Letter from India

L E T T E R F R O M I N D I A

It’s there, if you look carefully enough, all but lost amid the

ancient India of bullock-carts and lepers and ash-smeared sadhus

and farmhouse walls plastered with drying dung; the not-soancient

India of fume-spewing auto-rickshaws and mildewed concrete

apartment blocks and shantytowns the size of small cities;

the tourist India of taxi touts and Taj Mahal. It’s there in the

leather-clad teenagers at the South Delhi multiplex, shelling out

110 rupees (about two days’ average wages) for the latest Hollywood

release; in the VJs strenuously aping Western styles of

hipness on Indian MTV; in the handsome, dignified Rajasthani

painter, scion of an ancient family of Rajput aristocrats and creator

of exquisite miniatures, who replied, on being complimented on

the vitality of Indian handcraft traditions relative to those of the

United States, ‘‘Yes, but you have computers’’; and in all the young

Indians, particularly the women, who have been so eager to hear

whatever my wife and I have had to tell them about life in ‘‘America,’’

and especially about the remarkable fact that in our country,

nearly all marriages are what Indians call, disparagingly, ‘‘love

matches’’ – as opposed to the arranged ones the overwhelming

majority of them still have. Not a new India – it’s far too early to

say that – but a new attitude and a new class and even the beginnings

of a new kind of Indian.

For although the world has always come to India, India has

never gone to the world. Conquerors have arrived for millennia –

Aryans, Greeks, Scythians, Huns, Arabs, Turks, Afghans, Mongols,

and Mughals through the Afghan passes; Portuguese and British

from across the sea – and while India has coped with them...

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...(not

that Sita seems to have needed any help in that respect). As for

Harintha herself, an actor, she’s never really tried to excel in her

work – has gravitated toward teaching rather than performing –

because Indian women aren’t supposed to put themselves in the

spotlight, literally or figuratively. There may be an evolution here:

from the thirty-four-year-old who copes with her limited possibilities

by adjusting her expectations downward to the sixteen-yearold

who may have no greater degree of hope but who refuses to

suppress her discontent. Perhaps she’ll learn to make the same

adjustment as she grows up, but perhaps she won’t. Perhaps, coming

a generation later, she represents something new: a new kind

of woman, a new kind of person, of whom India will soon see

many more. In dreams begin responsibilities: of such discontents

are revolutions made.