How To Talk About Another Place
In this blog I've written a number of pieces about the events and energies surrounding me here in this city of Delhi. In the comments I've received, a few people have expressed dismay at the idea that India might become overtaken by Western styles and values. In my last piece on the preparations for the Commonwealth Games in Delhi, for instance, "Ian" wrote the following:
"[The article] is not about the Commonwealth Games but about the culture clash between modern western ideas of what a city should be and traditional Indian values. Only if India is itself ashamed of the beggers and beasts should it remove them and it should do so without the spur of the Games."
In response, Fitz wrote:
"Yes we need a few more Ghandis back in the world!"
(Is there any great figure of the 20th century whose name is so consistently misspelt as Gandhi's?)
In an earlier piece on the new corporate towers in Gurgaon, just outside Delhi, Richard O'Shea wrote:
"On the one hand I'm happy [at seeing glass towers in India] on the other sad and I sensed the same dichotomy in the authors language. It does look so terribly sterile and not at all like the organic India that most westeners consider. There is a sense that India will be another victim of globalisation and greed, that while some will prosper others will suffer greatly and that India will loose some of her identity to the corporate greyness of capitalism."
There seems to be a widespread concern amongst readers that India remain culturally "pure", and that any changes that happen as a result of its involvement in the global economy should only draw from its own cultural resources.
I have to say, I find this a strange position. Quite obviously, a country of a billion people that goes through rapid, but highly uneven, integration with the global economy, begins to acquire and build major corporations on every continent, generates enormous wealth and ambition, and sees its major metropolises swell towards twenty million people - such a country will not find its "traditional culture" adequate to deal with its contemporary experience.
This is not to say that there are only two forces in this place - "traditional culture" and "the West". The mistake that many readers make is to assume that the enormous upheavals in India are impositions from the outside, and represent a foreign intervention. In this respect, "Ian" has misunderstood what my previous article was about. It was precisely not about a "culture clash between modern western ideas of what a city should be and traditional Indian values". The picture I was giving of the new Delhi has nothing western about it. It is a self-consciously "Indian" idea of the city (after all, the centrepiece in that article was an enormous new Hindu temple) which is in fact very concerned to invoke "traditional Indian values" in remaking this metropolis.
But of course these values and aesthetics are deployed to very non-traditional ends: they go through a massive leap in scale, they are surrounded by hi-tech security systems, and they have a continual eye on the possibility of India's domination of the global economy. It is far too convenient to imagine that the new developments in India come from the West: what we are seeing here at present is an Indian modernity which is a totally different formation from European or Amercan modernity. For more on this theme I would again direct readers to my .
Why are readers in Europe and America so dismayed anyway that "Western values" might destroy Indian traditions? I have put "Indian traditional values" in quotes throughout this piece because no one would be able to give a satisfactory account of what they are. The imperialism of the Muslim courts? The great-dam-building Socialism of Nehru? In one sense, India's enthusiastic participation in the global economy is entirely traditional: there has been cosmopolitanism and trade here for millennia, and in the sixteenth century the GDP of this continent reached close to one-quarter of that of the entire world. But I don't think these are the things readers mean when they talk about "traditional Indian values". They are invoking something smaller, more quaint and soulful.
I can't help feeling that this great desire to preserve this idea of a traditional India has more to do with the history of the West than with Indian history. The West, after all, has seen its own "traditional values" destroyed, and much of the tourist industry is devoted to helping them witness them still alive elsewhere. How many people in Britain, for instance, have any sense of what English village culture was like only a few generations ago? How many of them could sing folksongs from their region, or tell the stories, or administer the traditional remedies? The world that sustained these things was actively destroyed during the nineteenth and twenieth centuries, and the pain of that destruction endures, shaping attitudes towards places like India where, it is imagined, the traditional remains intact.
But I think these categories are pretty useless for understanding anything that is happening here or in many other places of the world. This is displayed clearly by what Ian goes on to say:
"Only if India is itself ashamed of the beggers and beasts should it remove them and it should do so without the spur of the Games."
