Day 358: The God Market

India today is teeming with millions of educated, relatively well-to-do men and women who enthusiastically participate in global networks of science and technology. The Indian economy is betting its fortunes, at least in part, on advanced research in biotechnology and the drug industry, whose very existence is a testament to a thoroughly materialistic understanding of the natural world. And yet, a vast majority of these middle-class beneficiaries of modern science and technology continue to believe in supernatural powers supposedly embodied in idols, divine men and women, stars and planets, rivers, trees, and sacred animals. By all indications, they treat supernatural beings and powers with utmost earnestness and reverence and go to great lengths to please them in the hope of achieving their desires. Hindus are not the only ones who are becoming more religious—data shows that all the many religious communities of India are showing signs of growing religiosity. But since this book is about Hindus who make up the majority, we will be looking mostly at how the expressions of Hindu religiosity are changing.

That a great many Indians of all religious faiths are taking their gods with them into the new economy is hardly surprising. In this, Indians are no different from people in other fast growing economies like Brazil, China, and Russia: all of these countries are experiencing an explosion of religiosity. Besides, there are industrially advanced countries like the US which have always been highly religious. Contrary to classical theories of secularization, scientific, technological, and economic development does not invariably lead to a decline of religiosity. (We will look at these theories of secularization in the last chapter of this book and see if they help us explain the Indian experience of juggling with religion as it modernizes.)

However, what is noteworthy about the new religiosity of middle-class Indians is how openly ritualistic, ostentatious, and nationalistic it is. Unlike the previous generations that grew up on a mixture of Nehruvian exhortations for cultivating scientific thinking and the neo-Vedantic preference for a more cerebral, philosophical Hinduism, the new Hindu elite and middle classes revel in ritualism, idol worship, fasts, pilgrimages, and other routines of popular, theistic Hinduism, sometimes mixed with new age spirituality. It is not that these more ritualistic expressions of popular Hinduism were entirely absent from the cultural milieu of the educated, middle to upper classes of the generations that came of age in the earlier, more ‘socialist’ and secular era. What has changed is that the ritualistic aspects have moved from the privacy of the home and family, to the public sphere, the domain of pride and prejudice, politics, and profits. What has also changed is that the educated elite don’t feel that they have to defend their practices and beliefs against secularist finger-wagging (which has almost completely disappeared anyway). There is a new, unapologetic, and open embracing of religiosity in India today which wasn’t there in, say, the first half of our sixty plus years as a republic.

Overall, it seems fair to say that economic prosperity is bringing with it a new ‘rush hour of the gods’ in India. The expression ‘rush hour of the gods’ was first used by H. Neill MacFarland back in 1967, in a book bearing this title, to describe the proliferation of new expressions of religiosity in Japan in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It was a time when ‘new religions rose like mushrooms after a rainfall’, attracting millions of Japanese who were left battered after the war. The term ‘rush hour’ was supposed to signify the ‘frenetic quality’ of the mass-based, media-savvy popular religious movements that promised fulfilment of worldly goals through spiritual means to ordinary people.

Today’s India is obviously very different from post-war Japan. The Japanese rush hour, moreover, referred more to new religious cults rather than revival or reinvention of the traditional Shinto or Buddhist faith of the Japanese. Yet, one can legitimately speak of a rush hour of the gods in India, for the new religiosity displays that rather frenzied search for spiritual remedies for material concerns that characterized the Japanese case. Just like the Japanese religious movements were a response to turbulent and traumatic social change, the new Indian religiosity is in part a response to India’s headlong rush into the global economy with all the attendant social and cultural dislocations. Moreover, the new middle-class religiosity in India bears distinct undercurrents of the kind of muscular cultural nationalism that the Japanese displayed before the Second World War that left them defeated, and in despair.

There is no doubt that growing religiosity is, at least in part, a response to new socio-psychological needs created by neo-liberalism and globalization. But this turn to gods and faith was not inevitable, or unavoidable. It is not an unalterable law that all societies undergoing rapid change have to become more religious, for there are societies (especially in Europe) that cope with change in relatively secular ways. Nor is it the case that Indians are innately more religious than any other people, for what often passes as religion in India is a cover for ‘power and pelf’, to use Pavan Varma’s words cited above.

Far from being inevitable, public expressions of Hindu religiosity are growing because they are being facilitated by the Indian state and corporate interests, often in a close partnership. Despite the periodic panics about ‘Hinduism in danger’, and despite the often heard complaint that the Hindus face reverse discrimination in their own country, Hinduism is doing very well. The Indian state and its functionaries operate on the unstated assumption that Hinduism is not merely one religion among other religions of the Indian people, but rather the national ethos, or the way of life, that all Indians must learn to appreciate, if not actually live by. As a result, politicians and policymakers of all political persuasions think nothing of spending taxpayers’ money and deploying public infrastructure for promoting Hinduism in the guise of promoting Indian culture at home and abroad. In recent years, direct state and corporate sponsorship of expressly religious elements of Hinduism (as opposed to artistic and cultural aspects) has become more blatant, as is evident from provision of public funding for yagnas, kathas, and yoga camps; matching grants for organizing religious festivals and pilgrimages; promotion of temple tourism and pilgrimage circuits; providing land and state-financed infrastructure for temples, ashrams and priest training schools; providing funds, physical infrastructure, and official credentials for training in Vedic astrology, vastu, and other elements of Hindu priestcraft; and in some states, even directly paying the salaries of temple priests. In addition, many of India’s well-known family-owned business and industrial houses have a long history of contributing handsomely to building new temples and ashrams, and sponsoring religious events. In the absence of strong enough countervailing institutions and agencies that can offer secular alternatives to these well-funded initiatives, the public sphere in modern India has remained thoroughly intertwined with religious symbols and rituals of the majority religion.

