India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India

PROLOGUE

The East Coast Road has changed. Twenty-five years ago, when I was a child growing up at its edge, it was a potholed tar road that meandered across the South Indian countryside, cutting through rice fields and coconut plantations and sleepy fishing villages. The views were stunning—a rippled ocean, the gray waters of the Bay of Bengal, shimmering under the harsh coastal sun.

Sometime in the nineties, government contractors descended upon the road. They surveyed neighboring fields and farms, they bulldozed surrounding huts. Villages were cut in half, families were uprooted. Hundreds of ancient trees were brought down. Activists protested, but they were told the social and ecological disruption was the price of progress.

By the time I moved back to India, in the winter of 2003, after more than a decade in America, the country road I knew as a child had become a 160-kilometer highway. Politicians extolled it as a model for modern India—an ambitious collaboration between government and private companies, the kind of infrastructure the country needed to develop its economy.

The surface of the East Coast Road is now a smooth mix of tar and powdered rock. The road is adorned with dividers that glow in the dark, signs for emergency services, and toll counters that light up the night with their halogen lamps and bright metal booths. Some of the rice fields remain, and the views are still beautiful. But much of the countryside has given way to the promised development—beach resorts, open-air restaurants, movie theaters, and scores of small tea shops catering to the tourists that throng the road on weekends.

At the top of the East Coast Road, outside the city of Chennai, the capital of the state of Tamil Nadu, tourist attractions lead into urban congestion. Traffic is denser, the crowds swell off the sidewalks and onto the streets, and the ocean breeze is obstructed by tightly packed shops and office buildings.

The East Coast Road joins Rajiv Gandhi Salai, Chennai’s technology corridor. The change here is even more striking. Twenty-five years ago, Rajiv Gandhi Salai was itself a country road, a little-used path that carried tourists from Chennai to the seaside town of Mahabalipuram. Like the East Coast Road, it was bordered by farms and plantations; well into the nineties, when the software and outsourcing companies began setting up shop, you could see the occasional tractor, maybe even a bullock cart, on the road.

Today, Rajiv Gandhi Salai, also referred to as the Old Mahabalipuram Road—as if to distance it from the present, to demarcate it as a relic from a different moment in the nation’s history—is a showcase of the new India. The farmland has become fertile terrain for steel-framed and glass-paneled office buildings. These buildings house the technology companies driving India’s economic boom—the Yahoo!s and PayPals and Verizons that have rushed into the country over the last couple of decades, but also local upstarts like Infosys, Satyam, and Wipro that have for the first time put India on the map of global business.

Employees of these companies—men in tightly tucked shirts and khakis, women more likely to be dressed in pants than saris—swarm to work in the mornings, jamming the highway with their motorcycles and scooters. At noon, they break for lunch on well-maintained gardens, expansive lawns adorned with transplanted palm trees, like something out of Southern California. These are the foot soldiers of India’s surging economy; with their confidence, their enthusiasm, their willingness to work long hours, they are driving the emergence of a new nation.

It was to this new nation—this country where rice fields were giving way to highways, farmland to software complexes, and saris to pants—that I returned in 2003. I was coming home, but in many ways it was to a home I didn’t recognize anymore.

I landed in Chennai on a December morning. It was just before dawn. The sky was a dark blue, the air was cool but heavy. I remember being surprised by the humidity.

Outside the airport, amid the touts and baggage handlers, the commotion of a crowd whose crush I had almost forgotten, I caught an air-conditioned car. I was going to Auroville, the town where I had grown up, about a three-hour drive from Chennai.

I took the East Coast Road. In Chennai, I crawled through congested streets where traffic had once flowed easily, and I drove past the towers of Rajiv Gandhi Salai, their cubicles lit up even at that early hour. Outside the city, with the ocean gleaming on the horizon, I passed through the urban sprawl of gated communities and plotted-out fields.

In the village of Kadapakkam, about an hour and a half from the airport, I stopped for a coffee in a tea shop by the side of the road. The owner of the tea shop was a skinny, garrulous man. He stood over a kerosene stove and told me about his life. He said he was born poor, the son of a landless laborer. The road had changed everything for him.

He talked about the taxis and buses that stopped in at his tea shop, about the new house he had built, about the motorcycle he had bought himself. He talked about the private school where he sent his children.

