Modernity and India

...The 600 million Indians referred to in Harrington's book have nearly doubled in thirty years—to 1.15 billion— and in twenty more years India's population may exceed that of China...

...And many of the urban workers employed by large companies live and work in a world that defies description in Western terms...

...In the confrontation of modern technology and traditional culture, the use of sonograms has brought widespread abortion of female fetuses by middle-class families who prefer sons...

...They are merely accompanying their parents, who work as families on these jobs...

...Indian social scientists have remarked that the very notion of "society" is problematic in a country in which hundreds of languages are spoken—languages, not dialects—adding to the divisions created by caste, religion, rural isolation, and provincial cultures...

...When the girl brought her video footage to police officials, the young man's parents were arrested and the marriage was canceled...

...These were primary objectives of the modern Indian women's movement, which was nearly nonexistent in 1976 when Indira Gandhi was president and was viewed suspiciously even by politically educated women at the time that CFE first went to India...

...Of course, exposure to Western technology has a positive side as well...

...These are not child laborers...

...In the long run, ubiquitous public corruption and religious superstition may be overcome and modern India may prevail...

...Ah," they said, "don't bring your western prejudices to your perceptions...

...Although dowries are illegal, they are demanded not only by traditional families in the countryside but by the surging middle class, whose taste for material goods is DISSENT / Summer 2008 • 2 5 POLITICS ABROAD often insatiable...

...The police—who can rarely be counted upon to act on abuses against women—could not ignore the posting...

...On our return to the United States we learn that the powerful Tata organization (known for its development of the iron, steel, and textile industries in India from the early twentieth century) has developed and is marketing a new small car—to cost $2,500—within reach of the new middle classes but far from that of rural peasants...

...Oh yes," he replied, laughing, but "they are no more than a 'suggestion...

...People in this category performed the most menial tasks in society, including cleaning latrines and sewers and clearing away dead animals—all regarded as polluting activities...

...While a "final" negotiation was taking place, the girl secretly taped it and posted it on YouTube...

...Are there no traffic rules...

...Thus far, Indian sociologists agree, the new class has adopted Western free-market norms, largely acting in its narrow self-interest behind the gates of its homes and corporate offices, showing little concern for the fate of those less favored...

...26 n DISSENT / Summer 2008...

...HOWARD EPSTEIN is the former president of Facts on File Publications...

...If the roads were disorderly, the roadside sights were more so...

...He noted that an individual acquires a caste at birth, with an accompanying occupational position, and the two are linked through religious mandates...

...The Indian Constitution granted them (today they number some 260 million people) equal legal rights and assured places in schools and jobs—though the vast majority remain socially segregated at the bottom of the caste and occupational structure...

...We landed at the airport in Delhi, now named in memory of Indira Gandhi, and no longer marked by the surge of humanity that greeted travelers in the 1970s...

...After the anarchy of the streets, we settled into a large modern hotel— indistinguishable from those in cities all over the world, except for the warning not to drink water from the tap...

...They don't want the burden of providing dowries for daughters, and they hope to secure the dowry a son can bring the family by a lucrative marriage...

...AS NOBEL PRIZE-winning economist Amartya Sen points out in his recent book The Argumentative Indian, the restrictions on development posed by poor infrastructure— in communications, electric power, and transport—have held India back for a century...

...we asked the guide...

...Mohandas Gandhi's spinning wheel, once the symbol of Indian independence and self-sufficiency, is lost in the mists of time...

...For the moment, the people of the old India are waiting, patiently...

...In 1961, a law was established to prevent families from giving or receiving dowries, and a 1986 act requires investigation of the death of a woman within seven years of marriage as well as maintaining statistics on dowry deaths...

...Yet its brief history since independence has been marked by a continuous confrontation with Pakistan, its politically fragile Muslim neighbor...

...India's affirmative-action program has remained in place and was expanded to include reserved places for the adjoining group of castes, one step higher than Dalits—known as "OBCs," the "Other Backward Classes"— in 1989-1990...

...The movement was renewed in the 1980s and 1990s and today aims to advance women's status across the lines of caste, religion, and community...

...A left liberal is tempted to reject the Western media's optimism and to recall that most of the 800 million live today largely as they did when Mohandas Gandhi was alive...

