No Full Stops In India , livre ebook

Penguin Books Ltd - Mark Tully

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

195 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

India s Westernized elite, cut off from local traditions, want to write a full stop in a land where there are no full stops . From that striking insight Mark Tully has woven a superb series of stories which explore Calcutta, from the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad (probably the biggest religious festival in the world) to the televising of a Hindu epic. Throughout, he combines analysis of major issues with a feel for the fine texture and human realities of Indian life. The result is a revelation. 'The ten essays, written with clarity, warmth of feeling and critical balance and understanding, provide as lively a view as one can hope for of the panorama of India. K. Natwar-Singh in the Financial Times

Sujets

Histoire

Travel writing

History of Asia

India

Informations

Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	14 octobre 2000
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184759037
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

MARK TULLY
No Full Stops in India
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
List of Illustrations
Maps
Introduction
1. Ram Chander s Story
2. The New Colonialism
3. The Kumbh Mela
4. The Rewriting of the Ramayan
5. Operation Black Thunder
6. Communism in Calcutta
7. The Deorala Sati
8. Typhoon in Ahmedabad
9. The Return of the Artist
10. The Defeat of a Congressman
Epilogue: 21 May 1991
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
NO FULL STOPS IN INDIA
Born in Calcutta, educated in England, Mark Tully joined the BBC in 1964 and in 1972 became the Chief of the Bureau in Delhi, where he still lives and works. Among the many major stories he has covered are the Bangladeshi war, Mrs Gandhi s State of Emergency, the execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and Operation Blue Star when the Indian army launched an attack on the Golden Temple, the holiest shrine of the Sikhs. This operation and the Punjab problem were the subjects of his first book, Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi s Last Battle, which he wrote with his colleague Satish Jacob. In 1987 he made the much applauded radio series, From Raj to Rajiv, which traced the story of India s first forty years of independence. His second book accompanied this series.
List of Illustrations
Ram Chander s daughter, Rani
Ram Chander
Paul Paneereselvan of the Dalit Educational Trust in Arasankuppam
Pilgrims at the confluence of the Ganges and Jamuna at Allahabad
A naked sadhu leading his akhara s procession to the sacred confluence
Sadhus bathing at the confluence of the Ganges and Jamuna
Operation Black Thunder. Sikh militants taking aim from the Golden Temple at the police
Sikh militants surrendering in the Golden Temple
K. P. S. Gill, director general of the Punjab police
Ramanand Sagar s Ram and Sita
The communist chief minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu
Roop Kanwar s in-laws leading local people in a ceremony following her death
Mark Tully with Jangarh Singh Shyam
Mark Tully with Digvijay Narain Singh

