The Passenger: India

India

India, for those in the West, has long been – and continues to be – the object of an almost mystical mythologising, associated with vague notions of peace, spirituality and ascetic superpowers. Endlessly reinvented and venerated by a Western elite fleeing from self-styled rationalist societies, the country continues to fascinate with its millennia of recorded history, its pantheon of divinities whose shrines populate every street corner, the survival of its ancient cults and rituals and its multiplicity of languages and cultures. This time-honoured narrative is intertwined with a new one that focuses instead on the frenetic transformation of a society at the forefront of digital innovation, the new spirit encapsulated in the ‘India Shining’ slogan and the dynamism of its megacities that power its phenomenal economic growth. Success stories jostle with the daily struggles of the huge numbers of people who live without access to potable water or a toilet in their home, and with those engaged in a farming culture (still the largest employment sector for the greater part of the 1.35 billion individuals who live on the subcontinent) that is dependent on the monsoon season and is dangerously threatened by climate change. It is the epic of the largest democratic experiment ever attempted, which does not know, however, how to eradicate one of the most infamous forms of classism and racism, the caste system, exacerbated by the Hindu nationalism of those in power today, whose laws also discriminate against Muslims and rewrite the history books. Nevertheless, it is difficult to find anywhere more dynamic and optimistic on the planet – or, as Arundhati Roy writes, ‘an irredeemably untidy people’, able to oppose and resist for thousands of years ‘in our diverse and untidy ways’. There is a contradictory chaos, terrible and joyous, that these pages seek to restore, from the resistance of the Kashmiri people to that of the country’s atheists – detested by all the country’s religious communities – from the dances of the hijra in Koovagam to the success of the wrestler Vinesh Phogat, a symbol for all women who seek to remove themselves from the oppressive logic of the patriarchal system. India is a tenacious country on a long journey towards emancipation that, despite myriad difficulties and several steps backwards, is lifting the disinherited out of poverty.

Contents

India in Numbers

The National Sport

Tales from Another India

India’s Existential Challenge — Prem Shankar Jha

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu-nationalist BJP continue to pursue their right-wing fundamentalist dream of supplanting secular, multi-cultural India with a country that has room only for Hindus. Prem Shankar Jha argues for a rejection of this legacy of European fascism and for a reawakening of India’s inclusive culture based on the concept of dharma.

In/visible: A Woman’s Place in India — Tishani Doshi

Why is the number of women in the Indian workplace falling? Small advances in legislation and the outcry provoked by a number of high-profile acts of violence against women have not proved resilient enough to make a dent in a patriarchal model of society that seeks to confine women to domestic duties.

Rocket on a Bicycle — Susmita Mohanty

Space entrepreneur Susmita Mohanty takes a look at India’s space programme, the ISRO, about which surprisingly little is known in the West. Yet the ISRO impacts the lives of the subcontinent’s entire population and, almost under the radar, continues its work on grandiose projects.

The Monsoon: A Gamble on the Rains — The Economist

The monsoon rains have held sway over agriculture and life in the planet’s most populous region since the earliest times. But how, why and where do they form, what effects do they have – and, crucially, what of the future?

Ogo Shuncho! — Anindya Roy

Writer and illustrator Anindya Roy shines a light on Bengali food culture through the lens of his Kolkata family, who have been ‘expatriates’ in New Delhi since 1946.

Holding Back the Night: Secularism Under Siege — Julia Lauter

In the land of spirituality, gurus and holy men – where Hindu nationalism rules the roost – there seems to be no place for non-believers. Julia Lauter talks to members of India’s rationalist community and their struggle in the face of murder and intimidation.

Against Caste — Arundhati Roy

Blinded by an idealised view of Indian culture, global public opinion struggles to condemn the caste system openly, even though it is a racist and discriminatory practice that to this day inflicts unspeakable injustices upon those at the bottom of the pile. Arundhati Roy looks at the situation in India and at the work of B.R. Ambedkar in his fight against caste-based social oppression in the 20th century.

Cut to Switzerland! — Juhi Saklani

Switzerland is the embodiment of Bollywood’s passion for exotic locations, a trend that began in the 1960s and seems unlikely to lose its appeal any time soon. While many things have changed over the decades, the Alpine country continues to reap the benefits of this curious fascination.

The Blood of Tulips — Mirza Waheed

Kashmiri writer Mirza Waheed explains what it is to grow up in the world’s most militarised region, sandwiched between India and Pakistan, where for decades the desire for independence from India has been met with fierce and unrelenting repression.

In the Ring with India’s Most Powerful Woman — Sonia Faleiro

Wrestling had always been a male sport in India until Vinesh Phogat and her cousins came along. Now she out-earns most of her male colleagues and dreams of Olympic gold.

There’s No Such Thing as Indian Literature — Arunava Sinha

With its many languages and cultures – each with its own unique history and traditions – to talk of Indian literature as a single entity is a fallacy. Arunava Sinha selects four books from four Indian languages in this short guide to the countless voices of modern India.

