by Mark Tully
The roots of such evil [the caste system] go very deep; so deep that until very recent times those condemned through the accident of birth to occupy throughout their lives the lowest place (and in India the lowest place is low indeed) accepted their fate without any sign that they resented it or that they could and should have a different and better one. Many abominable cruelties have been practised on the low castes and tribes; at one time hardly a week went by without a Harijan being murdered because he had taken water from a well the use of which he was denied and thus polluted it.
This article was applauded by the English-speaking élite in India. One way to discredit any system is to highlight its excesses, and Levin is right to say that the caste system has many of these. But what the constant denigration of the caste system has done is to add to the sense of inferiority that many Indians feel about their own culture.
It would lead to greater respect for India's culture, and indeed a better understanding of it, if it were recognized that the caste system has never been totally static, that it is adapting itself to today's changing circumstances and that it has positive as well as negative aspects. The caste system provides security and a community for millions of Indians. It gives them an identity that neither Western science nor Western thought has yet provided, because caste is not just a matter of being a Brahmin or a Harijan: it is also a kinship system. The system provides a wider support group than the family: a group which has a social life in which all its members can participate. In the September 1989 issue of Seminar magazine, Madhu Kishwar, one of India's leading feminists, wrote, ‘Even though the survival of strong kinship and community loyalties has some negative fallouts the existence of strong community ties provides for relatively greater stability and dignity to the individuals than they would have as atomised individuals. This in part explains why the Indian poor retain a strong sense of self-respect.’ It's that self-respect which the thoughtless insistence on egalitarianism destroys. Madhu Kishwar also pointed out that the support system provided by kinship ties still provides greater social security than the combined effects of all the schemes that successive socialist governments have introduced to help the Indian poor. Every Indian government so far has thought it necessary to adopt socialism as its political creed, but none has tried to adapt that Western doctrine to the special needs of India.
The attack on Indian languages started in 1835 with what the Oxford History of India rightly describes as a ‘fateful decision’ by the governor-general, Lord Bentinck. He ruled that ‘the great object of the British Government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science.’ He therefore directed that all funds available for education should be ‘henceforth employed in imparting to the native population knowledge of English literature and science through the medium of the English language’.
The spread of English as an international language has given a new impetus to this onslaught on the languages of India. The upper echelons of Indian society regard English as one of the greatest gifts of the British. They have made it the language of the exclusive club they belong to, and parents who see half a chance of getting their children admitted to the club will make any sacrifice to provide an English-medium education for them. The élite are not concerned that English has impoverished Indian languages and stood in the way of the growth of an indigenous national language. They insist that English must be preserved as the common language of multilingual India, even though less than 3 per cent of the population have even a basic understanding of it. Yet the irony is that we, the British, laugh at India's zeal for our language, and Indian accents and Indian English have long been a fruitful source of jokes. In my many years with the BBC in India, I have often had contributors rejected because of their ‘thick accent’. ‘It's too Peter Sellers’, I am frequently told. I hear thick European accents on the World Service – accents which are certainly very difficult to understand on the crackly signal that reaches Delhi. I doubt that many BBC producers would tell a Frenchman that his accent was unacceptable: they are only too happy to find Frenchmen willing to speak our language. The French take an enormous pride in their own language: the still colonized élite of India do not.
India has followed Western economic thinking too. When socialism was in fashion, Nehru rejected Mahatma Gandhi's plea for development from the villages upward and concentrated on trying to create an industrialized nation through centralized planning. Now that the West has rejected socialism, the Indian élite talk of liberalizing the economy, making consumerism the engine of growth and allowing the wealth created to ‘trickle down’ to the poor. The irony is that, during the years when Rajiv Gandhi was liberalizing the economy, the growth in employment declined – and that's the growth rate that matters most in India.
An Indian friend of mine attended a conference at Oxford in the middle of the rejoicing over the downfall of communism in Eastern Europe. When asked what he thought about the triumph of democracy, he replied, ‘I don't think it's democracy which has triumphed – it's consumerism. And that's a disaster for us.’ You have only to watch the advertisements on Indian television to see how successful consumerism is in India too, even though most Indians have no hope of buying the goods advertised. We, the advocates of consumerism, might not be too happy if the day ever came when they could buy the goods. The average Indian's annual consumption of commercial energy is the equivalent of 210 kilograms of oil. A Briton consumes the equivalent of 3,756 kilograms of oil. India's population is around 900 million. If each Indian were to start consuming the amount of commercial energy a Briton does, that would mean the world finding the equivalent of an extra 3,190 million tonnes of oil each year. Imagine what consuming that would do to the greenhouse effect, not to mention its effects on oil and other energy reserves.
