India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (3 page)

Indians, Narayan added, cultivate a certain “otherworldliness.”
Americans have “a robust indifference to eternity.” A typical American “works hard and earnestly, acquires wealth and enjoys life. He has no time to worry about the afterlife.”

By the time I returned home, India was determinedly shedding the abstemiousness and detachment that had defined it since independence. “Material acquisition” was no longer the preserve of Americans. The “otherworldliness” of an earlier era—a certain apathy, a charming if ultimately unproductive indifference—was being replaced by the energetic (and often ruthless) ambition of a new generation.

A great reconciliation was taking place. As a boy, my two worlds had often felt very far apart. India and America were literally—but also socially, culturally, and experientially—on opposite sides of the planet. Now, for better and for worse, in ways that both excited and at times frightened me, I felt as though India was co-opting the very qualities that defined America.

India’s transformation began in 1991, when a financial crisis
forced the government to lower import barriers, ease foreign exchange controls, and allow a greater degree of private investment. These reforms unleashed the nation, spurring economic growth from an anemic 3.5 percent or so (what economists derisively referred to as “the Hindu rate of growth”) to around 8 or 9 percent. They transformed a closed, socialist—or at any rate semi-socialist—nation into a country that was far more willing to accept and even embrace global capitalism.

The change was most evident in the cities, in urban metropolises
like Chennai and Bangalore and Mumbai, which were the first to feel the impact of the reforms. On the green lawns of software parks, in the corridors of new shopping malls, crowded with young consumers clutching cell phones and bags of cosmetics and DVDs, and in the bars and clubs where men and women mingled freely, I felt that India was being redefined. The nation was widening its horizons, experimenting with fresh ideas and ways of living.

But even in rural India, where I had grown up, and to which I was now returning, the reinvention was palpable.

Auroville is in the countryside; it is surrounded by five villages. In the fields around me, farmers who had once gone to work in bullock carts without tires now drove shiny tractors. Down at the beach, fishermen were trading catamarans for diesel-powered motorboats. Satellite dishes were ubiquitous, and even a couple of ATMs had sprouted up between the older thatch huts and the new concrete buildings.

In both city and country, in shopping malls and on farms, what struck me most about India was not so much the cell phones and satellite dishes and other physical manifestations of change. I was impressed by something less tangible, something in the spirit of the nation.

Middle-class children, sons and daughters of parents who had aspired to nothing so much as a secure government job, were planning careers as software entrepreneurs; they envisioned themselves as the next Bill Gates. Farmers and fishermen were setting up restaurants and guesthouses; their ambition challenged the social order that had for so long pinned them to poverty and illiteracy.

For the first time—the first time in my life, but arguably in India’s history, too—people dared to imagine an existence for themselves that was unburdened by the past and tradition. India, I felt, had started to dream.

Later, after I had spent more time in the country, when I had
traveled around and met more people, I began to question aspects of that dream. The self-confidence I began to see as a kind of blindness, an almost messianic conviction in the country’s future. The unrelenting optimism was often delusional, a blinkered faith that ignored the many problems—the poverty, the inequality, the lawlessness, the environmental depredation—still facing the nation.

I grew less impressed with the shopping malls and shiny office complexes, with the fancy bars and the variety of cocktails they served. I began to feel that the country was being engulfed in its encounter with capitalism, swallowed by a great wave of consumerism and materialism that threatened to corrode the famous Indian soul.

Nothing is free. The more time I spent back home, the more it became apparent to me that India would have to pay a price for its prosperity—that new money was being accompanied by new forms of inequality, that freedom and opportunities were opening the floodgates, too, to disorder and violence.

Millions of Indians have risen out of poverty since the nation’s economic reforms. But millions more remain in poverty, and millions, too, are being subjected to the psychological dislocation
of having their world change, of watching a social order that has given meaning to them—and their parents, and their grandparents before them—slip away.

Development, I came to understand, was a form of creative destruction. For everyone whose life was being regenerated or rejuvenated in modern India, there was someone, as well, whose life was being destroyed.

This book really contains two stories. One is a story of
progress, of the sense of purpose and direction that rapid economic growth can bestow on a nation that had in many ways lost faith in itself. The other is a darker story; it tells of the destruction and disruptions caused by the same process of development.

One process, two outcomes. India is a complex country. Sometimes the creativity and the destruction, the good and the bad, were hard to disentangle.

I didn’t see this complexity when I first came back. My understanding of the country I had known only as a boy was superficial. When I landed on that winter morning in Chennai and took the East Coast Road back to Auroville, I saw just the optimistic side of India.

I suppose I saw what I wanted to see. After years of feeling alienated, never quite belonging in America, I was desperate to find a home. This book is in part a story of that homecoming—of how I embraced and found myself revitalized in the new India, of how I rejoiced in the nation’s economic progress; and then of
how, after a few years, I learned to see the many edges, more than a few jagged, of that strange phenomenon called development.

Most of all, this book is the story of the people I met after returning to India. These people allowed me to glimpse, and at least partially understand, the complexity and nuance of this exceptionally layered country. I have come to know India again through the men and women who shared with me their life stories, who allowed me into their families and their homes. Many of these people have become friends; their friendship has allowed me to write this book.

I have been back in India, now, for a little over nine years. A lot
has happened in my life during that time. I have built a house, married, had two children. Sometimes I watch my boys—Aman, age six, and Emil, age four—play in the same forests I did as a child, run through the same fields and villages I knew when I was just a little older than they are. It makes me happy, warms me in a place that I didn’t know I had until they were born, that their childhood memories will occupy the same landscape as mine.

But I know, also, that that warm feeling is a little bit of wishful thinking—that though the forests and fields and villages remain, and though my children are growing up, as I did, in rural India, nothing is really as it was. The world I knew as a boy doesn’t exist anymore.

Most of the time, I’m at peace with that reality. I celebrate the new India. But there are moments when all I can focus on is the
sense of loss—the memory of a time before software parks and shopping malls, the sobriety and moral purpose of a country before it succumbed to the bland homogenizations of twenty-first-century capitalism.

I know that the great transition under way now is inevitable, and probably even desirable. I know, too, that it is unstoppable. The forces at work in modern India are part of the great sweep of history. All I can do is watch them, understand them, and maybe, through understanding, learn to accept them.

I’d like to think of this book as a step in that direction. It represents my effort to come to terms with the forces remaking my home.

Part I

“
We used to ride across these fields on horses,” R. Sathyanarayanan
, or Sathy, as he called himself, told me.

“I remember it so well. We’d ride from that mountain over there, where my uncle lived. My father had a gun, a Webley & Scott pistol from Birmingham he’d inherited from my grandfather. He’d shoot it in the air to announce our arrival. The whole village knew we were coming. Our cook would warm up the food.”

We were standing in an empty field outside Sathy’s village of Molasur. It was summer. The land was hard and dry. Sathy was dripping with sweat.

He pointed to the gray mountain on the horizon by which his uncle still lived. He said all the land between that mountain and where we were now standing, thousands of acres, had once belonged to his family. They were zamindars, feudal lords. Not too long ago,
just a few decades, they had ruled over the land and the villages on it like country nobility.

We walked through the flat fields, along irrigation channels, up an embankment overlooking a village reservoir. The reservoir was empty. Ancient granite steps led down the embankment. Sathy sat on one of the steps and talked about fishing and swimming in the reservoir with his brothers when they were boys.