One of the things that's always amazed me about travel is how fundamentally similar people are all around the world. We have our different languages and foods and gestures and expectations and ways of being - but some things will seem universal in very comforting ways. Like laughter. An ability to bond over food. Or, as I'm finding out with my independent research project, the way that we are all drawn to rooftops for the fresh air and the stunning views.
But in some ways (mostly political ways that seem more relevant in my classes than on the street), India really is a fundamentally different place. Here are three reasons why:
Informality. We keep hearing the statistic that 92% of India's labor force is employed in the informal sector. These are street vendors and waste pickers, construction workers and clothes washers, the men who drive around vans offering cheaper fare than the city buses and the ones who will cut your hair on the side of the street for less than a dollar.
Informality makes India cheap. It creates an environment of vibrant, organized chaos that varies from neighborhood to neighborhood. It gives us some of the best examples of how people are endlessly creative and resilient in the face of adversity, and just how precarious it can be to live without a steady salary, a safety net, or a set of benefits. And informality defies any attempts to impose a systematic Master Plan from above - but that doesn't stop local governments from trying.
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| Ahmedabad's Master Plan (never mind the tens of thousands of people living where those red high-rises are planned) |
We see a slum and for a lot of us, our instinct is to feel uncomfortable with the bamboo-and-plastic tents and the children with too little space to play and no way to get to school. So our impulse is to clear the slum, until we realize that half the city lives like this and it could smarter and cheaper and more humane to just get water and schools and toilets and land titles to slum-dwellers instead.
Or, we see cows wandering the streets eating potatoes and celery from the baskets of row upon row of fruit stands, and we start to miss the hygienic standards and the English labels of American supermarkets. Then we realize that families get fed and communities get built because those stands are out there every day. And we start to realize that whatever master plans we might dream up in our own heads about fighting social inequities and making a place good to live in...will have to take informality into account. India's got a history and it's different from ours, and you can't just ignore that.
Speaking of which...
History. Or maybe a better word would be "age." The US as it exists today is a pretty young country with a very young history (that might be different if American colonization hadn't wiped out the people who had thousands of years of history beforehand, but that's another conversation...). India is a very old country with a very, very young history - just 62 years, in fact. But 6,000 years of history have left marks that you can still see.
You see it in two hundred-year-old buildings that developers have added two, three, even four stories directly on top of. You see it in the seven hundred-year-old temples and mosques that you can't just move around with zoning - but you certainly can latch a storefront onto one side, or run a gutter or phone wire along its edge. You see it in the way people talk about their country, or about the state within India, which is where their allegiance often really lies.
Communism. I have come across very, very few people in the United States who would call themselves "Communists" in public or even in private. Even "liberal" can be a dirty word. But here, the Soviets weren't the bad guys to hide from under your desk at school; they were the ones supporting you more than the other guys (the USA) as the world seemed to be burning all around. (India was technically non-aligned but in reality sided with the USSR over the USA during the Cold War.)
So conversations include Marx. Proposals to change capitalism are considered less than ludicrous. Communists get elected, sometimes. And a few of us students on IHP have been surprised to find that we were surprised that extremely complex intellectual debates and movements really are taking place outside the West (and outside the Northeast corner of the United States in particular). How's that for challenging assumptions you didn't know you had?
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These differences change the language and the assumptions that we use to talk politics. They also lead to disaster after disaster of failed development programs, blaming the mismatch between expectations and results on how India just plain "doesn't work." India works. It works differently from most of the countries where development programs are planned (and it would be preposterous to think that it would work just like Europe when 6,000 years of history beg to differ). Often, it works better.
And it's also too bad when we conflate these differences in politics with differences in people. When really we share a lot of fundamental similarities. So for now, it's time to get back to laughter and food - and maybe even some good rooftops.
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