What Does India Really Mean? When We Look at India, What Are We Looking At? | QDaily Annual Book Recommendations ⑮

We're recommending some books, and through them, hoping to see what China and India share and where they differ.

A year has passed, and China and the world, society and the state, the economy and our own lives have all been pushed around by big questions. In the middle of that bewilderment, the disappearance of intellectual voices — or their being drowned out by noise — only deepens our confusion. Or perhaps a turning point is about to appear. In any era, wise thinking is scarce, and people of insight are what let us see the road ahead clearly.

That's why our "2018 Annual Book Recommendations" aims to introduce, as widely as we can, some books we think are worth reading.

As in past years, every book within our view has been read by our editorial staff, who introduce them to readers in good faith.

We've also drawn on contributing writers to do this with us. They are always ahead of the curve, and their insights run deeper. Our thanks to them here.

This is the eleventh installment in our nonfiction book recommendation series, on the transformation of Indian society. The author, Liu Zhizhen, is an editor at QDaily.

1.

Buddhism, born in India, gave China an idiom: blind men touching an elephant.

Near things look large, far things look small. India is often seen as a single point.

What we know is fragmentary — or maybe not even fragments, just a string of labels.

Readers used to hearing that the motherland is doing splendidly while the rest of the world lives in misery may see nothing beyond "Ah San" rape cases and trains with people hanging off the sides; those with a bit more culture will think of Naipaul's India trilogy, which sketches the outline of an area of darkness; China's petite bourgeoisie (I thought about it for a long time, and that still seems the most accurate word) follow the hippie trail of the 1960s, circling endlessly around cleansed souls, liberated egos and bodies, Bohemia, and all that...

But apart from Steve Jobs learning to eat a vegetarian diet and wrecking his health, did India have any effect on his career or the rest of his life?

What India and China have most in common is simply being big enough. Big enough that people can see only what is around them, care only about what they care about, and no one bothers to ask what the folded-away other India might be.

Rana Dasgupta's Capital: The Eruption of Delhi has this passage:

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh once declared these groups "the greatest security challenge our country has ever faced," a statement that stunned the urban elite, because even by then most of them found it hard to imagine that they were sharing this country with hundreds of millions of hard-pressed farmers, hunters, and other such creatures out of myth.

This is not so different from how Chinese people see themselves. They — India's middle class, the people with a voice — probably picture their country through something like the shock we've felt since last year, on hearing that after all these years China has only 80 million college graduates; that maybe only 100 million people have ever been abroad; that maybe a billion people have never set foot on a plane.

And the channels through which we come to know India, even one as sophisticated as Naipaul, may be too far from the present. My guess is that Indians feel about Naipaul roughly the way Chinese readers feel about Lin Yutang's My Country and My People — that's history now.

Both countries are known for development on a huge scale. Beyond the vast distance in space there is also a long span of time: after a few decades, or even a few years, everything is different. And we may still be picturing the reality of India by holding it up against Naipaul.

I recently read Cao Jinqing's China Along the Yellow River, which is about nothing more than rural Henan in 1996, and even that reads entirely like history now. After the most recent GDP figures came out, the front-page headline of the Zhengzhou Evening News read "Zhengzhou: Please Call Me a Megacity" — this central city of Henan had reached 1 trillion yuan in GDP, a population of 10 million, and per-capita GDP past 100,000 yuan. Twenty years ago, who would have imagined that this "agricultural province" in the heart of the Central Plains would be so full of swagger?

Vast in space, we are blind men touching an elephant; displaced in time, the same is true.

So what does India really mean? When we look at India, what are we looking at?

We're recommending some books, and through them, hoping to see what China and India share and where they differ.

2.

There seem to be more books about the realities of Indian society than about China, especially on the problems that come with development.

The two countries have entirely different political systems, but the questions tied to development — the middle class, poverty, social transformation, class mobility, justice — are ones they both face.

The stereotype runs one way: India's middle class can hardly believe that all sorts of poor people are sharing the country with them. Ours runs the other: the poor country in our heads is made up of nothing but poor people. Does India even have a middle class?

When you meet them in Capital, if you haven't lost all your sharpness, a smile may creep across your lips — is he talking about us?

