India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (27 page)

Naresh walked me around the neighborhood of Bandra one afternoon
. He wanted me to see how the landscape of his youth had changed. His concern over the deterioration of Mumbai had spurred an interest in urban planning. He was engaged, alongside his work as a journalist, on an urban geography project that was part of a fellowship attached to New York University. In many ways, Bandra was the laboratory for that project—it was there, in the streets where he’d grown up, that Naresh first started noticing the havoc that India’s new economy was wreaking on his city.

Bandra was Naresh’s world. Save for the five years he had spent in America, he had lived there his whole life. He remembered a laid-back, genteel place—a collection of fishing villages, spinach fields, and coconut plantations. The streets were lined by tile-roofed villas, the homes of a close-knit population that paid regular visits to each other and interacted at church every Sunday. Much of Bandra’s population was Roman Catholic, converted by Portuguese colonizers in the sixteenth century.

Some thirty years later, the roads in Bandra still had names like St. Cyril, St. Alexius, St. Paul, and St. Leo. On leafy side streets, colonial villas with high, arched windows and wooden verandas bore nameplates announcing the homes of Carvalho, de Souza, Pereira, and de Silva. But Bandra was no longer a laid-back place. Now it was a happening—and crowded, and noisy, and dirty—suburb of Mumbai. The city’s movie stars, attracted by the sea views and the relative proximity to film studios, had moved in. The masses had followed, and today Naresh lived in one of Mumbai’s most desirable areas.

Development had been unkind to Bandra. The growl of autorickshaws, the horns of irate motorists, and the grind of construction congealed over the neighborhood like an awful urban symphony. As Naresh walked me around that afternoon, he spoke nostalgically about a quieter, more peaceful, and certainly more livable time. He complained about commercial establishments that he said were built on streets zoned to be residential, and about apartment towers that had encroached on sidewalks, effectively privatizing public space. The newspapers were full of stories about illegal constructions in Mumbai (and, indeed, throughout the country). Naresh said that certain well-connected developers had become experts at exploiting loopholes in the city’s building codes.

Naresh offered to take me to Bandra’s waterfront, to the remnants of a former fishing village. We walked along the playing fields of St. Andrew’s School, his alma mater, and past a construction site that he said had once been a “wonder marshland” that drew herons and kingfishers. We passed through a cluster of high-rises, and then we entered a winding alley of tightly packed huts, many with metal roofs.

The streets were unpaved; men and women hung around, apparently liberated from the busyness of the city. The feeling was sort of sleepy. It was true that the low buildings and swaying coconut trees bore traces of a village past, except that now they were towered over by expensive apartment complexes.

Naresh and I stood at the edge of the village, near the waterfront, on an open stretch of land piled with construction rubble and garbage festooned over sagging mangroves. The water was black; it stank of sewage. Fishing boats bobbed on the water, and underneath the smell of sewage it was just possible to discern a whiff of drying fish. Naresh remembered fishing around there when he was a boy. Now, he said, you’d probably get a “dermatological condition” if you ate anything caught in those waters.

He laughed, but then he turned serious. He talked about the way Bandra’s villages were being destroyed, the way the neighborhood he knew had simply been wiped away, pulverized and replaced in a frenzy of misdirected reinvention. He could still remember the enthusiasm advocates of India’s reforms felt in the early nineties—all the promises they made that India would be rid of poverty, that Mumbai would become a world-class city with world-class infrastructure.

“And what did deregulation really lead to?” Naresh asked me
now, standing by those black waters, under the afternoon sun, looking out at the smog-enshrouded towers that lined Bandra’s waterfront. “It opened the economy, but it didn’t put into place checks and balances. There were no checks and balances to make sure this great wave of entrepreneurial energy that everyone was so excited about didn’t just flatten everything in its path.

“Looking at Bombay physically, it’s exactly the way we imagined it would turn out when the reforms started,” Naresh said, using the old name for his city, in a gesture that I felt was as much out of habit as an act of resistance against the new order. “Sometimes I’m bewildered by how quickly it came to pass. We could have built parks, we could have built affordable housing, we could have widened the roads. But we just left it to the free market. The idea was that the market would find a solution, but the market didn’t find a solution. You had to be foolish not to see this coming. Of course it was all going to result in urban chaos.”

We ended our tour of Bandra in another former village, a warren of sloping roads and old villas where Naresh’s grandfather had once lived. Naresh bumped into a few people he knew, family friends from an earlier era. They lapsed into a kind of Bandra brogue when they spoke, a lilt that Naresh later told me he believed was descended from Irish priests who had settled the area. They caught up on relatives and acquaintances, complained about some of the new buildings that were coming up, and took guesses about which villa was likely to be torn down next.

Naresh showed me a spot where he’d recently had an argument with a woman. She was parking her car on the sidewalk, and he asked her why she was doing that. The woman replied that if she didn’t, someone else would.

“She didn’t bat an eyelid,” Naresh said, and he added that her response pretty much embodied the attitude of the city’s upper and middle classes. He shook his head and tightened his jaw. I could see he was angry. I asked him about that. I said I understood that he missed the old city, I agreed that Mumbai was a mess. But where did all the anger come from?

“The anger is that people are not mindful of the rights of others,” he said. “That they won’t wait for my mother to cross the street, that they’ll chuck plastic out of a moving car. All this wealth has led to a real sense of entitlement. People just don’t care anymore. There’s no such thing as society or social good.”

