January 8, 2011
GLOBALIZATION IS AMERICANIZATION:
Homeland Revisited: a review of INDIA CALLING: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking By Anand Giridharadas (GAIUTRA BAHADUR, 1/09/11, NY Times Book Review)
His main thrust will be familiar to readers of his “Letter From India” series in The International Herald Tribune (for which he now writes the Currents column): Western-style malls and skyscrapers have proliferated since his parents emigrated in the 1970s. But the landscape most transformed is the one within. The change, Giridharadas writes, is “in the mind, in how people conceived of their possibilities: Indians now seemed to know that they didn’t have to leave, as my father had, to have their personal revolutions.”Consider electricity, he says. Yes, power cuts once leveled class differences, democratically dooming everyone to the same arbitrary darkness. And true, gated communities now have private power plants that provide a way “to depart India without leaving.” But to Giridharadas this does not prove the existence of an emerging “iCaste.” He cites the example of the village of Umred, whose residents rioted to protest blackouts once stoically endured. “It was a small town in the middle of nowhere, dusty and underwhelming and dead,” he writes. “But it had begun to dream.”
For centuries, he argues, Indians had been born understanding their precise place. They knew who was master and who was servant, fixedly. Giridharadas describes hierarchy’s hold on his homeland with eloquence: “It was the calculus that governed life: Am I his sahib, or is he mine? Who should shout at whom? Whose body must apologize for its presence, and whose must swagger?” In his view, society — and the state-regulated economy set up by the nation’s founders — prevented the emergence of self-made men and (even more so) self-made women.
But globalization has led towns like Umred to demand electricity — necessary for the Internet and satellite television, and “essential,” as one resident tells Giridharadas, “to ambition.” Capitalism allows Indians to imagine and even realize lives outside their fates (kismet) and prescribed roles (karma). Servants might become masters. In other words, it accomplishes what the Naxalites and Nehru failed to achieve.
That is Giridharadas’s seductive theory. And it inspires wariness, just as the Naxalites’ does — yet not because of any dishonesty. In fact, Giridharadas is disarmingly honest. Raised in the United States, he acknowledges upfront his quintessentially American lens: “I had begun to see self-invention as a theme of India’s unfolding drama. It was an idea that resonated with me, naturally, because of my own family’s story.”
MORE:
-AUDIO: 'India Calling': The New 'Land Of Opportunity'? (NPR, January 4, 2011)
-AUDIO: Anand Giridharadas on India Calling (The Leonard Lopate Show, January 10, 2011)
Anand Giridharadas discusses what it was like to return to the land of his ancestors amid an unlikely economic boom. In India Calling: An intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking, Giridharadas profiles the entrepreneurs, radicals, industrialists, and Indian families who are responding to this economic upheaval.