Credit: Sebastien Cortes
In the past decade, dozens of books have been published that chronicle the rebirth of India, an ancient civilization formerly crippled by poverty and inequality. The poverty and inequality is still there of course, all the more jarring for the contrast it draws with the country’s newfound wealth.
India Becoming is written by the former International Herald Tribune columnist Akash Kapur, who filed “Letter From India” dispatches from Pondicherry, a small town where he grew up before moving to the U.S. for school. This is about his journey back home.
So much of India-inspired books coming out now days focus on the fortunes made in its megacities, in places that political scientist Sunil Khilnani calls “bloated receptacles of every hope and frustration.” This book does something seemingly anachronistic, choosing to focus — for the most part at least, you can avoid the allures of Bombay for only so long — on the outskirts, the suburbs, the rural.
The book, as the author himself will tell you, reads like a novel. Those seeking insight into business or trade will be disappointed, he says at a reading hosted by University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. The event is held at the top floor of the HSBC building in the heart of the financial district, and questions run the predictable course of education, geopolitics, and India’s IT sector. One gentleman solicits business tips for companies interested in expanding to the Indian market.
The book yields no such clues, of course. All it does is offer context for understanding the country, which is arguably more integral to long term business success than a quarterly report from McKinsey.
Kapur, a writer in the tradition of literary journalism, portrays an India that is, what is the word, American. To the point where scenes open with an image of an old country road, that classic American motif.
Back in March, he drew the ire of readers with an IHT column brashly titled “How India Became America.” But his seems a fair question to ask: Is India the only place where American dreams can be realized these days?
As the inherent ambivalence in the title suggests, maybe. Or maybe not.
India is a Rorschach test, and as Kapur confesses, the writer sees what he wants to see.
And so we meet Sathy, a man caught in the middle — he feels the pull of the burgeoning industries of Bangalore, and yet cannot abandon the dwindling fate of his agricultural past. He represents the class of Indians left behind by the nation’s meteoric economic growth.
There is also young Hari, who has ambitions that are large but without direction. He represents the solipsism of the new Indian middle class, for whom consumerism is the true shibboleth in the cathedral of capitalism. There are enough rags to riches stories to keep the myth alive. His easy confidence and blinded optimism mirror that of India’s.
(On page 99, we meet an atheist, and it was an idea so preposterous that I reached for my pencil and wrote WHAT on the margin. Just as there is no such thing as an empty street in India, I had never met an Indian who did not believe in god in my three months of travel there.)
At times, telling details are dispensed without being discussed. The fact that between 1990 and the late 2000s, per capita consumption of beef increased by some 60 per cent, or that a worker’s monthly salary dwarfed that of both of his parents’ 20 years of work combined are parts worth exploring further.
Many of the anecdotes follow a formula: Boy reporter meets everyday Indian. Everyday Indian tells boy reporter stories. Boy reporter takes notes. Boy reporter retells stories. There are some beautifully rendered passages that break the perceived monotony, however. Kapur is at his best when conveying the beauty of rural India. Exhibit A. “Sitting there, the stream gurgling below me, the chirp of crickets in the air and a mongoose pawing nervously at a clump of wild berries, searching maybe for prey.”
Another lovely moment comes later in the book when Kapur speaks on the temptation to write about poverty. Mercifully, his friend tells him what he needs to hear: The last thing the world needs is a book about poor people of India. Unless you are adding monumental depth to the canon through rigorous reporting, that is (see: Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity).
All journeys to India are deeply personal ones. From E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India to W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, the history of books about India is also the history of prodigal sons coming home, figuratively or otherwise.
I would have liked to read more about the personal journey that lured Kapur back to India and back to writing, but that would be a different book all together.
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May Jeong is Toronto Standard’s business editor. Follow her on Twitter @mayjeong.
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