The Elephant, The Tiger, and the Cellphone: India, the Emerging 21st-Century Power

by Shashi Tharoor

Overview

Interest in India has never been greater. Here Shashi Tharoor, one of the subcontinent’s most respected writers and diplomats, offers precious insights into this complex, multifaceted land, which despite its dazzling diversity of languages, customs, and cultures remains—more than sixty years after its founding—the world’s largest democracy. He describes the vast changes that have transformed this once sleeping giant into a world leader in science and technology, a nation once poverty-stricken that now boasts a middle class of over 300 million people—as large as the entire population of the United States. Artfully combining hard facts and statistics with opinion and observation, Tharoor discusses the strengths and weaknesses of his rapidly evolving homeland in five areas—politics, economics, culture, society, and sports—and takes a fresh look at the world’s oldest civilizations and most populous countries.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628721560
Publisher:	Arcade
Publication date:	09/01/2011
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	512
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Shashi Tharoor was born in London and brought up in Bombay and Calcutta. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, the Times of India, and Foreign Affairs. A human rights activist and winner of a Commonwealth Writers Prize, he is currently a member of the Indian Parliament and lives in New Dehli, India.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Invention of India

In a passage of his much-misunderstood novel. The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie writes of "the eclectic, hybridized nature of the Indian artistic tradition." Under the Mughals, he says, artists of different faiths and traditions were brought from many parts of India to work on a painting. One hand would paint the mosaic floors, another the human figures, a third the cloudy skies: "Individual identity was submerged to create a many-headed, many-brushed Overartist who, literally, was Indian painting."

This evocative image could as well be applied to the very idea of India, itself the product of the same hybrid culture. How, after all, can one approach this land of snow peaks and tropical jungles, with twenty-three major languages and 22,000 distinct dialects (including some spoken by more people than Danish or Norwegian), inhabited in the first years of the twenty-first century by a billion individuals of every ethnic extraction known to humanity? How does one come to terms with a country whose population is 40 percent illiterate but which has educated the world's second-largest pool of trained scientists and engineers, whose teeming cities overflow while two out of three Indians still scratch a living from the soil? What is the clue to understanding a country rife with despair and disrepair, which nonetheless moved a Mughal emperor to declaim, "If on earth there be paradise of bliss, it is this, it is this, it is this"? How does one gauge a culture that elevated nonviolence to an effective moral principle, but whose freedom was born in blood and whose independence still soaks in it? How does one explain a land where peasant organizations and suspicious officials attempt to close down Kentucky Fried Chicken(tm) as a threat to the nation, where a former prime minister bitterly criticizes the sale of Pepsi-Cola(tm) "in a country where villagers don't have clean drinking water," and yet invents more sophisticated software for U.S. computer manufacturers than any other country in the world? How can one portray an ageless civilization that was the birthplace of four major religions, a dozen different traditions of classical dance, eighty-five political parties, and three hundred ways of cooking the potato?

The short answer is that it can't be done — at least not to everyone's satisfaction. Any truism about India can be immediately contradicted by another truism about India. The country's national motto, emblazoned on its governmental crest, is "Satyameva Jayaté" — Truth alone triumphs. The question remains, however, whose truth? It is a question to which there are at least a billion answers — if the last census hasn't undercounted us again.

For the singular thing about India, as I have written elsewhere, is that you can only speak of it in the plural. There are, in the hackneyed phrase, many Indias. If India were to adopt the well-known U.S. motto, it would have read "E Pluribis Pluribum." Everything exists in countless variants. There is no single standard, no fixed stereotype, no "one way." This pluralism is acknowledged in the way India arranges its own affairs: all groups, faiths, tastes, and ideologies survive and contend for their place in the sun. The idea of India is that of a land emerging from an ancient civilization, united by a shared history, sustained by pluralist democracy, but containing a world of differences. It is not surprising, then, that the political life of modern India has been rather like traditional Indian music: the broad basic rules are firmly set, but within them one is free to improvise, unshackled by a written score.

When India celebrated the forty-ninth anniversary of its independence from British rule in 1996, our then–prime minister, H. D. Deve Gowda, stood at the ramparts of Delhi's sixteenth-century red fort and delivered the traditional Independence Day address to the nation in Hindi, India's national language. Eight other prime ministers had done exactly the same thing forty-eight times before him, but what was unusual this time was that Deve Gowda, a southerner from the state of Karnataka, spoke to the country in a language of which he did not know a word. Tradition and politics required a speech in Hindi, so he gave one — the words having been written out for him in his native Kannada script, in which they, of course, made no sense.

