The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone: Reflections on India - the Emerging 21st-Century Power

38. Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames

IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN A MATTER OF PRIDE for me that one of the very few countries in which the Jewish people never suffered any persecution is India. The first Jews came to what is today Kerala following the capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of their first Temple there by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar in 597 B.C. A second wave followed a few centuries later, after the Romans destroyed the second Temple. This migration was not all that surprising; trade routes between the Roman world and the southwestern coast of India were well established, so the refugees were not sailing on uncharted waters. (The Romans even established a port in Kerala, Muziris, one of the great port cities of the ancient world.)

The Jews of Kerala settled down largely around Cranganore and practiced their faith and their customs unhindered. It was only a millennium and a half later that they suffered for being Jews — when the Portuguese, fresh from the Catholic Inquisition, arrived on India's western shores and started persecuting the Jews they found. The Jews then fled Cranganore and established themselves in Kochi, where they built an exquisite synagogue that still stands, though attrition and migration (to Australia, I am told, rather than Israel) has taken its toll, and the community living in the indelicately named “Jewtown” of Kochi has now dwindled to forty-two.

The story of the Kerala Jews came back to me when I read Jael Silliman's fascinating book Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames. Not that they are even mentioned in the book, for there are two other distinct Jewish communities in India — the Bene Israel of Maharashtra (the largest numerically, who lived undisturbed for centuries till a wandering rabbi recognized them for what they were) and the “Baghdadi Jews” who migrated from various parts of the Arab world to urban centers in India during the British Raj. It is with the latter that Dr. Silliman is concerned. Jael, whom I knew as a teenager in Calcutta and will therefore call by her first name, is the fourth generation in her family to have lived in the Baghdadi Jewish community of Calcutta, and her story traces the lives of the preceding three — her great-grandmother Farha, her grandmother Miriam, and her mother, Flower. The book is subtitled Women's Narratives from a Diaspora of Hope. It tells an eye-opening story.

The four women's lives trace, in intimate fashion, the transformation of the community over a little over a century. Farha, who arrived in Calcutta around 1890, “dwelled almost exclusively in the Baghdadi Jewish community no matter whether she was in Calcutta, Rangoon, or Singapore,” Jael writes. Miriam, living in British colonial Calcutta, was more Anglicized, called herself Mary, but still saw herself as part of a close-knit community of Calcutta Jews. Flower came of age with the Indian nationalist movement, lived in an independent India with an eclectic circle of Calcuttan friends, and taught in a Roman Catholic convent. Jael saw herself as Indian first and foremost, went to study in the United States like so many of her contemporaries, married a Bengali Hindu physicist there and is again part of a diaspora — but this time of the Indian disapora rather than the Jewish one.

Their stories are told with an effective blend of historical research and personal anecdote, much of it in the form of family reminiscence by Flower, who lives with Jael and her family today in Iowa City. Though there is enough social and cultural detail to have given Jael material for a novel, she approaches her subject as a scholar, and her analysis is informed by a serious academic's understanding of both colonialism and feminism. But the scholarship, though backed by an impressive collection of endnotes (which the general reader may cheerfully skip), never undermines the readability of her narrative, which unfolds in clear, precise, and sometimes sparkling prose. The text is also brightened by a striking collection of black-and-white photographs, ranging from colonial Calcutta to a Jewish bar mitzvah gathering to Jael's daughters Shikha and Maya in Bharatanatyam costume, perfectly tracing the history of these four generations.

The story of Jael and her “foremothers” is an Indian story, because the stories of India cannot be narrowed to the Sanskritic specifications of the Hindutva bigots. The Calcutta Jews, alas, left only a few traces of their presence for a century and a half in that metropolis — three impressive large synagogues, two small prayer halls, two schools, and a cemetery. Two sizable buildings, Ezra Mansions and the Ezra Hospital, still bear the name of the Jewish merchant who built them. Ezra Street and Synagogue Street have been renamed. “Very soon,” Jael Silliman observes, “matzohs will no longer be made in Calcutta. The Jewish community will exist only as a memory…. The Jewish Girls’ School, once the center of community life, has no Jewish girls attending it. It has been increasingly difficult for the synagogues to attain a minyan — the ten men required to conduct a service. The imposing edifices and physical spaces that denote a Jewish presence are hollow, for they are bereft of the people and social relations that gave them their purpose and meaning.”

That is a sad ending to a happy story. As the Jewish community of Calcutta dies out, a part of India's history dies with it. It was a remarkable son of this community, Major General J. F. R. Jacob, who helicoptered to Dhaka to negotiate the surrender terms of the Pakistani forces there in December 1971. Indian Jews have left their mark on our national evolution. And yet, as Jael Silliman writes, “The Jewish presence has been written over by contemporary India and is only visible to those in search of it.” I am glad, for all our sakes, that she conducted this search.

39. Southern Comfort

WHEN A. P. J. ABDUL KALAM OF TAMIL NADU WAS ELECTED president of India in 2002, I had just finished a visit to his home state's capital, Madras, a city I still cannot bring myself to call Chennai (any more than I would refer to Deutschland when speaking in English of Germany). I grew up between the ages of three and nineteen in three cities — Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi — where being from the South meant you were generically classified as Madrasi, even if, like myself, you were from another state altogether. In vain did I protest that my parents were from Kerala and we had not spent five minutes in Madras: to most of our neighbors, Madrasis is what we were.

I doubt very much whether, three decades later, “Chennaiyyas” has acquired the same resonance in the suburbs of Matunga or Jodhpur Park. By reducing the term Madras to the petty specificity of “Chennai,” the city has lost its claim to stand for an entire peninsula. But this essay is not a lament for the lost redolence of Madras, whose renaming, along with Bombay's, I objected to in print at the time as emblematic of much that was wrong with modern Indian chauvinism (those who cannot create, I suggested somewhat nastily, can only rename). That battle is over, and the votaries of tradition and historical accuracy, not to mention linguistic common sense, have lost it. The Hindu’s masthead now proclaims that it is published in Chennai. But I took some perverse pleasure in the knowledge that one of my engagements in the city was an evening with the members of a group that still defiantly calls itself the Madras Book Club.

What did it mean to be a Madrasi? To those who used the term, we were a tribe of articulate, bustling people with polysyllabic names, who spoke with astonishing rapidity in a number of incomprehensible languages and were clever enough to have risen high and wide both in government jobs and in private sector corporations. The untiring stenographer, the gnomic bureaucrat, the brilliant professor of mathematics, the formidable nuclear scientist — these were the Madrasis the Delhiite came across in the course of a typical day, and they shaped the stereotype. The average Madrasi was also seen as smaller, darker, and more agile than his northern brethren, who made fun of his accent while secretly admiring him for his competence and dedication. It was always the Madrasi who was scurrying briskly to fulfill every responsibility, who came up with new ideas and was all too willing to put in overtime to implement them, who was the one person to be trusted with the cashbox when the manager was away. Ability, commitment, energy, initiative, integrity — these were the qualities the North saw in Madrasis, and many of us came to believe the stereotype enough to live up to it ourselves.

I spent most of my childhood in the North, visiting the ancestral homes of my parents only on the annual holidays they took to Kerala. When I began working abroad, returning to India meant going to Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi, where I found family and friends and the familiar associations of my own upbringing. But over the years I began to spend more of my limited vacation time in the South. My mother now lives in Coimbatore, and that is a powerful motivation. But getting to know South India better is only partly an effort to rediscover my roots; it is also an effort to stay connected with the future. For the future of India lies in the South.

No, that is not mere regional chauvinism. Nor am I just referring to Bangalore's “Silicon Plateau” and Mr. Chandrababu Naidu's “Cyberabad,” though these are powerful symbols of an India that is wired to the twenty-first century. I am thinking also of the South as the part of our country that is getting the basics right — where literacy rates and educational levels are higher than in the North, where women are respected and empowered, where infrastructure is built and maintained, and where the disadvantage of being born in the wrong caste is less of an obstacle to advancement than elsewhere in the country. Above all, the South is a place of time-honored coexistence among religious communities, where the evil bigotries that have been allowed to flourish in northern India simply have no place. We may have had the odd episode of communal violence — sadly, no place on the subcontinent is immune to rioting — but it is inconceivable that the murderous rampages of Gujarat could ever have occurred anywhere in the five southern states.

For all his delightful idiosyncrasies, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam is still a product of the southern India I cherish — a man who rose from humble beginnings to acquire a decent education and build a brilliant governmental career, a Muslim whose mentor was a Hindu priest, a rocket scientist who writes like an advaita philosopher, a college professor whose inspirational vision for India's future is a staple of NRI exchanges on the Internet, a polymath who plays the veena and quotes with equal felicity from the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita. The Dravidian cast of his features and complexion, and the Tamil inflections of his English, complete the picture.

The Delhi wallahs who elected him knew what to expect from President Abdul Kalam. He is, you see, a Madrasi — the very best of the breed.

40. God's Own Country

THOUGH I AM A MALAYALI AND A WRITER, I have no claims to be considered a Malayali writer: indeed, despite setting some of my fictional sequences in Kerala and scattering several Menons through my stories, I could not have written my books in Malayalam because I cannot write my own mother tongue. And yet I am not inclined to be defensive about my Kerala heritage, despite the obvious incongruities of an expatriate praising Kerala from abroad and lauding the Malayali heritage in the English language.

As a child of the city, growing up in Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi, my only experience of village Kerala had been as an initially reluctant vacationer during my parents’ annual trips home. For many non-Keralite Malayali children traveling like this, there was often little joy in the compulsory rediscovery of their roots, and many saw it more as an obligation than a pleasure. For city dwellers, rural Kerala (and Kerala is essentially rural, since the countryside envelops the towns in a seamless web) was a world of rustic simplicities and private inconveniences. When I was ten I told my father that this annual migration south was strictly for the birds. But as I grew older, I came to appreciate the magic of Kerala — its beauty, which is apparent to the most casual tourist, and also its ethos, which takes greater engagement to uncover.

We Marunaadan Malayalis are, for the most part, conscious — some would say inordinately proud — of our Malayali cultural heritage. But as we are cut off from its primary source, the source of daily cultural self-regeneration — Kerala itself — we have to evolve our own identities by preserving what we can of our heritage and merging it with those of the others around us. As we grow up outside Kerala, we know that we are not the Malayalis we might have been if our parents had never left Kerala. In due course Onam becomes only as much a part of our culture as any other holiday, and we are as likely to give a younger relative a Christmas present as a vishukkaineettam (Kerala New Year gift). We, Malayalis without our Mathrubhumi or Manorama newspapers, who do not understand the Ottamthullal folk dance and have never heard of the great poets Vallathol or Kumaran Asan — are, when we come to visit Kerala, strangers in our own land.

I am such a Malayali — and in towns and cities around India and across the world, thousands more are growing up like us. Our very names are often absurdities in Kerala terms. In my case, my father's veetu-peru (house name; the family name handed down from his mother and her female forebears in the Nair matrilineal tradition) has been transmuted into a surname. We speak a pidgin Malay-alam at home, stripped of all but the essential household vocabulary, and cannot read or write the language intelligibly. I tried to teach myself the script as a teenager on holidays in Kerala, gave up on the koottaksharams (joined letters) and as a result can recognize only 80 percent of the letters and considerably fewer of the words. (When an Indian ambassador in Singapore wanted discreetly to inform me of his imminent replacement by a Kerala politician, he passed me a clipping from a Malayalam newspaper and was startled at my embarrassed incomprehension of the news.) Malayalam books and magazines may be found at home, but they are seen by us as forlorn relics of an insufficiently advanced past and are ignored by the younger generation, whose eager eyes are on the paperbacks, comics, and textbooks of the impatient and Westernized future.

What does it mean, then, for Keralites like me, now living outside Kerala, to lay claim now to our Malayali heritage? What is it of Kerala that we learn to cherish, and of which we remain proud, wherever we are? In many ways my sense of being Malayali is tied up with my sense of being Indian. I grew up in an India where my sense of nationhood lay in a simple insight: the singular thing about India was that you could only speak of it in the plural. The same is true of Kerala. Everything exists in countless variants. There is no uniform standard, no fixed stereotype, no “one way” of doing things. This pluralism emerges from the very nature of the place; for both Kerala and India as a whole, it is made inevitable by geography and reaffirmed by history.

I came to my own Indianness through my Kerala roots. My parents were both born in Kerala of Malayali parents, speakers of Malayalam — the only language in the world with a palindromic name in English — the language of this remarkable sliver of a state in southwest India. Non-Malayalis who know of Kerala associate it with its fabled coast, gilded by immaculate beaches and leafy lagoons (both speckled nowadays with the more discerning among India's deplorably few foreign tourists). But my parents were from the interior of the state, the rice-bowl district of Palghat, nestled in the last major gap near the end of the mountain chain known as the Western Ghats, which runs down the western side of the peninsula like a subsidiary spine. Palghat — or Palakkad, as it is now spelled, to conform to the Malayalam pronunciation — unlike most of the rest of Kerala (which was ruled by maharajahs of an unusually enlightened variety), had been colonized by the British, so that my father discovered his nationalism at a place called Victoria College. The town of Palghat itself is unremarkable, even unattractive; its setting, though, is lushly beautiful, and my parents both belonged to villages an hour away from the district capital, and to families whose principal source of income was agriculture. Their roots lay deep in the Kerala soil, from which has emerged the values that I cherish in the Indian soul.

As Malayalis, the beauty of Kerala is bred into our souls; it animates our very being. Hailing from a land of forty-four rivers and innumerable lakes, with 1,500 kilometers of “backwaters,” the Keralite bathes twice a day and dresses immaculately in white or cream. But she also lives in a world of color: from the gold border on her off-white mundu and the red of her bodice to the burnished sheen of the brass lamp in her hand whose flame glints against the shine of her jewelry, the golden kodakaddakan glittering at her ear. Kerala's women are usually simple and unadorned. But they float on a riot of color: the voluptuous green of the lush Kerala foliage, the rich red of the fecund earth, the brilliant blue of the life-giving waters, the shimmering gold of the beaches and riverbanks.

Yet there is much more to the Kerala experience than its natural beauty. Since my first sojourn as a child in my ancestral village, I have seen remarkable transformations in Kerala society, with land reform, free and universal education, and dramatic changes in caste relations.

It is not often that an American reference seems even mildly appropriate to an Indian case, but a recent study established some astonishing parallels between the United States and the state of Kerala. The life expectancy of a male American is seventy-two, that of a male Keralite seventy. The literacy rate in the United States is 95 percent; in Kerala it is 99 percent. The birthrate in the United States is sixteen per thousand; in Kerala it is eighteen per thousand, but it is falling faster. The gender ratio in the United States is 1,050 females to 1,000 males; in Kerala it is 1,040 to 1,000, and that in a country where neglect of female children has dropped the Indian national ratio to 930 women to 1,000 men. Death rates are also comparable, as are the number of hospital beds per 100,000 population. The major difference is that the annual per capita income in Kerala is around $300 to $350, whereas in the United States it is $22,500, about seventy times as much.

Kerala has, in short, all the demographic indicators commonly associated with “developed” countries, at a small fraction of the cost. Its success is a reflection of what, in my book India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond, I have called the “Malayali miracle”: a state that has practiced openness and tolerance from time immemorial; which has made religious and ethnic diversity a part of its daily life rather than a source of division; which has overcome caste discrimination and class oppression through education, land reforms, and political democracy; which has honored its women and enabled them to lead productive, fulfilling, and empowered lives.

But that is not all. Kerala's working men and women enjoy greater rights and a higher minimum wage than anywhere else in India. Kerala was the first place on earth to democratically elect a Communist government, remove it from office, reelect it, vote the Communists out, and bring them back again. When the Italian political system saw the emergence of a Communist Party willing to play by the rules of liberal democracy, the world spoke of EuroCommunism, but Kerala had already achieved Indo-Communism much earlier, subordinating the party of proletarian revolution to the ethos of political pluralism. Malayalis are highly politically aware: when other Indian states were electing film stars to Parliament or as chief ministers, a film star tried his political luck in Kerala and lost his security deposit. (Ironically, the first Indian film star to become the chief minister of a state was a Malayali, Marudur Gopalannair Ramachandran — known to all as MGR — but he was elected in the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu, where he had made a career as a Tamilian film hero.) Malayalis rank high in every field of Indian endeavor, from the top national civil servants to the most innovative writers and filmmakers.

More important, Kerala is a microcosm of every religion known to the country; its population is divided into almost equal fourths of Christians, Muslims, caste Hindus, and Scheduled Castes (the former untouchables, now called Dalits), each of whom is economically and politically powerful. Kerala's outcastes — one group of whom, the Pariahs, gave the English language a term for their collective condition — suffered discrimination every bit as vicious and iniquitous as in the rest of India, but overcame their plight far more successfully than their countrymen elsewhere. A combination of enlightened rule by far-thinking maharajahs, progressive reform movements within the Hindu tradition (especially that of the remarkable Ezhava sage Sree Narayana Guru), and changes wrought by a series of left-dominated legislatures since independence have given Kerala's Scheduled Castes a place in society that other Dalits across India are still denied. It is no accident that the first Dalit to become president of India was Kerala's K. R. Narayanan — who was born in a thatched hut with no running water, who as a young man suffered the indignities and oppression that were the lot of his people, but who seized on the opportunities that Kerala provided him to rise above them and ascend, through a brilliant diplomatic and governmental career, to the highest office in the land.

When the artist M. F. Husain painted a series of paintings on Kerala for our joint book, God's Own Country, I was struck by what, in his striking style, he chose to depict: the violence and the idealism of the leftist movement, the calm spread of literacy, the turbulence of the quest for rights of the downtrodden, the vivid masks of the Kathakali dancers, the palpable air of tranquil fraternity in village Kerala. And everywhere there are the women: striding confidently through the green, holding aloft their elephants, steering their little boats through a storm, holding their own at the marketplace, and simply — how simply! — reading. The mere fact that every Kerala girl or woman above the age of six can read and write is little short of a miracle, in a country where more women are illiterate than not, and where a state like Bihar enters the twenty-first century with only 27 percent of its women able to decipher an alphabet. A girl born in Kerala can expect to live twenty years longer than one born in Uttar Pradesh, and she can expect to make the important decisions in her life, to attend college, choose a profession, do what others might consider “men's work,” and inherit property (something which, before the law was changed in 1956, Indian women could not expect to do, unless they were Malayalis following the marumakkathayam matrilineal system). Kerala's women have become doctors and pilots, supreme court justices, ambassadors of India; they have shone in sport, politics, and the armed forces. “If Kashmir is all about men and mountains, “Husain once said, “Kerala is all about women and nature.” His work in this series has been dubbed Kalyanikuttyude Keralam—Kalyanikutty's Kerala, with Kalyanikutty the emblematic Kerala woman, an enlightened modern figure steeped in her traditional culture, rising from it to conquer new worlds while remaining comfortable in her own.