~~The God Market: How Globalization is Making India More Hindu -by- Meera Nanda

Day 357: Outlaw

It seemed that Phoolan Devi had been born into a very poor low-caste family in a village in the north-central Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Unable to raise an attractive dowry, her parents married her off when only eleven to Putti Lal, a man in a distant village. He was twenty years older than her. He continually beat her, and sexually molested her even though she had not reached puberty. After three years of this, she became ill and he returned her ‘in disgrace’ to her family. Social stigma forced her family to return her to the husband. He, meanwhile, had acquired another woman. The two of them treated her as a slave – beating and starving her for several years – before returning her once again to her village. This time she was allowed to stay.

In the village, Phoolan became embroiled in a conflict with some richer relatives over family land. They arranged for bandits to kidnap her. Despite asking for police protection she was abducted. The gang was led by one Babu Singh, who made it clear that he wanted Phoolan as his mistress. One of the gang, Vikram Singh Mallah, who came from the same low caste as Phoolan, then killed the high-caste Babu Singh and Phoolan became his mistress.

The gang – now all low-caste – carried out many raids. They were based in the wild ravines of the Chambal river valley. Dressed as police, they ventured out to stop trucks and rob landowners. They took money from the rich and bought support from the poor. Eventually, knowing that now she could never return to her village, Phoolan joined in.

Vikram’s gang joined up with an upper-caste gang. They seemed friendly but it was a ruse. Vikram and many of his men were shot. Phoolan was captured, confined in a village called Behmai, and constantly raped. Eventually, a sympathetic priest smuggled a shotgun into her and she escaped.

Phoolan Devi then met with the gang of one of Vikram’s friends. They united together with a bandit called Man Singh, and formed a new gang that Phoolan would command. After some time, Man Singh and Phoolan became lovers. This gang carried out many raids in both Uttar Pradesh and the adjacent state of Madhya Pradesh. In one notorious incident they captured a town, looted the bazaar and distributed the goods to the poor. Phoolan became a folk hero. The government offered a reward for her, dead or alive.

In 1981 the gang attacked Behmai, where Phoolan had been imprisoned and raped. Twenty-two upper-caste villagers were rounded up and shot. Although Phoolan denied being directly involved in the massacre, she became the most wanted suspect. The government mobilised thousands of police to catch her. They tortured, raped and killed many innocent people. Phoolan, with the aid of the lower castes that she had always taken pains to help, evaded capture. In the wake of this and other reverses, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh (politically the most important state in India, with the huge population of 140 million) was forced to resign.

The Prime Minister of India, Mrs Indira Gandhi, then authorised the Madhya Pradesh police to negotiate a surrender deal. Eventually an agreement was concluded whereby none of the gang would be kept in jail for longer than eight years. In February 1983, Phoolan and her men ceremonially surrendered to the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh. Without ever appearing in front of a court, they were taken to Gwalior Jail.

(According to Mala Sen’s book, Phoolan was twenty-six when she was jailed, which would make her about thirty-five in 1992. The Independent article had put her age at thirty-two. Later in her life, most reports dated her birth as 10 August 1963. This would have made her only nineteen at her surrender and imprisonment, and still in her twenties when I first wrote to her in 1992. Earlier reports put the year of her birth as 1957. Exactly when she was born is unclear.)

I had some vague knowledge of the Hindu caste system but, as it appeared to figure prominently in Phoolan’s story, I read more about it. There were four main caste divisions. At the top were the Brahmins, traditionally the priestly caste. Below them were the Kshatriyas, originally the rulers and warriors, now the main landowners. In some parts of India they were called Rajputs; in Uttar Pradesh they were known as Thakurs. Below them were the Vaishyas, the merchants and farmers. At the bottom were the Sudras, to which Phoolan belonged, the labourers. Each of these main castes had a multitude of sub-castes, often confusingly themselves described as castes. Phoolan, for example, was from the Mallah, the sub-caste originally composed of boatmen and their families. Even lower than the Sudras were the Dalits or Untouchables, who were assigned to ‘unclean’ work. In the cities the caste system was beginning to break down, but in the countryside it remained largely intact. To a large extent the upper castes were the wealthy and the lower castes the poor. In theory it was possible to escape the caste system by converting to another religion, but even then the stigma of a low-caste origin tended to linger.
***
On 30 June I received a postcard from India, an ‘Advice of Delivery’. It had a Gwalior postal stamp. There was a signature on it that looked like it might be in Hindi script. Of course, I could not read it, so I did not know whether it was Phoolan Devi’s.

A fortnight later a letter from India arrived, written in what I assumed was Hindi. The signature was in a different hand, the same as on the earlier postcard. I needed someone to do a translation. This posed a problem, since it seems that Phoolan Devi was so hated by many Indians that I could get myself into serious trouble – perhaps even be attacked. Although seen as a Robin Hood figure by the poor, who idolised her, the wealthy upper castes saw her as a criminal and a dangerous threat to their traditional power. By chance, my friends Nick and Helen came round to my flat in the evening. Helen, who was teaching in London, said that one of the teachers she worked with knew Hindi. We photocopied the letter and Helen said she would ask her colleague if she would translate it.

At that time, I was working as a book and paper conservator for the Passmore Edwards Museum in East London. There had been a fire in West Ham Town Hall. This, and the water used to extinguish it, had severely damaged the archives of the old borough. Parish registers, including those recording the deaths in the plague of 1665, had been particularly affected. I had been engaged on a five-year contract to save the most important items. One evening, later in that week when I received Phoolan’s letter, a group of us from the museum went for a colleague’s leaving-party meal in Brick Lane. We met up in a pub. Before we went on to the Clifton restaurant, I nipped across the road to a cafe full of Asians. I asked if anyone knew Hindi and managed to find a man to look through the copied letter. He told me that it was from Phoolan herself. She wrote that she was grateful for my message, as she was very depressed. The letter then went on about how badly women were treated in India. The translator, and the men gathered around him, began to look angry. I made my excuses and rushed off. I needed a proper translation quickly. Unfortunately Helen’s colleague was away, so I would need to wait for anything from her. At supper, one of my museum colleagues, Nerina, told me that her aunt had a friend who might help. I gave her the copied letter to see what she could do.

