Liking India

It takes an outsider to enlighten you on the place where you are. Liking India has never been easy although liking Kerala was not so problematic. I saw India first around age five and then Kerala henceforth so much so it was a contrast from the barren north to see kerala in its spring and showers.

Apart from the physical absence sometimes and near total emotional absence always of parents which sure was a problem for me at a tender age, coming back to Kerala kept the rest of India at a distance. In fact I am sure all Indians consider them as Punjabis, Tamilians, Bengalis and so on first and then only as Indians. So a question of the love of the land is true only in the abstract and evokes different meanings to the Indian in him.


My sojourns first to Chennai (then Madras) gave a different picture of the world but the next one to Bihar was a complete shock. I could like these places only in the abstract and in hindsight away from the din, smells , noise and the dust first and then the caste, colours, tastes and irrationalities thereafter. It took much of the ethnocentrism (malluness) away from me, but gave greater insights into how a person can forget that he is blessed until he is taken away to some place else.

Coming to the topic at hand I had an accidental receiving of a book “Into India” by John Keay in 1999 or 2000 which I read only in May 2010. Surprisingly the mundane things that the Indian pushes to the background of perception comes alive when given a treatment by a foreigner. Will I be able to stand back and look at the daily scenes as if I am a foreigner. The answer is YES and I do!!

It is only that when I actually started reading the book I realized so. Also many things that I did not know came alive. The treatment of the subject is as an introduction for the foreign traveler to the country. So it comes as no surprise that one can hear names like Mathew, Joseph and John plenty in Kerala is what the book says. Well I belong to that very minority of communities the Syrian Catholic puts me immediately in a special place. Have I ever looked at me that way ? Have I ever tried to consider my identity? Sometimes I also wonder it is because we are not so different from some other communities as well. For instance Sakaria in his article on ‘Appol Christhuvine enthu cheyyum’ (Thereafter what will we do with Christ?) in Mathrubhoomy weekly says that Christians were a sort of ‘melekkida nainmar’ (upper class Nairs) two millennia ago until they were persuaded to be reorganised by the Portuguese into the Roman Catholic fold in the 17th century or so.

The book is a delight in its organisation and simplicity. I liked India better. I saw India in a different light without much traveling. In fact I had started liking India after I left Bihar. But that was when I started traveling again when I knew that I would come back to Kerala. There is something about the vibrancy, in the resilience that others speak so much about. There is also a certain Indian that I feel one with than my own cousins back home.

Some sort of leveling is taking place due to education , greater interaction and so forth. The next of such surprises was when I read about cultures and organisations in an academic way with Hofstede. And lo and behold a movie true to the letters of what India is as described from a cultural perspective appears. ‘OUTSOURCED’ is more than true and shows the transformation of the foreigner once he surrenders to this incorrigibly impossible land. Without pandering to the love of the false exotic as Satyajit Ray would say….

And then there was Amartya Sen with his ‘Argumentative Indian’. I had not come across the book and had thought it to be one of his academic prose. Sen is difficult in his essays, interviews and speeches. But here it was well conceived and well stringed around a single word ‘argumentative’. Discourse would be a better word but that would be too Greek, like Socrates. Well for India no other word suits other than argumentative. Just watch any crowd in a public place in India.

Shashi Tharoor has written something similar from midnight to the millennium. But with his cattle class, loose words and Sunanda Pushkar I will read it later when he matures. Well I did not mention Nehru in the same genre with 'Discovery of India' which was surprise to me in 1998. No politician in India today qualifies as such. Perhaps I will wait for Rahul Gandhi.