As a child, I grew up listening to my paternal grandmother read aloud from her venerable editions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. And I saw, too, my maternal grandmother running a big house and administering the affairs of a large brood of children and grandchildren with firmness and courage. In both cases, they had been widowed relatively young, but in neither case was their gender a disqualification in their assumption of authority. Keralites are used to seeing women ruling the roost. My own mother, now closer to seventy than she would like to admit, still drives her own car to our ancestral home in a Palakkad village, scorning male help. She likes to be in charge.

Fittingly, it was a woman ruler, Rani Gouri Parvati-bai, then queen of Travancore, who decreed in 1817: “The state should defray the entire cost of the education of its people in order that there might be no backwardness in the spread of enlightenment among them, that by diffusion of education they might become better subjects and public servants.” Her royal successors followed the policy, and after independence, elected Communist governments in the state and enshrined free, compulsory, and universal education as a basic right. Today, Kerala outspends every Indian state in its tax outlays on education, and Keralites support over fifty newspapers. No village is complete without a “reading room” that serves as a community library, and the sight of villagers reading their newspapers in public is a ubiquitous one, particularly in the chayakadas (tea shops) where animated arguments around the day's news over steaming sweet cups of tea are a regular feature of daily life.

It is not accidental that one of Husain's paintings depicts young and old sharing a home life; family bonds are strong in Kerala, though nuclear families are on the increase there as everywhere, and the older generation has an honored place in the lives of the young, who accept the responsibility to care for them. Another reveals an outdoor market, a street scene in which the people are surrounded by bananas, coconuts, fish, and tapioca, the great staples of Kerala cuisine. Men and women are equally present in the painting; indeed, the women seem to be in the position of economic power. It is striking that in the one picture in which Husain depicts the thundering force of the monsoon (which hits Kerala first before it takes on the rest of India, and with such force that it is often described as an invasion of gray elephants, a metaphor the artist underscores), he shows a woman rowing a boat, standing up to the forces of nature. My paternal grandmother would read the Ramayana from start to finish during the rains, and my maternal grandmother would dispense her herbal potions and pills, averring that they would be most effective if taken at this time of year. The monsoon buffets the people but replenishes the land; it affirms life and hope even as it sweeps away the frail and the weak before it. In its awesome impact it offers a clue to the resilience of Kerala's culture.

Not everyone is equally admiring of the “Kerala model”; economists point out it places rather too much emphasis on workers’ rights and income distribution, and rather too little on production, productivity, and output. But its results in terms of social development are truly remarkable; and as a Keralite and an Indian, I look forward to the day when Kerala will no longer be the exception in tales of Indian development, but merely the trailblazer.

Part of the secret of Kerala is its openness to the external influences — Arab, Roman, Chinese, British; Islamist, Christian, Marxist — that have gone into the making of the Malayali people. More than two millennia ago Keralites had trade relations not just with other parts of India but with the Arab world, with the Phoenicians, and with the Roman Empire. From those days on, Malayalis have had an open and welcoming attitude to the rest of humanity.

The Christians of Kerala belong to the oldest Christian community in the world outside Palestine, converted by Jesus’ disciple Saint Thomas (the “Doubting Thomas” of biblical legend), one of the twelve apostles, who came to the state in 52 A.D. and, so legend has it, was welcomed on land by a flute-playing Jewish girl. So Kerala's Christian traditions are much older than those of Europe — and when Saint Thomas brought Christianity to Kerala, he made converts among the high-born elite, the Namboodiri Brahmins. Islam came to Kerala not by the sword, as it was to do elsewhere in India, but through traders, travelers, and missionaries, who brought its message of equality and brotherhood to the coastal people. Not only was the new faith peacefully embraced, but it found encouragement in attitudes and episodes without parallel elsewhere in the non-Islamic world; in one example, the all-powerful Zamorin of Calicut asked each fisherman's family in his domain to bring up one son as a Muslim for service in his Muslim-run navy, commanded by sailors of Arab descent, the Kunjali Maraicars.

It was probably a Malayali seaman, one of many who routinely plied the Arabian Sea between Kerala and East Africa, who piloted Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer and trader, to Calicut in 1496. (Da Gama, typically, was welcomed by the Zamorin, but when he tried to pass trinkets off as valuables, he was thrown in prison for a while. Malayalis are open and hospitable to a fault, but they are not easily fooled.)

In turn, Malayalis brought their questing spirit to the world. The great Advaita philosopher Shankaracharya was a Malayali who traveled throughout the length and breadth of India on foot in the eighth century A.D., laying the foundations for a reformed and revived Hinduism. To this day, there is a temple in the Himalayas whose priests are Namboodiris from Kerala.

Keralites never suffered from inhibitions about travel: an old joke suggests that so many Keralite typists flocked to stenographic work in Mumbai, Kolkata, and Delhi that “Remington” became the name of a new Malayali subcaste. In the nation's capital, the wags said that you couldn't throw a stone in the Central Secretariat without injuring a Keralite bureaucrat. Nor was there, in the Kerala tradition, any prohibition on venturing abroad, none of the ritual defilement associated in parts of north India with “crossing the black water.” It was no accident that Keralites were the first to take advantage of the post oil-shock employment boom in the Arab Gulf countries; at one point in the 1980s, the largest single ethnic group in the Gulf sheikhdom of Bahrain was reported to be not Bahrainis but Keralites. The willingness of Keralites to go anywhere to do anything remains legendary. When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in 1969, my father's friends joked, he discovered a Malayali already there, offering him tea.

But Keralites are not merely intrepid travelers. They also have behind them a great legacy of achievement. In the fifth century A.D. the Kerala-born astronomer Aryabhatta deduced, one thousand years before his European successors, that the earth is round and that it rotates on its own axis; it was also he who calculated the value ofπ (3.1416) for the first time. In a totally different discipline from another era, the first great modern Indian painter, the prince Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906), was a Keralite. (Ravi Varma revolutionized Indian art by introducing the medium of oil on canvas and incorporating into his style a distinctively Victorian European realism.) But a recitation of names — for one could invoke great artists, musicians, and poets, enlightened kings, and learned sages throughout history — would only belabor the point. Kerala took from others, everything from Roman ports to Chinese fishing nets, and gave to the rest of India everything from martial arts (some of which appear to have inspired the better-known disciplines of the Far East) to its systems of classical dance-theater (notably Kathakali, to which I will return, Mohiniattam, and the less well known Koodiyattom, recently hailed by UNESCO as a “masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity”). And I have not even mentioned Keralite cuisine and traditional medicine, in particular the attractions of Ayurveda, the great health system of ancient India, with its herbs, oils, massages, and other therapies, now revived and attractively presented at dozens of locations around the state.

All this speaks of a rare and precious heritage that is the patrimony of all Malayalis — a heritage of openness and diversity, of pluralism and tolerance, of high aspirations and varied but considerable accomplishment. To be a Malayali is also to lay claim to a rich tradition of literature, dance, and music, of religious diversity, of political courage and intellectual enlightenment — and of energetic entertainment. A visitor must look at Kerala life beyond the sandy beaches. One should not miss the vallomkali, or backwater boat races (which during the harvest festival of Onam are among the biggest mass sporting events in the world). One should also go backstage at a Kathakali performance, revealing the thiranottam (the prelude to a performance in which the dancer emerges from behind a handheld curtain) and reminding us of the stark morality of color in Kathakali, where characters clad in green, nature's hue, embody goodness and dharma, and those in black represent the darkness of evil. One should also enter the state's myriad places of worship — Orthodox Christian cathedrals, the oldest Muslim mosque in India, and the exquisite synagogue in Kochi's “Jewtown,” as well as the famous Hindu temple at Guruvayoor and a smaller village shrine. One could also visit students learning the ancient martial art of kalaripayattu, or depict the holistic Ayurvedic treatments offered at the Kottakkal Arya Vaidya Sala, or take in the wildlife sanctuary at Thekkady.

There is an old verse of the poet Vallathol that my late father loved to recite: “Bharatam ennu ketal, abhimaana-pooritham aavanum, andarangam; Keralam ennu ketalo, thillakkanam chaora namukke njerumbugalil” (When we hear the name of India, we must swell with pride; When we hear the name of Kerala, the blood must throb in our veins). It is, in some ways, an odd sentiment for a Malayalali poet, for Keralites are not a chauvinistic people: the Keralite liberality and adaptiveness, such great assets in facilitating Malayali emigration and good citizenship anywhere, can serve to slacken, if not cut, the cords that bind expatriate Keralites to their cultural assumptions. And yet Vallathol was not off the mark, for Keralites tend to take pride in their collective identity as Malayalis; our religion, our caste, our region come later, if at all. There is no paradox in asserting that these are qualities that help make Malayalis good Indians in a plural society. You cannot put better ingredients into the melting pot.

Keralites see the best guarantee of their own security and prosperity in the survival and success of a pluralist India. The Malayali ethos is the same as the best of the Indian ethos — inclusionist, flexible, eclectic, absorptive. The central challenge of India as we enter the twenty-first century is the challenge of accommodating the aspirations of different groups in the national dream. The ethos that I have called both Keralite and Indian is indispensable in helping the nation meet this challenge.

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“In the exceptional nature of Kerala's social achievements,” Amartya Sen has written, “the greater voice of women seems to have been an important factor.” The literacy of Kerala women has produced a lower birthrate than China's, without the coercion China needed. But there is a cloud to every silver lining, and as an expatriate male Keralite, I discovered soon enough that not everything about the lives of Kerala's women is ideal.

I have received several striking letters from disillusioned Malayalis attacking their own state's prevailing culture in relation to women. Two of these stand out. The poet Thachom Poyil Rajeevan put it bluntly:

It's true that Kerala women can read and write (and) are doing better than Bihari women or the women in the neighboring states in the professional and social spheres. There may be pilots, doctors, ambassadors, and Supreme Court judges among them. But they cannot come out of their houses after six in the evening. If anyone dares to do so, she is not safe outside in the dark. Any man she comes upon on the way is a potential intruder into her modesty. I don't know whether women in Bihar face a similar threat in public places. But I have seen girls in Madurai Kamaraj University in Tamil Nadu walk fearlessly and safely to hostels late at night after completing their work in libraries and laboratories. Yet I cannot expect [to see] a girl after six or seven on the campus of the university where I work. I have seen many Malayali women walk with confidence in Bangalore, Mumbai, and New Delhi. But when they come to Calicut or Trichur, they become timid. Kalyanikuttys, despite all their claims to literacy and empowerment, are not safe in their home state.

That is a sad enough indictment coming from a man, but even more searing are the words of a Malayali woman reader, Prema Nair. “Oh dear, oh dear!!” she begins. “Are you one of those who have seen everything through the tinted lens of the acclaimed ‘Kerala model’? Nobody is disputing the favorable development and lifestyle indicators this state has, but please do not confuse well-being with an empowered and independent sense of being. Do we not often also confuse literacy with education?”

Fair point, Ms. Nair. She goes on to assail what she ironically calls the “other glories” of Kerala — a state where women become regular victims of dowry harassment (“Unlike in the north of India, this is prolonged mental harassment leading to suicides”) and of domestic violence (she cites scholarly studies from INCLEN and Sakhi confirming the “increasing and alarming rise of domestic violence” in Kerala). “Yes,” Prema Nair goes on, “animated arguments are a regular feature of daily life in Kerala. But what happens after? Political parties and politicians play their games; women suffer. The elected women representatives are expected to toe the party line; women's concerns are always given a back seat, except when it can be a means of increasing votes. Women's groups and the autonomous women's network have to consistently intervene (with) regular gender-sensitizing and training programs (in order to) support women and equip them to withstand this masculinization of public spaces.”

I am already feeling the telltale symptoms of male inadequacy, but Ms. Nair goes on: “Isn't this the very state that produced the infamous sex rackets, or should we look the other way? Isn't this God's own country and the devil's own people who waltz their way into organized sex-racket gangs (a special feature of Kerala, by the way) victimizing teenage girls, luring them into jobs, and then sexually exploiting them? This is done by the VIPs… politicians, civil service officials, businessmen, film stars. Along with the distinction of having women ‘doctors, pilots, supreme court justices, ambassadors of India,’ we also have the women of Suryanelly, the Ice Cream Parlor sex racket in Kozhikode, the Vithura sex racket in Kiliroor; the list is endless.”

And Prema Nair drives the point home: “Isn't this the state where rape happens to a six-month-old baby girl as well as to an eighty-year-old female corpse? Isn't this the state where the latest sex-racket victim breathed her last in a private nursing home, under very suspicious circumstances? Isn't this the state where one of the latest sex-racket victim's brothers killed her, and gave the reason as ‘honor killing’ (that is another first for Kerala, or maybe not)? Or maybe we should just look the other way; away from the muddy fields to the beautiful backwaters. After all isn't that what we see when we just pass by?”

Citing my reference to the longer life spans of girls born in Kerala, Prema Nair argues that fewer girls are being born now, since studies have shown a declining female birthrate. My other points also get short shift: “Oh, she ‘makes the decisions,’ yet she cannot choose her own contraceptive. And when she works (‘men's work’ maybe) she gets paid less than men do. What about the high rate of dowry here, in all communities — one of the highest in the country? ‘Enlightened modern figure’ who stoops to be trampled? Have we missed something here…?”

I clearly have. “Dear Mr. Shashi Tharoor,” Prema Nair concludes, “We are proud of you. But please do get your facts and fiction right, sir — or Kalyanikutty would get angry, for she does know how to read.”

She does indeed. I am suitably chastened. But at least I was right about one thing. You can always trust a Kerala woman to put you in your place for praising the lot of Kerala women!

41. Oh, Calcutta!

FOR YEARS IT WAS FASHIONABLE to see Calcutta as the epitome of all the ills of our urban culture. Poverty, pollution, pestilence — you name it, Calcutta had it. (Forgive my alliteration: you could stick to that one letter of the alphabet and still find no difficulty cataloguing Calcutta's woes: power cuts, poverty, potholes, pavement-dwellers, political violence, paralyzed industry.) As business capital and professional talent fled the city from the late 1960s onward, the former First City of the British Empire spiraled into increasing irrelevance. “Calcutta,” I found myself writing in my book India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond, “has become a backwater.”

It wasn't always that way. When, as a twelve-year-old in late 1968, I first learned of my father's transfer from Bombay to Calcutta, I embraced the news with great excitement. Calcutta still had the lingering aura of its old grandeur. It was the bustling commercial metropolis of the jute, tea, coal, and iron and steel industries. More important, it was the city of the greatest cricket stadium in India, Eden Gardens, the pavement bookstalls and animated coffeehouses of College Street, the elegant cakes of Firpo's Restaurant, and — recalling the whispers of wicked uncles — the cabarets of the Golden Slipper, the acme of all Indian nightclubs. It was the city of the visionary Rabindranath Tagore and the brilliant Satyajit Ray; for juveniles of less exalted cultural inclinations, it had India's first disco (the Park Hotel's suggestively named In and Out) and, in JS, India's only “with it” youth magazine. Former Calcuttans still spoke of the brilliance of the Bengali stage, the erudition of the waiters at the Coffee House, the magic of Park Street at Christmas.

By the mid-1980s, most of that list had disappeared. What remained, instead, was the dirt and the degradation, the despair and the disrepair, that made Calcutta the poster child for the Third World city. The global image of what had once been a great metropolis remained a cross between the “Black Hole” of historical legend and the tragic City of Joy of modern cinema. The best you could hope for was salvation in the slums.

Well, I am glad to report that Calcutta has turned the corner. On repeated visits to the city I had felt that nothing had changed, that the only alternative to decline was stagnation. As the twenty-first century gets under way, I have discovered this is no longer true. Two things have happened: the problems are abating, and creativity has returned.

I am not suggesting that Calcutta has suddenly become a paragon of civic virtue. But the streets are cleaner, the garbage is being picked up, hawker encroachments cleared, and power cuts are largely a thing of the past. There are still people sleeping on the pavement, but very much fewer than ever before: reforms in the Bengal countryside mean that destitute villagers no longer flock to Calcutta for survival, and nearly three decades of Left Front rule have given the city a measure of political stability unimaginable even a quarter of a century ago. It may be true that one of the reasons that “load-shedding” does not regularly plunge the city into darkness is that nothing succeeds like failure: the exodus of major industry in the last thirty years has reduced demand for power consumption. But there is also something positive in the air.

The signs of progress are everywhere: in the new roads and housing developments that are expanding the metropolis; in the stylish new buildings that have come up where collapsing colonial structures used to stand; in the new high-tech Science City, which both amuses and educates the young; in the gleaming Vidyasagar Setu, which bids fair to rival the great Howrah Bridge as both artery and symbol; in the dazzling prosperity of Salt Lake City, which used to be a mangrove swamp on the way to the airport; in the air-conditioned supermarkets and restaurants that are attracting a new breed of affluent customers. Calcutta feels like a real city once more.

But most important, Calcuttans are innovating again. One businessman I met — Harsh Neotia, a large and gentle forty-something — epitomizes the revived spirit of the city. His three current projects encapsulated for me the reasons to hope again about Calcutta. First, he has taken over the decaying eighteenth-century Town Hall and given it a multicrore-rupee facelift as a renewed symbol of Calcuttan splendor. Second, he has given middle-class Calcuttans a weekend escape from the city by constructing a residential resort at a bend in the Hooghly at Raichak an hour and a half from the city, a place where city dwellers can swim, boat, play tennis, watch a cultural performance, or simply enjoy the sunset from the balcony of their well-appointed room. Third and most important, he has worked with the state government to create India's first joint-sector public housing project, a twenty-five-acre development called Udayan, a beautifully landscaped complex designed by Balkrishna Doshi in which half the flats are reserved for the city's lower- and middle-income groups. The below-cost sale of these small but practical flats is subsidized by the popularity of the more expensive luxury apartments in the same development. HUDCO's dynamic former national chief, V. Suresh, has called the concept a “revolution” in the country's housing sector. It is not the kind of revolution Calcutta had become famous for.

