digestive rather than his sexual organs: in mastication, not masturbation.

Lelyveld is gently persistent in his efforts to elicit gaps between Gandhi’s life as it was lived and as he later chronicled it—between Gandhi the activist and the memoirist. In the case of Gandhi’s South African life, Lelyveld concludes that while it was transformative for Gandhi himself—furnishing him with perceptions, commitments and methods, that would later define his Indian politics—it had, contrary to what Lelyveld terms ‘Gandhi’s somewhat rosy version of his heroic personal history’, decidedly less impact on the politics of his adopted home.

Indeed, Lelyveld’s account of Gandhi’s South African life is far more subversive not for what it has to say about the Kallenbach connection (details of which have after all been known for quite sometime), but in his claim that Gandhi left South Africa at the end of 1914 not as the victorious leader of a satyagraha movement that had delivered rights to indentured Indians, but rather as part of a deal with Jan Smuts, one that in fact left Indian labourers worse off. South Africa helped make Gandhi, but he had less impact upon it than he liked to claim, or than post-apartheid South Africa—which has made Gandhi one of its heroes—would prefer to think.

The Gandhi that Lelyveld brings back to India is a man fitfully awakened in his human empathy, and also one coming quickly to a sense of his political command. What is striking is to see how Gandhi—the most exotic, weird human the Indian subcontinent has ever produced—soon after his return to India, had acquired for himself an undisputed claim as the man who knew the Indian masses best, and could speak on their behalf. “Without any impertinence I may say I understand the mass mind better than anyone amongst the educated Indians”—yet, coming from a man back in the country a mere five years after over twenty abroad, it was an assertion full of impertinence. How on earth did he manage to make such claims credible to so many for so long?

No one—biographer, historian or acolyte—has ever really managed to explain this. Was it all a rhetorical performance—as the rising scholarship on Gandhi’s symbolism, body, theatricality, would have us think? Was it his ideas—as the studies of his philosophical, religious and ethical beliefs claim? Was he just a masterly political fixer—as accounts of his capture and manipulation of Congress tell us? Sheer force of personality, charisma? Or was it that goat’s milk he had begun to drink—as Kasturba, who encouraged him to indulge, might have liked to think?

Lelyveld himself concentrates on Gandhi’s social vision. He explores the Indian Gandhi through a series of episodes which he believes reveal both Gandhi’s inner conflicts and his struggles with fellow Indians: his standoff with Ambedkar at the London Round Table Conference and then at Poona; the Vaikom satyagraha and Gandhi’s attempts to breach upper-caste barriers to temple entry; his running skirmishes with Jinnah; and his final epic failure to stop communal violence by exiling himself to Noakhali.

Like all who write about Gandhi, Lelyveld has to confront the shifting meanings, obscurities, ambiguities, inconsistencies, of Gandhi’s actions. And it is one of the virtues of Lelyved’s book that it does not try to tidy these up in a simple ‘message’. Nor does he opt for the other easy judgement: which would see Gandhi’s inconsistencies as evidence of his hypocrisy. Yet what he does end up with is less than remarkable. As he traces, for instance in his interesting exploration of Gandhi’s Vaikom satyagraha, the different messages Gandhi was sending to different interlocutors and audiences, his seemingly calculated fluidity of position even while claiming to stand for principles, Lelyveld finds himself concluding: “What really shows here is the difficulty of being Gandhi”. No one, I think, ever did imagine it was easy.

Like every good journalist, Lelyveld is a skilled rhetorician in the art of knowingness. Wherever information is sparse, he resorts to the leading question, planting an idea even as he denies it evidentiary status: “Could this have been such an occasion?”; “Did it involve the day’s events? We’ll never know”; “Could the example of the white mine workers have served as Thambi Naidoo’s mustard seed” (and that’s all just on one page, admittedly a passage that represents a rather critical—if non-weightbearing—bridge in his interpretative narrative). The reader will encounter a fair sprinkling of terms like “possibly”, “probably”, and “it’s not far-fetched to think”. Leyveld’s style can be engaging, but he is also often at risk of achieving a certain sophisticated banality.

In assessing Gandhi’s legacy, Lelyveld marks its severe limits. And yet. It is true, as Lelyveld insists, that Gandhi did not abolish untouchability. But he did de-legitimise it. It is true, as Lelyveld tells us, that Gandhi did not succeed in cementing Hindu-Muslim unity. But he did make all thinking Indians feel embarrassment and shame when religious violence and bloodletting occurred. Unlike a Lenin or a Mao, Gandhi’s chosen instrument of change was not the state, but the imagination. His work was to transform belief: more difficult, slower, but perhaps in the end, more enduring?

Joseph Lelyveld’s book arrives in India apparently already pre-read and certainly pre-judged. We need to put aside that false knowledge—so we actually read and genuinely discuss it. We can then, finally and thankfully, hope to move into a new phase of biographical scrutiny of figures like Gandhi—where basic questions can be raised, taboos explored, and where we can start to see them as humans in hard times. Studies by Rajmohan Gandhi, Narayan Desai, Tridip Suhrud, and now Lelyveld—all let us see Gandhi not as the prim pope of non-violence, but as a more subtle being, often in emotional turmoil, ragged in his personal relationships and cruel to his family, a better starter than finisher, dependent on entourages of aides and adorers, selfless and egotistical by turns—and always able to command the deepest loyalty.

The idea that a politician like Narendra Modi can self-erect to defend Gandhi’s legacy, that he and Gujarat are Gandhi’s guardians against supposed charges of perversity and racism, is laughable. I well remember sitting in a Gandhinagar cinema a little more than a decade ago, at the very time when Modi was manoeuvring himself into power in that city, watching the film Hey Ram—and can never forget how, at the very moment when Godse is shown pumping bullets into Gandhi, the cinema hall erupted into wild applause to celebrate Gandhi’s death. I remember too watching the West Indies playing a Test match at Ahmedabad’s Motera ground—and when they took to the field, being pelted by bananas and greeted by monkey whoops. Today’s Gujarat, before it can imagine it has any claims to Gandhi, let alone to defending his memory, has a long way to go.

(Sunil Khilnani, In Outlook, under Books/Reviews/Essays on May 02, 2011)

Programmed To Survive: The Idea Of India Redux

{This essay is the new Introduction to the fifth edition of The Idea of India, published as a Popular Penguin on January 20. Professor Sunil Khilnani is Avantha Chair and Director, King’s India Institute, London.}

That the nation persists is what has lent the India story such gravitas: an idea that’s taken strong root. But will the march of history leave us behind? 

-Sunil Khilnani

Why India? Why, of all post-colonial nations, is India the country that gets taken most seriously by the very powers it once struggled against? Whether it is corporate Britain wooing Indian money by throwing Bollywood bling parties at London’s Claridge’s Hotel or European luxury houses like Hermes launching special sari lines for India’s glamorati or US President Obama choosing the Indian prime minister as the guest of honour for his first state banquet—the world wants a piece of India. Not since nineteenth-century America has an ex-colony moved so fast into prominence on the world stage.

Plenty of people have answers that purport to explain this phenomenon—India’s scale, its software and smartness, its strategic location. But I think the real answer is at once more subtle and more obvious. It has to do with the fact that India is still here—that, unlike many new states created after the end of the age of European empire, it has not self-destructed. What if India’s current prominence has more to do with what it has avoided, steered around, than with what it has done?

When I wrote The Idea of India in ’97, I wanted to show that the founding idea of India is anchored as much in resisting certain powerful seductions—the temptations of a clear, singular definition of nationhood, of the apparent neatness of authoritarian politics, of the clarities of a statist or pure market economy, of unambiguous alliances with other states—as it was in realising declaratory visions.