Such an episode is almost inconceivable elsewhere, but it represents the best of the oddities that help make India India. Only in India could the country be ruled by a man who does not understand its national language; only in India, for that matter, is there a national language that half the population does not understand; and only in India could this particular solution have been found to enable the prime minister to address his people. One of Indian cinema's finest "playback singers," the Keralite K. J. Yesudas, sang his way to the top of the Hindi music charts with lyrics in that language written in the Malayalam script for him, but to see the same practice elevated to the prime ministerial address on Independence Day was a startling affirmation of Indian pluralism.

For the simple fact is that we are all minorities in India. There has never been an archetypal Indian to stand alongside the archetypal Englishman or Frenchman. A Hindi-speaking Hindu male from Uttar Pradesh may cherish the illusion that he represents the "majority community," an expression much favored by the less industrious of our journalists. But he does not. As a Hindu, he belongs to the faith adhered to by 81 percent of the population. But a majority of the country does not speak Hindi. A majority does not hail from Uttar Pradesh, though you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise when you go there. And, if he were visiting, say, my home state of Kerala, he would be surprised to discover that the majority there is not even male.

Even his Hinduism is no guarantee of his majority-hood, because his caste automatically puts him in a minority. If he is a Brahmin, 90 percent of his fellow Indians are not. If he is a Yadav, a "backward caste," 85 percent of his fellow Indians are not. And so on.

If caste and language complicate the notion of Indian identity, ethnicity makes it even more difficult. Most of the time, an Indian's name immediately reveals where he is from or what her mother tongue is: when we introduce ourselves, we are advertising our origins. Despite some intermarriage at the elite levels in our cities, Indians are still largely endogamous, and a Bengali is easily distinguished from a Punjabi. The difference this reflects is often more apparent than the elements of commonality. A Karnataka Brahmin shares his Hindu faith with a Bihari Kurmi, but they share little identity with each other in respect to their dress, customs, appearance, taste, language, or even, these days, their political objectives. At the same time, a Tamil Hindu would feel he has much more in common with a Tamil Christian or a Tamil Muslim than with, say, a Haryanvi Jat, with whom he formally shares the Hindu religion.

What makes India, then, a nation? What is an Indian's identity?

Let me risk the wrath of anti-Congress readers and take an Italian example. No, not that Italian example, but one from 140 years ago. Amid the popular ferment that made an Italian nation out of a congeries of principalities and statelets, the nineteenth-century novelist Massimo Taparelli d'Azeglio memorably wrote, "We have created Italy. Now all we need to do is to create Italians." Oddly enough, no Indian nationalist succumbed to the temptation to express the same thought — "We have created India; now all we need to do is to create Indians."

Such a sentiment would not, in any case, have occurred to the preeminent voice of Indian nationalism, Jawaharlal Nehru, because he believed India and Indians had existed for millennia before he gave words to their longings; he would never have spoken of "creating" India or Indians, merely of being the agent for the reassertion of what had always existed but had been long suppressed. Nonetheless, the India that was born in 1947 was in a very real sense a new creation: a state that had made fellow citizens of the Ladakhi and the Laccadivian for the first time, that divided Punjabi from Punjabi for the first time, that asked the Kerala peasant to feel allegiance to a Kashmiri Pandit ruling in Delhi, also for the first time. Nehru would not have written of the challenge of "creating" Indians, but creating Indians was what, in fact, our nationalist movement did.

Nations have been formed out of varying and different impulses. France and Thailand are the products of a once ruthless unifying monarchy, and Germany and the United States were created by sternly practical and yet visionary modernizing elites. Italy and Bangladesh are the results of mass movements led by messianic figures, Holland and Switzerland the creation of discrete cantons wishing to merge for their mutual protection. But it is only recently that race or ethnicity has again been seen as the basis of nationhood, as has become apparent in the prolonged breakup of the former Yugoslavia.

Most modern nations are the product of a fusion of population groups over the centuries, to the point where one element is indistinguishable from the next. The nineteenth-century French historian Ernest Renan pointed out, for instance, that "an Englishman is indeed a type within the whole of humanity. However, [he] is neither the Briton of Julius Caesar's time, nor the Anglo-Saxon of Hengist's time, nor the Dane of Canute's time, nor the Norman of William the Conqueror's time; [he] is rather the result of all these." We cannot yet say the same of an Indian, because we are not yet the product of the kind of fusion that Renan's Englishman represents.

