BOOK REVIEW The inscrutable
Indians Being Indian by
Pavan K Varma
Reviewed by Chanakya Sen
The greatest asset of any country is its people.
This aphorism holds especially for India, whose pool of
human resources and talent makes the best in the world
envious. Diplomat Pavan Varma's new rendering is a
discourse on what it means to be Indian in the 21st
century, and what characteristics make Indians tick with
resilience and elan in varied fields of excellence.
Generalizations on national psyche are amenable
to be challenged via exceptions or counter-examples.
Ergo, Varma disclaims in the preface: "India is too big
and too diverse to allow for convenient cover-all
labels." Yet personality traits and behavioral patterns
that are distinctly Indian do exist, accumulated over
centuries of conditioning. Varma's quest is to dig into
the core of this Indian-ness using history as the
teacher.
The stereotypes in which foreigners see
Indians and the self-image that Indians project about
themselves are both inaccurate. Indians are considered
democratic, spiritual, tolerant, peaceful etc. But
Varma's value-neutral reappraisal throws up surprising
conclusions that can be embarrassing. Indians respect
the powerful and will collude with them for personal
gain. They are extremely hierarchical, bending before
superiors and subjugating inferiors. They have never
been "other-worldly" and hanker for material prosperity.
Spiritualism is "mostly a means to harness divine
support for power and pelf". (p 7) Morality is a
theoretical construct abjured as impractical in real
life. Indians also sanction violence when convinced of
numerical strength and surety of victory. Varma's thesis
is that some uncomplimentary facets of Indians are
actually assets that make them resilient, tough and
successful.
The kowtowers Indians are
congenitally sensitive to the power calculus. From the
Maharajas and the British to modern politicians, the
powerful are not expected to be reticent or modest in
the Indian tradition. Power is a legitimate pursuit and
the winners are expected to flaunt it. Caste rigidities
may be blurring today but the preoccupation with
everyone's place in a hierarchy persists, akin to
Confucian value systems. Indians are obsessed with
status. They discount the morality and means of securing
status as long as one becomes mighty. Hinduism's
flexibility "always allowed a conveniently fractured
response to the moral imperative". (p 29) Beliefs never
come in the way of personal gain.
Pragmatic
Indians have always collaborated with a stronger power,
especially foreign conquerors (poignantly essayed in
Amitav Ghosh's novel The Glass Palace). They are
willing to acquiesce in the abuse of power when it seems
undefeatable. If power is ascendant, Indians
opportunistically defer. When it is declining, they turn
hostile. Personal rivalries, factions, jealousies and
intrigue are stock-in-trade of the Indian mind. Yet
Indians collude without being subsumed by masters, a
detachment which has preserved the Hindu way of life
despite being overrun by Muslim and Christian invaders.
Absence of ideals in the functioning of Indian
democracy is the result of a "societal consensus" where
power is the end and all the rest are instrumentalities
in reaching that end. Indira Gandhi was the leader
Indians trusted the most as she played the power game
with dexterity and ruthlessness. Democracy survives in
India as the most effective instrument for the pursuit
of power and upward mobility. It "provides legitimacy to
hierarchies". (p 54) Indians have a special genius for
political accommodation and compromise since the pursuit
of power would close if the institution of democracy
collapsed.
The materialists A
universal Indian feature is "to single-mindedly pursue
material benefit in the most adverse and improbable
situations". (p 61) The most important deities in the
Hindu pantheon are Lakshmi (goddess of wealth) and
Ganesh (remover of obstacles to commerce). Artha,
procurement of wealth, is among the four fundamental
goals of Hindu life. Only a person with material means
could properly tread the path to moksha
(salvation). Hindus show little compassion for the
indigent and the downtrodden. The Ramayana epic says,
"There is no difference between a poor man and a dead
one."
Entrepreneurship is in Indian blood. In a
scarcity economy, only the fittest are able to survive.
With instincts for improvisation, initiative, quick
thinking and cunning, Indians are "street-smart about
making money". (p 74) Most Indians privately agree that
money may not be god, but no less than god. Nothing
distracts them from the opportunity to make a fast buck.
Indians are willing to live easily with an "ethical
deficit" (former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee), a
dual chalice containing corruption as well as robust
commercial acumen. The ideologies of socialism or
Gandhian austerity are "clearly not in sync with the
Indian psyche". (p 86) The protuberance of consumerism
since 1991 is entirely in keeping with Indian
inclinations. Economic reforms unleashed India's mammoth
entrepreneurial energy and adaptability but also
deepened its neglect of the poor.
Metaphysical
concepts like maya (illusion that the world is
real) are lip-serviced when the going is good, but
dusted out in times of adversity to "give failure the
cushioning of philosophical acceptance". (p 99) Indians
are better able to survive distress and mishaps owing to
certain unique concepts in their religious beliefs.
