Spectres of India Competing visions of a complicated country

ANJALI JOSEPH

“Reassurance”, 2006, by Nandini Valli Muthiah, from India: Contemporary photographic and new media art (300pp. FotoFest & Schilt Publishing. £45. 978 90 5330 900 1)

SOCIAL STUDIES 3

In “The Other Side of the Looking Glass:Retelling Mizo folktales”, from theanthology Centrepiece: Women’s writ-ing and art from Northeast India, Jac-

queline Zote has us picture a woman tellingtraditional stories to her teenage daughter andniece. The teller introduces some of the myth-ical beings to come: “They say that the khua-vang are a group of magical creatures.They’re like humans but they can turn them-selves invisible so they live all around us,possibly in a different realm. We can’t seethem but they can see us”. Their presence isunsettling. “You know how sometimesthere’s pin-drop silence even when you’re ina group? That moment is called khuavang kallai . . . a moment during which the khuavangwalk among us.”

Like the khuavang, spectral ideas of Indiapopulate and unsettle the astral plane of thisalready populous nation. Perhaps the mostabiding – until 2014, when the present gov-ernment, Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya JanataParty (BJP) came in with a striking majority –lay in a fusion of the ideals of JawaharlalNehru and Mahatma Gandhi: this was an Indiathat still saw itself as a poor country, devotedto bettering the lot of the rural majority; acountry that valued simplicity and a certainmoral austerity (Gandhi’s maxim, “Simpleliving and high thinking”); and a countrythat, even while asserting its right to auto-nomy, had a cultural relationship with itsformer colonizer. This idea of India, eventhough only imperfectly realized, retained agreat deal of charge for many generations ofIndians. Mine – I am forty – is probably thelast of them. That early spectre of independentIndia was allied with a notion of the country assecular and hospitable to all religions, as theconstitution mandates. It was also, however,usually and unfortunately identified with theIndian National Congress, a political partythat in recent years seems to have turned intoan employment scheme for the Gandhi–Nehru family (Indira Gandhi’s descendants,no relation to the Mahatma).

But the old myth has had its day. Mr Modiand his many fans would like to replace it witha new one, which, a little in the manner of afantasy novel, has its own roots and justifica-tions in myth and legend, especially fromIndia’s Hindu traditions. Mahatma Gandhi –now recast principally as a Luddite – is out,and the athletic yogi Swami Vivekananda,who preached Hinduism to the West in theearly twentieth century, is in.

In her diligent, comprehensive survey ofIndian foreign policy since independence,Our Time Has Come: How India is making itsplace in the world, Alyssa Ayres registersthe shift made by the Modi administrationtowards a retrospective story of Hindu nat-ionalism. Ayres interviews many subjects,among them current and former politicians,the right-wing political commentator SwapanDasgupta, and the news anchor Arnab Gos-wami, famous in India for screaming at his

other countries, notably the United States, is notnecessarily only laughably wilful – what if a country were motivated, for example, by goalsother than economic growth alone? Onlytowards the end of the book does it becomeapparent that it is a primer intended for Amer-ican students, and Ayres ends with a touching argument about how the US should endeavourto understand Indian interests better – she notesthat a survey from 2016 showed that “Ameri-cans are mildly favourable towards India, butthey don’t see it as mattering very much”. Per-haps that lack of interest partly accounts for thesimplified picture she at times presents.

Snigdha Poonam’s Dreamers: How youngIndians are changing the world returns us to theIndians themselves, focusing on the aspirationsof those in their twenties and thirties. Inescapa-bly, it is also a story of the youthful constituentof Modi’s voters. One group of people she fol-lows are evangelical teachers of English, who market their teaching as essential to anyonelooking for employment in outsourcing. “Afterhe told me his story I felt I could have made itup”, Poonam observes of one teacher, SantoshDev Thakur, who is based in Ranchi, the capitalof the fairly new state of Jharkhand. As well asdrawing students with the possibility of a job ina call centre, the sales pitch of such teacherspresents English as able to transform a life: “English is like magic . . . English mantra, magicmantra”, Poonam summarizes the promise, in astrange inversion of the Sanskrit “mantra”,

an invocation whose very sounds containtransformative power. It is indeed a nineteenth-century story: for the teachers Poonam meets, English has had a transformative power, by pro-viding a source of income, but it has alsoendowed them with the ability to transformothers, like urban shamans, halfway between glib salespeople and wise monks. All of them talk in homilies: “I don’t want to be successful,I want to be significant”; “Taking no risk is thebiggest risk in life”.

Poonam is good on the aggressive national-ism of this generation. Vivek Thakur, a youngman in charge of the social media output ofModi’s BJP, tells her how his commitment tothe nation came partly from reading the worksof Swami Vivekananda. Thakur, Poonamnotes wryly, “has a book to recommend foreverything you need to know about thecountry’s fall from glory: how JawaharlalNehru destroyed India, how the Congressparty destroyed the Indian economy, howWestern secularism is destroying Hinduism.Thakur’s politics is the politics of anger”. Oneof the bugbears of Thakur and others likehim is the policy of reservations (for univers-ity places and government jobs, amongothers) for certain historically disadvantagedgroups, including the members of what areknown as scheduled castes and scheduledtribes (meaning those whose existence islisted in the constitution). Although the policyaims to redress perhaps thousands of years of

interviewees. She seems to accept fairlyuncritically the present Indian government’sconflation of “Indian” with “Hindu” – shewrites about “Indian spiritual teachings”,“Indian wisdom” and “Indic culture” when itis principally Hindu traditions she is talkingabout – mirroring the way the BJP tries toignore the Indian constitution. She also citesChanakya’s Arthashastra, a treatise on gov-ernance from the fourth century BC, as adirect precursor to Indian politics, a lineagealready staked out by the BJP. Around 172million Indians are Muslims – more than 10per cent of the world’s Islamic population.But if one accepts Ayres’s definition of“Indian”, they might as well not exist.

At times I wondered for whom this bookwas intended. Ayres does a thorough job ofsumming up the foreign policy of the past fewdecades, but her tone is sometimes bizarrelycondescending. She notes, for example, adebate over whether India should focus oneconomic growth or public investment in socialservices as a means of reducing poverty: “in India everything is hotly contested”. Is thatsurprising in a large democracy? (It’s worthconsidering whether the same sentence, so banal but patronizing, would survive the editin a book about France.) Elsewhere, Ayresmentions India’s “reputation for prickliness” because of a long-standing policy of non-alignment. But this refusal to toe a line set by

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TLS OCTOBER 12 2018