In his desire to understand everything through the grand dichotomy of "the West" and "traditional Indian values" he stifles his own capacity for political and moral critique. Absolutely anything would be permissible in India, it seems as long as it is in line with traditional Indian values. How we are supposed to answer the question of whether evictions, arrests for loitering, etc etc are in line with these values he does not say. Moreover his desire to preserve India unchanged becomes so extreme that he would like a mega-event like the Commonwealth Games to influence nothing around it - when we know (for instance from London's recent Olympic bid) that all cities take advantage of such events to undertake major new projects.
There is something devastating about the destruction of life-forms, and I myself feel great despair about the processes that evict dense and vibrant communities in order to build shopping malls. But let us think about these processes with the complexity they require. Let us not imagine some eternal, unshifting, traditional India invaded by the evil of Western processes. There never was an unchanging India, and the things that are causing the latest, tumultuous changes are conceived, for the most part, by India's own business and politial class, and not by the West.
Perhaps India's remaining "culturally pure" is its value to us. Though the dimension of the change might surprise us, message board contributors, perhaps more than most, dislike the sameness of exported culture and shopping malls. Maybe there's some McLuhanism too: we sense the export of our ways will commercialise you far faster than your culture conservers can resist.
Your final sentence says it all. Just wreaking the greatest changes is proving how mad, bad, and dangerous to know they are. Just is not enough. Olympics are a show, a big side-show admittedly.
India does not I believe necessarily mimic European of American or Western architecture for the sake of wanting to copy 'foreign'
What I believe it has learnt is a simple lesson of economic rationale - it is much cheaper to build up rather than around .You take up less space on the ground and get more in the air. And in fact if the glass walls are reflective then they may very well reflect the sun superbly and may be much cooler than the concrete version.
So it has simple learnt the same economic lesson as the West.
Of course living in skyscrapers does remove one from the riff raff below and gives one a panoramic view from which to view your new kingdom - the serfs below you labouring for your gains!
Living close to the ground has lost it's allurement!
Yes the changes we see in India are really economic ones and nothing to do with culture or even wanting to be Western.
And I am sure that Mr Gandhi would have kindly forgiven my error
he had bigger things on his mind.
But he was reminding us all the time that materialism whether of the Indian variety of Western variety was doomed to destroy the true soul of man and for that he has my vote and thanks - I wrote of Gandhi for his vision and humility not for his desire to cross all the 't's and dot all the 'i's
But who has risen to his challenge since? No one really comes to mind
Gandhi had many facets. Among other things he believed strongly in cleanliness, neatness, and hygiene; he patiently instructed a village boy in how to peel and eat an orange with minimum misdirection and fuss. He was of course an apostle of the simple life, like the later Tolstoy and the American Thoreau. When asked what he thought of Western civilization, he said, "It would be a good idea."
What is "culturally pure"? Is there such a thing? Change, whether desired or not, both destroys and creates; what was past is lost to our understanding and attachment, and what is now defines who we are. This is reflected in all things - architecture, art, language, lifestyle. It is interesting how so many of us mourn the loss of something we have, in all probability, never experienced; or desire a "time" or "era" that, if given the opportunity to live it, would probably be unable to cope with its 'lack of culture' and amenities. I just think of all the urban dwellers who race to country homes and remote locales to 'return to nature' and who wind up complaining of the masses of insects and lack of indoor plumbing. The tragedy of romanticizing about the unfamiliar past is that the undesirable aspects of those 'societies' and 'cultures' often are ignored in our efforts to seek out something 'better' than our current existence.
Most of us are indeed 'fickle' creatures - always yearning for something better and listening as the Buddhists point out - to the 'chattering of the monkeys - they always lead us astray!
Great post, one that I agree with entirely. There is no such thing as an unchanging India or a single given idea of it - its inventiveness lies in its ability to absorb and change everything it touches. Even MTV and McDonalds, and Buddhism and Gandhian thought are among its greatest exports.
""Buddhism and Gandhian thought are among its greatest exports.""
did it really mean to export these? and were the returns valuable?
COWBOYS AND INDIANS
Rana wrote: 'There seems to be a widespread concern amongst readers that India remain culturally "pure", and that any changes that happen as a result of its involvement in the global economy should only draw from its own cultural resources.'
Whether or not "culturally pure" is an accepted concept is irrelevant. Countries have cultures. One can say, 'I liked England in 1970, but since then it's gone to the dogs.' In other words you liked the culture around that time, and from your high, it's been adulterated.