***

History moves fast these days—faster that it did when nineteenth-century America began its climb to world power, faster than when Gandhi and Nehru brought India to independence in the mid-twentieth century, and faster still than in the years since I wrote The Idea of India. In India, what were once gradual changes—the upswing of economic growth, the movement of Indians from the countryside to the city, the sabotage of the old hierarchies of the social order, the renegotiation of India’s place and status in the world—now turn at dizzying pace.

Such historical fast-tracking has taken India to a point where it is now possible to envisage a real change in the chronic conditions of deprivation and injustice that have so long entrapped most Indians. Actually altering those conditions for the better will, however, require a run of political judgement and action as momentous as that accomplished by India’s founders in the mid-twentieth century, when that remarkable generation broke India free from an authoritarian, oppressive past and set it forth in pursuit of liberty and democracy.

The grand tasks of the years ahead are daunting: managing the largest-ever rural-to-urban transition under democratic conditions; developing the human capital and sustaining the ecological and energy resources needed for participatory economic growth; contending with powerful competitor states and containing a volatile neighbourhood; defining what sort of power we wish to be in the world. It is an agenda that would test any society at the best of times. But in India’s case, these tasks will have to be achieved under severe constraints of time and choice.

Ours is a society of swiftly inflating expectations, where old deference crumbles before youthful impatience. And internationally, India must navigate a fluid arena: one where global power is rearranging itself in as yet undefined ways, where capital is restless, and where new, unforeseen threats and risks are facts of life. India will have only a sliver of time, a matter of years, in which to seize its chances. After all, the faster history moves, the more likely one is to get left behind.

Political imagination, judgement, action—the capacities that birthed India—seem to have deserted us when we need them.

The policy choices we make over the coming decade—about education, about environmental resources, about social and fiscal responsibility, about foreign affairs—will propel us down tracks that will be difficult to renounce or even revise in years to come. The aptness of those choices will depend not on India’s entrepreneurial brilliance or technological prowess, or the cheapness of its labour, but on politics. Yet, at this historical moment when emergent possibilities and new problems are crowding in, the transformative momentum of India’s politics seems to have dissipated.

Although the nation’s founders saw political freedom as their great goal, decades on, what that freedom has delivered measures up poorly for many. For India’s business leaders eager to compete with China, for the middle classes fed up by corruption, for radicalisant intellectuals, for desperate citizens who’ve taken up arms against the state, democracy in India is a story of deflating illusions, of obstacles and oppression. Democratic politics itself is seen as impeding the decisive action needed to expand economic possibilities.

It is a troubling irony: political imagination, judgement and action—the capacities that brought India into being—seem to have deserted both the air-conditioned hallways of power as well as the dusty streets of protest, just when it needs them. The distinctive source of modern India’s legitimacy has, to many, become an agent of the country’s ills.

India’s democratic discontent echoes a wider disaffection. Across the globe, democratic politics is in distress and disrepair. It is being challenged in its homelands, from the US to Europe to Japan, while in Russia and China, it stands summarily dismissed. As citizens grow ever more contemptuous of their leaders, leaders readily return the compliment—complaining that they are hamstrung by the short-sighted, unrealistic demands of their citizenry. Just a couple of decades after democracy was proclaimed as the universal future—the riddle of human history solved—it seems fragile, ineffectual, contingent.

In India, the impatience with democracy is perhaps not unreasonable, given how quickly we have moved in such a short time, and how much further we wish to get. But one way to understand the possibilities that democracy alone can underwrite is to remember the context that existed in India at the time that I wrote The Idea of India.

***

I was motivated, then, by a different kind of concern about India’s democracy: a kind of majoritarianism, it seemed, might threaten our foundational commitment to diversity and pluralism.

In the mid-’90s, India had emerged from a deep economic crisis, only to be ensnared in battles over identity. What sort of a nation were we? Which groups or cultures had the right to claim special privileges? Religion, caste, region: all were vigorously advanced as answers.

These answers seemed bent on blurring, even dissolving, the idea of India—the constitutive idea of this “unnatural nation”. It was that idea that I sought to recover, in hopes of showing how it had made India and kept it going. Part of the burden of my argument was that India’s politics was proliferating a variety of ideas about India, some in contradiction and collision with one another. The Indian idea had itself become a proudly plural one—a measure as good as any of the original idea’s success. And amidst that plurality were, perhaps inevitably, some conceptions that sought to singularise India’s many religious and cultural identities and make it a narrower place.

Today, in many parts of the country, those battles seem to have played themselves out—so much blood under the bridge, or down the Sabarmati, as it were. The conventional view is that India’s economic surge has stilled those fights over identity. And although there is some truth in that explanation, it is too partial a perception. It does not address, for instance, why one of India’s most developed and fast-growing states, the calendar girl of big business—Gujarat—is also the purveyor of India’s most chauvinistic and poisonous politics.

It is the capacity of India’s democracy to articulate and incite its diversity that has saved it from civil conflict.

In fact, what has at least for an interval calmed such politics has been the workings, however rickety, of democratic politics. It is the capacity of India’s representative democracy to articulate, and even to incite, India’s diversity, to give voice to differing interests and ideas of self, rather than merely to aggregate supposed common identities, that has saved India from the civil conflict and auto-destruction typical of so many states. Many of those states have been in fact smaller and less diverse than India. Consider for a start, the ragged history of India’s regional neighbours. The desire to impose a common identity has broken them down.

What has protected India from such outcomes is not any innate Indian virtue or cultural uniqueness. Rather, it is the outcome of a political invention, the intricate architecture of constitutional democracy established by its founders. That constitutional democracy has prevented monolithic outcomes in India. It has stalled zealots in their tracks, penned demagogues to their corrals and taken the wind out of populist sails—just as it has also frustrated and slowed more positive or desirable outcomes. But that is the crucial, under-recognised value of such a system: its capacity not to achieve the good, but to prevent the worse.

***

Democracy’s singular, rather astonishing achievement has been to keep India united as a political space. And now that space has become a vast market whose strength lies in its internal diversity and dynamism. It is that vast market, of considerable attraction to international capital, that is today one of India’s greatest comparative advantages—and one that makes India a potential engine of the global economy.

In the years ahead, whether the old battles over identity stay becalmed will to a large extent depend on the capacity of India’s political system to sustain and spread the country’s new growth. Rising disparities in income, wealth and opportunity are a global fact, but they can be particularly acute in growing economies. For twenty-first century India, as economic growth spreads unevenly over the productive landscape, the big questions will turn onto the disequalising effects of economic transformation. This isn’t a question that any society, democratic or despotic, has been able to solve, let alone any rapidly growing society—and certainly not China.

The project of devising workable alternatives to market capitalism has animated much of the politics and history of the past two centuries. But that project did not on the whole fare impressively. The collapse of revolutionary dreams symbolised by the events of 1989 and immediately after has been followed by slow punctures in the wheels of Western social democracy. And yet, the lived conditions that gave rise to such political hopes—revolutionary or reformist—remain as intense and painful as ever, not least in the world’s two major growth economies, China and India. Part of what it must mean, therefore, for states like India and China to take their place as major world powers must rest on their ability to invent better alternative models of market capitalism.

For India, developing such alternatives must be a priority in coming years. It is imperative for India’s economic future that the global disaffection with market capitalism does not take wider hold in the country. We shall need, somehow, to strike a balance between, on the one hand, redistributive social policies and regulation and, on the other hand, the need to keep the economy open, markets functioning, and incentives alive.

Most people in India remain hopeful that their turn will come. Yet as I write this, thousands of protesters have taken to the streets and squares of the world’s financial centres, from NY and London to Frankfurt and Hong Kong, hoping to change the skewed order of global capitalism. Such dissidence is a reminder that the tolerance for disparities, for inequality, can shift sharp and sudden.