With the recent rise in real estate prices, they found the scale of their wealth astonishing. Kapoor owns property in Delhi's best neighborhood, plus a "farmhouse" outside the city — the kind of property now valued at somewhere between $50 million and $100 million. Over the past several years, it is precisely this property boom that has made the city's propertied class extremely confident. These people are now discovering that they count as rich by global standards, and they didn't even have to do anything.

Their wealth — or perhaps, more precisely, their anxiety and uncertainty about their social standing — also decides how they see life: you can't afford to fall behind, and you have to sacrifice for the next generation. Whether it's worth it, who knows?

Of course, none of this is easy. I don't have time to spend with my kids. My wife keeps bringing it up. I see them for half an hour every morning, and maybe spend two evenings a week with them. But I tell her: by the time they're nineteen, at least they'll have money. Think about it — if we didn't have money, and they were complaining about not being able to go to a good school or anything else, what would I say to them? "Well, at least I spent time with you"?

These two passages in Capital about India's middle class are only one corner of the picture. Katherine Boo, author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, a book about the slums of Mumbai, put it this way: "Every country has its myths, and one that successful Indians love is a story about instability and adaptability — that their country's rapid rise comes in part from the chaos and unpredictability of daily life. In Europe and America, it's said, people know what will happen when they turn on the tap or flip a light switch. In India, a country with almost no reliable assumptions, prolonged uncertainty is said to breed quick-witted, creative problem-solvers."

3.

"When they want to build a city, they have to bring in people from elsewhere to make it run, because they have no labor of their own. People who live in mansions cannot make a city run. What makes a city run are the people who live in shacks and slums — rickshaw pullers, vegetable vendors, cobblers, construction workers and so on. Those are the people who make any city run."

"People keep coming to Delhi because there is so much work here. The Delhi Metro needed tens of thousands of workers. They built shacks right under the government's nose, and the government said nothing. But later the government decided these people were dirty and hurt the city's image. And once the city expanded, the areas where they lived were no longer the city's edge — the government wanted to profit from that land, so it told these people that living there was illegal and made them leave."

Capital is describing demolition and relocation in Delhi, India's capital — a scene we know all too well...

In Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo makes a teenage boy named Abdul the protagonist of the whole book, presenting his family, his friends, and the turns of his life to readers.

Every time Abdul went back to Dongri, he was still looking for his mentor. He wanted to tell him that in his last years as a child he had tried to be a person of some nobility, but that now he was fairly certain he had become a grown man and could no longer keep it up. A man, if he is wise enough, does not draw clean lines between good and evil, true and false, justice and whatever the other thing is.

"For a while I tried to keep the ice inside me from melting," he said. "But now, like everyone else, I'm turning into dirty water. I tell Allah I love Him very, very much. But I also tell Him that because of the way the world works, I can't manage to become a better man."

Isn't this our life too? There is always some inspirational text telling us how adults are supposed to behave: "Only children talk about right and wrong; adults talk about interests." Adults are well versed in "the way the world works," adults don't care whether they become "better people," and what they hold up for children is the successful man's creed of "get it done first, worry later" — hence the man who took someone else's seat on the high-speed train and refused to move, hence "change it first, explain later"...

Reading a description like this is unbearably sad.

How did we fall into this abyss? How did we fall into it without knowing? Katherine Boo lays the moment bare for readers — so why do we look away from it, untroubled by the thought that the next generation may turn into cynics on the way to growing up?

Abdul's father had picked up an irritating habit of talking about the future as if it were a bus: "It goes by, and you think you're going to miss it, but then you say, wait, maybe I won't miss it, I just have to run faster than before. Except now we're all worn out, body and soul — how fast can we run? You have to try to catch up, even knowing you can't, even when it would be better to let it go—"

In the Douban reviews of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, someone started a topic asking which period of Chinese history the social conditions it depicts most resemble. Thankfully no one took up the discussion — otherwise there's no telling how much arrogance we'd have had to read.

China lifting a huge share of its population out of poverty is seen as a rare and great achievement, and it truly is striking. But that doesn't mean we can pretend the problem of poverty is gone; poverty has always been a relative idea. The Husain family in Behind the Beautiful Forevers is called "well-off" —

Many Annawadi residents still remember how much the Husain family lost in the 2005 floods. Their youngest daughter nearly drowned, and their clothes, rice and 5,000 rupees of savings were all washed away. Now they have a crudely made wooden wardrobe, twice the size of Asha's; a small television bought on installment; two thick quilts, one blue-and-white checked, one chocolate-colored. There are also eleven stainless-steel plates, five pots, and fresh cardamom and cinnamon, better spices than most Annawadi residents use. Then there is a cracked mirror, a bottle of Brylcreem hair cream, a large bag of medicine, and finally a rusty iron bed. Most people in the slum, even Asha, still have to sleep on the floor.

