[Vision2020] The Wonder That Was--and still is--India

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Greetings:

When I got back from India last November, Phil Nisbet requested, off list or on, I don't recall, that I write something about my trip. I've been making mental and physical notes and gathering news paper clippings since then, but only now have had the time to do it.  I would like to dedicate this column to his memory.

The full piece is 3,000 words which I will put on my website when I get home.

THE WONDER THAT WAS—AND STILL IS—INDIA

By Nick Gier

In 1967 A. L. Basham published "The Wonder That Was India," which was so well regarded that it has now become a classic in Indian studies.  The meaning of wonder is obviously the awe that we experience standing before the Taj Mahal or our amazement at the exquisite marble filigree of a Jain temple.

There is another meaning of wonder of which I will speak.  This is the wonder not of awe and delight, but the wonder of puzzlement and despair.  There is the wonder how could they have done all these incredible things, but also the wonder why do they make it so difficult for themselves and fail to make the progress of which they are so fully capable. Even Indians agree that the wonders of India are both positive and negative, which I will now describe in alternating accounts.  

There is the wonder of India’s democracy, the largest and most dynamic in the world.  There are dozens of political parties that, after the demise of the once dominant Congress Party, are forced to form shaky coalitions.  Some of the alliances make for strange bedfellows, such as the Dalit (formerly “untouchables”) dominated BSP and Hindu nationalist BJP. 

There is the wonder why of Indian corruption. Every time I travel to India I am impressed with the individual initiative I see in street vendors and family stores, but corruption at every level has prevented this entrepreneurial spirit from translating into a prosperous national economy that benefits all Indians.

There is the wonder of India’s elite graduate schools, which recently have been ranked just behind Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. These graduates have made their presence felt in Silicone Valley, where 35 percent of the companies are Indian led; in NASA, where 36 percent of the scientists are Indian; and at the top of American medical practice and research.

There is still the disgrace of the Indian caste system, which divides Indians into four categories of priests, rulers/landlords, merchants/artisans (with over 1,000 sub castes), and farmers.  Even after years of governmental directives, 99 percent of the city workers in Hyderabad who pick up the garbage and clean the streets and sewers are Dalits, while a large majority of the higher positions go to those of high caste.

Still, there is the wonder of India’s religious diversity and tolerance. In the country that is more than 80 percent Hindu, the current president, a famous scientist, is Muslim, the prime minister is Sikh, and the Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi, Rajhiv Gandhi’s widow, is Roman Catholic. 

Returning to the negative, we wonder why it has to be that 40 percent of the world’s poor live in India, and 25 percent of the world’s women who die in childbirth are Indian.  Because of traditional preference for males, it is estimated that, with aid of prenatal sex selection, 10 million Indian female fetuses have been aborted over last 20 years. This has led to the worst ratio of females to males in the world: the lowest being 793 to 1,000 in the Punjab.

There is the wonder of New Delhi’s city government. It has found the political will to remove hundreds of roaming cows from its streets and also to force motorized rickshaw drivers to convert to compressed natural gas.  For the first time it was a delight to cruise this great capital city laid out beautifully by the British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens.

My most moving experience in India was one that I had in a poor Muslim village in Harayana state. A Hindu Goddess temple at which my hosts—six Hindus and two Sikh students—paid their respects dominated the village.  After the temple visit the students offered English or Hindi lessons to the village children, whose only good meal of the day, I was told, came from the temple’s curry kitchen. But as I was experiencing Gandhi’s vision of India, on that same day, December 6, 1992, Hindu fundamentalists tore down the Barbri Mosque in the Northern Indian city of Ayodhya. 

In 2004 Indian voters turned the BJP from office and their fundamentalist supporters are now in disarray. It is my hope that the Indians continue the religious harmony I experienced in that Harayana village rather than demean themselves in religious strife.