Meetings with remarkable Indians

Poonam Mutreja, MacArthur Foundation
The MacArthur Foundation has conducted what is probably the largest ever survey of adolescents in India, 25,000 young people in each of six Indian states; 150,000 in all. The results are to be published at the end of the year. The findings from the survey shows what many have started to suspect anecdotally from the experience of their own families and children: Middle class Indian youth is beginning to display all the alienations and anomie of Western youth; a rash of what Poonam Mutreja called psycho-social problems, like anorexia, freely available ‘leisure’ drugs (300 rupees, about £4, will buy you a good time on the latest designer drug apparently), confused sexual identities and all the familiar traumas of Western adolescence – but without yet the propensity to rebel which has been institutionalized amongst adolescents in Western societies. The transition to adulthood, which was once so predictable and perhaps stifling in India, has now become a complex and, for some, confusing and uncertain mosaic.


Indira Jaiasingh, Additional Attorney General
The Indian Supreme Court complex has a special post-Raj atmosphere. It is in one of Lutyens’ wonderful cupola-ed red sandstone temples, at the heart of New Delhi. Once you get through security, which has the familiar air of barely suppressed chaos that often reigns in Indian Government environments, the compound is full of black-clad lawyers rushing hither and thither, gowns billowing behind them, mostly men, but now a few women. Laptops poke out from under flowing batwing sleeves. Following rapidly behind them are assistants carrying bursting bundles of papers. It is like a grand conclave of large black birds in permanent motion. Watching them all swirl around you feel that if you clapped your hands loudly perhaps all the black-clad lawyers would simply fly away.

Indira Jaiasingh is a radical lawyer who has fought many cases in Indian courts about the adverse consequences for poor and marginalized people of globalization and privatization. In a highly significant and confident move after the victory of his UPA coalition in the General Election, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has appointed her Additional Attorney General. So from being a radical critic, she is, now a Government official, but she has not the slightest intention of abandoning what she called her campaigning ‘baggage.’ Her radical passions burn with as much fervour as ever. Proximity to power combines the feeling that something can at last be done with the frustration that even where power supposedly resides, getting things done can still be maddeningly difficult.

Indira Jaisingh, in a white patterned sari, the blouse adapted for a legal collar combined with a black waistcoat, to denote her legal uniform. Her grey hair is firmly scraped back in a utilitarian fashion. She sits calmly in her office waiting for her two young legal assistants, who are tapping away at laptops and mobile phones in the corner, to tell her that the Supreme Court is ready for her. She is appearing for the Government to argue the case for the Delhi Master Plan which makes provision for legalizing some informal settlements and allowing some hawkers, street vendors and small traders to regularize their status and continue to trade with the protection, rather than the hostility, of the police and the law. The middle class residents of Delhi have organized themselves into a powerful and litigious network of residents’ associations and they are opposing the Master Plan. Their objections have gone all through the courts and have now landed in the Supreme Court. Indira Jaisingh regards their objections as ‘frivolous’. There is in her view no constitutional right to walk on a clear pavement unimpeded by hawkers or pavement dwellers when the people involved have nowhere else to go and no other way to make a living. Her anger is controlled, precise and absolutely to the point; she speaks slowly, in short, lucid, incontrovertible sentences which go straight to the heart of the matter. Being polite or amiable just for its own sake is evidently terra incognita. One imagines how phased her opponents must feel when fixed with her steely, unphased glare. Despite the frivolousness of the residents’ associations’ objections in the current case she fears the court may uphold them. In her view the courts have been consistently biased against slum dwellers and street hawkers and willing to back middle class residents. She is not impressed and she intends to spend the afternoon over turning that bias.


Andre Beteille, Sociologist
The monsoon, due in June, had yet to arrive when I landed in Delhi two months later at the end of July. The humidity was so high and the air so thick and viscous, you could almost pick it up with a spoon and put it in a bowl. If one ignores the traffic chaos and the hopeless overflowing drains, the monsoon is wonderful, cool and fresh – particularly for me as I hadn’t been in a monsoon in India since my childhood, so it was almost Proust-ian to feel the atmosphere lift as the rain began falling.

As the skies darkened and the heavy rain started to fall, not in drops, but in ropes, Sujata and I arrived to visit India’s most distinguished sociologists, Andre Beteille. He lives in Jor Bagh, that lovely residential district of leafy green squares near the centre of New Delhi next to the Lodhi Gardens with its palm trees and monumental Mughal tombs. We sat in his small but beautiful sitting room, surrounded be fascinating abstract paintings, with the fan whirring on the ceiling. In the rain trees turn a luminous emerald green and we sat looking out on his garden eating delicious home-made cake and drinking tea.

Andre Beteille has gained a certain notoriety in India for being an active promoter of equality for the under-privileged or ‘scheduled’ castes in India, but an active opponent of quotas in universities and jobs for them. This latter opposition had led him to resign from the Indian Government’s powerful Knowledge Commission, somewhat to the Government’s consternation. He dismisses this high-profile act of objection and defiance as unimportant. “I’m not really the committee-type. I’m at my best in the seminar room.” Under-statement, like its close cousin irony, may be one of the more benign British post-colonial legacies.


