India

by Shashi Tharoor

  These culinary variations simply demonstrate again how the pluralism of India is reflected in its cuisine. The country’s diversity affects:

  • What people like to eat. For instance, most Hindus (the exceptions being westernized ones) do not eat beef or pork; Muslims generally (again, unless they are very westernized) eat beef but not pork. Bengalis are renowned fish-eaters; people from Andhra like their food extremely “hot.” Most Brahmins are vegetarian, but Brahmins from Kashmir and Bengal are not; indeed, they insist on meat or fish even on such auspicious occasions as weddings, where other Indians would be inclined to serve vegetarian fare to underscore the purity of the event. The distaste for beef makes it the cheapest meat in India and helps explain the absence for decades of a McDonald’s or a Burger King in such a vast country. (McDonalds finally opened its first outlet in Delhi in 1995, with vegetarian burgers the star attraction on the menu.) The sublime idli, a steamed dumpling of ground and fermented rice and urad lentils, and its crepelike sibling the dosa, are staples of the south, but virtually unknown in the north (though one evidence of “national integration” is their increasing availability at least in the bigger cities).

  • What people are able to eat. Mushrooms are a delicacy in the extreme north, but cannot be found elsewhere in the country. People in rice-growing areas often can conceive of no other grain, so that in past famines starving people have rejected wheat. Fish is popular near coastal areas and rivers, but the relatively poor quality of preservation and transportation makes it scarce, and sometimes unsafe, elsewhere.

  • What food is cooked with. Kashmiris use saffron, which is an expensive delicacy in other parts of the country; but whereas Kashmiri Hindus use asafetida and reject garlic, Kashmiri Muslims do exactly the opposite. Coconut in various forms — shredded, grated, pulped, blended, sprinkled — abounds in Kerala cooking, but is totally absent in Mughlai. Red and green chilies are used around the country, but their proportions decrease with latitude, so that the seemingly illogical equation between hot climates and “hot” food is underscored in India.

  • How food is cooked. In cuisines where many dishes are fried, the “cooking medium,” as it is called in India, becomes very important. Mustard oil gives Bengali dishes their unmistakable taste, but other Indians dislike its sharp odor. Coconut oil is preferred in Kerala, but vegetable oils, including sesame seed (til) oil, are more popular in the north. Oil is, of course, the cooking medium of the budget-conscious: only ghee (clarified butter) will do for those who can afford it, and can afford to disregard their cholesterol count.

  • How food is eaten. Most Indians eat Indian food with their hands, forks and knives being an affectation and an inconvenience. But whereas northerners confine themselves to the very tips of the fingers, southerners use the whole hand to mix and pick up food. Where Muslims might think nothing of dipping their hands into a communal dish, Hindus are careful not to let the hand they are eating with touch anyone else’s plate, let alone a bowl others have to help themselves from.

  • What food is eaten on. In the south, food is served on a large banana leaf, which is first washed by the eater. In the north and west, the thali, a round metal tray laden with small bowls for individual portions of each item, is customary. The westernized urban Indian uses a porcelain plate, to the disapproval of the orthodox, who note that animal bones go into its making.

  This catalog of contrasts does not even begin to take into account the endless variations in each individual home. Some of these reflect personal preferences, others long-held family traditions, a particular way of cooking a dish handed down from generation to generation. Many of the dissimilarities result from the way in which the cook uses the spices and seasonings for which Indian cooking is famous. “Spicy” does not mean “hot”: what burns the tongue in Indian cooking is the chili, red or green, which is too often used by indifferent cooks to disguise the mediocrity of their cooking. In a country of strong smells and brilliant colors, Indians like their dishes to look and taste different from each other, nor uniformly “hot.” Chilies only came to India with the Portuguese, who had discovered the natives growing them in America, so it is somewhat ironic that westerners should identify them with India. The major Indian spices — cumin and coriander (leaves, seeds, ground powders), turmeric, the pleasantly scented “three C’s” (cardamom, cinnamon, and cloves), or fennel and mustard seeds — are all both mild and fragrant. They are each used in different ways, separately or together, to enhance the variety of flavor of Indian dishes. As Madhur Jaffrey explains:

  Sometimes we leave the spices whole and fry them, sometimes we roast the spices and at other times we grind them and mix them with water or vinegar to make a paste. Each of these techniques draws out a completely different flavor from the same spice.

