India is elepha…
India is elephants, henna and spiritual awakenings. India is corrupt businessmen and Cadillacs parked outside slums. India is saris, yoga and cows. India is cell phones, mathematics institutes and bespectacled students asleep on physics textbooks. These are some of the most commonly told stories about this continent-sized country. For some people, all of the above is true. For some people, none of the above is true. India has been molded into stereotypes, sprung from these stereotypes then remolded into others. Each time, the potter insists that her story is the truth, that hers is the ‘real’ India. I don’t know why it is so difficult to fathom that there are many stories about India and that all of them are equally real.
Anand Giridharadas’ book India Calling is not given as a representation – it is given as the representation. Giridharadas speaks regularly of what Indians think, of what goes on in the Indian mind. He talks about what Indians do and don’t do; how we eat, how we argue, how we love. At no point does he discuss the difficulty of generalizing to a country of 1.2 billion that is experiencing India’s shifting at different pressure points, unfolding at different angles.
These generalizations take place in part because of the book’s structure. Giridharadas has structured the book as an examination of a country’s shifting social landscape with each broad insight classified under abstract nouns such as ‘ambition’ ‘love’ and ‘anger.’ These abstract nouns are the title of each paragraph. Within each paragraph, the insights are filtered through a person that Giridharadas met during his five years in India who exemplifies the very change that Giridharadas speaks of. The theme is introduced, then the character is introduced, and the theme is elaborated on as the character’s story unfolds. Theoretically, such an approach allows the reader to ground Giridharadas’ ideas in a specific situation and a person, to marry the concrete with the abstract. However in practice, this method means that the complexity of both the idea and the person is flattened. The issue is reduced to the experience of one person who unwittingly represents an entire spoke in Giridharadas’ spinning wheel. The effect is something like a three-member merry-go-round, with much shuttling and little actually being said. Since Giridharadas’ goal is to reveal the nuances of India’s momentous shifting, this approach is ultimately self-defeating to his goal.
Then there is the Giridharadas’ general attitude, which might be exemplified by a line that particularly riled me up in his ‘love’ section. He writes “it was the commonest kind of Indian love story: a love story brimming with every ingredient but love.” Because the romantic love that he sees in India does not emulate the romantic love he has seen in the US, the most common Indian love story is without love.
The feeling I got is that Giridharadas believes that the west is the way. If any of India’s myriad changes do not emulate the west then they are not defined as progress. Effectively, he takes a framework that was created in a highly industrialized, capitalist society and applies it to a country that has a radically different political and economic history. It is difficult to trust his narrative because he makes no attempt to abandon his perspective, nor address the fact that his perspective might be affecting his perceptions.
The reviews of India Calling that I have read from within the Indian media are scathing. The Indian Express review said “I blame Naipaul for making it okay to think that a continent-sized country can be cut into bite-sized pieces, half-digested with your own acidic identity crisis and then regurgitated.” By contrast, the Western media has heralded Giridharadas’ debut as “acutely observed” and “full of insight.” This dichotomy of opinions places Giridharadas in the same group as Danny Boyle of Slumdog Millionaire and Aravind Adiga of The White Tiger. All of these artists were, for the most part, slammed by the Indian media and celebrated by the western media for their depictions of India. The White Tiger, for example, was called “curiously inauthentic” by The Hindi, and then seen as a commentary on “how life really is in India” by The Economist.
For the western media, it seems that any depiction of the country that is not the old stereotype, an airy tale of marigolds, henna and a spiritual awakening, is necessarily deemed the ‘true’ India. This is particularly problematic in the case of The White Tiger and Slumdog Millionaire because both portray India as a morally destitute country where the people are entirely incapable of self-governance; in short, a country that deserves to be colonized. My issue is that each of these depictions are held up in their singular form by the western media as being ‘real’ and ‘true’ with little understanding that this might be just one of multiple truths. In a sense, even though the content of the stereotype is changing, these critics still insist on the structure of stereotype; on delimiting and simplifying.
