A different India for different people

As I write on this page devoted to women writers, I think it apt that India is referred to as “she”, especially today at the end of the first day of the Jaipur Literature Festival. Two festival directors are women–Faith Singh and Namita Gokhale–who worked with William Dalrymple and Sanjoy Roy of Teamwork Arts to make it one of the most famous literary events globally.

If you look at India’s progress, it would be easy to think she didn’t need literature to advance. The Economic Times (India) has reported that “India decisively withstood global headwinds in 2023 and is likely to remain the world’s fastest growing major economy on the back of growing demand, moderate inflation, stable interest rate regime and robust foreign exchange reserves. It’s no exaggeration. India’s digital footprint is deep. Most transactions are done on mobiles. The streets of Shimla, Delhi and Jaipur are spotless. The airports are vast, gleaming, and efficient, transporting over 400,000 passengers on 3,000 flights with ease and grace. This month, the Modi Government claimed that nearly 250 million people have been lifted from multidimensional poverty.

The days of the Slumdog millionaires appear to be over, at least to the visitor’s eye–the poverty hidden behind tall walls. The middle class, the largest in the world, of over 440 million, is prospering. But speak to a Sikh, Muslim or Nepalese cab driver and ask him about his India, and he asks which India I am talking about. Different India for different people, he says, pointing to Hindu saffron flags everywhere– roadside, on vehicles, outside shops, on buntings. Sikh, Muslim, Parsi, Christian Anglo Indian and other non-Hindu communities are increasingly silenced. When we drove past yet another crumbling fort of Mughal times in Delhi and a driver tells us in hushed tones of plans to raze down yet another mosque ahead of next year’s elections, the effect is chilling. They disagree that India is as great as it looks. They don’t need to see beautifully manicured lawns and rose gardens in Chandigarh as prosperity. They say that PM Modi has spin doctors, a public relations machinery that has hypnotised India and the world, that to support Modi is to support Hindu Nationalism and that to be secular is to be seen as an enemy of India.

I know where it’s coming from. India has been invaded and mercilessly looted through the centuries by the Persians, Greeks, Muhammad bin Qasim, Mahmud of Ghazni, Muhammad Ghori, Timur, Babur, Nader Shah, Ahmad Shah Durrani, Alexander the Great, Britain posing initially as the British East India Company. As India outclasses many first-world countries in science and technology, there is a sense here among Hindus that, finally, India has come into its own. Yet history cannot be overturned. There is no such thing as a pure Indian race. This country of varied people that look everything from African to European with roots stretching across continents has been pieced together after a brutal partition in 1947, casually drawn across a map by the British in which more than a million Muslims and Hindus butchered one another. Jawāharlāl Nehru, helped by Mahatma Gandhi brought together 27 states under a secular dream.

I visited the late PM Indira Gandhi’s former home in No 1, Safderjang Road in Delhi, the day before I flew to Jaipur. Now a museum, her home has been carefully preserved. The sari she wore when she was shot dead, with blood stains, is on display. Her drawing and dining rooms, where she sat with her sons, Sanjay and Rajiv, and her daughters in-law, Sonia and Maneka, and grandchildren intact as she saw it last on October 31, 1984, when she walked out to her front lawn at 9:30 when Sikh nationalists, her own bodyguards assassinated her.

I remember meeting her on that lawn with my parents as a child. Now, the neatly arranged beds of roses make me think of her death. Just seven years later, on May 21, 1991, Rajiv Gandhi, Indira Gandhi’s son, the then prime minister of India, was killed as a result of a suicide bombing in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu, India, a member of the Sri Lankan Tamil banned separatist rebel organisation Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). I have lived through a time when I saw the worst of separatism.

This new separatism has filled me with pain. Part Muslim, part Hindu, I feel like I am walking on water in this new India. But with my strong relationships with my adopted country, Trinidad, I feel safe. Everyone at the Jaipur Lit Fest takes two names when I say I’m from Trinidad. Brian Lara. VS Naipaul.

In one of the first sessions at the Jaipur Lit Fest, Gulzar, regarded amongst India’s greatest Urdu poets, recited a poem that suggested that all of India shared a heartbeat. At that moment, it struck me that not only was I attending among the greatest literary festivals on Earth (heard online by some 30 million around the world with some 238 sessions and in over 46 languages, attended by over 400,000 people over four days) but the festival of writers and readers was about providing a voice and safety to the displaced everywhere. It also reminded me of a poem by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) that Indira Gandhi kept by her bedside all her adult life.

“Where the mind is without fear, and the head held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit, Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action; Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”

Mrs Gandhi was flawed like all humans, but her heart was in an India that had “not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls.” She gave her life for it. Now India needs poets like Gulzar to pick up the steadily shattering fragments of India’s minorities.