These are just three projects pursued by one man; there are undoubtedly other Harsh Neotias in the city. It used to be said that when Calcutta catches a cold, the rest of India sneezes. The Neotia virus is the kind one hopes is infectious.

42. Urbs Maxima in Indis

TO SOME OF US, THE STORY OF BOMBAY is a story of decline. I lived in Bombay from 1959 to 1969, the formative years of my childhood, and in those days everything exciting and vital in India appeared to be happening there. As late as 1979, the only Indian selection in Time-Life Books’ Great Cities of the World series was, inevitably, Bombay (elegantly evoked by Dom Moraes and a clutch of brilliant photographers). A plaque outside the Gateway of India reminds us that it is known as “Urbs Prima in Indis.” But Bombay has been increasingly overtaken by Delhi. In the last two decades, Delhi has grown, sucking up the nation's resources and talents like a sponge — money, art, theater, publishing. Delhi is now the capital of virtually all the things that Bombayites used to pride themselves on. Gaining fast, especially on the livability index, is Bangalore, flourishing on our own Silicon Plateau.

What makes Bombay Bombay is not just that it is India's commercial capital, the home of its stock exchange, a city that generates nearly 40 percent (38 percent at last count) of the country's taxes; nor that it manufactures the grandiose dreams of Bollywood (making five times as many films annually as the United States); nor that it houses the country's most opulent hotels and boasts of commercial rents higher than Manhattan or Tokyo (in a city where half the population is homeless); nor even that Bombay supports India's most innovative theaters and art galleries and 150 diet clinics while millions of its residents eke out a bare subsistence in the world's largest slums. No, what makes Bombay Bombay is that it is a microcosm of the best and worst of India. Its 17.5 million inhabitants — more than the entire populations of Norway, Denmark, and Finland put together — hail from every part of the subcontinent. On Bombay's bustling streets you can hear every one of India's twenty-three major languages, see all of its styles of dress, taste all of the astonishing variety of its cuisines, buy and sell any of its products, pray to any of its gods. Bombay is India writ small — a marvel of cosmopolitanism, of the country's pluralism and collective energy. It is living, thriving evidence that India's diversity, when channeled productively, is its richest asset.

The expatriate writer Suketu Mehta portrayed Bombay as still the biggest, richest, most murderous city in India, in his stunning debut, Maximum City. Bombay, Mehta points out, is a city of appalling contrasts — a bottle of Champagne at the Oberoi Hotel sells for one and a half times the national average annual income when 40 percent of the city has no safe drinking water; the world's largest film industry thrives in a city where plumbing, telephones, and law and order break down regularly; millions starve in filthy slums while the city supports several hundred slimming clinics. Such contrasts can be found elsewhere, but is there any other place on earth to which immigrants continue to flock while the trains in the city alone kill four thousand people a year? Where a thug buys chickens in the morning from Muslims he will butcher in the afternoon? (“Bombayites understand that business comes first,” Mehta quotes him as saying.) Where a ragpicker can be hired to kill a man for a sum of money that would not buy a cup of coffee at a good hotel in the city?

And yet to say this is to overlook Bombay's eclectic architecture, its fine museums and art galleries, its commercial life; to forget about a boat trip in the choppy seas to Bombay's premier attraction, the Elephanta Caves, with their remarkable ancient Hindu carvings; a visit to the cooperative Aarey milk colony; paying homage at Mani Bhavan, the house where Mahatma Gandhi lived and where many of his possessions can still be seen, as well as an intriguing series of dioramas on his life. To focus only on the crime and the corruption is to neglect the remarkable buildings and beautiful views (especially from the Hanging Gardens on Malabar Hill). And if either the heat or the rains drives one indoors, one must seek shelter at the Prince of Wales Museum, which houses one of the finest collections of Indian miniature paintings in the country. Most date from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries and are from the Deccani, Mughal, and Pahari schools. There is a particularly interesting series of paintings portraying the moods of the classical ragas, and some exquisite, but poorly labeled, temple statuary.

In other words, Bombay must not be reduced to its seamy underside. How can a visitor ignore, for instance, its fabled Taj Mahal Hotel, built in 1903 and still perhaps India's finest hotel, a grand crenellated edifice facing the sea near the historic arch of the Gateway of India? Legend has it that the hotel was born when Sir Jamsetji Tata, India's leading industrialist in the 1890s, was refused entry, together with a group of Indian friends, to the British-owned Pyrke's Apollo Hotel. Tata, a visionary steel magnate, vowed to build a hotel that would exceed the Apollo in quality but admit patrons of all races. He succeeded spectacularly, so that the Taj has now sprouted a modern twenty-two-story annex and is the flagship of a chain that has acquired the Pierre in New York and the Ritz-Carlton in Boston while Pyrke's is buried in the mists of colonial memory.

Legend also has it that the Taj's architect, William Chambers, visited the hotel only when its construction was complete and, discovering to his horror that the plans had been misread and the building built back to front, killed himself. Romantics should best not explore the veracity of this tale too closely, since it is almost certainly apocryphal, though the hotel staff is careful neither to confirm nor deny it.

Which is altogether the right approach to take to the great stories of a great city.

43. Of Cows Sacred and Profane

THE OTHER DAY I RECEIVED BY E-MAIL one of those Internet jokes that constantly do the rounds, particularly among expatriate Indians, whose appetite for desi humor, usually self-deprecating, knows no bounds. It purported to be an essay written by a Bihari candidate at the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) examinations for the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). The sender quoted what was allegedly the candidate's essay on the subject of “The Indian Cow,” which, for the benefit of those fortunate enough not to be assailed daily by the Internet, I reproduce below almost in full:

He is the cow. The cow is a successful animal. Also he is four-footed. And because he is female, he give milks, but will do so when he is got child. He is same like-God, sacred to Hindus and useful to man. But he has got four legs together. Two are forward and two are afterwards. His whole body can be utilized for use. More so the milk. Milk comes from 4 taps attached to his basement. Horses do not have any such attachment. What can it do? Various ghee, butter, cream, curd, why and the condensed milk and so forth. Also he is useful to cobbler, watermans and mankind generally.

His motion is slow only because he is of lazy species. Also his other motion (gobar) is much useful to trees, plants as well as for making flat cakes like Pizza, in hand, and drying in the sun. Cow is the only animal that extricates his feeding after eating…. His only attacking and defending organ is the horns, specially so when he is got child. This is done by knowing his head whereby he causes the weapons to be paralleled to the ground of the earth and instantly proceed with great velocity forwards.

He has got tails also, situated in the backyard, but not like similar animals. It has hairs on the other end of the other side. This is done to frighten away the flies which alight on his body whereupon he gives hit with it.

It goes on for a few sentences more in similar vein, and then the e-mailer added the following footnote: “We are reliably informed that the candidate passed the exam and is now an IAS officer somewhere in Bihar.”

Now let's put aside the obvious implausibilities of this story — the unlikelihood of an IAS exam paper being posted on the Web, the even greater unlikelihood that the IAS would ask its examinees to write an essay on the cow — and consider the sneering that lies behind it. The anonymous candidate is, of course, supposed to be from Bihar, which over the last couple of decades has become a sort of national symbol for corruption, venality, and incompetence in Indian governance, at least among the urban Anglophone classes. (This phenomenon has, of course, accelerated since the ascent of unprincipled rusticity to high office in that state, as embodied in the person of Shri and Smt Laloo Prasad Yadav.) Worse still, the e-mail claims the howler-laden essay actually got its author into the IAS. This is startling, because it suggests that the stock of that institution, once considered the home of the best and the brightest in our society, has fallen lower than any of us could have imagined, at least in the eyes of our nouveaux riches computer-owning yuppies and their NRI friends. In the old days, the IAS officer was the paragon of authority and power, the prospective bridegroom who commanded the highest price on the marriage market. Today, as multinationals and dot-coms (and better still, multinational dot-coms) reward their executives with riches and perks that a mere sarkari babu can only dream of, the once-august IAS man can even be portrayed as a semi-illiterate dehati who can't write a sensible English paragraph but still gets sent off to rule over the masses, at least in Bihar.

I may be making far too much of a silly Internet joke, but I wonder what its wide circulation (I have received it from at least three different people) reveals about the way Indian society is changing. I once wrote about the insidious divisions being promoted between “India” and “Bharat”—between a slice of our country that is seen as cosmopolitan, liberal, Anglophone, technologically savvy, and secular, and the undifferentiated rest that is thought of as traditional, casteist, superstition-ridden, backward, and vernacular. It worries me that, in this era of greater communication, complete interdependence, and the leveling influence of mass television, the gulf of empathy between the “Indians” and the Bharatvasis seems to be widening rather than shrinking. There is probably room here for more serious sociological enquiry than I am capable of. I hope it is undertaken by someone in Bihar.

But I don't want to leave the subject of classroom howlers before making the defensively feeble observation that Biharis, or for that matter Indians, are not their only perpetrators. Anders Henriksson, an American professor of history (at the not particularly well known Shepherd College in West Virginia) has compiled a volume he has titled Non Campus Mentis, a collection of egregious errors taken word for word from term papers and exams conducted at American and Canadian colleges. His chronicle runs from such prehistorical periods as “the Stoned Age” to the more contemporary dramas of “the Berlin Mall.” In his account, Julius Caesar is assassinated on “the Yikes of March” and bursts out while dying, “Me too, Brutus!”

In the student essays the good professor has trawled, there are knowing references to “Judyism” as a “monolithic” religion (whose adherents, in a contemporary computer-age error, worship the god “Yahoo”). Columbus's benefactors, Ferdinand and Isabella, conquer not Grenada but “Granola.” Martin Luther King Jr. (the student even left out the surname “King,” confusing the black American Nobel winner with the fifteenth-century German Protestant reformer) makes a historic “If I Had a Hammer” speech (the title of a pop song — King had, in reality, famously declared, “I have a dream”). Hitler is depicted as terrorizing his enemies with his feared “Gespacho,” a conflation of the Spanish soup, or gazpacho, with the dreaded Gestapo. Kennedy resolves the “Canadian Missile Crisis,” not the Cuban. And so on.

Ignorance, in other words, knows no boundaries. Not even national ones. I don't know how much they might know about the cow, but I have no doubt that none of the American students in Professor Hendriksson's book would have gotten into the IAS.

44. Of Vows and Vowels

THE NEWS THAT THE ERSTWHILE (or should one say “once and future”?) chief minister of Tamil Nadu, Jayalalitha, has decided to add an extra “a” to the end of her name because a numerologically minded astrologer told her it would be more propitious is the kind of Indian story foreigners find almost impossible to believe. There is no other society on earth in which a leading public figure would change the spelling of her name in such a manner, and for a reason that most non-Indians would find frivolous. And yet we take it so cheerfully in stride in our country because we manage to live in that rare combination of modernity and superstition that defines us as a breed apart from the other peoples of the world.

Where else, after all, is so much made of an individual's astrological chart, that mysterious database which determines his opportunities in life, his marital prospects, his willingness to undertake certain risks? I once wrote that an Indian without a horoscope is like an American without a credit card, and the truth of that observation shows no signs of fading away in the twenty-first century. It seems particularly entrenched in our political world. As one who is what we like to call a “God-fearing” Hindu, I make no claims to be a pure rationalist myself, but I am still bemused to read of the swearing-in of a minister delayed because a politician's astrologer told him the time was not auspicious to take the oath, or of a candidate's nomination papers being filed at the last possible minute to avoid the malign influences of raahu-kaalam. My favorite story is of the chief minister who refused to move into his official residence because a pundit claimed it was not built according to the principles of vastu (the Indian forerunner of feng shui) and he would not fare well in it. The bungalow was accordingly redone, at great public expense, with new doorways made and windows realigned to satisfy the pundit. At last the chief minister moved in — only to lose his job and his new home the next day, the vagaries of politics having outstripped the benefits of vastu.

Why on earth do otherwise intelligent, educated people put themselves in thrall to such superstition? I am all in favor of the innate human desire to propitiate the heavens, and I am even prepared to entertain the notion that the cosmos might be sending us signals in every planetary realignment, but what makes us so credulous as to believe that our godmen understand the code? I suppose it is entirely possible that Ms. Jayalalithaa will attain political successes that a mere Ms. Jayalalitha might not have, but on what possible basis can it be argued that the addition of a superfluous vowel made all the difference? I remember when I was about to publish The Great Indian Novel and a friend's guru advised me solemnly that all that was lacking was an extra vowel in the title. Put in another a, he advised, and success was certain; otherwise the book's prospects could not be guaranteed. I could scarcely believe he was suggesting that a retelling of the Mahabharata would work better as The Great Indiana Novel, or that a 432-page tome could get away with calling itself The Great Indian Novella. So I ignored the advice, and I am glad to say the novel is currently in its eighteenth printing while the godman himself, having been arrested a couple of years later under Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code, is now spending his eighteenth year in prison.

I must confess, however, that there has been a spelling change in the bosom of my own family. My son Ishaan was named Ishan on his birth certificate, but growing up in America he soon tired of people pronouncing his name as if it rhymed with “I can,” and around age seven he did a Jayalalithaa and baptized himself Ishaan — a spelling less liable, he felt, to mispronunciation. (His twin is named Kanishk, without the conventional final vowel, which puts us doubly out of sorts, since to the purist Ishaan has one a too many and Kanishk one a too few.)

I was quite willing to accept this precocious act of individual affirmation by my little son, but had he based his preference on the suggestion of a trusted astrologer, I would have resisted it stoutly. I do not believe God dispenses his favors according to the number of vowels in his creatures’ names.

Bollywood, of course, disagrees with me; our cinematic history is full of the titles of movies being chosen, amended, or misspelled on astrological or numerological grounds. (Think of that absurd second u in Ek Duuje Ke Liye or the bizarre extra e in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Ghum.) Actors, too, have had their names tampered with for luck: I recall the actor Rakesh Roshan, after a couple of undeserved flops, trying his hand at being Raakesh Roshan for a film or two before giving up and finding success behind the camera rather than in front of it. And wasn't Raaj Kumar a plain “Rajkumar” once upon a time?

Not that other fields are immune from the contagion. As a longtime cricket fan, few things drove me as much up the wall about the exhilarating and exasperating Krishnamachari Srikkanth as that irritating second k in his surname. Was it idiosyncrasy, illiteracy, or numerology? After all, no Indian language renders this Sanskritic name with a double k sound.

But in all fairness, I have to admit that the rendering of Indian names into English follows few consistent principles to begin with. Why do many Maharashtrian names end in e (as in Borde or Godse) when they could as easily be spelt with an ay (as in Mhambray or Thipsay)? Even more confusingly, why do the Sinhalese use the same e ending (as in Ranasinghe) to convey not the ay sound but the “uh,” the half vowel that comes at the end of many Sanskritic names? Yet that only reaffirms my point: spellings vary for assorted reasons, so do people's fates, but a correlation would be impossible to find. Do Naidus, Nayudus, and Naidoos enjoy different kinds of divine benediction? And what about those Bengalis who spell their common name Mukherjee, Mukherji, Mukherjea, Mookerjee, and even Mukherjei, because the Brits couldn't wrap their tongues around Mukhopadhyaya?

Spelling cannot disguise, let alone alter, the essential nature of the thing itself — the person, the name, the title, the book, the film so labeled. As Gertrude Stein so memorably put it, a rose is a rose is a rose, whatever else you choose to call it, and Shakespeare beat her to it by famously asking whether a rose by any other name wouldn't smell as sweet. (If it were spelled “roase,” though, it might not look as attractive.) Bollywood might hope that a different spelling on the marquee would alter an actress's fortunes, but would it matter whether a woman was Priti, Preeti, Preety, or even Preity as long as she was pretty?

Of course not. But nonetheless, we are all wedded to our own spellings — to the ways in which we are used to seeing our own names written down. I can only hope that some Indians will stop writing to me as Sasi Tarur.

45. Indian Realities, Virtual and Spiritual

ON A RECENT HOLIDAY IN BANGALORE, I made two trips out of the city that captured, within a span of forty-eight hours, a simple truth about the Indian reality.

Late one night I set out on a four-hour drive with my mother to the town of Puttaparthi in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. We arrived after 2 A.M. in a remarkably well-lit and orderly town. Buildings gleamed white against the streetlights; the sidewalks, patrolled by volunteers even at that hour, seemed freshly scrubbed. Puttaparthi, once a humble Andhra village like so many others, had become a boomtown as the birthplace and headquarters of the spiritual leader Sathya Sai Baba.

My mother had been a devotee for eighteen years, attending prayer meetings of Sai Baba followers around the world and singing devotional bhajans. I was a skeptic myself, but joined her among the early-morning gathering of thousands, all waiting patiently for a glimpse of the great man. Sai Baba emerged in his long ochre robe and made a stately progress through the throng. He paused here and there to accept a petition from a believer, or to materialize vibhuti (sacred ash) from his palm into the cupped hands of a worshiper. We were privileged to be invited through an ornate door into a small room for a private audience. There we were joined by two other groups that had been similarly favored: an Indian family of three and half a dozen Iranian pilgrims, wearing green scarves that proclaimed their Islamic faith. They looked up at him with folded hands, their adoration glistening in their eyes.

“Would you like something from me?” Sai Baba asked me.

“Peace of mind for my mother,” I replied.

“Yes, yes,” he said somewhat impatiently, “but would you like a gift from me?”

“Whatever you give me is for my mother,” I replied. He waved his hand in the air and opened his palm. In it nestled a gold ring with nine embedded stones, a navratan. He slipped it on my finger, remarking, “See how well it fits. Even a goldsmith would have needed to measure your finger.” He shook some vibhuti into my mother's grateful hands before taking the Indian family into an inner chamber for what devotees called an “interview.”