The technocrats What is the role of
culture in nurturing Indians as the czars of the
information technology revolution? Mathematics is the
single greatest contribution of India to the world of
science. In Vedic times, Indians mastered numeration as
part of religious ritual. More than 3,000 years ago,
Indians built the world's most extensive database, the
Bhrigu Samhita, predating modern information management.
A bias in favor of competence in math goes back to
millennia. Indians have an innate receptivity to the
interconnectedness of things. They are able to structure
a link between a sum and its parts, and see patterns of
networks invisible to most others. "A German or a
Japanese will work meticulously within the system. An
Indian is taught to take failure of the system in his
stride and find a solution anyhow." (p 145)
Indian culture forever looks down on manual
labor as degrading and higher studies as the ladder to
climb the hierarchical totem pole. Hence, institutes of
higher learning and technical education proliferated
after independence at the cost of primary education. The
largest number of unschooled children and the largest
reservoir of trained geeks coexist in India. Social
callousness for the uplift of the marginalized has
ironically made India an IT superpower.
Relentless greed for money has motivated Indian
IT entrepreneurs, who head the list of the country's
billionaires. The salary of an IT professional is much
higher than the amount spent to acquire his or her
skills. Working knowledge of English, a major asset of
Indians in the IT market, is a product of the Indian
eagerness for Lord Macaulay's project of creating "a
class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English
in taste, opinions, morals and intellect". English is an
instrument of social exclusion in India, but
paradoxically for the IT industry, "a bane has become a
boon". (p 127)
Many Indian techies are at the
low end of the value chain, mocked as "cyber coolies".
Varma links it to "centuries of hierarchic regimentation
that conditioned them to obey rather than to innovate …
to embellish the groove rather than to explore new
avenues." (p 130) All Indians harbor a deep inferiority
complex toward the West and are stuck in a "vast
imitativeness trying to be like someone else". (p 134)
The flag bearers of the new economy are ironically
socially backward and trapped in old conservatism. Many
have no objections to extorting fat dowries and
humiliating women.
The
unifiers India's perceived diversity is often
deceptive. Indians have a vast number of genes in
common. Their polyglot vocabulary has its roots in only
four major language families. Varma sees "a new
supranational Indian culture that cuts across class
barriers and permeates all aspects of daily life: dress,
food, art, language, employment and entertainment". (p
149) Indians are far more homogenized than they can
admit. The salad bowl is emptying into a melting pot,
dissolving differences.
Radio, television,
Bollywood, cricket, popular music etc are mediums fast
integrating India's 1 billion plus denizens. So many
more Indians speak Hindi today that it would surprise
the language's staunchest opponents. The anti-Hindi
bastion of Chennai has more private tuitions for
learning Hindi than any other city. Markets have
homogenized a pan-Indian class of consumers. There is an
identifiable similarity across the country in product
tastes and preferences. Increasing middle class domestic
tourism means Indians are no longer strangers in their
own land.
Though violence is a staple in
society, Indians have displayed unwarranted pacifism in
dealing with external threats. In the 1999 Kargil war,
the option of destroying staging posts and supply lines
of invaders across the border was rejected. After the
Pakistan retreat began, Indian forces were ordered not
to shoot in the back. During the 1999 IC-814 plane
hijacking, the overriding concern of the state and
relatives of victims was the lives of hostages, not the
national interest of confronting terror. In dealing with
internal threats, Indians do not think that to concede
is to lose. Concessions co-opt extremists and sanctify
the mainstream. Historically, all separatist movements
have been eventually contained, assimilated and diluted
by this ploy.
Varma opines that the vision of
India engulfed in perpetual religious strife is vastly
exaggerated (see Khushwant Singh's The End of
India). Remarkably self-assured Hindus have never
been insecure about their religion. They accepted Muslim
and Christian rulers but not their faith. No practical
alternative to religious coexistence is comprehensible
to the average Indian. For workers as well as
businesspersons, there is no choice but communal
harmony. In politics, Muslims form political alliances
with Hindu parties. Condemnable riots are actually
outnumbered by "countless incidents of religious harmony
in the daily ebb and flow of life". (p 181) Indians are
hard-nosed realists wanting to get on with their daily
work rather than be mired in self-defeating identity
quagmires.
Varma concludes with the thesis that
public policy in India has mostly been insertion of
square pegs in round holes. It should be congruent with
the behavioral patterns of Indians as they are, not as
they ought to be. India will not fall apart, but for it
to attain critical mass for take-off as a major world
power, Indian policymakers should know the nature and
proclivities of their people and design policy
interventions buttressing them.
This book is
controversial for its candid debunking of myths about
Indians. Psychoanalysis has been brilliantly used to
bare the average Indian sans affectations. Those who
felt understanding inscrutable polymorphic Indians was
impossible now have a master guide.
Being
Indian by Pavan K Varma, Penguin Books India, New
Delhi, 2004. ISBN: 0-67-005780-0. Price: US$ 7.50, 238
pages.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd.
All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
Varma's new rendering is a
discourse on what it means to be Indian in the 21st
century, and what characteristics make Indians tick with
resilience and elan in varied fields of excellence.
