by Alan Weisman
iii. Seducing Utopia
The Indian state of Kerala has been lauded internationally for showing how a poor society can nevertheless enjoy a high standard of living, if the standard is not wealth but quality of life. No child marriages, feticide, or gender imbalance here: Kerala actually has slightly more women than men, which is natural for our species. Since the 1970s, it also has the lowest fertility rate in India—a stunning reversal from 1947, when its population growth was the highest in newly independent India.
Yet today, Kerala is also a cautionary example of how tangled human ecology is in the twenty-first century, and of what we must avoid if we ever want to achieve a lasting peace—or to at least to strike a truce—with our own planet.
“If you look at tomorrow, your heart will break,” says Sugathakumari.
A revered Indian poet who writes in Malayalam, the language of her native Kerala, as she approaches eighty, Sugathakumari is not happy with our species.
“Animals, birds, bees, and flowers obey nature’s laws. Only one creature has broken them. I almost feel that the world would be a better place without us.”
Even Kerala? Where, despite incomes averaging only a few hundred dollars a year, in the 1990s they achieved 100 percent literacy? Kerala, which has India’s highest life expectancy, nearly that of the United States? And universal health care, equal status for the sexes, and schooling for all? And tropical wilderness where tigers and elephants still roam the steep forests of the Western Ghats, including the fabulous Silent Valley, a national park that Sugathakumari herself saved from government dam builders? Kerala, where a man who marries goes to live with his wife’s family, not vice versa?
“I don’t know what happened to Kerala,” she moans, her ceiling fan stirring her long, silver hair. “I don’t know what happened to Kerala’s women. I’m disgusted.”
The Kerala where she was born in 1934 contained what might have spelled trouble elsewhere in India: a 60 percent Hindu majority, with the balance equally divided between Muslims and Christians—mostly Catholic or Syrian Orthodox. (The latter claim to be descendants of Brahmins evangelized in Christianity’s early days, when the doubting apostle Thomas came to Kerala and founded seven churches.) But rather than ethnic strife, Kerala’s multiple religions dwelt in harmony. During the nineteenth century, a rare alliance among enlightened British missionaries, a benevolent young queen, a charismatic outcaste Hindu swami reformer, and several respected Muslim leaders had resulted in state-mandated schools for everyone, regardless of gender, creed, or caste—including slaves and untouchables.
In 1956, India’s former principalities of Hindu maharajas and Muslim Nawaabs were reorganized into linguistic states, including Malayam-speaking Kerala. In 1957, its pro-education caste reformists formed the world’s first democratically elected communist government. Since then, communists have held power frequently in Kerala, winning praise and votes for their commitment to public health and schooling.
Their success was due in part to realizing by the 1960s that Kerala had the fastest population growth in the country, an unintended consequence of improved medical care that slashed infant mortality and boosted longevity. A family-planning program began distributing newly available pills for free, emphasizing that fewer children are easier to educate. Modest payments were offered to whoever volunteered for vasectomies or tubal ligations. Compliance with family planning tracked directly with female literacy, allowing Kerala to escape Sanjay Gandhi’s “emergency” forcible sterilizations in the mid-1970s of more than 8 million Indian men and women—a barbarity that toppled the presidency of his mother, Indira Gandhi.
By the end of the 1990s, Kerala became the first place in India—and in all south Asia—to achieve replacement rate fertility. It was another social success for which democratic communism was credited, even as it was blamed for the state’s general economic shambles.
“Cashews, rubber, coir”—coconut fiber—“and agriculture: we had everything,” recalls Sugathakumari, who has no political affiliation, but whose campaigns for women’s and environmental rights flourished under the leftist governments. But the communists’ effectiveness at defending workers ultimately backfired. “They didn’t teach our laborers the prestige of doing their duty. They taught them to demand more and more wages, and to limit their workday. The laborers became very proud, very strong, very powerful. Their unions dictated terms to the people hiring them. And one by one, the factories closed.”