While they were gone, my mother expressed disappointment about the meager quantity of the ash she had received. But soon it was our turn for a private interview, and no sooner were we alone with Baba than he materialized a little silver urn for her, overflowing with vibhuti. “It was as if he had heard what I wanted,” my mother breathed.

The encounter was indeed astonishing at several levels. In our private talk, Sai Baba uttered insights about my family and myself that he could not possibly have known. He has a habit, disconcerting at first, of turning his palm quizzically outward and staring off into the distance, as if silently interrogating an unseen, all-knowing source. Sometimes he scribbles in the air with a finger as if dashing off a note to a celestial messenger. And then he says things which are sometimes banal, sometimes profound, and sometimes both (if only because so much of what he says has become worn out by repetition and frequent quotation, including in signs on the streets outside). His manifesting gifts from thin air is startling; he “transformed” a metal ring worn by one of the Iranians to a gold one, then returned his original to him as well.

But a skilled magician can do that, and it would be wrong to see Sai Baba as a conjurer. He has channeled the hopes and energies of his followers into constructive directions, both spiritual and philanthropic.

Everything at his complex is staffed by volunteers who rotate through Puttaparthi at well-organized two-week intervals; while we were there, the volunteers were all from Madhya Pradesh, and it was to be Orissa's turn next. Many left distinguished positions behind to serve. (“I once asked a man washing a window where he was from,” mused a visitor, “and he said he was the Chief Justice of Sikkim.”) The free hospital in Puttaparthi, which I visited, is one of the best in India; many reputed doctors volunteer their services to him. Sai Baba has built schools and colleges, and is currently undertaking a project to bring irrigation to a number of parched southern districts.

The next day I drove from Bangalore in a different direction, to the campus of Infosys, India's leading computer technology firm. It, too, wore the clean and scrubbed look I had seen at Puttaparthi. But there were no temples here, no pavilions thronged with devotees. Instead, escorted by the company's affable CEO, Nandan Nilekani, I saw the world's leading software museum, a state-of-the-art teleconference center, classrooms with sophisticated video equipment, and a work environment that could not be bettered in any developed country. Infosys is a world leader in information technology services, providing consulting, systems integration, and applications development services to some of the biggest firms in the world. Infosys's then thirteen thousand staff (known in the company's argot as “Infoscions”) worked in over thirty offices around the world. In Bangalore they sit amid lush landscaped greenery dotted with pools, recharge themselves at an ultramodern gym (“the best in Asia,” Nandan said lightly), display their creativity at a company art gallery, and enjoy a choice of nine food courts for their lunchtime snacks. I marveled at the sophistication and affluence visible in every square inch of the campus. “We wanted to prove,” Nandan explained, “that this could be done in India.”

Sai Baba and Infosys are both faces of twenty-first-century India. One produces rings out of the ether and urges people to be better human beings; the other deals in a different form of virtual reality and helps human beings to better themselves. One runs free hospitals and schools; the other seeks to bring the benefits of technology to a country still mired in millennial poverty. In the 1950s, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru declared dams and factories to be “the new temples of modern India.” What he failed to recognize was that the old temples continued to maintain their hold on the Indian imagination. The software programs of the new information technology companies dotting Bangalore's “Silicon Plateau” may be the new mantras of India, but they supplement, rather than supplant, the old mantras. Programming and prayers are both part of the contemporary Indian reality.

Sai Baba and Infosys are emblematic of an India that somehow manages to live in several centuries at once. On our way out of Puttaparthi, my mother and I had a brief word with a devotee who was lining up to buy a packet of vibhuti to take home with him. “What do you do?” I asked.

“I am,” he replied proudly, a cell phone glinting in his shirt pocket, “a project manager at Infosys.”

46. The Prehistory of Indian Science

WHILE WORKING ON A SHORT BIOGRAPHY of Jawaharlal Nehru (Nehru: The Invention of India), I became conscious of the extent to which we have taken for granted one vital legacy of his: the creation of an infrastructure for excellence in science and technology, which has become a source of great self-confidence and competitive advantage for the country today. Nehru was always fascinated by science and scientists. He made it a point to attend the annual Indian Science Congress every year, and he gave free rein (and taxpayers’ money) to scientists in whom he had confidence to build high-quality institutions. Men like Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai constructed the platform for Indian accomplishments in the fields of atomic energy and space research; they and their successors have given the country a scientific establishment without peer in the developing world.

Nehru's establishment of the Indian Institutes of Technology (and the spur they provided to other lesser institutions) has produced many of the finest minds in America's Silicon Valley. Today, an IIT degree is held in the same reverence in the United States as one from MIT or Caltech, and India's extraordinary leadership in the software industry is the indirect result of Jawaharlal Nehru's faith in scientific education. Nehru left India with the world's second-largest pool of trained scientists and engineers integrated into the global intellectual system, to a degree without parallel outside the developed West.

And yet the roots of Indian science and technology go far deeper than Nehru. I was reminded of this yet again by a remarkable book, Lost Discoveries, by the American writer Dick Teresi. Teresi's book studies the ancient non-Western foundations of modern science, and though he ranges from the Babylonians and Mayans to Egyptians and other Africans, it is his references to India that caught my eye. And how astonishing those are! The Rig Veda asserted that gravitation held the universe together twenty-four centuries before the apple fell on Newton's head. The Vedic civilization — broadly, that of Aryan India from 1500 B.C. to 500 A.D. — subscribed to the idea of a spherical earth at a time when everyone else, even the Greeks, assumed the earth was flat. By the fifth century A.D. Indians had calculated that the age of the earth was 4.3 billion years; as late as the nineteenth century, English scientists believed the earth was 100 million years old, and it was only in the late twentieth century that Western scientists estimated the earth to be about 4.6 billion years old.

If I were to pick one field to focus on, it would be that of mathematics. India invented modern numerals (known to the world as “Arabic” numerals because the West got them from the Arabs, who learned them from us!). It was an Indian who first conceived of the zero, shunya; the concept of nothingness, shunyata, integral to Hindu and Buddhist thinking, simply did not exist in the West. (“In the history of culture,” wrote Tobias Dantzig in 1930, “the invention of zero will always stand out as one of the greatest single achievements of the human race.”) The concept of infinite sets of rational numbers was understood by Jain thinkers in the sixth century B.C. Our forefathers can take credit for geometry, trigonometry, and calculus; the “Bakhshali manuscript,” seventy leaves of bark dating back to the early centuries of the Christian era, reveals fractions, simultaneous equations, quadratic equations, geometric progressions, and even calculations of profit and loss, with interest.

Indian mathematicians invented negative numbers: the British mathematician Lancelot Hogben, grudgingly acknowledging this, suggested ungraciously that “perhaps because the Hindus were in debt more often than not, it occurred to them that it would also be useful to have a number which represents the amount of money one owes.” (That theory would no doubt also explain why Indians were the first to understand how to add, multiply, and subtract from zero — because zero was all, in Western eyes, we ever had.)

The Sulba Sutras, composed between 800 and 500 B.C., demonstrate that India had Pythagoras's theorem before the great Greek was born, and a way of getting the square root of two correct to five decimal places. (Vedic Indians solved square roots in order to build sacrificial altars of the proper size.) The Kerala mathematician Nilakantha wrote sophisticated explanations of the irrationality of pi before the West had heard of the concept. The Vedanga Jyotisha, an astrological treatise written around 500 B.C., declares: “Like the crest of a peacock, like the gem on the head of a snake, so is mathematics at the head of all knowledge.” (Our mathematicians were poets, too!) But one could go back even earlier, to the Harappan civilization, for evidence of a highly sophisticated system of weights and measures in use around 3000 B.C.

Archaeologists also found a “ruler” made with lines drawn precisely 6.7 millimeters apart with an astonishing level of accuracy. The “Indus inch” was a measure in consistent use throughout the area. The Harappans also invented kiln-fired bricks, less permeable to rain and floodwater than the mud bricks used by other civilizations of the time. The bricks contained no straw or other binding material and so turned out to be usable five thousand years later when a British contractor dug them up to construct a railway line between Multan and Lahore. And though they were made in fifteen different sizes, the Harappan bricks were amazingly consistent: their length, width, and thickness were invariably in the ratio of 4:2:1.

“Indian mathematical innovations,” writes Teresi, “had a profound effect on neighboring cultures.” The greatest impact was on Islamic culture, which borrowed heavily from Indian numerals, trigonometry, and analemma. Indian numbers probably arrived in the Arab world in 773 A.D. with the diplomatic mission sent by the Hindu ruler of Sind to the court of the Caliph al-Mansur. This gave rise to the famous arithmetical text of al-Khwarizmi, written around 820 A.D., which contains a detailed exposition of Indian mathematics, in particular the usefulness of the zero. With Islamic civilization's rise and spread, knowledge of Indian mathematics reached as far afield as Central Asia, North Africa, and Spain. “In serving as a conduit for incoming ideas and a catalyst for influencing others,” Teresi adds, “India played a pivotal role.”

For a nation still obsessed by astrology, it is ironic that Indians established the field of planetary astronomy, identifying the relative distance of the known planets from the sun, and figured out that the moon is nearer to the earth than the sun. A hymn of the Rig Veda extols “nakshatra-vidya”; the Vedas’ awareness of the importance of the sun and the stars is manifest in several places. The Siddhantas are among the world's earliest texts on astronomy and mathematics; the Surya Siddhanta, written about 400 A.D., includes a method for finding the times of planetary ascensions and eclipses. The notion of gravitation, or gurutvakarshan, is found in these early texts. “Two hundred years before Pythagoras,” writes Teresi, “philosophers in northern India had understood that gravitation held the solar system together, and that therefore the sun, the most massive object, had to be at its center.”

The Kerala-born genius Aryabhata was the first human being to explain, in 499 A.D., that the daily rotation of the earth on its axis is what accounted for the daily rising and setting of the sun. (His ideas were so far in advance of his time that many later editors of his awe-inspiring Aryabhattiya altered the text to save his reputation from what they thought were serious errors.) Aryabhata conceived of the elliptical orbits of the planets a thousand years before Kepler, in the West, came to the same conclusion (having assumed, like all Europeans, that planetary orbits were circular rather than elliptical). Aryabhata even estimated the value of the year at 365 days, six hours, twelve minutes, and thirty seconds; in this he was only a few minutes off (the correct figure is just under 365 days and six hours). The translation of the Aryabhattiya into Latin in the thirteenth century taught Europeans a great deal; it also revealed to them that an Indian had known things that Europe would only learn of a millennium later.

If Aryabhata was a giant of world science, his successors as the great Indian astronomers, Varamahira and Brahmagupta, have left behind vitally important texts that space does not allow me to summarize here. The mathematical excellence of Indian science sparkles through their work; Indian astronomers advanced their field by calculations rather than deductions from nature. Teresi says that “Indian astronomy, perhaps more than any other, has served as the crossroads and catalyst between the past and the future of the science.” Inevitably, Indian cosmology was also in advance of the rest of the world. Teresi's book has a fascinating section relating Hindu creation myths to modern cosmology; he discusses the notion of great intermeshing cycles of creation and destruction and draws stimulating parallels with the big bang theory that currently commands the field.

The ancient Indians were no slouches in chemistry, which emerges in several verses of the Atharva Veda, composed around 1000 B.C. Two thousand years later, Indian practical chemistry was still more advanced than Europe's. The historian Will Durant wrote that the Vedic Indians were “ahead of Europe in industrial chemistry; they were masters of calcination, distillation, sublimation, steaming, fixation, the production of light without heat, the mixing of anesthetic and soporific powders, and the preparation of metallic salts, compounds, and alloys.” An Indian researcher, Udayana, studied gases by filling bladders and balloons with smoke, air, and assorted gases. The ancient Jain thinkers predicted the notion of opposite electrical charges and advanced a notion of the “spin” of particles, which would not be discovered by the West till the twentieth century.

So what about physics? Indian metaphysicists came upon the idea of atoms centuries before the Greek Democritus, known in the West as the father of particle physics. In 600 B.C. Kanada established a theory of atoms in his Vaisesika Sutra; the Jains went further in later years, expounding a concept of elementary particles. Indians also came closer to quantum physics and other current theories than anyone else in the ancient world.

The Upanishadic concepts of svabhava— the inherent nature of material objects — and yadrchha (the randomness of causality) are startlingly modern. The Upanishads developed the first classifications of matter, evolving into an awareness of the five elements and later of the five senses. When the Samkhya philosophers explained, in the sixth century B.C., that “the material universe emanates out of prakriti, the rootless root of the universe,” they anticipated Aristotle. And when Indian philosophers spoke of maya, or that which gives illusory weight to the universe, they did so in terms that evoke the twentieth-century idea of the Higgs field, the all-pervasive invisible field so beloved of particle physicists, which gives substance to illusion.

Which brings us back to technology. Did India have any technology of its own before the IITs? The answer is an emphatic yes. I have already mentioned the extraordinary achievements of the Harappan civilization, which included terra-cotta ceramics fired at high temperatures, a sophisticated system of weights and measures, and sanitary engineering skills in advance of the West of the nineteenth century. Our skill at digging up, cutting, and polishing diamonds goes back millennia. In the sixth century A.D. India made the highest-quality sword steel in the world. Iron suspension bridges came from Kashmir; printing and papermaking were known in India before anywhere in the West; Europeans sought Indian shipbuilding expertise; our textiles were rated the best in the world till well into the colonial era. But we were never very good with machinery; we made our greatest products with skilled labor. That was, in the end, how the British defeated us.

47. The Anatomy of Civil Conflict

DESPITE HAVING EARNED A PH.D. IN INTERNATIONAL POLITICS twenty-nine years ago, I have always squirmed a little at the expression “political science.” For all its fountains of theory and the associated outpourings of academic jargon, I always suspected that political studies were not and could not be a science because the best political analyses, in my view, were those that drew from the art of understanding human behavior. A journalist's eye, even a novelist's heart, I felt, were preferable in this field to a scientist's microscope and petri dish.

An Indian scholar has proved me wrong. Ashutosh Varshney, a forty-five-year-old scholar from Allahabad, currently associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan — by way of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, and Notre Dame — has published a book, Ethnic Conflict and Civil Life: Hindus and Muslims in India, that has been ten years in the making and seems likely to prove seminal in its impact on the field. And it is indeed a work of science, based on comprehensive and wide-ranging field research, overflowing with charts and graphs and tables, testing a hypothesis assuredly as any lab scientist in a white coat, and coming up with answers (and further questions) that should offer further possibilities to a whole generation of political scientists to follow.

The thesis is deceptively simple: the greater the patterns of intercommunal civic engagement in a city, the lower the likelihood of violent conflict and communal riots. To prove this, Varshney examines three pairs of Indian cities: Aligarh and Calicut (Kozhikode); Hyderabad and Lucknow; Ahmedabad and Surat. In each pair, the demographics of the two cities are similar, with broadly comparable percentages of Muslims, but one of the pair is riot prone and the other is not.

Varshney asks, why not? What is there about Calicut that makes it a less likely site of Hindu-Muslim violence than Aligarh? He delves into history, studies the social and cultural factors, analyzes the politics of each place — but concludes that the real difference is that in Calicut but not in Aligarh, Hindus and Muslims engage with one another in strong associational forms of civic life, from political parties and nonreligious movements for social justice or land reform to trade unions and business groups. In Calicut, caste is a more important divider than religion, whereas in Aligarh much of Muslim civic life takes place within the Muslim community. Varshney extends the analysis, with obvious variations for local color, to the other pairs of cities, and arrives at the same conclusion.

Varshney's central insight is invaluable, and its buttressing with an impressive array of facts and figures from over seven years of research means that it is solidly grounded. Varshney has no illusions about how riots are instigated and manipulated: whatever the proximate trigger for violence, there is always a politician with an ax to grind, pulling the strings, inflaming passions, exploiting the victims for purely political ends. But his point remains that the chances for success of such politicians (he calls the breed “riot-entrepreneurs”) would be remarkably lower if there is vigorous and communally integrated civic life, not just through everyday casual contact but through formal associations that consolidate the mutual engagement of the two communities. The Hindus of Varanasi would not attack the Muslim artisans who make the masks and effigies for the annual Ram Lila, even if an irresponsible and bigoted politician egged them on to do so.

Since the tragic events in Gujarat shook my faith in this economically highly developed state, Varshney's chapters on Ahmedabad and Surat are particularly fascinating. Varshney describes two cities, which were largely peaceful communally but succumbed later. Since 1969, Ahmedabad has been one of the most riot-prone cities in the nation, and Surat's shantytowns suffered terribly after 1992. He asks why the civic structures of peace broke down in these cities. His answer is troubling. From the 1920s onward, Gandhian nationalism created a strong level of civic associational activity across communal lines, with the cadre-based Congress Party creating labor unions and mass-rooted social organizations that welded the society together before Partition. Gujarat's business associations were also intercommunal.

But the weakening of the Congress Party as a civic institution following its rise to power, the enfeeblement of the trade unions, and the emergence of new, less communally integrated organizations made the descent to violence in recent years possible. If Varshney is right, the increasing polarization we are seeing in the aftermath of the Gujarat horrors will make matters worse, not better, since the prospects for an integrated civic life in many parts of the state have worsened after the riots.

It has to be asked — and Varshney raises the question toward the end of his fine book — whether his findings could be relevant to the rest of the world. He seems to think so, though he acknowledges that much more research will have to be done. Having dealt with the former Yugoslavia myself, I think his thesis would falter there, because this was a thoroughly integrated society where 22 percent of the population either lived in mixed marriages or was the product of them. Yet people turned against each other in the most brutal way, with neighbors killing and raping neighbors — the very people with whom they went to school or belonged to the same chess club (or the same branch of the local Communist Party).

This might be the exception that proves Varshney's rule; perhaps one day a scholar will apply the same level of scientific rigor to research civic life in the former Yugoslavia as Varshney has in India. The results would be worth waiting for. Ashutosh Varshney has written a rich, complex book, meticulously researched, exhaustively analytical, and carefully argued. It is a fine work of scholarship that has broken new ground in the field of political science. But its greatest value lies not in academics but with those who must make public policy — the politicians and policemen in whose hands lies the safety of Indian citizens the next time a riot is instigated.