I think the wish that a country/region "should only draw from its own cultural resources" derives not from a desire to deny any change at all, but our own awareness of how voracious international business can now be.
I think the 'global village' concept is now more of a reality that ever before - in many ways different cultures have kept us apart - differentiated - alienated at times. Perhaps the more similiar we become the more forgiving and understanding we may become?
mis spelling, napolan bonaparts ?
moving on - moving on?
I have just found out that we are in fact addressing someone who is not Indian at all, but British-born and bred.
Rather like illiterate Indians voted in Newhru's daughter because she had herself renamed "Ghandi",
I must admit this reinforces my feeling that along with Jeffrey Archer's teaching on the subject, we have to remember that all novelists are liars, fantasists and not at all in-touch with the real world.
Now, I have no doubt whatever that I am as good a photographer as this old toad Rana is a "novelist", but although I use a machine to reproduce the surfaces of reality as one eye sees it, I would describe this as the best possible form of "magic realism" because it does not mean slogging away making up more and more porkies pile upon pile and shitheap upon shitheap enough to rival the Bible-Babel baby, but one-click only for which claims to uniquity are a superfluity akin to strep throat for which there are no lozenges.
What native literary talent to write about this India can he have with his track record, I ask? How is a life unlived- no 6am baths at Bhimashankar, no pujas by the Ganges or breakfast off banana leaves, no sweets in shops down Assighat and primary hot schooldays under trees sat in the dust being bitten. No India at all in fact less than a recidivist tourist like me?
However I do recommend him leaving lying for a living to lesser men and women, and putting my ID harrappeter in search-people in Flickr.com. where he shall discover only a few out of thousands of snaps of a country he must anonymously explore.
The camera is very useful if your i8magination is inclined to run away with you, as you can make up any number of stories (or indeed write music) about Pictures at an Exhibition.
So much for DasGob, ta!
I think there are a number of things wre need to admit to one another and enquire about.
I would have stayed in India and be living there now, were I allowed then to work and be employed and paid as Indians are there and here.
I could not stay, I was told, unless I was employed by a foreign company, or could prove myself wealthy enough not to have to work. I could buy property and own land (unlike arabs in Israel), but would not be able to vote in elections (like arabs in Israel); and could not ever work for an Indian company; so could not live where I most wanted to be!
I feel we need, all of us now, to know how and where India is in this regard, since a world-blog, and a world, and countries that exclude influence, and indeed real help, really do need to do more than just make noises and put shows on.
I find it very difficult to forgive a double standard which on the one hand criticizes the "West" on every possible occasion- and usually justifiably- whilst doing nothing to make itself worthy of the name of "India".
The reality is still very far off the concept. Are your police still killing tribals for sport? (Madya Pradesh) Are your Hindus still carrying out human sacrifices as they were found to be in Benares the last time I was there? Are you still kidding yourselves you are in some divinely appointed way superior to muslims and christians?
Whilst British myself and a man who despises people like our present "leaders" I find India today increasingly disturbing. I have had years away and missing it all the time, but was Mohandas Ghandi right? Was he right and his fellows to go for independence at all?
He was wrong. Very wrong. He did not live in the real world, and millions slaughtered one another at Partition-none of them British.
You are still all too primitive to attain nationhood-and will remain so as long as you are so ignorant you imagine that God has ANY religion or attends any church or temple or mosque or gurudwara (I have to use 4 words for the same thing already).
You are too ignorant to be a nation as long as you divide it all up again by making Hindi the first language- rather than English- which first as a novelist I would invite you to discuss the consequences of.
Beginning with which Indians CAN read your books?
As I said before, I cannot read fiction. I have here lent me by an old friend T.Prachett's "Interesting Times" but somehow lack the will, the suspension of disbelief, and the attention-span required.
In another magic place years ago I read Marquez "100 years of solitude" which followed 5 weeks in Italy as a tourist with the short stories of Borges in my bag. They are several magic places in themselves and my hair stood on end for days.
After that I consoled myself here with "Midnight's Children" by AL Fatwahri which echoed my own consciousness sometimes in painfully intimate ways.
I sent lovers, friends, without comments except my love for the place, to Idia, and all have benefitted as human beings- more than reading even the best book because it is still a fabulous treasure of stories and books and films.
