Incarnations

by Sunil Khilnani

  Tagore’s enthusiasm for Swadeshi promptly lapsed. He valued the living pluralities of Indian civilization more than the speculative idea of a tidied-up Indian nation. Instead of political change, he subscribed to a belief in self-improvement not unlike that of his contemporary Booker T. Washington in the American South: instead of attacking the oppressors, edify yourself. In an article of 1909, following a series of terrorist incidents, Tagore wrote, “The British Government is not the cause of our subjection; it is merely a symptom of a deeper subjection on our part.” India’s own laws, customs, and religious and social institutions were holding its people back, he believed.

  Although this tendency toward critiquing his own nation was in line with Gandhi’s temperament, Gandhi had little use for Tagore’s belief that individual freedom and expression were the drivers of social change. The men’s respective views on education illuminate the difference. Tagore felt that a broad liberal education, encompassing Indian ideas and traditions as well those from Europe and Asia, was central to self-development and the sound exercise of personal judgment; he argued that the British had set Indian development back decades by providing a small segment of Indians with a flimsy and entirely Anglocentric education that prepared them simply to be cogs in the colonial administration. Meanwhile, Gandhi, for all his concern for the masses, possessed a view of education almost as limited as that of the British: among other things, he believed that literacy wasn’t necessary unless it was practical for work. (Views such as Gandhi’s prevailed, which left primary education to be the poor relation shunted to the corner of the modern Indian state.)

  In Tagore’s conception, freedom should not be subordinated to the expediencies of nationalism or of politics. “Those people who have got their political freedom are not necessarily free,” he cautioned. “They are merely powerful.” He felt that Gandhi’s authoritarianism boded ill for India’s future. In 1921, at the height of Gandhi’s movement of noncooperation with the British, Tagore wrote of how, across the country, he sensed “a spirit of persecution, which is not that of armed force, but something still more alarming, because it is invisible.” The use of reason was being shut down. “It was only necessary to cling to an unquestioning obedience,” he went on, “to some mantra, some unreasoned creed.”

  Another sharp conflict with Gandhi blew up in 1934, when Gandhi declared that an earthquake in Bihar was “divine chastisement” for the “sin of untouchability.” Tagore’s views on personal liberty had made him an opponent of untouchability well before Gandhi was, but as much as he loathed the institution, he was repulsed by how Gandhi exploited superstition to turn an event with a scientific explanation into an ethical homily. Instead of correcting popular unreason—which was, in Tagore’s view, “a fundamental source of all the blind powers that drive us against freedom and self-respect”—Gandhi was fostering it.

  * * *

  Tagore’s resistance to Gandhi’s charms and his skepticism of nationalism made him unpopular. Some of his enemies considered him treasonous to the nationalist cause, and it was not uncommon in the 1930s for India’s sole winner of the Nobel Prize to be lampooned in the press. Abroad, the Japanese and Chinese dismissed his cautions against nationalism’s dangers as the pleadings of a colonized mind. (Mussolini, though, welcomed him warmly in the early 1930s; Tagore’s appetite for praise overcame his scruples on free expression, now that he was less loved at home.) In his last two decades, the famous educational experiment begun at Shantiniketan, outside Calcutta, became the focus of his attention.

  In his poem imagining his whole country waking to freedom, it’s telling that Tagore writes of a world beyond “narrow domestic walls”: our larger freedom, he’s saying, begins at home. Making and sustaining that connection between the freedom of the individual and of the collective, and recognizing their indivisibility, has been a struggle in India. Tagore had been dead six years when Nehru, who considered Tagore his intellectual guru, became Free India’s prime minister, and he was nine years gone when the Indian Constitution was enacted, in 1950. That document installed a conception of equal freedom as a promise to all Indians; but it also conceded to state power and to social interests many opportunities to constrict those freedoms in an array of hedging qualifications made in the name of state security and collective rights.

  Menaka Guruswamy was one of the lawyers who argued in the Supreme Court against the constitutional legality of the part of the Indian Penal Code that criminalizes consensual gay sex. She lost—in a setback not just to the rights of a minority, but to the Constitution’s promise of freedom to every Indian citizen. “If you do not recognize the ability of a human being to freely love, or if you do not recognize the ability of a human being to have freedom of thought and expression,” Guruswamy says, “then you are doing something to freedom … And there is nothing intrinsically more powerful in the quest for freedom than being able to love whom you want to.” It’s hard not to think Tagore would agree.

  33

  VISVESVARAYA

  Extracting Moonbeams from Cucumbers

  1860–1962

  If the Netflix streaming service had a category entitled “Twentieth-Century Industrialization Porn,” alongside the Soviet backlist there should by rights be the 1972 Kannada-language blockbuster film Bangarada Manushya (“The Golden Man”). In it, the legendary South Indian actor Rajkumar plays a relocated urbanite bringing technology to a drought-stricken village. In one exuberant song, ragged farmers watch in awe as dynamite shatters a rock mass, hydraulic drills create bore wells, and plows upend tree after tree. (Environmentalist viewers may want to cover their eyes.) Not long after the denuded terrain floods, villagers are shown staggering about under the weight of magnificent harvests. The climax of this sequence isn’t the seductive close-up of a tractor sputtering across a field; it’s the moment when the director briefly cuts away to a clip of newsreel: a turbaned, unsmiling, hawk-faced engineer named Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, bending to receive a medal. The song moves to its climax: without his work, “would this precious land have harvested gold?”

