A to Z of Indianness

This post is a collection of articles, written by Shashi Tharoor in The Times of India

What does it mean to be an Indian? Our nation is such a conglomeration of languages, cultures, ethnicities that it is tempting to dismiss the question as unanswerable. How can one define a country that has 2,000 castes and sub-castes, 22,000 languages and dialects and 300 different ways of cooking the potato? Sixty years after Independence, however, it will no longer do to duck the question. For amidst our diversities we have all acquired a sense of what we have in common: the assumptions, the habits, the shared reference-points that constitute the cultural and intellectual baggage of every thinking Indian.

Of course, India’s complexities make the task a little more difficult than that of the British friend who defined Englishness as “cricket, Shakespeare, the BBC”. Any Indian equivalent “cricket, Bollywood, the Mahabharata?” would be far more contentious. Instead of a phrase, therefore, one would need an entire glossary, an A to Z of Indianness. I’ve decided to embark on one in this space, not every week but from time to time, and readers’ suggestions for must-include topics are most welcome. And since each Indian has his or her own view of India, this glossary must be treated as being as singular and idiosyncratic, as wide-ranging and maddeningly provocative as India itself.

• Akashvani
• Ambassador
• Babri Masjid
• Bidis
• Birla
• Black money
• Bollywood
• Bureaucracy
• Buses
• Caste
• Cellphones
• Censorship
• Clubs
• Communal violence
• Cows
• Congress
• Corruption
• Cricket
• Crowds
• Dacoits
• Dhabas
• Dance
• Disinvestment
• Doodhwalas
• Dowry
• Elections
• Election symbols
• Emergency
• Eve-teasing
• Family planning
• Fasts
• Fasts, personal 
• Films 
• Gandhi
• Ganga
• Gavaskar, Sunil
• Gheraos
• Godmen
• Gulf, the
• Harijans
• Hindi
• Hinduism
• Hospitality
• Illiteracy
• Indianenglish 
• Indira 
• Information age
• Jokes 
• JP 
• Kama Sutra
• Kargil
• Khalistan
• Khan
• Kolkata
• Lata
• Law
• Laxman, R K
• Maharaja
• Mangoes
• Maruti
• Matrimonial ads
• Minorities
• Monsoon 
• Mother Teresa 
• Music 
• Nationalisation 
• Nehru 
• Nepotism 
• Non-alignment 
• Population
• Privatisation
• Public schools
• Queues
• Railways
• Ray Satyajit
• Reliance
• Rice
• Opinions 
• Paan 
• Parsis 
• Partition 
• Political Parties 
• Pollution 
• Religion 
• Renaming 
• Sari 
• Secularism 
• Singh, Khushwant 
• Socialism 
• Tagore, Rabindranath 
• The Taj Mahal 
• Tata 
• Tendulkar, Sachin 
• Tigers 
• Call Centres 
• IITs 
• Villages 
• Weddings 
• Xerox 
• Yes-men 
• Zoroastrianism 

Just a couple of decades ago I would have had to begin my glossary with All India Radio.
Akashvani: the voice of the sky, which was also the voice of millions of radio-receivers, transistors and loudspeakers blaring forth from puja pandals and tea shops. Its ubiquitousness reflected the indispensability of radio in a country where most people could not read, and where television was largely absent (can anyone still remember those days?). Despite the often heavy hand of government on its programmes, the anodyne cadences of its newsreaders and the requests for filmi-geet from improbably remote locations, All India Radio mirrored the triumphs and trivialities that engaged the nation.
But its moderation also meant mediocrity. In the first five decades of our Independence, when an Indian wanted real news, he switched on the BBC; for detailed analyses, he turned to the newspapers; for entertainment, he went to the movies. The rest of the time, he listened to Akashvani. Today, AIR’s monopoly has long since given way to a proliferation of cable television channels and the mushrooming of FM stations. So no Akashvani; but even in 2007 one cannot eliminate, as our first entry, the…

Ambassador: Ambassador cars are the classic symbol of India’s post-independence industrial development. Outdated even when new, inefficient and clumsy, wasteful of steel and petrol, overpriced and overweight, with a steering-mechanism like an ox-cart’s and a frame like a tank’s, the Ambassador dominated Indian routes for decades, protected and patronised in the name of self-reliance. Foreigners were constantly amazed that this graceless ugliness enjoyed two-year waiting-lists at all the dealers right up to the 1990s. What they didn’t realise is that if they had to drive on Indian roads in Indian traffic-conditions, they’d have preferred Ambassadors too.

Babri Masjid: The mosque that stood for nearly 470 years in Ayodhya before being demolished by a howling, chanting mob who never understood that you can never revenge yourself upon history, for history is its own revenge.

The Babri Masjid became the site where contending versions of history and faith fought each other over the rubble, where the very character and limitations of the Indian state were put on display for the world. Its destruction typifies a great national failure; the continuing impasse over what to put in its place reveals our talent for temporising, while the fundamental questions raised by the event remain unresolved. What could be better than a restored mosque side-by-side with a Ram mandir?

Bidis: Are, along with paan, India’s most original and long-lasting vice. There are few more authentically Indian sights than a five-rupee bundle of bidis, brown-green leaves rolled around a sprinkling of tobacco and tied together with a string of pink cotton. They also represent one of India’s great unfulfilled marketing opportunities. Made of wholly natural ingredients, low-tar and instantly biodegradable, bidis should prove eminently exportable to the ecology-conscious international smoking public.
If a cigarette had also those qualities it would rapidly become the brand-leader in its class. And there’s no proven link between bidis and cancer, mainly because chronic bidi smokers usually die of something else first. In other words, for once we have the technology and are ahead of the competition. Is anyone in computerland listening?

Birla: Is a name attached to a number of leading Indian institutions: mandirs, planetariums, trusts, schools, clinics, institutes of technology, all of which have been made possible by a number of other leading institutions to which the Birla name is not attached, like Century Mills and Ambassador cars. (Also see Tata.)

Black money: Is the real currency of traditional Indian business, the fuel of election campaigns, the high-octane of film star contracts, the spark of real-estate deals. The vast majority who don’t have any of it are condemned to irrelevance; the lack of black money is the real explanation for the relative weakness of the salaried middle-classes, with their printed payslips and taxes deducted at source.
Undeclared income is so widespread that its existence no longer shocks anyone; for all the years of liberalisation, the black economy is probably as large as the white one. If it’s any consolation, this also means that all the official figures for India’s GNP should be doubled to reflect reality, so the average Indian is only half as poor as he thought he was.

Bollywood: It’s Indian culture’s secret weapon, producing five times as many films as Hollywood — and taking India to the world, by bringing its brand of glitzy entertainment not just to the Indian diaspora in the US or UK but to the screens of Syrians and Senegalese.
A Senegalese friend told me of his illiterate mother who takes a bus to Dakar every month to watch a Bollywood film — she doesn’t understand the Hindi dialogue and can’t read the French subtitles, but she can still catch the spirit of the films and understand the story, and people like her look at India with stars in their eyes as a result. An Indian diplomat friend in Damascus a few years ago told me that the only publicly-displayed portraits that were as big as those of then-President Hafez al-Assad were those of Amitabh Bachchan. Without Bollywood, India would not loom as large in the global popular imagination.

Bureaucracy: Is simultaneously the most crippling of Indian diseases and the highest of Indian art-forms. No other country has elevated to such a pinnacle of refinement the quintuplication of procedures and the slow unfolding of delays. It is almost a philosophical statement about Indian society: everything has its place and takes its time, and must go through the ritual process of passing through a number of hands, each of which has an allotted function to perform in the endless chain. Every official act in our country has five more stages to it than anywhere else and takes five times more people to fulfil. (Also see Unemployment.)

Buses: Are Indians’ favourite means of transport, whether rattling along country roads taking villagers to melas or screeching through cities over laden with office-goers clinging to the sides, the window-bars, and the shirt-tails of other passengers. India knows a great variety of them, from dilapidated double-deckers to maniacal minibuses, which collectively constitute the cheapest mass public transportation system in the world. Regrettably the bus-drivers’ tendency to plough into pedestrians and drive off bridges also makes it among the most dangerous.

Caste: has been described as the glue that binds Indian society together, but thanks to the Constitution and decades of democracy, its worst features are beginning to come unstuck. While in the villages caste may still dictate where you live, whom you eat with and who you marry, it is more difficult in the cities to pick the shoulders you might rub with on the bus, and this is leading to a major decrease in urban caste-consciousness. On the other hand, post-Mandal reservations and the politics of opportunism have preserved the institution into the 21st century: after all, in much of rural India, when you cast your vote, you vote your caste. So the main thing that keeps caste going today is not negative discrimination but positive: the ‘affirmative action’ programmes with their quotas and reservations have created a vested interest in social backwardness. Not that the privileges for the Scheduled Castes and Tribes are unjustified: after centuries of oppression, it is the least that can be done for those who have known millennia of suffering. But today there are many parts of the country where you can’t go forward if you’re not a Backward…

Cellphones: The instrument that has truly networked India. We don’t have as many as China, but we’re now selling more every month (7 million) than any country on earth. Not only does it cost Indians less to use a cellphone than anyone else on the planet, but the handy little devices have done something that decades of socialism could not — they’ve empowered the less fortunate. Cellphones are wielded today by people who could not have dreamt of joining the eight-year waiting-lists our country used to have for land-line connections — drivers, farmers, fisherfolk. It is difficult to imagine a greater transformation than one wrought by the communications revolution in India, and the cellphone is its triumphant symbol.