Next week Nerina came to see me.

~~Outlaw: India's Bandit Queen and Me -by- Roy Moxham

Day 356: Everybody Loves a Good Drought

NUAPADA, (Orissa): Mangal Sunani was thrilled. The government was giving him a miracle cow which would greatly reduce his poverty. The cow would be impregnated with Jersey semen—brought all the way from Pune and elsewhere. So it could, over the years, make him the proud owner of several bulls and high-yield milch cows.

A little later, Sunani, a harijan of Ulva village, was even more grateful. The government had given him an acre of land free. On this, he was to grow subabul trees to provide fodder for the cattle he would soon possess. There were thirty-eight such beneficiaries in his village. And a thousand in other villages of Komna block. The government had targeted them for a major dairy development scheme aimed at reducing poverty.

The beneficiaries were ecstatic when they learned they would also be paid the minimum wage to work on the free land, growing those trees. The project, called ‘Samanwita’, evolved around 1978. By the early ’80s, it was in full swing. ‘Everybody pitched in enthusiastically,’ says Jagdish Pradhan of the Paschim Orissa Krishijeevi Sangha.

‘Five agencies got involved,’ he says. Among them were the Bharatiya Agro Industries Foundation (BAIF), a body set up by the leading corporate house, Mafatlal. With it was the Satguru Seva Trust, an NGO linked to the same group. Also in on the show was the State Bank of India. Completing the cast were the veterinary and revenue departments of the state. The theatre of action was mainly Nuapada, now a separate district in the Kalahandi region.

The authorities, like everybody else pushing the scheme, were committed to their purpose. The idea was to create a new, higher breed of cattle. Impurities, in any degree, were not welcome. How then to ensure that all the cows given to the beneficiaries received only Jersey semen and none other?

This dilemma weighed heavily on the minds of those involved. What if those cows mated with local studs? They decided to prevent the cows from crossing with local bulls. That would ensure the purity of the future race. So, according to Bishwamber Joshi, principal of the high school at Komna, local bulls were subjected to a massive castration drive. ‘The livestock inspector relentlessly castrated all bulls in Komna, Khariar and Khariar Road,’ he says. ‘Then, they resorted to artificial insemination of the cows with Jersey semen.’

Two years and Rs. 2 crores later, says Pradhan, ‘just eight crossbred calves were born in the entire region. Not one extra litre of milk was produced. And subabul trees had vanished from the area, though they were planted in thousands.’

A decade later, the results are even more stark: many villages across Komna are without a single stud bull. The castration drive has rendered the local ‘Khariar bull’ extinct—in this region at least.

There is not a single bull in this village now, Fudku Tandi tells me in Ulva. He was another ‘beneficiary’ of Samanwita. ‘Eight calves were born,’ he says, ‘very small, useless ones. Some died, the others were sold. Their yield of milk was nil.’

Shyamal Kuldeep, also a Samanwita beneficiary, says: ‘My wife and I managed to breed six calves, four of which died in a single day. Finally, none survived.’

‘When we told them of the problems,’ says Chamru Niyal, ‘they said they would give more injections and some day the calves would come.’ The initial eagerness of the villagers arose from the wage employment the project provided. ‘Whoever gives us work that feeds us is god,’ says Fudku Tandi.

As Tandi recalls, ‘A government officer came from Bhubaneswar. He said we would get employment, wheat and rice if we planted subabul on the land given to us. At first the subabul grew splendidly. Then they told us to cut the trees down for use as fodder. We did this. But they did not grow again.’ (Experts like Pradhan say this tree is most unsuited to the soil of the region.)

What upsets the villagers most is that the employment is over. ‘The land is back with the government,’ says Mangal Sunani. ‘A revenue official came and told us to vacate it. So the thirtyeight acres now lie fallow.’ This happened in the villages of other ‘beneficiaries’ too.

The disaster has been enormous. Throughout Kalahandi region, people traditionally keep large numbers of cattle. The cattle population here is among the highest in Orissa and India. During lean years, peasants compensate the loss from agriculture by selling two or three head of cattle. This is about the only insurance they have. Consequently, the decline of the species has battered their fragile economy.

The mass castrations destroyed the Khariar bull. In 1980—before the scheme had fully blossomed —the Kalahandi District Gazetteer had noted the calibre of this species. It recorded that ‘if properly maintained, a cow of this breed is capable of yielding four to five litres of milk per day. This breed was selected for research by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR).’

Locals wonder why the Khariar bull has vanished. The fact that the cows and bullocks these days are very small also puzzles them. The number of cattle is not increasing the way it used to. Quality has suffered badly.

‘I have five cows and I buy milk daily from the market,’ laughs Bishwamber Joshi. ‘And I doubt if there is a single decent ox in the whole block now. Several one-time surplus milk producers suffered enormously and are now milk buyers.’ In 1977-78, pure ghee was actually cheaper than Dalda in Komna and Khariar. Ghee cost just Rs. 7 a kg against Rs. 9 a kg for Dalda.

‘The Khariar bull is almost extinct,’ confirms Dr Maheshwar Satpathy, the veterinary surgeon at Khariar Road. Dr Satpathy says specimens of the old type may still exist outside Kalahandi. But there is ‘definitely a decline in the quality of Khariar cattle as a whole’. For years prior to this, cattlebreeders from other parts of Orissa used to come here to buy Khariar bulls. They were popular as studs and helped improve breeds elsewhere. Now they do not exist.