  MV, as he was widely known, was an unlikely celebrity—a frail bureaucrat who walked stooped over, as if the burden of state-building literally pressed down on his shoulders. But in the popular imagination he turned an engineering degree into superhuman world-fashioning prowess. Austere to the point of dourness, but audaciously hopeful, he sought to frog-march India into modernity.

  In the early twentieth century, Visvesvaraya became the chief administrator of the princely state of Mysore. His well-tended state (now part of Karnataka) stood as a rebuke to other princely domains run down by decadent or incompetent maharajas. A state in which efficiency and technological innovation mattered; a state in which meritocracy, not patronage, reigned—that’s how even the British spoke of Mysore. Its image of correct and diligent self-improvement was so carefully crafted by Visvesvaraya that it would not be matched again until twenty-first-century Gujarat.

  Though the myth of MV’s accomplishment is a bit too polished to be believable, this much is true: moving across the towns and princely capitals of South and western India, he left in his wake enduring improvements for millions of people. He innovated in sanitation, statistics, flood control, drainage, and irrigation—though all these water management leaps aren’t the only reason I occasionally think of him while in the shower. As he worked to support cottage industries, he also founded the factory that makes my favorite Mysore sandalwood soap.

  Visvesvaraya’s plans for economic growth struck some as vain and overly ambitious; one South Indian newspaper derided them, in a nod to Gulliver’s Travels, as “promises to extract moonbeams from cucumbers.” He would have extracted those moonbeams if he could have, as they would have lowered Mysore’s electricity costs. Yet such technocratic strong-headedness had its weak points. Visvesvaraya was quick to construe democratic processes as an irritant, and often saw social and local diversities as problems that more uniformity could solve. Both his technical vision and hi
s ideological blinkers brought him into conflict with other patriots, and ultimately his favored path for India’s development was not taken by Nehru and his successors. Indeed, he was embittered when Nehru’s plan for the new nation absorbed only a smattering of his economic ideas.

  Visvesvaraya’s century-long life spanned a fundamental shift in conceptions of the Indian economy: from fatalism about India’s economic prospects (seen as fragmented by geography, and trapped by social and cultural attitudes) to a post-Independence faith in state-led industrial growth and redistribution. In the decades since his death, that post-Independence faith has dwindled as a planned and protected economy failed to fulfill its promise. Today, as India seeks to become a global economic power, some of Visvesvaraya’s views on economics and governance have come back in fashion. The new faith is in technocratically managed growth, and in the example of competitive success. Laggards, current wisdom says, will learn: they will have to get on their bike. It’s a stricture Visvesvaraya would have endorsed. Yet the tensions between an efficient, fast-growing economy and an inclusive one remain as acute in our time as they were in his.

  * * *

  In still portraits, he seems almost masked, as unreadable and hieratic as a face on a coin. But MV’s willfully depersonalized, industry-standard self—every day the same ritual, the same outfit—was consistent with his social vision. Quirks, charm, and connections should have nothing to do with an individual’s ability to ascend the social ladder: what counted was discipline, honesty, and expertise at the role you were given. He self-consciously modeled these practices, and underplayed how his own life embodied that other means of social ascent, dumb luck.

  Visvesvaraya was born to a poor Brahmin family around 1860, in the Mysore village of Muddenahalli. At the time, the British controlled the state, the royal family having been disempowered on the grounds of maladministration. Visvesvaraya had already attended a mission school and was excelling at college in Bangalore when luck hit: a new maharaja, Chamarajendra Wadiyar, came of age.

  Wadiyar was a princely exemplar of Macaulay’s class of men: “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in morals, and in intellect.” In 1881, confident that he was up to managing the state, the British ended fifty years of their own rule in Mysore. The newly empowered maharaja, intent on governing so judiciously that the British would stay out of his business, promptly launched a series of democratic and educational reforms. One of the latter sent the diligent twenty-year-old Visvesvaraya off to get an engineering degree at the College of Science in Poona (now Pune). He topped his class and, for the next three decades, honed his skills and reputation in western and central India.

  Working for the Raj’s Public Works Division in Bombay Presidency, Visvesvaraya swiftly demonstrated a capability well beyond inspecting minor irrigation projects and supervising repairs. Instead, he built a water pipeline system in Nasik, concocted an efficient way to supply potable water in Sukkur, and devised in Pune new ways of controlling floods and capturing the rain that was historically wasted during the monsoon, with a system of sluice gates that was soon imitated around the world. It could have been another Rajkumar song sequence: Super-Engineer of Mysore, zipping across India, bettering lives.

  As one of his private secretaries would later remark, “In action he was a great autocrat, else he could not have achieved so much.” That he got a patent for those sluice gates, but chose to give up the royalties, illuminates another aspect of his nature. He wasn’t motivated by money, and was intolerant of the excuses other bureaucrats made to justify their corruption. Public credit mattered to him more—and the credit dispensers he worked for were the British.