Censorship: Has a strange status in India: unacceptable and even unthinkable in respect of the national print media, it is perfectly applicable to radio, TV, cinema and (in times of trouble) the provincial press. This is part of the elitism of the guardians of our public morals: those with the education and good taste to read the Times will not overreact to its contents, but the peasant in the villages must be protected from the pernicious effects of too much freedom. Sentiments we take for granted in the edit-pages of our big-city papers are thus carefully excised from All-India Radio discussions; fashion shows on TV are rigorously screened to weed out non-conformist attire that might shock the sensibilities of the custodians of Bharatiya sanskriti. While nudes appear in urban glossy magazines to titillate the bourgeoisie, villagers for whom partially-clad women are a daily sight are spared the view of bare Bollywood bosoms by our city-based censors. Violence is illegal but is rife on our screens; love is legal but is reduced to coyness by our censors. It’s time our democracy decided we’re mature enough to do away with censorship altogether.

Clubs: Were thought likely, by Forster and other critics of colonialism, to be the first British institution to die with imperialism. In India, however, they simply passed into the hands of another elite and have carried on gloriously unchanged, with week-old British papers still available in the members’ reading-rooms and areas off-limits to women. Clubs are harmless enough as pleasant places to escape from the bustle of the city and to catch a game of tennis or a cucumber sandwich. But when they preserve the worst of the colonial legacy without the slightest imagination or national self-respect, as far too many do, they are worse than absurd. As a child i was thrown out of the Breach Candy swimming-pool in Bombay for being an Indian, a state of existence my innocent American host had not imagined would pose a problem in India; as a teenager i have been upbraided by a committee member for not taking a fork-and-knife to my naan at dinner; in another club i have had to tuck a kurta into the waistband of my trousers, since a flowing desi garment was not considered appropriate attire. The communist minister who led a party of sweat-stained Santhal tribals into the pool of a whites-only club in Calcutta in 1969 expressed the feelings of millions of his countrymen. What a pity the tribals could not then be elected to the club’s committee to put its affairs straight for good.

Communal violence: Is, tragically, a sad reality and an avoidable stain on the Indian societal map. Every Indian carries with him the shame of the periodic bouts of blood-letting that hit the world’s headlines: Hindu-Muslim, Thakur-Harijan, Assamese-Bengali, Sikh-Hindu, Shia-Sunni. One of the costs of being a composite nation proud of its storied “unity in diversity” is that diversity sometimes asserts itself at the expense of unity. When the madness passes, asjavascript:void(0) it always does, what is left amidst the wreckage is the belated recognition of intertwined destinies.

Cows: Are as much a symbol of India as of Switzerland, though ours do not contribute to a flourishing cheese and chocolate industry. But the veneration of the cow and its ubiquitousness have become something of a cliche, masking the often depressing reality of the conditions in which Indian cows live and die.

Congress: Was the name of our national movement before it became reduced to that of a political party, and new generations of Indians are continuing to discover how vital is its magic. Shorn of its associations, ‘Congress’ is even a faintly absurd name, for all it means is ‘assembly’, but it is the association with the freedom struggle that makes ‘Congress’ such a sought-after suffix even for opposition parties (from the Tamil Maanila Congress to the Trinamool Congress). No other political party in the developing world has as old or as seminal a history, as agglomerative a nature and as many offspring (with Congresses-I, O, R, S, J and even U at one stage). The Indian National Congress even inspired the African National Congress in South Africa and a host of lesser parties around the globe. That is why, even as it is reduced to heading a minority government, the Congress — as a movement and a model — should remain a source of pride for Indians, even those who utterly reject its performance after Independence.

Corruption: Is endemic in our society, even if it is never quite as all-pervasive as we ourselves proclaim it is. Indians are givers and takers of bribes, adulterators of foodstuffs, black marketeers of cinema tickets, resellers of train reservations, payers of capitation fees. Our soil nurtures bootleggers, smugglers, hoarders and touts of all descriptions. Perhaps this is because there are so many laws and regulations that some will always have to be violated; perhaps it is that in any situation of resource-scarcity, temptation will always be reinforced by need; perhaps it is simply that we have so many underpaid officials exercising power out of all proportion to their earnings that some are bound to want to narrow the gap by profiting from the power to permit. Perhaps, as Gibbon remarked about the Roman Empire, corruption is merely “the infallible symptom of constitutional liberty” — how else can politicians afford to run for election, after all? Or perhaps we should stop making excuses and find within ourselves a Hercules to clean out our Augean stables.

Cricket: Was not considered our national sport until quite recently (when I was growing up, that was supposed to be hockey) but the crowds at cricket matches and the media coverage of the game confirm the new reality. In how many countries would work crawl practically to a halt during a major match, crowds stay awake till the wee hours of the morning to hear a result from abroad and pilots interrupt their passengers’ reveries to announce the latest score? The range and subtlety of cricket, its infinite variations and complexities, its vulnerability to the caprices of the weather and its inability to guarantee a result make it perfectly suited to the Indian temperament. Now that our players’ performances are beginning (World Cup aside) to match the spectators’ enthusiasm, now that talent scouts and coaches are moving to the villages, now that the money in the game is attracting players of ability from all walks (and runs!) of life, now that 80% of the sport’s global revenues come from India, it is time to celebrate the truth in Ashis Nandy’s claim that cricket is really an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British.

Crowds: Are an inescapable feature of Indian life. If foreigners stepping on to Indian streets for the first time were asked to name what struck them most about India, it would not be the heat, the dust or the poverty but simply the crowds — the enormous pressure of people on every available space. Pavements and parks, maidens and markets, buildings and buses are all full to an extent never seen elsewhere. There is no such thing in India as a deserted street, an empty train or even a secluded spot. Every act that takes place in public, from a farewell kiss to a film shooting, immediately attracts an audience; every inch of open space has at least two claimants; open air offers no release from claustrophobia. The fact that Indians manage to live, function and order their creative energies even in these circumstances is a remarkable feat of social organisation.

And before we leave the letter ‘C’, a further thought about caste, which featured last time: Who could have imagined for 3,000 years that an ‘untouchable’ woman would rule India’s most populous state? It’s all to the good that this has happened not once, but thrice, with Mayawati in UP; it’s even better that Dalits have served as President and Chief Justice of India. Caste isn’t what it used to be, an ineradicable stigma that could make or break your prospects. Perhaps the most important ‘C’ word of all in our glossary should be Change.

Dacoits: Are an Indian peculiarity: even the word doesn’t exist anywhere else. While they flourish in varying degrees all over the country, the image conjured up by the word is that of the mustachioed bandits of the Chambal ravines, with their blood-feuds, their codes of honour, their glamorous ‘bandit queens’. In their tyranny over innocent villagers, their rapacious plunder (Veerappan despoiled the natural resources of his jungle as ruthlessly as any contractor) and the toll they have taken in human lives, the dacoits have exceeded the worst excesses of the Wild West, but it is typically Indian that the main method of bringing them to book has not been the gunfight at OK Corral but the extraordinary ‘mass surrenders’ masterminded by assorted Gandhians.

Dhabas : Are everywhere, even if they are called kadais in Tamil Nadu and other things elsewhere. Few Indians have not bought tea, cigarettes, soft drinks or even an impromptu meal at a dhaba . And these sheds, roughly constructed of thatch or aluminium sheeting with a rudimentary wooden bench (if anything) to sit on, invariably offer more pleasure, and better food, than most five-star hotels. Which is why fancy hotels are setting up five-star fare in places they disingenuously call ‘ Dhaba ‘…

Dance: Has a curiously schizoid status in India. The revival of classical dance since Independence has helped Indians rediscover a precious heritage of great beauty and skill, and the encouragement of folk dancing has brought respectability and public attention to such expressions of rural exuberance as the bhangra or the ottamthullal . But for the mass of the urban public, dance is still something to be viewed on the stage, rather than a participatory activity, and social dancing is still widely disapproved of as decadence on legs, confined to discos and nightclubs patronised by a tiny and westernised elite.

Disinvestment: A charming Indian euphemism for getting the government out of businesses that it has no business being involved in. (See ‘Privatisation’.)

Doodhwalas: Are still features of Indian life, despite the recent mushrooming of ‘milk booths’ on certain city corners and the availability of packaged milk in supermarkets. They testify to the persistence of India’s traditional social relations in the face of the encroachments of urbanisation; and more prosaically to the lethargy of the Indian consumer, who would rather put up with watered milk delivered to his doorstep than pick up a quality-controlled bottle of it elsewhere.

Dowry: Is the classic Indian social evil: the cause of much rural indebtedness, a great deal of human misery and sometimes the death of an unwanted bride, usually in a ‘kitchen accident’. There are still those who justify dowry as recompense for the parents of the son, and many who, more ‘progressively’, argue that it is really intended for the bridal couple to make their start in life. Whatever the arguments, nothing can justify the misery caused by dowry; yet, despite years of campaigning for its abolition, and four decades during which the giving or receiving of dowry has been formally illegal, the iniquitous practice continues. In our country, social pressures are more powerful than legal or moral ones — even when the pressure is to do the wrong thing.