  Since each item or ingredient can be treated this way, the possibilities are literally endless: a simple potato can be cooked with one spice or an almost infinite combination; each spice can be used in a different way each time; or a different method (boiling, baking, roasting, frying, mashing, sautéing, enveloping in different flours, etc.) can be applied within each technique. Early in this book I wrote whimsically of three hundred ways of cooking the potato: given the variations I have just described, that must be considered a very conservative estimate. In our food, as in our civilization as a whole, India affirms yet again that it is a singular land of the plural.

  * * *

  These sketchy impressions are partial in both senses of the word: they express my view of a number of random issues that caught my eye, and they are noteworthy for what they omit of Indian society and culture — not just caste and religion (which are treated elsewhere in this book), but the buying and burning of women, crime, sex, sport, and especially music, dance, theater, and Indian cinema (which are not). There is no particular reason for my selection. But society and culture are abstractions, whereas India is something real and tangible to every Indian. When I think of India, I think of steaming breakfast idlis and pungent coconut chutney, of lissome women in saris the colors of paradise, of the throngs of working men pouring from a brown-and-ocher train; I hear the roar of the white-specked blue ocean lapping up at sandy beaches, the clear, calm stillness of the snow peaks, the cacophony of city traffic; I imagine the sun shining off the marble and stone of our greatest monuments, the rain falling vigorous and life-renewing upon the drying plains, the breeze stirring the green stalks of the paddy fields in my village. I remember how, each time I come home, I stand in the sun and feel myself whole again in my own skin.

  10

  A Future Without Shock

  I remember beginning the New Year of 1993 with a depressing visit to India. It is not an adjective I ever expected to use about my visits home; nothing had in the past diluted the exhilaration that was my usual response to being back there. If anything, that exhilaration had increased on recent visits; India had seemed at last to be turning the corner, to be breaking out of the rut of economic stagnation that had condemned it to what cynical economists had dubbed “the Hindu rate of growth.” There was real talk of the nation at last unshackling the statist controls that had fettered the creative energies of her hardworking, thrifty, notoriously entrepreneurial citizenry. Headlines spoke of India as “a giant on the move” and “a tiger uncaged.” Business journals wrote approvingly of her new economic policies; in late November 1992 The New York Times published a flattering profile of Narasimha Rao, the septuagenarian prime minister who was presiding over this thrilling if overdue transformation. And then it all seemed to fall apart.

  On the sixth of December 1992, howling mobs of Hindu extremists tore down a disused mosque in India’s northern heartland. In the frenzy that followed that wanton act of destruction, the streets of sixty-five cities and towns erupted; two thousand were killed in rioting, several tens of thousands injured, billions of dollars worth of property destroyed. Barely had calm and order been restored when the city of Bombay, urbs prima in Indis, the country’s thriving commerc
ial capital, blazed again in an orgy of organized violence against its Muslim minority. When that too was put down — but only after hundreds more lives were lost, thousands more livelihoods shattered — the next act in the tragedy followed. A series of thirteen bombs exploded across the city in a well-planned and orchestrated terrorist assault on Bombay’s nerve centers, including its newly computerized Stock Exchange. When another huge explosion rocked Calcutta days later, and the United States urged its citizens to cancel planned trips to New Delhi, the questions began to be asked: “Is it all over for India? Can India ever recover from this?”

  Of course the answers were no and yes, but outsiders cannot be blamed for asking existential questions about a country that so recently had been seen as poised for takeoff. The factors that point to India’s potential — its size, its human resources (particularly a skilled, educable, and inexpensive workforce), its burgeoning middle-class market, its thriving democracy — also point to its pitfalls. Was the country simply too vast, too riven by differences, too torn apart by ancient and incomprehensible hatreds, to be taken in the direction that Malaysia, Indonesia, and now even China were going?