He talked and talked and then, while he was talking, an older man sitting in front of me, a customer, interrupted. He told the owner he was wrong; the road had ruined many lives. He spoke about families that had lost their houses to government acquisition, about all the development that had spoiled the area, about the accidents.

Just last month, the customer said, a boy, the relative of someone he knew, was run over and killed outside this village.

Their conversation turned into an argument; a few others joined in. I listened for a while, and then I turned away. I was jet-lagged, still taking in the familiar yet strangely unfamiliar sounds and smells of my childhood. But I heard enough to know that I was with the owner: I welcomed the change. I found what was going on in India exciting, even intoxicating.

In America, I had been living in New York. I loved New York—loved the nightlife, loved the parks, loved the diversity of the city—but increasingly, I had found life there stifling. America, I felt, was in a kind of fog. The war in Iraq was turning sour, the economy was sputtering. The country was depressed, consumed with forebodings of decline.

India was so different. India was emerging from its depression, a centuries-long misadventure of colonialism, poverty, and underdevelopment. Now, on its way to what was surely a better future, the country was giddy, exuberant. Bookstores were filled with titles like India Arriving, The Indian Renaissance, and India Booms. Newspapers and magazines regularly ran surveys showing that India was the most optimistic country in the world.

In America, my friends were worried about losing their jobs; they held on to what they had. But in India, people I knew were quitting their jobs, casting aside the safety of well-established careers for the excitement—and potential riches—of starting their own business. Every other person I met dreamed of being an entrepreneur; they were willing to take a bet on the future.

It was as if my world had come full circle. I had grown up between India and America, the son of an Indian father and an American mother. I always considered both countries home. In 1991, at the age of sixteen, I moved to America in search of better education and more opportunities. Like so many before me, I was escaping the economic and social torpor of India—the austerity imposed by the nation’s socialist economy, the fatalism and bureaucracy that blocked all creative impulse and even a hint of entrepreneurial energy.

The India of my youth felt cut off, at the edge of modernity. When I boarded that plane in Chennai, trading the heat of coastal South India for the bitter winters of boarding school in Massachusetts, I felt like I was entering the world.

Now, twelve years later, India was at the center of the world. It was India, with its resurgent economy, high savings rates, and young, educated workforce, that beckoned with the sense of a brighter future; it was India that offered the promise of a country and an economy on the upswing. Einstein once wrote of America that its people were always becoming, never being, but it was in India now that I felt that sense of newness, of perpetual reinvention and forward momentum that I had felt when I first moved to America.

Almost half a century ago, R. K. Narayan, that great chronicler of Indian life in a slower, less complex time, traveled through the United States. In a book he later wrote about his journey, he noted the apparently irreconcilable gaps that separated the two nations. America and India are profoundly different in attitude and philosophy, he wrote. Indian philosophy stresses austerity and unencumbered, uncomplicated day-to-day living. America’s emphasis, on the other hand, is on material acquisition and the limitless pursuit of prosperity.

Indians, Narayan added, cultivate a certain otherworldliness. Americans have a robust indifference to eternity. A typical American works hard and earnestly, acquires wealth and enjoys life. He has no time to worry about the afterlife.

By the time I returned home, India was determinedly shedding the abstemiousness and detachment that had defined it since independence. Material acquisition was no longer the preserve of Americans. The otherworldliness of an earlier era—a certain apathy, a charming if ultimately unproductive indifference—was being replaced by the energetic (and often ruthless) ambition of a new generation.

A great reconciliation was taking place. As a boy, my two worlds had often felt very far apart. India and America were literally—but also socially, culturally, and experientially—on opposite sides of the planet. Now, for better and for worse, in ways that both excited and at times frightened me, I felt as though India was co-opting the very qualities that defined America.

India’s transformation began in 1991, when a financial crisis forced the government to lower import barriers, ease foreign exchange controls, and allow a greater degree of private investment. These reforms unleashed the nation, spurring economic growth from an anemic 3.5 percent or so (what economists derisively referred to as the Hindu rate of growth) to around 8 or 9 percent. They transformed a closed, socialist—or at any rate semi-socialist—nation into a country that was far more willing to accept and even embrace global capitalism.