In 1957, Kerala’s first communist government capped the amount of land that citizens could own, redistributing holdings of important families among poor farm laborers. “On the one hand,” says Sugathakumari, “that was good for poor laborers. But our agriculture suffered. If you grow rice, you need big fields. As they were partitioned into smaller ones, the laborers lost interest. So they sold the land, and agriculture dwindled into something weak. It’s a sad thing to say.”
Outside the mental health shelter for women that she founded in 1985, a leaden sky signals the gathering monsoon. The storm that Sugathakumari fears, however, is one that has rained in from the Persian Gulf, flooding the streets of Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala’s capital—with capital. This once-serene city that Mahatma Gandhi praised for its jungle-like lushness is now a cacophony of relentless commerce, much of it involving jewelry and surprising numbers of expensive cars.
It began with Kerala’s Muslims, once its poorest community. The decay of Kerala’s economy coincided with the rise of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, and the other Arab petro-capitals. As those cities grew—and grew more lavish—plentiful construction work was just a hop across the Arabian Sea, and soon Kerala’s Muslims were returning no longer poor: they were driving foreign cars and wearing enough gold that Kerala’s highly educated Hindus couldn’t help noticing.
Migrating for work was nothing new: Most of Kerala’s stars—India’s first female supreme court justice, first female surgeon general, first female head of its stock market, and international literary figures such as novelist Arundhati Roy—made their careers outside the state. Because of their excellent schooling, employees from Kerala are prized; in Mumbai and New Delhi, companies routinely advertise for applicants from Kerala, especially independent women with no qualms about working in distant cities.
But now Keralites were bypassing professional careers in India, because even menial jobs in the opulent Arab Gulf paid better. It was said that Kerala had finally built its economy—but in the Gulf. However, the money that migrants brought back also changed the face of Kerala.
“All spent on gold, fancy boats, and luxury cars,” mourned Sugathakumari, as Kerala became India’s biggest market for Audi, Mercedes, and BMW. “So many shops, resorts, theaters, and hotels. Hundreds of new mosques built by wealth, looking like the Taj Mahal. More roads, more electricity, more river sand for cement, more land for even more buildings. More, more, more. That’s the slogan of today: ‘We want more.’ ”
Never had she seen so much gold jewelry. That was something she’d expect in northern India, where people compete to have the biggest weddings, the biggest jeweled necklaces and rings, the biggest dowries. And something else: “We’ve always had fathers, mothers, uncles, sisters, and grandparents living together, all sharing the family wealth. Now everyone wants separate homes, and freedom from family responsibilities.”
The deluge of materialism confounded the image of Keralans enjoying dignified lives on very low incomes. Kerala’s progressive social development and miraculously low fertility had been frequently extolled by Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen. In the 1990s, the “Kerala Model” became an inspiration for the UN’s Human Development Index that Sen developed with Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq—an alternative to GDP as the measure of healthy development. Kerala was cited repeatedly during formulation of the UN’s current Millennium Development Goals as a world-class example of gender equality, women’s empowerment, reduced maternal and child mortality, and universal health care and education.
Now, even
the admiring Amartya Sen publicly worries about Kerala’s failure to develop a domestic economy to staunch the draining of its most highly educated brains to other parts of India and south Asia. “And when oil runs out in the Gulf,” wonders Sugathakumari, “what will happen to these people? If they come back, how can Kerala contain them all?”
They had done so much so well, she says. Not only could everyone read, but they did: Kerala is said to have the world’s highest per capita newspaper readership. They had the highest number of hospital beds per capita in India. They’d effectively mobilized against Coca-Cola’s overexploitation of groundwater, and led—and won!—the world’s battle to ban the endocrine-disrupting pesticide Endosulfan. They preserved enough forests that tigers, elephants, leopards, deer, Indian goats, four species of civet, wild boar, porcupines, pythons, and hairy-footed gerbils still shared Kerala with Homo sapiens.
On Sugathakumari’s desk is a photograph of herself surrounded by ferns in the Silent Valley they saved, singing one of her poems that inspired thousands to defend their natural heritage.
We bow to the trees with their sacred dreadlocks;
the forest gives us our life-breath
like Lord Shiva, who swallowed the poison
that would otherwise destroy the Earth…
“But then the money poured in like poison.” She shakes her head: all their achievements, undermined by temptation.