Of course it's not just consumerism that has distorted the Indian economy: many of its ills can be blamed on socialist controls which have protected inefficient and often corrupt industrialists. But I don't think it's good enough to say that all would be well if India amended its policies, liberalized its economy and concentrated on competing in the world market rather than protecting its own market. That would mean massive investments going into products which few could afford. In spite of all the controls, investment is already slanted in favour of the élite. To take one example, private transport is beyond the wildest dreams of most Indians, but the streets of Delhi are nevertheless clogged up with Japanese-designed cars and scooters which can compete in the international market. For the less affluent there are only decrepit, outdated and fuel-inefficient buses quite incapable of providing an efficient service even if the roads were cleared for them. There has been no development of suburban railways worth the name, and not even any attempt to relieve the burden of the poor man's taxi-driver – the cycle-rickshaw puller. He does not enjoy the fruits of modern aerodynamics, metallurgy or engineering. His vehicle hasn't changed in the twenty-five years I have known Delhi – it's still inordinately heavy, and doesn't even have such modern aids as gears.
In its 1990 report on poverty, the World Bank suggested that those developing countries will be most successful which ‘promote the productive use of their most productive asset – labour’ and provide ‘basic social services to the poor’. Officially, India has spent the last forty or more years trying to do that. On paper, or in theory, it has not failed: laws have been passed and funds have been voted to provide social services. The failure has been in the implementation of the laws and the disbursement of the funds. To implement and supervise the laws and policies, the élite who dominate the administration would have to go into the countryside and become involved in the lives of the villagers, but they resist even being moved from the state capitals, where they enjoy the comforts of modern conveniences, to the district headquarters. There's an entertaining Hindi novel, Rag Darbari, about the futility of the government's efforts in the countryside. Its author, Shrilal Shukla, writes:
In the old days when the white men ruled India, the Rest Houses w
here they stayed while touring villages were built on river banks or in valleys, forests and mango groves – that is, wherever the poetry of Wordsworth, Rabindranath Tagore or Sumitranandan Pant came to mind. Such things as dust and bustle, cholera, smallpox and plague, starvation and poverty, ugliness, bad manners and unpleasantness found it very difficult to reach them…. Now there have been hundreds of experiments in which brown sahibs have gone from the town to the country, stayed in a village for a few days, drunk the local water and returned alive and kicking without any contagion or disease. By means of jeeps which stir up typhoons of dust day and night, one thing has been settled – India, which until now had been located in the towns, is spreading into the villages.
The cynical Shrilal Shukla was himself a member of the élite cadre of government servants – the Indian Administrative Service. He knows how experimental the stays in the villages have been, and how administrators leap into their jeeps at the earliest possible moment to rush back to their comfortable quarters in some government compound and clear the dust from their lungs with purified water, aerated soft drinks or stronger medicines.
If an industrialist does take advantage of the various tax and other concessions available to those who venture into the countryside, he will import all his key employees from the cities and provide them with houses, schools and health centres so that they do not have to interact with the locals or take any interest in improving their facilities. Very often all the locals get is jobs as cleaners and a little trade. Until administrators, doctors and teachers spread out from the cities and settle in the countryside, no end of investment in school buildings or health centres will provide the effective social services which the World Bank rightly says are so essential for balanced development.
The failure to deliver has brought democracy into disrepute. During the 1989 general election, I asked a labourer who he was going to vote for. He replied, ‘What does it matter? Whoever I vote for will put my vote in his own stomach.’ Disillusionment with politicians has spawned its own vocabulary. One phrase which has gone straight into Hindi without translation is ‘vote-bank’. It means the politician's practice of trying to build up the support of a caste or religious community by making promises specific to its members – promises that are not fulfilled. Another telling usage is the word ‘kursi’ or ‘seat’. In political terms, this is the seat on which an office holder sits, and has come to signify the unscrupulousness with which a politician fights for that seat and the tenacity with which he sticks to it if successful. Then there is ‘Aya ram gaya ram’, or ‘He's just come and he's gone.’ That describes the many politicians who change their parties with each fluctuation in their political fortunes. A ‘note chapne ka machine’, or a currency-note printer, refers to a scheme involving large sums of money from which the politician will take his cut. Most political pundits credit the Indian voter with great wisdom because he has consistently thrown out politicians who fail to perform, but the system does not seem to allow anyone to make radical changes, so the time will surely come when the Indian voter will lose faith in the system too.