The change was most evident in the cities, in urban metropolises like Chennai and Bangalore and Mumbai, which were the first to feel the impact of the reforms. On the green lawns of software parks, in the corridors of new shopping malls, crowded with young consumers clutching cell phones and bags of cosmetics and DVDs, and in the bars and clubs where men and women mingled freely, I felt that India was being redefined. The nation was widening its horizons, experimenting with fresh ideas and ways of living.

But even in rural India, where I had grown up, and to which I was now returning, the reinvention was palpable.

Auroville is in the countryside; it is surrounded by five villages. In the fields around me, farmers who had once gone to work in bullock carts without tires now drove shiny tractors. Down at the beach, fishermen were trading catamarans for diesel-powered motorboats. Satellite dishes were ubiquitous, and even a couple of ATMs had sprouted up between the older thatch huts and the new concrete buildings.

In both city and country, in shopping malls and on farms, what struck me most about India was not so much the cell phones and satellite dishes and other physical manifestations of change. I was impressed by something less tangible, something in the spirit of the nation.

Middle-class children, sons and daughters of parents who had aspired to nothing so much as a secure government job, were planning careers as software entrepreneurs; they envisioned themselves as the next Bill Gates. Farmers and fishermen were setting up restaurants and guesthouses; their ambition challenged the social order that had for so long pinned them to poverty and illiteracy.

For the first time—the first time in my life, but arguably in India’s history, too—people dared to imagine an existence for themselves that was unburdened by the past and tradition. India, I felt, had started to dream.

Later, after I had spent more time in the country, when I had traveled around and met more people, I began to question aspects of that dream. The self-confidence I began to see as a kind of blindness, an almost messianic conviction in the country’s future. The unrelenting optimism was often delusional, a blinkered faith that ignored the many problems—the poverty, the inequality, the lawlessness, the environmental depredation—still facing the nation.

I grew less impressed with the shopping malls and shiny office complexes, with the fancy bars and the variety of cocktails they served. I began to feel that the country was being engulfed in its encounter with capitalism, swallowed by a great wave of consumerism and materialism that threatened to corrode the famous Indian soul.

Nothing is free. The more time I spent back home, the more it became apparent to me that India would have to pay a price for its prosperity—that new money was being accompanied by new forms of inequality, that freedom and opportunities were opening the floodgates, too, to disorder and violence.

Millions of Indians have risen out of poverty since the nation’s economic reforms. But millions more remain in poverty, and millions, too, are being subjected to the psychological dislocation of having their world change, of watching a social order that has given meaning to them—and their parents, and their grandparents before them—slip away.

Development, I came to understand, was a form of creative destruction. For everyone whose life was being regenerated or rejuvenated in modern India, there was someone, as well, whose life was being destroyed.

This book really contains two stories. One is a story of progress, of the sense of purpose and direction that rapid economic growth can bestow on a nation that had in many ways lost faith in itself. The other is a darker story; it tells of the destruction and disruptions caused by the same process of development.

One process, two outcomes. India is a complex country. Sometimes the creativity and the destruction, the good and the bad, were hard to disentangle.

I didn’t see this complexity when I first came back. My understanding of the country I had known only as a boy was superficial. When I landed on that winter morning in Chennai and took the East Coast Road back to Auroville, I saw just the optimistic side of India.

I suppose I saw what I wanted to see. After years of feeling alienated, never quite belonging in America, I was desperate to find a home. This book is in part a story of that homecoming—of how I embraced and found myself revitalized in the new India, of how I rejoiced in the nation’s economic progress; and then of how, after a few years, I learned to see the many edges, more than a few jagged, of that strange phenomenon called development.

Most of all, this book is the story of the people I met after returning to India. These people allowed me to glimpse, and at least partially understand, the complexity and nuance of this exceptionally layered country. I have come to know India again through the men and women who shared with me their life stories, who allowed me into their families and their homes. Many of these people have become friends; their friendship has allowed me to write this book.

I have been back in India, now, for a little over nine years. A lot has happened in my life during that time. I have built a house, married, had two children. Sometimes I watch my boys—Aman, age six, and Emil, age four—play in the same forests I did as a child, run through the same fields and villages I knew when I was just a little older than they are. It makes me happy, warms me in a place that I didn’t know I had until they were born, that their childhood memories will occupy the same landscape as mine.

