The Great Indian Novel

Introduction

On August 15, 1997, independent India turns fifty years old. What has been the story of those first fifty years? What does the twenty-first century hold for India? And why should either of these questions matter?

Twenty-one years ago, when I was fresh out of college and about to go to the United States for postgraduate studies, a leading Indian national newspaper asked me to do an article for their Independence Day supplement. The Emergency had just been declared; politicians had been locked up, the press censored; even one of my short stories, a police-detective effort called "The Political Murder," had been banned by censors who thought the very notion of a political murder dangerous and antinational. Around me, newspapermen and journalists were cowed and resentful. The freedoms for which our independence struggle had been waged seemed in peril; and yet weren't we, the literate minority, disqualified by our privileged status from objecting to measures designed, as the government claimed, to benefit "the common man?" I was angry, cynical, and confused - a combination of emotions appropriate both to my age and to the times. This is how I began my article:

Independent India is twenty-eight years old today. I was nineteen a few months ago. In school they told me I was the citizen of tomorrow. Around me I saw the citizens of today, and wondered what purpose I was going to serve. They seemed worn and jaded and cynical. To my fellow-citizens-of-the-future, Independence Day merely meant early mornings in starched uniforms on parade grounds, relieved only by the comforting thought of no more classes. In college they were more sensible. They just gave us a holiday, and the chowkidar unfurled the flag.

I look at a fading photocopy of the piece today, and marvel that they published it at all. By August, of course, censorship by unimaginative government babus had given way to self-censorship by imaginative sub-editors, and mine were evidently more daring than most. "Independence," I went on in adolescent passion,

conjures up visions of mammoth patriotic rallies outside Red Fort; a reminder of freedom and self-reliance and the hope of unexploited progress. But when the drums have been beaten and the cavalcade has passed, the cheering invariably seems to subside into a desultory grumble. Our capacity for unproductive complaint is seemingly limitless; but then we appear to have developed the art of destructive criticism to the proportions of a national characteristic. Perhaps it is because, as a former colony, we are used to bemoaning our lot without being able to do anything about it....

The divisions [that matter] are less between Indian and Indian - whether Hindu-Muslim, Brahmin-untouchable, landlord-peasant or bureaucrat-revolutionary - than between Indian and India. And what is far more fearsome than economic stagnation or political apathy is that atrophy of the line of association that binds the one's fortunes indissolubly to the other's. For otherwise we have the strange spectacle of a nation without nationals, of Indians who are not involved in India.

"Atrophy." "Indissolubly." I was nineteen, I liked big words. But beneath the overdeveloped vocabulary I had a message from my generation. After a couple of paragraphs savaging "cocktail-toting polemicists" at "boxwallah gatherings" for their lack of a "sense of belonging' to India, I argued: "That one is an all-too-dispensable part [of the Indian reality] is surely all the more reason why one should take one's role all the more seriously, instead of affecting the dislocated detachment that has become the untaxed perquisite of citizenship." That was my point: we had to belong, we had to care, we had to be involved inwhat became of our independence. This "sense of belonging" (thephrase with which I titled the article) would be vital "to me and those of my generation who now stand on the threshold of that which has, over the last twenty-eight years, been made to mean so little."

It was easy enough to say this, I suppose, when I was holding a ticket to the United States and escaping from my responsibility to do anything about it. But as I read these words now, I wonder how much they might resonate in the mind and spirit of a nineteen-year-old collegian in today's India. A year and a half after I wrote this article, boys and girls very much like me, children of executives in Hindustanized multinationals, accustomed to ease and privilege, came out in the streets of Calcutta and Delhi, threw off the apolitical detachment I had described, and campaigned door-to-door to unseat an authoritarian government. They asserted the "sense of belonging" I was afraid we had all lost.

Today the issues that confront India are, in a strikingly different way, as important as those that faced my contemporaries two decades ago. There is no immediate threat of a suspension of our basic freedoms, as there was then. But in this book I propose to argue that India is, in a phrase first used (though in a different context) by the British historian E. P. Thompson, "the most important country for the future of the world." For Indians stand at the intersection of four of the most important debates facing the world at the end of the twentieth century:

• The bread-versus freedom debate. Can democracy "deliver the goods" to alleviate desperate poverty, or do its inbuilt inefficiencies only impede rapid growth? Is the instability of political contention (and of makeshift coalitions) a luxury that a developing country cannot afford? As today's young concentrate on making their bread, should theyconsider political freedom a dispensable distraction?