Elections: Are a great Indian tamasha , conducted at irregular intervals and various levels amid much fanfare. It takes the felling of a sizeable forest to furnish enough paper for 600 million ballots, and every election has at least one story of returning officers battling through snow or jungle to ensure that the democratic wishes of remote constituents are duly recorded. No election coverage is complete, either, without at least one picture of a female voter whose enthusiasm for the suffrage is undimmed by the fact that she is old, blind, crippled, toothless or purdah- clad, or any combination of the above. Ballot-boxes are stuffed, booths are ‘captured’, the occasional election worker/candidate/voter is assaulted/kidnapped/shot, but nothing stops the franchise. At every election someone discovers a new chemical that will remove the indelible stain on your fingernail and permit you to vote twice (as if this convenience made any great difference in constituencies the size of ours); at every election some distinguished voter claims his name is missing from the rolls, or that someone has already cast his vote (but usually not both).
At every election some ingenious accountant produces a set of figures to show that only a tenth of what was actually spent was spent; somebody makes a speech urging that the legal limit for expenditure be raised, so that less ingenuity might be required to cook the books, and everyone goes home happy. Elections are an enduring spectacle of free India, and give a number of foreign journalists the opportunity to remind us and the world that we are the world’s largest democracy. But they are also an astonishing achievement that we take for granted at our peril.

Election symbols: Lend both colour and clarity to our political landscape. The great Indian achievement of reducing the differences among a bewildering array of parties to the graphic simplicity of bicycles and banyan trees has been deservedly imitated elsewhere. (There is, of course, somewhat less universal appeal to the dhoti-clad farmer in his plough, and political parties abroad might not so bitterly contest the right to be identified by two yoked bullocks, but the principle remains worthy of emulation). Symbols can, however, cause their own confusions, as when a number of electors in the early 1980s cast their votes for the wrong Congress, thinking that the woman on its symbol was meant to represent Indira Gandhi. In the mid-1990s the Election Commission forbade parties from choosing small animals or birds as symbols — after one candidate chose a parrot and his rival proceeded to wring a real parrot’s neck to show what he would do in the contest. An elephant would have been safer!

Emergency: A period almost everyone would rather forget, during which elections were suspended but jail sentences for politicians were not, and censorship suddenly involved more than oculatory activity on celluloid. For many Indians it was a watershed in their political growth, because the assumptions they had always made about the kind of polity in which they lived were so rudely shaken.
For others, it was merely a period of fewer strikes and power-cuts, when prices were stable and yes, the trains ran on time. But those were the side-effects of a far more fundamental change of system — and you don’t need an Emergency to attain those ends.

The phase ended happily, with free elections that defenestrated the government, but it demonstrated the fragility of institutions Indians had begun to take for granted and so strengthened the determination of those who wished to protect them. Ironically, the Emergency’s most lasting legacy was the impetus it gave the press upon its withdrawal. Courage, innovation and investigative journalism, all conspicuously lacking in the pre-Emergency press, became hallmarks of the newly-freed media. There’s nothing like losing your freedom to make you realise how much you can do with it; Indians are among the very few people in the world to have been given the opportunity to act on that realisation.

Eve-teasing: Is a uniquely Indian activity. It is not that Italians and Indonesians don’t have the same proclivities, simply that the term itself doesn’t exists anywhere else. ‘Eve-teasing’, with its coy suggestion of innocent fun, is of course, another of the numerous euphemisms that conceal the less savoury aspects of our national life. Anyone who has seen eve-teasing in operation in Delhi knows that the term masks sordid and often vicious behaviour by depraved youths against victims often in no condition to resist. Calling it ‘assault’ or ‘molestation’ would be more honest and might do more to raise public consciousness against it.

Family planning: Is a happier coinage; it suggests that population control is really all about applying common-sense to the welfare of one’s nearest and dearest. Despite the many problems encountered in its implementation, family planning has already taken a hold on the popular imagination in a way that few could have predicted at the campaign’s inception.
The standard portrait of the four-member ‘happy family’ (not so standard, in fact, because the posters in the South give the happy father a pencil-line moustache rather than the curler on display north of the Godavari) is now part of our national consciousness, as is the symbol of an inverted red triangle.
Our vasectomy camps of the 1970s and 1980s, where thousands of men have gone for a quick snip and a transistor, are already the stuff of sociological legend, and who could have imagined the brazenness of government-sponsored advertisements for condoms in a country where a public kiss can provoke a riot?

The achievements of family planning were done a great disservice by the excess of zeal which led to forced sterilisations and to villagers living in fear of being dragged off to fulfil arbitrary Emergency quotas. Ironically, when governments changed, one of the first victims was the name itself, which became diluted to the neo-euphemistic ‘family welfare’. The urgency went out of the effort. Today, we are on course to top the global population charts, overtaking China as the world’s most populous nation by 2034. Family planning cannot afford to be forgotten, though. Euphemisms do not prevent babies.

Fasts: Have never worked half as well anywhere else as they have in India. Only Indians could have devised a method of political bargaining based on the threat of harm to yourself rather than to your opponent. As a weapon, fasts are effective only when the target of your action values your life more than his convictions — or at least feels that society as a whole does. So they were ideally suited to a non-violent, moral national leader like Mahatma Gandhi (despite the resentment of a couple of Viceroys, who thought his fasts akin to a child browbeating an adult by threatening to hold its breath until it turned purple.)

Gandhi’s example was effectively emulated by other Gandhians: Potti Sriramulu’s fast unto death in 1952 led to the reorganisation of states on linguistic lines; Morarji Desai’s in 1975 led to elections being called in Gujarat. But when used by lesser mortals with considerably less claim to the moral high ground and no great record of devotion to principle, fasts are just another insidious form of blackmail, abused and over-used in agitation-ridden India.

It might have been worse, though. If more politicians had the courage to fast in the face of what they saw as transcendent wrong, governments might have found it impossible to govern. But too many would-be fasters proclaim their self-denial and then retreat to surreptitious meals behind the curtain, which makes their demands easier to resist since there is no likelihood of their doing any real harm to themselves.

And inevitably fasts have suffered the ultimate Indian fate of being reduced to the symbolic. What could be more absurd than the widely-practised ‘relay fast’, where different people take it in turns to miss their meals in public? Since no one starves for long enough to create any problems for himself or others, the entire point of Gandhi’s original idea is lost. All we are left with is the drama without the sacrifice — and isn’t that a metaphor for Indian politics today?

Fasts, personal: The individual, rather than political, fast is another Indian institution for which there is no equivalent abroad, except among expatriate Indians. Indians starve on certain days of the week, deny themselves their favourite foods, eliminate essentials from their diets, all to accumulate moral rather than physical credit. Where a Western woman misses a meal in the interest of her figure, her Indian sister dedicates her starvation to a cause, usually a male one (think of ‘karva chauth’). Her husband or son never responds in kind: he manifests his appreciation of her sacrifice by enjoying a larger helping of her cooking.

Films: Are the great Indian national pasttime, an institution of such overwhelming importance that this glossary can barely hint at their impact on the national ethos. Films are the dominant, and in many cases the sole, form of mass entertainment available to the vast majority of our people. India produces more films than any other country in the world, and these are seen several times each by people who have fewer alternative forms of distraction. Filmstars are better-known than most politicians, sportsmen or writers and are the most potent symbols of the hopes and aspirations of ordinary Indians. There is no limit to their mass appeal: several have been elected to Parliament, three have founded political movements and two have become chief ministers of their states. (One of them, NTR, still has a temple dedicated to him in Andhra Pradesh; the other, MGR, might easily have too, but for the inconvenient fact that was an atheist).

For decades there was virtually no popular music in India but film music, though this is now changing. The most widely-read Indian journals in any language are film magazines, and even general-interest publications cannot do without a film gossip column. Films are the nation’s most participatory activity: they attract larger audiences and employ more people than any other industry. They are a perennial growth sector in periods of economic stagnation; if so many of their financial transactions were not sub rosa, films might constitute one of the largest single determinants of our GNP. There is hardly any corner of our vast land that has not been touched by that great manifestation of popular art, the film poster.

In other countries, films are threatened by television, but in India the most popular television programmes are song-sequences from films, or movies themselves. Films, also spelt (and pronounced) fillums, are not to be confused with cinema, which is the exclusive domain of auteurs either Bengali or Benegali whose reputations abroad generally exceed their receipts at home.

Gandhi: (1) A legendary, almost mythical figure, shrouded in the mists of history and the masks of textbooks, whose precepts, like God’s, are cited more often than obeyed. The father of our nation, with a billion children and no followers.

(2) An award-winning Hollywood film starring Candice Bergen, which won more golden statuettes than anything else ever sponsored by the Indian taxpayer.

(3) Is a magic name that guarantees its bearer short odds of being offered the prime ministership (though it gains in lustre if the prime ministry is refused).

Ganga: Is the country’s great river, which to some degree is ironic since the names India, Indian, Hindu and Hindustan all derive from the river Indus, which now flows through Pakistan. It is the Ganga, though, that irrigates Northern India’s great alluvial plain, waters many of Hinduism’s holy places and washes away the sins of believers. Nehru waxed lyrical about the Ganga in his will: to him it was the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are intertwined her racial memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats. She has been a symbol of India’s age-long culture and civilisation, ever-changing, ever-flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga, a memory of the past of India, running into the present, and flowing on to the great ocean of the future.