Introduction
How do you cope with the poverty? That must be the question I have been asked most frequently by visitors to India. I often reply, I don t have to. The poor do. It s certainly true. I live a very comfortable life in Delhi, while the taxi-drivers who have lived opposite me for fourteen years have to sleep in their cars in the cold winter and on a charpai or light bedstead in the open during the hot weather. I have a three-bedroomed flat. The taxi rank is their home. My foreign guests expect the taxi-drivers to take them back to their hotels whatever hour of the night it may be. Before leaving, they will check the fare with me to make sure the taxi-drivers don t get a few more rupees than they are due. That s the way my guests usually cope with the poverty .
The crocodile tears that have been shed over India s poor would flood the Ganges, so there s no need for me to add my drop to them. No matter how much it may upset my guests, it s better to be honest and admit that I ve learnt to live with India s poverty. The only excuse I can give is that I m not alone in this: most prosperous Indians - and indeed the prosperous in all parts of the world - have learnt to live with the fact that millions of Indians live below what economists have defined as the poverty line. Millions more don t have adequate housing and sanitation. The fact that we, the fortunate of the world, still live with India s poverty is a scandal. India - which barely rates as a trading nation, which has no oil to export, which has no monopoly of any other essential commodity, which has not adopted a hostile ideology, which can threaten only its smaller neighbours - does not count in the capitals of the West. It ought to count if we really cared about coping with poverty.
The successful capitalist countries of the world are rejoicing in the downfall of communism, and in the West we are talking of the final triumph of our civilization as though it was now proved that there was no other way ahead but ours. But our civilization has still to show that it can provide for the poor of the world. A great deal of evidence indicates the opposite - that the West has harmed the poor and continues to harm them. After all, it was our civilization which left India a poor and backward country. A. Vaidyanathan writes in the Cambridge Economic History of India of the impoverished economy which was the raj s legacy to India. He says, Altogether the pre-independence period was a period of near stagnation for the Indian economy . There was hardly any change in the structure of production or in productivity levels. The growth of modern manufacturing was probably neutralized by the displacement of traditional crafts, and in any case was too small to make a difference to the overall picture. It is also our civilization that India has tried to follow since independence, with results which certainly could not be described as a triumph.
There are many reasons why India in particular should make us in the West aware of how much remains to be done in the developing countries and of how many difficulties have still to be overcome before anyone speaks of triumph. One is obviously the size of the problem India faces. There are countries which are poorer than India, there are countries which have made far less economic progress, there are countries which don t have even the rudiments of a modern state, but there is none which has so many poor people. India s nearest rival in this respect is China, but the World Bank s World Development Report (1990) shows that there are more than twice as many poor people in India than in China, and more than four times as many extremely poor people.
China is a communist country but India is a parliamentary democracy - surely that s another reason why we should take the plight of India very seriously. China s achievements could mean that it is communism which will triumph in the war against poverty and democracy which will be defeated. I think that that is unlikely, but those who are now talking of the victory of freedom should perhaps ponder the strange fact that one of the freest countries in the world, which has made an all-out effort since independence to eradicate its legacy of poverty, has been much less successful in this than its communist neighbour. Of course India s achievements in some fields are more impressive than China s, but the fact remains that communism has provided better education, better health services and more food and clothes for its poor than democracy has.
In the Indian Express of 17 June 1990, the eminent Indian economist Amartya Sen wrote, It is important to understand the lite nature of India to make sense of India s policies. He has, for example, compared India s success in providing higher education with what he has called the shocking neglect of elementary education . Why has giving every man a vote not meant the transfer of power from the lite to the majority who in India are undoubtedly the poor? I believe one of the main reasons is that India s lite have never recovered from their colonial hangover, and so they have not developed the ideology, the attitudes and the institutions which would change the poor from subjects to partners in the government of India. Democracy has failed because the people the poor have elected have ruled - not represented - them. The ballot-box is only the first stage in democracy.
If all that were wrong with India were a particularly bad hangover from the raj, there might well be room for optimism. After all, even the worst hangover evaporates eventually, and in the twenty-five years I have known the country I have seen many of the more obvious relics of colonial rule disappear. India is no longer a land dominated by brown sahibs imitating the ways of the white sahibs who used to rule them. But India is still a land dominated by foreign thinking, and I would suggest that that thinking is just as alien as the brown sahibs . Colonialism teaches the native lite it creates to admire - all too often to ape - the ways of their foreign rulers. That habit of mind has survived in independent India.
India s most successful students no longer knock at the doors of the colleges of Oxford or Cambridge: they now prefer Harvard or Yale. But what do they learn there which is relevant to their country? The scientists are versed in technologies aimed at reducing the role of human beings in production, although labour is India s greatest asset. The doctors want to practise medicine which provides the latest and most expensive techniques of healing individuals, whereas India s need is for public health, preventive medicine and simple cures which can be administered by paramedical staff trained inexpensively. The business-school graduates know how to administer complicated corporations with billion-dollar assets - the sort of corporations which will put out of business the small, labour-intensive and unsophisticated industries that India is officially committed to encouraging. All this is not surprising, because America is concerned about educating students to propagate the American way of life and keep its economy expanding.
What makes matters worse is the cultural imperialism of the West, an imperialism now strengthened by our success in the battle with communism. We don t need armies to hold down our modern colonies, we don t need viceroys to administer them on our behalf: our economic might holds them in captivity, and our apparent success ensures that they accept, if not enjoy, their slavery. Today most Indians see no alternative to our culture at the end of this century, just as their grandparents and great-grandparents saw no alternative to direct colonial rule at the start of the century.
The best way to destroy a people s culture and identity is to undermine its religion and its language. We, the British, did that as India s rulers and we continue