“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.
The son of an American mother and an Indian father, Kapur 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 US 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 eight per cent, led by the expanding service and IT industries, and the country’s mood was “giddy, exuberant”, “ardently capitalist”, and aspirational.
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 centres, colleges and gated communities that now lined the newly blacktopped country roads he’d known as a boy, 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. And heedless growth steadily despoils the environment; 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 smouldering untreated garbage dumped outside the town of Pondicherry seeped into his home and sickened one of his children.
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. Despite the movement of millions of people from the land in recent years, seven out of 10 Indians still live in rural areas, but their world, too, is becoming almost unrecognisable.
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. His once-rich fields have been poisoned by chemical fertilisers. His neighbours 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.
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Sathy has 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’ 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.
INDIA BECOMING
A Portrait of Life in Modern India
Akash Kapur
Riverhead Books; 292 pages; $26.95
©2012 The New York Times News Service