To Nehru, the most sacred river of Hinduism was a force for cultural unity, a torrent that unites history with hope. When his grandson Rajiv Gandhi was elected Prime Minister, he used his first post-election broadcast to announce the setting up of a Central Ganga Authority to cleanse and safeguard this ‘symbol of India’s culture, the source of our legend and poetry, the sustainer of millions’ and ‘to restore its pristine purity’ after centuries of neglect and pollution.

Two decades later, the Ganga is less neglected but more polluted.

Gavaskar, Sunil: Is one of contemporary India’s first authentic national heroes – somebody good enough at his chosen vocation to be numbered among the best in the world at it. Who can forget his memorable debut series of 774 runs in four Tests against the West Indies, and what it meant for a generation of Indian cricket fans who were becoming inured to defeat?

Since then his innumerable batting records have fallen to others, most memorably the highest number of Test centuries ever scored and the most runs ever made in Test cricket, but they were records he set in a sport where Indians did not usually set records. Even if his captaincy never quite measured up to expectations, Gavaskar’s batting, as he stood up to the world’s fastest and most fearsome bowling attacks, did as much for national pride as it did for Indian cricket.

Hinduism is the sole major religion that doesn’t claim to be the only true religion, and the only religious tradition which allows for such eclecticism of doctrine that there is no such thing as a Hindu heresy. This hasn’t prevented self-appointed votaries of the faith from developing their own brand of Hindu fundamentalism, even though Hinduism is uniquely a faith without fundamentals.

Back to our intermittent glossary of things Indian! Let’s try G and H this week…

Gheraos: Are India’s contribution to the art of industrial disputes. The notion of getting your own way by blockading your opponent in his office may have little in common with that of the self-sacrificial fast, but as a tactic of coercion it is used at least as often in India. Regrettably, there is no equivalent Indian invention on the conciliation side of the process.

Godmen: Are India’s major export of the second-half of the 20th century, offering manna and mysticism to an assortment of foreign seekers in need of it, though some of the biggest and best of the tribe remain on our shores. Godmen appeal to the deep-seated reverence in Indians (by no means only Hindus) for spiritual wisdom and inner peace, perhaps because the conditions of Indian life make it so difficult for most of us to acquire either. Many also prey on the credulous by seeking to demonstrate their divinity through their mastery of magic, a device used for millennia by those who seek to impress themselves on others. The majority, however, are content to manifest their sanctity by sanctimoniousness, producing long and barely intelligible discourses into which their listeners can read whatever meaning they wish. If religion is the opium of the Indi-an people, then godmen are God’s little chillums.

Gulf, the: Not a body of water, but a magic land in far-away Araby, paved with gold, cheap electr-onics and the hopes of Indian immigrants. So-meone will no doubt do a study one day on the number of Indians who sold land, jewellery or the family home to abandon a reasonably viable existence in India for the life of a labourer, clerk, driver or shop-assistant in the Gulf, offering ten times the income, five times the hardship and half the joy. It has been a long tradition, particularly in Kerala, to seek work in distant places, live frugally, remit the bulk of one’s earnings home and hope to retire on the accumulations of a lifetime of privation; but the Gulf (or, as we say in Kerala, “the Gelf”) simply changed the scale of the whole enterprise, dramatically increasing the stakes.

Meanwhile, the Gulf began to attract highly educated and well-qualified expatriates as well. Though there is growing consciousness of the problems encountered by working-class Indian emigrants in the area and frequent reports of broken promises, dishonest or tyrannical employers, abysmal living conditions, terrible loneliness and lack of legal rights, there are very few signs as yet that the Gulf dream is fading. That will take something else — a narrowing of the vast gulf of affluence that separates life in ‘the Gulf’ from the life of lower-middle-class Indians in India.

Harijans: Or ‘Sons of God’, is what Gandhiji called the ‘untouchables’ in an effort to remove the stigma of that term. But unfortunately, the word has quickly become another typical Indian palliative — a means of concealing a problem by changing its name. No wonder that Harijans themselves prefer ‘Dalit’ — the oppressed. Nothing like calling a spade a bloody shovel when it comes to labelling social injustice.

Hindi: Is the language of 51% of our people, a vernacular 200 years old with practically no history, little tradition and minimal literature, whi-ch is no doubt why it enjoys the elevated status of our ‘national’ langua-ge. Every two-bit northern politician demands that it be the sole official language of India; the lo-udest clamour usually comes from politicos who are busy educating their own children in the English medium, to ensure they have the very opportunities they propose to deny the rest of the populace. One chauvinist central minister addressed a letter in Hindi to then West Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu, who duly replied in Bengali; that ended the correspondence. On the other hand, Hindi is the language in which Bollywood’s film producers reach their biggest markets, so there must be something to be said for it — as long as you don’t say it in Chennai or Kolkata.

Hinduism: Is the religion of over 80% of Indians, and as a way of life it pervades almost all things Indian, bringing to politics, work and social relations the same flexibility of doctrine, reverence for custom and absorptive eclecticism that characterise the religion — as well as the same tendency to respect outworn superstition, worship sacred cows and offer undue deference to gurus. Hinduism is also the sole major religion that doesn’t claim to be the only true religion, and the only religious tradition which allows for such eclecticism of doctrine that there is no such thing as a Hindu heresy. This hasn’t prevented self-appointed votaries of the faith from developing their own brand of Hindu fundamentalism, even though Hinduism is uniquely a faith without fundamentals. What they don’t seem to realise is that Hinduism is a civilisation, not a dogma. It’s ironic that those who claim to be its defenders define Hinduism in a way that makes it something it isn’t — narrow-minded, exclusive and intolerant.

Hospitality: Is the great Indian virtue, practised indiscriminately and unhesitatingly irrespective of such unworthy considerations as whether one can afford it. Indians throw open their doors to strangers, offering their time, their food and the use of their homes at the drop of a mat. After dowry, hospitality is probably the greatest single cause of Indian indebtedness. There is one catch, though: we are usually hospitable only to those we consider our social equals or betters. Oddly enough, foreigners inevitably seem to qualify.

In a land of a million Indiras, there was still only one ‘Indira’. Indira Gandhi’s domination, not just of India but of India’s consciousness of itself and of the perception of India abroad, has finally begun to fade from the public memory, two decades after the tragic circumstances of her departure from the national scene. She did much to transform Indian politics, and to promote Indian culture and the arts, but she will sadly be remembered for the excesses of the Emergency and for fostering a culture of sycophancy.

It’s glossary time again! ‘I’ is for ‘India’, and for….

Illiteracy: Remains rife, with just under half our population unable to read or write in any of our several dozens of scripts. This may well be, as Indira Gandhi once suggested, because half our population is either too young or too old to read or write, but the real reason is that our society is not so constructed as to make illiteracy the kind of handicap it would be in the developed world. We are a particularly verbal people, reading aloud to each other in village tea-shops, communicating fact, rumour and interpretation without the intermediaries of pen, paper and ink.

But we can no longer afford the attitude that literacy is an extravagance (requiring implements to write with, material to write on and light to read the results by, none of which is easily available in our rural areas). In today’s Information Age, no country can succeed economically without a population that is wholly literate, and that can use every keyboard it can gain access to: allowing illiteracy to prevail is to handicap our people in a 21st century race they have no choice but to run. It is true that illiteracy is not a sign of lack of intelligence: most Indian illiterates have a native shrewdness and a sense of personal conviction that would put a city lawyer to shame. But it does reflect a lack of opportunity that remains a serious blot on our society.

Indianenglish: Is a popular native dialect, spoken with varying accents and intonations across the country. It has not been greatly codified, its practitioners preferring to believe that they speak the language of a distant Queen, even if she couldn’t tell a dak bungalow from a burning ghat or a zamindar from a boxwallah. The point about this truly national language is that it has its roots in India and incorporates terms not found among the 900 ‘words of Indian origin’ listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED’s Indianisms are pretty tame stuff, like jungle, shampoo and thug, whereas the true speaker — and reader — of Indianenglish doesn’t blink at a lathi-charge on a sarvodaya leader emerging from a pandal after a bhajan on his way to consume some ghee-fried double-roti at a paan-shop near the thana (none of which would make any sense under the, er, Queen’s very rules). Indians are at home with Vedic rituals and goondaism, can distinguish between a ryot and a riot and wear banians under their kurtas, and still function in the language of Macaulay and Churchill. Our criminal classes, alone in the Commonwealth, are populated by dacoits, miscreants and anti-socials who are usually absconding; if these 420s are then nabbed by the cops, they become undertrials or detenus. Indianenglish has its own rules of syntax (“why you didn’t come? it was good, no?”), number (“i give my blessings to the youths of the country”), usage (“i am seeing this comedy drama thrice already”), convention (we eat toasts off quarter-plates instead of pieces of toast off side-plates) and logic (“have some Indian-made foreign liquor”). After our chhota-pegs we sign chit-books; the next day we don our dhotis and Gandhi-topis and do pranam when felicitating the PM at his daily darshan. These are not merely the mantras of babus: each term has a specific meaning within the Indian context which would be impossible (and unnatural) to convey in an ‘English’ translation. Which is why the ultra-chauvinists who upbraid us for speaking a ‘foreign’ language don’t have a leg to stand on. As far as I’m concerned, Indianenglish Zindabad!