In India’s case, just as six decades and more of democracy have broken down age-old structures of deference and released a new defiant energy, so too years of rapid but uneven growth may, before we are quite ready to acknowledge it, dismantle the intricate self-deceptions that have so far kept India’s grotesque disparities protected from mass protest. As the Indian political classes exercise their populist instincts, corporate India, heady with new opulence, lately comports itself like a well-plumed sitting duck. Without renewed political imagination and judgement, the disaffection and alienation of those who are being left out or actively dispossessed by rapid growth could change the course of our history.

Can India’s democracy rise up to the task of rectifying this sorry state of affairs—accommodate the dispossessed and channel discontent into political forms? Most importantly, can India’s democracy be rescued from its current function as an acclamatory mechanism to instal new leaders? Is it possible to turn that democracy into something that makes political responsibility more legible, and also enables those who hold power to invest in the country’s long future?

In the twentieth century, India was a striking example of post-colonial reinvention. We might now, in the new century, turn our thoughts to practising a more effective democracy and a more inclusive market capitalism—in contrast to China, where wealth amasses and democracy remains a bad coin.

The transformational opportunities that India confronts today have their origins in the life and story that unfolds in my book, The Idea of India. As India moves forward in coming years, ever more forgetful of its history, those origins and that story will matter more than ever. For, even when nations pride themselves on their freedom from the past, it is often in fact their beginnings—their founding spirit and imagination—that remain, in very altered worlds, their greatest resource.

{Originally in print, Outlook, Essay, on Feb 06, 2012}

Beyond controversy: The Hindus: An Alternative History

Before we starts, just a minute on this Controversy:

The Hindus: An Alternative History is a book by American Indologist, Wendy Doniger which the author describes as an “alternative to the narrative of Hindu history that they tell.” The book was initially published by Viking Penguin in 2009 and later in India by Penguin's Indian subsidiary, Penguin India.

In February 2014, it was the subject of litigation in India by the group Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samithi (Hindi, literally, "Committee for Struggle to Save Education"), alleging violations of a law which punishes "deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage the feelings of any religious community." 

The book was criticised by Shiksha Bachao Andolan arguing that the work was "riddled with heresies" and that the contents are offensive to Hindus. Certain content and wordings in the book were challenged by Dina Nath Batra, the head of Shiksha Bacho Andolan in a lawsuit and the publisher Penguin India agreed to destroy all the existing copies within six months commencing from February 2014.

And remember this was year 2009, when Sunil Khilnani was reviweing this book.

Can one tell a history of the Hindus through their stories? That is the challenge that American scholar and Sanskritist Wendy Doniger sets herself in this book, a culmination of many years of teaching and engagement with Hindu thought and writing. One thing those years have made clear to Doniger is the difficulty of defining Hinduism. The term itself lacks any roots within India—only after the seventeenth century can we find the first usage of the title ‘Hindupati’ or Lord of the Hindus—and there is no agreed doctrine, founder, or church-like institution with which it is identified. There is no Hindu canon. Nor do the Hindus themselves form a race, or inhabit a narrowly specified territory.

What does connect them and set them apart, Doniger argues, is the fact that their imaginations, and many of their social practices, are structured by a vast web of stories—texts that spin across and through the languages and cultures of the subcontinent. Doniger calls it ‘intertextuality’, the self-conscious reference to stories that came before, all the way back to the Rig Veda. And from there on, the Brahmanas, Upanishads, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Shastras, Puranas, Tantric texts, the philosophical schools whose networks extended from the Tamil South up to Kashmir, the poetry and song of the Bhakti movements. There is no comparable output in any of the other great instances of the moral and religious imagination still available to us today.

Such texts can’t, however, be read as open windows on the societies that produced them. We don’t even know when some of the most fertile Hindu texts were composed. The Mahabharata and Ramayana, for instance, can only be dated to some time between 300 BC and AD 300 and 200 BC and AD 200 respectively. Still, Doniger is interested in the tensions between history (what exactly happened) and what societies tell themselves about what is happening. Her passion is the human imagination.

Doniger calls her book an ‘alternative history’ because she believes the other histories overemphasise the Brahminic wellsprings of Hindu stories. She argues, effectively, that the ‘high’ texts have quite often fed off low tales. She shows in particular how the voices of women, Dalits and tribals have energised many Brahminic scripts. So too, she makes us hear the voices of Buddhist and Jain thought, and later of Islam and Christianity, in dialogue with the Hindu texts. Just as those lower in society sought to Sanskritise and Kshatriyise, so the Sanskrit texts were permeable to what she terms ‘deshification’—the absorption of local, ‘small’ traditions.

Doniger’s capacity for a ‘shlesha’ of empathy and criticism fails in her treatment of Hindutva, though she pokes fun at it.

She draws out the layered cruelties and conflicting natures of Hindu texts with verve, among them the story of Ekalavya, the expert tribal archer in the Mahabharata. He displays his skill by unleashing arrows into the mouth of a dog. Arjuna, outraged that someone of lower caste can do this and threatened by his prowess, tells Ekalavya’s guru, Drona, to put a stop to it. Drona requires Ekalavya to cut off his thumb, which he does. The story reveals and revels in the injustice of caste. But Doniger also cites other versions—for instance, a Jain text in which Arjuna is shown as cruel and vindictive. These constitute what Doniger calls the ‘intertextual’ argument and conversation of the Hindus—with the Mahabharata as a central clearing house for this vast network of disputation. One of her arresting comparisons likens the Mahabharata to ‘an ancient Wikipedia, to which anyone who knew Sanskrit...could add a bit here, a bit there’.

But the central insight driving her argument concerns the Hindu way of telling stories, a capacity to make not just art, but ethics, out of ambiguity. It’s a characteristic embodied in the Sanskrit figure of speech known as ‘slesha’. Slesha—literally ‘embrace’—holds together at once two different stories or images, allowing the listener or reader to switch between them. This is essentially a metaphoric capacity: to see something as something else. It also offers a way out of any impasse. As E.M. Forster put it, ‘Every Indian hole has at least two exits’.

In such a universe, meaning is never settled—and so, neither, is authority. Claimants to authority, from the gods themselves to the human scribes who record their doings to modern-day gurus who hold forth on the texts, climb up ladders but also slide down snake chutes. This fosters an internal pluralism: within the individual, the possibility of internal conflict between the demands of society’s moral code and a more universal ethics is never resolved or far from the surface. The recognition of ambiguous meaning also enables, though in more complex and sometimes attenuated ways, an attitude of pluralism towards other moral cosmologies and religions.

The eighteenth century Scottish philosopher, David Hume, put this capacity for pluralism down to polytheism, a religious view that saw nature as distinguished not by order and beauty, but “by the various and contrary events of human life”. “So sociable is polytheism,” wrote Hume, “that the utmost fierceness and aversion which it meets with in an opposite religion is scarcely able to disgust it and keep it at a distance”. Now, this sociability is hardly one that would guarantee survival in a biological species; and polytheism has been a characteristic mainly of ancient religions, which rarely got beyond the lower branches of the Darwinian tree of human belief systems. Why, then, has Hinduism been able to survive, with some vigour, across such a span of human history? Some, of course, over the past century and more have feared that it possibly cannot—and have hoped to make Hinduism more mono in its theism.

It’s precisely the capacity of the Hindu imagination to keep telling and re-telling stories, rather than to box them up into a single authorised narrative or code, which has kept it in business—and enabled it to flourish within a society at once of great internal complexity and which has also regularly encountered tough external pressures.

Doniger takes an obvious joy in the stories she analyses, and one of many pleasures in the book is her consideration to animals in the Hindu world—as objects of sacrifice, consumption, devotion and protection, sometimes all at once. The idea of non-violence, ahimsa, is first developed in relation to the treatment of animals—a matter of public concern to rulers, who encouraged forms of casuistry to justify animal sacrifice. The cow, of course, figures. But Doniger more interestingly tracks the importance of dogs. The Mahabharata, she notes, begins and ends with stories about justice for dogs. She also brings the horse back to the centre of the Hindu imagination. From the great Ashvamedha sacrifice, described in shudder-inducing detail in the Vedas, to the raging hooves of Kalki, it is the horse—an animal not native to the subcontinent—that has fascinated Hindus.