Asha is a woman with a lot of "pull" in this book, sometimes playing a role in the community much like the neighborhood committees we know, sometimes finding a little room for rent-seeking — and still "even Asha has to sleep on the floor."

It is also hard for us to grasp how wretched the lives of the poor really are.

Only fifteen-year-old Meena knew that Manju had considered suicide — on the night she ran out of the party on Asha's fortieth birthday, and on many nights afterward. Manju was deeply ashamed of her mother's affair and worried about it, and all Meena could do was offer advice. She herself was often beaten badly by her parents and brothers, and to get away from those hours at home, a trip to the public tap and the public toilet already counted as an expedition. To Meena, any mother who let her daughter go to college, rarely beat her, and had no plans to marry her off at fifteen could be forgiven her other faults.

What I want to say is this: Abdul's father's anxiety and sense of fate, the Husain family's inventory of possessions, a poor fifteen-year-old girl's humble wishes and small satisfactions — these are the paths by which we observe Indian society.

But when it is our turn to observe ourselves, it doesn't feel nearly as rich. Take books on India's social transformation: besides this year's two big ones, Capital and Behind the Beautiful Forevers, there are earlier ones like In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India and The Beautiful and the Damned, which seem to touch on nearly every layer of India's changing society.

What we can point to this year is, it seems, Street of Eternal Happiness. And for this one book, new copies have disappeared from most e-commerce platforms, while used copies now generally go for more than 100 yuan. That seems to say something.

In our annual recommendations, here is how we described Street of Eternal Happiness:

Any translated book by a correspondent based in China — commonly called a wire-service reporter — writing about real, present-day China deserves a recommendation.

There are fewer and fewer of them now. They were scarce to begin with.

There is no need to argue about their angle or their stance; as far as we can see, they are objective, friendly, generous, and careful not to hurt the feelings of ordinary people. The government and the big shots, of course, are the exception.

This is a reporter's natural duty.

The author of Street of Eternal Happiness is Rob Schmitz, and the book's protagonist, so to speak, is Changle Road itself, a fashionable street in Shanghai. In the local media's telling, it is linked to Edison Chen and other people's trendy boutiques, to the former French Concession that no one quite names outright, to plane trees, old villas and new ones — a Li Ka-shing development was for a while the benchmark for luxury housing there... And every so often it is also linked to Maggie Lane, which comes up often in Schmitz's pages.

In Schmitz's story there is a flower shop run by a migrant from out of town; a bohemian office worker who sells sandwiches and also deals in vintage accordions; a shoebox holding old letters that tell a brutal story spanning forty years; and... Maggie Lane, separated by a single wall from Li Ka-shing's luxury development, where the story is not far in the past, and just as brutal.

The Chinese edition is said to have been cut very little, but what may be missing is the sense of fatalism around Abdul's family — as in Behind the Beautiful Forevers — or the historical depth of Capital.

Some of our colleagues disagree slightly: is this too much praise? Given how scarce it is to face reality head-on, maybe it isn't — such books really are getting rarer.

Even when they do get published, they have to put up with being called "biased" or "arrogant," though that may not be true at all. If they really are arrogant, it is usually only arrogance toward power.

Nowadays, even in short reviews of books about India, you can see Chinese readers on guard against the "arrogance" of authors from Europe or America — as if the reader were a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

4.

There is only one reason we see more of India than of China: these books depend on the existence of a free market of ideas. Or, more bluntly, on room to speak.

India always likes to put "world's largest democracy" at the top of its list of labels (please call me the largest democracy), and every so often it gets mocked, kindly or not so kindly, by the genuine, long-established democracies. And not only by them — we occasionally poke our heads in too: India? Democracy? With that institutionalized corruption? That society with no safety net? Manmohan Singh must be scrapping the big banknotes again! Mockery is the mild version — usually there's some vulgar little line thrown in as well, along the lines of, well, I just have to laugh.

But we get to see more true stories about Indian society.