The promotion of Hindu-Muslim civic engagement, Varshney has demonstrated, is now an urgent priority for India's leaders if we are to prevent the spiraling descent into communal violence whose worst manifestations were seen in Gujarat.

48. Stephanians in the House

THE STARTLING NEWS THAT NO FEWER THAN TWELVE of my fellow Stephanians — alumni of that bastion of elite liberal education, Delhi's St. Stephen's College — currently hold seats in Parliament, and that eight of them were actually elected to the Lok Sabha, has provoked in me a mild state of astonishment.

The roster of Stephanians in the Lower House is impressive enough: Mani Shankar Aiyer, Kapil Sibal, Lakshman Singh, Sachin Pilot, Manvendra Shaha, Dushyant Singh, Sandeep Dikshit, and Rahul Gandhi. Add to these Natwar Singh, Ashwani Kumar, Arun Shourie, and Chandan Mitra in the Rajya Sabha, and one's surprise is complete. In my time Stephanians were expected to go into the IAS and IFS, not to enter politics. And they conquered babudom in large numbers every year, rising to the highest ranks of the civil service but believing profoundly that politics was not for them.

I have never forgotten the college's annual “Games Dinner” of 1974–75, which I, never proficient at games of any sort, was invited to attend as the elected president of the College Students’ Union. Our guest speaker that night was a distinguished Stephanian of royal descent, an Additional Secretary to the government of India and a civil servant known to be well connected to the ruling family. He surveyed us, seventeen- to twenty-two-year-olds with bright eyes and scrubbed faces, and chose to express a candor none of us was accustomed to from Indian officialdom. “I look at you all,” he said bluntly, “the best and the brightest of our fair land, smart, honest, and able, and my heart sinks. Because I know that most of you will do what I did and take the civil service examinations, little realizing that if you succeed, your fate will be to take orders from the dregs of our society — the politicians.” He could see the shock on the faces of his audience as he went on: “Don't make the mistake I did. Do something else with your lives.”

I have never forgotten the speech, thinking about which kept me awake most of that night — and helped change my own career plans. If someone as successful and important in the bureaucracy as he could feel this way, I wondered, what satisfaction could ordinary people without his rank or connections derive from government service?

Nor have I forgotten the speaker, whom I have had the privilege of meeting many times since. He was Kanwar Natwar Singh, star of the IFS, who went on to put his money where his mouth was: he resigned from the government before he could attain the foreign secretaryship that most of his peers considered inevitable, and entered politics instead. This gave him a stint as minister of state for external affairs, where he could give orders to the foreign secretary of the day; and for two years he was India's foreign minister.

This transformation from diplomacy to politics — from pin-stripes to khadi—was extremely unusual even when Mani Shankar Aiyar followed in Natwar Singh's footsteps. But it became possible because of the unexpected ascent of Rajiv Gandhi to the prime ministry in 1984, which brought to power the kind of Indian almost completely unrepresented in Indian politics. The Stephanian kind.

How can one describe them? There are many of us, but, among India's multitudes, we are few. We have grown up in the cities of India, secure in a national rather than local identity, which we express in English better than in any Indian language. We rejoice in the complexity and diversity of our India, of which we feel a conscious part; we have friends of every caste and religious community, and we marry across such sectarian lines. We see the poverty, suffering, and conflict in which a majority of our fellow citizens are mired, and we clamor for new solutions to these old problems, solutions we believe can come from the skills and efficiency of the modern world. We are secular, not in the sense that we are irreligious or unaware of the forces of religion, but that we believe religion should not determine public policy or individual opportunity.

And, in Indian politics, we used to be pretty much irrelevant.

Usually, we don't get a look in. We don't enter the fray because we can't win. We tell ourselves ruefully that we are able, but not electable. We don't have the votes: there are too few of us, and we don't speak the idiom of the masses. Instead we have learned to talk about political issues without the expectation that we would be able to do anything about them.

Rajiv Gandhi epitomized the breed, dismissed by so many as the baba-log (pampered children). When he came to office he was unlike any Indian political figure I had ever met. He had nothing in common with the professional politicians we had taught ourselves to despise, sanctimonious windbags clad hypocritically in homespun who spouted socialist rhetoric while amassing private wealth through the manipulation of political favors. And at a time when casteists and religious fanatics were attempting to redefine India and Indianness on their own terms, I was proud to have an Indian leader who belonged to no single region, caste, or community, but to the all-embracing India I called my own. By simply being Rajiv Gandhi, he represented a choice it was vital for India to have.

It didn't last. He failed at his first attempt in office, and I was not alone in regretting that he did not more effectively act upon the convictions of his upbringing. At the second attempt, a suicide bomber deprived India of that choice. With Rajiv Gandhi's passing, there was no longer any Indian political leader of whom it could be said that his appeal was truly national, and in the spectrum of alternatives available to Indians, that loss was disenfranchisement indeed.

All that is now changing. Twelve Stephanians in Parliament, with more (the likes of Salman Khurshid, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, and Sheila Dikshit) behind the throne! And, to paraphrase Macaulay, others in politics who may not have earned the Stephanian label but are “Stephanian in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” (like ministers P. Chidambaram, Praful Patel, and Jairam Ramesh and parliamentarians like Milind Deora). The political landscape may not have been irretrievably transformed, but we at last have a breed of politicians who have a chance to prove they can do better than “the dregs of society.”

Of course, as that very phrase suggests, there is a danger here, too. The very name St. Stephen's conjures up in the minds of some critics three overlapping concepts, none of which is meant to be flattering: elitism, Anglophilia, and deracination.

Whether it is a good thing that so many Stephanians are in Parliament, there is certainly a spirit that can be called Stephanian: I spent three years (1972–75) living and celebrating it. Stephania was both an ethos and a condition to which we aspired. Elitism was part of it, but by no means the whole. In any case, the college's elitism was still elitism in an Indian context, albeit one shaped, like so many Indian institutions, by a colonial legacy. There is no denying that the aim of the Cambridge Brotherhood in founding St. Stephen's in 1881 was to produce more obedient subjects to serve Her Britannic Majesty; their idea of constructive missionary activity was to bring the intellectual and social atmosphere of Camside to the dry dust plains of Delhi. Improbably enough, they succeeded, and the resultant hybrid outlasted the Raj. St. Stephen's in the early 1970s was an institution whose students sustained a Shakespeare Society and a Criterion Club, staged avant-garde plays and wrote execrable poetry, ran India's only faculty-sanctioned practical joke competition (in memory of P. G. Wodehouse's irrepressible Lord Ickenham), invented the “Winter Festival” of collegiate cultural competition, which was imitated at universities across the country, invariably reached the annual intercollegiate cricket final (and turned up in large numbers to cheer the Stephanian cricketers on to their accustomed victory), maintained a careful distinction between the Junior Common Room and the Senior Combination Room, and allowed the world's only non-Cantabrigian “gyps” to serve their meals and make their beds. And if the punts never came to the Jamuna, the puns flowed on the pages of Kooler Talk and the cyclostyled Spice (whose typing mistakes, under the impish editorship of Ramu Damodaran, were deliberate, and deliberately hilarious). And Stephanians wryly acknowledged the charge of disconnection from the masses by organizing union debates on such subjects as “In the opinion of this House, the opinion of this House does not matter.”

This was the St. Stephen's I knew, and none of us who lived and breathed the Stephanian air saw any alien affectation in it. For one thing, St. Stephen's also embraced the Hindi movies at Kamla Nagar, the trips to Sukhiya's dhaba and the chowchow at TibMon (as the Tibetan Monastery was called); the nocturnal Informal Discussion Group saw articulate discussion of political issues, and the Social Service League actually went out and performed social service; and even for the “pseuds,” the height of career aspiration was the IAS, not some foreign multinational. The Stephanian could hardly be deracinated and still manage to bloom. It was against Indian targets that the Stephanian set his goals, and by Indian assumptions that he sought to attain them. (Feminists, please do not object to my pronouns: I only knew St. Stephen's before its coedification.)

At the same time St. Stephen's was, astonishingly for a college in Delhi, insulated to a remarkable extent from the prejudices of middle-class Indian life. It mattered little where you were from, which Indian language you spoke at home, what religious faith you espoused. When I joined college in 1972 from Calcutta, the son of a Keralite newspaper executive, I did not have to worry about fitting in: we were all minorities at St. Stephen's and all part of one eclectic polychrome culture. Five of the preceding ten Student Union presidents had been non-Delhiite non-Hindus (four Muslims and a Christian), and they had all been fairly elected against candidates from the “majority” community.

But at St. Stephen's, religion and region were not the distinctions that mattered: what counted was whether you were “in residence” or a “dayski” (day scholar), a “science type” or a “ShakSoc type,” a sportsman or a univ topper (or best of all, both). Caste and creed were no bar, but these other categories determined your share of the Stephanian experience.

This blurring of conventional distinctions was a crucial element of Stephania. “Sparing” (or hanging about) with the more congenial of your comrades in residence — though it could leave you with a near-fatal faith in coffee, conversation, and crosswords as ends in themselves — was manifestly more important than attending classes. (And in any case, you learned as much from approachable faculty members like David Baker and Mohammed Amin outside the classroom as inside it.) Being ragged outside the back gate of Miranda House, having a late coffee in your block tutor's room, hearing outrageous (and largely apocryphal) tales about recent Stephanians who were no longer around to contradict them, seeing your name punned with in Kooler Talk, all were integral parts of the Stephanian culture, and of the ways in which this culture was transmitted to each successive batch of Stephanians.

Three years is, of course, a small — and decreasing — proportion of my life, and of course I was at St. Stephen's at an age when any experience would have had a lasting effect. But in celebrating Stephania I think of its atmosphere and history, its student body and teaching staff, its sense of itself and how that sense was communicated to each individual character in the Stephanian story. Too many Indian colleges are places for lectures, rote learning, memorizing, regurgitation; St. Stephen's encouraged random reading, individual note-taking, personal tutorials, extracurricular development. Elsewhere you learned to answer the questions, at college to question the answers. Some of us went further, and questioned the questions.

Politics has never been a noble profession, but in every democracy it is a necessary one. The quality of our politicians inevitably affects the quality of our democracy. Perhaps it is time for more Stephanians to set aside their preparations for the IAS exams and seek to serve their country in elective office instead.

49. Ayurveda Takes Off

“AYURVEDA GOES GLOBAL,” bLAZED THE HEADLINE in a leading Indian weekly. The cover story waxed eloquent about the West's discovery of this five-thousand-year-old Indian discipline, dropping the names of celebrities who have turned to our traditional remedies to cure their postmodern ailments — Naomi Campbell, Demi Moore, Cherie Blair, and the ubiquitous Madonna were prominently mentioned. “Ayurveda continues to grow rapidly as one of the most important systems of mind-body medicine, natural healing, and traditional medicine,” the article quoted a Dr. David Frawley as saying, “as the need for natural therapies, disease prevention, and a more spiritual approach to life becomes ever more important in this ecological age.” That sounds like an appropriately New Age sentiment, but tellingly, the article calculates the success of this otherworldly science in material terms: ayurveda, it seems, accounts for $60 billion of a $120 billion “global herbal market.”

And therein, if I may coin a phrase, lies the rub. There is no argument about the increasing popularity of ayurveda: clinics professing to offer ayurvedic treatments are sprouting like herbs in places as far afield as London and the Italian Dolomites, and “ayurvedic tourism” is already a significant money earner for our national exchequer.

Kerala has long attracted tourists to its abundant natural beauty, but these days even a glimpse of paradise is not enough to lure jaded international tourists. So Kerala has turned to the past to improve its present. It has resurrected the ancient life-science of ayurveda, which uses herbs and oils concocted millennia ago to promote health and longevity. The state is now dotted with about as many ayurvedic clinics as mango trees. No Kerala hotel worth its name fails to offer, at a minimum, an ayurvedic massage, with more esoteric treatments — a half-hour drip of oils onto your forehead, medicated oil infusions into your nostrils — available at most places. Even several five-star hotels, which not so long ago would have looked down at anything so desi, have cashed in on the rage.

But what exactly is it that they are selling? Tourist brochures show a winsome blonde in a bikini being massaged by a lady in a traditional red-bordered white Kerala sari, with jasmine in her hair and a brass lamp at her side. This is effectively packaged exotica: not ayurveda as a remedy for disease, but rather as an upmarket beauty treatment — a relaxation cure for the jaded. A five-thousand-year-old science has become the diversion of choice of the era of the fifteen-second sound bite. “Pamper yourself with the wisdom of the ancients,” the slogan might as well say.

“This is not ayurveda,” says Dr. Ramkumar of the venerable Arya Vaidya Pharmacy in Coimbatore, which offers the more traditional treatments. “This is a travesty of ayurveda. People are taking what is meant to be a total system of medicine and reducing it to a few superficial treatments. Ayurveda is meant to diagnose and treat the entire person, not one part of his or her body. And the principle behind our treatments is vital. Our massages, for example, are not intended for transient pleasure. In fact, massage is the wrong word for them — they are really oil applications. A doctor determines what are the right oils you need, and they are then applied systematically over a period of time. The benefit of the treatment comes from the oil, not from the rubbing. But instead it is the massage that is being promoted rather than the medicinal purpose of the oil.”

True enough. Professional ayurveds are also critical of the way in which the cosmetics industry has latched on to ayurveda. The hottest range of beauty products in North America these days — soaps and moisturizers, anti-wrinkle creams and conditioning shampoos — claims to be based on ayurveda. But it calls itself “Aveda,” a more digestible brand name, in order to appeal to a mainstream clientele. “Aveda,” snorts one ayurved dismissively, “that means against the Veda!”

Purists sneer at what they consider the rampant commercialization of a hallowed practice. “Ayurveda is a holistic science,” one expert explained to me. “The oils, the herbs, the foods are all part of the treatment. It's not something you can dispense with a pill or an oil rub in an air-conditioned spa.”

The Arya Vaidya Pharmacy is doing tremendous work to popularize “real” ayurveda across the country — both former prime minister Vajpayee and former president Narayanan were beneficiaries of their treatments — but it is more of a challenge to get the word out around the world. Most countries — not just in the West — do not recognize ayurveda as a system of medicine, which makes it impossible to export medicines and oils except as “herbal dietary supplements.” Ayurvedic practitioners are also not recognized as doctors (though many of them have graduated from a rigorous four-year course taught by the Central College of Ayurveda in India), and as such would not be licensed to treat illnesses. This leaves them little choice but to offer the cosmetic treatments, especially massages, which have less exacting licensing requirements. An ancient science has been reduced to a modern fad.

“You wouldn't go for a bypass and ask the doctor to short-circuit some of the procedures,” says Dr. Ramkumar. “Why should you ask an ayurved to do so?”

The answer is that no one has a bypass for pleasure, but some ayurvedic treatments are indeed pleasurable, whether or not they serve a larger medical purpose. One August day, I drove up to the Tamil Nadu hill resort of Kotagiri to spend a blissful twenty-four hours at the Arya Vaidya Pharmacy's Ayurprastha retreat, the former palace of the Travancore Maharajah. I walked in the bracing mountain air, ate organic vegetarian Kerala meals, and treated myself to two ayurvedic massages by an expert therapist. I knew perfectly well that twenty-four hours was not going to redress anything fundamentally wrong with my constitution, but twenty-four hours was all I had, and even if the effects could not possibly be lasting, I felt reinvigorated for the next few days. Is that such a bad thing for India to offer the rushed visitor?

Our ancient traditions evolved in ancient times; if we can adapt them to the present and in the process bring a few of those sixty billion dollars into our country, what's the harm in doing so? We're never going to become a major tourist destination because of our beaches or our shopping malls; no one is going to come to us for our spectacular historic sites because they are so badly maintained and so poorly supported by our infrastructure. The one commodity we have in abundance that the world wants is our ancient wisdom — the spiritual teachings of our sages, including the practice of ayurveda. The purists like Dr. Ramkumar are right that what is being promoted is really “Ayurveda Lite,” but let us not allow the best to become the enemy of the good.

No one wants the basic principles of ayurveda to be compromised. But perhaps by popularizing ayurveda in this way we will generate the resources the ayurveds need to do their serious work better.

*

“The palace?” the excitement in my mother's voice was palpable.

“We're going to stay at the palace?”

“I suppose so,” I replied. In booking my annual holiday in India, I opted this year for a change from the usual round of visits to friends and relatives. My mother, my sons, and I would instead play tourist in our native Kerala — and check in to the tony resorts that have recently sprung up around the state. How, I wondered, had the backwater I knew as a kid become a tourist destination?

Each winter, my sisters and I round up our British- and American-reared children and head for Kerala, rather self-consciously “renewing our roots” and instilling in the new generation our same sense of obligation.

But this time, as we visited our crumbling two-hundred-year-old ancestral home in a seemingly timeless village, it was Kerala that had changed. Savvy tourism promoters have lately come to appreciate the region's exceptional beauty. And because Kerala is also the spiritual center of the ancient life-science of ayurveda, with its aromatic oil massages and yoga, New Age travelers have come flocking.

I worked out our itinerary: five top-class resorts in fifteen days — a trip “home” doubling as a real vacation, with us trying out ayurvedic treatments at half a dozen different resorts, many run by the ecologically savvy CGH Earth Group, which offers its guests tours of the compost-processing biogas plants at its hotels.

Some resorts definitely traded authenticity for a more cosmopolitan allure: you could sip a Singapore sling poolside before going in for a massage, blissfully unaware that alcohol is prohibited in ayurveda.

But the majority have clung to ayurveda's origins as Kerala's indigenous medical system, insisting on an on-site interview with a registered ayurvedic practitioner before arranging the appropriate treatments. And only one, the newly restored Kalari Kovilakom in Kollengode, went the whole way, offering its guests all ayurveda, all the time.

My mother couldn't believe it when I e-mailed her. “The palace!”

“What's the big deal?” I asked. “Tourists in Rajasthan have been staying in converted palaces for decades. It's the one thing palaces are good for in our democratic age — serving as hotels.”