A Sign of the Times

The Playlist

Further Reading

The photographs in this issue were taken by Gaia Squarci, a photographer and videographer who divides her time between Milan and New York, where she teaches at the International Center of Photography. She also works with Reuters and the Italian photographic agency Prospekt. With a background in art history and photojournalism, she tends towards a personal approach far removed from the descriptive tradition of documentary photography. Her work focuses on themes linked to our connection with the natural world, disabilities and family relationships. She received POYi (Pictures of the Year International) awards for her work in 2014 and 2017 and was one of the thirty photographers under thirty chosen by Photo Boite in 2018. Her installation Broken Screen was selected for reGeneration3, the exhibition held at Lausanne’s Musée de l’Elysée in 2015. Her photographs have appeared in titles including The New York Times, Time Magazine, Vogue, The Washington Post, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, Internazionale, Io Donna and Corriere della Sera.

India in Numbers

The National Sport: Cricket

Translated by Alan Thawley

India is a country of getting on for 1.4 billion people with a passion for just one sport, which explains why cricket, after football, is the world’s second most followed game. As the Indian sociologist Ashis Nandy put it, cricket is ‘an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British’. The Indian Premier League (IPL) was launched in 2008 and has moved the sport’s centre of gravity to the Indian subcontinent, attracting the world’s best cricketers, including players from England, South Africa, Australia and the West Indies. This has not always been the case, obviously. The British exported cricket to their colonies as a pastime but also as an implicit demonstration of their own civilisation: the idiosyncrasies of traditional test cricket – matches lasting up to five days, the fact that the rules are known as ‘laws’, the obscure terminology, the white ‘flannels’, the tea breaks – are the legacy of this concept of the ‘gentleman’s game’, requiring patience and sportsmanship (not to mention free time, money and well-kept grounds), qualities that many British believed were alien to the peoples they were colonising. But the Indians saw other values in the game: its rich complexity, the infinite variations possible in each delivery and the dozen different ways for a batsman to be dismissed are, as the politician and writer Shashi Tharoor once wrote, similar to Indian classical music, in which the basic laws are just the starting point on which musicians can improvise. The game’s glorious uncertainties echo ancient Indian thinking: with their sense of fatalism Indians instinctively understand that, just when think you have read the ball’s trajectory and are lining it up with your bat’s sweet spot, your innings can be ended by an unexpected bounce that sends the ball straight into the wicket.

The Indian game is not an elite sport. Although the first Indian cricketers were rich maharajahs and Parsees from Bombay’s business community, cricket very soon became the people’s sport, played in the street. In A Corner of a Foreign Field (Picador, 2002), the best history of cricket in India, Ramachandra Guha tells of the first true Indian champion, Palwankar Baloo, a Dalit belonging to the Chamar community of leatherworkers, being forced to sit on his own during tea breaks and drink from a clay mug while his teammates sipped from porcelain cups. But Guha argues that over time cricket has been one of the most important factors in undermining the caste system.

Since Partition cricket has often played a conciliatory role in the febrile relations between India and Pakistan, creating an intense but, on the whole, peaceful rivalry. Matches between the two nations attract fervent support: more than a billion TV viewers watched India play Pakistan in the first round of the World Cup in 2015. (Rather than following the traditional test-match format, the World Cup is a tournament of one-day cricket.) But sporting rivalry has also been a powerful diplomatic tool, used several times – for instance after the war of 1971 or during the Kashmiri insurgency of the 1990s – to reopen dialogue. It was at a cricket match in 1987 that President Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan allegedly whispered into the ear of his Indian counterpart, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, that his country had obtained the atomic bomb.

Cricket is not just about soft power, however; it has also helped to redefine Indian identity. Whereas the 1983 World Cup win at London’s historic Lord’s ground was unexpected, 2011’s victory in the final in Mumbai was a triumph on the part of a country that had become aware of its status as a world power. The success of the IPL, modelled on English football’s Premier League and the USA’s NBA, has radically changed the face of cricket. By adopting the Twenty20 format, which reduces matches to around three hours in length, making them more suitable for TV viewing (complete with advertising breaks and cheerleaders), the new tournament has become a money machine, shifting the game away from its original homeland and attracting the world’s most talented players to help transform the ‘gentleman’s game’ into the first truly globalised sport.

Tales from Another India

VALERIO MILLEFOGLIE

Translated by Alan Thawley

On entering Vestingstraat, visitors to the Belgian city of Antwerp are greeted by the Del Rey chocolatiers and the Nicholas Diamonds jewellery store. As you continue down the street, you find yourself passing diamond shop after diamond shop after diamond shop. All the way to number 74 the shop windows on either side of the road mirror each other like a kaleidoscope that, whichever way you look at it, reflects jumbles of necklaces, rings and precious stones.