If we are ever going to emerge from the shackles of stereotypes, we must start believing that that every understanding of India is as necessary as the next; that there are many true representations of India, even if they conflict with one another. India is elephants and gurus and marigolds just as it is rocket science and mathematical philosophy just as it is saltwater and skyscrapers and concrete. It might be a human need to simplify, but this simplification is occurring at the expense of the multitudes within a continent-sized country, and I think it is important that we work against it.
Ultimately, I think the goal is the quote at the beginning of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Written by John Berger, it reads “never again will a single story be told as if it’s the only one.”
bombay’s canine monarchs. and why sleep is the new sex.
taking the train should be a fairly humdrum affair. i am waiting for the day that it will be humdrum. these days, it is more about dashing maniacally for a retreating train, realizing i am on the wrong train just as it is leaving the station and making the amusing (to my fellow passengers) leap back onto the platform. on other occasions, i am on the wrong train but become distracted by something and then find myself in some scenic location surrounded by nose-ringed cows when i am supposed to be in a factory town surrounded by smoke plumes.
inevitably, there is a great deal of wandering around lost at train stations waiting for some kind of sign from the universe as to how next to proceed. there aren’t many people who wander in train stations. people are going or coming, selling or haggling, wheeling or dealing, or giving me directions that aren’t right when they could just say that they don’t know. my comrades in this aimless wandering are the dogs. a friend tells me that most of bombay’s stray dogs belong to an ancient canine lineage called the pariah dog. she tells me that these dogs have always been scavengers, surviving on garbage and living in settlements where the promise of old or thrown out food is a daily realization. apparently, they have existed in india for over 14,000 years. they live impossibly grim lives, frantically avoiding government officials who kill off dozens at a time in the name of rabies control. i fall asleep almost every night to the sound of these dogs fighting, staking claim over their territories and battling for remnants of food. they seem to have evolved into nocturnal creatures, favoring the nighttime for their scavenging when humans are likely to let them sniff through their garbage, while during the day they sleep.
rarely is a dog seen snoozing in some shaded corner away from the traffic of humanity. instead, they set up camp in front of ticket booths or in the middle of train platforms; they sprawl in triangles of sunshine on a crowded pavement. and amazingly, the human flotsam works itself around them. when they are awake, stones are thrown at them or they are leveled with a quick kick. many dogs walk around limping, some are without limbs – the result of dog fights or cruel treatment by humans. but when asleep, queues assume concave shapes, rush hour rushes to their left or right; the whirling mass of humanity moves instinctively around their warm, sleeping forms. they remain undisturbed, left to their somnolent devices. in slumber, they become monarchs: traffic shifts in their name – the ultimate sign of power in bombay.
perhaps it is a subconscious admiration for any kind of creature that can sleep in the middle of this ruckus. or perhaps it is because sleep is the enigma, the elusive stranger that every bombay resident is chasing. napping on the bus, we are jolted awake at a traffic light; the elusive stranger slips out the back door just as we enter the room, leaving only a burning cigarette in her wake. we then spend the rest of the day thinking about that ten-minute nap. sleep, a friend tells me, is the new sex. we think about it constantly, hankering for it in meetings, while commuting, as we’re buttering toast. we tell tales of quickies, incredible nights, unexpected saturday afternoons. the more we get, the happier we are, but the truth of it is that no matter how much we get, it’s never enough.
back to the dogs. their princely status is revoked as soon as they wake up. once they join the masses of the open-eyed and hustling, nobody moves for them; they become one of the many snowflakes in this sweltering blizzard. but then the next day comes and they step momentarily out of the maelstrom to become monarchs once again. and we bustle around them, we adapt because we want it too, because we know how sweet it is.
bollywood turns to the west
As reverberations from President Obama’s visit continue to be felt within the political and economic sphere, Indian culture sways in time with these movements.
Keep reading: http://thefastertimes.com/indianculture/2010/12/02/bollywood-turns-to-the-west/
the ambani effect
Antilia, the newly unveiled world’s most expensive home valued at US$ 1 billion, is inciting great controversy in a city where more than half the population resides in a slum. But the man behind the mortar, summons near-unanimous respect across India’s stark divisions of class.