He told me that he was reading an anthology of collected writings and speeches by some of India’s founding political figures. What really struck him about the book was that every time the word “reform” was used, it was used to describe an act or moment of personal reinvention or improvement. That was the old way. Now, he said, “reform is what happens to the environment. Reform is what happens around you. Reform is something that demands no responsibilities. It’s something that I personally benefit from.

“This really sums up the change in modern India,” he said. “Everyone has a great sense of what the world owes them, not what they owe the world.”

Naresh had strong opinions. He could be forceful, even a little
aggressive, when airing them. I admired his passion and conviction, but I didn’t always entirely agree with him. I didn’t disagree, exactly, when he talked about India’s inequalities or when he
complained about the nation’s lack of civic consciousness, but I did think he could be a little strident.

Naresh’s views harked back to an earlier moment in India’s history—before the dismantling of the nation’s socialist economy, before its tryst with capitalism. Like many on the left, he seemed not entirely to have accommodated himself to the passing of that moment. I often felt that he exaggerated the negative aspects of India’s new economy, and tended to give too little credit to the benefits of economic reforms. Sometimes, I would jokingly call him a “commie.”

Naresh told me one day that if I wanted to better understand the injustices of the new India, I should meet his friend Vinod Shetty. Vinod was a labor lawyer and activist. He fought for the rights of workers, many of whom were displaced or ill-treated by companies looking to increase profits in a newly competitive economy. In addition to his work as a lawyer, Vinod was also the founder of a nonprofit organization that helped workers in India’s huge informal sector. Among other things, Vinod’s organization helped small shopkeepers whose livelihoods were being threatened by the arrival of large multinationals, and provided various forms of support to the thousands of scavengers who lived in Mumbai’s slums and collected waste from across the city.

Vinod lived just a few streets away from Naresh. We met in Bandra one Saturday afternoon, in a coffee shop overlooking the waterfront. We sat outside, under umbrellas, in the path of heavy, loud fans that blew at the napkins and cardboard cups on our table. It was a hot day. The breeze lifting off the ocean stank a little, but it was cool, and, even with the stench, a welcome respite from the grit of the city.

Vinod was forty-nine years old, a broad, heavy man with a prominent mustache. He was in pain the afternoon we met. He’d just returned from a holiday in the hills, where he’d pulled his shoulder while playing volleyball. He had circles under his eyes. His flight had been delayed by more than seven hours the night before. He got home at five in the morning.

He’d been flying Indian, the national air carrier. He said he always flew it, out of loyalty to the public sector and its employees. Like many Indian leftists, Vinod was against the privatization of the nation’s state industries. Now, when he told me about the delay, he grimaced, and said, wryly: “One is romantic about such things, but one gets screwed as a result. One must pay for one’s beliefs.”

Vinod was tired and in pain, but he came to life as he started telling me about his work. He had strong feelings about what he saw as the failings of India’s new economy. He said that the reforms were a form of “violence against the poor.” He told me that in opening its markets to foreign capital and corporations, India was killing traditional livelihoods. “When you take away livelihoods, it’s the worst form of oppression,” he said.

As a student, Vinod had been influenced by workers’ movements and struggles for social justice around the world. He read Karl Marx and Gandhi; he followed the struggle for civil rights in America, and the 1968 student protests in Paris. His worldview was informed by a broad, progressive tradition that grew out of India’s anti-colonial movement, and that had guided public discourse for the first three or four decades of independence. That tradition was leftist, even socialist, but not doctrinaire communist. Mostly, Vinod told me once, explaining his own attitude, it was motivated by what he called “humanism”—a concern for the poor
and marginalized, a determination to dismantle oppressive structures of power.

For Vinod, the promise of Indian capitalism was something of a chimera. He, too, remembered all the assurances advocates of economic reforms had given, all the starry-eyed predictions that the nation was entering a new period of prosperity. Looking at the state of Mumbai today, considering the millions across the country who remained in deprivation, it was clear to him that those assurances had been hollow.

He gave me the example of India’s technology industry. That industry was often upheld as a shining success story. But it employed only a little over two million people. Its success was good for India’s self-esteem, maybe, but it was foolhardy to imagine software or outsourcing could provide real succor to a nation of more than one billion people.

It was a curious thing, really. As I talked to Vinod that afternoon, it struck me that one man’s freedom was another man’s prison. The same economic path that in so many minds had unleashed India, set it on a trajectory to self-sufficiency, to Vinod marked a kind of national enslavement. The nation’s reforms, he told me, had started “the mortgaging of India.” He said he’d seen what happened to other countries that followed the diktats of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. They became, in his view, “neo colonies.”

“It’s like with the East India Company,” he said, referring to the English trading business that had served as a beachhead for the British Empire. “It’s the same thing that happened hundreds of years ago, when the British came and various people were too relaxed and let their markets open. The East India Company first broke traditional
systems, took over Indian markets, and the result was hundreds of years of slavery.”

As an illustration of this process, Vinod told me about his work with the small shopkeepers of Mumbai. These were mostly vegetable vendors who bought from farmers and sold out of stalls in traditional bazaars. People called them middlemen, and argued that cutting them out of the supply chain would introduce greater efficiency into India’s vegetable markets. This argument was being used to justify a push to further open India’s retail sector to large multinational companies.

Vinod had launched a campaign to resist this push. If India’s traditional markets were opened, he said, the inevitable result would be unemployment for small traders across the nation. What was the use of efficiency, he asked, if it put millions of people out of work? Shouldn’t the main objective of economic reforms—of any economic policy—be to provide employment and livelihoods to its people?