Lopsided India

By Joseph Lelyveld

 
India: A Portrait
by Patrick French
Knopf, 398 pp., $30.00

India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking
by Anand Giridharadas
Times Books, 273 pp., $25.00

AN EXCERPT IS BELOW. FULL ARTICLE HERE.

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Anand Giridharadas, a second-generation Indian-American journalist born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, doesn’t travel nearly as far as French into the subcontinent’s past or present but, in a book that’s a hundred pages shorter (and could easily have been briefer), he manages to dig considerably deeper into the psychology and circumstances of the “new kind of Indian” we’ve been hearing about since Naipaul. In this younger writer’s account—drawn from family visits in his childhood, followed by a prolonged residence in Mumbai as first a corporate consultant, then a journalist—this new Indian is at once more self-confident and less Westernized in the sense of being freer from hand-me-down colonial models. Viewing the changes through the prism of the families his parents left behind in India, Giridharadas sketches pictures of cultural reinvention and loss that will be more or less familiar to anyone who has read a few Jhumpa Lahiri stories. The personal narrative provides a useful point of entry but becomes repetitious; his forays into the actual India are more likely to be remembered.

Giridharadas finds in the new India “quiet refusals to know one’s place,” to be pinned down by the old signifiers of caste and status, the old Indian “boundedness,” by even geography. He’s not merely finding new words for the “mutinies” Naipaul described a generation ago. He succeeds in evoking these new Indians, most strikingly in the case of Ravindra, a self-created motivational speaker who overcomes humble village origins through close study of Dale Carnegie. He never wore footwear till the ninth grade but he has now read How to Win Friends and Influence People twenty-eight times, he says. “I will change my destiny,” vows Ravindra, who gets his start staging “personality contests” in a small nondescript town called Umred near his village in the center of India, a town too small to have a train station but big enough to have had its conventions shaken, if not exploded, by television and the Internet. One of the contestants for the plastic tiara that comes with the title of Miss Umred is asked what she hopes to become. “My aim in life is to become a newsreader,” she replies in English, which Giridharadas calls “the language of success in the India that was beginning to flourish in the 1990s.” She probably picked it up at what he calls “middle-class finishing schools,” describing a sort of low-rent Berlitz for the slightly dislodged, aspiring masses.

The pleasure of Giridharadas’s portrait of this striver is that he doesn’t just descend on his subject for a single opportunistic interview but returns again and again over a period that seems to cover a few years. Soon Ravindra has started one of those makeshift academies on his own, offering Umred’s awakened youth not only English but courses in “personality development”—what’s now sometimes called “personal branding” in listings of American extension courses—so they can learn how to present themselves at a job interview, perhaps at a call center where successful candidates go on to field orders and complaints from American villages, towns, and cities.

Roller-skating is also part of the curriculum. In the period when Giridharadas follows him, this former villager buys himself a motorcycle, builds a house, becomes manager of an Indian skating team that travels to Hong Kong, and nearly pulls off a “love match” instead of falling into the standard arranged marriage. His journalist friend engages him in quasi-metaphysical discussions of concepts like karma and destiny. “I believe that life is only a one-time chance,” Ravindra says, writing off, it seems, millennia of Indian spiritualism.

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From Umred and Ravindra, India Calling swings back to Mumbai and the billionaire Mukesh Ambani—the conceiver and lord of the twenty-seven-story mansion with hanging gardens—whom Giridharadas pursues with the same admirable persistence and curiosity with which he went after Ravindra. The young provincial becomes in this telling an Ambani acolyte and wannabe. Reliance Industries, the empire over which the tycoon presides, is portrayed as a state within a state, with its own intelligence service, fixers, and emissaries, all rooted in the sort of personal give-and-take relationships and obligations that drive trading in an Indian marketplace where insider trading is the name of the game. These are values not taught in any business school. Ambani, sent to Stanford by his father, a trader who became an empire builder, left without completing his MBA. He didn’t feel he needed it to run an expanding business in India.

In the portrait Giridharadas assembles almost obsessively through interviews and close observation in the owner’s box at a cricket match, Mukesh Ambani becomes “more than a man, more than a businessman, more than the billionaire.” The author skates along the edge of hyperbole but by the time he describes Ambani as “the most powerful private citizen of India since Gandhi,” it seems he has made his case. Here he stands, “a new kind of Indian…mentally uncolonized, fanatical about his own country, unconstrained by an abstract British-taught morality.” Of course, as we’ve repeatedly been reminded these last few years, it’s not necessary to be reared in the customary ways of Indian trading to be unconstrained by an abstract morality, or to lobby politicians long entangled in a web of favors and obligations to which cash values may be imputed. MBAs do it too.

The nonresident Indian from Ohio is fascinated by the way these various moralities bleed into each other. At the fancy airport in Hyderabad, sometimes called “Cyberabad” because of its success in attracting foreign software companies, he finds sixty-three kinds of whisky on sale in a shop where sumptuary laws once banned the sale of liquor to Indians. He introduces a Maoist who wrote for a business newspaper where he accepted gifts from companies like Reliance Industries, and a self-propelled divorcee from the Punjab who, speaking no English, had gone to England to become a beauty therapist. He shows how the Internet is used in India to arrange marriages rather than dates, and remarriages when the new kind of self-seeking Indian flouts tradition by bailing out of a failed union. The single career women he gets to know in Mumbai believe, he says, “with equal fervor in filial piety and in promiscuity, rejecting as false the dichotomy the Western mind would see.” Ultimately most of them will make a match acceptable to their parents.

Giridharadas sees his own story as part of a pattern, finding a symmetry between his journey and that of his parents, who left India to reinvent themselves. The chief executive officers of Citibank and PepsiCo are also offshoots of that migration as are the governors of Louisiana and South Carolina. One of “India’s stepchildren,” he is doing the same thing “in reverse” as, he tells us, thousands have. “We forged dual-use accents,” he writes, becoming part of “a new worldwide fusion class: people positioned to mediate among the multiple societies that claim them.” Lapsing into self- absorption, he plays a series of variations on that theme.

I was reminded of an evening a couple of years ago on the rooftop terrace of Mumbai’s Intercontinental Hotel where I found myself seated near a large group of spirited and stylish young Indians with American accents, gossiping and drinking Cosmopolitans. I couldn’t tell whether they were visitors in transit or expatriates in the land of their parents. The terrace we inhabited seemed as the sun sank into the Arabian Sea to be afloat somewhere between Mumbai’s Marine Drive and Tribeca. India, meanwhile, was down below, just an elevator ride away.