The Paschim Orissa Krishijeevi Sangha has tried to assess the damage. Their estimate: in Komna block alone, the loss of cattle during the last ten or twelve years has been to the tune of Rs. 30 lakhs a year. Bishwamber Joshi believes the decline of cattle wealth has spurred further migrations from the region.

~~Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India’s Poorest Districts -by- P. Sainath

Day 355: India Unbound

The bazaars and palaces of Punjab had been filled with talk ever since Alexander made the Persian Empire vanish four years before. The princes of India had shivered when they heard that Persepolis had been set on fire. But the India that Alexander faced was not united. Even Punjab, guarding the northwest gateway, was divided between three major kings and dozens of free tribes who were constantly at war. Their inability to unite lost them four years during which they could have planned for Alexander.

Alexander crossed the Indus near Attock and reached the kingdom of Taxila, between the Indus and Jhelum (Hydaspes) rivers. Ambhi, the king of Taxila, from prudence or cowardice, chose not to fight. He sent Alexander envoys and presents and offered him his army, provided his kingdom was spared. Ambhi warmly welcomed the Greek invader and threw open the gates to his city, long famous as a center of trading and learning. The inquisitive crowds in Taxila watched the strange Greek figures in curious dress who milled about their streets.

Smaller chiefs from the surrounding areas brought presents, and Alexander rewarded them with generous extensions of their territories and vessels of gold and silver. The Greek soldiers performed games and sacrifices before the awestruck citizens. The Greeks were impressed by the civilized city life within the mud-brick maze of Indian streets. They visited the university and the learned men. They watched the rich townsfolk go about in linen tunics, capes, and turbans, their beards dyed white, blue, red, and purple. Some carried umbrellas, others wore leather boots. Holy men blessed the passersby by smearing their foreheads with oil.

Puru watched Alexander from across the Jhelum River. He observed the traitorous alliance struck by Ambhi, his old enemy. He saw the other princes rapidly submit to the new power, including his own Paurava kinsmen. He realized that he was up against huge odds, and he had to fight or surrender. When Alexander’s envoys came to summon him to Taxila, Puru replied that he could meet another king only as an equal. War became inevitable and the stage was set for one of Alexander’s greatest battles.

Alexander’s army soon marched towards the Jhelum, accompanied by Taxila’s forces. When they reached the river and saw Puru’s hundred elephants massed on the other bank, the Macedonian cavalry became frightened. Not having faced elephants before, the Greeks feared them as soldiers feared the Patton tank in recent times. Behind the elephants stood a thousand chariots and Puru’s forty thousand infantry. Although different figures are given about the relative strength of the two forces, they were more or less equal, with Alexander’s cavalry superior in numbers. Alexander quickly realized that a direct crossing would be impossible. Meanwhile, the river began to rise, as the snows melted early in the Himalayas. Heavy rain and storms made the river swell further. Puru’s spies brought news that Alexander had ordered vast quantities of grain, and since nothing seemed to happen for days, Puru concluded that the invasion had been put off for several months, till after the monsoons.

One morning at dawn, Puru was stunned to learn that boats filled with horses had crossed twenty miles up the river. Concealed by the torrential downpour Alexander had quietly moved a third of his army upstream. He had chosen this point because it was hidden from the other side of the bank by a wooded island. As the rain abated, Alexander and his cavalry crossed in the first light of dawn. A single narrow boat carried history—the king himself with his great captains, who would one day rule vast parts of the world: Ptolemy, the future king of Egypt; Lysimachus, the future king of Thrace; Perdiccas, the future regent; and Seleucus, who would inherit Alexander’s vast Asian empire. However, they had not reached the other shore. They were still on the island, which a swollen channel had completely cut off from the eastern shore after the rains.

It was here that Puru’s outposts discovered the Greeks, who had to hurry to get across because Puru’s troops would arrive any moment. They found to their horror that the channel was not fordable: they were caught in a trap. They made desperate efforts at various points, at all of which the water was too deep. In that moment of panic, Alexander reassured his men that they were doing all this for the sake of glory—one day the people of Athens would talk and write about them. Eventually, they found a spot where the water was only waist-high and the men and horses struggled through.

When Puru heard that the enemy had crossed, he sent his son with a force of two thousand mounted men and 120 chariots. He did not send the bulk of his force because he did not believe that this was the main attack. Across the river, he saw the Macedonian phalanxes, the royal guard, and the Asiatic horsemen were in a state of readiness. As soon as Puru’s son reached the scene, he was greeted by a hail of arrows followed by squadron after squadron of the famous Macedonian horsemen. Soon they were overpowered. Four hundred cavalry fell fighting. All his 120 chariots were captured—most of them stuck in the mud, the charioteers dead.

When Puru heard of this, he realized that the final hour of decision had come. He turned his entire force upstream. He placed himself on the largest elephant, alongside the image of Indra. Puru was a giant of a man, and his troops took courage from the sight of their powerfully built leader with the banner of the warrior god. The battle began with the trumpeting of the elephants, which terrified the European horses. Alexander’s thousand mounted archers from Central Asia began to hail arrows upon the Indian left flank. The Indian archers responded, but the rain made it impossible to get a firm rest for their longer bows. When the Indian cavalry began a wheeling movement on the left wing, Alexander’s horse guard charged upon them from the right. The Indian cavalry found itself outnumbered by the Greek cavalry, which had the experience of a hundred battles. Finding that they now had the upper hand, the Greeks sprang a surprise attack from the rear. Puru’s infantry was thrown into confusion. The elephants, pushed back from the front, were now hemmed in from behind. Under stress, they caused a stampede on their own men. Resistance became hopeless; butchery followed. Meanwhile, the balance of Alexander’s forces crossed the river, including two fresh Macedonian phalanxes, and they completed the rout. In the end, Alexander’s superior cavalry had decided the battle. Among the thousands who died that bloody day were two sons of Puru and a brave neighboring prince.

