Spectator's Journal/Enduring India

...When Westerners think of Calcutta, they think of misery and Mother Teresa...

...Chandra Shekhar's successor faces a distinctly unenviable job...

...Even before the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi on May 21, common wisdom held that the country hasn't been in such a mess since Independence and the horrors of Partition that accompanied it...

...Writer" was a Raj euphemism for "bureaucrat...

...In Calcutta, as in Delhi, the British Imperial past becomes either backdrop or tourist attraction, and people are too busy talking, selling, and begging to pay it much mind...

...In Calcutta, a beleaguered Indian Tourism Development Corporation (Frpc) officer gave me a glossy brochure on Rajasthan, a still-calm province of deserts and hill-forts in the northwest...

...The Indian press, free and raucous, has lately been full of examples of communalism at its worst...

...With Rajiv Gandhi's death they lost the last powerful member of a dynasty that spoke for a united, secular India...

...Lower-caste Indians make up 80 percent of a population of 836 million people...

...The talk only generates more talk...

...Some of the country's finest writers and filmmakers, its Rabindranath 'Pagores and Satyajit Rays, hail from Calcutta...

...It's rare now to see a public bus with glass in its windows...

...It's the Muslims who cause all the trouble," she said...

...A slight woman in a black salwar-kameez, a baggy-pants-and-loose-top ensemble worn as an alternative to a saree, she smiled at me over the well-laden buffet table...

...Though they have more immediate things to think about, Calcuttans haven't forgotten the British presence...

...He and his cronies should be taken out and shot...

...When one of the domestics didn't serve the lychee nuts properly, the hostess turned to us and said, "They do it on purpose, you know —just to annoy one...

...Inside, visitors (mostly Indian) stroll past glass cases containing letters from Imperial viceroys to native princes...

...In Agra, as in Ayodhya, Hyderabad, Kanpur, Aligarh and elsewhere, Hindus and Muslims have taken to the streets...

...The shelves are lit by candlelight whenever the utility people resort to load shifting...

...Some Hindus claim that it was built on the god Ram's birthplace, thus desecrating a holy site...

...No longer an emblem of peace, it now stands as a rallying point for devout Hindus closing ranks against non-Hindus and reformers like Singh...

...More obvious to Calcutta's daily life, a huge number of bookstores squeeze into whatever space they can find between the ubiquitous paan and betel-nut shops and samosa vendors...

...Dogs that look as if they're straight out of a George Booth cartoon lie everywhere, oblivious, scratching the occasional flea, yet contented in some strange way as life falls apart around them...

...The guidebooks don't mention that the town is as well known in India for its mental hospital as it is known abroad for the Taj Mahal...

...With the help of militant Hindu groups such as the Vishwas Hindu Parishad (VHP), the fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) organized a month-long agitation campaign last fall to rally support for building a Hindu temple at Ayodhya...

...These discussions suit the broad, planned avenues of a capital city that still bears the stamp of the British...

...The case has gone to the Supreme Court in Delhi, which is weighing the conflicting historical and theological evidence...

...The party's omnipresent symbol, the traditional Hindu lotus blossom, adorns walls from Delhi to Agra to Calcutta to Bombay...

...Fundamentalist Hindus blame him for setting up the Mandal Commission to look into the plight of the lower (in Hindi, "backwards") caste...

...alcutta, unlike Delhi, has a sense of humor...

...The bookstores are well-stocked and wonderfully anarchic, having given up on alphabetization so that browsing becomes a necessity...

...In a stylistic outburst that would curl an American editor's hair, the writers concluded that "the blood that flowed down the narrow gullies in these towns stained the conscience of the country like never before...

...Early in the morning, groups of men of all castes stand on Calcutta's streetcorners arguing over the day's first newspapers...

...Iisonly 124 miles to Agra, but maps don't take into account the very uncartographical obstacles that can make the trip last five hours...

...Ask Delhiites about communal violence and they'll often point the finger at anyone but the members of their own community...

...The problem goes to the heart of Indian society...

...The rioting, it said, "was a brutal throwback to the days of Partition, of friends stabbing each other because they suddenly discovered they belonged to different communities...