...Encampments of people—workers and their families, we were to learn—were visible in the floodlights at the sides of the roadway and the open trenches...

...They lived in housing that moved as each section of the subway was constructed...

...In the new India as in the old, some 85 percent of marriages are arranged directly by parents within appropriate castes, and the practice is strenuously defended, even by sophisticated middle-class adult children still nervously awaiting the event...

...Much depends on the course taken by the Indian middle class now being formed by the new global economy...

...CFE had been brought to India by the U.S...

...I NDIA IS A rapidly changing country...

...It has enormous problems, but it has an energetic population that—despite crushing poverty, limited education, and the constraints of caste—radiates optimism and self-reliance and has managed thus far to preserve a functioning national democracy...

...The lack of university slots also fuels resentment among members of India's upper castes, because 22 percent of classroom seats are reserved by law for Dalits and other "scheduled classes" (lower castes), and there is ongoing debate about whether to increase that percentage and reserve even more employment in government work and perhaps the private sector...

...And the trucks and scooters and buses continue to race by, insistently sounding horns when they pass each other, as mandated by traffic laws...

...In the ongoing discussions, the young man's parents kept escalating their demands for expensive consumer goods to be included in the transaction...

...Jamsetji Tata went on to found the Institute of Science, which, DISSENT / Summer 2008 n 23 POLITICS ABROAD along with a number of other higher education institutions, today feeds the country's high tech industries...

...T. K. Oomen of the Schumacher Institute and Jawaharlal Nehru University, former president of the International Sociological AssociaPOLITICS ABROAD tion, addressing our academic meeting in Delhi, declared that caste remains India's great unsolved problem...

...to know it infinitely better than someone who has never been there, weeks will suffice...

...Education, too, was a source of restriction, Sen asserts, noting the frustration of a pioneering member of India's richest family, Jamsetji Tata, who took advantage of Britain's inattention to iron and steel production to develop the industry in India...

...They order all aspects of family and communal life in this multinational, multicultural, and multiethnic society...

...CYNTHIA FUCHS EPSTEIN is a distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York...

...A member of our delegation asked an Indian scholar whether this was an offensive term...

...And thus we saw the women, but not the men, carrying bricks on their heads...

...Gradual upward caste mobility is possible over the generations or through conversion— to Christianity, for example—but one's birth position is a legacy that remains a constraint, much like skin color in the United States...

...Why are there no wheelbarrows for the women carrying wood or for the women at a building site, carrying cement and bricks on their heads for a new parking area at a mosque favored by tourists...

...We can't imagine how any more vehicles can share the roadways with the torrent of vehicles and animals, each moving at its own top speed, day and night, many not equipped with lights...

...The sights from the bus windows were prelude to the contradictions experienced in the days to come...

...He mused on the chutzpah of reporting his impressions after only a few weeks in this enormous country...

...Of the 370,000 engineers who graduate annually, just 200,000 have employable skills as engineers, reports Mohandas Pai, a board member for human resources at the software and computer services firm Infosys...

...professionals (doing legal research and reading patient x-rays, for example...

...Gandhi had especially championed the recognition of rights for the "untouchables"—those so low they were not even in the caste system— whom he renamed Harijans, "Children of God," a name now regarded as condescending and which has been replaced in the west by the term Dalit (meaning oppressed...

...Even at midnight, work was underway for the new subway line being rushed to completion in time for the Commonwealth Games in 2010...

...The family bids as a unit to work and thus you see the women and men working side by side...

...Some commentators have reported noticeable mobility, but others deny it exists...

...Within India the term "scheduled class" is the proper constitutional usage...

...We tried to find out how much upward mobility these policies actually create for those at the bottom of the caste system, but it turned out to be impossible to quantify...

...It is a land of amazing contrasts, increasingly open to the world and struggling to advance...

...More than three thousand castes and subcastes are recognized in India, sanctified by the Hindu religion and legitimated by government and the dominant culture...

...Later, in Agra, a sign on the door to the hotel-room balcony warned visitors to lock it to keep monkeys out...

...The serious changes under way in Indian society remain hidden from the traveler...

...Both parents and children seem eager to share horror stories of "love marriages" that have brought misery to couples who defy tradition...