Puru himself, unlike the king of Persia, did not flee nor surrender. Despite the losing battle, he kept fighting and goading his men to keep their honor. Alexander’s forces were impressed, by both his size and his courage. It was only when he was hit by a dart on his right shoulder that, wounded and tired, he turned his elephant to safety. He had not gone far when he recognized the hated face of the traitor Ambhi. He turned around and hurled a lance with whatever strength his wounded arm could muster. Ambhi evaded it and turned back. Soon, two envoys from Alexander came up to him. Loss of blood had made him intolerably thirsty. He halted his elephant and got down. Alexander’s envoys honored him and gave him water to drink, and he commanded them to lead him to their king.

As Puru neared the Macedonian lines, Alexander came galloping out to meet him. He was filled with admiration for his brave and proud adversary and asked Puru how he wished to be treated. “Treat me, Alexander, as you would treat a king,” replied Puru. Alexander was confused and asked him to be more precise. “When I said ‘a king,’” repeated Puru, “everything was said.”

Alexander was pleased with the reply. He not only gave Puru back his kingdom but, much to Ambhi’s chagrin, enlarged Puru’s territory to all the lands towards the east. Thus, Puru accepted the Greek dominion and became Alexander’s faithful and energetic ally. Puru’s own people, like the Greeks, were also proud of their king. Alexander ordered a city of victory, Nicaea, to be built on the field of battle, and another at the gray spot on the opposite bank from where he had crossed the Jhelum that morning. He called the second Bucephala, after his great horse who had died that day. The Greeks then performed their sacrifices and athletic games before the admiring people of the Paurava kingdom. After this great battle of the Hydaspes River the Greeks marched on. When they reached the fifth river of Punjab, the Beas (Hyphasis in Greek), Alexander’s tired army refused to go further. He ordered and cajoled them, but it was to no avail. Disappointed, he turned back, somewhere near modern Gurdaspur.

Seven years later, all trace of Greek authority had disappeared from India. The chief reason was another romantic figure, Chandragupta, who was a lesser warrior but a greater ruler than Alexander. The young nobleman from Magadha, helped by his subtle, Machiavellian adviser, Chanakya, organized an army and overcame the Greek garrisons. He established the Mauryan Empire, which ruled north India and Afghanistan for 137 years.

At the end of this saga, the main question is, why did Puru lose and Alexander win? On the face of it, the invader’s superior strategy and the element of surprise clearly gave the Greeks a decisive edge. However, beneath the surface there were important differences between the two armies. Professor Stephen Rosen, the military historian from Harvard, has recently found the answer in the divisions in Indian society, which resulted in poor coordination in Puru’s army. Puru’s cavalry refused to aid the infantry. On the soggy banks of the Jhelum that morning, the Greek historian Arrian observed, Puru’s chariots got stuck and the charioteers were unwilling to double up as infantry. Later in the day, cohesion in the Indian army broke down as the Macedonian phalanx put pressure on Puru’s infantry, and the elephants pushed back and began to trample their own men. In this crisis, Rosen notes, “the Indian cavalry … did not assist the Indian infantry against the enemy phalanx but dealt as best as it could with the Macedonian cavalry.”

In contrast, Alexander’s army was a professional machine. Originally it had been, like Puru’s, a tribal militia. Neither was Greek society more cohesive, but Alexander had professionalized his army and separated it from the divisions in society. When Alexander’s cavalry first sighted Puru’s troops, their first instinct was to charge. Alexander, however, “checked the advance of his cavalry to allow his infantry to come up with him. Regiment by regiment, they made contact, moving swiftly until the whole force was again united.”

Indian military historians have also noted this aspect. Rosen attributes the lack of solidarity partially to the caste system, although he correctly points out that caste structures were not yet fully developed. Caste, he hypothesizes, divides society, encourages loyalty within the subgroup, and discourages it across caste lines. Puru’s upper-caste mounted cavalry did not sufficiently support the lower-caste soldier who was on foot. Jadunath Sarkar, an authority on ancient and medieval military affairs, said that although “the Indian defenders of the Punjab were brave, each man fought to death in isolation.” The soldiers were “unable to make a mass movement in concert with their brethren of other corps.” The people of Punjab were disunited and narrowly self-centered, with the net effect that “divided we fell.”

Puru may have lost to the greatest general of his time, but the theme of the poor teamwork runs throughout Indian history. Babur’s victories at Panipat and at Khanua (against the Rajput confederacy, led by Rana Sangha) were partly a result of the same deficiencies. Although the Marathas had more cohesive armies, they too suffered because some sub-castes armed themselves against others. The British Empire professionalized the Indian armies, however, and after 1947 the Indian military has been “an island of discipline.” Despite that, there have been problems between generals in the battlefield. In the 1962 Indo-Chinese war, the commander of the Fourth Division at Se-La confessed that “private animosities, personal weakness and in many cases lack of mutual confidence among the commanders … led to disaster.” Even in the victorious wars against Pakistan, in 1965 and 1971, there were major failures of coordination, according to Generals Harbaksh Singh and Sukhwant Singh.

~~India Unbound : From Independence to the Global Information Age -by- Gurcharan Das

Day 354: In Spite Of The Gods

Understanding the difference between organized and unorganized India is the key to understanding why India’s economy is so peculiar: at once confident and booming yet unable to provide secure employment to the majority of its people. Contrary to much of conventional wisdom in the West, which often, quite wrongly, sees Indian employees of foreign multinationals as exploited sweatshop labor, the 14 million who work either for Indian or foreign private companies are the privileged few—India’s aristocracy of labor. In 1983, as India was entering the twilight of its swadeshi phase, the average labor productivity of the worker in the private organized sector was six times that of his counterpart in the unorganized sector. By 2000 that gap had risen to nine times.10 The gap in earnings was similar. This is a world of difference. Crossing from one world to the other takes good education and skills, or a huge dose of luck. It does not happen often enough.