The morphing of universities
Universities, as he defines them, are a threatened species, in India as elsewhere. The heart of the traditional university, as invented in Europe and particularly in Oxford and Cambridge (800 years old this year) was teaching and research of science and humanities. The more applied academic disciplines were on the periphery. Using academic research to influence public policy or practice was more or less unheard of. The point of it all was increasing the sum of human knowledge. He sensed that this model of the university was now moribund for two reasons. Firstly, the applied disciplines of technology and business management were fast becoming the core and humanities and natural sciences were being shunted to the periphery. Secondly, academics were no longer content with just teaching and research. They also wanted to write in the newspapers, influence public debate and be policy makers (not just policy analysts) in Government. These new ambitions could not in his view be achieved through institutions such as traditional universities, but were most effectively achieved through fluid personal networks.


Institutions vs networks
He has written a paper about the differences between institutions and networks; “just a rant”, he said modestly. In fact the analysis was compelling. Institutions are characterized by clear and manifold rules and regulations. Even if many people think the rules are absurd and unjustified, compliance will still be required. Institutions also have fixed membership which is hard to enter and which people were reluctant to leave. The essence of the institution is typified, according to Andre Beteille, by the British boarding school. Traditionally universities were certainly such institutions. Networks on the other hand relied on agreements and values, rather than traditions and rules and entry and exit was straightforward, common and frequent. Networks could be long-lived but had no aspirations to permanence, whereas institutions wanted to see themselves as eternal and were therefore prone regularly to publicly celebrate their longevity.


Isher Ahluwallia, Education policy-maker
“Please come,” Isher Aluwalia, smiling warmly, shows us into her office at the Habitat Centre. The power is out at her home where we were going to meet. Even the important and influential are not immune to the egalitarianism of the ubiquitous power cut in India. She is an elegant woman in an electric blue silk sari and striking jewellery. Her thick grey hair is elegantly and perfectly evenly bobbed.
She is a distinguished researcher and has looked in great depth at the learning outcomes achieved by primary schools, comparing the performance of schools in the Punjab, one of India’s wealthiest states, with those achieved in other states. She is generally not impressed. Results are poorer even when school buildings may be better and classes smaller, not to mention higher spending per capita. Her diagnosis, in line with a great deal of international research, is that not enough has been spent on improving the skills and quality of teachers. Investment in education is not neutral. The greatest benefit, rupee for rupee, is to be had from teacher development, a very important area of work for the Council in numerous countries.

She visited a school in the Punjab with her husband, Montek Singh Aluwallia, the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, and one of the closest associates of Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister. He is therefore said to be one of the four most influential people in India. The local officials were proudly showing Montek, (as everyone calls him, even those, like me, who don’t know him) and his wife their new buildings, the new separate toilets for boys and girls and the much improved classroom equipment. They were seeking to demonstrate that the education budgets, which have recently (and very belatedly) been greatly increased all over India, were being wisely spent and not squandered in rake-offs and other forms of corruption. The officials were therefore disconcerted when Mrs Aluwallia, who was presumably supposed to just nod and smile in the background, flatly asserted that she had looked at the evidence and they were probably spending money on the wrong things, as the state of Punjab needed to spend a great deal more on improving the quality of its teachers, not just the quality of its school buildings. Cue deflated officials.

She says Indians are reluctant to compare what they are doing with foreigners because they think that talking about things too much, particularly boasting, leads to people putting the evil eye on you. Superstitions, even amongst intellectuals, die hard. She has been involved in many international exchanges. Her eyes twinkling with mischief and merriment, she tells us about a high level exchange with Chinese academics and officials, who amongst other things, wanted to find out about the Indian IT industry. As the leader of the Indian delegation she tells them, showing the smiling directness we are coming to recognize as her trademark, “The Indian IT industry happened by accident; it happened despite the Government, not because of the Government.” The Chinese officials were astonished and frankly disbelieving. They thought the Indian delegation were being disingenuous, perhaps seeking to avoid the evil eye. Such a thing would be impossible in China: a world-beating industry being created without Government support. This subject kept recurring in all their exchanges so eventually, Isher Aluwallia repeated her observation in the presence of an Indian Government Minister. He nodded vigorously and the Chinese delegation were finally convinced that things can happen without Governments and sometimes Governments even get in the way.


Ashis Nandy, Sociologist
Ashis Nandy lives in a lovely flat in Delhi, with the illustrations for the covers of his book on the wall interspersed with tribal art. There are books and paper everywhere with sculptures and computers scattered amongst them. Perched precariously on the top of his bookshelf is a large poster with a poem written by his brother to celebrate Ashis’s 65th birthday. “You left home before I smoked my first cigarette”; the opening line summons up a touching sense of sibling intimacy. Uma, Ashis’s wife, breaks off watching an angry TV debate about corruption in the distribution of the Government’s flagship cash benefit scheme for the poorest of the poor, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, to serve delicious, freshly-cooked, bite-size pakora, cooked in the Guajarati way.