But I know, also, that that warm feeling is a little bit of wishful thinking—that though the forests and fields and villages remain, and though my children are growing up, as I did, in rural India, nothing is really as it was. The world I knew as a boy doesn’t exist anymore.

Most of the time, I’m at peace with that reality. I celebrate the new India. But there are moments when all I can focus on is the sense of loss—the memory of a time before software parks and shopping malls, the sobriety and moral purpose of a country before it succumbed to the bland homogenizations of twenty-first-century capitalism.

I know that the great transition under way now is inevitable, and probably even desirable. I know, too, that it is unstoppable. The forces at work in modern India are part of the great sweep of history. All I can do is watch them, understand them, and maybe, through understanding, learn to accept them.

I’d like to think of this book as a step in that direction. It represents my effort to come to terms with the forces remaking my home.

Part I

GOLDEN TIMES

"We used to ride across these fields on horses," R. Sathyanarayanan, or Sathy, as he called himself, told me.

I remember it so well. We’d ride from that mountain over there, where my uncle lived. My father had a gun, a Webley & Scott pistol from Birmingham he’d inherited from my grandfather. He’d shoot it in the air to announce our arrival. The whole village knew we were coming. Our cook would warm up the food.

We were standing in an empty field outside Sathy’s village of Molasur. It was summer. The land was hard and dry. Sathy was dripping with sweat.

He pointed to the gray mountain on the horizon by which his uncle still lived. He said all the land between that mountain and where we were now standing, thousands of acres, had once belonged to his family. They were zamindars, feudal lords. Not too long ago, just a few decades, they had ruled over the land and the villages on it like country nobility.

We walked through the flat fields, along irrigation channels, up an embankment overlooking a village reservoir. The reservoir was empty. Ancient granite steps led down the embankment. Sathy sat on one of the steps and talked about fishing and swimming in the reservoir with his brothers when they were boys.

Back then, he said, the reservoir was always full. Now it was full only after the rains, when the monsoons brought muddy water from the fields and surrounding hills. But Sathy never went swimming anymore, and he never let his children fish in the reservoir. It was too dirty, he said; villagers used the area as a toilet. They lined up in the mornings, crouched around the reservoir, and used the water to clean themselves.

It’s disgusting, Sathy said, and he shook his head and wrinkled his nose. The reservoir had been built a thousand years ago. For a thousand years, it nurtured the village—irrigated the fields, provided bathing and drinking water to homes. People had forgotten all of that, Sathy said; now they defecated in the water.

People don’t care anymore, he said. Before, there was respect, there was decency. Now all that’s gone. Who knows what people believe in anymore?

He wiped the sweat from his brow. He pressed down on his mustache, flattening it with the sweat off his palms. Sathy had a big mustache. It curled up at the corners. Sometimes, when he pressed on it, settled it down, I thought he was trying to maintain a degree of control.

I met Sathy about a year after returning to India. He was forty-one years old. We were introduced by a relative of mine who ran an equestrian academy not far from Molasur. Sathy brought his children—his son, Darshan, age eight, and his daughter, Thaniya, age seven—to learn from her. He no longer kept horses in the village, but he wanted his children to know the old ways.

When my relative first told me about Sathy, she said he was a talkative man. She knew I was writing a book. She thought I might find some of his stories interesting.

So we met, one afternoon, in Pondicherry, a former French colony near Auroville, an elegant town of tree-lined streets and high-ceilinged villas by the ocean. We met in the courtyard of a hotel. We had coffee under a mango tree. Sathy talked a lot. He seemed jittery. I thought he was trying to impress me.

He told me all about his family at that first meeting—about their noble background, about the land they had owned, about the way they had dominated Molasur and the roughly seventy-five villages around it. He said they were Reddiars, members of a warrior caste that had migrated from the north some eight centuries ago and become the biggest landowners in the area.

He told me about a childhood of status and privilege. One of his ancestors, he said, was a famous chief minister of Madras Presidency, an amalgamation of South Indian states during colonial rule. He had grown up in the biggest house in Molasur. His family owned the only car in the village. Whenever they left home, villagers would line the roads and bow their heads in respect.