Indira: In a land of a million Indiras, there was still only one ‘Indira’. Indira Gandhi’s domination, not just of India but of India’s consciousness of itself and of the perception of India abroad, has finally begun to fade from the public memory, two decades after the tragic circumstances of her departure from the national scene. (Even in death, she was larger than life.) She did much to transform Indian politics, and to promote Indian culture and the arts, but she will sadly be remembered for the excesses of the Emergency and for fostering a culture of sycophancy epitomised by D K Borooah’s fatuous pronouncement, “Indira is India and India is Indira.” As the voters responded in 1977: Not.

Information age: The era India entered when a super abundance of fiber-optic cabling and the imminence of the Y2K scare suddenly made India’s hard-working computer geeks indispensable to the rest of the world. Today, India’s young software programmers have gone well beyond the menial labour of ensuring that American computers didn’t crash at the end of the previous millennium: they write original code and devise creative approaches that make the world’s info-tech networks buzz. Today, an IIT degree is held in the same reverence in the West as one from MIT. And the stereotypes are catching up: a friend recounts being accosted at a European airport by a frantic traveller saying, “hey, you’re Indian — I have a problem with my laptop, i’m sure you can help me!” The stereotyped Indian used to be the sadhu or the snake-charmer; now it’s the software guru.

Our occasional glossary of the shared assumptions resumes this week. As Sheikh Abdullah might have said, let’s see what we can do about J and K.

Jokes: Are a staple of the national conversational diet; it was not so long ago that most Indian magazines ran a pageful of them. Indian jokes are almost always directed at Indians, either archetypally (as in the host of jokes about an American, a Russian, a Chinese and an Indian, in which the Indian wins by being cussed or obtuse or both) or sectionally (Bengali jokes about Oriyas, Nair jokes about Namboodiris, Sikh jokes about Sikhs). Jokes in Indianenglish are in a class by themselves, of course, because they are cheerfully bicultural, and often involve elaborate (and untranslatable) bilingual puns. The Ajit jokes remain the classics of the genre, featuring lines of imaginary filmi dialogue that the famously dehati villain would never have dreamt of uttering (Raabert, isko centrifuge mein daal do. Pata chal jayega ki chakkar kya hai.)

JP: Was the simple name by which one of India’s simplest men was known. Jayaprakash Narayan was the Mahatma of 1977, but he was a flawed Mahatma. A man of insight and compassion, humanity and principle, JP stood above his peers, a secular saint whose commitment to truth, honesty and justice was beyond question. But though his loyalty to the ideals of a democratic and egalitarian India could not be challenged, JP’s abhorrence of power made him unfit to wield it. He offered inspiration but not involvement, charisma but not change, hope but no harness. Having abandoned politics when he seemed the heir-apparent to Nehru, he was reluctant to return to it after the fall of Nehru’s daughter, and so let the revolution he had wrought fall into the hands of lesser men whose application was unworthy of his appeal. JP died a deeply disappointed man, but his legacy lives on in the subsequent conduct of the Indian people – to whom, in the last analysis, he taught their own strength.

Kama Sutra: May well be the only Indian book which has been read by more lascivious foreigners than Indians, unless one counts the works of Sasthi Brata. It is for the most part a treatise on the social etiquette of ancient Indian courtship, and those who think of its author Vatsyayana as some sort of 4th century Harold Robbins are usually sorely disappointed to go through his careful catalogue of amatory activities, which reads more like a textbook than a thriller.

Nonetheless it never ceases to amaze me that a civilisation so capable of sexual candour should be steeped in the ignorance, superstition and prurience that characterise Indian sexual attitudes today. Perhaps the problem is that the Kama Sutra’s refined brand of bedroom chivalry cannot go very far in a country of so many women and so few bedrooms.

Kargil: The war that wasn’t a war. The conflict that claimed hundreds of soldiers’ lives, fought against an enemy that wouldn’t acknowledge it was there and would not even reclaim the corpses of its dead (in order to protect its denials). An unnecessary war that sowed more mistrust in Delhi towards Islamabad than the officially-declared wars had ever done, the Kargil conflict of 1999, nonetheless, played a huge part in awakening a sense of patriotism amongst the Indian people – who had just begun to slip into the cynical self-centredness of our post-modern age.
Kashmir: Was for years the fabled playground of favoured tourists, a status it has yet to regain after nearly two decades of violent conflict. But it was always much more than a land of snow-capped mountains, exquisite carpets and idyllic houseboat holidays. Kashmir has had to bear the burden of being a testament to the Indian secular democratic ideal, an affirmation that religion has nothing to do with nationhood and that Indian pluralism admits of no exceptions. The idea of India can only succeed if it embraces justice in Kashmir. That is what makes Kashmir so important for the future of India.

Khalistan: (1) An imaginary homeland for the pure of faith, the land of the Khalsa; (2) Also khali-sthan, the space between its advocates’ ears; (3) In the words of Khushwant Singh, a duffer state.

Khan: One of five unrelated cinematic heart-throbs who rule the hearts of Indian filmgoers and the wallets of the industry’s bankrollers. Each of them – Shah Rukh, Aamir, Saif Ali, Salman and Fardeen – has variously been dubbed King Khan by unimaginative sub-editors. But they may all have to make way, in critical acclaim, for a namesake who doesn’t chase actresses around trees but can really act, the quietly impressive Irrfan.

Kolkata: Is more a state of mind than a city. It epitomises all that is magnificent and all that is squalid about urban India: its people, its theatres, its coffee-houses and its bookshops set against some of the most depressing slums, the most wretched pavement hovels, the most noxious pollution, the most irreparable decay in the world. It seems a city without hope, a soot-and-concrete wasteland of power-cuts, potholes and poverty; yet it inspires some of the country’s greatest creative talent.

To the true Kolkatan there is no other city quite like it: if one tires of Kolkata, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson about old London, one tires of life.

Lata: Still doesn’t need a surname to be recognised, indeed she doesn’t even need a face; her ageless voice alone means magic to millions. The late Piloo Mody once defined All India Radio as an institution designed for the promotion of two women: Indira Gandhi and Lata Mangeshkar. He was half wrong. Lata has done far more for All lndia Radio than All India Radio can ever do for her.

Law: Rivals cricket as the major national sport of the urban elite. Both litigation and cricket are slow, complex and costly; both involve far more people than need to be active at any given point in the process; both call for skill, strength and guile in varying combinations at different times; both benefit from more breaks in the action than spectators consider necessary; both occur at the expense of, and often disrupt, more productive economic activity; and both frequently meander to conclusions, punctuated by appeals, that satisfy none of the participants. Yet, both are dear to Indian hearts and attract some of the country’s finest talent. And in both cases, the case for reform seems more and more irresistible, as results fail to keep up with the nation’s legitimate expectations. Unlike cri-cket, though, the problem with law is one of popular access to it. As an eminent judge once put it, the law courts of India are open to the masses, like the doors of the Taj Mahal Hotel.

Laxman, R K: You don’t need to read The Times of India to be a fan of India’s first Magsaysay Award winner for journalism who won for his images rather than his words. Two generations have delighted at his rapier-sharp wit, his telling eye for instantly recognisable human foible, his brilliance at capturing an insight in an image. And his enduring creation – the frail, perpetually bewildered, balding, check-coated ‘common man’ – remains an abiding symbol of our day.

Maharaja: (1) Ancient feudal ruler, extinct as a species since 1947 and as a class since 1969. (2) Title of some of India’s better hoteliers. (3) Symbol of Air-India, usually depicted in turban, waxed moustache and leggings bowing deeply from the waist, an act of which most real Maharajas were incapable.

Mangoes: What more can one say about the king of fruits (though it now sells at prices that make it the fruit of kings)? It seems that the immortal Ghalib was frequently ribbed by his friends about his passion for the fruit. One day, they spotted a donkey going up to a mound of mango skins, sniffing it and turning away. “See,” they chortled, “gadha bhi nahin khata hai” (“even a donkey doesn’t eat it”). “Yes,” Ghalib replied quietly, “gadha nahin khata hai” – a donkey doesn’t eat it.

Maruti: (1) 1500 BC, the Hindu wind god. (2) 1975-76, a wheeled object in the shape of an inverted bathtub, with scooter tyres and a smuggled West German engine, five of which were produced, as a ‘People’s Car’, by an unqualified engineer with government funds in a striking example of democratic socialism. (3) 1982-present, a Japanese car, manufactured under an Indian name in keeping with the nation’s commitment to indigenisation, sold to the masses in ever-larger numbers, with the government’s participation in the profits declining in inverse proportion to its sales. See also Ambassador.

Matrimonial ads: Are seized upon by every hack journalist who wants to ridicule India for fun and profit, but
in fact they are no more amusing or pathetic than the lonely hearts announcements that litter the personal columns of the Western press. Indeed, they have an even more valid role to play in Indian society than elsewhere, for they harness modernity to the preservation of a traditional cultural practice, that of the arranged marriage. Matrimonial advertisements have brought together families who might never have heard of each other if they had stuck to the local barber. At the same time, the ads are a microcosm of Indian social preoccupations and prejudices, with their excruciating specificities about caste, age, salaries and the intactness of hymens. But Indian typesetters always find ways to relieve any tensions with deftly-placed printers’ devils like the ones that, in one day’s issue of a Delhi paper, invited proposals for a ‘fair-complexed young widow, aged 92’, declared the liberality of a ‘US-based unclear scientist’ who proclaimed ‘caste, colour, no bras’ and touted the attractions of a young divorcee ‘holding respectable job in pubic relations’. I don’t know if any of the advertisers achieved the desired results, but they could have made a remarkable threesome….

