India: Old and New

Our students often see India as a place of contrasts and contradictions, old and new (they are also keeping an India blog if you have the time and curiosity to see what India looks like through younger eyes than mine: indiainterim2014.blogspot.com).  Sometimes this is expressed in terms of what they see as the "real India," by which they often mean the India they expected or hoped to encounter, the "older" or "traditional" India.  They like, and are inspired by, Gandhi's India, less so by the display of military might in the annual Republic Day parade we attended (from tanks up through a fly-over by fighter jets) (how can we put those two things together?).

And, of course, there still is plenty of the "real" India to see: cows wandering the city streets, munching on piles of garbage; auto rickshaws or even bicycle rickshaws for transportation, as well as fancy cars and city busses; round discs of cow manure drying by the roadside, to be used as a fuel for cooking.  There's water it is wise not to drink if one can afford to drink water from plastic bottles instead (as we can: while the "real" India is often scenic, it can also include troubles and inconveniences we Americans prefer to avoid--we'd like not to get sick, to have enough to eat, to have at least warmish water for showers, a significant degree of physical comfort and safety, to know we can get the cash we need from an ATM rather than depending on the kindness of strangers from whom we beg or pester--all of which many, many people limited to the real India do not have.  This "real India" thing is complicated.

One place we've encountered what we think of as the real India are the several farming villages in which we've spent time (such as the one described in an earlier posting, a Dalit or Untouchable village celebrating the annual harvest or Pongal festival).  Here we're arriving at a different village (in the photo to the left), greeted by a lot of children excited about who we might be.  We get a chance to walk a woman's fields as she shows us her millet plants, and we are invited into her home, full of an extended family, for hospitality and some food.  But, as noted before, it's not clear whether, in the long run, traditional village life is
viable.  There's less water available for the fields, and the rains have been less predictable, meaning that farmers can't always rely on a harvest, or the income that it might have one provided.  We're told that 600 rural villagers move to Delhi (already around 12 million people) every day, 4,000 a week.  Yet if the farmers eventually leave the land, who will grow the food people need?  Will the children whose classrooms we spend time in, once they have access to more education, want to move to town for the kinds of work, or excitement, available there?

We also enjoy the remnants of earlier Indian civilizations which we've been visiting more often once we were in Delhi and Agra, such as the Taj Mahal or the tomb above with green parrots.  But note that the script on the monument is in Arabic (or Persian/Urdu) lettering, so both the Taj and this monument are not part of Hindu India, but Mughal India (which started in the early 1500's and lasted for several centuries).  Is the "real India" only Hindu (as it was more easy to believe in Southern India), or also Muslim?  And what about the Buddhist heritage (a faith born here as a branching from Hinduism), or the Sikhs (whose temple we so much enjoyed doing service work in), or the Jains (whose dietary restrictions are the most strict of all, sometimes indicated on cafe menus as "safe for Jains to eat").  Or the Christians--early on we visited the Church of St. Thomas ("doubting Thomas"), who did work in India in the first Christian century (52-72) in Madras/Chennai, long before missionaries reached pagan countries like Norway.  Is India all these things?  Are generalizations possible?  

Or, as with this design in the ceiling of a lovely Mughal (Muslim) tomb, do we simply wonder at each piece of India as we find it?  (This is about fifty feet across, high above us.)

Still, there is a "new, modern" India emerging.  In spite of now having almost as many people as China (1.2 billion versus 1.3), India has been growing economically in recent years, less fast than China, but faster than the U.S. and Euro-zone countries.  We could see this when we spent much of a day at InfoSys, one of the first high-tech companies begun in India by Indian scientists and engineers in the 1980's, with only $250 in working capital.  We began our visit in their meeting hall, full of any communications technology you could imagine (see photo below).  

As befits our course focus on psychological issues and human development, we met for a while with Human Resources people; a third of their employees are women (likely higher than you'd find in high-tech firms in Silicon Valley?), and they have strict policies against sexual harassment. If a woman's husband is transferred, they try to find comparable work for her in one of their other locations nearby.  They provide transportation for women to ensure they get home safely. 

Their campus is quite large ("Electronic City"), with grass, trees, lots of water, a workout center, a large library, smooth streets, nice places to eat--everything that we think a "modern" city would need, and a clear contrast with the "real India" we encounter every day.  To the average Indian living on the streets, and sleeping on the sidewalks overnight (whom we see if we go out early in the morning), this would seem like utopia.  We might find it less interesting than the older India (too much like ourselves?) but many Indians, if they had the education to become part of InfoSys, might find it idyllic.

Here we are, for the almost-daily "group photo" while being guided around the InfoSys campus, by an older man who's wearing identification badge #00004, the fourth employee in the company's history.

Our group is also sometimes drawn to modern malls.  They are clean, they have familiar food courts (if with unfamiliar foods from both Northern and Southern India), they have large stores in which we as shoppers are less "encouraged" to buy than at a street-seller's stall, there are multi-screen movie theaters with stadium seats (featuring Bollywood films in several different local languages, usually without English subtitles--but we can still usually tell the bad guys from the good).  You can buy an inexpensive kurta (long shirt worn outside one's pants), get some inexpensive food at the food court, all in a place that's familiar enough to feel safe and comfortable.  One of the more fancy malls we visited is shown below; we noted that in the more culturally conservative South, most girls and women even in "modern malls" were wearing kurtas or saris (but boys and men were rarely wearing traditional clothing).  

Having said all this, I don't want to leave the impression that our students liked experiences that were familiar and safe the best.  They enjoyed them, and I think they're now part of India as well, with its growing middle class and very wealthy 1%, but they found their immersion in the "real India" usually more meaningful, the things they are more likely to remember.  They have liked being with little kids, often from urban slums (the term used in India) or rural villages, who are excited to learn, adorable, and funny.  They have been inspired by our visits to social justice or empowerment projects for women, or by making food for those waiting patiently in the Sikh Temple for the next seating (more on these in the next posting).  

And this is perhaps enough for this entry.  Except…whoops, I almost forgot the tribute, in flowers, at the huge annual flower show in Delhi (in January!  we're not in Minnesota anymore!), to India's latest proof of modernity--the successful launch of a deep-space rocket, a very complex task that only a really "developed" country can usually achieve (I remember China making the most of their own launch when we were there in 2004, as well).  See photo below!