India has shown that democracy alone is not enough – nor, incidentally, is economic growth. What are required are politics and a political system which are relevant to India's past traditions and present circumstances. In Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, the political scientist Michael Oakeshott wrote, ‘Those societies which retain, in changing circumstances, a lively sense of their own identity and continuity (which are without hatred of their own experience which makes them desire to efface it) are to be counted fortunate, not because they possess what others lack, but because they have already mobilized what none is without and all, in fact rely on.’ The élite who dominate modern India believe that all that's good comes from outside and are certainly not without ‘hatred of their own experience’ but do ‘desire to efface it’. We in the West do not hate India's experience: we despise it and believe that what we have to offer is far superior. As satellite television spreads, it will be even harder for the many courageous but uninfluential Indians who realize the rightness of Oakeshott's words to fight the pressure from outside. They will become more and more marginalized. It's my belief that if we are really serious about coping with India's poverty we too have to show far greater respect for India's past and perhaps even learn from it ourselves, for we have still not shown that we have the answers to poverty. We must be aware that our way of life is encouraging thinking and policies which increase poverty and instability in the less prosperous parts of the world. Development is more than mere economics.
I am well aware that I will be accused of advocating a return to some golden age of India which never existed. Many will say I am trying to drag India backwards – to deny it the fruits of modern science and technology and to rob it of the freedom of democracy. Such critics are, I believe, in effect accepting the claim that there is now only one way: that Western liberal democracy has really triumphed. Of course India must live in today's world, and its citizens must feel that they are progressing and prospering. India must keep abreast of all the latest knowledge, but it must adapt that knowledge to its own problems, it must build on its own traditions and beliefs. In The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi is quoted as saying, ‘My Swaraj [self-rule, or independence] is to keep intact the genius of our civilization. I want to write many new things but they must all be written on the Indian slate. I would gladly borrow from the West when I can return the amount with decent interest.’
It should be possible for India to preserve its own genius and to build a nation according to its lights, for, as Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the philosopher who became India's second president, said in his edition of the Upanisads, ‘The characteristic genius of the Indian mind is not to shake the beliefs of the common man but to lead them by stages to the understanding of the deeper philosophical meaning behind their beliefs.’ But the Western world and the Indian élite who emulate it ignore the genius of the Indian mind. They want to write a full stop in a land where there are no full stops.
The stories I tell in this book will, I hope, serve to illustrate the way in which Western thinking has distorted and still distorts Indian life – I might almost say they are parables. They provide no answers to India's poverty, but I believe they do suggest where we should begin to look for those answers – in India itself.
1
RAM CHANDER'S STORY
Bed tea or chota hazari (small breakfast), as we used to know it when I was a child in Calcutta during the last days of the raj, is one of the luxuries of my life in India. It's one I would be able to appreciate more if I had the self-discipline not to drink until eleven o'clock or so at night, eat a vast dinner and then go straight to bed, even though I know my digestion will only just be starting to cope with such excesses when the time comes for me to get up. Waking up would be easier if I had a more old-fashioned servant: some of those who lived here during the raj have admitted that they knew it was time to get up when they felt their cheek and realized they had been shaved. My Ram Chander's banging on the door is not much more kindly than the hammering of the corporal's baton at the end of my bed when I was in the army.
Ram Chander, or ‘Chandre’ as I have come to know him, is not one of those smooth, smart, silent, servants of the raj. He would stand, if he ever stood straight, about five foot four. He doesn't stoop, but he always seems to lean – perhaps because anything akin to a straight line is abhorrent to him. No amount of encouragement will make him eat three meals a day, so he is thin almost to the point of emaciation. He caught smallpox as a child, and so his face is pockmarked and one eye is covered by a glaucous film. Whatever clothes he wears become instantly crumpled, and his hair, although thinning, has a will of its own. Chandre speaks no English, for which I am to blame since I have never made any effort to teach him – in this city of snobs, I don't want to lose one of the few opportunities I get to practise my Hindi.
It would be surprising if Chandre were a Jeeves, because he comes from
a caste which is not normally promoted beyond the lowest ranks of the servants' quarters – he is from the bhangi or sweeper caste, at the bottom of even the Harijan caste hierarchy. But Chandre is no upstart; the success he has made of his life has not gone to his head. I can imagine that in these egalitarian days many will regard it as the height of condescension for me to describe his becoming my servant as a success, but that is the way Chandre looks on it because he is a lot better off than most people from his village.
Condescension is a trap which anyone who writes about his servant can easily fall into. The word ‘servant’ itself shocks liberal consciences, but that is what Chandre is. So why do I want to write about him? One reason, of course, is because I think that I have a good story to tell. I also hope that his story will show those who have a horror of the caste system that a Harijan is a human being. Ever since Mahatma Gandhi awoke India and the world to the suffering of Harijans, they have been much pitied. But all too often those whom we pity become pitiable. Our concern, our anger about their plight, denies them humanity. Above all, I hope that I am paying a tribute to the affection that Chandre and I have for each other.
Chandre does not know the year of his birth. That's not uncommon in an Indian village, where life is still not measured exactly in ages – the ages for joining and leaving school, the legal age for marriage, or even the legal age to vote. These all exist in law, of course, but rural India has never been a great respecter of that. All that Chandre does know is that he was still a child when the jhagra or troubles took place.