But for all the delights in Doniger’s scholarship, there is a deeper question she might have done well to confront. How did the Hindu capacity for moral pluralism actually stand in relation to Indian society? Doniger notes and celebrates the presence in many texts of challenges to hierarchy and caste. She shows that caste was not invariably an intellectual or philosophical prison. It was possible to think oneself out of it, to criticise its injustice, mock its absurdities. But she doesn’t probe a central paradox: Why did such critical thoughts and stories gain such little purchase on the social order? The astonishing plurality of Hindu thought—its vast ocean of polydox beliefs—is only matched by its equally staggering orthopraxy, the unchanging rigidity of social patterns and practices. The old Hindus seem to have perfected ‘repressive tolerance’ well before Herbert Marcuse discovered it in California.

Similarly, Doniger sets out but does not fully unravel some of the central dilemmas embodied in texts like the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata poses the problem of the world’s moral irrationality. If the concept of Karma appears to suggest a rational moral economy—that my present action will have a future pay-off—this idea is constantly subverted in the Mahabharata, where one more throw of the dice again and again determines the moral horizon. “The Mahabharata sees a vice behind every virtue, a snake behind every horse, and a doomsday behind every victory,” Doniger writes, and so every moral choice and act is somehow the wrong choice. In fact, the notion of Karma so diffuses the location of merit and de-merit, makes them such mobile and transferable qualities that it is impossible to track causality. Sinners too, can go to heaven, despite their intentions—if they happen simply to be in contact with some salvaging ritualistic practice. What sort of moral universe can be sustained if there is such a weak relation between intention and consequence?

More disappointing in this important book is Doniger’s treatment of recent history. Kipling and Foster are her orienting stars in discussing the colonial period, and she conveys little sense of the intellectual ferment in India at the time—the many experiments with religion, politics, caste, and the different meanings that Hindu ‘reform’ came to hold. This leads directly to the book’s greatest weakness—the absence of any serious explanation of Hindutva. Doniger has a potent—indeed, quite felt—sense of its presence and projectile capacity, and has had occasion to reflect on it. But while she has roustabout fun at the expense of the adepts of Hindutva, she doesn’t stop to ask what it is about the potentialities within Hinduism, and what it is about the Hindus at this point in their history, that have conspired to breathe life into such versions of Hinduism. Her capacity for ‘double vision’, for empathy and criticism, here fails.

Doniger is an unstoppable teller of tales and a brilliant interpreter of them also. Yet, occasionally, one feels that, rather than delve deeper into the contradictions of history, she too, like her subjects stretching back many thousands of years, prefers just to tell one more story.

A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth

Patrick French reveals enough devil in Naipaul, the autocrat and the alchemist- Sunil Khilnani

"A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth,"

V.S. Naipaul once wrote, a myth that is ultimately in the keeping of others. Yet Naipaul has worked hard in recent decades to retain control over his personal story—producing numerous autobiographical essays and fragments, ever tucking himself into the folds of his writing. His books have set abroad the story of a poor sensitive youth of high-caste origin who wrenched himself out of a dissipated colonial-dominated black culture and, through sheer hard effort and dedication to his craft, clambered on to the ark of civilisation. He kept his helmsman's position there, in the myth, by his clear-eyed willingness to tell the truth.

Naipaul's tactic to appear helpless, get others to do his bidding, make them feel inadequate fails here. Patrick French is in control.

Notoriously secretive and controlling, Naipaul has seemed unwilling to cede to anyone else the authority to tell his life. So what could have possessed Patrick French to agree to write a life of Naipaul, authorised by his subject? French knew that an archive existed, largely closed to scholars and boxed away in the wilds of Oklahoma (the university at Tulsa had paid some half a million dollars for it). French told Naipaul he would only want to take on the project if he had access to all the available archival material, could quote freely, interview him at length, and retain full control over the book—which he proposed to take up to 1996. That year, Naipaul's first wife died, he sacked his Argentine mistress of 24 years, and married Nadira Alvi. Naipaul agreed to French's terms and, French notes, "stuck scrupulously to our agreement".

The result is gripping, magnificent—a triumph of the biographer's art. Patrick French's book peers unblinkingly at the dark, destructive energies that have sustained Naipaul's creativity. It counts and counts again the human—womanly—cost of Naipaul's drive to make himself and his work, and yet fully accords him, as a writer, his due.

It is not easy to make sense of Naipaul's life and work. Sprawled across four continents (the Caribbean and South America, England, India, Africa) it spans the eras of colonial rule, the struggle against that rule, the early decades of nationalist hopes and the brutal subsequent betrayals. What is so striking about Naipaul is how, out of this unprecedented diversity of experience, he has created and sustained a cohesive vision of the world—turning himself in the process from a 'regional' novelist of Caribbean street life to a maker of 'global' literature. On what authority did he ground his grand perspective—the fearless dissections of anti-colonialism, the future of Africa, the Muslim world—of civilisation itself? By labouring, in his own version, to be a disciplined writer, he proclaimed his fidelity to one enterprise: pen, pad, desk; nothing else.

French, through mastery over his materials and sources, restores to the purist tableau the messy stirring life—the mess that made the myth, and the books, possible. French weaves his myth-puncturing subtly into the narrative, knocking off Naipaul's poses one by one. Here, more crudely than French would want to note them, are at least half dozen that he addresses.

Naipaul's Brahminic origins and its lasting effects, part of his own self-image, have become a trope by which he and others have explained his mannerisms and attitudes. Paul Theroux made much of this in his vicious homage to his master. But as French delves into the lineages and history of the Naipaul family (an excellent portrait of the family—large, cantankerous, chippy, given to violence and habitually on the make), he sheds doubt on the idea that Naipaul's father, Seepersad, had Brahmin origins.

Naipaul has always stressed his devotion to his father—by all accounts a man of some charm, bookish, moody and severely impractical. As French suggests, he sentimentalised and idolised his father. Only very recently, to French, has he spoken of feeling 'great rage' at Seepersad's paternal incompetence. But even as a young man at Oxford, Naipaul often chose to ignore his father's requests—especially to help Seepersad fulfil his own writerly ambitions. Conversely, Naipaul distanced himself from his mother, erasing her from his self-creation myth (originally doting, she later more or less disowned him). Yet it was his mother and her rough-hewn family who dominated the Naipaul household—and made it practically possible for him to advance.

Another integral strand of Naipaul's auto-mythology was his rejection of his Caribbean origins, his denial that Trinidad shaped him in lasting ways (he refused any mention of Trinidad in his Nobel acceptance). Yet French is perceptive and convincing on just how profoundly he was shaped by Trinidadian culture. The rich dialect (which even later in life, in the company of fellow islanders, he could slip into), the styles of humour, and most significantly the ease with which the culture encouraged people to reinvent themselves without feeling any sense of lost authenticity. Naipaul adopted the idea of masquerade, 'playing ole Mas'; the persona of the Trinidadian 'smart man', a clever, stylish deceiver. He also perfected what French terms 'Trinidadian street style', 'picong' or piquant humour—an oracular outrageousness.

After he had moved to London, though, Naipaul took pride in keeping his fellow West Indian writers at arm's length. He saw early that if he was to achieve the success he was after, he must escape the trap of being a 'regional', Caribbean writer. Yet French, in his reconstruction of the lower reaches of London literary life in the early and mid-1950s, shows how close Naipaul was with other black and colonial writers—George Lamming, Sam Selvon, Edward Braithwaite, Jan Carew and others—and how much he learned from them about what it was to be a writer.