“We don’t know what will happen to Kerala now. As Gandhi said, there is enough for everyone’s need—but not for everyone’s greed.”
iv. The World to Come
If Kerala—or Kerala before it was seduced by lucre—can’t be the future, then is it Mumbai? Is the densest mass of humanity in what soon will be the most populous country a glimpse of what’s next, if we don’t guide our demographic destiny?
Rukmini2 is used to the police. “Namaste—I salute the God within you,” she greets Inspector Sudhakar, her palms pressed together, fingers pointed heavenward.
In her gold-trimmed, shimmering red sari, Rukmini strikes an artful balance between demure and dazzling. Her long dark hair is tied with a deep red ribbon, which is also the color of the powdered part in her hair. On her forehead’s third eye chakra is a black bindi. This is a cryptic message: a vermilion head stripe is a bride’s symbol, while a black bindi is worn by widows or unmarried girls. Rukmini doesn’t know if she’s a widow, because her husband in Calcutta left after she bore her second child, yet another daughter. She managed a clothing store there to feed her two girls, but when they entered secondary school, she needed more money. A friend gave her the name of someone in Mumbai who needed a manager.
It wasn’t what she’d expected, but it’s worked out. She redid the interior of this tiled, British-era building—it was a brothel in colonial times, too—and made it a proper house, not like the dens of tiny cribs up and down the adjacent streets. She added faux marble flooring and paneling in the parlor, and installed wide plywood beds. In the street-level doorway where she waits every night, inviting and approving clients, is a shrine to the deities Lakshmi, Ganesha, and—because she’s from Kolkata—Kali. At the top of the staircase, there’s another.
Five of her thirteen girls are paraded out for the inspector and his two constables. The premium trade she caters to demands young girls, and they’re dressed accordingly. Only one wears a sari; the rest are in short skirts or diaphanous blouses with skin-tight pants. One wears a T-shirt that says “Human Being” in white letters stretched across a taut bosom. They sit on plastic chairs across from the sofa and smile at the officers through carmine lips. The officers stroke their moustaches, surveying the goods by the glow of standing lamps and an illuminated aquarium overfilled with goldfish.
“So little business tonight?” Inspector Sudhakar asks.
Rukmini indicates the hallway. “Only one. The rain keeps them away.” Outside, for the second night, the monsoon is pounding. On a normal evening, they’d have twenty clients. But life’s getting harder here in the red-light district of Siddharthnagar, a central Mumbai slum. Fears of HIV have cut into this historic business, but there’s no shortage of girls for the work: there’s a steady surplus of neglected unwanted daughters of Hindus who keep having babies until they get a son to light their funeral pyres. They come from the most populous states, where procurers prowl crowded villages, promising illiterate girls a chance to make money in Mumbai, possibly by getting bit parts in Bollywood films. Or husbands.
By the time Rukmini meets them, they’ve learned otherwise. “When they come crying,” she says, “I tell them not to get into this life. I tell them if they do, then earn your money fast and go back to your village, live with your parents, think about your children.”
The girls, all in their teens, glance at each other and titter. Things could be much worse for them. Nobody beats them here, like in Siddharthnagar’s cheap cages. Rukmini makes clients wear condoms. She takes her girls for medical checkups. Because she charges more than anyone on this street—350 rupees, about US$6.35—they don’t have to go with unbathed men who live under tarps. They’re fed. They can go shopping by themselves, or pray in the temple or church or mosque. And they’re free to leave when they choose. So far, these girls aren’t going anywhere. Most wouldn’t be welcome back home anyway, although the money they send is. And the ones from Nepal and Bangladesh—in high demand for their beauty—don’t ever want to leave Mumbai, where there is actually money to make.
Prostitution is illegal, but Rukmini and the police have an understanding. “If these girls couldn’t work, there would be a terrible increase of rape in this city. Most of the men we get have left their families to work in Mumbai. They’re away from their wives for so long, and like everyone, they need sex. If these women weren’t here, this city would go insane.”