• The centralization-versus-federalism debate. Does tomorrow's India need to be run by a strong central government able to transcend the fissiparous tendencies of language, caste, and region, or is that government best which centralizes least?

• The pluralism-versus-fundamentalism debate. Is the secularism established in India's Constitution, and now increasingly attacked as a westernized affectation, essential in a pluralist society, or should India, like many other Third World countries, find refuge in the assertion of its own religious identity?

• The "Coca-colonization" debate, or globalization versus self-reliance. Should India, where economic self-sufficiency has been a mantra for more than four decades, open itself further to the world economy, or does the entry of Western consumer goods bring in alien influences that threaten to disrupt Indian society in ways too vital to be allowed? Should we raise the barriers to shield our youth from the pernicious seductions of MTV and McDonald's?

These are not merely academic debates; they are now being enacted on the national and world stage, and the choices we make will determine the kind of India our children will inherit in the twenty-first century. And since the century will begin with Indians accounting for a sixth of the world's population, their choices will resonate throughout the globe.

In the pages that follow I embark upon a sweeping and highly personalized examination of contemporary India, with these debates in mind. This book is not a survey of modern Indian history, though it touches upon many of the principal events of the last five decades. It is not "reportage," though I do draw anecdotally upon my own travels and conversations in India. It is instead a subjective account, I hope both informed and impassioned, of the forces that have made (and nearly unmade) today's India, and about the India that I hope my sons will inherit in the second half-century after independence.

Not all agree with my vision of India. There are those who wish it to become a Hindu Rashtra, a land of and for the Hindu majority; those who wish to raise higher the protectionist barriers against foreign investment that are slowly beginning to come down; those who believe that a firm hand at the national helm would be preferable to the failures of democracy (one prominent nationalist even called recently for the army to take over the government). As far back as 1949, during the debates on the draft Constitution of India, its principal draftsman, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, had pointed out that Indian democracy was as old as its ancient village republics. India had political assemblies with elaborate parliamentary rules of procedure at a time when most of the rest of the world suffered under despotism or anarchy. "This democratic system," Ambedkar said movingly, "India lost. Will she lose it a second time?"

I will argue that the only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts. An India that denies itself to some Indians could end up being denied to all Indians.

In asserting this, a few words of explanation are in order. This book is a paean to India, yet it emanates from the pen of a United Nations official who has lived outside India for most of his adult life. I am, indeed, often asked how I can reconcile my passionate faith in India with my internationalist work for the United Nations. I see no contradiction; indeed, both emerge from the same pluralist convictions. The Indian adventure is that of human beings of different ethnicities and religions, customs and costumes, cuisines and colors, languages and accents, working together under the same roof, sharing the same dreams. That is also what the United Nations, at its best, seeks to achieve. It is arguably easier for Indians than for most others to work with people who are unlike them, since that is what we are brought up to do at home.

The second explanation, however, deals with that collective "we." Who are the Indians of whom I speak so proprietarily? In his magisterial essay on life and thought in Mexico, The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz observed that his thoughts were not concerned with the entire Mexican population, but rather with those among them "who are conscious of themselves, for one reason or another, as Mexicans." The same applies, for comparable reasons, to this book, which speaks of an India that exists in the imagination of most, but not all, of my countrymen and countrywomen. Paz went on to serve as Mexico's ambassador to India in the 1960s, and I imagine he saw that, as in the Mexico he was writing about in 1950, several historical epochs and states of development coexist simultaneously in India. This is still the case, and it would be foolish as well as presumptuous to seek to speak for them all in a general notion of Indianness. In the last fifty years not all Indians have learned to think of themselves as Indians, and to speak of an Indian identity is really to subsume a number of identities that vary depending upon class, caste, region, and language. But this variety is in itself integral to my idea of Indianness; the singular thing about India is that you can only speak of it in the plural. India is fundamentally a pluralist state; its pluralism emerges from its geography, is reflected in its history, andis confirmed by its ethnography. It is this that I hark to in my writing,which - when it succumbs to generalization - will generalize for the many rather than for the mass.

This is hardly a new predicament. The narrator of my book The Great Indian Novel confesses his own subjectivity to his scribe, Ganapathi, and acknowledges the validity of alternative viewpoints on everything he has had to say:

This is my story of the India I know, with its biases, selections, omissions, distortions, all mine. But you cannot derive your cosmogony from a single birth, Ganapathi. Every Indian must forever carry with him, in his head and heart, his own history of India.

I couldn't have put it better myself.