Stop Wondering

How cultural exotica can be injurious to India

How cultural exotica can be injurious to India
As an unabashed fan of Dipankar Guptas Mistaken Modernity,a near-classic on the rise of the Indian middle class in the Eighties/ Nineties,expectations were high as this reviewer approached his new book,The Caged Phoenix.

It has a sweeping theme. With 14 chapters on modern and modernising India and its several dimensions,Gupta expends considerable ink slaying the ghosts of how India is looked at even as it is feted and admired (as has been the case over the past few years). It is the authors contention that India has been too often explained in cultural terms alone,and the country continues to be transformed into the exotic. A new-age Orientalism does beset those who descend on and try to explain and understand India. The best bits in The Caged Phoenix are when the author expands on the problems when India is viewed through this prism. He writes,My attempt here is to normalise India and provide an explanation of how the rich and the poor,the IT and the tired village,live in the same time frame; how technological training and caste and religious bigotry can express themselves with equal felicity in the same society….

We have become used to sweeping books about changing India,in-a-flux India,and to several by foreign journalists comparing India and China. So,coming from a serious scholar who is an Indian,the book is a welcome change of perspective. There isnt much gush at the wonder that is India,but a hard look at some of its problems and that too in all their complexities like why caste alone does not necessarily work in politics and how caste went on to become an identity.

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The book has another interesting thought to link the well being of the rich with those not so well off,making a case to seriously inquire why growth has not always meant development of the majority of Indians. Gupta writes that what India,in the past 60 years,has done is to move away from the constitutional promise of creating a fraternity of citizens. He argues that had we been closer to that,there would have been more clarity in the vision that the lives of the rich and those of the poor need not be negatively related.

The chapters Connecting the Rich to the Poor and Against Rolling Back the State make forceful points on how sociology and a material look at Indian problems are necessary,and not what he terms culturology of India. The authors understanding of Gandhi,as a political entity,not viewed through the cultural prism alone is indeed very persuasive.

Gupta,apart from attempting to restore the primacy of sociology and politics to describe the changes in India,has also elaborated on reservations,caste,the problems of extrapolating caste to electoral results,rural India,FDIs,politicians,NGOs,the role of the state and the need to not roll it back any further themes that are grand although tough to succinctly analyse in a chapter each.
The book does use Guptas eclecticism and academic prowess to try and handle the breadth of the journey,but leaves one wondering if it was a right decision to collapse at least four possible books into one. The focus of the brilliant Mistaken Modernity is somewhat missing in this one.