  India can recover from the physical assaults against it. It is a land of great resilience that has learned, over arduous millennia, to cope with tragedy. Within twenty-four hours of the Stock Exchange bombing, Bombay’s traders were back on the floor, their burned-out computers forgotten, doing what they used to before technology changed their styles. Bombs alone cannot destroy India, because Indians will pick their way through the rubble and carry on as they have done throughout history.

  But what can destroy India is a change in the spirit of its people, away from the pluralism and coexistence that has been our greatest strength. Equally, there are vital areas of life, political and economic, in which India cannot afford not to change. As the country celebrates the sixtieth year of its independence, it is undergoing a period of ferment in which profound challenges have arisen to the secular assumptions of Indian politics, to the caste structures underpinning society, and to the socialist consensus driving economic policy. Any one of those three changes would be significant enough to send political scientists scurrying to their keyboards; all three occurring simultaneously point to a dramatic transformation. Where is India heading?

  * * *

  India has some serious problems. Three vital border states, Kashmir, Assam, and Punjab, have suffered secessionist ferment in the 1990s, and though Punjab seems to have turned the corner, violence has become endemic in the country, with bomb blasts (and their accompanying tragic toll) a frequent occurrence even in the capital. Terrorist attacks (by Kashmiri separatists, shadowy al-Qaeda cells and alleged Pakistani agents) in supermarkets, movie theaters, temples and commuter trains have all taken lives in the first years of the new millennium. Until T. N. Seshan astonished the country and the world with his conduct of the 1996 elections, it seemed that amid assaults, intimidation, and “booth-capturing” (ballot-stuffing by thuggery), we were unable to exercise our democratic rights without spilling blood. And as if we did not have enough violence of our own, terrorism is also imported: Rajiv Gandhi’s killing in an otherwise tranquil Tamil Nadu state occurred at the hands of Sri Lankan “Tamil Tigers” who had crossed the Palk Strait, bringing their murderous campaign for a separate homeland onto Indian soil.

  Corruption, violence, sectarianism, the criminalization of politics, and widespread social tension all mounted during a period when a degree of economic liberalization opened up a new entrepreneurial ferment. A new consumer culture was born amid a population of whom 65 percent live below a tragically low poverty line and 25 percent earn less than twenty-five dollars a month. As the visible consumption of the color TV sets, VCRs, and automobiles increased, there was more for the have-nots to aspire to, and more for the hungry and frustrated to resent. The competitive ferment has erupted through all the fissures in Indian society — farmers and peasants raging against the cities, Hindus bitterly protesting the “pampering” of the Muslims, Assamese revolting against being reduced (by Bangladeshi immigrants, Calcutta capitalists, and Delhi bureaucrats alike) to second-class citizens in their own state. Maoist insurrections rage in a swathe of impoverished districts cutting across the peninsular heardand. A combination of India’s own economic choices and external factors has left the country with a colossal economic challenge, with chronic fiscal deficits, and increasingly disastrous balance of payments, a deficient infrastructure, and mounting unemployment and inflation.

  The social ferment engendered by economic change is also a key factor in the communal violence following the Hindutva resurgence of the 1990s. The youths who smashed the Babri Masjid wore the shirts and trousers of lower-middle-class urban youth, men whose opportunities have not matched their expectations, and who are taking out their resentment on the visible Other. Various sections of Hindu society are seeing their status and privileges threatened by bewildering processes of change: affirmative-action programs for Dalits and “backward classes,” trade liberalization, economic reforms that have brought foreign employers into the country, remittances from Gulf labor that have made nouveaux riches out of their Muslim neighbors. A worldview resting on timeless assumptions has been jolted by the realization that you can’t take anything for granted anymore.