Each of us is a world, a book, a movie.
There I learned that all is recorded and that cinema is a divine in(ter)vention. There I accepted being alive.
I accepted my fallible stupid humanity faced with a world so vast and various all one can do is laugh.
But I cried too. I lived with saints, but read the Indian Express in english, and wept and whined like a baby about abuses in their country they do, as we, nothing about.
But I reject theologies and theories of an afterlife in a world where it should exist but cannot happily do so- for what price rebirth now-if your mother is mad, or your villages are being bombed?
Faced with the real world outside of books and scriptures I learned , I realised we have just this one life given us, and that to imagine, demand or believe in more flatters It's goodness and It's abilities (omni-everything and everybody) in ways spoilt children crave another bedtime story and kissandhug.("I'll only love you if you let me live forever,Father)
The latest of course being that novelist Dawkins great work "The Benevolent Gene". Yes, and its ALL true!
I can remember as a sincere doubter and God-mad lover of all creation years ago asking a much younger aquaintance here whom she thought composed the books of the Bible. Just lightly in passing dropped into other chat about film, animation and other things.
I dunno this waif just creased up smiling as we walked across the park and said-"well, you know I think it was all made up by a bunch of doped-crazed hippies".
This put her light years ahead of me! That is cultural purity!
So evolution and human progress is not adherence to belief systems which are ideologies not created by God, but by the novelists of this world, dope-crazed or not; who with the likes of Bush, Sadam and Hitler are SOO vain they expect us all, God included to pander to their demands, dance to their tune, and live if they let us, and die when they want us to.
The dangers however of paper are paramount.(pointed out by Talking Heads in 79)
Avoid its use.(I have just bagged todays 60gram junkmail offerring)
I cannot breathe and our atmosphere lacks oxygen because of paper. France has much more air per person. Plant lots of trees for lots of lungs please.Decidedly deciduous ones. Cover Scotland with forests (for rests!) NOW!
The plagues that will be caused by paper once asians all use it in their loos like we do-blocking up their ancient sewers.
The horror of it all.
One bunch of people killing another bunch of people the diseases havent wiped out yet because their novelists and poets and saints never bothered to explain to them in their own languages that the 1000 words for Allah include those of the Hindu Gods and our Gods and everyone else's too- its a metaphor. Its poetry and love, not fact.Or that the Koran was written by men, like the Bible and the Buddhist books and Disneys Hercules.The guy who is said to have said that the scribes have their reward already was being Ironic
And it has to be explained clearly now. It is what Ghandi and Co. should have done first-before all the rest. And they should have refused to go for independence, like the Irish must, until there's no such thing left as "religious" belief in all that, or the altruism of a gene, or a monkey called Darwin, who had the misfortune to own a typewriter.
Whilst anyone I believe can be invited to write about anything and anyone and anyplace. There is a certain moral code in literature or just the world that we do declare or interests, biases and backgrounds.
Can we have a real Indian next time please? You could lose viewers (or at least discerning viewers) otherwise!
Wow, you opened up a can of worms with this one! I'll try and stay on topic, which I am assuming is cultural identity or the ownership of identity. I agree that there is a hint of cultural snobery from us westerners holding onto our own perception of India with little qualitative experience.
I was shocked to hear that India's GDP made up almost 25% of the world GDP, please explain the widespread social deprivation in the presence of such wealth? Are Gandhi's untouchables to be left to rot? Forced relocations just to put on a good show really is morally reprehensible, especially when the people you are relocating have little to begin with and less when its over.
I am certain that an Indian is no different to me in form or function, so it is only culture that serves to delineate us. There was clearly cultural absorption between India and Britain, many English words originate from india e.g. pariah and India absorbed aspects of British culture e.g. military structure.
Cultural identity suffers from regionality, an example is the anamosity between city dwellers and country folk in the UK, we both live very different lives. I suspect that this is no different for the Indian farmer and stocktrading Dhelite. For sure India will impose an identity onto these new constructs but how true will this new identity be to the one that exists now -accepting the subjectivity of identity- will India morph into something else? Who is in charge of this cultural change or is it out of singular control, a runaway train heading toward an unkown destination? In the rush to power who will hear the cry "Stop the train I want to get off!"
