Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography (31 page)

Slums are not unique to India. The slums of New York and London were legendary in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. We need to distinguish here between urban decay and slums. Urban decay describes the condition of blight and abandonment that one sees in Detroit, New Jersey, and northern England. In contrast, as writers like Jeb Brugmann have pointed out, Indian slums are full of enterprise and energy.
²⁴
Indeed, Indian slums are remarkable in how safe and cohesive they are. Most readers of this book will be able to walk through the average Indian slum even at night without
fear of being harmed. This cohesion comes from the fact that migrants do not view slum life as a static state of deprivation but as a foothold into the modern, urban economy. Life may be hard but, in a rapidly growing economy, there is enough socio-economic mobility to keep slum-dwellers hardworking, enterprising and law-abiding. I am not glorifying slums or arguing that they do not need help. Clearly, we need to provide the urban poor with better sanitation, public health, education and so on. The point I am making is that real slums are not the places of static hopelessness portrayed in popular movies like
Slumdog Millionaire
.

The expansion of cities usually happens by engulfing the surrounding countryside. In some cases the old villages are swept away. However, in most parts of India, the old villages often survive despite being engulfed by the expanding urban sprawl. Scattered across modern Indian cities, there remain enclaves where the contours of the old villages can be clearly discerned decades after the surrounding farmlands were converted into offices, roads, houses and shops.

In some ways, this is in keeping with Indian civilization—the ability to allow the past to live on in the present. Tucked away behind modern buildings, the former villages make their presence felt in many different ways—as the source of vagrant cattle, as homes to armies of informal workers, as the place to visit if one wants to buy bathroom tiles or electricals. Many of these villages have been newly absorbed into the
urban fabric, but some are very old and have been embedded in the city for generations. In Mumbai, the villages of Bandra and Walkeshwar retain strong vestiges of their origins despite being located at the heart of a throbbing megapolis.

For the purposes of this book, I will limit myself to the experience of urban villages in and around Delhi. My studies suggest that, roughly speaking, these villages go through the following cycle. In the first stage, the farmers sell their farmland to the government or to a developer but the village settlement itself is usually left alone. This settlement, dubbed as ‘lal dora’, is exempt from the usual municipal and building codes. The former farmers now notice that there is inadequate housing for the legions of workers, contractors and suppliers who have descended on the construction site. They, therefore, use their newly acquired capital and the exemption to build a mish-mash of buildings within the lal-dora area. Often built with little regard for safety or ventilation, these become home to construction workers and suppliers. Thus, the village turns into a slum with the former villagers as slumlords.

A few years pass and construction work in that particular area begins to wind down. The construction workers drift away to other sites. New migrants move in—security guards, maids, drivers and other people who work in the newly built urban space. The shops selling construction material and hardware are steadily replaced by shops selling mobile phones, street-food, car-parts and so on. For the first time we see private and, occasionally public, investment in amenities such as common toilets. As the migrants become more permanent, they bring their families in from their ancestral villages. This leads to an interesting supply-side response—the ‘English
Medium’ school! In my experience, language is seen by the poor as the single most important tool for social climbing. Nathupur village in Gurgaon, circa 2009–10, was an example of a village in this second stage.

After another ten to fifteen years, the village goes through a third transformation. By this time, the surrounding area is well settled and open agricultural fields are a distant memory. We now see students, salesmen, and small businessmen move into the village. Some of them may be the newly educated children of migrants but they are now a higher social class. The old villagers still continue to be the dominant owners of the land but they begin to invest in improving their individual properties in order to elicit higher rents (after all, they now have a location advantage in the middle of an established city). In many instances, the owners have become politically important enough to lobby for public investment in basic drainage and sanitation. The shops upgrade themselves and the old street-food-sellers become cheap restaurants. An ‘Aggarwal Sweets’ is almost obligatory in the larger settlements.

The final stage of transformation is that the old village gentrifies. This can happen in a number of ways. Since the early nineties, Hauz Khas village has become a warren of boutique shops, art galleries and trendy restaurants. Mahipalpur, near the international airport, has seen an explosion of cheap hotels in the last decade. Anyone driving to or from the airport will have seen the screaming neon signs that remind one of Hong Kong’s Wan Chai district. Similarly, Shahpur Jat has become home to numerous small offices and designer workshops. In many cases, the old villagers have
encashed their real estate and the ownership pattern has become much more mixed. The areas now grapple with the problems of prosperity such as inadequate parking.

Out of this messy process of migration, social-climbing and urban evolution, a new India is emerging. It will be dominated by the newly middle class children of migrants. The country’s old middle class was the product of the British and socialist eras. However, it is now being swamped by those climbing into the middle class from the slums and small ‘mofussil’ towns. Unlike the incumbents, the newcomers are usually the first generation that can speak some English. Their parents would have been the first literate generation and their grandparents would often have been illiterate subsistence farmers. One sees them working in call-centres or as shop-assistants in the malls. Even the changing social background of India’s sports heroes hints at the shift. India has never witnessed such social mobility.

Moreover, as the new middle class climbs the social ladder, its tastes and attitudes will impact the mainstream. This is already visible from Bollywood music to television news. The superhit Bollywood song
Munni Badnaam Hui
(Munni is Notorious) is an example of how ‘mofussil’ music is being mainstreamed. No matter what the snobs of the old middle class may say, this is generally a good thing.

As we have seen in the previous chapter, Indians had again begun to travel and migrate abroad during the colonial era.
The fortunes of these various diasporas changed with the withdrawal of British rule. In some places like Singapore and Mauritius, the Indian community would thrive. However, in many places, they faced severe persecution. In 1962, the Indian community in Burma was expelled by the dictator Ne Win and its properties were expropriated. A similar fate befell the Gujarati community in Uganda under Idi Amin in 1972. Some of these groups returned to India but others sailed farther afield. The Ugandan Gujaratis, for instance, moved to Britain in large numbers and would become a successful business community.