Here, French gives a more general correction to the founding myth of Naipaul and—his scrupulous self-reliance. It's a conceit most thoroughly undermined by the story of Naipaul's first wife, Patricia Hale. Her story becomes a biography within a biography, and French is able to tell this through letters and some 28 volumes of diaries left at her death. Naipaul met Pat while at Oxford, and after crushing her ambitions to be an actress, he manipulated her into abject dependence. Pat understood his methods: "If I'm unhappy you just say you can't bear other people being miserable and that I'm more or less driving you to drink"; but she was docile, and in awe (he became, in her diaries, 'The Genius'). French is able to show that Pat actually helped Naipaul in his writing—not just as a transcribing sounding board, but more substantively.

Finally, Naipaul cultivated the pose of the highly cerebral, reflective intellectual, aware of his history and circumstances, and willing to take responsibility for his actions. The unthinking, instinctual attitudes he claims to find in many parts of the world have evoked his deepest contempt. And yet: French shows again and again Naipaul's own surrender to instinctual urges, his inability to pursue introspection, and his unwillingness to take responsibility for his own actions. (One could argue that this biography is an attempt at rigorous self-accounting—but alas he had to commission someone else to do it for him.)

Deception and self-justification defined his relations with women. French writes about these relations—with Pat, prostitutes, Naipaul's mistress Margaret, and the 'second Lady Naipaul', Nadira—with delicacy but spares no one. On the basis of Pat's diaries and letters, French judges her to be on "par with other great, tragic, literary spouses such as Sonia Tolstoy, Jane Carlyle and Leonard Woolf", without denying her own psychological errors. The diaries, he observes, are also "a record of a kind of blankness", evasive and self-deluding about the degree to which Naipaul's writing drew on life and especially his life with Margaret.

French pays considerable attention to Naipaul's liaison with Margaret, the central sexual relationship of his life. Asked how it started, Naipaul would say: "It was not a meeting of minds"; or, as French puts it, "A kink in his personality met a kink in hers, and snagged". Paraphrasing her letters, French reveals a sado-masochistic relationship—summoned to accompany him on his writing journeys, they would have several weeks together during which he would beat and sexually degrade her, before he would tire of her and despatch her back to Argentina or London. Again she would be called, again she returned, explaining her infatuation thus: "Being with you is like always being in a film." One wonders a little just what was being shown in the film houses of Buenos Aires.

Naipaul abused all the women close to him. French notes that when Naipaul recalled how he told Pat of his involvement with Margaret, Naipaul "characteristically, recalled the disclosure of infidelity in terms of his own suffering". He made Pat comfort him for what he had been doing. With Margaret, he asserted that he as much as she was the victim of his violence—he had been somehow forced to it. And, in a scene which is particularly macabre and perverse, French describes how, after Pat's death, Naipaul made his new fiance, Nadira, collect Pat's ashes, carry them in a gray plastic bag, and then scatter them in the Wiltshire woodland.

Naipaul came to perfect this stance: controlling a situation by appearing helpless, then getting others to do his bidding—while making them feel that they were doing it inadequately. In this biography, however, this method has failed him. This may be an authorised biography, but it is firmly and in every sense in Patrick French's control—and he has written a superb account of the life, as what it is. Now, knowing the myth, having read the life, one goes back to the work. That is Naipaul's monument. We are many, who lead less than exemplary lives; but very few are able to turn the matter of their lives into great work. Naipaul, as Patrick French lets us still better see, is one of them. 

Book Reviewed- 'The World Is What It Is: The Authorised Biography of VS Naipaul' by Patrick French, Picador, Pages: 576; Rs. 595. In Outlook Magazine | Apr 21, 2008

It’s now 20 years: Reforms Vicenary: 1991-2011

It’s now 20 years—a generational epoch—since the 1991 economic reforms that have helped spur the fastest economic growth in our country’s history, and that have embedded us in an ever-more-complicated world. That 1991 also brought another pivot point, the fall of the Soviet Union, and seemed to signal a profound global switch: the victory of market capitalism and liberal democracy. But 20 years later, the meaning of 1991 looks more blurry.

Authoritarian China controls the world’s most dynamic economy, while the beacon of liberal democracy—the United States—finds its legitimacy chastened and its economic momentum checked, with no clear idea of how to renew that impetus. The neoliberal dream embodied in the ‘Washington Consensus’ has evaporated and, while China increasingly asserts itself as a powerful sovereign actor, the idea that there could emerge an attractive model that is styled around a ‘Beijing Consensus’ seems delusive.

Where, in this transformed, undecided world does India—itself changing profoundly, and ambivalent about its options and desires—stand? How is economic expansion altering our own society—and our place in the world? What is India’s post-liberalisation story, and how does it fit both with our own account of what we wish to be, and with a new global story?

We have now an entire post-1991 generation of adult Indians for whom the ambiguities of coalition politics, a volatile Hindu nationalism and intense caste politics are simply parts of the landscape—as are the market economy, dynamic growth rates, traffic hell and the electronic media. They have been reared in the age of economics. If in the 20th century India’s search was for political freedom, today most Indians are in search of wealth—and power.

Yet, in that search for wealth, it’s worth remembering that economic advantages are not always best achieved by economistic means. Achieving them requires a more complex view of human beings, and of the world, than the dismal science can ever allow. The greatest economists are not the whizkid ‘quants’ trying to model and predict the future in numerical terms. The greatest have been those—Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes—with insight into human psychology and how the nature of uncertainty itself shapes human actions. Keynes, in 1937, wrote: “We assume that the present is a much more serviceable guide to the future than a candid examination of past experience would show it to have been hitherto. In other words we largely ignore the prospect of future changes about the actual character of which we know nothing.”

As Indians seek now to expand and consolidate the opportunities opened by the reforms of 1991, we need more than ever to think systematically about such uncertainties. Republics that endure and prosper are those that balance optimism about the future with a sense of the threats that may spring.

In our exuberance, we forget we cannot stay insulated from a dysfunctional neighbourhood.

“India is firmly on the growth expressway,” Goldman Sachs declared a few years ago, but the future is seldom reached by a through-route, nor can we foresee it in an economist’s graph or forecast. And only in the rhetoric of politicians do we reach out to grasp the future—more often, it hits us in the face, from unnoticed angles and with unexpected force. “The paradigmatic moment of political awareness”, the political theorist John Dunn reminds us, is Julius Caesar’s greeting his least-expected assassin, “Et tu Brute?”

It is clear that structurally, the fundamentals are now aligned to sustain India’s economic expansion. The country’s demographics, its levels of savings and investment, and its entrepreneurial talents could indeed enable significant growth to continue for another generation and more.

But the world consists not just of structures and trends—it is made up also of agency, and of actors. And how we cope with our own actions and their unforeseen results, as well as the often unpredictable actions of others, will be decisive for whether India’s economic potential is realised or squandered.

Twenty years on, the most important legacy of 1991 is that it has given us real choices to make, for better or worse. In making those choices—political judgements—two facts are crucial. The first is that we now have a very limited window of opportunity during which to get things right with respect to our productive capacities and competitive abilities—five years at most, perhaps ten. The second is that the decisions we take will have long-term effects, and will set us on paths that will be hard to alter. In that sense, the real turning point in our economic prospects will lie just ahead—and not back in 1991.

One of the most striking transformations since 1991 has been in our psychological outlook. Changes in the material world produced by economic growth—directly or vicariously experienced—have sparked extraordinary optimism about the future. Whether measured by levels of the stockmarket, investment, policy forecasts, it’s an optimism that seems insulated against political uncertainties, terrorism and the corruption that marks so much of what passes for everyday life in India.

