Looking glass

Time to celebrate? Hardly or less than ever before. As India, hungry for foreign exchange and global respect, marches into its second decade of liberalisation, the west’s, particularly America’s, perception of us is going to be increasingly significant. And on this score there is reason for dejection for even if a slight increase in visibility has occurred, the stereotypes are still firmly in place.

Let me explain. Freelancing for various overseas publications through the latter part of the eighties and the early part of the nineties I found largely that it was possible to sell only two kinds of stories to the West.

One was stories that made India seem exotic. These could include negative themes : untouchability, infanticide, child labour or quaint ones such as arranged marriages, frog weddings, elephant stampedes and so on. Such stories confirmed and expanded America’s notion of India as a wild and backward place filled with people who were `not like us at all’. Then there was the other kind of story, the kind about the purportedly modern Indian — the Harvard educated businessman, the emerging middle class, the popularity of Hollywood in India. People `who were trying to be like us’. Both underscored the idea of America?s superiority and India’s relative inferiority.

Sometimes the two themes collided. I remember clearly a picture from a story on the Indian middle class in an American magazine of a pyjama clad man carrying a briefcase — the exotic and the modern in one image! The current picture of India appears to be a little bit like that. The achievements of Indian writers for instance convey a mastery over the English language but they also rest partly on images of enticingly alien smells and flavours. Similarly the Indian bomb, a technological feat, arouses fear rather than admiration among westerners given the perceptions they have of the unpredictable hands that control it.

So, like it or not, we are stuck in a syndrome: the zoo or the xerox machine. And nothing, not our much-touted progress, our economic liberalisation programme, the startling success of Indians in areas as diverse as computer software and filmmaking or the bomb, has done much to change that. If India wants respect on its own terms it has to find a way of breaking out of it. The old ways clearly haven’t worked. A new way has to be found.

The best place to begin is perhaps by acknowledging the existence of the syndrome. We Indians often accuse America of being isolationist. This is not an entirely unfair assumption. Most Americans tend to be too preoccupied with domestic affairs and ignorant about many parts of the world, particularly South Asia. On the other hand, consider for a moment, the manner in which the Indian media cover happenings abroad, particularly in the social and cultural sphere.

Though the proliferation of the audio visual media has expanded foreign coverage considerably in that one can be kept abreast of events in Kosovo and East Timor by watching Star or Zee news, the stories that are likely to get widespread display across all kinds of local media are usually stories with an Indian angle : Non-resident Indian success stories, the growing popularity of Indian food and so on.

If an actor makes even a minor dent in the glamour business (Persis Khambatta and Kabir Bedi, to give just two instances of celebrities propped up by incontrovertibly slim successes abroad) or an artist/ filmmaker wi ns an international award, much is made of it with no attention to perspective or relevance. Given this proclivity, can we emerge with any other thought but that Indians are or deserve to be at the centre of the world?

The true fact of our insignificance abroad either escapes us completely or, the few times we are forced to confront it, fills us with rage (note the euphoria over Shekhar Kapoor’s debut in the west and the furore when he was denied the best director nomination). Right and wrong apart, neither response is particularly helpful to a weak nation seeking a more mutually satisfactory relationship with a powerful one.

What however our natural responses can do is help us understand why the west looks at us as it does. Most countries try and make sense of the world through their own peculiar prisms. If we are going to change perceptions then we have to think not only of ways of getting into that narrow range but to do it in a manner of our not their choosing. And to do that we will need first and foremost to put our touchy self-esteem aside and think smart. For any possibility of success is likely to be based on a more realistic rather than a grandiose notion of ourselves.