India’s ability to provide a better bridge between the old world and the new depends a great deal on the extent to which it can provide jobs for low and semiskilled employees in its manufacturing sector. In terms of scale, India can only be measured against China. In 2005 India employed just 7 million people in the formal manufacturing sector, compared to more than 100 million in China. Given the large investment flows and the priority that Nehru gave to industrialization, many people find it puzzling that sixty years after independence India’s manufacturing sector remains so small in terms of the number of people it employs. That is because Nehru’s strategy was essentially capital-intensive—its priority was to develop India’s technological capacity, rather than to employ the maximum number of people. But it does not follow that Indian manufacturing is correspondingly weak or uncompetitive. Measured by quality, if not quantity, many of India’s homegrown private sector manufacturers are considerably more impressive than their counterparts in China. Again, India finds itself higher up on the ladder than one would expect it to be. It is just that most of its people are still sitting at the bottom.

This very Indian paradox is everywhere visible. But one of the best places to see it is in the impeccably maintained and clean-swept company town of Jamshedpur in the eastern state of Jharkhand, close to the isolated Himalayan kingdom of Nepal. Jamshedpur is almost a museum of India’s industrial history from its nationalist beginnings in the late nineteenth century long before the British departed, to the India of the early twenty-first century that exports galvanized steel to China and auto components to America and Japan.

The town was established in 1902 by Sir Jamshed Tata, founder of the Tata Group, India’s largest private sector company. At the beautifully kept park in the center of the town, fourth- and fifth-generation menial employees of the company can be seen leaving rice or flowers or offering puja (small prayers) beneath the imposing bearded statue of Jamshedji,* as he is still known. The sight reminded me of Rudyard Kipling’s description of lower-caste Hindus and Muslims worshiping at “each other’s wayside shrines with beautiful impartiality.” But the prayers are well deserved. For the poor, a job with Tata is a job worth having. With it comes access to high-quality company medical care, pukka (quality) housing with clean and drinkable tap water, and good schools in which to educate your children. But there are fewer and fewer jobs.

Like many large Indian manufacturing companies, Tata’s balance sheet has gone from respectable in 1991, when a new world was opened up by Manmohan Singh’s abolition of the industrial licensing system, to world-class today. Yet the company’s payroll count has gone in the opposite direction. In 1991 the imposing steel mill in Jamshedpur turned out just 1 million tons of steel a year and employed 85,000 people. Now, in 2005, it is making 5 million tons a year and employs 44,000 people. Tata Steel’s turnover has risen from $800 million to $4 billion over the same period. “We could probably get the labor force down to 20,000 and move up to a production of 10 million tons,” said one of the Tata executives assigned to show me around.

Tata Steel’s story, in which it transformed itself from a laborintensive company that supplied low-cost steel to the domestic market in 1991 to a capital-intensive company that supplies world-beating automobile steel to Japan’s shiniest car companies today, parallels that of other successful Indian manufacturers. Up until 1991, Tata Steel made everything it possibly could in its own backyard, since it was always too much of a struggle to import spare parts or new machinery under India’s “import substitution” regime. Naturally this need for bureaucratic approval was a distraction from what the company was supposed to be doing and added greatly to its labor force. The company also employed large numbers of lobbyists and “gofers” who spent their time hanging around ministries and petitioning bureaucrats.

It was yet another questionable legacy of the well-meaning society Nehru wanted to build. Nehru gave India some of the strictest labor laws in the world, making it virtually impossible to sack an employee, even if the person you wanted to fire was a chronic absentee. Nehru gave India an industrial licensing system in which companies such as Tata needed the permission of bureaucrats for even the smallest investment decisions on what they could produce, when they should produce it, and where they should produce it.

Some parts of Nehru’s model, such as the Orwellian “License Raj,” have been dismantled. But some, such as the absurdly strict labor laws (which were made even stricter by Indira Gandhi in 1976), remain. This means that companies are reluctant to hire large numbers of people even when they are expanding since they fear being stuck with boom-era payrolls during the next recession, which would push them into bankruptcy and endanger everyone’s job. But it also means companies prefer to outsource as much as possible of their work to small, unaudited outfits in the “unorganized sector,” so they can escape the labor laws, which are unenforceable in India’s labyrinthine informal economy. There are other legacies that have yet to be abolished, including the “Inspector Raj” of constant inspections that plagues much of Indian business. As Gurcharan Das, former head of Procter & Gamble’s India operations, wrote, “In my thirty years in active business in India, I did not meet a single bureaucrat who really understood my business, yet he had the power to ruin it.”

~~In Spite Of The Gods: The Rise of Modern India -by- Edward Luce

Day 353: India at War

Throughout the 1930s, psychiatry and psychoanalysis had been gaining wider acceptance among medical professionals in India, and Jung had made an extensive tour of India in 1937–8. In October 1942, Edward Bennett, a highly respected Jungian analyst, arrived in Delhi to advise the military from the progressive environment of London’s Tavistock Clinic. The number of qualified psychiatrists serving the Indian Army increased from four to eighty-six during the war, including some Jewish refugee doctors, and a number of junior medical officers also received training in psychiatric care. Specialist wards were developed in General Hospitals like Ranchi, Moradabad, Poona and Comilla. Nurses were reading the latest works on psychoanalysis, pavement bookstalls sold the works of Jung and Freud, and the role of domestic, emotional and childhood neuroses and their contribution to an individual’s ability to withstand the tensions of battle all became more thoroughly understood.
Needless to say, Indian soldiers did not benefit from these medical innovations in psychiatric care to the same extent as their British comrades, despite psychiatric cases accounting for 10 to 15 per cent of all casualties in the Indian Army. In the forward areas of North Africa and the Western Desert, neuroses ranged from exhaustion and homesickness to fear of battle. The Indian Army’s approach was less nuanced and responsive than the British Army’s. The ‘trick-cyclists’ of the psychiatric profession still tended to believe people had predilections towards certain mental illnesses; this might be because of an individual’s background or childhood but might also be predetermined by ethnicity or by race. The idea persisted that Indians were peculiarly predisposed to certain types of mental ill-health, particularly hysteria. This idea had gained currency in the First World War and continued to inform the treatment of Indian soldiers, even among the more liberal and progressive psychiatrists.