An hour later, as the police make ready to leave, a young john emerges from a back room, a Nepali girl in a black sari behind him, carrying the sheets. He stops when he sees constables in black caps and gold braid with truncheons, but they wink and wave him off. Usually Rukmini locks the door when the law visits, but this one was already here. She accompanies Inspector Sudhakar and his constables downstairs. As they leave, several drenched men who’ve been waiting outside rush in.
Rukmini greets them and leads them up, pausing to pluck a spent lily from the pile of blossoms at the Lakshmi icon’s feet. Morning, evening, and midnight she performs puja, showering these deities with fresh flowers and prostrating before them.
“My girls and I know we’re guilty of a mistake,” she says. “I admit that, and pray for their blessed forgiveness.”
Back in their mobile unit, a Mahindra jeep, the three policemen crawl through the Siddharthnagar streets. Things are improved since Mumbai brought in paving stones; before, the narrow lanes turned to soup during monsoon. But pavement hasn’t sped up traffic, because the roads are also used by pedestrians, as sidewalks have been usurped by blue, yellow, and red tarps, under which everyone is either cooking something, repairing something, or just living, often with goats.
With the downpour now a drizzle, swarms of men in rolled-up pants, and women hiking their saris with one hand as they clutch babies with the other, negotiate the puddles. The police’s windshield is screened with heavy mesh against stone pelting, but what they really need is a cowcatcher to deflect humans. Earlier, at noon, several solid blocks here were filled with rows of kneeling Muslim men in prayer caps, overflowing the red-light district’s forty-eight mosques. Most are still here, among the throngs of resident SC/STs—“scheduled caste/scheduled tribes,” bureaucratese for untouchable—whose Hindu temples are equally numerous. Thousands cluster around tarps, where people make chapatis, stir dhal, fix computers, mend clothing, hawk electronics, cobble shoes, and milk goats. Yet for being stupefyingly jammed, Siddharthnagar is surprisingly congenial.
“God’s gift to Mumbai,” says Inspector Sudhakar, “is that people are mostly respectful. It comes from the dharmas, which tells us to be compassio
nate and understanding.” In all his years, he has used his .38 revolver only once, during the 1993 sectarian riots that killed nearly a thousand, mostly Muslims. That ended with thirteen bombings across the city on a single March day, widely believed to have been masterminded by the don of Indian organized crime, Dawood Ibrahim, who operated from a Siddharthnagar tailor shop, encoding secret messages in his stitching. Today, the worst problems involve not violence, but the stresses of infrastructure whose limits have been sensationally exceeded.
“There’s no place to park, so people leave autos on the street. The whole city is like a used car lot. We’re lucky that only fifty a day get stolen.”
But other than an occasional terrorist attack from Pakistanis next door, things are amazingly calm. “That is fortunate, because our manpower is stretched as these mobs keep getting bigger. At least we’re not Karachi. The difference is because here,” says Inspector Sudhakar, “everyone works. When everyone has employment, no one has the time or need to break the law. Mumbai is a lot safer than New York.”
Has Mumbai, née Bombay, somehow suspended the laws of physics? It is swollen beyond anyone’s comprehension. Traffic is beyond berserk. Lanes are ignored or nonexistent, horns insistent, construction cranes omnipresent. Everywhere are legions of humanity, picking their way over eternal building rubble, weaving between stalled cars, or leaping sidewalks and road dividers in motorized rickshaws. Greater Mumbai, population 21 million though nobody really knows, is the archetypal new megalopolis. When India becomes the most populous country, metro Mumbai will be closing fast on shrinking Tokyo for the dubious distinction of being the world’s largest city.
The difference, however, is that Tokyo is in hyper-developed Japan, while half of India is still in mud huts or under tarps. Yet this city, its biggest human crucible, somehow works—because everyone here is working. Anybody in India who wants a job can come to Mumbai and either find or make one. And they do, about a thousand more each day. With its deep-water harbor, Mumbai is India’s principal port and its financial, business, and entertainment capital. Forty percent of the country’s tax revenues come from this humongous city. With its Bollywood and coastal real estate, it would be south Asia’s Los Angeles—if Los Angeles were this solvent.