Similar optimism pervades popular views. In 2009, when the effects of the financial crisis were cascading across the world, the Pew Global Attitudes group surveyed opinion in G-20 countries and found Indians to be the most positive in their attitudes towards market capitalism. Ninety-one per cent of Indians could describe their economic situation as good; 96 per cent were positive about trade with other countries; and 81 per cent agreed that people were better off in a market economy despite the inequalities. Such survey figures often do demand a dose of salt—but still they indicate the enthusiasm of the new convert, for whom the tests of experience lie ahead.

It used to be said that Indians didn’t bother to pursue wealth because of their belief in karma, a fatalistic determinism that held back economic development. Now, as we hear repeatedly—whether it is from caste groups or from national leaders—that “our turn has come”, there’s equally the danger of an inverted complacency: a deterministic faith in our upward economic surge. There is no way of knowing how history works, but it certainly does not work like a game of musical chairs.

The new optimism that fills young India is undoubtedly a good thing. Economic growth, despite being uneven (in fact, precisely when uneven), does have the initial psychological effect of encouraging hope and optimism. This in turn shapes behaviour. People may become initially less risk-averse, more willing to borrow, to invest—and to believe in the future. But setbacks can have equally powerful reverse effects. Think of Japan: once the paragon of consumerism, today shops there implore people, not very successfully, to buy.

It would be a mistake to imagine our future on the basis of extrapolating economic trend numbers. The core problems we face—questions of social justice, of ecology and natural resources, social conflict, an insecure neighbourhood—are not merely external constraints on our search for wealth, matters to be addressed in due course. They will have to be tackled all at once, and this will often generate contradictory choices. But working to sustain multiple commitments, often in tension with one another, is a lesson our founders taught us.

Three tensions—domestic, international and global—are intrinsic to our economic possibilities and will frame the choices we make.

We should by now be well aware of the accumulating domestic strains accentuated by our post-1991 growth pattern—a pattern economic analysts like Michael Walton have called ‘disequalising’. It results in fantastic over-concentrations of wealth, ‘Antilian’ islands teetering above impoverished oceans. Walton notes that the private wealth of India’s billionaires has surged dramatically in recent years (from less than one per cent of GDP in 1997 to a peak of over 23 per cent in 2008), and as a share of GDP, it’s now close to that of Russia and Saudi Arabia, even while India’s level of per capita income is much lower than in those countries—and it is a democracy.

The rich, we have learned to recognise, are a necessary public good for every society. But there are also times one has to ask the question: What exactly is the social utility of such levels of wealth concentration?

Precisely because we are a democracy, there will be pressures for redistribution. Yet, unsurprisingly, these have been couched in terms that seek preferential treatment for groups defined by social identities—which, in many cases, do indeed correlate with deprivation. But the correlations are increasingly contentious, not least because identifying them calls for a fair number of discretionary judgements—and the disputes as well as the attempts to smooth them over (“Let’s extend quotas”) run the risk of jamming our economic progress. We need to move away from notions of social justice based on redistribution, and towards an Indian social democracy based on expanding participation and giving the citizenry universal access to the dynamic parts of the economy.

That can only be done by a steroidal enhancement of our human capital. Spreading education and improving skills have to be the one central task to which we commit, now, our accumulating wealth. Azim Premji’s judgement about where to invest his wealth is exactly right—and it will need many more to clamber off their Antilias and Anandams and follow his example, as well as more sensible government efforts, if we are going to scale up to the levels we need.

Twenty years on, it’s time to broaden attention from economic liberalisation, toward achieving knowledge and skill liberalisation—so that Indians can participate in the growth economy. Rapid experiment and innovation will be needed as we search for effective ways to educate and train millions of Indians in quick march. We are talking, in effect, about an educational revolution: revolutionary in methods, scope, speed—above all, in will.

We have so far relied on 19th century models of education. It cries out for radical change.

Government will have to open up space for new ideas and approaches to building India’s human capital. Until now, we have relied on models developed in the 19th century—elite institutions and universities, supposedly fed by schools and colleges lower down the food chain—and on the amazing autodidactic capacities of Indians. Given the magnitude of the problem—one million Indians entering the workforce every month for the next 20 years—neither self-help nor lumbering governmental institutions can offer a strategy to educate citizens and make them socially mobile.

Lines of tension also loom in the international domain, in both our regional neighbourhood and the international economy.

Since 1991, the paths and prospects of India and Pakistan have dramatically diverged: if it is optimism that prevails in India, in Pakistan the dominant sentiments are resentment, victimhood and despair. Pakistan’s problems are severe. The country’s population is rapidly expanding, and it will likely be the world’s third most populous country by 2050. It has dismal social and human indicators, and its rate of growth is declining. Combined with the predicament of Afghanistan and the brittle veneer of order in Burma, the dysfunctionalities of our immediate region will hold back India’s progress: distracting attention and resources, extracting opportunity costs and hindering the economic integration of the subcontinent. The crises of these societies are deep; we are in no position to intervene to try to resolve them. Yet, neither will we be able to keep out. It will need considerable political skill to manage our economic development in this geopolitical terrain.

Beginning in 1991, we embraced an economic model based on the liberal premise of benign global integration—which for many years the western economies pressed on India. Yet, in today’s world of structural imbalances, the developed economies grow ambivalent about the liberal premise. They sense a threat in Asian economic growth—yet, also for their own purposes, need the economies of China and India to grow. The western economies, struggling to cope with the effects of trade imbalances, are likely to meander between efforts to protect their acquired gains, to intervene in and seek to regulate markets, and to push for greater access to growing markets.

The leaders of western economies recognise that India can be one of the main drivers of global economic growth. But, the more India succeeds in integrating, the more it may face pushback, as its growth collides with a sense in western economies that this threatens their prosperity. Already among western electorates there is a popular reaction against open markets—and their governments will be compelled to be more politically active in the management of their economies.

India, for its part, needs to be careful and shrewdly strategic as it deals both with global markets and competitor states. The fact that India appears frequently now on the business pages of the New York Times and in the Financial Times is driven by western self-interest in India’s growth. This is perfectly reasonable. India’s likely demands for consumer goods, for major infrastructure projects and for defence wares—makes it the last great economic frontier. Given India’s scale, if it maintains its current growth rates and profile, that will be sufficient to keep western economies in business. The latter only really need the revenue-rich Indian state—the buyer of armaments, and of major infrastructure— and a relatively small part of India’s society, the part that can hang out at DLF Emporio in Delhi or the Palladium in Lower Parel, Mumbai, to provide the necessary markets.

NREGA is fine, but when will we address the problems that made it necessary in the first place?

But is that the sort of growth we should be interested in? The standard leftist response, of course, is to abhor with full moral fervour any growth linked to the global economy—while remaining unable to offer a viable account of how to improve the lives of the majority of Indians. A more intelligent response, though one requiring greater political skill, is to figure how to leverage the current western interest in Indian growth to the advantage of those parts of the society that really need to benefit.

The third paradox is a truly global one—one that escapes and encompasses state boundaries. India’s post-1991 globalisation has not only increasingly connected it to international flows of goods, services, capital and ideas, it has also inserted India into a universal history of nature, a history in which all humans, whatever state they happen to live in, have a stake. It’s a history that is making humans, even as they have imagined themselves nature’s master, become its ever more abject supplicant.

For Indians, this has a particularly sharp edge, because, just when they feel that they are gaining some control over their material conditions, those material conditions are proving unsustainable in ecological terms. The growth pattern we’ve fallen into essentially replicates the high natural resource and energy use that the earlier growth economies followed. But for latecomers, it’s unlikely to be a repeatable ploy—especially not for an economy of India’s scale. What should India do? The answers remain in dispute. Alter growth models; trust in the market; or place hope in technical solutions. Frugality, price, science—individually, none seems adequate, but perhaps there is a winning combination.