Wilfred Abse, an eminent psychiatrist from Cardiff, worked with patients suffering from mental health issues in the Indian Military Hospital in Delhi. He wrote emphatically about the differences in hysteria between Indians and westerners, convinced that it was a peculiarly Indian phenomenon, and something to which Bengalis were particularly prone; indeed, he argued, it was the illness ‘second only to malaria in Bengal’. There had been a long suspicion that Indian soldiers had a particular susceptibility to hysteria and among the nervous disorders Abse saw in Delhi, he detected hundreds of cases of hysteria – convulsions, paralysis and sensory disturbances – among Indian soldiers who had been hospitalised. Psychiatrists from Europe rarely knew Indian vernaculars and they had to interview patients using a translator, often failing to grasp the subtleties of the social and economic strains on the Indian soldier.

Wilfred Abse included photographs in his case-notes of patients manifesting physical symptoms because of their mental distress. One patient’s limbs had been studded with thorns (‘Hysterical anaesthesia of legs. Thorns plunged into the skin were ignored by patient’), other sepoys were pictured with bloated stomachs or bent perpendicular with bad backs. He saw convulsive attacks as ‘frequent manifestations of hysteria in Indian soldiers’ in addition to amnesia and abdominal pains. In one case, a soldier had not been able to sleep for two months and his insomnia was so severe that he had been hospitalised. Abse’s notes give a slender glimpse into the multifarious tensions weighing on some Indian soldiers and in particular their strong sense of responsibility towards their kin and the burden of responsibilities back home. In the case of the insomniac soldier, ‘Questioning revealed that two months earlier his mother had died. Owing to his absence from home in the Army, he had been unable to carry out the appropriate religious ceremonies. He felt that he had insulted his mother and that in consequence the divine power had rendered him incapable of sleep.’ In this instance the patient responded well to sympathetic discussion of his concerns and to the use of hypnosis but also, not remarkably, to some home leave.

In another case a sepoy, identified only as a twenty-five-year-old Muslim soldier, was under observation in hospital for muteness. He did not utter a sound for two months but the doctors could find no physical explanation. The patient scribbled in notes that the cause was the intervention of a malignant spirit and that he could only be cured by returning home and seeing the local hakim, ‘though he thought even this would take a long time’. When he was told firmly that he would have to stay in hospital until he spoke, the patient continued to beseech for release in his handwritten notes, before he finally began speaking. While the doctor found a convoluted explanation for the muteness as ‘a fear of the homosexual instinct’, the modern reader is tempted to wonder if the sepoy was using desperate measures to try to acquire home leave. Dr Abse stayed alert to the fact that his patients often felt homesick, missed their wives and grieved over lost parents whom they had not been able to see. However, he was unable to fully articulate the difference of the Indian sepoy’s experience of war, or to fully navigate his way to understanding the complex social pressures on the shoulders of many sepoys.

Nonetheless, treatment was more successful than during the First World War and about a quarter of psychiatric casualties in the Indian Army returned to active duty. There was far more recognition of how physical and mental symptoms might be interwoven and how soldiers with malaria or dysentery might fall into a depressed state. There was greater understanding of the mental impact on soldiers in Burma who saw their comrades killed or injured or who endured long weeks of uncertainty, waiting for the apparently indefatigable Japanese, struggling with the heat, mosquitoes, monotony and alienation of the war. Sepoys on the Burmese front were anxious about injury and apprehensive of the peculiar cruelties and persistence attributed to the enemy. On one three-day boat-trip from Gauhauti to Dacca on a medical steamer of 172 Indian casualties, half of the passengers were classified as pagals – or mentally ill sepoys. ‘Most were sad quiet men suffering from depression’, recorded the nurse Angela Bolton, who was charged with accompanying the hospital ship as it slowly navigated the river. ‘Those who were a danger to themselves or others occupied the large wire-mesh cage at one end of the deck which was otherwise used for prisoners of war.’

~~India at War: The Subcontinent and the Second World War -by- Yasmin Khan

Day 352: India Becoming

Life in the country had its rhythms; it was one of the nicest things about living in Auroville. The summers were dry and quiet, with a hot wind that emptied roads and public spaces. Winters were wet, and then cool, monsoon downpours followed by a clear, clean light and crowds of tourists. The familiarity, the predictability, was comforting. The world around me was moving so fast, but the seasons stayed constant.

Then one April the summer wind brought with it an unfamiliar guest: the smell of burning plastic. It started on a Sunday afternoon, a hint of bitterness, like something rotten in the air. I barely noticed. A couple days later my wife woke me in the middle of the night and said something was burning. This time the bitterness was unmistakable, overwhelming, a chemical taste in my mouth, a trail of roughness along my constricted throat.

My older son woke up, vomiting. We nursed him through the night. We told ourselves it was a stomach bug, something he’d eaten. But he’d eaten what we had all eaten, and as we stayed up with him, wiped his vomit and rubbed his stomach, comforted him, promised him it was nothing, it would pass, we couldn’t shake the terrible feeling that it was in fact something very real—that he’d been poisoned by the air.