...It's the sort of city that puts the American consulate on a street called Ho Chi Minh Sarani...

...S o Singh's attempts to address India's caste problem had as much to do with his fall from power last November as the Ayodhya mosque crisis...

...ENDURING INDIA by Jennifer Howard M y hostess, the wife of a self-made businessman, supervised the houseboy as he brought in a never-ending series of courses, encouraging us to eat copiously in honor of her 18-yearold daughter's engagement...

...Riots - broke out in the capital...

...I wasn't frank enough to tell her what I thought of such generalizing, but I heard a lot of it in New Delhi...

...Across the back end of each truck someone has politely painted "Horn Please," an invitation that's taken much to heart by passing drivers...

...The bus creeps past every form of transportation known to subcontinental man...

...Vestiges of empire still cling to the crumbling Victorian facade of the red-brick Writers' Building, once the nerve center of the Raj bureaucracy...

...Somewhere between the sidewalks of Calcutta and the dinner parties of Delhi, Indians will have to find a way to translate that debating spirit into positive action, to take the teeth out of communalism before it tears the country's communities apart...

...This spring, as the country braced for late-May elections, much of the grist for the conversation mill came from the waves of communal and separatist violence that have swept over the north of the country from Kashmir to Assam...

...Although 1991 was supposed to be "Visit India Year," last December the situation in Agra deteriorated to the point that the authorities imposed a curfew and even closed the Taj to tourists for a few days, a desperate act in a country hungry for foreign exchange...

...Those same descriptions could just as well apply to Punjab or Kashmir as Ayodhya...

...No one stays very long...

...I even heard a few people say that they expected Singh to make a reappearance...

...The newsweekly India Today devoted a special report in January to the communal violence...

...Lately, the town has been the focus of a new sort of bad press...

...Stop AIDS" screamed some graffiti in Agra...

...When then-Prime Minister V. P. Singh sent troops in to Jennifer Howard is a writer living in Charlottesville, Virginia disband the agitators, the BJP withdrew its support for his 11-month-old Janata Dal-led coalition government, helping to topple it in a November 7 vote of no confidence...

...It doesn't help that the Bengali government spars frequently with whatever party happens to be in control in Delhi, which means that sometimes the old British capital gets shortchanged by its successor...

...Any evening in Delhi, the politicians and businessmen gather for their own heated discussion...

...Some say that there was originally a Hindu temple there, which Babur tore down...

...When the electricity goes off, which it constantly does, people set up individual generators, and the air fills with the machines' hum and fumes...

...Massive green trucks lumber by with strings of offertory marigolds looped around an image of the driver's favorite deity, who rides shotgun on the dashboard or above the windshield as a sort of insurance policy...

...The paunchy host, looking like a colonial planter in white linen slacks and white shirt, stood up at the end of the meal and shouted down a Singh supporter...

...A Hindu civil servant who has risen through the bureaucracy to become secretary (second only to the minister) of a government department, told me that his religion could never breed fundamentalists...

...T o read the Western coverage, you 1 might think that rioting between Hindus and Muslims over a controversial mosque in Ayodhya in the state of Uttar Pradesh had started the whole mess...

...Singh and the Mandal Commission had a lot to work against...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 27...

...She told me that it was impossible for Hindus to be the cause of violence because of the age-old tolerance of their religion...

...Shekhar, whose politics veered far into socialism, seemed to agree: He resigned in March after only four months in office, leading to speculation that Rajiv Gandhi and his Congress (I) Party would make a comeback in May...

...That kind of rhetoric goes over well with the readership of India Today, in the "Letters to the Editor" section, Shakespeare gets quoted no fewer than four times...

...When you look past the dirt and the homeless, legless, miserable, but somehow dignified tenants of the city's sidewalks, you begin to see what they mean...

...From dinner parties to informal, in-house gatherings over ginger- and cardamon-spiced tea, Delhiites spend a great deal of time drawing broad conclusions about groups of people...

...A well-educated young woman of 23—computer expert, student of homeopathic medicine, and progressive enough to have earned a pilot's license—had strong opinions on the subject...