Who is in charge of this cultural change - ultimately the politicians, planners and architects - the rest of us don't get much say - apart from a few heritage societies - I wonder whether Indian has any at all?
I remember reading some time ago about the great London diaspora after the war - spear headed I believe by churchill.
Great new towns would be built in the surrounding country side and other 'home counties' towns would be enlarged and modernised to take the Londoners in their droves. A fascinatiing experiment to read for its own value.
But one of the stark statements that were made ( the article was written by a University academic - make what you will of that!) was that there wasn't then and isn't now some big long term master plan for country progress or city or town progress for that matter.
What you get and see is the limited imagination of the politicians of the day and their dreary town planners and architects. Their visions are limited certainly by personalities but also lack of long term visionary views and thoughts.
Politicians it has been claimed cannot see or plan beyong their 5 year span of office and so never think beyond that - architects and planners are very sparse in visionary characters and just want to earn a quick buck and go home for a beer!
So as you view the ever changing scenes in British towns and cities and villages and hold your head in horror you are I believe watching this phenomena of 'short term lack of visions and plans'
I'm sure the same applies to India and any other country for that matter - we are all more similiar in our humanity and lack of vision than dissimilar.
I guess to be honest in our early days of national building and progress (say the last 500 years) we did seem to have more vision and creativity - thus the great cathedrals were built and mosques and temples like Angor Wat and the Taj Mahal.
and although the people of the day laboured on these monuments perhaps for nothing; surely they must have felt a much greater pride in the finished product than we can today with our glass and concrete edifices?
So it is the short sighted politician or the greed driven businessman that decides how the future of a society unfolds. I agree with Fitz here, these types of people have questionable motivation, limited visions and can't spell altruism. The perverse thing about their methods is that it produces the one thing they fear the most, chaos. Yet this is exactly what they build, a slow creeping chaos.
Sadly and all too often, when a visionary dares to stand up and declare an opposing tempo and score... well you know the rest, and you've seen it all before. An unsustainably growing population driven to serve a non-human variable called economy will ultimately waste its existence meeting futile goals. Chasing money, do the world a favour and let it get away.
I think this view goes some way to explaining why westerners yearn for India to remain culturally pure, the west has experienced what India is becoming. If this sounds patronising it isn't supposed to be. It is supposed to warn you of a growing perception in the west that we do not like where we are, and that we are posting sentinels to warn the weary traveller to steer clear of golden shores.
An interesting thought Richard, the East comes to the West and sees, cleanliness, law and order, well run cities, richness and opulence and want some too!
The West goes to the East and sees un-cleanlinness, bribery and corruption, cities that seem to stagger in chaos with no discernable system, apart from dog eat dog, some richness and opulence certainly but much more poverty.
I don't think the West wants it for themselves but they do admire the history and the ancient arts and buildings and bemoan the fact that we are loosing ours.
Mankind has built some beautiful edifices around the world and some still exist,but there is no guarantee that they will for last for ever, or even need to.
But after all that is said and done - if we did it once surely we can if we wish re-creat them again. Perhaps we no longer though, have the patience and feel more comfortable moving into our ivory (concrete) and glass towers more quickly and feeling more comfortable doing so.
and let's remember perhaps that the ancient edifices were built by many for few - whilst today surely few ar building for many - and getting paid better for it too!
Just watched a fascinating program on the 'call centre' phenomena in Indian cities. large concrete aircon buildings housing hundreds of young hopeful Indians male and female all providing call centre services for the rest of the world.
And guess what - they love it they are earning approx 3-4 thousand pounds a year much more than their counterparts doctors are and some of them are qualified doctors too!
And it is also changing the social structure of their lives and their relationships. Young males and females thrown together - falling in love together and often living together in modern flats and owning their own cars.
And they are loving every minute of it - and they are also grappling with changing family relationships and loosing the ties that bind.
But despite all this good change for them I feel sure that they still love their culture and practice it - they haven't lost most of it - just the bits they want to change and young people all over the world will challenge their own internal cultural norms.
We westerners want to see the India that we remember from 'Jungle Book'
and we never want it to change!
I want the England of the 40's and 50's to return, but this is wishful thinking - it never will and why should it in fact?
Any New Dehlians around at all?