Minorities: What we all are – for no one single Indian group can claim majority status in our country. A Hindi-speaking Hindu male might consider himself a representative of the ‘majority community’, to use the term much abused by the less industrious of our journalists; but a majority of the country does not speak Hindi, and Hinduism is no guarantee of majorityhood since his caste automatically places him in a minority as well. Amidst India’s variegated communal divisions we are all minorities. Even in the days of “India is Indira and Indira is India”, Indira Gandhi herself represented this condition: she was a Kashmiri ruling a majority of non-Kashmiris, a Brahmin amongst a majority of non-Brahmins, a UP-ite facing a majority of non-UP-ites, and (lest we forget) a woman leading a majority of men. Indian democracy is quintessentially about minority rule.

Monsoon: Is not, as a Doon School student once put it, a French gentleman, but the season that sets our climate apart from the rest of the world’s. Other lands have cold and fog and snow, and some tropical countries enjoy hot and hotter climates relieved by bursts of wetness, but few know the exhilaration of being lashed by monsoon rains for weeks on end, the frustration of vehicles stalled in the 180th successive year of flooded streets, the camaraderie of wading knee-deep in water with shins bared by the privileged and the proletarian alike, and, let’s face it, the relief of avoiding our responsibilities as life spirals helplessly to a halt. In our rural areas the monsoon is life-giving, the harbinger of hope for the next harvest, nourishing the parched earth, flooding the paddy-fields and filling the wells that sustain people, animals and plants. The monsoon is integral to the Indian experience; centuries ago, Kalidasa wrote these immortal lines about the monsoon – “a source of fascination to amorous women, the constant friend to trees, shrubs and creepers, the very life and breath of all living beings, this season of rains”. No one who has experienced the monsoon can treat the rains of Western climes as anything but a nuisance; our rains, however, are an event.

Mother Teresa: With her compassion, her vigour and her faith, Mother Teresa brought light into the lives – and the deaths – of many miserable human beings who might never have known what it was to be touched by grace. Yet, for all her undoubted greatness, I cannot help squirming at the perversity of those Indians who take pride in her Nobel Prize, who instead of being shamed by the conditions that made the Prize possible, organised “committees of felicitation” when Mother Teresa returned to Kolkata with a Norwegian certificate clutched to her Indian passport. We Indians should actually be striving to create the kind of society that makes a Mother Teresa unnecessary.

Music: Enters every Indian ear; from the classical cadences of the sitar and the sarod to the lyrical lilt of catchy film-tunes, music is impossible to escape in India, whether blaring from your neighbour’s radio in the morning, broadcast on loudspeakers outside temples and tea-stalls all day or nocturnally available in the all-night concerts of classicians. To the undiscriminating connoisseur there is a vast range to be traversed between Carnatic and Hindustani music, morning ragas and mourning ragas, Ravi Shankar and Lata Mangeshkar. With Muslim ustads playing Hindu devotional ragas and Bollywood playback singers chanting Urdu lyrics, the music of India is the collective anthem of a hybrid civilisation. But music represents an even larger metaphor, for it sets the tone for the political life of modern India – in which, rather like traditional Indian music, the broad basic rules are firmly set, but within them one is free to improvise, unshackled by a written score.

Nationalisation: An act of socialist governance that consists of transferring banks, insurance companies, industries and other functioning institutions from the hands of competent capitalists into those of bumbling bureaucrats. The prevalence of nationalisation in the face of widespread evidence of its shortcomings, inefficiencies and failures testifies to the curious Indian credo that public losses are preferable to private profits. In other countries, this would be known as cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Nehru: Was as much the father of modern India as Mahatma Gandhi was of Indian independence. Nehru was a moody, idealistic intellectual who felt an almost mystical empathy with the toiling peasant masses; an aristocrat, born and accustomed to privilege, who had passionate socialist convictions; an Anglicised product of Harrow and Cambridge who spent over 10 years in British jails; an agnostic radical who became an unlikely protege of the saintly Mahatma. Few national political leaders have made as much of an impact on their nation’s ethos. It is to Jawaharlal Nehru that we owe the ‘socialistic pattern of society’, the dominance of the public sector over the ‘commanding heights of the economy’, parliamentary democracy, non-alignment, secularism, the electoral system, the IITs, respect for the judiciary, freedom of the press, the Nehru jacket, the Congress cap and, at several removes, Rahul Gandhi.

Nepotism: Or uncles granting jobs and favours to nephews, does not exist in India. None of our prime ministers, for instance, had uncles of any consequence.

Non-alignment: Was (and in theory still is) the basis of India’s foreign policy and consists of equidistance from the superpowers, a concept challenged by both geography and reality, not to mention the lack of a second superpower to be equidistant from. Nonetheless non-alignment is still paid ritual obeisance by Indian diplomacy, which has been defined by a former doyen of South Block as being “like the love-making of an elephant: it is conducted at a high level, accompanied by much bellowing, and the results are not known for two years.”
Opinions: As may be readily apparent from this series, opinions flow from lndian tongues like the Ganga through Benares: profuse, stimulating and muddied with other people’s waste-matter. From village tea-shops to urban Coffee Houses, Indians give free rein to their opinions, which like those who express them, often do not have visible means of support. On most issues, however, these are unrelated to any expectation of action, and the Indian public as a whole largely acquiesces in governmental policies even when they are contrary to its professed beliefs. In India, the expression of public opinions is no proof of the existence of public opinion.

Paan: Is India’s answer to French wine as the essential adjunct to a good meal, a useful if mildly intoxicating aid to digestion and the most national of liquid vices, though each consumer is obliged to generate his own liquid and to dispose it of against the most convenient wall. (This even led one Japanese health expert to declare that acute TB was endemic in India because he had seen so many people spitting blood). The distinctions between a Calcutta-patta and a Banarasi-mitha are at least as significant as those between a Bordeaux and a Burgundy, but paan-chewing is too down-to-earth to have evolved the same pretentious vocabulary as its French counterpart. It is time we established our own paan columnists, to wax lyrical about the ‘strong body’ and ‘delicate coconut fragrance’ of a 2007 Madrasi beeda, contrasting it, perhaps with the ‘heady bouquet’ and ‘lingering aftertaste’ of a silver-wrapped Mumbai concoction.

Parsis: See Zoroastrians. (I had to have something beginning with Z, didn’t I?)

Partition: Is the scar inflicted by history upon the nation, when Pakistan was carved out of India’s stooped shoulders by the departing British. Its human cost in lives, in the tragedies of displacement and flight, in lost faith and comradeship across communal divides, in the surrender by people on both sides of a part of their national heritage, was appalling enough; but it was further augmented by the colossal waste of resources thereafter in mutual defence preparedness and in actual military conflict. Partition betrayed both those Hindus who lived in what became Pakistan and those Muslims who were abandoned in India by the more affluent and vocal of their co-religionists. Above all, it betrayed all those, irrespective of religion, who believed that nationhood transcended creed and credo.

Political Parties: Grow in India like mushrooms, split like amoeba and are as productive and original as mules. The old saw that two Indians equals an argument and three Indians equals two political parties can almost be taken literally, as every ‘leader’ disgruntled with his lot in one party takes off to found another. (Shri Ajit Singh, if memory serves, has actually ‘‘led’’ 11 parties in the last 10 years.) As a result, most of India’s so-called ‘national’ parties, with the sole exception of the BJP, are variants of the Congress (or variants of variants of the Congress), even when they have been founded with explicitly anti-Congress aims. The proliferation of regional parties, often with appeals that do not go beyond a single state, has further complicated this situation and virtually guaranteed coalition governance in perpetuity in Delhi. While there is something to be said for the view that a multiplicity of parties is inevitable in a pluralist polity like India’s, where a number of groups contend to defend their interests, a total fragmentation of political representation can hardly be in the national interest. And it is difficult to be entirely enthusiastic about a system in which a political party, rather than being the vehicle for the expression of a coherent set of ideas and interests, is merely a convenient cloak for the ambitions of an individual leader, to be cast off (or stitched to another’s raiment) whenever it suits him.

Pollution: You can live in India today provided, as the old Tom Lehrer song put it, ‘‘you don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air.’’ Indians have learned to live with pollution, inhaling more particles each day than a chain-smoker might in the West, and boiling their water for fear of being laid low by every imaginable liquid-borne pollutant (and many a poison, including arsenic). India’s cities are among the world’s dirtiest. The air in Kolkata or Delhi is all but unbreathable in winter as car-exhaust fumes, unchecked industrial emissions and smoke rising from countless charcoal braziers get trapped by descending mist and fog.

