I have been reading “The Inheritance of Loss” by Kiran Desai, which won the Booker Prize last year. It is rather interesting, a good book, but the characters are not terribly appealing. A misanthropic retired judge rotting in a villa amidst the mountains, his orphan grand daughter, the son of their cook who scrapes a living as an illegal immigrant in New York – I am listing them in order of attractiveness: the judge is a dead bore, the girl is so-so, the cook’s son enlisted most of my interest, probably because of his underdog appeal. Anyway, I didn’t finish the novel. By the time I had reached about two thirds of it, I had the growing impression that the whole story didn’t have enough momentum for it to reach a convincing end.

I didn’t quite understand how this book got the Booker, and I went googling to see what other people felt about it. Thus did I stumble on an awful article entitled “Wounded by the West” written by Pankaj Mishra, in February 2006 in the New York Times. The link is as follows:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/books/review/12mishra.html?ex=1297400400&en=a3d469a1782b2d59&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt

Truly shocking, that article. The self rightedness of it. The just guy just lifts up everything which is wrong with the characters’ lives and personalities – the judge’s misanthropy, the servile anglophilia of the old crones whom the girl is friend to, the miseries of the illegal immigrant – and drops it all at the doorstep of the West. Just like that.

I don’t know if I’ve received a bad upbringing, but I tend to believe that people do share a bit of responsibility for who they’ve become, by the time they’re fifty. I didn’t know that a guy can spend his whole life as a bizzare, self-hating character, despising his fellow Indians, (badly) aping the British, but that it’s not his fault at all, no way, it’s because of colonialism. Oh really. Same goes for the old crones with their imported Marks and Spencer’s underwear or whatever.

You gather, reading Mr Mishra’s article, the idea that India was some sort of Utopia that was once invaded by some evil aliens coming from a mothership called the West, and they’ve laid the whole garden of Eden to waste.

But a few months before, I do remember having read part of an article from the same Mr Mishra, where he was telling how, after graduating from a provincial university in North India, he had spent one winter in the library at Benares University, reading all the novels that came by his hand, trying to pick up the latest names and trends in contemporary English literature. And after some research on him, I came to understand that it is when he himself made his way to England, that he became a successful author.

And that evil West that he is talking of, is it not also part of Kiran Desai’s inheritance ? She does have a German grandmother, doesn’t she ?

My point is, that Western culture which Mr Mishra is talking of like a clean sprightly elf talking of Sauron in his impregnable fortress, isn’t it part of Indian civilisation, in the same way as the Persian/Arabic heritage in Northern India, even stronger, actually ? When the top brass wakes up in India, they do read the Times of India and The Hindu at breakfast, don’t they, I mean, they read English language newspapers. And they do like to send their kids to Catholic schools, and later to English-speaking universities and IIM’s… Mr Mishra is part of that set up, the West has made him well-known and prosperous, and so is Ms Desai. I’m not blaming them for that, it’s just that one has to face the fact of life, which is that India’s elite does have a love affair with the West.

That does not mean the West is beyond reproach, far from that. But that Mr Mishra should come in on his high horses, like that, talking about the West as if he was some tiger-skin clad sadhu in the Himalayas, it’s pretty rich.

I suspect it’s a habit of the Indian top brass, of suddenly lecturing others as if they themselves were beings of light. The way they can just , at the drop of a hat, start talking of the “spiritual decadence of the West” always leaves me breathless. What on earth gives them the entitlement to talk of spirituality and morality, they who live in a society which is greedy and corrupt to the core ? I like the way they explain away the poverty and backwardness of their country by blaming it on the poor. Yessir, they do, I have heard Indians explain to me, without blinking an eye, that India is held up in its progress by its rampant population growth, and that’s because they’re a democratic country, so they just can’t enforce a one child policy like the eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeviiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiil Chinese do. So, they just have to let the poor keep breeding, nothing doing , yaar, hopeless bunch, those poor. Pretty clever explanation, eh ?

I must have been reading the wrong articles on sustainable report, but it just happens that whatever I read on the matter, I always come across the notion that one of the key elements for sustainable development is mass literacy, especially the education of the girl child. A literate girl child will, once married, have a greater tendency to be interested in learning about contraception, and to use it. She will also tend to see to it that her children get some education, as she herself can read and write. An illiterate woman, on the other hand, is ignorant and superstitious, and will feel afraid to go enquire about contraception methods or anything regarding her well-being, for that matter. She will feel ashamed that she won’t understand what is explained to her.

So, you’d expect that Indian society would care to give some education and basic health care to its poor. No go, man. Indian society is profoundly elitist, and Nehruvian “socialism” hasn’t changed that. On the contrary, Nehru, with his obsession with heavy industry and electric dams, saw to it that the country was well provided in universities and technical institutes. He didn’t care much about mass education and health care. India’s fabulous economic growth is happening in the cities. Its countryside is like the African bush – no roads lead to there, and there’s just nothing out there but mud huts strewn amidst the fields. One can read the World Bank reports about rural education and health services in India. It’s shocking.

And it’s even more shocking to hear well-off Indians talk about their poor. A friend of mine just came back from Delhi and the Indian official who was guiding him through town said, acknowledging my friend’s shock at seeing the people living on shacks on the roadside: “Don’t bother yourself with these people. They live, breed and die on the streets. It’s always been like that”. Nobody sees the poor in India, not in reality, and even less on television, which is filled with fair-skinned, prosperous actors and actresses in the soap operas. Let’s not even talk of Bollywood. And they say that the West is racist….

It’s a pretty nice life, actually, being one of India’s elite. The state scoops up its meager resources to build you gleaming, state-of –the-art universities and IIT’s and IIM’s, while the rural poor squat under the trees around a piece of rotten chalkboard. Once you’ve squeezed the country’s educational resources to the limit, you get yourself a green card and fly to the States. But not only that, man, you also have a CLEAN CONSCIENCE. Ah mean, whatever’s going bad in poor ole India, it’s the fault of the White Man, and of the niggers in the countryside…