At the far end is the central railway station. And this story, too, is that of a journey, one that started out in India and arrived here in Belgium. At 52 Vestingstraat you will find the AIA, the Antwerp Indian Association, founded in 1979 by a group of diamond traders and now boasting more than five hundred members. Antwerp’s diamond market, which was once the preserve of the Jewish community, is now in the hands of four hundred families of Indian origin. The first of them arrived in the late 1960s and, gradually, following in the footsteps of parents, siblings and cousins, transformed the city into an extended family business, in which marriages sealed the creation of work partnerships and other relationships. Initially they dealt in low-value uncut stones of less than a carat each, which were sent to be polished in the city of Surat in Gujarat, India’s westernmost state, where the cost of skilled labour was lower. Once processed, the stones were shipped back to Antwerp to be sold in small shops. The sector remains similar to this day, but the shops have become big businesses: Antwerp accounts for 86 per cent of the global trade in rough diamonds, 90 per cent of which are sent to India and Vietnam, where wages remain low.

The majority of the Indian pioneers were Jains from the city of Palanpur. Followers of Jainism are prohibited from hunting, fishing, dealing in arms or ivory or even cutting down trees. So the sectors in which they excel are banking and diamonds.

In a photograph on the Diamonds Creations website, Santosh Kedia, who came to Antwerp from Kolkata, sits on a black-leather chair. In one hand he holds a magnifying loupe up to his glasses; in the other he firmly grips a gemstone with a pair of tweezers. On the piece of furniture behind him you can make out the photograph of a young man on his graduation day. The job of telling his life story falls to his son, who writes that Mr Kedia ‘started attending the family business under the tutelage of his grandfather and father at age seventeen. At the young age of twenty, my father was given the opportunity to move to Belgium and establish the family business in the diamond industry. It didn’t take long before everyone knew my father, and, most importantly, what he stood for … At fifty-four years of age he is a young veteran very actively involved in all aspects of our organisation with a hands-on approach. I wish to be guided by him for many years to come!’

He and his fellow Indians all started out in similar ways: selling door-to-door with no car or bicycle, living two to a one-room apartment, putting in longer hours than the rest, working in the evenings or at weekends and willing to be paid less. As they explain, work always came first in these family businesses. These days they live in the residential area known as Little Bombay or Beverly Hills, with its large townhouses and tree-lined avenues leading to the nearby Den Brandt Park, complete with castle and swans circling on a little lake. Surroundings worthy of the likes of Dilip Mehta, CEO of Rosy Blue, who has been awarded the title of baron by the king of Belgium. In November 2019 Mr Mehta told The Times of India that, along with his children, he would be launching a new division of his company, with the aim of producing 25,000 carats of diamonds by importing synthetic roughs from China: ‘Our target market will be India along with the US and Dubai.’

Meanwhile, Orra jewellers of Antwerp, with thirty-eight outlets in twenty-two cities, sells its Men of Platinum bracelet under the strapline: ‘When the voice in your heart is the one you listen to. It’s rare.’ And on TripAdvisor one user left the following comment on the services of another jewellers, Diamond Boutique of 26 Vestingstraat: ‘I bought my engagement ring here. The staff were very helpful, professional and trustworthy. Yair and his father listened to my wishes, took into account my budget and, after some negotiating, provided me with a superb diamond that sparkles wonderfully on the finger of my fiancée.’

A guard rests in the shade at Amber Fort near Jaipur in Rajasthan, which mixes a Hindu architectural style with Islamic influences.

India’s Existential Challenge

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu-nationalist BJP continue to pursue their right-wing fundamentalist dream of supplanting secular, multi-cultural India with a country that has room only for Hindus. Economist and writer Prem Shankar Jha argues for a rejection of this legacy of European fascism and for a reawakening of India’s inclusive culture based on the concept of dharma, which allowed for centuries of religious syncretism that the nationalists now dream of sweeping away.

PREM SHANKAR JHA

PREM SHANKAR JHA is an economist, journalist and author of over a dozen books. After his studies in Delhi and Oxford, in the 1960s he worked for the United Nations in New York and Damascus before turning to journalism and writing for the main Indian English-language newspapers – Hindustan Times, The Times of India, Economic Times, Financial Express and Business Standard – and for the weekly Outlook and Tehelka. From 1986 to 1990 he was a correspondent for The Economist. He also worked as a lecturer and researcher as well as media adviser to Prime Minister V.P. Singh. His most recent book is Dawn of the Solar Age: An End to Global Warming and Fear (Sage, 2017).

Aquarter of a century ago, at the formal White House press conference that followed Indian Prime Minister Narasimha Rao’s one-on-one meeting with President Bill Clinton during his state visit to the United States in April 1994, President Clinton heaped lavish praise upon India for doing what no other modern country had succeeded in doing before: to form a stable nation state using the tool of democracy instead of war. Clinton’s point was that this was not the way in which nation states had been created in Europe in the tumultuous century that had preceded the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.

Up until the advent of globalisation, the archetypal European nation state had