...we asked our guides at each place...

...The individual is fixed in place through practices surrounding life's important events...

...But urban, chic, high-tech India was alive in the magazines on the hotel room coffee table, among them Time Out Delhi, its cover much like that of its counterpart seen on a newsstand in New York City the previous day...

...Information Agency as part of its contribution to activities marking International Women's Year...

...The resulting gender imbalance, created by both rural and middle-class families in India and throughout South Asia and China, was the subject of an article by Amartya Sen, stunningly entitled "More than 100 Million Women Are Missing," in the December 20, 1990, issue of the New York Review of Books...

...In India, at least, the abuse has finally been addressed through a legal ban on the use of sonograms for elective abortions, although we were told the practice continues...

...Certainly, many more than before have attained respected positions in academic life and in the government...

...Both countries now possess nuclear bombs, and missiles, and another war could extinguish Indian dreams of becoming a major economic and political power not only in Asia but in the rest of the world...

...and the legal, medical, and lab services linked with U.S...

...And "Why were there children at this site...

...What has changed...

...offices where sophisticated and educated young people work are behind closed doors...

...Was this the division of labor in the family that we read about...

...The resulting pollution clogs nasal passages and makes the eyes tear...

...There is an acute shortage of colleges in the country and a lack of vocational training institutes...

...It POLITICS ABROAD reinforced the visitor's belief that the new, modern India must lie hidden somewhere behind the anarchic traffic and crowds on the capital's streets...

...It has, after all, the ninth-largest industrial economy in the world and has substantial computer and nuclear capabilities...

...Though most—some 70 percent of India's 1.15 billion people—live in rural areas and are employed in the agrarian economy, the country's labor force is so huge (510 million) that even a comparatively small percentage working in a high tech field can have an important impact both on India's society and economy and internationally Yet, only 10 percent of the labor force is listed as employed by government or by companies in the "organized" economy—those with ten or more permanent employees...

...We listened to a tale of resistance against traditional repression, told by a sophisticated guide as our bus rolled between academic meetings and historic sites...

...Sociologist Mangala Subramanian reports that the phenomenon emerged in the late 1970s with the rise of the new middle class...

...Of the 202 million children who enroll in the country's one million primary schools every year, barely 15 percent make it to high school, according to a 2006 BusinessWeek article citing the findings of Pratham, a foundation that focuses on education...

...On the highways out of Delhi, to Jaipur and Agra, the old India—a country of half a million villages and eight hundred million rural peasants—is still very much alive...

...Whether this growth will continue and bring an Indian cultural revolution depends on Lenin's dictum, amended for the Indian case: What is to be done about caste...

...Children darted in and out of the construction sites and the lean-tos...

...These were not houses or trailers, but hovels under tarps and blankets, with laundry hanging on trees...

...Everywhere, roadsides were alive with a stream of women, men, and children, walking from place to place, often carrying wood or produce on their heads...

...It's all confusing and contradictory...

...Underlying it is, of course, the continuing second-class status of women...

...This is a travelers' report, not a study—a set of impressions to keep in mind when thinking about what Harrington called "the vast majority...

...We asked this question of two sets of leading Indian social scientists at conferences in Delhi and Jaipur...

...Oomen observed that caste, with its apparently intractable grip on Indian society, is rooted in Hindu religious belief...

...Though it provides a framework for social order in an often chaotic society and is a refuge for families and individuals without resources, it is at the same time a formidable barrier to equality and social and economic change...

...The two countries share religious hostility and border strife, especially in Kashmir, and have fought three wars in the sixty years since their creation in the violent partition of British India...

...But, now, as in the past, public education in the primary grades lags far behind...

...The broad lawns bordering the avenues of official Delhi, the imperial buildings of ministries and Parliament, and the massive India Gate marking India's contribution to the empire's victory in World War I are stage settings for picnic lunches and naps of hundreds of government clerks, the men in white shirts, the women in saris...

...In its worst form, it results in "dowry deaths"—the "accidental" deaths of young wives caused by husbands and in-laws if the wives' families do not meet demands for television sets, motorcycles, computers, or other expensive items...