Keep reading: http://thefastertimes.com/india/2010/11/17/why-do-indians-like-mukesh-ambani-so-much/
solace takes many faces
I don’t want to explain the khwaja saraa because I think they have been overwritten. They have been observed, documented and discussed by psychologists, sociologists and bloggers, but little of their own writing has emerged from their tightly-knit communities. Instead, I’m going to encourage you instead to do your own research, and also let you know that the khwaja saraa also go by the term hijra.
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On the train yesterday, a khwaja saraa stepped into the compartment. She snapped her fingers at me. I handed her a coin and she brushed my forehead with her palm, murmured a blessing and continued on her way.
The khwaja saraa make a living by capitalizing on their status as those who are simultaneously feared and revered. It is believed that they curse all those who come in to contact with them, but with a coin or two, they will change this curse into a blessing. The khwaja saraa are the guardians of a kind of divinity, but they are also those most likely to disturb that divinity. By virtue of this power, they are condemned to the fringes of this society. Even so, their position as those who are both exalted and damned manifests itself in a responsibility that they have to this city, and that the other citizens of this city has to them. In a city where opulence coexists with destitution, a certain level of disillusionment is inevitable. In this sense, the blessings of the khwaja saraa are a way of relieving this asymmetry, of providing balance in a city that relies on disproportion. To the khwaja saraa, we are people who can endure curses or be liberated by their blessings; the distinction is simple. And in their barest form, the blessings are the same regardless of the amount of money given and the class status of the cursed/blessed; they are the same whether the cursed/blessed is selling lightbulbs or real estate. It is the simplest of spiritual exchanges: I give them one rupee and my faith in their sacred faculties, and they restore a sense of order, possibility, balance. The muddled cosmos is re-ordered, wrongs are righted and for a moment, each of us is the same. Solace takes many faces. The responsibility of those who provide relief, even if it is momentary, cannot be discounted.
lady of feist
Commuter train culture begins with a rat race. People jump down before the train comes to a complete stop and people scramble furiously to get on; they curse, they charge, they battle ferociously to get that coveted rush hour seat, which in that moment is as precious as an MBA. Almost as soon as the train picks up speed, the atmosphere of the carriage radically shifts; it’s like a lid is lifted off a kettle, the tension is sucked out as if through a gigantic straw. I read somewhere that in Bombay, we do just what we need to do to survive, and this is nowhere more evident than on the commuter trains. We engage in a fierce scrimmage to get on the train, and then once we’re on and we have to sit as close to our neighbors as we do to our lovers, we calm down and do what we can for our fellow bystanders because it’s the only way we can get through the next forty minutes squeezed into our neighbour’s armpit.
This was illuminated to me with particular clarity yesterday evening. I had managed to find a seat and shortly after, a feisty woman in a purple sari barged her way through the crowd and nudged me and my neighbor with her bag so we would move over. We hustled, we rearranged, we got uncomfortable. A few stops later, I was craning my neck to look out the window to see which station it was. The sun was dipping and kept smacking me in the face with sunbeams so it was hard to see. Lady of Feist asked me which station I was looking for. I told her. She said Dadar was coming up next. I thanked her and relaxed. As we approached Dadar, she caught the eye of a woman standing and sweltering in the standing crowd by the door. She beckoned her over, pointing to me so that it was clear that she was saying my seat would soon be empty. I asked Lady of Feist if the woman was a friend of hers. No, she smiled, almost chuckling at the absurdity of my suggestion. I understood then; she just wanted to help out a fellow commuter. That was all. She knew what it was like to have to exhaustedly wade through elbows after a long day. She knew and she wanted to make it marginally better for someone else. My station came and I got off the train; the woman from the crowd took my seat.
It was a small effort, minute even, to beckon a stranger to a soon empty train seat, but that simple initiative took me entirely by surprise. I have never seen such a gesture of goodness before. I was reminded then of the ferocity of community, the simplicity of kindness, of the beauty that springs from economy.
holding hands
Men hold hands here. Initially – since this was a phenomenon unknown to my ‘Western’ society accustomed eyes – I thought this was glorious. I wanted to stand up, throw confetti and applaud. Over time and through discussions with friends, I have come to learn that the common sight of men holding hands – regardless of their sexual orientation – is not reason for celebration as I had previously thought.