“You don't understand,” Mother replied, “this is the Kovilakom in Kollengode.”

Then I caught on. Kollengode, a tiny town miles from anyplace, was where she was born. “When I was a little girl, I used to walk along the outer walls of the palace every day on my way to school,” she said. “It looked so immense, so forbidding. It was unimaginable that I could even step into it, let alone stay there. The biggest thrill of my life was when your father and I were invited to tea by the rajah nearly fifty years ago. But even then we sat on an open porch. Visitors were not allowed inside. And now we're going to stay there?”

“Four nights,” I said. “The authentic ayurvedic spa experience.”

As lunch arrived I looked covetously at the steaming dishes placed before my sons. “I'd like some of what they're having,” I said.

The waiter grinned a bit sheepishly. “Sorry, sir,” he said, “the doctor has prescribed a different lunch for you.”

“You mean my lunch requires a prescription?” I exclaimed. The waiter nodded, unabashed. Welcome, his smile seemed to say, to the serious world of ayurvedic tourism.

No sooner had I checked in than I was interviewed by the resident doctor, Dr. Sreelatha. Her searching questions about my medical history sought to establish which of the three basic ayurvedic “humors” my body ran to—vaata (air), pitta (bile), or kapha (phlegm). Then she determined the types of treatment I'd undergo and the precise combination of oils that would be mixed for my massages. Dr. Sreelatha prescribed the last thing I'd drink at night and the hot water, lemon, and honey with which I'd be roused at 6 A.M. And, as I found out at my first lunch, she decided what I was allowed to eat.

“Ayurveda is not like Western medicine, which treats an individual symptom,” she explained. “Your entire lifestyle has to be treated.”

And so it was. I sat with my sons on yoga mats with coconut trees swaying in the gentle breeze around us as an Australian swami in saffron robes took us through our exercises. Mother woke up in a royal bedroom and had her breakfast on the very porch she'd visited when young. And just down the road, our ancestral village slumbered on, as farmers with yoked bullocks plowed the fields as their forebears had done for centuries.

I smiled at my mother when she returned from an hour-long ayurvedic massage meant to ease her arthritis. “Welcome home,” I said.

Under the good doctor's care, and with wholesome organic vegetarian fare, I began to glow — and even to lose weight. But we were on holiday, and five days after checking in, it was time for me to move on to the beach.

Dr. Sreelatha wouldn't accept my thanks. “You should have stayed at least a month,” she said disapprovingly. “Five days of ayurveda isn't enough.”

“I'll be back,” I promised.

That, of course, is the point of ayurvedic tourism. Don't just get people to come in and breeze out: get them to stay, and to return. In Dr. Sreelatha's words, treat their lifestyle. Even if it means denying them what they want for lunch.

50. In Defense of Delhi

MOST OF US INDIANS ARE, I SUPPOSE, ambivalent about our capital city. Its broad avenues, late-colonial architecture, and a general air of well-ordered self-importance goes well with popular notions of what the nation's premier city and seat of government should be like. When Lutyens's aging imperial model was given a multicrore-rupee facelift before the 1982 Asian Games, the new highways, overpasses, and tourist hotels made our rajdhani presentable as well as patrician. New Delhi, its inhabitants tended to assure impressed visitors, wasn't like the rest of India. And they meant it as a compliment.

But, at the same time, another stereotype also existed. The chattering classes lament that Delhi typifies an India that has lost its soul, that it's the epitome of a new concrete culture of “black money,” five-star hotels, and shopping malls divorced from tradition, the arts, or the refinements of the higher life. All that was worth cherishing in old Delhi, they moan, has now given way to the over-pass and the fast-food counter, both occupied by hustling Punjabis who feel no real sense of belonging to the city and don't even know the history behind the addresses on their visiting cards.

But so what if New Delhi is, as the intelligentsia claim, a parvenu city? It was re-created by those who had lost everything in the partition of the subcontinent — men and women of the Punjab, Sikhs, and Hindus uprooted from the land that had been the home of their ancestors for countless generations, rejects of history who had to carve out their own futures. They worked and struggled and sweated to make it. They were unencumbered by the baggage of the past, for the past had betrayed them. They succeeded; and as a result of their efforts, they created the first truly postcolonial Indian city.

So families that had trudged across the frontier as refugees today drive shining Suzukis across superhighways; people whose parents had lost their houses now sip imported wine in fancy restaurants. But instead of applauding them, educated Indians from Kolkata or Chennai tend to curl their refined lips in scorn. The crass materialism of the archetypal Delhiite is sniffed at, his lack of culture ridiculed, his ignorance of history deplored. Literate North India, for its part, laments the transformation of a Delhi that was once a byword for elegant poetry, Mughal manners, and courtly civilization.

Old Delhi may indeed have had its attractions, but it was also a moribund place steeped in decay and disease, ossified in communal and caste divisions, exploitative, and unjust. Today's New Delhi — not the musty bureaucratic edifices of government, but the throbbing, thriving agglomeration of factories and TV studios, industrial fairgrounds and software consultancies, nightclubs and restaurants — is a city that reflects the vigor and vitality of those who have made it. It is far and away India's richest city; it provides and reflects a stimulus, unfamiliar to the Indian intelligentsia, of enterprise and risk taking; its people are open and outward-looking. They may have forgotten their history but they remember their politics. They may not know why but they know how.

New Delhi has enshrined performance and effectiveness as more important measures of human worth than family name or pedigree. If, in the process, it has also placed a premium on vulgar ostentation rather than discreet opulence, so be it. The new rich could not have run the old clubs, so they built the new hotels and restaurants. The “five-star culture,” for all its vulgarity, is more authentically Indian than the club culture it has supplanted, a musty relic of proto-colonial dress codes and insipid English menus.

It is true that New Delhi lacks a coherent cultural focus. Its physical sprawl, its disaggregated “colonies,” ensures that the capital is really twenty townships in search of a city. But as the ambitious new Metro railway proves, it is not a city indifferent to the basic needs of its citizens. Nor is it lacking in creative endeavor. Today, fueled by the money and the people that have poured into the city, there are more plays, exhibitions, and concerts on any single day in New Delhi than anywhere else in India.

New Delhi is also, uniquely, a cosmopolitan society in the international sense. We have always been an overly self-obsessed people; our decades of protectionist policies also drastically reduced, in most other Indian cities, the frequency of routine contact and interchange between Indians and foreigners. Thanks to the diplomats and journalists based there, New Delhi is the one place where Indians of every class benefit from relating to, and seeing themselves in the eyes of, the outside world. (Bangalore is getting there, too, but not on the same scale.)

In its urban openness and economic energy, Delhi reminds me of the bustling coastal ports of a bygone era. With the advent of jet travel and the World Wide Web, you don't need port cities as your principal contacts with the outside world: the “coast” can move inland. New Delhi is India's contemporary equivalent — bustling, heterodox, anti-ritual, prosperous. For all its inadequacies, it is a symbol of a country on the move, the urban flagship of a better tomorrow. It has led India into the twenty-first century, even at the price of forgetting all that happened in the other twenty.

51. NRIs — The “Now Required Indians”

INDIA HAS AN OFFICIAL ACRONYM for its expatriates — NRIs, for “Non-Resident Indians.” In my book India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond, I jokingly suggested that the real debate was whether NRI stood for “Not Really Indian” or “Never Relinquished India.” The nearly twenty-five million people of Indian descent who live abroad fall, of course, into both categories. And in recent years, as the government has set about cultivating them through generous new policies, the establishment of a ministry for overseas Indian affairs and annual Pravsai Bharatiya Divas (Overseas Indians’ Day) events in India, it's clear one can apply a third variant to the acronym: “Now Required Indians.”

The 1,600 to 2,000 delegates who have flocked annually to India from over sixty different countries for the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas celebrations were firmly in the “Never Relinquished India” camp. They were in India to affirm their claim to it.

I attended one of the Pravasi Bharatiya weekends — the third one, in 2005, which fell on the ninetieth anniversary of the return to India of the most famous NRI of them all, Mahatma Gandhi, who alighted from his South African ship at Bombay's Apollo Bunder port on January 9, 1915. The nativism that has seen Bombay being renamed Mumbai has not diluted the city's dynamic cosmopolitanism. It still remains the gateway to India, a thriving, bustling, industrious, polyglot beehive of trade and exchange. If Mumbai seems sometimes to be choking on its own traffic, the city's aspirations, both literally and metaphorically, seem limitless. It was the right place to bring the world's largest gathering of NRIs together.

And they came in larger numbers than ever, their enthusiasm undampened by the grim news of the tsunami disaster just two weeks earlier. The vice presidents of Suriname and Mauritius, the former prime ministers of Fiji and Trinidad and Tobago, Malaysian politicians and Gulf-based entrepreneurs, tycoons from Hong Kong and titans from the United States, all united by the simple fact of shared heritage — the undeniable reality that even exiles cannot escape when they look in the mirror. They were united, too, in the words of the typically thoughtful and inspiring inaugural address by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, by an “idea of Indianness.” It is an idea that enshrines the diversity and pluralism both of our country and of its diaspora. In a land and a city that is home to Indians of every conceivable caste and creed, the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas celebrations afforded to Indians — including former Indians — of every conceivable caste and creed the welcome assurance that they were indeed at home.

In his speech, the prime minister traced what he characterized as four waves of Indian emigration: the first, in precolonial times, featured Indians leaving our shores as travelers, teachers, and traders; the second involved the enforced migration of Indian labor as indentured servants of the British Empire; the third, the tragic displacement of millions by the horrors of Partition; and the fourth, the contemporary phenomenon of skilled Indians seeking opportunity and challenge in our globalized world.

I would probably divide the fourth wave further into two distinct categories: one of highly educated Indians, often staying on after studies abroad in places like the United States, and the other of more modestly qualified but even harder-working migrants, from taxi drivers to shop assistants, who for the most part see their migration as temporary and who remit a larger proportion of their funds home to India than their higher-earning counterparts. But in today's world both sets of “fourth wave” migrants remain closely connected to the matrbhumi (motherland): ease of communications and travel makes it possible for expatriates to be engaged with the country they left behind in a way that was simply not available to the plantation worker in Mauritius or Guyana a century ago. To tap in to this sense of allegiance and loyalty through an organized public gathering was an inspired idea of the previous government, one that the present government has built upon through its creation of a “one-stop shop” in the form of a dedicated ministry.

So I was mildly surprised by the cynicism of the many desi journalists who thrust microphones into my face during the weekend and asked me if it wasn't all a waste of time. “What does a conference like this actually achieve?” they wanted to know. “How is it useful?” This was a remarkably utilitarian approach to the occasion, and I suppose I could have responded by pointing to the many parallel seminars being run by state governments to attract NRI investment, or the session on disaster-management that had been added in the wake of the tsunami.

Many shared the negativism of the journalists. “These NRIs have left the motherland and gone off to make their fortunes elsewhere,” wrote A. Mukesh. “They have abandoned India. India does not owe them anything. Indeed, it is they who owe the country that has educated them and given them the opportunity to better their lives abroad.” To Mukesh, “The money spent on celebrating the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas would be better spent reconstructing the fishing villages of Tamil Nadu.”

Now, with the greatest of respect to Mukesh, I would like to take issue with him (and others who have, in whole or part, echoed his arguments) on several points. First, I was not suggesting that India “owed” its NRIs anything, other than an occasion to affirm their Indianness. Second, while it is a fact that many, perhaps most, of the recent wave of Indian emigrants have benefited from a subsidized education in India before going off to make their living elsewhere, that is not true of many of the pravasis in attendance, who are descended from earlier waves of (often forced) emigration to the farflung outposts of the British Raj a century or more ago, and who return unburdened by any reason for guilt. Third, the reconstruction of fishing villages is, if I may be pardoned the metaphor, a red herring. The choice is a false one: the NRIs are as committed as any resident Indian to tsunami relief and have raised a great deal of money for the purpose. The expenditure on the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas is not diverted from more worthwhile national causes but is, rather, raised specifically for this purpose from sponsors, notably the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), which bears the organizational burden entirely.

But I preferred to make a larger point: sometimes the real value of a conference lies in the conferring. Perhaps it is time we realized that instead of counting how many new millions were raised for tourism in Rajasthan or pledged for reconstruction in Port Blair, we should appreciate how much it means to allow NRIs from sixty-one different lands the chance to share their experiences, celebrate their commonalities, offer their ideas, and swap business cards. Because when India allows its pravasis to feel at home, it is India itself that is strengthened.

After all, one can ask the core question: Why do NRIs matter to India?

The answer is simple: as a source of pride, as a source of support, and as a source of investments. It is entirely natural for Indians to take pride in the successes of their erstwhile compatriots abroad. I once remarked rather cruelly to an interviewer that the only country where Indians as a whole did not succeed was India. That is fortunately no longer the case, as signs of Indians’ growing prosperity are increasingly evident everywhere one travels in India, but Indians abroad have certainly given us all a great deal to be proud of. One recent statistic from the United States shows that the Indian-American family's median income is nearly $71,000 a year, the same as Japanese-Americans, but nearly $20,000 higher than the figure for all American families. That kind of success is not merely at the elite end of the scale: in England today, Indian curry houses employ more people than the iron and steel, coal, and shipbuilding industries combined. (Many are the ways, indeed, in which the Empire can strike back.)

So we can be proud of the impact Indians have made on foreign societies. But pride is not merely an intangible asset. Living in the United States, I have been struck by the extent to which the success of our NRIs has transformed the public perception of India here. A generation ago, in 1975, when I first traveled to the United States as a graduate student, India was widely seen as a land of snake charmers and begging bowls — poverty marginally leavened by exotica. Today, if there is a stereotypical view of India, it is that of a country of fast-talking high achievers who are wizards at math and are capable of doing most Americans’ jobs better, faster, and more cheaply in Bangalore. Today IIT is a brand name as respected in certain American circles as MIT or Caltech. If Indians are treated with more respect as a result, so is India, as the land that produces them. Let us not underestimate the importance of such global respect in our globalizing world.

The presence of successful and influential NRIs in so many countries also becomes a source of direct support for India, as they influence not just popular attitudes, but governmental policies, to the benefit of the mother country. And I haven't even mentioned NRI investments in India — from the remittances of working-class Indians in West Asia that have transformed the Kerala countryside to the millions poured into cutting-edge high-tech businesses in Bangalore or Gurgaon by investors from Silicon Valley. But we shouldn't get carried away — overseas Indians still invest a lower proportion of their resources in India than overseas Chinese do in China. Encouraging them to do more — and giving them reasons to do more — is certainly a worthwhile task for the newly established ministry for overseas Indian affairs in New Delhi.

Which is why I was concerned to hear rumors that the government was contemplating reducing the frequency of the hitherto annual Pravasi Bharatiya gatherings to one every other year. I was quite sure that the minister and his mandarins had not road-tested the idea with a cross section of the attendees. My own conversations, across the board, left me in no doubt that this would be a mistake, since the occasion has clearly acquired a momentum that it would be a shame to disrupt. When a locomotive has been gathering steam, why apply the brakes?

Perhaps the fear is that, with dual citizenship granted, there is not enough new for the government to offer the pravasis each time. But that is, in my view, beside the point. The interactions are worthwhile as ends in themselves. No doubt this will mean putting up with new demands from NRIs — voting rights, for instance (India, shamefully, is one of the few democracies that denies the vote to its own expatriate citizens). But so what? A government that seeks the allegiance, support, and money of its diaspora should also be willing to be accountable to it. Hosting a forum once a year where the pravasis can make their views known seems to me a very small price to pay indeed.

The dialogue between India and its diaspora has only just begun. Let us not interrupt it.

*

“Oh, you'll feel right at home,” a friend from Delhi said when she learned I was traveling to the Gulf for the first time. “The place is crawling with Indians. And most of them aren't just Indians, they're Keralites like you.”

This didn't entirely surprise me. My home state of Kerala, with its long sliver of coastline, had long been known for its intrepid travelers. Keralites had plied the waters of the Arabian Sea for millennia, taking cloth and spices to the Arab world, and returning with dates — and gold. Keralites sailed to the Gulf as if it were an outpost of their own land. They brought back wealth and ideas. Islam came to Kerala on the lips of traders and travelers, not by the sword. A society evolved in Kerala of Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Jews living amicably side by side, open to the influences of the rest of the world. The Chinese came, and either acquired or left behind their fabled fishing-nets. Keralite sailors went to China, and returned with the favorite cooking pot of the Kerala housewife, a wok known in Malayalam as a cheen-chetti—literally, a “Chinese pot.” Xenophobia is as unknown to the Keralite as snow is to a Bedouin.

As a result, Keralites are all too willing to travel to make their fortunes. And harsh economic reality makes travel necessary. Kerala is an overcrowded place with little industry, so many Keralites have no choice but to seek employment elsewhere. Under the British, the route to advancement for hardworking Kerala men was to learn to type in English and take up clerical work in cities across the subcontinent.

So it was entirely in keeping with the Kerala spirit that, when oil-fueled prosperity caused a boom in the Gulf countries in the 1970s, the people of my home state leapt at the opportunities that arose. There was far more work available than locals to do it, and so Keralites flocked to the Gulf in droves. They took every job, from salesclerks in shops to schoolteachers and yes, stenographers. Perhaps a million Keralites have worked in the Gulf at one time or another; it is estimated that they account for a quarter of all the expatriate workers who have lent their sweat to the Gulf sheikhdoms. At one point in the late 1970s, it was reliably reported that the most populous ethnic group in the Gulf state of Bahrain was not Bahrainis but Keralites.

A generation later, this is no longer true. Economies were not the only things that boomed in the Gulf; demography did, too, and many of the Gulf states doubled and even trebled their populations, leaving fewer openings for foreigners to fill. War and terrorism have not diminished the attractiveness of Gulf salaries, but the first Gulf war witnessed the expulsions of Keralite labor from Kuwait and some of its neighbors, and, though many returned, the numbers just aren't the same. No longer does every other Kerala family boast of at least one member who is remitting part of a Gulf salary home every month. The Malabar Coast is dotted with incongruously fancy abodes rising among thatched-roof dwellings, built on the proceeds of employment in the “Gelf” (as Keralites pronounce it). But today there are fewer garish new mansions being built in Kerala's villages. So I wasn't as sanguine as my Delhiite friend. “I'll believe it,” I replied, “when I see it.”