For centuries, the Reddiars had ruled over the countryside, making a comfortable living off agriculture, extracting labor and taxes from semi-indentured workers. They had proven to be adaptable rulers. Wave after wave of invaders—the great Chola dynasties, who controlled much of South India until the thirteenth century; the Mughals, who swept down from the north around the seventeenth century; and the British—came through. But the Reddiars always managed to hold on to their power.

Sathy talked a lot about his family’s land that afternoon—about the fields and forests that were their main source of wealth, about the hundreds of acres he still cultivated with rice and peanuts. Farming was in his blood, he said, and I could see he was excited, exuberant in a way that was almost childish, when he remembered the times he had spent with his father in the fields, burning under the sun or soaking in the rain, planting and plowing and reaping from their land.

It was harder to make a living off farming now, Sathy said. He leaned forward, as if he was letting me in on a secret. He emptied his third cup of coffee. He said that the land around Molasur was less fertile; it had been poisoned for too long by chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The water table, overextended and overpumped, was in decline.

Agriculture is a difficult business these days, Sathy said, and for the first time since we met, his confidence seemed to sag a little. He said it was a challenge to keep the farm running. He hinted that the family’s financial position wasn’t quite what it had once been.

It was just a little crack in the façade. There would be many more. But on that afternoon, Sathy pulled back quickly. He started talking about real estate. He said he’d been thinking about developing his land. There were fortunes to be made.

He’d been considering building some homes, maybe selling them to technology workers from the cities looking for country retreats. Or maybe he’d build a golf resort. He asked if I knew people with money; he invited me to join him in the resort project.

People in Chennai and Bangalore are big into golf these days, he said. It’s the new fashion. I’m sure they’d travel to my village if I had a world-class resort.

I wasn’t interested in building a golf course with Sathy. But I was interested in knowing more about his world. Sometimes Sathy seemed excited about the changes in Molasur, all the wealth and opportunities presenting themselves to my people (as he always referred to them). Other times he seemed less positive, even downcast. He worried about his loss of status, about the way the social order he had known as a boy was disappearing. He said that villagers were losing their values, succumbing to the temptations of money, turning into liars, cheats, and murderers.

People are lost, Sathy said to me one time. They no longer know who they are. All the money has taken them away from themselves.

I thought Sathy was himself a little lost. He seemed disoriented, maybe confused. I knew that his discomfort was in many ways cause for celebration, part of the great emancipatory wave sweeping across India. The old feudal order was crumbling; as the fortunes of the Reddiars declined, thousands of men and women in and around Molasur were rising.

Still, I couldn’t help feeling a little sympathetic. Molasur was around thirty kilometers from Auroville. My childhood was very different from Sathy’s, but I grew up in the same rural landscape. By the time I met him, it had become apparent to me that the world I had known was also disappearing. The change was overwhelming—and, in many ways, bewildering.

Once, the villages around Auroville had been a jumble of thatch huts, fetid ponds, mud roads, and cashew plantations. Malnourished children, their bellies bloated and their skin pulled tight against their faces, so that they looked like old men, played naked by the side of the road. Few houses had running water or electricity.

Now, a little more than a decade later, the villages were transformed. Mud roads had been tarred, and cashew plantations turned into restaurants, coffee shops, and yoga centers. Streets were jammed with mopeds and motorcycles and even cars. In the evenings, the restaurants were busy, buzzing. The prosperity, the sense of progress, was hard to deny.

But I knew, also, that below the shine of new money, below the easy confidence and optimism, the villages around my home were wounded places. The wealth that had flowed into the area had swept away existing hierarchies and power structures. It had led to new resentments, and new feelings of entitlement. It had demolished a long-standing social structure that held the villages together.

In the years before I returned to India, the villages in my area were wracked by gang warfare. More than ten people were killed. One of them was pulled off his motorcycle and hacked up in broad daylight. Another was chased through the streets, into a home where he took refuge, and cut into pieces. Someone I knew was kidnapped, bound with his son for several days before ransom was arranged.

Once, the panchayats, traditional assemblies made up of village elders, would have been able to control the violence. They functioned as local courts and law enforcement bodies. But young men in the area, flush with new money and a sense of empowerment, no longer feared their elders. The panchayats still met, under banyan trees and in temple courtyards, but they were mostly toothless. The village elders were intimidated by their youth; they didn’t dare assert their authority.

There was a woman I