India: A Million Mutinies Now Read online

  An editor of an economic weekly, a good and dedicated man who became a friend, said to me in Bombay, when we talked of the untouchables, ‘Have you seen the beauty of some of our untouchables?’ India was the editor’s lifelong cause; the uplift of the untouchables was part of his cause; and he was speaking with the utmost generosity.

  There was a paradox. My continental idea of an Indian identity, with the nerves it continually exposed, would have made it hard for me to do worthwhile work in India. The caste or group stability that Indians had, the more focussed view, enabled them, while remaining whole themselves, to do work – modest, improving things, rather than revolutionary things – in conditions which to others might have seemed hopeless – as I saw during many weeks in the countryside, when I stayed with young Indian Administrative Service officers.

  Many thousands of people had worked like that over the years, without any sense of a personal drama, many millions; it had added up in the 40 years since independence to an immense national effort. The results of that effort were now noticeable. What looked sudden had been long prepared. The increased wealth showed; the new confidence of people once poor showed. One aspect of that confidence was the freeing of new particularities, new identities, which were as unsettling to Indians as the identities of caste and clan and region had been to me in 1962, when I had gone to India only as an ‘Indian’.

  The people once known as untouchables lined up for more than a mile on a busy road to honour their long-dead saint, Dr Ambedkar, who in his icon wore a European-style jacket and tie. That proclamation of pride was new. It could be said to be something Gandhi and others had worked for; it could be said to be a vindication of the freedom movement. Yet it could also be felt as a threat to the stability many Indians had taken for granted; and a middle-class man might, in a reflex of anxiety, feel that the country was going from bad to worse.

  The Bombay stock market had boomed. Papu, a twenty-nine-year-old stockbroker, had made more money in the last five years than his father had made in all his working life. Papu’s father had migrated to Burma during the British time, when Burma was part of British India. When Burma had become independent, and had withdrawn from the Commonwealth, Papu’s father, like other Indians, had been made to leave. In India, Papu’s father had gone into trading in stocks and shares on his own acount. He read the financial pages carefully and he made a modest living. ‘On the stock market,’ Papu said, ‘if you succeed seven times out of 10, you are doing well.’ Papu’s father, not a formally educated man, had done well according to his own lights.

  Papu, better educated, and operating in a far larger economy, had done very well, even by his own standards. The last five years, he had said, had been exceptionally good; and he felt that the next ten years were going to be pretty good as well.

  But Papu had become anxious. He didn’t know where the new aggressiveness of Indian business was going to lead, and he wasn’t certain how far, with the strong religious feelings he had, he would be able to fit into the new scheme of things. He had also grown to fear something his father had never thought about: Papu, at the age of twenty-nine, lived in dread of revolution and anarchy. The fear was partly a fear of personal loss; but it was also an extension of Papu’s religious concerns.

  Papu came of a Jain family. The Jains are an ancient, pre-Buddhist offshoot of Hinduism, and they aim at what they see as absolute purity. They don’t eat meat; they don’t eat eggs; they avoid taking life. Every morning a Jain should bathe, put on an unstitched cloth, and walk barefooted to his temple to pray. And yet the Jains are famous in India for their skill as businessmen.

  Papu’s office was in the stock market area of Bombay. At road level it was not easy for the visitor to distinguish this area from other areas in central Bombay. The lobby of the tall building where Papu’s office was had a special Indian quality: you felt that every day, in the name of cleaning, someone had rubbed the place down with a lightly grimed rag, and – in the way that a fresh mark of sandalwood paste is given every day to an image – given a touch of black grease to the folding metal gates of the elevators. Roughly painted little boards gave each elevator a number; and there was a little zigzag line for each elevator, so that in the lobby people created a floral pattern.

  On the upper floor where we got off the walls still hinted at the lightly grimed rag. But in this upper lobby, which was much quieter, people clearly didn’t have the anxiety they had downstairs about being seen or about giving offence, and they had spat out gritty red mouthfuls of pan-juice, sometimes in a corner, sometimes broadside, in great splashing arcs, on the walls.

  After this informality there was an office. Desks, clerks, office equipment. There were framed colour pictures of Hindu deities on the walls, and some of the pictures were garlanded. Papu’s chamber was a small inner room. Computer screens blinked green. On one wall were three pictures of deities side by side. The goddess Durga, riding on her tiger, was on the right; a garland of marigolds hung over the glass.

  I asked Papu about Durga. He didn’t answer directly. He began to talk about his Jain faith and its application to what he did.

  He said, ‘Basically, we are without the killer instinct, which is what businessmen should have.’

  I said, ‘But you do so well.’

  ‘We are traders.’ The distinction was important to him. ‘The killer instinct is required in industry, not in trading. Which is why the Jain community is not involved in industry. If I’m trading on the stock exchange now, and I cannot get some money out of a guy, I wouldn’t hire a mafia guy to get it out of him. Which is what happens here in something like the building industry – if I’m a builder, I have to have my own mafia connections.’

  ‘How long has it been so?’

  ‘It’s growing in the cities. After 1975’ – the time of Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency – ‘all the mafia dons gave up smuggling and took up building. They will “encourage” people, for instance, to vacate land, so that the land can be used for building.’