  By 1907, as he upgraded the water supplies in Aden and in Kolhapur, the Swadeshi movement was in full swing elsewhere in India. But while Visvesvaraya wanted independence, and quietly engaged with liberal progressives such as Mahadev Govind Ranade and Gopal Krishna Gokhale, he was nervous about being linked to antigovernment agitators. After all, his career was flourishing. By 1908, when Swadeshi lost steam, Visvesvaraya had, by merit, superseded eighteen of his seniors.

  Yet now he bumped up against a ceiling that talented Indians before him had hit. The crowning position in the Public Works Department of Bombay, the title of chief engineer, would never be given to a brown man. Too disciplined to publicly air his frustration at his employer, MV resigned to accolades and honors, then hightailed it to Europe, Russia, and America to study sewers, irrigation techniques, and dams. Back in India, he applied his expertise to Hyderabad after a devastating flood, trying to ensure it didn’t happen again. And by the end of 1909, he received from the Maharaja of Mysore the job the British in Bombay wouldn’t give him: chief engineer. Within three years, local politics advanced him even further, to the role of dewan, or prime minister, of the entire princely state.

  * * *

  Since the Mysore royal family’s return to power in 1881, they had selected their dewans from outside the state, to avoid factionalism. But by 1912 the clamor for a Mysorean to be chosen was so loud that a new maharaja, Krishnaraja Wadiyar, had to bow to public opinion. His eye turned to his chief engineer, whose aloofness from court politics was matched by an interest in methods of economic development. To one Mysore skeptic, placing an engineer in charge of government was only marginally wiser than appointing a woodcutter: the era of the technocrat as the guide and savior of society and public life had not yet begun. In fact, Visvesvaraya, who immediately set to work applying the statistical precision of engineering to the development of the state, was one of those men whose careers established in India the technocrat’s halo.

  While other rulers of princely states embarked on study tours of European casinos, Visvesvaraya was drawing heavily on lessons in development from the United States, Sweden, and especially Japan, which had modernized swiftly in the wake of the Meiji Restoration, combating the cliché that efficiency and good governance were synonymous with the West. Among the Japanese lessons Visvesvaraya applied to Mysore was that fostering industry and creating jobs would help the poor in the long run more than weaving social safety nets. This stood in contrast to other princely states, where dole money and fruitless public works projects were offered against mass hunger.

  Still, for all their practical-mindedness, technocrats need theories as well as examples. In the air of Mysore were also the mercantilist ideas of the nineteenth-century German political economist Friedrich List, which had gained favor in Indian liberal intellectual and progressive princely circles. List advocated state protectionism for infant industries in the weaker national economies that hoped to compete with powers such as Britain—a position that Visvesvaraya would adopt.

  At a time when the Indian economy’s growth rate was barely a number, and when the Indian literacy rate was just over 10 percent, Visvesvaraya grasped that sustained industrial growth required a more skilled and literate populace. Nurturing Mysore’s revenues to an increase of 50 percent in six years, he invested the surpluses in infrastructure and education. Mysore became the first state to make primary education compulsory, the first princely state to have its own university (and an engineering college, of course) in addition to a network of public libraries. And Bangalore became the site where Jamsetji Tata (27) fulfilled his ambition to build a research university with the founding of the Indian Institute of Science in 1911.

  Visvesvaraya also developed the sandalwood oil and soap, tourist, and sugarcane industries; founded the Bank of Mysore; and commissioned what was then India’s biggest, most expensive dam. Built across the Kaveri River over twenty years, the Krishnaraja Sagar Dam allowed one hundred thousand acres of previously arid land to be irrigated, the feat that inspired the film tribute in Bangarada Manushya. Meanwhile, the electrical power the dam produced jump-started the state’s industrialization and electrified Bangalore, several years before the electrification of Bombay.

  Mysore’s Tamil neighbors complained about the dam (they said its height deprived them of their rightful water), and
local critics sniped that the flinty Visvesvaraya recouped the state wages of dam builders by selling them alcohol at the end of the day, according to the social scientist Chandan Gowda. As MV’s tenure as dewan progressed, there were other, more substantial grumblings. At a time when the state was nominally increasing legislative representation, MV’s dictatorial style offended many. The cost of his schemes rankled, too. The dewan who advocated fiscal discipline and statistics as a means of making government more analytical and accountable saddled Mysore with an exquisitely enumerated, and alarmingly large, public debt. It wasn’t until the dawn of the Second World War that his most financially and technologically ambitious project, the Bhadravati Iron and Steel Works (now named after MV), would turn a profit.

  Still, under Visvesvaraya, the national image of Mysore flourished. In addition to pulling off feats such as the dam, he made canny investments in trophy projects, such as the graceful fountain and gardens attracting tourists to Mysore city’s Brindavan Gardens, a forerunner of beautifications such as Ahmedabad’s Sabarmati Riverfront. Even the loss-making steelworks had its defenders. Gandhi, for all his anti-industrialism, declared it an instance of a Mysorean enterprise “top to bottom,” revealing Indians to have “practical genius.”