So India cannot claim ethnicity as a uniting factor, since what we loosely have in common with each other as a generally recognizable "type" we also have in common with Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Maldivians, and Nepalese, with whom we do not share a common political identity. (And further distinctions make matters worse — after all, Indian Bengalis and Punjabis have far more in common ethnically with Bangladeshis and Pakistanis than with Bangaloreans and Poonawallahs.) Nor can we cite religion. Looking again at foreign models of the nation-state, many scholars have pointed out that the adoption of Christianity by both conquerors and the conquered helped the creation of the Western European nations, since it eliminated the distinction between ethnic groups in the society on the basis of their religion. But this is not a useful answer in India, for a Tamil Hindu can share a faith with a Haryanvi Jat and still feel he has little else in common with him. And equally important, over 200 million Indians do not share the faith of the majority, and would be excluded from any religiously defined community (as non-Christian minorities among immigrants in Europe feel excluded today from full acceptance into their new societies).

A third element that has, historically, served to unite nations in other parts of the world is language. In Europe, conquerors and the conquered rapidly came to speak the same language, usually that of the conquered. In India, attempts by Muslim conquerors to import Persian or Turkic languages never took root and, instead, the hybrid camp language called Urdu or Hindustani evolved as the language of both rulers and the ruled in most of North India. But Hindi today has made very limited inroads into the south, east, and northeast, so linguistic unity remains a distant prospect (all the more so given that languages like Bengali, Malayalam, and Tamil have a far richer cultural and literary tradition than the Hindi that seeks to supplant them).

No language enjoys majority status in India, though Hindi is coming perilously close. Thanks in part to the popularity of Mumbai's Bollywood cinema, Hindi is understood, if not always well spoken, by nearly half the population of India, but it cannot truly be considered the language of the majority; its locutions, gender rules, and script are still unfamiliar to most Indians in the south and the northeast. And if the proliferation of Hindi TV channels has made the spoken language more accessible to many non-native speakers, the fact that other languages too have captured their share of the TV audience means that our linguistic diversity is not going to disappear.

But my larger and more serious point is that the French speak French, the Germans speak German, the Americans speak English (though Spanish is making inroads, especially in the Southwest and Southeast of the United States) — but Indians speak Punjabi, or Gujarati, or Malayalam, and it does not make us any less Indian. The idea of India is not based on language. It is no accident that Jawaharlal Nehru's classic volume of Indian nationalism, The Discovery of India, was written in English — and it is fair to say that Nehru discovered India in English. Indeed, when two Indians meet abroad, or two educated urban Indians meet in India, unless they have prior reason to believe they have an Indian language in common, the first language they speak to each other is English. It is in English that they establish each other's linguistic identity, and then they switch comfortably to another language, or a hybrid, depending on the link they have established. Language and religion are, in any case, an inadequate basis for nationhood. Over eighty countries profess Christianity, but they do not seek to merge with each other; the Organization of the Islamic Conference has more than fifty members, who agree on many issues but do not see themselves as a single nation. As for language, Arabic makes meetings of the Arab League more convenient, no doubt, but has hardly been a force for political unity; Spanish has not melted the political frontiers that vivisect Latin America; and England and the United States remain, in the famous phrase, two countries divided by a common language.

A more poetic suggestion made by the French historian Ernest Renan is that historical amnesia is an essential part of nation-building, that nations are those that have forgotten the price they have paid in the past for their unity. This is true of India, though the Babri Masjid tragedy reveals that we Indians are not very good at forgetting. We carry with us the weight of the past, and because we do not have a finely developed sense of historicism, it is a past that is still alive in our present. We wear the dust of history on our foreheads and the mud of the future on our feet.

So Indian nationalism is a rare animal indeed. It is not based on language (since there are at least twenty-three or thirty-five, depending on whether you follow the amended constitution or the ethnolinguists). Nor on religion, since India is a secular pluralist state that is home to every religion known to mankind, with the possible exception of Shintoism; and Hinduism — a faith without a national organization, no established church or ecclesiastical hierarchy, no uniform beliefs or modes of worship — exemplifies as much our diversity as it does our common cultural heritage. Not on geography, since the natural geography of the subcontinent — the mountains and the sea — was hacked by the Partition of 1947. And not even territory, since, by law, anyone with one grandparent born in prepartition India is eligible for citizenship. Indian nationalism has therefore always been the nationalism of an idea.