Ashis Nandy is one of India’s most distinguished – and controversial – social critics. He has argued that the nation state as defined by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and developed in Europe thereafter, which has been enthusiastically embraced by the post-colonial Indian elite, is deeply flawed for the Indian context. It can never produces stability and harmony, just varying degrees of, at least, discord and, at worst, chaos. He argues controversially that nation states will always privilege military security over social development. Their primary focus is always on strengthening the state, if necessary at the expense of the interests of the people. He goes even further to argue that nation states, whilst claiming to represent and preserve cultural traditions and linguistic identities, consistently and systematically undermine and trash traditional forms of knowledge and celebrate technocratic and globalised information even though the champions of these hyper-modern approaches know perfectly well that everyone in India can never live like people in Western Europe; there are simply not enough resources to go round. Again he points to middle-class self-interest dressed up as a nation-building project of economic and social development. In these culture and political wars, truth is often a casualty, but so too are the rights and aspirations of individual citizens.


Anil Gupta, Social alchemist
Anil Gupta is a Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmadabad, probably India’s best management school, in Gujarat, India’s fastest growing state – and its most religiously divided. But his much greater claim to fame is that he is a great champion of social innovation – probably the greatest in the world; he is a social alchemist seeking to turn poor people’s base metals into gold for their benefit. Dressed in an unostentatious traditional cotton kurta and taking his shoes off in every building he entered (though insisting we need not) his office on the lovely campus is small, dark and full of books and news cuttings from all over the world.

Although he is less combative than Ashis Nandy, he makes the same point: India is too poor to wait for globalization to bring about huge increases in material standards of living for everyone. In the meantime the productive and creative potential of poor people is their greatest asset. In developed countries highly stratified education systems identify those with talent early in life. Ignoring humble origins (like mine), the education system will make many of the talented successful, (making the successful talented is of course impossible, or perhaps that’s too unkind!). This is what Michael Young called meritocracy. India is not a meritocracy, particularly in the rural areas where three quarters of the population continue to live, many of them in great poverty. Talent is held back, and therefore, ironically, beneficially present almost everywhere, if only the best ideas could be collected, shared and developed using more conventional investment and management methods. That is Professor Gupta’s mission.

His method of research is walks around the country, a tradition inherited from Gandhi from whom many of his ideas are clearly drawn, though much adapted and modernized. These walks are long and undertaken in high summer or the depth of winter, sleeping out where necessary. He believes fervently that you listen better when walking. He and his companions record the ideas of those that they meet and publish them on the internet. We are astonished to discover that so far he has collected and published 164,000, including shoes to walk on water (invented by a farmer who wanted to visit his girlfriend on the other side of the river) and a washing machine powered by pedal power.

Using funds he received from an award from an American foundation, he has established a laboratory to test some of the ideas he encounters in a more scientific environment (his original expertise was in genetics). He shows us some of the experiments. They are conducting tests on the immunizing properties of single-bulb garlic, which some rural people told him they used for treating many ailments. He shows us the petri dish whish shows the garlic producing a larger zone of immunity than a conventional drug. If these tests prove successful, his laboratory will patent the single-bulb garlic and the farmer and his community will receive the royalties. They have already brought many products to market, including an organic fly spray (which Moumitra uses in her garden and recommends) and a natural cream for cracked skins on heels.

In another room in the laboratory, pots of earth are organized in tidy rows, some are cheap factory-made earthenware and others are darker, almost black, and handmade. In each one a small seedling is growing. The seedlings in the handmade pots seem to be larger and healthier than the ones in the factory-made pots. Sujata picks up one of these handmade pots and asks Professor Gupta, “What is this?” “That pot,” he replies, “is made of cow dung and we are testing what farmers have told us: cow dung pots retain water better and produce healthier plants than factory-made pots.” Sujata swiftly returns the pot she is holding to the table and gingerly dusts off her fingers seeking to discreetly remove the remaining traces of cow dung without looking too urban and fastidious.


Ela Bhatt: global activist for women
At dinner in a wonderful vegetarian restaurant in a historic building in the centre of Ahmadabad we meet Ela Bhatt who is the leader of a million-strong women’s movement. She is a small, thin woman, perhaps not so young now, in a pink starched cotton sari. Her balance and poise, hands folded on the table in front of her, head still, half a smile, makes me think she is probably a long-time practitioner of yoga; asking, though tempting, seemed rather personal as I had just met her.
She is feted all over the world and consulted by leaders from all over the world, including Hillary Clinton, who recently visited SEWA. Mrs Clinton has visited before, but on this visit she asked for the first time about the women’s views on environmental sustainability. The French have given her the Legion d’Honneur, nothing yet from the Brits as far as I can tell.

We are deep in conversation and she asks me about the lives of women from the sub-continent in the UK. I explain some research I had done with Bangladeshi women in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets: how difficult it was for them to care for many children and look after ailing, prematurely aged husbands and how many had taken to chewing tobacco for its sedative effects to such an extent that there was now an epidemic of mouth cancer. She listened carefully to what I had to say and at the end, moving her head from side to side in that characteristically Indian way, she said “But the men are tyrants, no?”