I had thought that men holding hands was a sign of the relinquishing of traditional markers of masculinity, the abandonment of patriarchal values which served to banish genders from certain behaviors. On the contrary, physical affection does not undercut traditional definitions of masculinity; instead, it enhances it. I am learning, and it has been explained to me, that men feel more empowered to carry out their patriarchal heritage when they are in physical solidarity with other men. Indeed in my experiences, it is the men who are holding hands who are most willing to participate in street harassment.
This is unfortunate. I sincerely wish it were otherwise. I wish that physical solidarity and affection served to discourage the bravado and masculine posturing that continually dis-empowers women. I wish that it encouraged ways of being for all people that would not continually condemn all of us to ancient, stuck, codified behaviors. If this gentleness between men could be harnessed to create a new understanding of how we all don’t need to feel condemned to certain ways of acting depending on our gender, I can only imagine how much would change.
I see this kind of potential in two young men who take afternoon naps in the carpark of a building in my neighbourhood. A mattress is kept rolled up against a wall and then unfurled when the sun is at its zenith and everyone retires to the shade. They share this single mattress and sleep nestled into one another. Heads resting on each others necks, legs slung over each other’s like rice sacks, limbs intertwined. Their sexuality is irrelevant to me. The sight of this reminds me that as important as women’s empowerment is men’s re-education; reminding men that to be true to the gentleman title, they can be just that: gentle – men. This gentleness does not have to detract from strength, instead it can inform it; when their ways of being are unhindered by the failures of many societies’ imagination, there will be space for new ways of being.
They can be gentlemen, gentle-men. And there is nothing unmanly about that.
hindi
My Hindi is fairly rough around the edges. I am picking up more and more with each day, but I am continually reminded of the humble struggle one must embark upon when learning a language. Usually, I can get through a short conversation speaking to a security guard, a bank clerk, a bus driver, without them realizing that in actuality, I am fumbling with this trippy lexis, this startling syntax; that my mind is working overtime to make the most basic small talk. The longer I can go without them figuring out that I am not a native speaker, the better. The other day, asking a balloon seller for directions, he figured out halfway through that I do not speak Hindi fluently.
‘How do I get to the sea face?’ I asked in Hindi
‘Turn left and then take the second right after the traffic lights,’ he replied in Hindi.
I fumble. He notices. He repeats in English. I stick with Hindi.
‘Is that the traffic light by the bank?’ I ask in Hindi. My verb tenses aren’t quite right, my order haphazard. He perseveres in English. I push back in my broken Hindi. Eventually, a smile plays at the corners of his lips, he gracefully appeases me in Hindi, and points me in the direction of the sea face. I thank him and continue on my way.
Strangely enough, this is a reversal of how my mother and I would speak to each other when I was a young adolescent. She would speak to me in Gujarati, occasionally Hindi, and I would respond in English; her Gujarati, my English, back and forth. It was a battle of sorts, and the simplest of conversations had an undercurrent of conflict to it; both of us simultaneously asserting our own ways of being in the world even as we discussed lunch plans. And now, several years later, I am doing the reverse; learning a language I resisted, refused, bucked against furiously.
I don’t quite know what to do with all of this.
the tipping point
There are intersections in Bombay with traffic lights. Some of the traffic lights work, others do not. There are drivers of vehicles who obey the colourful commands of these lights, and others who do not. This means that generally, it is fairly difficult to cross the road. My usual tactic is to find someone else who is crossing the road and trail after them. But at busy roads, where there is no pedestrian crossing, navigating the whirling motorcade becomes almost impossible for anyone on their own. So I wait. And then someone else joins me in my attempt to cross. And someone else. And someone else. And it so happens that when once we have reached a tipping point of bodies, we move as one in silent concensus, and the sheer force of a mass of people moving together forces the cars to slow down, to wait for us to pass.
I do this almost every day, and I am reminded that revolutions begin in this same manner; with one person, then another, then another, then another, until the velocity of the people force the established way to halt, even, to falter. And there is something beautiful to me about how similar starting a revolution is to crossing a street in this country; how crossing the road requires a minor revolution.
