“There are people from many Islands here madam…Haryana, Punjab, Assam, West Bengal (saab islands se bacche aaye hain madam) …,” explained a local to me on being asked what was happening at the stadium in Port Blair in the Andamans.
When I was studying in Shillong, my friends from the North East would ask me, “Are you going to see the Indian dance?” I would often find myself being referred to as an Indian at the All India Radio, Shillong, where I was a part-time announcer. Obviously there were different Indias with different perceptions of what India was.
More recently in the office, colleagues were discussing the cooking of a certain kind of food. A North Indian colleague asserted, “But this is how this vegetable is cooked…” She had to be reminded gently that North India too has its differences, and North India, comprising the Hindi speaking belt, is not the whole of India!
In another instance a Sri Lankan friend commented, “How can Indian men bear to sit on horse to be married and go down the street making a spectacle of themselves?” Another friend taking umbrage to this stereotyping said, “But that is not how it happens all over India!”
So when one is asked to write about India, one cannot help but wonder — which India? The India that one sees in old style Bollywood films — sometimes bleak and dreary, or with dancing tribals in costumes and feathers, or the modern day version where all the babes look cool and beautiful and men look like hunks — largely Punjabi urban cosmopolitan? Many others have different images — snake charmers, men in bright turbans, monkeys and tigers on the one hand, fast growing economy with all the indications of “modern India. Which is the real India?
Even driving through the Capital city presents so many different Indias. Sari clad women, heads covered with a pallu and with yellow plastic helmets over that, working on the Delhi Metro; a young man in Mercedes Benz throwing a coke can nonchalantly out of the car window; men on a motorcycle who kill a car driver who brushed past them on a heavy traffic day. Thousands of houses razed to the ground, evicting families who have lived on that land for 30 years to make way for beautification of Delhi before the Common Wealth Games, even while Supreme Court allows the construction of glitzy malls on the ridge to continue because the builders have already invested so much money! And this is only the Capital.
The further one moves from the metros, the notion of what Indiais changes. Indeed, the conditions in which the citizens live almost makes one wonder if they are truly considered Indians by the rest of India.
Far far away from the Capital, on the border of India and Bangladesh, 5,000 people live on a sand bank in the middle of the Padma river, that divided the two countries. They have moved there after their houses were washed away by the river in spate. The River Padma is known to gobble up thousands of acres of land every year as she changes her course. Families, children, women and men, old and young, live on this char with access to no services. After all they are not meant to be there. Women and children walk on the burning sands with their quotas of sugar and rice on their heads, their proof of Indian Citizenship hanging from their waists. No schools, no dispensary, no electricity, sandy land – that is their life. And then when they sell their share of sugar and rice into Bangladesh, they are smuggling! The men, women and children who occupy the char are Indians, but who remembers that they even exist?
To the extreme south of India lie the wonderous Andaman andNicobar Islands. The Andamans are some of busiest tourist destinations and sold as such by the government and private enterprise alike. Years ago, before the British and we “the main landers” discovered these islands, they were inhabited by islanders who are their original inhabitants. Today there remain only some 5,000 of them — all the tribes together. A colleague who visited Port Blair made a very interesting observation. “You have Kamaraj Road, the ubiquitous MG Road– every possible name you may find somewhere in the rest of India, but there is only one place that has a local name — the Shompen Hotel, which too is run by some private hotelier.” This too is India.
On my last visit to Himachal, the enterprising young man who was driving us in his new Scorpio over the RohtangPass, pointed to the mountains and said, “The mountain tops from Rohtang to Chandrakhani Pass are being leased to the FORD company. They will build ski resorts, ski slopes, restaurants… People who live on some of that land are being forced to leave. All these bhutta wallahs, ghode wallahs, boot-coat wallahs you see will be gone. Now all of us will wear FORD uniforms and become their employees — guides, instructors, drivers, coffee-vendors, cell genetically modified corn in cups, right here in our own land. Aise hi to aaatank vadi bante hain madam! (This is how terrorists are born madam). The events of Nandigram and Singur are still fresh reminders of what can happen. But do we learn our lessons?
Every day the visuals in the media, the politicians who govern us, the rich and the famous who occupy important positions in government or outside will remind us how India is progressing. The malls, the flyovers, the freeways are all treatise to the “brand India” we have become. No longer shopping abroad is needed to get the best brands of lingerie, clothes, cosmetics or electronics. No longer does the slow Fiat or Ambassador need to be the only choice of cars. Indeed, over the last decade, like countries across the world,India too has embarked on a course of changing its existing economic models in favour of one driven by the free-market, incorporating processes of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation and these are dominant symbols of “growth and progress”, as is the GDP rate and the stock market.
But how do we reconcile the different parts that are India? An India where potable water is not a “public issue” for all those who have access to well-marketed bottled water. Public health services no longer matter, as high-tech, super-speciality hospitals that look like hotels flood the market along with myriad health insurance schemes, even while people die of starvation, locally grown food is replaced by beautiful genetically modified food in tetra-packs. A country where lakhs of children remain out of school while there are air-conditioned public schools available to those who can afford. A country which has no space for homosexuality, even while it welcomes hijras to celebrate every occasion, worships goddesses and kills girls even before they are born, makes a public fetish about secularism, but encourages state-sponsored riots, places a woman as President – a rubber stamp position of the country — but ensures that women in bureaucracy are kept away from positions that matter. An India, as someone wrote recently, that has the most honest Prime Minister heading the most corrupt government. How do we live with ourselves?
enakshiganguly 