Et in Arcadia ego
I cannot help but be saddened by the whole Commonwealth games fiasco. It doesn’t matter now if the organisers get their act together, or how great the games actually turn out to be – the damage is done. Unfortunately every negative cliché about India is reinforced by the international news coverage and footage of the sports village. To be clear, internationally people are using the word India when talking about this, the problems are seen to be representative of the problems facing the country as a whole, therefore Shimla’s image also suffers. It doesn’t help when problems are dismissed as being due to the culturally relative nature of hygiene, in fact this just furthers the problem. As someone who now doesn’t live in India but who spends a lot of time talking about India I am constantly having to defend it from critics who want to label the whole place as some sort of unhygienic, mismanaged, corrupt , unpractical and irrational place – this is not the India that I know and love.
Just the other week I was in Portugal , talking about the problem of waste disposal management and hygiene systems in a remote part of Himachal Pradesh, when a distinguished American scholar objected to my speech on the grounds that Indians can’t be getting upset about this as they are so used to living in filth that it is normal. I wanted to sigh, but I did my bit and battled back talking about parts of India that I knew where people were not living in the kinds of clichéd conditions that he seemed to believe everyone in the subcontinent inhabited. I think that despite his seniority I stood my ground and won a small victory, but then, after all that, some news like the Commonwealth fiasco breaks and effortlessly overrides my small efforts.
Nothing annoys me more than the constant harping on (in academic and popular circles) about certain problems of a supposedly exotic India. Always people comment on the same features, disorganised markets, filthy streets, chaotic roads, poor orphans and strange Sadhus. Now of course these things exist in Shimla and in other parts of India, but they are not the whole story, heck they are not even the half of it. I have been particularly frustrated when watching ethnographic films about India of late. I was invited to give a guest speech about a film showing an orphanage in Delhi a few months back and all I could say was that the images shown in the film were so foreign to the Delhi that I knew. At the conference in Portugal there was a film shown called the face of Calcutta, which showed an image of Calcutta I could not recognise, despite my wife’s family being based in Calcutta. The friendly place that I know and love was transformed in the film by a vision of Calcutta that betrays a gaze fixed on poverty. The film showed the usual tired clichés: road side dhabas, illegal book printing, fish markets, and begging orphans. I was just crying out for them to stick a shot of Flurys in there, or Mani Square. Surely, this is Calcutta also, these places that are blanked out of existence by reports are real, vibrant and alive. And this is India also, an India of young, vibrant, kind hearted people, boldly dreaming of the future and making that dream in the present, yet this is an India that is almost always filtered out of the essentialising gaze.
I try and do my bit to counteract the vast swell of images and discussions. So, I like to tell people that I am going to show them a Himalayan landscape and stick a picture of IIAS up. Or say, here is a typical image of life in Shimla and show CCD or Barista. And of course I talk a lot about Shimla’s churches, which are entirely and authentically, Indian and Himalayan.