We also get to know why the poor in Delhi's slums dare to live where they live.

"So people from Bihar, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh who couldn't find work moved to Delhi from their villages. In Delhi they found they could get work but had nowhere to live, so they started building small houses on empty land at the edge of the city. To the government they were a bloc of voters worth courting, so the government decided to register them as Delhi voters and give them water, electricity and ration cards. Later their families moved in too, and they lived a normal life here together for 30 years."

Naipaul made the same point earlier, in India: A Million Mutinies Now.

Seen from here, Dharavi looks out of place, even superfluous within Mumbai itself: people say it persists because it is a vote bank, a breeding ground for hatred, and a place many people can profit from. All of Mumbai's conflicting currents spread there as well, and every new particularity becomes sharper inside it. But people still live there, and endure this extra exploitation, because in Mumbai, once you have a place to live, you can make money.

5.

What differs is not the poor. It is the attitude toward the poor.

The sociologist Oscar Lewis, in his famous field study The Children of Sánchez, quotes C.P. Snow: "I sometimes worry that people in the rich countries have no idea what poverty tastes like, and that we can no longer, or will no longer, talk to those less lucky than ourselves. We must learn how."

And then there is George Orwell's famous statement in Homage to Catalonia:

When I heard the whole story I felt better. It was clear enough: on one side the CNT, on the other the police. I had no particular love for the idealized "worker" of the bourgeois Communist's imagination, but when I saw an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I did not have to ask myself which side I was on.

I believe most people would consider themselves kind, even without Orwell's flat, unarguable certainty. But do we still have the ability to talk to "those less lucky"? Can we bear to have filthy, wretched lives and people living around us?

We can think of tolerance.

Raymond Aron recalled his high school teacher Monsieur Ziegler, who was Jewish: the students usually heckled him, but one year the class he taught was quiet and hardworking, and he was delighted. He finally brought up the word "tolerance," arguing that "tolerance" does not capture the right feeling toward "people who are different" — that "respect" is a better word than "tolerance," because tolerance implies looking down from above.

We can also think of "solving" it. Once we are used to these problems appearing, it is natural to think of "solving" them, and however much weight we put on that word, it would not be too much. Making the city more livable — isn't that exactly our goal?

Neil Smith, in The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, shows us the truth behind "livable city": the phrase was never meant for all city residents.

In fact, and necessarily so, the city has always been "livable" for the working class too. The claim that revitalization benefits people of every class is nothing more than an advertising and sales gimmick, because the facts show otherwise. The annual housing survey by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development shows that roughly 500,000 American households lose their homes each year, which may displace as many as 2 million people. Of these households, 86 percent were displaced by free-market activity, and most of them belonged to the urban working class.

For ourselves, for the government, for the tidy modern megacity, for everything that gleams — when you feel a poor person has offended your middle-class life, can we hold back a little of that look of disgust? Can we care a little less about the small sacrifice it costs us?

6.

And still there is more.

Beauty.

Even the poor have beauty.

Life is ugly, but people are beautiful.

Abdul gave him a swat: "Listening to you talk makes my head spin." Sitting next to someone who still had ideas of his own made him feel old. Once the slum was torn down, they would most likely never see each other again. Sunil wanted to start his new life somewhere on the city's outskirts, with trees and flowers; Abdul thought Sunil was more likely to end up sleeping on the street. These last days in Annawadi might be the best years Sunil would ever get.

We don't have enough realist work showing what society is; we don't have enough care for ourselves or for the poor; our courage may still be bound by wealth; we may still be selfish... The good thing is that we still have a conscience, and it lets us notice problems and know they exist.

But we have not noticed the beauty.

When we talk about tolerance, are we being kind and respectful? When we talk about solving problems, are we only thinking, just don't bother me? When we talk about upgrading employment, urban renewal, transformation, livability, are we only thinking about our own property values going up?

They are a group of people who, however humble their lives, feel things exactly as everyone else does; their souls, and their trust in humanity, are the equal of anyone's.

What made Orwell take the side of the poor without a second thought was his faith in the goodness of human beings.

They are not a problem to be solved. They are ourselves.

Back to the words of Manmohan Singh that so shocked India's middle class at the start of this piece. Inside them is a bigger question: who are we sharing this country with?

Cover image: a still from the film Dangal, via Douban.