...In August, Singh unveiled an affirmative-action plan that called for 27 percent of public-sector jobs to be set aside for the lower castes...

...I've suffered under that man," he screamed...

...Hindu fundamentalism, he said, "is a contradiction in terms...

...Rioting in Uttar Pradesh took fifty lives, and spread to the neighboring state of Bihar, where as many as 2,000 Muslims died in the communal clashes...

...a city of anarchy, of power failures, of street life crowding past the crumbling remnants of the Raj...

...But Indians say that Calcutta is the country's soul...

...Some Hindus claimed that Singh was shamelessly pandering to the lower-caste vote...

...Indians say "Agra"the way Americans say "Bellevue" and the British say "Bedlam...

...Despite the antagonism the Mandal Commission generated, Singh was back on the campaign trail this spring, still hop26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 ing to turn his lower-caste support into success at the polls...

...Bombay may have its lurid, lucrative "Bombay talkies," three-hour musical extravaganzas that pack theaters throughout Asia, but artists call Calcutta home...

...The grandmother of a Brahmin family in Delhi announced one day that she couldn't bathe because the lower-caste sweeper had touched the spigot in the bathroom...

...Caste prejudice colors even small domestic scenes...

...She might have been summing up her husband's feelings about Singh...

...They're so frank...

...The couple hoped for a return to power of the Gandhi dynasty, under which the belligerent arms salesman had done rather well...

...I love Americans," she said...

...Kill V.P...

...In Delhi, at the grand and gaudy house of an obscenely (some said illegally) wealthy arms contractor, the debate raged through his three living rooms and shook the fashionable artwork on the wall (modernist paintings set in windowframes from a maharajah's palace...

...His wife agreed, comparing Singh to Hitler...

...Imc buses still take tourists around the Raj buildings, last stop on the tour being the gaudy Victoria Memorial...

...Outside, a jowly and very unflattering statue of an old Queen Victoria sits scowling out at the Maidan, the central public park in thecity...

...Though not a majority, the Congress (I) is still the largest single party in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament...

...The growingcracks in Indian society run not only between ethnic and religious groups but through them...

...Built out of white marble, with a central dome and a tower at each of its four corners, it was unfortunately billed as the British answer to the Taj Mahal...

...Muslims maintain that several sites are known in local lore as the birthplace of Ram, and they were provoked when some of the more militant Hindus laid a foundation stone for a temple to Ram within the precincts of the existing mosque...

...The mosque dates back to the midsixteenth-century Mogul emperor Babur...

...When I asked if tourism had fallen off since the communal violence had escalated, he did the side-to-side head roll that in India is the equivalent of a shrug and raised palms in the U.S...

...Brahmin university students protested by immolating themselves...

...But, as the dinner-party conversations of Delhi make clear, resolving the Ayodhya case won't put an end to the recurring violence...

...Political debate goes from circle to circle, just as Delhi's wide streets do...

...How this opinion jibed with the unabashedly fundamentalist agenda of the BJP eluded me...

...No one seems to mind, though some enjoy blaming the shortages on the incompetence of the Communist government of Bengal, of which Calcutta is the capital...

...Watching the round-bellied politicians trying to look populist in homespun clothes, on their way to drinks and "clients" at five-star hotels, one sees why a certain world-weariness creeps into even the most impassioned discussions in New Delhi...

...As for Singh's successor, Chandra Shekhar, Delhiites dismissed him and his minority government of renegade Janata Dal party members as opportunists, with no real interest in or aptitude for settling the country's crises...

...There's still the south," he said, and smiled...

...A few private cars—heavy old Ambassador sedans and newer, more squash-able Japanese clones—weave around all sorts of non-motorized moving objects, from bullock carts to unflappable sacred cows...

...Last year, nearly 4,000 people—almost double the 1989 figure—were killed in Punjab alone...

...Indians' sentiments about politicians seem generally to run along the lines of that same "it's so hard to get good help these days" theme...

...Delhiites talk more about inter-Hindu caste turmoil than they do about Ayodhya...