State of Paradox‘India Becoming,’ by Akash Kapur
By GEOFFREY C. WARD
source:India Ink
“India” and “change” were once virtual antonyms: old India hands returned again and again in large part because the subcontinent was so dependably different from the West. But since 1991, when a financial crisis forced India’s government to devalue the rupee, lower import barriers and relax controls on private investment, things have nearly reversed themselves. As the journalist Akash Kapur demonstrates in his lucid, balanced new book, “India Becoming,” his homeland now seems almost synonymous with change.
Kapur is especially qualified to assess the contrasts and contradictions all that change has brought. The son of an American mother and an Indian father, he was raised on the outskirts of Auroville, a utopian international community in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Sent away to boarding school in the United States at 16, he studied at Harvard and Oxford, then returned to South India 12 years later, in 2003. His lively “Letter From India” appeared for several years in The International Herald Tribune and the online edition of The New York Times.
At first, he was dazzled. While the friends he’d left behind in America fretted about holding on to their jobs, it seemed to him that every other young person he met in India was eager to quit his or hers to become an entrepreneur. The Indian economy was then growing at about 8 percent, led by the expanding service and I.T. industries, and the country’s mood was “giddy, exuberant,” “ardently capitalist,” and aspirational. “For the first time — the first time in my life, but arguably in India’s history, too,” he writes, “people dared to imagine an existence for themselves that was unburdened by the past and tradition. India, I felt, had started to dream.”
But, over time, as he settled permanently back into the countryside, married and had two sons, he found himself at least as appalled by the new India as he was admiring. For all the restaurants and yoga centers, colleges and gated communities that now lined the newly blacktopped country roads he’d known as a boy — and despite two decades of new money and new opportunities — poverty stubbornly persists. More than 300 million of India’s 1.2 billion people still live on less than a dollar a day, he tells us; more people have cellphones than access to a toilet. And heedless growth steadily despoils the environment; nearly half of India’s land is eroded; at least 70 percent of its surface water is polluted and, according to one recent study, India’s air is now the most toxic on earth — a fact vividly brought home to Kapur and his family one spring when the smoky reek of thousands of tons of smoldering untreated garbage dumped outside the town of Pondicherry seeped into his home and sickened one of his children.
His conclusions about all this are rarely surprising and often reiterative: we are told too many times that change comes at a cost; that “unrelenting optimism” is “delusional”; that “India could often feel like two nations.” But Kapur is determinedly fair-minded, neither an apologist nor a scold, and he is a wonderfully empathetic listener, willing patiently to visit and revisit a large cast of men and women over several years to learn how they are benefiting from — and being battered by — the change going on all around them.
He is on familiar ground when following the careers of middle-class young people who’ve left behind the small towns and ancient customs that had given shape to their lives in order to build wholly new ones in the brand-new big-city world of shopping malls and office towers. Hari, a gay I.T. worker in Chennai, finally comes out to his friends but can’t bring himself to confide in his parents. Selvi, a call-center worker in the same city, disappointed to find that most of the Americans with whom she speaks each night are “rude and also quite stupid,” suddenly finds herself accused by neighbors and relatives of being a loose woman simply because one of her flatmates is found to have been involved in a love affair. But Kapur is at his best when writing about what is happening out in the country, where he has chosen to live. Gandhi once said the soul of India was to be found in its villages. “That was still true when I was growing up,” Kapur notes, “when the pastoral world around me — the hand plows, the windmills, the bicycles, the catamarans and bullock carts — contained all the charm and simplicity (and the backwardness) of the nation.” Despite the movement of millions of people from the land in recent years, 7 out of 10 Indians still live in rural areas, but their world, too, is becoming almost unrecognizable.
INDIA BECOMING
A Portrait of Life in Modern India
By Akash Kapur
292 pp. Riverhead Books.
$26.95.
Kapur’s guide to most of what’s happening there is a middle-aged landowner named Sathy, whose warrior clan once controlled the village of Molasur (along with 75 surrounding communities), but who cannot now persuade even his citified wife to live with him in the country. For him, everything seems upside down. His once-rich fields have been poisoned by chemical fertilizers. His neighbors are selling off their land to developers, relying on shopkeeping or remittances sent home by sons in the city to keep going.
Caste is loosening its grip. Sathy introduces Kapur to
a Dalit (untouchable) named Das, still unwilling to enter Sathy’s house out of
respect for older members of the family, who has nonetheless made himself
prosperous by buying up 50 acres of farmland, dividing it into 1,700 plots and
selling all of them off within four months to newly prosperous young couples
from Chennai, looking for second homes. He has named his colony Kingmaker City.
Sathy has more or less made his peace with the fact
that the people of his hometown are no longer satisfied to have their children
lead the truncated lives they and their ancestors have always led; he marvels
that his own niece and Das’s son now study in the same school, something that
would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. But “if all the farms are
gone,” he asks, “then who will feed all these fancy people?” He has a point:
Indian agricultural production has slowed; food prices and malnourishment are
both on the rise.
Villages like Molasur have become, as Kapur puts it,
“wounded places,” no longer predominantly agricultural, not yet really urban.
“People are lost,” Sathy says. “They no longer know who they are. All the money
has taken them away from themselves.” The rapid infusion of cash combined with
the collapse of old hierarchies has led to lawlessness: thuggery, kidnappings,
bombings, clashes between castes. When Kapur’s car accidentally injures a boy,
an angry mob collects around the police station where he and his driver have
gone to report the incident. The police officers seem unable or unwilling to
intervene. Kapur phones Sathy, who, still cloaked in a remnant of his ancestors’
feudal power, hurries to the site and manages to calm things down. Had he not
been able to do so, Kapur and his driver might have been lynched.
“I had left America because I felt that the country
was in many ways at a standstill,” Kapur writes. “I moved to India in search of
action. I wanted to feel alive, and I suppose I got a little bit more than I had
bargained for. India was undeniably — sometimes terrifyingly — alive. The
country was an adventure. On good days, the dust and chaos and danger could seem
part of the adventure; they were invigorating. On bad days, I now decided, I
would remember the good days.” For Indians and Indophiles alike, that is very
good advice.
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