Indeed, when I landed in Doha, the capital of the Emirate of Qatar, to be greeted by a young Arab in flowing robes and then driven to my hotel by a chauffeur who spoke only Arabic, I made a mental note to tell my friend how out of date her information was. And there seemed to be more Romanians than Indians on the staff of my five-star hotel. But then, for my first dinner in the country, my host invited me to a fancy restaurant on the water's edge, and I realized I should have stowed my skepticism. The maître d’ who greeted us bore a common Muslim name — but he had only to utter a few words to give his identity away. The accent was unmistakable: he was a Keralite. It was the same story with the waiter who took our order and the busboy who cleared the dishes. “Where are you from?” I asked each of them in Malayalam as soon as I heard their accent, each time earning an enthusiastic response and terrific service.

The next day, I visited the offices of Qatar's leading English-language newspaper, the Gulf Times. I was formally received by the editor in chief, a distinguished Arab gentleman in robes whose modest conversational English suggested he served as the paper's presiding deity rather than as the wielder of the blue pencil. That role clearly belonged to his vice editor, an experienced Englishman from Liverpool, who duly suggested that I might wish to pay a visit to the newsroom. I gladly shook hands with each of the journalists on duty. And then it struck me: every single one of them, without exception, was from my home state.

“Is there anyone here who isn't from Kerala?” I rather crassly asked the news editor, K. T. Chacko, who was taking me around.

“Oh, there's Ramesh Mathew,” came the reply. “He's from Bombay.” A sheepish look came over the news editor's face. “But his parents were from Kerala.”

Clearly my Delhi friend was absolutely right. Even Doubting Thomas would have felt right at home.

*

“Here,” said Mr. Shankardass, leading me to his garden, “we live in heaven.”

I looked around the lush African foliage, multicolored flowers ablaze amid the verdant Nairobi green. “It certainly looks like paradise,” I replied.

“I don't mean the garden,” my eighty-six-year-old host replied. “I mean Kenya.” Mr. Shankardass's garden was a metaphor: a fertile place in magnificent bloom, it stood for the life that Indians were able to lead in this corner of East Africa.

Mr. Shankardass and his wife were both born in Kenya, when it was a British colony. They had grown up amid anticolonial ferment, in which most Asians — descended mainly from nineteenth-century migrants and indentured workers from the Indian subcontinent — made common cause with their African fellow subjects. But when independence came, some Africans looked on the Asians as inter-lopers, foreigners depriving the locals of jobs and economic opportunity. In next-door Uganda in 1972, the dictator Idi Amin gave his entire Asian population seventy-two hours to leave the country for good. The mass expulsion of Ugandan Asians, mainly people who had never known any other home, sent tremors through the Asian community in Kenya and Tanzania as well. But their fears proved unfounded. Asians stayed on in Kenya as honored and respected citizens, building flourishing businesses and excelling in the professions. Mr. Shankardass's garden was emblematic of that.

But I couldn't help wondering, as I devoured a delicious Punjabi lunch on his porch with three generations of his Kenya-born family, whether the garden was an oasis as well, isolating the Asians from the Africans among whom they prospered. Indians abroad are often an insular people, focusing on their own community, customs, and (as I could savor it) cuisine. Did Mr. Shankardass's heaven have room for African angels, too?

It didn't take me long to find out I needn't have worried. Later that day I attended a party in my honor thrown by another Kenyan Asian, the media entrepreneur Sudhir Vidyarthi, to whom I had been introduced by my good friend and former UN colleague Salim Lone, a Kashmiri Kenyan. Vidyarthi's father had run an anti-British newspaper, the Colonial Times, in which the legendary Jomo Kenyatta had first published his nationalist screeds. The elder Vidyarthi had gone to jail for his pains, and his son had continued in the family tradition as a courageous antiestablishment publisher.

Sudhir Vidyarthi's garden, with its outdoor deck and outsized bar, was even grander and more impressive than Mr. Shankardass's, but as fifty guests milled about on the patio, what struck me most was their ethnic mix. An Indian DJ bantered with the African CEO of a rival radio station; a Ugandan Asian journalist questioned the newly appointed government spokesman; a senior government official, a striking woman with a vivid tribal scar down her cheek, held forth to an older lady in a graceful sari. Asians and Africans melded seamlessly into one. “We're all Kenyans here,” my host said simply.

A group of Kenyan South Asians was publishing a magazine called Awaaz, subtitled The Authoritative Journal of Kenyan South Asian History. I was given a copy of the latest issue. On the cover was a photo of the recently deceased Pranlal Sheth, a hero of Kenyan independence who was then deported from his country by the Kenyatta government and died in exile in England. If that seemed discouraging, the same issue carried a review of a new play by a Kenyan-Indian playwright Kuldip Sondhi, dealing with shop demolitions in Mombasa. And a portfolio of photographs by the legendary Mohammed Amin, who first broke the news of the Ethiopian famine with his searing pictures, lost a leg in the Somali civil war but went on immortalizing East Africa through his lens till he was killed in a plane crash in 1996.

There was much talk at the party about a new exhibition that had just been mounted by the National Museum of Kenya. It was called “The Asian African Heritage: Identity and History”; through photographs, documents, and artifacts, the exhibition depicted two centuries of Asian assimilation in Kenya. Indian labor had built forts in Kenya as early as the sixteenth century; Indian masons and carpenters had practiced their craft in even larger numbers from 1820; and over 31,000 contract laborers from Punjab and Gujarat had built the famous Mombasa railroad, 2,500 of them perishing in the process. The city of Nairobi (like forty-three other railway towns along the line) was erected by Indian hands.

“This is our home,” said Pheroze Nowrojee, who had written the text of the exhibition. “Our social identity rests on our bi-continental tradition. We are both Asian and African. We are Asian African.”

Sudhir Vidyarthi soon emerged, proudly holding a little black toddler in his arms. “Meet my new daughter,” he beamed. “She's been with us since she was four months old; the official adoption comes through next week.” His excitement was as palpable as his affection for the girl, who nibbled at Indian hors d'oeuvres from his palm. “Give Daddy a kiss,” he told her in Swahili, and the tiny tot, bits of samosa and kebab still on her lips, duly obliged.

I looked at them — Asian father, African daughter, sharing Indian food and chatting in an East African tongue — and I raised a silent toast to their Kenyan garden. I only wished I knew the Swahili word for heaven.

*

As an Indian who, without actually emigrating, has found himself working abroad all his adult life, I have always had some sympathy for my fellow NRIs. The argument that Indians who work abroad are doing a disservice to their country seems to me misplaced, especially in recent years as Indians abroad gave back to their homeland so much more than they could ever have contributed while staying there. The old fears of a “brain drain” seemed to me to have been supplanted by hopes of a “brain gain,” as desi software designers and high-tech gurus from Silicon Valley have opened thriving firms in India, employing their countrymen and women, increasing the country's export revenues and pumping up the national GDP. Indians going abroad after their studies have done a great deal to benefit the Indians who stayed at home.

But one category of Indian professional who emigrates still troubles me. I know it's unfair, but though I am unfazed by the expatriation of our engineers and economists, our scientists and scholars, it still bothers me when I see an Indian doctor settle abroad.

Don't get me wrong. Some of my best friends in the United States are Indian doctors, and I feel no personal desire to uproot them from their lives here and send them back. But whereas our country is so abundantly supplied with talent that few of us living abroad can truly claim that our absence from our native shores makes any negative difference to India, doctors strike me as a different case, mainly for two reasons: they possess knowledge and training that is still in short supply in our country, and the government of India, through its generous subsidies for higher education, has spent a large sum of money helping them to acquire the skills they are taking abroad.

The problem came back to me when I read that Indian doctors in the United States are discovering a new means of staying on legally in America. They are serving the poor.

Under U.S. immigration rules, a foreign doctor — even if he completes his medical schooling in the United States, or does an internship or residency at an American hospital — is obliged to return to his homeland for a period of at least two years before he can seek employment in the United States. There is, however, an exception built into the law. The U.S. government has designated 2,100 areas, mostly impoverished districts at the nadir of the economic recession, as “medically underserved.” If a foreign doctor agrees to work in one of these areas, the standard requirement of two years outside the States before working here is lifted. The much sought-after green card, entitling the doctor to permanent residence in the United States, is just a few prescriptions away.

As a result, the brain drain of doctors from developing countries continues while ensuring Americans get medical care even in areas where American doctors wouldn't want to work. There are some 600,000 licensed medical practitioners in the United States, of whom about 120,000 are foreigners. The largest single group of foreign doctors is, of course, from India — no fewer than 25,000. The irony of Indian doctors, who have no lack of poor patients needing their medical skills in their own country, coming to help the American underclass, is considerable.

Few American doctors want to build a practice or make a home in some of the places where Indians are prepared to serve. I remember one New York Times piece years ago about one such “medically underserved” area, the town of Welch, West Virginia. The journalist described Welch, a remote outpost in the Appalachian Mountains, as “an economic sinkhole whose coal-mining jobs have been vanishing.” Towns like Welch, populated largely by the very poor and the often sick, have little appeal for American doctors, whose principal objective is to earn back the quarter of a million dollars they have spent on their medical education. Even graduates of West Virginian medical schools refuse to work at the local hospital. So Welch has made use of its federal designation to import its doctors. Fifteen of the nineteen doctors in the town hospital were from abroad, including India.

As with lesser professions, from janitors to cab drivers, immigrants are always willing to do the jobs the locals consider beneath them. The easier route to a green card may not, however, be the only incentive for the foreign doctors. The New York Times wrote that many found greater professional opportunity in these blighted rural communities, less professional discrimination — and greater material comforts. Typical earnings, the newspaper reported, ranged from $80,000 to $200,000 a year. Only in America can you make that much by serving the poor.

No wonder Indian doctors prefer to work in Welch than in Warangal or Wardha. But must the Indian taxpayer subsidize them for seven years to do so? As is usually the case, the responses from Indian readers who considered this question can broadly be divided into two categories: agreement (sometimes enthusiastic) and disagreement (often vehement). But many in both categories of respondents are willing to see some merit in the opposite point of view.

Dr. N. R. Ramesh Masthi, who teaches in a medical college in India and has served as a doctor in several remote rural areas, “fully agrees” with me, saying that in his experience, “nearly forty to fifty percent of the students migrate from every medical college each year.” He notes that “ninety to ninety-five percent of the students who join medical college are from urban areas, mostly capital cities, and [are] just not interested in working even thirty kilometers from an urban area.” Barely 2 percent of the students admitted are from rural or government schools. Dr. Masthi says with feeling: “If we cannot retain our doctors, the whole notion of merit in education has no value for people like me who are paying a very high tax to subsidize their education in the hope that they will give back something to the community which sponsored them.” He would rather have an average student joining a medical college and staying on to serve India than a bright student who goes abroad “because ultimately in medicine it is experience and commitment which makes a doctor good.”

Dr. Vishwa P. Rath from Canada says that medical education is no longer as attractive as it used to be to the younger generation. “The youngsters feel medical studies are time-consuming, less paid, makes one look thirty years older than one's age, and [offers] limited scope.” A computer science or technical degree, Dr. Rath says, provides a far better lifestyle. The solution is to offer Indian doctors better financial incentives and more attractive working conditions: “If a patient dies, a doctor should not be beaten in the corridor!” The good Dr. Rath adds, “Even if twenty percent of [doctors] emigrate, we still have eighty percent to serve our nation. Personally, I belong to a family of doctors serving in the Indian Air Force, Indian Navy, and other government assignments. Therefore subsidy is essential because for a family like mine this generous help has contributed seven doctors to our nation.”

An NRI blogger named “Seeji” (Dr. C. G. Prasanna) lists the “minimal number of postgraduate seats not catering to the thousands of [medical] graduates, illogical reservation system, a very low pay package compared to other professions” among the reasons doctors emigrate. Seeji asks: “How justified is it to blame doctors alone when even IITians and IIM guys have studied with the same taxpayers’ money?” But he proposes the passage of a law that would bind graduates to work in India for a specified number of years. “That should be applied to doctors as well as engineers,” he suggests. A regular reader, Anju Chandel, agrees that “the Indian government should first ensure a basic level of comfort, safety, and salary for young doctors and then enforce mandatory service in medically underserved areas for a stipulated time.”

The issue of subsidies for medical education elicits the most informed and contentious debate. Blogger T. A. Abinandan in Banga-lore points out that subsidies apply to “everyone — nonmedicos or medicos, irrespective of whether they work in India or elsewhere.” Noting that tuition fees are a pittance, he states that “such low fees do not allow our colleges and universities to upgrade their infrastructure and hire high-quality faculty. On the other hand, making every college student pay — up front — the true cost of higher education may render it inaccessible to the deserving among the poor.”

Mr. Abinadan suggests an “Australian model,” under which every college student (whether in public or private colleges) benefits from a loan from the government that he repays by paying taxes at a higher tax rate. “This additional tax kicks in only when the income exceeds a certain minimum, thereby protecting those individuals who fall on hard times.” The great flaw in this model, however, is that it does nothing to address the problem of doctors emigrating. If repayment is solely through the tax system, how will the government recoup its investment from doctors who, having emigrated, no longer pay Indian taxes?

Dr. J. Mariano Anto Bruno Mascarenhas of Tuticorin sent me a lengthy philippic explaining that the subsidy argument is a myth. Medical colleges have some twenty departments, of which most also treat patients; only three (anatomy, physiology, and pharmacology) are exclusively for students. So “98 percent of the subsidy is for health and less than 1.5 percent is for education…. The truth is that even if a medical college does not admit MBBS students, it will still have 98 percent of its expenses for treating patients.” Dr. Mascarenhas considers the main reason for emigration to be the poor remuneration for doctors. “Please understand one simple fact,” he declares. “No one will want to work in another country for money alone if he can earn enough in India.”

That may well explain why we can only expect the tribe of NRIs to grow and prosper.

52. Ajanta and Ellora in the Monsoon

IT IS TO AN ELUSIVE LION that we owe our rediscovery of the magnificent cave temples of Ajanta. A party of British officers, out hunting in 1819, pursued their quarry into a gorge in the thickly wooded Sahyadri Hills of west-central India. The animal retreated into the dense jungle, but the dazzling sun revealed, through the seemingly impenetrable foliage, the outlines of a horseshoe-shaped cave. The British officers followed, crossing a river to investigate — and soon forgot all about their hunting.

For they had stumbled upon a site lost for centuries — a series of thirty caves cut into the hill by Buddhist monks between 200 B.C. and 650 A.D., to serve as residences, temples, and schools. Each is adorned with statuary chiseled into the rock face by the monks, and in many cases by remarkable paintings, telling stories both religious and secular. “They took our breath away,” one of the officers reported, and they have continued to do so for generations of visitors since.

History does not record what happened to the lion, but the leader of the hunting party etched his name into the wall across a priceless painting: “John Smith, 20 April 1819.” (Fitting, perhaps, that so extravagant a treasure should have been found by one with so prosaic a name, and so barbarous an attitude.) The Ajanta cave-temples joined those at Ellora, forty miles away as the crow flies (and which had not been reclaimed by the jungle), as extraordinary monuments to human artistic accomplishment. Ellora has few surviving paintings, but its carvings, which represent three different faiths (Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism) and were created between 350 and 700 A.D., offer even finer examples of the skill, virtuosity, and determination of ancient India's artists and sculptors.

“Ajanta and Ellora, in the monsoon?” asked my then wife, Minu, when I suggested we visit the caves in the summer of 1998, when our twin sons, Ishaan and Kanishk, then fourteen, would be enjoying their school break. We were planning to go to India anyway, but Minu's idea of a monsoon holiday was to put her feet up at her parents’ home in Calcutta and consume vast quantities of mangoes, the season's great fruit. “We'll get soaked. And the flights will be delayed by the weather.”

That seemed to make sense, until I ran into a bibulous Indian guest at a diplomatic party in New York.

“Have you heard they're going to close the caves to visitors?” he asked. “Too many visitors. All that hot breath and tramping feet, causing damage to the paintings and sculptures. So they'll be closing them all to the general public.”

“When?” I asked, horrified.

“Next year, I believe.”

That did it. Monsoon or no monsoon, we were going to catch a glimpse of Ajanta and Ellora before the curtains came down on either place.

After recovering from our transcontinental jetlag with two days in Bombay, we flew 375 kilometers inland to the city of Aurangabad, northeast of Bombay, for our excursions to Ajanta and Ellora. Aurangabad, a manufacturing town of some 1.1 million people, has the nearest airport to the caves, as well as several fine hotels. We had a bit of a drama coming in: Kanishk, whose hospitability to visiting bugs is a source of family legend, threw up copiously and looked decidedly queasy. Our first hour after landing in Aurangabad was therefore spent driving in the gloom to every building that looked like a hospital. Aurangabad, a prosperous and spread-out town, green and dusty in equal measure, had several of these. After knocking fruitlessly at the doors of a couple of maternity clinics with a retching boy in tow, which rather confused the doctors in the labor wards, we took Kanishk to our hotel, the spanking new Taj Residency, whose in-house doctor promptly prescribed something that cured him in twenty-four hours.

As a concession to Kanishk's state, we reversed the traditional order of doing things and decided to go to Ellora first. (A leisurely start even allowed me to use the hotel's gym, which made a change from my usual form of exercise — jumping to conclusions.) The Residency equipped our rented car with packed lunches, chilled drinks, and even umbrellas to ward off the depredations of the monsoon, of which, to Minu's relief, we saw little evidence.

Our twenty-something tourist guide, Srikant Jadhav, had been in the business only four years, but he made up for inexperience with a fund of historical knowledge and a small stock of witticisms he tested on the boys (“Why is the number six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine.”) It also helped that he was slim enough to squeeze into the front seat of our air-conditioned Ambassador car with the driver, Mohammed Nissar, and me (which, given Kanishk's condition, was probably the safest place to be in the vehicle.)