  It was what many people spoke about. It was part of the ‘criminalization’ of Indian business and politics.

  Papu said, ‘It is a problem. I don’t know how long this’ – he indicated his own room, with the computers, and the outer office – ‘is going to continue. We’re doing well right now. We’re vegetarians, but I don’t know how long we can go on without going out there to fight.’

  It was strange, this stress on vegetarianism just there. But vegetarianism was fundamental to Papu’s faith. In the mess and flux and uncertainty of life, vegetarianism, the refusal to be impure, was something one could anchor oneself to. It was an exercise of will and virtue that saved one from other kinds of excess, including the excess of ‘going out there to fight’.

  Papu was of middle height. His vegetarianism and his sport – which, unexpectedly, was basketball – had given him a fine, slender physique. He was strong, without pronounced muscular definitions; he was curiously like one of the smooth marble figures of Jain sculpture. His eyes were serene; his face was squarish and well-defined, his skin smooth and unmarked.

  He thought that if the nature of trading changed, if the killer instinct entered it, Jains would have to fight or give up. From what he said, it seemed that so far Jains had preferred to give up. They had left the building industry. In Bombay, as in Delhi, they had given up those trades which required them to carry cash or valuables.

  He began to speak again of his faith, and when – taking his own time to come back to my early question – he spoke of the goddess Durga, he didn’t speak of her as a deity with special attributes. He spoke of her simply as God.

  ‘I have to think of God whenever some things happen. I lost my father in the beginning of this year. My father died of a heart attack. At a time like that the feeling comes that there is some external factor I can’t do anything about.

  ‘I am now using computers, the way they are doing in the developed countries. There is a time that there is a feeling in me that if I’m able to beat t
he market, it’s because I’m able to take on these developments. But then – when something like this happens: my father, his death – I get the feeling that my intelligence or my aggression is worth nothing. Here I am, in this business. I forecast stock movements, price movements. There is an obsession about the work, as you know. And then suddenly this feeling – that I can’t foresee my life. That is the time I feel there is something like God, and I wish to have faith.

  ‘In the last year that feeling has been coming any time I’m excited or very sad. Earlier, if I had been excited, I would have expressed my excitement. You would have been able to see it. But now I know that at the end of the day, after the excitement, something sad might happen. So why get excited?’

  ‘I can understand older men having these thoughts. But you are not old.’

  ‘We have this saying on the Bombay stock exchange: “How many Diwalis have you seen?” ’ Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. ‘Which is a way of saying, “How old are you?” The friend of mine who owns this firm is only thirty, and he’s been very successful these last five years. He’s encountered two income-tax raids, and several ups and downs. Things which my father would have taken a lifetime to experience, he’s done in five years. So we say it isn’t the number of Diwalis you’ve seen, it’s the number of crackers you’ve burst. For me the same is true, not only in business, but in life. I go to the temple every morning. I basically pray to have control over certain feelings.’

  ‘Grief?’ I was thinking of his father.

  He misheard me. He thought I had said ‘greed’, and he said, ‘Greed and fear. The two feelings associated with my business. I walk into the temple, hold my hands together, and wait there for five minutes.’

  ‘Who do you address when you do that?’

  ‘Something you think of who’s controlling the world.’

  ‘You don’t think of a particular deity?’

  ‘If you’re doing business, the picture you would have would be of the goddess Lakshmi. On other occasions it would be Saraswati. Lakshmi is the goddess of wealth, Saraswati is the goddess of wisdom. And when I think of the children in the slums, I have to think of God. That is the time I think there is a certain womb I came out of – which is why I’m here today, and not there. Now, why am I here, and not there, in the slums? Nowhere in the organized learning I received at school and college do I get an answer to this question. The answer is: God. A couple of times a day I think these thoughts.’

  ‘Did your father think these thoughts as well?’

  ‘My father was a self-made man. He was only a matriculate. He had to be more involved with his work. Basically, a man thinks of these other things when he’s taken care of food and shelter. Although my father must have been having the same thoughts, he had to be doing his duties to his family. I’m a little more comfortable at a younger age. That is one of the reasons why this comes up.’

  ‘Can anyone be successful in business without some aggression?’

  ‘Aggression creates a vicious circle. I’ll give you an example. We have a man called Ambani here. He’s going to become the largest industrialist in India in a couple of years. This man would really give you the true picture of how business success works in India. He is a good administrator and a good manipulator. Those are different words. An administrator organizes his business, a manipulator manages the world outside. Ambani’s got the foresight, and finally he’s got the aggression. If you compare him to old industrialists like Tata and Birla, he’s one generation ahead. Birla had the licences. He put up industries, he’s manufacturing goods. This man Ambani goes one step ahead. He makes and breaks policies for himself. Now he sees a demand for polyester. It’s shiny and it lasts and lasts. It’s perfect for India, where people can’t afford to buy too many clothes. So he gets into polyester, and he makes sure that nobody else is involved in it. After this he takes the next step – making the raw material for polyester. Then he wants other people to make polyester so they can use his raw material. This backward integration will get him to a situation where he will control the textile industry in India. Polyester will be the largest market.