When the Australian cricket team last played in Delhi, its coach complained the smog-laden air gave the home team an unfair advantage-by impairing his players’ performance. Factories belch forth noxious black clouds. Effluents pour untreated into rivers. Sewage systems reek and overflow. Governments pass regulations, then ignore them. Meanwhile, more and more cars ply the congested roads, and more small factories open up that do not meet pollution-control standards. Cardiovascular and respiratory illness is rampant, with attendant health costs estimated at 4.5% of India’s GDP. In other words, more than half of India’s annual economic growth is wiped out by pollution, and development is taking place largely at the expense of the environment. But given a choice between living more modestly in a ‘‘green society’’ and becoming more prosperous in the midst of brown, most Indians would be happy to gasp and wheeze all the way to the bank.

Returning to our alphabetical catalogue of the things that help determine what it means to be an Indian — what better topic to start off with than…

Population: Is India’s greatest asset, but some assets are better when they are not growing. We add an Australia every year to our population, which would be fine if we could also add Australia’s resources to ours every year. By the year 2034, we will have overtaken China, by the year 2050 every fifth human being on earth will be an Indian. The nation’s great challenge will be to ensure that she is a well-fed, healthy, clothed and educated Indian. See also Family Planning.

Privatisation: The ‘third rail’ of Indian politics, which cannot be touched for fear of electrocuting yourself. Privatisation is essential in a society where the government finds itself running businesses for which it has neither the aptitude nor the mandate, and where the public sector’s rampant inefficiencies both slow down the economy and impede growth, but the politics of the issue oblige even governments in favour of privatisation to tread warily — so that even those who do it call it something else (“disinvestment”). It is an axiom of Indian politics that our political consensus prefers public losses to the prospect of private profits.

Public schools: Are, of course, like most British legacies, not what they seem; they are, in fact, private schools, set up to make better maharajas, Indian civil servants, tea-planters and boxwallahs out of their dusky charges. The tradition has continued after independence, so that our public school products can generally be found with a glass in one hand, a sporting implement in the other and a languid lady within reach. Their recent switch of emphasis from garden parties to political ones has sociological implications which are yet to be studied.

Queues: Are orderly lines of individuals seeking the use of public facilities and services. They were last spotted at a Delhi bus-stop in February 1977, and have never been the same since. Indians don’t mind their peace in queues.

Railways: Are vital to Indian unity because they guarantee the mobility that makes Indians conscious of India. And they are also the institution that has made the Indian elite look at Lalu Prasad Yadav with respect. For all their inadequacies, our trains are still the best value for money in the country, getting you further for fewer rupees than any other mode of mechanised locomotion available in the world. Much is made of their lack of punctuality, but being a few minutes late should hardly be held against them in a civilisation which rarely takes notice of the passage of years. The railways have spawned an entire sub-culture, from the congested life on station-platforms to the comradeship of what used to be called third-class sleepers (since dubbed second-class in another fit of egalitarian euphemism, as if a change of rank might make them more comfortable). The management of millions of train reservations made, entered and kept up-to-date by hand is a human miracle that the most sophisticated computers have only just been able to match. The art of railway travelling is also one that has reached great heights in India — literally, if you take a look at the rooftop passengers on many carriages. India offers more kilometres of passenger railways than any other country, more varieties of gauges (broad, narrow and metre) and more kinds of train (from the Palace-On-Wheels which tours Rajasthan to the suburban electric trains of Bombay, from the air-conditioned Rajdhani Express to the ‘toy-train’ that winds its way to Darjeeling). And Indian Railways doesn’t just mean trains. Who can forget such marvellous ancillary institutions as the sumptuous SER Hotel in Puri, with its fabled cuisine, and the famous Railways hockey team?

Ray, Satyajit: The late master, under whom Indian cinema came of age. Artist, musician, children’s storyteller par excellence, Ray’s creative genius would have won him a following even if he had not happened to be one of the world’s greatest filmmakers as well. When he made Pather Panchali with a 35 mm hand-held camera, this Renaissance Man placed India on the cinematographic map of the globe and confirmed its place there with a series of celluloid masterpieces that captured the soul of his people. His success, directly or indirectly, inspired others — Sen, Karnad, Sathyu, Gopalakrishnan, Benegal and many more — to lift Indian cinema out of the morass of commercial formulae and earn it the respect of the world. But above all, he gave the Indian sub-continent a cinematic voice whose equivalent India had found in literature with the works of Rabindranath Tagore.

Reliance: The company that gave us a founding father who inspired a Bollywood blockbuster, suitings that not ‘Only Vimal’ could wear, one of the world’s largest petrochemical plants, a high-tech communications network, a family feud to rival any soap opera, and a cricket World Cup. Now split into two empires, each headed by a billionaire.

Rice: Is the great Indian food, whatever northerners may think about the merits of wheat. There are few more lyrical sights in India than the lush green of the paddy fields, and few happier ones than a Tamil or a Bengali before a plateful of rice. At the basic level, rice is a sustainer of millions, the source of more energy for Indians than any other food, the vital staple of our land. At the level of culina-ry art, rice is the essential ingredient of those triumphs of Indian cuisine, the idli and the dosa. An India without rice would no longer be India.

Though we ended the last instalment of our glossary of Indianness with “rice,” we need to reverse up the dictionary a bit for the first couple of our entries this week. Both are subjects on which i’ve waxed eloquent for too long to omit from my personal list of cultural reference points for every Indian.

Religion: Is ever-present in Indian life. Whether it is the loudspeaker-aided call of the Lucknow muezzin or the raucous din of the Kolkata puja-pandal, the stray half-starved cow meandering through a gully or the profusion of fruit-cake in the stores at Christmas, the presence and influence of religion is everywhere apparent. Hardly a foundation-stone is laid, ship launched or hazardous ascent by car begun without the ritual smashing of a coconut or the offering of a puja to propitiate the gods. Fundamentally, Indians are a religious people, even if (as in the case of the enthusiastic young Kolkatans who collect ‘donations’ for the betterment of their local Durga-puja-pandal) they claim to be communist. Three of the world’s major faiths —Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism — originated on Indian soil, as did several of the minor ones (the Jains and the Qadianis, for instance) and most of the others — notably Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism — have found fertile ground here. Unfortunately, though, in India as elsewhere, religion has also served to justify injustice, to provoke division and to whip up hatred: the faithful rarely live up to the gentle precepts of their faiths. But India, of all countries, remains the living embodiment of the dictum that there is only one religion, though there are a hundred varieties of it.

Renaming: Renaming streets and monuments is a highly-developed Indian art, though nowhere is it more refined than in Kolkata, where a Left Front government managed, during the Vietnam war, to rename the street on which the US consulate was housed after Ho Chi Minh. (The Americans, however, were cleverer, changing their letterheads to reflect a side-gate that opened onto the less disconcerting Little Russell Street, which was not named for Bertrand). Where this becomes more disconcerting is when whole cities are renamed: in the 1990s Pune, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata entered the consciousness of English speakers. The nativism this bespeaks sits ill with the cosmopolitanism to which India has been laying claim at the beginning of the 21st century, but we shall have to list it amongst the many contradictions that constitute the Indian paradox. It’s a great pity, though, to lose centuries of brand-name building, especially for Bombay and Madras; and to do so out of nothing but a petty chauvinism, a reassertion of pride in the right to label rather than the capacity to build. As i wrote at the time, our civic leaders seemed to be saying, in an admission of their own smallness: if we can’t create, we can at least rename.

Sari: The sari is to Indian dress what rice is to Indian food, its prose as well as its poetry. No more graceful garment has been invented by man, nor one more truly flattering, for the sari can conceal flaws that other dresses only accentuate, and hint at features that other costumes only hide. It has adorned Indian womanhood for at least two thousand years, but it has never gone out of fashion, primarily because it has adapted with the times. Worn straight or pleated between the legs, with pallavs flung over the left or the right shoulder, below long-sleeved high-necked blouses or backless cholis, saris have retained an appeal that cuts across all distinctions of rank, religion, age or shape. Tied primly beneath the breastbone or low in ‘hipster’ style, knotted at the waist or pinned to an undergarment, in plain colours or patterned prints, polyester or poplin, heavy silk or sturdy cotton, saris have survived every sartorial change from the burqa to the mini-skirt. In Pakistan, the sari has resisted the blandishments of the official churidar culture and is triumphantly worn on special occasions; in Bangladesh, the battle did not even need to be fought. In India, alas, its use by the impatient younger generation is fading, and when I appealed in these columns to “save the sari from a sorry fate”, i was met with a feminist backlash that left me reeling. So there is something of rueful defiance in this glossary entry: the sari is a triumphant achievement of Indian culture, but only Indian women can save it from being reduced to ritual wear, donned only to temples and weddings.

Secularism: Is an article of faith in the Indian political ethos, but where dictionaries define it in opposition to religion, Indians equate it to toleration of all religions. Either way, secularism presumes that the state shall grant no favour on the basis of religion, even though 82 per cent of the population may have one in common. In an intensely religious nation like India, this credo is easier stated than adhered to, but there is widespread recognition among opinion-leaders that India can no more abandon secularism than it can democracy.

At least at the top, secularism has worked well, with armed services chiefs having represented every major community and Rashtrapati Bhavan having been home to Presidents of three leading faiths. The important thing, however, is that for all the attacks upon “pseudo-secularism”, the overwhelming majority of Indians remain non-communal, wedded to the chronic pluralism of our civilisation, of which secularism is merely the official reflection.

Back to our ‘‘A-Z of Being Indian’’, in which we ask ourselves, alphabetically, about the shared cultural assumptions of our nationhood….

