Another India

It has been a short six years since I first visited India. Yet the pace of change in most of the major cities of this nation is nothing short of astounding. My earlier post on Gurgaon -- a test-case in unbridled globalization -- represents that increasingly globally integrated, English-speaking, wealthier India. That world comprises tens or perhaps a couple of hundreds of millions of others who are some how caught up in a world that increasingly includes cars, shopping markets and malls, restaurant culture, and the like. It is a very influential part of India. 

But there is another India. It is the India of the many hundreds of millions. It disappears only in those most elite gated enclaves of the wealthy in the biggest cities. Elsewhere, it is woven continually into the ever-changing fabric of this nation. It is the barefoot sixteen-year old carrying a ton of grain in bags on the back of a bicycle cart, weaving amidst the traffic of a major city or on a busy highway. It is the hardened migrant laborer from Bihar or Uttar Pradesh sipping a cup of tea from a flimsy plastic cup beneath a tree with coworkers after a long day's work. It is the sprawling slums where even a cursory glance reveals things that are truly hard to see. 

Few places raise more questions for me about justice, politics, and economics than India. Simple solutions just don't fit.

Streets of the old city of Ahmedabad

But there's another more subtle and more beautiful divide in India as well. It is the divide between the "old India" and the "new India." This is, no doubt, a hopelessly simplistic device employed by an inexperienced foreigner. The city of Amritsar was for me quintessentially "old India," an India that I have seen in numerous places, but rarely on the scale of a whole city of 1.5M. I can only describe it as about a billion moving pieces and parts that all appear ready to fall in upon one another at any moment. But they do not. They just keep moving, flowing, pulsing. Like many North Indian cities, Amritsar's old city is surrounded by the remains of a city wall, with numerous gates issuing in various directions. Within the old city (and to some extent throughout it) streets are narrow lanes shadowed by ancient 3-4 story buildings, many in a state of seemingly continual ruin and rebirth. The streets flow with cars, horse carts, tuk-tuks, rickshaws, bicycles, motorbikes, and pedestrians. The goods of thousands of tiny shops spill out into the street and vendors cook every imaginable treat over hot flames and oil. 

One of many varieties of transport in India

The "new India" is the traffic-choked streets and highways of Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore, with their new flyovers and freeways. It is the world of overcrowded parking lots in popular restaurant districts, of efficient and timely transportation options. It is the new frontiers of social networking that are everywhere in India. It is the India of "progress." 

The lines between these worlds are not sharp. Elements of the old India that are quaint and beautiful butt up against things that are so unjust as to label them deplorable, if not evil. And then the rickshaw driver's mobile phone rings and the "new India" bursts into the picture. Just as lines between worlds are not sharp, value judgements seem very difficult to make, not just for this outsider, but for Indians themselves. Who doesn't value the economic development of the last 20 years in terms of opportunities it has afforded to middle-class Indians and even the slight boost given to some of the poor? Yet it's hard to avoid simultaneous questions that wonder about the effects of these changes on community, communality, and culture. As is so often the case, such questions are hardly unique to India.

A rural scene in Punjab