Review of India Calling by Anand Giridharadas, JMWW, Spring 2011

Originally appeared in the Spring 2011 edition of JMWW.
Source: http://jmww.150m.com/IndiaCallingrev.html

India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Re-making
by Anand Giridharadas
Times Books, NY, New York. 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9177-9, $25.00

Let's hold up Anand Giridharadas's India Calling as a mirror that reflects the zeitgeist of 21st-century India. What does one see? One sees aspirations, dreams, new-found desires, and hope. But the mirror only reflects what is immediately opposite. In reading India Calling, one realizes that what better reflects India is a fun-house mirror, at once exaggerating the new riches and lest you are caught up in the euphoria of a resurgent India, smacks you in the face with chilling images of crushing ,debilitating poverty, malnutrition, and corruption, of farmers committing suicide and politicians slipping cash-loaded envelopes into daily newspapers, quite literally, securing vote banks.

Anand Giridharadas, a writer and columnist for the New York Times, grew up in suburban Ohio of the 1970s and 80s but moved to India in the early 2000s. A product of a multi-ethnic family (father, a Tamil from the south and mother, a Punjabi from the north), his initial idea of India was severely limited to his yearly vacations spent with family and friends who belonged to what he calls the Anglicized elite of India. Giridharadas's India of the 1970s and 80s was stagnant, unchanging, caught in the morass of caste, communalism, and the license raj. When he returned to India in 2003 for a lucrative job with an international consulting firm and then onto a position with the Times, he witnessed a transformation in the very soul and psyche of its peoples. Giridharadas's India of the 2000s was an India breaking free from the shackles of its colonial, caste-ridden past, an India "that was changing when I arrived, and it continued to change dramatically, viscerally, improbably."

Six chapters, variously titled "Dream," "Ambition," "Pride," "Anger," "Love," and "Freedom," are each devoted to the author's own musings and supporting character portrayals in the vein of the chapter's title. Thus, in Ambition we encounter the ambitious Ravindra, who by far is the most fascinating of that people that the author chronicles. Ravindra lives in Umred, a small town in rural Maharashtra state, home also to Bombay. Born into a poor family, of a caste that while not untouchable was still considered backward (belonging to the vague category of OBC or "Other Backward Caste"), Ravindra, dreams big and what's more, makes it big too. He organizes a pageant for young men and women in Umred, opens up finishing schools that provide personality development and English language coaching, and even heads a delegation of roller-skaters to an international competition in Hong Kong. In Ravindra, the roller-skating, Dale Carnegie-quoting, English-speaking small-town entrepreneur, Giridharadas finds all that is new and resurgent in today's India.

A broader question that emerges from reading India Calling is one of representation. Who and whose point of view does the author represent? Indeed, should he represent anybody but himself? Further yet, is the question of representation even pertinent to this discussion? Well, The answer is yes and no. No, if works such as this provide vignettes with minimal meta observations and allow the readers to come to their own conclusions. Yes, if, as the byline to India Calling suggests, the author is attempting to paint an "intimate portrait of a nation's re-making." Now that's a tall order, and with it comes a great responsibility. One of presenting a well-rounded and balanced argument or view point. Giridharadas sets out to paint this portrait by falling back on his family's history in and out of India and then by teasing out strands of similarity between his family's experiences and a few other characters that he meets along the way during his time in India. While his character portrayals are strong, immediate and provide fertile ground to display both his story telling and journalistic skills, where the book falls short is in its analysis. Girdharadas's arguments though while not explicitly so, are one of economic determinism, whether in portraying Ravindra's meteoric rise from small town lad to an ambitious entrepreneur or in contrasting the old guard India with the new guard India.

Giridharadas as a social scientist does not cut it. One cannot, based on snippets here and glimpses here, generalize and essentialize the soul of a complex, multi-ethnic, pluralistic nation of a billion people. India's Calling's premise is fairly simple and arguably trite. What has changed in the last 20 or so years in India? How did it transform from the lumbering elephant to resurgent tiger metaphor? Indians, the author argues, are beginning to think differently, shedding their caste and communal affiliations. Small-town India is dreaming of big town possibilities. But these observations are by now, fairly well-documented. The Indian government liberalized the economy in the early 1990s. This, coupled with increased university-level education and a fairly developed road and rail infrastructure, led to robust economic growth. One that is now palpable in people like Ravindra, or less convincingly in the Ambanis' story from the chapter titled "Pride."

For a much more intimate portrait of a changing India, William Dalrymple's Nine Lives is both humble in its purpose and while different in its premise, is magnanimous in its character portrayals, with the author taking a back seat and allowing the reader to make their own judgments.

India Calling would have a made a much stronger calling for India if Giridharadas had let the characters speak for themselves. The stories of his grandparents, while touching, are brought down by the drone of his arguments. That said, India Calling is a calling for non-Indians, for the many Janes and Joes moving to India to train at the call centers in Bangalore or Chennai. This could be the book's greatest strength and weakness—strength in that it provides a slice of life in the India of today and how it's changed over the last 20 years, weakness in that for an average English-educated, college graduate Indian (such as myself), this story has been told many a time over. This is the stuff of our tea-time, dinner table conversations in American suburbia and in cafes around big town India. Giridharadas does not provide us with new fodder.

However, Giridaradas's journalistic traits are evident in some of his keen observations. Some points struck home and hard! Indians tend to be curious about how much things cost, he says. That reference took me back to a time when I asked my co-worker how much his expensive-looking shoulder bag cost him. Pray what I was hoping to do with that little nugget of information? Drive home any guilt that he may already be experiencing from an impulse buy? Yes, I nodded along, at least one Indian is guilty of that.

Despite his valiant attempts to paint an intimate portrait, what emerge are broad strokes and silhouettes, not quite of a nation's re-making but of an individual's re-imagining of a nation.—Girija Sankar