  The list of Indian woes seems endless. And we haven’t even mentioned the widespread illiteracy (still 40 percent of the population), the calamitous consequences of accelerating deforestation, the stifling levels of water and air pollution, the decline of the once-reputed administrative system (too many members of India’s prestigious civil services are reported or rumored to be indulging in petty, and not-so-petty, corruption), the cripplingly congested and outdated education system. Worst of all, the sheer effort of combating insurgency has besmirched India’s once-proud record as a rare Third World democracy. There are increasing reports, primarily by Indian civil liberties organizations, of human rights violations in counterterrorist opera tions; and the army, still deservedly admired by most Indians, is beginning to show the strains of being called out again and again to do a job it was never meant to do. The state has become a battleground of sharply defined identities where sectarian interests have replaced national loyalties as the banner around which rival forces rally — and this has, inevitably, raised concern about the future of India.

  * * *

  Nearly half the Indian population lives below a poverty line that has, to put it mildly, been drawn just this side of the funeral pyre: to be poor in India is to be unable to manage the basic elements of human subsistence. No per capita income figures, no indices of calorie consumption, can capture the wretchedness that is the lot of the Indian poor, whether destitute amid the dust of rural India or begging on the sidewalks of its teeming cities. To be poor is to be born of a malnourished mother in conditions where your survival is uncertain; to survive with inadequate food, clothing, and shelter, without the stimulation of learning or play; to grow unequipped intellectually or physically to be a productive member of a striving society. That such conditions still afflict 350 million Indians is worse than a tragedy — it is a shame.

  The challenge of Indian democracy is to meet the basic material needs of all Indians while accommodating their diverse aspirations within the national dream. Economic policies are central to political prospects; the failures of the Nehruvian economic path have contributed directly to some of the political strains that have beset Indian democracy. An economy that welcomed foreign investment sooner, and thus offered a wider range of employment possibilities to India’s youth, might well have kept them off the streets and weakened the temptations of agitational and insurrectionist movements. State-directed industry simply did not have the absorptive capacity to soak up rural surplus labor; nor could an overregulated economy, in which even Indian capitalists were prevented from freely reinvesting their own profits, generate enough jobs to employ the graduates of the country’s colleges. The result was a shiftless, angry mass of alie
nated young people, prey to the incitements of demagogues of various hues, from the fundamentalist (Bhindranwale in Punjab) to the ideological (the Naxalites in Bengal). One of the less-appreciated consequences of Indian socialism was the dangers it created for Indian democracy.

  The dominance of the state in the national economy had other negative repercussions. The sector of the economy that grew most in independent India was neither the agricultural nor the industrial, but the bureaucratic. In other words, regulation became a more important economic activity than production. As the state became all-pervasive, it was also the only available focus for discontent. If jobs were not available, it was the state’s fault; if there was not enough food on the table, the government had failed. In turn, the state was the only available means for redressing its own failures, and when it took steps that alienated its citizens, they had nowhere else to turn but to (or against) the state. Would despairing young men have taken to immolating themselves in the streets in protest against the V. P. Singh government’s decision to guarantee reservations of government jobs to “backward castes,” if the government was only a minor option among many for a graduate job-seeker?

  The economic reforms ushered in since 1991 — and whose continuation under an avowedly left-of-center United Front (UF) government in 1996 suggests that they are indeed irreversible — have been steps in the right direction. But the progress made so far, with the hesitancy characteristic of a government looking over its electoral shoulder, has been limited largely to the removal of restrictions on investment, a partial deregulation of industry, and the easing of some controls on trade and foreign exchange. Much more needs to be done to attract investment in labor-intensive enterprises, to channel foreign and private-sector money into infrastructure development (our roads are an abomination, our national highways little better than country paths), to liberate existing small-scale industries from crippling bureaucratic restrictions and promote the establishment of additional ones, to reduce the discretionary powers of officialdom over economic activity, and to eliminate the influence of the criminal underworld. The speculators and racketeers on the make who have inevitably cashed in on the early stages of liberalization are an unnecessary evil and must be curbed. The stock exchange scam manipulated by Harshad Mehta, the millions of rupees flowing into and out of illegal accounts, as borne out in the Jain hawala scandal, are symptoms of a way of doing things that liberalization ought to have rendered irrelevant. Deregulation of the economy must, paradoxically, be accompanied by more effective regulation of the way in which the deregulated economy works.