  ‘If I want to go out into any business in India, that is what I would have to do. Something like that.

  ‘But there is another side. There is a firm here called Bajaj. They are the second largest scooter-manufacturer in the world. Three years ago, when the Japanese entered India, we thought that Bajaj would soon be out. He’s not only able to stay, but he’s grown much more than all of them. He’s a Harvard graduate. But it’s a conventional family, with all the culture and conventions of Indians. They’ve gone through personal taxation at 97 per cent and inheritance tax as high as 80 per cent, and yet today they are still very large. This gives me confidence that it can still work.’

  By ‘it’ he meant the traditional Indian way, the way that fitted in with ‘all the culture and conventions of Indians’.

  Papu said, ‘The important point here is your asking me how to be sucessful without aggression. The problem is discipline. I don’t find my non-vegetarian friends have the will-power and discipline and character that the vegetarians have. When we started out being vegetarians we never thought of these things. But now, looking back at life, we find the non-vegetarians have a problem.’

  Papu had a plan of sorts for his own future. He wanted to work for the next ten years, to exercise the business faculties with which he had been endowed. He wanted in those ten years to make enough money to live on for the rest of his life. And then he wanted to devote himself to social work. But he had doubts about his plan. He had doubts especially about the wisdom or efficiency of giving up. If he personally went out and did social work, wouldn’t that be a waste of his natural talent? Wouldn’t he serve his social cause better if he continued in business and devoted his profits – which would grow – to his social work?

  These ideas were worrying him. He was uncertain about his promptings, and that worried him even more. He thought that, living the kind of life he did, the concern he felt for the poor was at the moment only ‘hypocritical’.

  ‘If I say I should be doing social work, why should I be here in an air-conditioned office? If I have a genuine feeling, I should be out there in the slum, working. But up to the age of forty I may have to continue to live like a hypocrite. And then I would do what I want. Today I am getting so great a return for my input. This makes me feel I should be working harder. This makes me feel I should not be entitled to these luxuries.

  ‘The earlier generation of Jains, when they thought of social work, used to build marble temples. We find that to be not very right, maybe because there are already so many temples. We think of orphanages and hospitals. Our generation thinks more of social work than of religion.’

  ‘Are you really as nervous of the poverty as you say?’

  ‘I am sure there’s going to be a revolution. In a generation or two. It cannot last, the inequalities of income. I shudder when I think of that. I am very sure that the Indian mind is religious, fatalistic. Even after all the education I’ve had, I still think that destiny will take me – I’ll get there whatever I do. This is why we haven’t had a revolution. Now, with the growing frustrations, even if people are religious there is going to be a revolution. The tolerance is being stretched too far.’

  ‘What form do you think the revolution will take?’

  ‘It won’t be anything. It will be totally chaos.’

  For some, like the Shiv Sena, the revolution had already started. Nikhil, a young magazine journalist I had got to know, took me on a Sunday morning to meet a Sena ‘area leader’ in the industrial suburb of Thane. The Sena had 40 units in Thane – 40 units in one suburb – and each unit had a leader like Mr Patil, the man we were going to see.

  Thane was one hour north of downtown Bombay by train. The coaches were broad and roomy and basic, built for the heavy duty of Bombay suburban travel, no-nonsense affairs of undisguised metal poles and brackets and bolts. A prominent metal label in each
coach gave the name of the builders: Jessop and Co., Calcutta, once British, now Indian.

  We passed blocks of flats, mildewed and grimed; swamps, drains; browned patches of field; dust, children; and, always, the shacks and the rag-roofed dependent shelters they encouraged, the existing shack or hut or shelter providing one ready-built wall for the newcomer, the tide after tide of human beings that came into Bombay all the time, sometimes undoing in a night the rehabilitating effort of years. The Shiv Sena, in its early days, had wanted Maharashtra for the Maharashtrians; it had campaigned against immigration into Bombay from other states. What could be seen from the train was explanation enough.

  Even in Thane, one hour out, there was a feeling that living space was still immensely valuable. In a working-class lane near the railway station – just past the bright stalls, some with fruit, some with cheap watches, some with Sunday-morning fripperies, shiny fairground goods – a simple apartment could cost two and half lakhs of rupees, 250,000 rupees, about £10,000.

  The entrance to Mr Patil’s house was off this lane, in a passageway between two two-storey houses. Mr Patil lived upstairs in the house to the right, an old house; the house to the left, which was still being built, and had unexpected architectural style, was going to be substantial. The yard at the end of the passageway was like an old Port of Spain backyard, with a busy outdoor life; though the crumbling brick dependencies against the back wall had the Bombay constriction, and spoke of people making do with very little room.

  In the plot or yard on the other side of the back wall, and not far from that wall, was the weathered concrete frame of a projected building of some size that looked as though it had been abandoned. If that building had gone up, it would have blocked out some of the light from Mr Patil’s yard; the yard would have felt hemmed in. As it was, with the openness at the back, there was, curiously, no feeling of oppression in Mr Patil’s yard, even with the crowd and the general noise – many scattered sounds, many varied events, running together to make something like a sea sound.