Crisis prompted the economic reforms of 1991. It’s ironic, then, that the most recent global economic crisis has produced virtually no further reforms or policy ambition—at a time when much remains to be done. The one significant initiative in social and economic policy in recent years, NREGA, is an attempt to mitigate the failures of the Indian agrarian economy. The real question to ask is not whether NREGA is working or not, but: When are we going to address the causes which made NREGA necessary in the first place? There will be more crises and surprises ahead—and we’ll need to make better use of them, as we did in 1991.

{ Sunil Khilnani in Outlook | Magazine | Jan 10, 2011}

Is Indian Modernity Working: Shashi Tharoor

Books Reviewed: The Idea of India: Sunil Khilnani, 1997

A mid the popular ferment that forged an Italian nation out of a congeries of principalities and statelets in the nineteenth century, the novelist Massimo Taparelli d'Azeglio memorably wrote, "We have created Italy. Now all we need to do is to create Italians." Oddly enough, when the British pulled down the Union Jack in 1947, no Indian nationalist succumbed to the temptation to express the same thought-"we have created India. Now all we need to do is to create Indians." 

Such a sentiment would not have occurred to the preeminent voice of Indian nationalism, Jawaharlal Nehru. India's first prime minister would never have spoken of "creating" India or Indians, merely of being the agent for the reassertion of what had always existed but had been long suppressed. Nonetheless, the India that was born in 1947 was in a very real sense a new creation: a state that made fellow citizens of the Ladakhi and the Laccadivian for the first time, that separated Punjabi from Punjabi for the first time, that asked the Keralite peasant to feel allegiance to a Kashmiri Pandit ruling in Delhi, also for the first time. Creating Indians was, in fact, what the nationalist movement did.

After all, this was the India that Winston Churchill had once dismissed as "a geographical expression"-a land that was "no more a single country than the Equator." Churchill was rarely right about India, but it is true that no other country in the world embraces the extraordinary mixture of ethnic groups, the profusion of mutually incomprehensible languages, the varieties of topography and climate, the diversity of religions and cultural practices, and the range of levels of economic development that India does. The Indian nation is not united by a shared ethnicity (it incorporates almost every conceivable racial type), a common language (it has at least 17, according to the constitution, or 35, if one counts all languages spoken by more than a million people), or a single religion (India is home to every faith known to mankind, and Hinduism, the majority religion, itself reflects the country's diversity).

And yet India is more than the sum of its contradictions. It is a country held together, in the words of Nehru, "by strong but invisible threads . . . a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive." That nebulous quality is what the analyst of Indian nationalism is ultimately left with. It is an idea-the idea of India. But what is that idea? Nehru articulated it as pluralism vindicated by history, seeing the country as an "ancient palimpsest" on which successive rulers and subjects had inscribed their visions without erasing what had been asserted previously. A generation of nationalist historians echoed him, making "unity in diversity" the most hallowed of independent India's self-defining slogans.

In the 1950s and 1960s came the skeptics, almost all based abroad, who began to take scalpels to this sanctified idea of India. Nirad Chaudhuri, the iconoclastic author of The Continent of Circe and other volumes of largely autobiographical social commentary, excoriated India's nationalist presumptions and what he saw as its civilizational inadequacies.

V. S. Naipaul, a descendant of Indian indentured laborers in the Caribbean, visited his ancestral homeland and chronicled his disappointment in An Area of Darkness and the even more savagely negative India: A Wounded Civilization. A host of Western writers portrayed the problems and limitations of India's modernization as portending the imminent breakdown of the nation and the inevitable collapse of its political institutions. Despite the doomsayers-and there were many who predicted India's disintegration well before the twentieth anniversary of its independence from British rule-the country survived, withstanding political, military, and economic challenges. By 1990 Naipaul was writing in celebration of the "million mutinies" through which Indian diversity was working to transform the democratic society he had so recently been prepared to write off. 

How did India preserve and protect a viable idea of itself in the course of the last 50 years, while it grew from 370 million people to 970 million, reorganized its state structures, and sought to defend itself from internal and external dangers, all the while remaining democratic? Explaining this is central to the task taken on by Sunil Khilnani, the author of The Idea of India, a title probably borrowed from Amartya Sen's celebrated lecture at Oxford in 1993. "Reflective and incisive nonfictional interrogations of India's distinctive modernity have yet to be produced," Khilnani claimed recently, setting the stage for his own work. This comment was-as I informed the editor who offered me this review-in a dismissive notice of my own book, India: From Midnight to the Millennium. Though I mention this to declare an interest, I rather like Khilnani's slender volume, an amiable disquisition on Indian modernity structured as four essays on democracy, political economy, urbanization, and Indian identity.

RETELLING TALES 

"This book," Khilnani tells us in his introduction, "is an initial venture into the task of retelling the political history of independent India." The qualification is necessary; Khilnani competently organizes a series of reflections on well-worn themes, and despite the occasional lapse into the turgid prose that afflicts all political scientists, generally does so with style. Style is central to both the pleasures and the pitfalls of his narrative. Khilnani is charmingly self-indulgent, fond of sweepingly colorful generalizations. (The Government's Planning Commission is a "retirement home for the socially benevolent," whatever that may mean.) His penchant for sweeping one-liners is fetching in an academic-who can resist a chapter that begins with the sentence "India in the 1950s fell in love with the idea of concrete"?-but he cannot resist an epigram, even when it is more witty than wise. "Like the British empire it supplanted, India's constitutional democracy was established in a fit of absent-mindedness," he declares, ignoring the overwhelming weight of evidence to the contrary in nationalist literature.

Khilnani tells us he is working on a biography of Nehru, and he is sound on the lasting contributions made to the Indian state by that remarkable man, whose extemporization of Indianness remains an enduring legacy to so many Indian liberals. A highly self-aware scholar, Khilnani ends his book with an assertion of the value of Western political theory and a useful if contentious bibliographical essay that students of Indian politics will appreciate. But the unwary should be warned that Khilnani's glibness sometimes trips him up. Any reader of Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography knows that he did not "discover" vegetarianism in Holborn; Nehru was never a head of state; Chandigarh is not "400 kilometers north of Delhi," which would put it in Kashmir; the Mughals entered India in 1526, not 1528 (this would be like a British historian placing the Battle of Hastings in 1068). This sort of carelessness is disconcerting, for it undermines the reader's willingness to take some of the author's more esoteric suggestions seriously. For instance, Khilnani attributes the existence of "less stark inequalities" in the Indian state of Kerala to its "own cultural forms of matrilineal property inheritance"-a dubious proposition at best, since not all Kerala communities are matrilineal and inheritance per se has few redistributive implications, but one made worse by being wholly unsubstantiated.

THE FAILURES

More important, Khilnani's exegesis on Indian modernity inadequately examines its failures. Nehru's legacy to India was a mixed one. It consisted of four major pillars-democratic institution-building, staunch secularism, nonalignment, and socialist economics. The first two were indispensable to the country's survival; the third (not examined by Khilnani) preserved its self-respect and enhanced its international standing, though without bringing any concrete benefits to the Indian people; the fourth was disastrous, condemning the Indian people to poverty and stagnation and engendering inefficiency, red-tapism, and corruption on a scale rarely rivaled elsewhere.

In the five decades since independence, Indian democracy has failed to create a single Indian political community. Instead, we have become more conscious than ever of what divides us: religion, region, caste, language, ethnicity. The Indian political system has become looser and more fragmented. Politicians mobilize support along ever-narrower lines of political identity. It has become more important to be a "backward caste" Yadav, a "tribal" Bodo, or a sectarian Muslim than to be an Indian. This is particularly ironic because one of the early strengths of Nehruvian India-the survival of the nationalist movement as a political party, the Congress Party serving as an all-embracing, all-inclusive agglomeration of the major political tendencies in the country-led to this situation by undermining the evolution of a genuine multiparty system. Had the nationalist movement given birth to, say, three parties-one right of center, one social democrat, one communist-a culture of principled and ideological contestation might have evolved in India's polity.