To repeat the argument: we are all minorities in India. Indian nationalism is the nationalism of an idea, the idea of an ever-ever land — emerging from an ancient civilization, united by a shared history, sustained by pluralist democracy. India's democracy imposes no narrow conformities on its citizens. The Indian idea is the opposite of what Freudians call "the narcissism of minor differences"; in India we celebrate the commonality of major differences. The whole point of Indianness is its pluralism: you can be many things and one thing. You can be a good Muslim, a good Keralite, and a good Indian all at once. To borrow Michael Ignatieff's famous phrase, we are a land of belonging rather than of blood.

If America is a melting pot, then to me India is a thali, a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast. Indians are used to multiple identities and multiple loyalties, all coming together in allegiance to a larger idea of India, an India that safeguards the common space available to each identity.

That idea of India is of one land embracing many. It is the idea that a nation may endure differences of caste, creed, color, conviction, culture, cuisine, costume, and custom and still rally around a consensus. And that consensus is about the simple idea that in a democracy you don't really need to agree — except on the ground rules of how you will disagree.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Elephant, The Tiger, and The Cell Phone"
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Copyright © 2011 Shashi Tharoor.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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Table of Contents

Preface: Why India Matters,
Introduction: The Elephant Who Became a Tiger,
Part One Ideas of Indianness,
1 The Invention of India,
2 Hinduism and Hindutva: Creed and Credo,
3 The Politics of Identity,
4 Of Secularism and Conversions,
5 On the Importance of Being Muslim and Indian,
6 Making Bollywood's India a Reality,
7 Epic Interpretations,
Part Two India at Work and at Play,
8 Hooray for Bollywood,
9 Democracy and Demockery,
10 The Bond That Threatens?,
11 Cricket's True Spiritual Home,
12 Good Sports, Bad Sports,
13 Bad Sports, Bad Spots,
14 Salad Daze,
15 Wholly Holidays,
16 Memories of a Bombay Childhood,
17 Nothing to Laugh About,
18 The Sari Saga,
19 The Challenge of Literacy,
20 Reconstructing Nalanda,
21 Cops and Jobbers,
22 Becoming Bengaloorued,
23 India's Lost Urban Heritage,
Part Three Indians Who Made My India,
24 The Legacy of Gandhi and Nehru,
25 The Man Who Saved India,
26 The Man Who Stayed Behind,
27 The Man Who Wanted More,
28 Anchored in Himself,
29 Tea and Antipathy,
30 Smother India,
31 The Spy Who Came In Through the Heat,
32 The Genius Lost to Infinity,
33 The Other Saint Teresa,
34 A Polymath's Politics,
35 Art from the Heart,
36 Carrying His Bat,
37 The Dear Departed,
Part Four Experiences of India,
38 Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames,
39 Southern Comfort,
40 God's Own Country,
41 Oh, Calcutta!,
42 Urbs Maxima in Indis,
43 Of Cows Sacred and Profane,
44 Of Vows and Vowels,
45 Indian Realities, Virtual and Spiritual,
46 The Prehistory of Indian Science,
47 The Anatomy of Civil Conflict,
48 Stephanians in the House,
49 Ayurveda Takes Off,
50 In Defense of Delhi,
51 NRIs — The "Now Required Indians",
52 Ajanta and Ellora in the Monsoon,
Part Five The Transformation of India,
53 The Davos Economy,
54 The Myth of the Indian Middle Class,
55 Connecting to the Future,
56 The Strange Rise of Planet India,
57 Calls from the Center,
58 Looking to the Future with Brand IIT,
59 India and Soft Power,
60 The Thrilling Face of a Bold New India,
61 The Branding of India,
62 India, Jones, and the Template of Dhoom,
63 Heroines of Rural Development,
64 Kerala: Open for Business,
65 Shaking Hands,
66 Trade for Peace,
67 The Dangers to India's Future,
Part Six An A to Z of Being Indian,
68 An A to Z of Being Indian,

What People are Saying About This

Joseph Heller

I’m enthralled by the writing of Shashi Tharoor, his remarkable erudition and insight. For me, his work has been an illuminating introduction to India.

Editorial Reviews

I’m enthralled by the writing of Shashi Tharoor, his remarkable erudition and insight. For me, his work has been an illuminating introduction to India.

Joseph Heller