Every day we go through our lives as members of our families, organisations or localities; the 50th anniversary of independence is a time to look at ourselves as citizens, as members of a society. But is India a nation? A society? Fifty years ago the answer was no; in another 50 it may be yes.
The most striking division in my childhood was between those who sweated and those who did not. The dominant form of work was physical labour, even in cities. Millions of people hauled, pushed, lifted things; the slightly better off supervised animals doing the same things. The commonest forms of transport were the bullock cart and the handcart. A member of the middle class was one who did not do physical labour. One look sufficed to distinguish between the labouring poor and the sedentary non-poor; they differed in food habits, in clothes, in shelter, in speech and behaviour. The middle class was tiny by todays standards, and its members struggled constantly not to slip down into the labouring poor.
This struggle had become ever more trying in the near-century that passed after the mutiny of 1857. For India once had a numerous middle class, a class of courtiers, bureaucrats and landlords in the princely states. The British brought in a vastly more efficient form of government which rendered this class functionless and unemployed; the durbars where noblemen drank kasumbo and shared chillums were deserted as nawabs and bapus became pensioners of the British. The story of Ghalib is a story of how slowly, how painfully this class declined; many rikshawallas of Bhopal, Lucknow or Hyderabad represent the last step in the descent of the aristocracy into poverty. That struggle against decline continued together with the struggle against the British; they no doubt combined ever so often.
Independence stopped that decline; in fact, it led to the cooption of large numbers of people into the middle class. Today we bemoan the bloated bureaucracy, the incompetent pan-chewers occupying battered desks in public enterprises; but they are the worlds largest middle class that we boast about. They are also the reserves that the private sector carves into to create its own bureaucracies.
And the labouring poor are still there, but they labour much less. The internal combustion engine and the motor have displaced their labour with trucks, tractors, pumps, threshers, harvestors, cane-mills. With this change in the mode of work has gone a change in clothing - from handspun to synthetic blends, from mini-dhotis to legwear. Housing too has improved: much less reed, mat and corrugated iron, more bricks and cement, fewer kerosene lamps, more electric lights and fans. Today, the farmers of Punjab, Gujarat or Maharashtra are middle-class by all counts: they send their children to college, they read film magazines, they go on holiday in buses, they run cooperative societies. It is difficult to imagine how inconceivable this was half a century ago. When I was 15, the daughter of our domestic servant matriculated; she was the first Maratha in Deccan Gymkhana to have studied. If, at that point, anyone had said that there would be Maratha film actresses one day, he would have been laughed out of court. But it has happened. Not only has the middle class of 1947 multiplied, but millions who were outside the pale then have joined it, and many more have acquired elements of middleness. Sanskritisation is as much an economic process as a social one.
There is, of course, still much physical labour, but its decline is not only far greater than the planners of half a century ago would have thought possible, but they would have considered it undesirable and immoral. For all the tearful rhetoric about the poor required them to stay poor. Labour-saving mechanisation was always considered a curse and energetically prevented by pristine socialists. They wanted small tractors, which they hoped would displace labour in a small way. They denied licences to produce combine harvestors. When backyard manufacturers began to make tractor-mounted combine harvestors, the socialists reserved them for small-scale industry - so that the big firms, the only ones under their control, would not produce them. The socialists did not just put the hammer and the sickle on their flag, they really expected them to be used, and not to be displaced by more productive devices.
But they faltered, and they will fail. Peoples standards of living are determined by their productivity. Everywhere in the world, rising prosperity comes from the elimination of physical labour and from the use of peoples time to produce as much as they can. The dykes the socialists constructed against more productive work have been breached. In the next 50 years they will be washed away; however badly our governments mess things up, the average Indian worker will be at least four times more productive than today, and will consume so much more. If we could get rid of stupid governments, standards of living could go up 15 or 20 times in 50 years. With such a rise in the standard of living, the differences of today in food, clothing and shelter simply cannot survive. The many nations of India have begun to coalesce; in terms of lifestyle, a single nation must emerge within the next half century. Fifty years ago, everyone knew his place; in another 50, everyone will find a place in the new society.
What will that do to our heartlessness? When I was young, no one owed any duty to someone not of their class or caste. Millions died of famine in Calcutta; through those months the Bhadralok of Calcutta carried on their daily business, stepping past people dying on the streets. In 1948, I remember thousands of refugees arriving from Sind, hanging outside trains to sell peanuts, begging, squatting; no one bothered. The Indian society is one of the most callous I know; one can bleed to death in a street accident without anyone bothering to look. I think this has much to do with our history: there were centuries when it was difficult enough to survive, and impossible to care about others. It has given us an internal definition of who belongs and who does not -- basically, we recognise only the people we personally know as human beings towards whom we have obligations. And I think this parochiality will dissolve once we begin to dress, eat, speak more alike. And once this basic human concern returns, it will also reflect itself in the social arrangements to deal with common human disasters - floods, earthquakes, illness, old age etc. Our governments spend much money today running bogus arrangements to deal with these human accidents; I think that once we begin to recognise our fellow-citizens as humans, we will cease to tolerate these make-believe government organisations such as the provident fund, the life insurance corporation and the employees sickness insurance scheme and develop a genuine social insurance.
So in this sense, I think India will be a more human country in 2047. We think of ourselves as an old civilisation. Maybe we were once civilised. But I feel we have just begun to be civilised; we will move quite fast on that road in the next half century.