Instead the Congress Party's dominance stifled this process, and opposition to it (with a few honorable exceptions, like the pro-free enterprise Swatantra Party between 1959 and 1974) was largely based on the assertion of identities to which the Congress was deemed not to have given full expression-regional, religious, or caste-based. With the increasing weakness of the Congress, politicians have been tempted to organize themselves around identities other than party (or to create parties to reflect a particularist identity).

A distinctive feature of the Nehruvian legacy was its visionary rejection of India's assorted bigotries and particularisms. The Nehrus-displaced Kashmiris-were, by upbringing and conviction, completely secular. Not only did Indira Gandhi marry a Parsi, but her daughters-in-law were an Italian Christian and a Punjabi Sikh. The one strand of political opinion Nehru and his offspring abhorred was that of Hindu religious revivalism. Nehru himself was an avowed agnostic, as was his daughter until she discovered the electoral advantages of public piety. All four generations of Nehrus in public life remained secular in outlook and conduct. Their appeal transcended caste, region, language, and religion, something impossible to say of any other leading Indian politician. There could be no starker indication of the end of Nehruvianism than the fact that, 50 years after partition and independence, religion has again become a key determinant of political identity. Demolishing a mosque they say stands on a Hindu holy site, denouncing what they decry as the appeasement of minorities, clamoring for office and power for their "saffron brigades," Hindu revivalists have assertively attempted to convert the religion of the "majority" into a badge of Indian identity.

If the Nehruvian version of democracy is discredited, democracy itself is not. Amid India's myriad problems, it is democracy that has given Indians of every imaginable caste, creed, culture, and cause the chance to break free of their lot. There is social oppression and caste tyranny, particularly in rural India, but Indian democracy offers the victims a means of escape, and often-thanks to the determination with which the poor and oppressed exercise their franchise-of triumph. The significant changes in the social composition of India's ruling class since independence, both in politics and in the bureaucracy, are proof of democracy at work, but the poor quality of the country's democratic political leadership in general offers less cause for celebration. India's rulers increasingly reflect the qualities required to acquire power rather than the skills to wield it for the common good. Pluralist democracy is India's greatest strength, but its current manner of operation is also the source of its major weaknesses.

These new developments are ensuring a dramatic transformation of Indian society, but they imply another idea of India than the one in which the Nehruvians rejoice. The workings of Indian democracy have served to create and perpetuate India's various particularisms. The Hindu-Muslim divide is merely the most visible, but that within Hinduism, between caste Hindus and the former "untouchables," and now between the upper castes and the lower intermediate castes known as the "backwards," is actually transforming Indian society in ways the founding fathers did not anticipate. Caste, which Nehru and his ilk abhorred and believed would disappear from the social matrix of modern India, has not merely survived and thrived, but has become an instrument for highly effective political mobilization. Candidates are picked by their parties with an eye toward the caste loyalties they can call upon; often their appeal is overtly to voters of their own caste or sub-caste, urging them to elect one of their own. The result has been the growth of caste-consciousness and casteism throughout Indian society. In many Indian states, caste determines educational opportunities, job prospects, and governmental promotions; all too often, India's unique brand of affirmative action means you cannot go forward unless you're a "backward." Whether through elections or quotas, political mobilization in contemporary India has asserted the power of old identities, habits, faiths, and prejudices, which suggests a more complex form of "modernization" than that implicit in Khilnani's essays. 

SOCIALISM, INDIAN STYLE

In economics, too, the Indian idea described by Khilnani is fading. Self-sufficiency and self-reliance were the twin mantras of Nehruvian India, which shackled itself to statist controls that emphasized distributive justice above economic growth, stifled free enterprise, and discouraged foreign investment. The Government's reasons were embedded in the Indian freedom struggle: since the British had come to trade and stayed on to rule, Indian nationalists were deeply suspicious of foreign investment. (One of the lessons history teaches us is that history often teaches us the wrong lessons.) "Self-reliance" thus became a slogan: it guaranteed both political freedom and freedom from economic exploitation. The result was that for most of the five decades since independence, India pursued an economic policy of subsidizing unproductivity, regulating stagnation, and distributing poverty. We called this socialism.

Socialism, Indian style, was a compound of nationalism and idealism. It was the conviction that items vital for the economic well-being of Indians must remain in Indian hands-not the hands of Indians seeking to profit from such activity, but the disinterested hands of the state, the father and mother to all Indians. In this kind of thinking, performance was not a relevant criterion for judging the utility of the public sector: its inefficiencies were masked by generous subsidies from the national exchequer, and a combination of vested interests-socialist ideologues, bureaucratic management, self-protective trade unions, and captive markets-kept it beyond political criticism.

The "permit-license-quota" culture of statist socialism allowed the ruling politicians to use politics as a vehicle for self-gratification. Over the years India has overflowed with the sort of professional politicians the educated middle classes have come to despise, sanctimonious windbags clad hypocritically in homespun who spouted socialist rhetoric while amassing uncountable-and unaccountable-riches. Of all this, there is very little in Khilnani's book. His admiration for the Nehruvian project is boundless: Rajiv Gandhi, the impatiently modernizing prime minister, is mentioned precisely three times, whereas P. C. Mahalanobis, the socialist advisor to Nehru's Planning Commission, gets a fulsome seven pages, including the titles of the "technically striking but intellectually rather listless" papers he published as a statistician in the 1930s and 1940s.

In fact, India's misfortune, in Jagdish Bhagwati's famous aphorism, was to be afflicted with brilliant economists. And clamorous politicians: for every group claimed a larger share of a national economic pie that decades of protectionist economic policies prevented from growing. It is sadly impossible to quantify the economic losses inflicted on India over four decades of entrepreneurs frittering away their energies in queuing for licenses rather than manufacturing products, paying bribes instead of hiring workers, wooing politicians instead of understanding consumers, and getting things done through bureaucrats rather than doing things for themselves. The penny, or rather the paisa, finally dropped in the major financial crisis of 1991, which forced the Government to let sweeping dogmas die and to adopt new policies. India's economic liberalization since then has often seemed hesitant, but its essential repudiation of Nehruvianism now seems irreversible. 

INEVITABLE DIVERSITY

"The idea of India," Khilnani concludes, "has been constituted through struggles to balance contrary pulls in a coherent political project, to respect the diversities of culture with a commitment to a common enterprise of development." This unexceptionable proposition rests on an idea of India as, in essence, an ever-ever land, the product of a long history, a wide geography, and a short memory. This India is a plural nation, where diversity is as natural as sunshine and there is no alternative to democratic coexistence. The stresses and strains of competing identities are real. In pluralist India, it is essential that each citizen feels secure in his or her identities. But Indians have come to understand that while they may be proud to be Muslims or Marwaris or Mallahs, they are secure in these identities only because they are also Indians. It is their larger national identity that gives them the framework within which to work, trade, compete, and coexist with other members of the broader society, contend for political office, and feel safe behind defensible borders.

So the only idea of India that can work is that of one land embracing many. It is the idea that a nation may endure differences of caste, creed, color, culture, cuisine, costume, and custom, and still rally around a democratic consensus-on how to manage without consensus. It is an India open to the contention of ideas and interests within it and unafraid of the power or the products of the outside world.

Our founding fathers wrote a constitution that gave passports to their ideals. Where Freudians note the distinctions that arise out of "the narcissism of minor differences," in India we celebrate the commonality of major differences. If America is a melting pot, then India is a thali, a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast. Khilnani's four essays do not culminate in quite so direct an explication of his title. Yet his somewhat uneven, decidedly partial, but intelligent and readable book reveals that he belongs in a congenial camp, among those who cherish an idea of India as a land that safeguards the common space available to a medley of identities-an India that remains safe for diversity.

{From 'Foreign Affairs' January/February, 1998 Issue.}