Singh, Khushwant: If one were to single out an Indian journalist whose name has evoked instant reactions across the land for the longest time, one would not look beyond Khushwant Singh. No other man could be remembered for two achievements so different as revealing the existence of the female torso to the incredulous readership of the formerly staid Illustrated Weekly of India and returning his Padma Shri to an equally stunned President Zail Singh.

Khushwant Singh is revered by many for making bluntness and candour respectable in a profession that thrived on euphemism and ellipsis, for teaching journalists that it was not incompatible with their trade to get up from their desks, and for showing readers for the first time that writing was meant to be enjoyed as much as admired. He is condemned by an equal number of critics for what they see as his salivating lasciviousness, his tiresomely idiosyncratic obsessions and his complete lack of either taste or discretion. No English-speaking Indian reader is neutral about Khushwant Singh: the one thing he does not do is leave his readers cold. May he live to be a hundred, and may he continue to amuse, delight and provoke well past that landmark.

Socialism: Is the political credo of India’s left wing. It was also the credo of India’s right wing (remember when the BJP claimed ‘‘Gandhian Socialism’’ as its ruling ideology?), its centre, its ruling party and all its editorialists. You could own land, fancy apartments and cars and call yourself a socialist; the dominant principle of Indian socialism is ‘‘do as i say, not as i do’’. It’s only since 1991 that it has become acceptable in India for some people not to be socialists, but the vast majority still pay lip-service to the creed, whether or not they implement its tenets in policy or practice.

Tagore, Rabindranath: Is the Shakespeare of the country, our greatest litterateur and a genius on the da Vinci scale, who wrote novels, short stories, plays, poems, and songs, who founded a new discipline of music (Rabindra Sangeet) and a new university of the arts (Santiniketan) and whose work, even in a poor translation, won India’s first Nobel Prize (and its only one for Literature).

Tagore towers over India’s cultural consciousness. His ‘Gitanjali’ still evokes admiration wherever it is read; his ‘Kabuliwallah’ is among the few short stories most Indians remember; and his famous poem, ‘‘Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high’’, inspires generations of Indian school-children long after the context of its composition has been forgotten. Tagore is also the only human being in the world to have composed the words and music to two separate national anthems, those of India and Bangladesh. Rabindranath Tagore would have won immortality in any of his chosen fields; instead he remains immortal in all.

The Taj Mahal: Is the motif for India on countless tourist posters and has probably had more camera shutters clicked at it than any other edifice on the face of this earth. How easily one forgets that this unequalled monument of love is in fact a tomb, the burial place of a woman who suffered 13 times the pain of childbirth and died in agony at the 14th attempt. Perhaps that makes it all the more appropriate as a symbol of India – a land of beauty and grandeur amidst suffering and death.

Tata: The dynasty that long represented the acceptable face of Indian capitalism: efficient, progressive, productive, honest, profitable and socially conscious. The Tatas gave India its first indigenous steel industry, its first five-star hotel, its first company town (Jamshedpur) and its first airline.

When Jamsetji Tata set up India’s first steel plant in the late 19th century in the teeth of British opposition, a prominent Englishman dismissed the endeavour by saying that he would personally eat every ounce of steel an Indian was capable of producing. Last year, the Tatas purchased British Steel (as part of Corus).

I am not sure which is more symbolic of the reversal of fortunes – that an Indian company now owns British Steel, or the earlier purchase by the Tatas of the premier British tea company, Tetley’s. That each sup of Tetley’s tea puts money into Indian coffers is poetic justice for which we must always be grateful to Tata.

Tendulkar, Sachin: The sobriquet ‘Little Master’ was already taken, but Sachin Tendulkar was our sole ‘Boy Wonder’. By the time he was 14, people were speaking of him as potentially India’s greatest batsman ever, and after breaking onto the international scene as a precocious 16-year-old, he proceeded to fulfill that potential brilliantly. His records will long remain the stuff of cricketing legend, but what future generations will never know is the extraordinary weight of expectation that Sachin carried on his young shoulders every time he went out to bat, and the palpable sense of deflation that accompanied his every return to the pavilion.

Tigers: Are India’s most significant, yet most fragile, conservation achievement. In 1900 there were about 35,000 tigers in India; by the time tiger shooting was banned under a 1972 law there were only 1,872 left, a decimation rate of 95% in 70 years.

Thanks largely to Project Tiger, established in 1973, that figure has slowly climbed up towards 3,000 again. The problem is that the tiger remains gravely endangered and conservation requires political sacrifices that are not easily made, notably relocation of villages to create tiger sanctuaries, and maintenance of adequate prey to sustain tiger populations.

Tigers need large areas of land relatively free from incompatible human uses, but how can India reconcile the agreed ecological goal of protecting tigers with the pursuit of equitable socio-economic development for the people of the affected areas? The PM’s ‘Tiger Task Force’ came up with ideas that, conservationists agree, have not yet solved the problem. Unless real political will is put behind it, India risks the extinction in the wild of this magnificent specimen of our natural diversity.

Seventeen installments ago we embarked in this space on a quixotic scheme: to compile a glossary of things Indian, “a sense of what we have in common: the assumptions, the habits, the shared reference-points that constitute the cultural and intellectual baggage of every thinking Indian.”

We have ploughed through the alphabet, with tongue yoked firmly to cheek, and here we are at last at the final furrows on our brow (and the last letters of the alphabet).

But before we get there, as faithful readers have reminded me, there are a couple of other terms I should have defined for our glossary that I didn’t before their alphabet slipped away.

Call Centres: The quintessential symbol of India’s globalisation. While traditional India sleeps, a dynamic young cohort of highly skilled, articulate professionals works through the night, functioning on US time under made-up American aliases, pretending familiarity with a culture and climate they’ve never actually experienced, earning salaries that were undreamt of by their elders (but a fraction of what an American would make) and enjoying a lifestyle that’s a cocktail of premature affluence and ersatz westernisation transplanted to an Indian setting.

Critics argue that this is “coolie work” (see my column of April 15 this year) but it’s transforming lives, boosting our economy and altering our society. When the story of the New India is written, call centers will have to play a large part in the narrative.

IITs: Are perhaps Jawaharlal Nehru’s most consequential legacy: they epitomize his creation of an infrastructure for excellence in science and technology, which has become a source of great self-confidence and competitive advantage for India today. Nehru’s establishment of the Indian Institutes of Technology has led to India’s reputation for engineering excellence, and its effects have been felt abroad, since the IITs produced many of the finest minds in America’s Silicon Valley and Fortune-100 Corporations. Today, an IIT degree is held in the same reverence in the US as one from MIT or Caltech. There are not too many Indian institutions of which this can be said.

Back to our final entries:

Villages: Are where two-thirds of Indians still live. They are, for the most part, neither the dregs of misery they are sometimes portrayed to be (living conditions in our city slums are surely far worse) nor the idealised self-sufficient communities our Gandhians wish they were (there are too many inequalities and vested interests, and too few opportunities, for that). Our villages are just as susceptible to the encroachments of change, to the influence of the nearest movie theatre, to the ideas of the loudest politician, as any of our cities. They have simply lasted longer, and changed slower, because neither the attempts nor the resources have been geared for dramatic transformation. But village India is changing — few villages can claim to be identical in every respect to the way they were even a decade ago — and the pace of change can only accelerate. As urbanisation proceeds apace, within the lifetime of many of the readers of this column, villages will no longer house a majority of India’s population. And then, to borrow from Edward Luce, if Gandhiji hadn’t been cremated, he would surely have rolled over in his grave.

Weddings: Are the classic Indian social event, glittering occasions for conspicuous consumption, outrageous overdressing and free food. In a culture where marriage is a family arrangement rather than a legal contract, the wedding is the real opportunity to proclaim a new relationship to society, and brings together friends, business contacts, relatives and spongers in orgiastic celebration of the act of union. Beneath the surface bonhomie and backslapping jollity, however, lurk the real tensions, as the bride’s father asks himself, “Are the groom’s party really happy with the dowry? Can i trust the chap who’s collecting the presents?”

Xerox: Xerox machines are a relatively new feature of Indian life. The cost of photocopying, though it has been dropping, is still prohibitive enough to dissuade all but companies, scholars and the occasional spy from resorting too freely to it. But the existence of so many roadside sheds with Xerox machines in them is, like our STD booths, a contribution of Indian democracy to the popularisation of technology.

Yes–men: Known north of the Vindhyas as chamchas, yes-men have existed throughout Indian history and will no doubt continue to do so. Their role is sanctified by the tradition of deference, the power of position, the fact of overpopulation and the alternative of unemployment. No one with money, power or position moves alone when he can be accompanied by a host of sycophants ready to echo his every nod. Yes-men are not necessarily at the bottom of the social scale; the role can be played at various levels. Thus, a peasant can be a yes-man to a contractor who is a yes-man to a landlord who is a yes-man to a party boss who is a yes-man to a chief minister who is a yes-man to a cabinet member who is a yes-man to the prime minister… At no stage in the process does anyone actually think anything other than, “What does my boss want me to think?” Fortunately for the country, somebody up there values the word no.

Zoroastrianism: See Parsis. (This is part of the typical Indian habit of observing the letter of an undertaking, while violating its spirit. It is also known as having the last laugh.)