After independence, the nature of Indian migrations changed. There was one wave in the ’50s and the ’60s, with Punjabis moving to the United Kingdom as industrial workers. Another was of Anglo-Indians who migrated to Australia and Canada. By the 1970s, the oil-rich Arab states in the Persian Gulf began to import Indians in large numbers to work in construction sites. The single largest source of this migration was Kerala and, as already discussed in
Chapter 5
, many of these workers were descendants of Arabs who had come to India in the Middle Ages to trade. By the 1990s, large Indian communities would come to agglomerate in hubs like Dubai.

Thus far, Indian migrations had been predominantly of blue-collar workers and of traders. From the late sixties, a new kind of emigration took shape: that of middle-class Indians in search of education and white-collar opportunities. By this time, India’s socialist economic model was beginning to fray and the optimism of the early years of independence was fading. What began as a trickle became a flood by the late 1980s, and it was commonplace for middle-class Indian
students to take the SAT and GMAT tests and apply to foreign universities. The United States was the biggest recipient of this flow, although smaller streams also went to Britain, Canada and so on. By the late ’90s, yet another sub-category emerged—Indian professionals who were hired into the global economy. This group clustered around important cities like Singapore, London, New York and Dubai, and were concentrated in sectors such as medicine, law, finance and information technology.

Over the years, many of these groups have mixed and merged, but traces of each stream can still be discerned in the early twenty-first century. What is interesting is the extent to which ‘Indianness’ has been consciously retained by most of these expatriate communities even when they have been away from the subcontinent for generations. I remember two gentlemen, both Swedish citizens, whom I met on a boat trip from Dar-e-Salaam to Zanzibar in May 2010. Their ancestors were Gujarati Muslims who had settled in Zanzibar in the late nineteenth century but were forced out by race riots in the mid-1960s. They were on a trip back to rediscover their roots. I found them in the cabin chatting away in Kutchhi and, when they discovered I was Indian, they insisted that I share their supplies of Gujarati snacks. They had never visited India, but I was amazed by how strongly Indian they felt. Indeed, they were very proud of India’s recent economic successes and were planning a trip to see their ancestral homeland.

This brings me to a fundamental point about what it means to be Indian in the twenty-first century. The Indian diaspora is said to be around twenty-five to thirty million strong and spans the world. Through hard work, education and
entrepreneurship, its members have become very successful in fields ranging from business and politics to literature. With success has come a new confidence in its identity. Thanks to globalization and technology, these expatriate communities can now maintain business, personal and cultural links with India in ways that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Richer and better connected, they share passions ranging from Bollywood to cricket with their cousins back in India.

Note that this is not a one-way relationship. Indians tend to be inordinately proud of the personal achievements of people of Indian origin even if they have had no direct link to the subcontinent. An Indian-origin governor of an American state, a Nobel Prize winner or a CEO of a multinational company can make headlines in Indian newspapers. In other words, both sides share a very palpable sense of shared identity. This is not unique to Indians since the Jewish and Chinese diasporas also share similar sentiments. The point is that India’s civilizational nationhood includes people who are neither citizens nor live on the subcontinent. In recent years, the Indian Republic has tried to deal with this reality by creating, perhaps clumsily, different shades of citizenship in the form of Overseas Citizen of India and Person of Indian Origin. Such has been the journey of the ‘global Indian’: from the docks of Lothal to the boardrooms of London, New York and Singapore

The journey from Gondwana to Gurgaon has been a long one. In this book, I have hopefully given the reader a sense of the twists and turns, the abrupt shifts as well as the surprising
continuities. It is remarkable how the artifacts of this long history sit juxtaposed and piled up next to each other. The brand new city of Gurgaon, for instance, is being constructed right next to the Aravalli ridges, the oldest discernible geological feature on this planet. If you look north from one of Gurgaon’s tall office blocks, you will see the Qutub Minar, built by a Turkish slave-general to commemorate the conquest of Delhi. Just below the medieval tower, globalized Indians enjoy Thai and Italian food at the expensive restaurants of Mehrauli, an urban village that is steadily gentrifying. Metro trains slither nearby on their elevated tracks.

Similarly, a short drive south of the imperial inscriptions of Junagarh, the Asiatic lion is making a slow comeback. A survey in 2010 suggests that there are now 411 lions in Gir. In fact, the sanctuary in Gir is proving to be too small for the expanded population and some of these animals are now wandering into the surrounding countryside. Some have even been seen on the beaches of Kodinar. Just across from this beach is the island of Diu, a Portuguese stronghold for four centuries. At some point, the Portuguese had presented a group of African slaves to the Nawab of Junagarh. Their direct descendants now live in hamlets just outside Gir National Park. Thus, the country’s bubbling genetic mix has come to include a barely-remembered community of African Indians! The Sidi community of Sasan Gir is nominally Muslim but retains customs, music and dances from its African past.

The last hundred years have not been kind to India’s tigers. It is estimated that barely 1706 of them remain in the wild, down from over 3600 in the 1990s. Poaching is a major problem but even more important is the destruction of their habitat
through illegal encroachments, logging and mining. The imagery of the lion and the tiger, however, remains alive in the human mind. Every year, the drums of Kolkata beat for Goddess Durga, astride her lion, at war with Evil. In Singapore, tourists take snaps of the Merlion, half-lion and half-mermaid, a mythical beast that through many twists and turns recalls the influence of ancient Indian merchants who brought their culture to these distant shores. These distant cultural memories can have very important symbolic meaning for modern people. In 2009, the Sri Lankan army, flying a lion flag, decimated the separatist Tamil Tigers to end a long-running civil war.