Ellora is less than an hour's drive from Aurangabad, across lush farming country, on a good road. Even if Ishaan and Kanishk hadn't announced, at age seven, their desire to lead the Mongol hordes or, failing that, to become military historians, we would have made one stop on the way. This was at the Daulatabad Fort, a soaring citadel on a conical hill that commands the land approaches from both north and east. This thirteenth-century edifice was widely reputed to be invincible, so intricate was its pyramidal construction atop the hill. The rock-hewn fort had several layers of walls, iron gates with elephant-deterring spikes, a forty-foot-deep moat, and a narrow, twisting subterranean passage that could be blocked by the intense heat generated by a large brazier at one end. It is a bit of a hike to the top, and Minu soon gave up the climb, preferring to sit under a mango tree with a lazily solicitous Ishaan, while Kanishk, miraculously revived by the sight of cannon, trudged up with me.

The fort is well worth the effort. A medieval sultan of Delhi, Muhammad bin Tughlaq, was so impressed by its impregnability that he moved his capital to Daulatabad. (The experiment failed, however; Tughlaq and his displaced citizens marched back to Delhi, and he has gone down in history as the “mad monarch.”) Among the fort's incongruities is an ancient Hindu temple, its roof supported by a hundred and fifty pillars, that today houses a modern idol — a kitsch figure of “Mother India,” draped in a gaudy sari, her eight arms brandishing an assortment of implements, including a sword, a sharp-pointed trishul (the Hindu trident), and a somewhat startled-looking snake. No one seems to know who invented this deity, except that the statue is clearly of fairly recent provenance, a post-independence version of the powerful mother goddess (worshiped variously as Durga, Kali, and Shakti, but not, other than here, as “Bharat Mata,” Mother India).

Before leaving the fort's attractive setting, Ishaan pulled out our camera, and Minu and I looked expectantly at each other to produce a new roll of film. We had left seven at the hotel, but our condition immediately attracted a swarm of boys clutching Kodak packages. “A hundred and fifty rupees,” one said, offering a 35mm ISO 200 film with twenty-four exposures. Since the rupee's post-nuclear depreciation in 1998 (at that point it had fallen to forty to the dollar) meant that this was less than four dollars, we gladly bought two. Five minutes later another youth came by to sell us two more rolls at a hundred and twenty. Scarcely able to believe our good fortune, we bought them as well. We were almost back in our car when a sad-eyed teenager begged us to take at least one roll for a hundred; he was the only peddler who hadn't made us a sale. By this time Minu was convinced the film canisters would all turn out to be empty. They weren't, and the film was fine; what we found out later was that Kodak manufactures the film in India, where each roll normally retails for eighty to ninety rupees in photo stores.

On our way to Ellora, we also took in two contrasting graves. The first was that of the Emperor Aurangzeb, the last of the Great Mughals, after whom Aurangabad is named — a simple and austere slab of marble paid for by the sale of prayer caps the devout monarch had stitched himself. (He had forbidden any other expenditure on a tomb.) The second grave, the Bibi-ka-Maqbara, was that of his wife, Rabia Durani, a grand imitation Taj Mahal startlingly reminiscent of the original, but without the Taj's perfect proportions and majesty. In other circumstances it might have been an attractive resting place, but Minu didn't think so. “Wonder what it's like for her,” she said sympathetically, “to know she's buried in a travesty and her mother-in-law's tomb is where the real action is?”

Ellora itself was exquisite. In a little over four hours, we took in all thirty-four caves, sequentially admiring the work of artists of different faiths. This meant starting with the Buddhist (constructed 550–750 A.D.), then working our way through the Hindu caves (600–875 A.D.) to the Jain ones (800–1000 A.D.). The tour was not arduous, not even with Kanishk still a bit wobbly at the knees. The monsoon finally sprinkled us, but briefly and rather halfheartedly, as if it didn't really want to get in the way of our view. We took in the rolling hills, rock-laden and stately, all around; the golden gulmohur blossoms, flaming insolent and tender in every garden; and then, in the afternoon sun, the caves themselves, opening into the earth like a secret prayer.

The caves are numbered, logically enough, for visitors’ convenience. We walked through them in order, marveling at the paucity of people. The previous year we had taken the boys to Italy, where they had gotten accustomed to the throngs at every site; here, being able to enjoy the splendors without crowds, to sense the space available, made each cave, each carving, more approachable, our discovery of it more intimate. Remarkably, every pillar, alcove, and niche is carved from solid rock. We admired the contrast between Cave 5, in the Mahayana style (the more ostentatious “Great Vehicle” tradition of Buddhism), whose treasures include a magnificent “praying Buddha,” and the plain and austere lines of Caves 1 and 7, in the Hinayana (Little Vehicle) tradition, of which Aurangzeb might have approved (if only his Islamic fundamentalist bigotry had made it possible for him to approve of any other faith).

We could see why Cave 6 might have been “afraid of 7.” It seemed the work, perhaps, of lay sculptors rather than monks, because it overflows with lush carvings: dancing dwarves play musical instruments; busty goddesses disport themselves, every detail of their clothing, ornaments, and headdresses rendered with minute precision; on one wall, a student toils at a desk, oblivious to temptation. Cave 10 is spectacular: with its vaulted arches and intricate interior carvings; it reminded the boys of a Roman basilica, except that it had been hewn entirely out of a rocky hillside, and there are no gelati on sale outside.

“You mean they didn't actually carry a single stone into the cave?” Ishaan asked incredulously. They didn't. Though the temples are referred to as caves, they are the work of men, hammering and chiseling diligently away for centuries, creating principally two kinds of structures — monasteries, or viharas, and halls of worship, or chaityas. Their method required great technical expertise, aesthetic dexterity, and infinite patience. The monks seem to have marked an outline on the surface of the hill and dug downward, cutting away the rock to create the entrances, columns, and chambers. Imagine the drama of it, turning mountain faces into works of art, sanctuaries, temples; year after year, working only with natural light, the metronomic poetry of hammer and chisel against rock. It is possible to imagine one set of sculptors working dexterously on the ceilings while muscular excavators hacked away beneath them to reach the floor. The artists and painters must have followed, though age, moisture, and vandalism have left little trace of their work in Ellora.

One remarkable feat of skillful labor is Cave 12, a three-storied edifice carved in the seventh century to serve as a hostel for the monks. Each “room” cut into the rock has a carved stone bed for the monk to sleep on, complete with stone pillow, and a niche cut into the wall for his lamp. To complete the dormitory effect, there is a room for an attendant on each floor. “Look,” said our guide, Srikant, pointing to a rectangular depression in the stone, “they even had a notice board.” Ishaan and Kanishk, overwhelmed by the sense that they were in a two-thousand-year-old boarding school, refused to climb to the headmaster's floor. Minu and I followed our guide to the top level, where a row of seven meditating Buddhas sits alongside another row of seven who have already attained enlightenment, as attested to by the stone umbrellas over their beatific heads. Here, too, are faded remnants of paintings on the ceiling, a faint hint of what is to come in Ajanta.

The Hindu Cave 16 goes one better: it is the largest monolithic carving in the world, a gigantic temple called Kailash, after the god Shiva's mountain abode, which took eight hundred workmen a century and a half to complete and is twice the size of the Parthenon. The sculptors’ vision was that of a flying chariot, and the cave is carved like one. It is embellished with vivid statuary depicting various Hindu legends, a particularly astonishing piece being that of the goddess Durga slaying the demon Mahishasura amid a stone flurry of flailing arms and weapons. This was the sort of authenticity missing in the ersatz idol at Daulatabad.

“Hey, Dad,” said Kanishk irreverently, “the Great Indian Novel.” He had just finished reading my book of that name, a reinvention of the ancient Mahabharata epic as a twentieth-century political satire, and was pointing to a series of friezes bringing episodes of the epic to life on the temple's plinth. Then the rain came again, and we sheltered under one of Kailash's many ribbed cupolas, marveling at the sheer scale of the architectural achievement. In a curiously modern touch, the sculptors have carved a statue outside of their principal donor, King Krishna Raya II of the Rashtrakuta dynasty, his palm open in generous giving. Other contemporary resonances echoed in statues of Shiva playing a game of dice with his consort Parvati, and one of their wedding, with Parvati as a nervous bride, her head bent in modesty, shyly placing one foot against the other as she receives her husband.

We ate our picnic lunch at a spot where Cave 29 overlooks a waterfall. There was something incongruous about biting into sandwiches a few feet away from pillars that had been carved laboriously a thousand years before sandwiches were invented by an impatient earl. We sat on an ancient ledge and looked out to where the water cascaded sudden and silvery from the hillside like a gasp. When the food was finished and we tried to venture farther into the cave, we found it had been cut so deeply into the hill that no sunlight ever reached its deepest interior. The back of the cave smelled strongly of the droppings of bats, who whirled furiously past us in the dark.

We ended our tour of Ellora at the massive double-storied Jain Indrasabha, Cave 32, a relatively late construction (eleventh century) notable for more than one statue of Siddhayika, a female attendant of the founder of the Jain faith, Mahavira. An exquisitely carved lotus on the ceiling caught our eye. And then I couldn't resist telling Minu we could have done without the film at Daulatabad after all. For there, in stone, was a yakshi (a demoness) sitting on a lion under a mango tree, for all the world like the pair Kanishk and I had left behind on our trudge up to the top of the fort. It was a striking piece of work, for the ripe beauty of the doe-eyed woman seemed at odds with the legendary asceticism of the Jain faith. But the caves were carved in lushly prosperous times, and asceticism always thrives better in penury.

Ellora and the medieval distractions on our way prepared us well for the wonder that is Ajanta. We woke a little earlier on the second day, since the sixty-five-mile journey from Aurangabad takes almost two hours by road, and we had a flight to catch back to Bombay at the end of the day. The long trip provided my sons the opportunity to ask why questions: Why were the caves created here, Ishaan asked, and Why, Kanishk added, in this form? Part of the answer lay in political stability: the area was ruled by two enlightened dynasties, the Satavahanas and the Vakatakas, during the first eight hundred years of the Christian era, a period of great prosperity and growth during which art and culture flourished under royal patronage. The second reason is more functional: the basalt rock of the Deccan plateau proved ideal for the sculptors, solid but easy to hew, which is why there are other examples of rock-cut caves scattered throughout the area, including in Aurangabad itself.

Ajanta looks more like an organized tourist destination. As soon as we parked, we were inundated with hawkers offering tchotchkes with the most tenuous connection to the caves we had come to see. Young boys thrust mineralized chunks of rock into our hands as free gifts to entice us into their shops. We fled, but were drawn up short at a paved ascent that curved upward from the parking lot to the caves. A wiry porter emerged to carry our possessions for us — eighty rupees (two dollars) for the entire duration of our visit. I accepted with alacrity, since the Taj Residency appeared to have given us an even more generous supply of bottled drinks than on the previous day. Two more individuals appeared, looking as if a couple of the larger sculptures had come to life. They were palanquin bearers, enterprising young men ready to carry the less energetic visitor up to the caves in a stuffed chair mounted on two long poles. Minu looked wistfully at the palanquin, but the shocked disapproval of our sons sent her off, abashed. (“They need the work,” she muttered as she reluctantly turned away. “It's their livelihood.”) But the ascent was less arduous than at Daulatabad Fort, and the palanquins were not missed.

There weren't enough foreigners around to remind us that we were tourists, but the pressure of tourism is felt more keenly at Ajanta than at Ellora: the four main caves admit only forty visitors at a time, for a maximum of fifteen minutes. It was just as well that we were there in the relatively unpopular monsoon, for we found an intimidating queue only at one cave, to which we were able to return later. For years, attendants used to stand outside the caves with large mirrors to reflect the sunlight onto the art within, but today Ajanta employs a “lighting attendant” in selected caves, whose job it is to shine a large electric lamp upon certain paintings pointed out by your guide.

Ajanta, which was created in the second century B.C., had disappeared from popular consciousness around the eighth century A.D., when Buddhism faded away in India, largely absorbed by a reformed and resurgent Hinduism. Eleven hundred years of neglect have preserved it well, particularly its paintings, though we wondered about the long-term effects of the helpful ministrations of the lighting attendant. We were grateful that he existed, though, because there would have been no other way to have captured, from three angles, the extraordinarily enigmatic expression of the Padmapani Bodhisattava in Cave 1, an amazing work that invites comparisons to Da Vinci's Gioconda. The young male figure, his elongated eyes both brooding and reverential, a lotus in his hand, his expression soulful in the fullest sense of that overused word, seems both of this world and beyond it. The cave carvings and paintings are positioned so as to catch natural light at certain moments of the day, and if one had all day one could have waited to see how different rays of sunlight might have illuminated different aspects of the face and figure portrayed in this magnificent painting. But even five minutes under electric light told us we were in the presence of a work of genius.

Buddhist monks lived and learned in the womb-shaped caves, which served as their monasteries and seats of learning. The paintings of tales from the Buddhist Jatakas and the nondevotional images of princesses and nymphs suggest the caves were also intended to attract lay visitors. Our guide had an attentive eye for signs of modern life in ancient art, pointing out figures carrying such items of daily use as Coke-shaped bottles, glass tumblers, and playing cards. (“Ancient India had Coke,” he smiled proudly.) With the football World Cup going on, he showed Ishaan and Kanishk a figure in a blue striped garment that might have been a soccer jersey. But when he suggested that a hanger-on in one Buddhist painting was actually wearing blue jeans, I called a halt to his appropriations of the past. The truth was remarkable enough: many of the paintings testified to an amazing degree of international contact and trade. The ceiling in Cave 2 is covered with portraits of visiting princes, including a Persian monarch and his consort; Hellenic influences are reflected in bacchanalian figures wearing stockings and hats; all this two thousand years before “international relations” became a subject of study rather than what you acquired if you married abroad.

The desire to astonish sometimes takes tourists too far. In Cave 6, our guide asked an attendant to thump a series of pillars with the heel of his palm to produce musical sounds; amusing, but it seems highly unlikely that the monks ever used the rock pillars for an orchestra. No, it's the paintings that made Ajanta special for us. The art of Ajanta has a standing comparable in the history of Asian art to the place that the frescoes of Siena and Florence enjoy in the development of European art. The Ajanta painters used a tempera technique, applying their colors onto a thin layer of dry plaster rather than directly on the walls themselves. The plaster was composed of organic material, including vegetable fibers and rice husks, mixed with fine sand. The paints themselves, in vivid chromatic colors, were derived from locally available minerals, though the blue is believed to have come from lapis lazuli imported from Central Asia. Legend has it that several attempts to reconstitute the paints after chemical analysis failed — the ancients knew a thing or two that the moderns cannot replicate.

Apart from the Padmapani figure in Cave 1, I was most struck by a painting in Cave 16. It portrays the emotional scene of the conversion of Prince Nanda by the Buddha, as his princess swoons, realizing she is to lose her husband to the world-renouncing faith of his preceptor. The narrative painting, depicting the mournful messenger bearing the news, an attendant bringing the prince's rejected crown, and melancholy ladies-in-waiting consoling the grieving princess, is an extraordinary evocation of the price of faith, rendered with exquisite sensitivity. In a different mood is a flying apsara (celestial nymph) in Cave 17, a figure of joy and glitter, her necklace studded with diamonds and sapphires that glint fifteen centuries after she was painted, her ribbons trailing gaily as she swings forward.

In Cave 17, devoted largely to the good deeds of the brave and devout Prince Simhala — beginning with the shipwreck of his expedition to Sri Lanka and ending with his coronation there — the artists have entered into prodigious evocations of detail, including a particularly grisly image of a wounded soldier with his large intestine spilling out of his slashed midriff. Even Ishaan and Kanishk seemed momentarily to have mislaid their war lust at the sight. They moved silently along to another painting on an adjoining wall, a moving depiction of the legend of a captured elephant being returned to its blind parents.

This is art revealing a high level of technical skill, with a subtle use of shading and highlighting to achieve a three-dimensional effect. Often, the eyes of the painted subject seem to follow the viewer. There are curiosities: the women in the pictures are all dark, the men all fair, and it is not clear whether this was an artistic convention or the reflection of some ancient colonizing sensibility. With their varied themes, their sophisticated execution, and their vivid depictions of human and animal forms, the paintings of Ajanta made a tremendous impact across Asia, becoming a model for artists throughout the Buddhist world. But it isn't just their age or beauty that imprints the Ajanta paintings on our consciousness; it's their vitality, the energy and social acuity of their creators. Today their art is an invaluable record of the past, but in its time it had immediate validity as a depiction of what mattered in the world and of the images that drew the community together. To think of this stunning work being created, day after day in those precious moments of sunlight, back-breaking work with anonymity its only reward, is to sense the devotion of these artists to a higher calling than art itself.

We returned to Aurangabad after five hours, including a quick lunch, consuming the Taj's packed offerings in a gazebo a hundred steps below the cave level. Our patient porter had sensibly waited downstairs, rather than dog our footsteps as we climbed, and he laid claim to the gazebo before anyone else had the same idea. Oddly enough, there is no concession stand, let alone a restaurant, in the complex. Though there is no shortage of peddlers offering everything from postcards to samples of local rock, you have to bring your own food.

D. M. Yadav, the knowledgeable senior tourism official in Aurangabad, tried to talk us into extending our stay by another two days. He urged us not to leave Aurangabad without making two more excursions: to Paithan, two hours away, the old capital of the Satavahanas and seat of a legendary weaving tradition, famed throughout the ancient world, which still produces wondrous saris and other fine cloth; and to Lonar, a four-hour drive, the site where a meteorite struck the earth some fifty thousand years ago, leaving a crater with a radius of five kilometers. We had commitments in Bombay that obliged us to make our plane, though Minu pointedly observed that she had no Paithani sari in her collection. “And we have no fragments of meteorite, either, Ma,” Ishaan retorted.

Before boarding the aircraft, I did ask Yadav about the threatened closure of the caves to tourists. He seemed puzzled. “Why would we do that?” he asked. “People have been coming daily to Ellora for two thousand years, to Ajanta for somewhat less. Why stop them now?”

“Never believe all that you hear at diplomatic parties,” the twins chimed in. But I was grateful for the misinformation, which had sent us scurrying here in the monsoon. We had seen the caves, encountered no crowds, and stuck to our schedule. What's more, not a single flight was canceled because of the weather. And we didn't even really get wet.