...The media seemed to be inferring that India has turned a crucial corner in its progress from former colonial backwater to newly emerging participant in the global market...

...It looked picturesque until one saw an older woman (perhaps she was forty) sitting by the roadside with her bundle, eyes closed and exhausted...

...In the evenings, smoke from open cooking fires (fueled by dried cakes of cow dung fashioned by women) rises along Delhi's roads from the encampments of subway and road workers and others—rural migrants, scavengers, and those without housing in the city...

...But the economy has shown vigorous growth in recent years, due in part to extraordinary increases in the hightech and online administrative sectors...

...In the thirty years since he wrote, India's population has overtaken that of the United States and the expanded European Union combined...

...newspapers were very impressed with the large Indian contingent in Silicon Valley computerengineering and programming teams and their companies' efforts to win more work visas for new recruits from India...

...In his telling, an educated middle-class Delhi girl had complied with her parents' plan to negotiate her marriage with a prospective husband's family...

...The other 24 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 90 percent, some 460 million people, work the land and engage in local trades...

...We suppose the workers are grateful for the jobs...

...There is little room for deviation unless one rejects family, religion, and the social order...

...But the roadways to the city from the airport retained the old chaos, and en route by chartered bus to our hotel, we encountered the mayhem of cars, 22 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 scooter taxis, packed city buses, motorcycles carrying several people on the seats and handlebars, the odd person walking amid the traffic, and the more-than-occasional cow and infrequentbut-by-no-means-rare camel or elephant...

...THE QUESTION hanging in the smoky air is whether and how the country of the high-tech campuses and global business and professional information systems will one day prevail and extend its way of life and culture to the country of the 800 million others...

...we learn that high tech India is more evident in Mumbai and certainly in Bangalore...

...With Harrington's words in mind, we offer some perspectives gathered during a trip to India by Western sociologists that we coled under the sponsorship of the People to People Foundation—a nongovernmental organization formed with the support of President Dwight D. Eisenhower to bring American professionals face-to-face with counterparts in other regions of the world...

...The new Tata car...

...one wondered, seeing women in colorful saris, erect and balancing large bundles of brush...

...For one of us (CFE), it was a return visit to places mentioned by Harrington, because by chance both had attended the 1976 Fulbright conference in Gopalpur-on-Sea, Orissa State, a focus of his book...

...Scanning the American media before the trip, we were struck by how much attention they give to the growth of modern India—the computer design and engineering campuses of Mumbai and Bangalore...

...The following account mixes memories of 1976 with the sociologists' meetings of November 2007 and some informal research on the enormous changes in India during the past thirty years...

...The new IT class drinking in the bars of Mumbai...

...In spite of these efforts, India remains a traditional society, one in which women's roles are limited and often girls are victims of forced child marriage and child labor...

...It is evident, however, that there is a chasm between Indians in the high tech world and the universities and the hundreds of millions in rural India who remain functionally illiterate...

...The family tale of a fatal accident is generally accepted by police without further inquiry...

...Other legislation has guaranteed women elemental freedoms such as the right to divorce, to inherit property, and to vote (1950...

...The government has attempted repeatedly to establish rights for women and girls and to protect them against the abuses of traditional Hindu and Muslim societies...

...And only half of those-14,000,000—will graduate...

...SINCE independence in 1947, the Indian government has attempted to mitigate the harsher aspects of the caste system in ways first suggested by Mohandas Gandhi...

...the thriving call centers and online technical information networks serving overseas corporations and banks...

...But as we walked in Delhi and took bus and car trips through the capital, we saw few signs of the new India beyond some gated and guarded residential streets, a few huge glassedin malls, and the modern buildings of some corporations and private hospitals, where, we learned, medical tourists come for discounted kidney transplants or other major surgery...

...But, he noted, "To know a country from the inside, one must live there for years...

...And jobs are a life-and-death issue for a poor country with a high rate of increase...

...He answered that because the program was effective, some groups, rather than shunning the designation, have campaigned to be classified as OBCs in order to qualify for reserved jobs...

...Suttee, the Hindu tradition of widows' suicides on the death of their husbands, was outlawed by the British colonial administration during the nineteenth century, but it persists in some rural areas, and it has been the subject of repeated laws and enforcement efforts...