The smell invaded our house throughout the following weeks and months. Sometimes it blew in during the day, mostly at night. It came from a twelve-acre landfill south of my home, next to a village called Karuvadikuppam, just outside the town of Pondicherry. It was Pondicherry’s main landfill. Every day, almost 400 tons of garbage—plastic bags and shoes and rubber tires and batteries mixed with rotting fruit and meat and rice—were carried there by tractors, and dumped in putrefying piles that emanated combustible methane gas.

The landfill was far from my house—across fields, a village, more fields, and then a forest and cashew plantations. It was almost two miles away. It had been there for over a decade, smoldering, throwing smoke into the atmosphere, but I had never noticed it. Now, with Pondicherry growing, its residents getting richer, buying more, discarding more, the dump had swollen.

Every day, the tractors brought their loads of garbage. Over the years, hundreds of thousands of tons had built up. The dump was running out of space. The fires, some man-made, some the result of spontaneous combustion, were getting bigger. The smoke was getting thicker, and traveling farther.

To me and my wife, the situation was bewildering. For so long, we had told ourselves that we were happy with the bargain we had made by choosing to live in rural India—happy to trade the vibrancy and life of the cities for the safety and cleanliness of the countryside. We had decided to live, to raise our children, in a place where crime was low, the water was drinkable, and the skies clear at night.

But now the world was crowding in—murder in the villages, poison in my living room. I was told that the dump was emitting dioxins and furans and other toxic chemicals. I was told that these poisons could lead to cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular and respiratory disease. And I was told, too, that children, with their undeveloped immune systems, were most susceptible.

What were responsible parents to do? We kept our children off the roads after dark. We bought a new air conditioner. On a good night, a night when the fumes weren’t too thick, it filtered out the smell (though, I suspected, not the poison).

We talked a lot about moving. “But to where?” my wife would ask. Crime was everywhere, and so were the dumps, smoking heaps outside (and sometimes inside) cities, along highways, in fields and forests. In Chennai, just off Rajiv Gandhi Salai, a massive landfill spewed black smoke, making a mockery of the surrounding state-of-the-art technology complexes. I took a holiday in Goa, stayed at a high-end beach resort; every night, I choked on an all-too-familiar smell.

India produced some 100 million tons of municipal waste every year. On a per capita basis, this was still lower than most developed countries. But the problem was in the way the waste was treated—or not treated. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, only 60 percent of municipal waste was even collected. A far smaller (almost nonexistent) amount was recycled. Instead, the garbage just piled up—and rotted, and smoldered, and polluted the air and water.

Sometimes, when I drove along highways lined with blazing mounds of garbage, when I passed through remote villages shrouded in acrid smoke, it seemed like there wasn’t a safe (or clean) corner in the country anymore. India, I began to feel, was burning.

India was burning—and, in a similar way, it was eroding, melting, drying, silting up, suffocating. Across the country, rivers and lakes and glaciers were disappearing, underground aquifers being depleted, air quality declining, beaches being swept away.

The numbers were astounding. According to a government report I read, almost half of India’s land suffered from some kind of erosion. Seventy percent of its surface water was polluted. Half a million deaths a year were attributable to air pollution. Altogether, environmental damage cost about 4 percent of the nation’s annual GDP (about the same amount the country spent every year on education or health).

Evidence of this destruction had been apparent around me for years. I had, of course, noticed how beaches and fields were being despoiled, how rivers and canals were choking on plastic bags, and how every scenic picnic spot was turning into a mire of paper plates and foam containers. I had seen these signs, registered them, but never really fit them together into a bigger picture. Auroville was green; I lived by a forest. I was shielded from—and a little blind to—the environmental calamity enveloping the nation.

But now the calamity had crept up on me, blown into my bedroom late one night, and into my children’s lungs. The smoke was in my house; I could smell the fire. I could no longer overlook the scale of the problem, or the terrible human toll I suddenly understood it was exacting across the nation.

In the weeks after I first smelled the garbage, I started paying more attention to the way we had been abusing our world. The crisis in Indian agriculture, which I had thought of primarily as a social drama, a tragedy played out in farmer suicides and disruptions to village culture, now became apparent to me as an ecological crisis. The fields around me had been abused with chemicals for too long. Farmers had taken their wells for granted. Now the land was dying, and the wells were emptying.

Everyone always said India needed better roads, that without new infrastructure the country couldn’t develop. I mostly agreed. Now, though, my eyes were fixed on the ancient tamarind and jackfruit trees that were being chopped down all over the place to make way for highways. Some of those trees were more than a century old; it took an excavator fifteen minutes to uproot them.

Along the beach, a twenty-minute drive from my house, the sandy stretch of coconut trees and fishing villages that lined the East Coast Road was slipping away, a victim of massive erosion. This was another man-made calamity. Some two decades ago, the town of Pondicherry had built a harbor farther down the coast. It was designed to spur development in the area. There was some debate about whether it had done that, but the harbor had indisputably blocked replenishing sand flows carried by currents from the south. Now the beaches around me were starved of nourishment.

I went to the ocean one day, to the fishing village of Chinnamudaliarchavadi. It was on a beach I used to frequent as a child. I had heard about the erosion, but I wasn’t prepared for what I found. It was a shocking sight. A stretch of sand that had once extended for at least a hundred meters was now reduced to a strip of no more than ten or fifteen meters. Trees were uprooted, and fences and compound walls were breached. At least one electricity pole had come down. In the village, houses were perched precariously above the waters; some huts, I was told, had already been swallowed.

I sat on that sand, what was left of it, and I thought of just how little remained of the beach I had known as a boy. So much was being swept away. So much was being destroyed. I knew it was part of the compact of modern India: in with the new, out with the old, all in the name of progress.

I welcomed the progress. But all the destruction seemed a heavy price to pay.

~~India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India -by- Akash Kapur