THE WONDER THAT WAS—AND STILL IS—INDIA

By Nick Gier, Professor Emeritus, University of Idaho

In 1967 A. L. Basham published The Wonder That Was India, which has now become a classic in Indian studies.  The meaning of "wonder" is obviously the awe that we experience standing before the Taj Mahal, our amazement at the exquisite marble filigree of a Jain temple, or the finely chiseled sculpture right up to the top of nine-storey South Indian temple towers.

There is another meaning of "wonder" of which I will speak.  This is the wonder not of awe and delight, but the wonder of puzzlement and despair.  It is the wonder "why" there is smog on Elephanta Island, where I was able to breathe fresh air at the great Shiva cave temple there in 1992.   In November 2005, I could only shake my head at the 30-mile-long cloud of pollution hanging over Bombay 8 miles away. It is also the wonder of "why oh why" the people in front of me got their train tickets at the tourist window but I somehow could not, no matter how much I pleaded. 

There is the wonder how could they have done all these incredible things, but also the wonder why do they make it so difficult for themselves and fail to make the progress of which they are so fully capable. Even Indians agree that the wonders of India are both positive and negative, which I will now describe in alternating accounts. 

There is the wonder of India's democracy, the largest and most dynamic in the world.  India's 1.1 billion people live in 28 states with 18 official languages, but there are an additional 216 languages spoken by 10,000 or more. In all 3,372 languages are recorded in the 1991 census.  Voters turned out for elections at a rate double that of Americans.

There are dozens of political parties that, after the demise of the once dominant Congress Party, are forced to form shaky coalitions.  Some of the alliances make for strange bedfellows, such as the Dalit (formerly "untouchables") dominated BSP and Hindu nationalist BJP.  I was also amazed to learn that many Muslims vote for the BJP, even though some BJP members want all Muslims to leave India. 

Regardless of the bumps on the road, the major one being Indira Gandhi's state of emergency of 1975-77, it is still amazing that in 1948 more than 500 princely states came together under the inspiration of the Gandhi-led Congress Party and enlightened Britishers such as Lord Mountbatten.

Some have said that India would never have been united had it not been for European built railways and British administration, which the Indians continue in their own lumbering and inimitable way. But Gandhi proved that India was united spiritually long before it was brought together politically.  For centuries Indian pilgrims went from sacred place to sacred place all over the subcontinent.

These pilgrims are wonders in themselves.  Indians save all of their lives to make a pilgrimage to Varanasi, the holy city on the Ganges, or all the way south to the goddess temple at Cape Comorin, or all the way north to the cave temple of Vaishno Devi in Kashmir.  American men save their money to go big game hunting in Alaska, but I met dozens of Hindu men from Calcutta, all dressed in black, who traveled a 1,000 miles to seek the blessings of the goddess Parvati at Cape Comorin.

There is the wonder why of Indian corruption. Every time I travel to India I am impressed with the individual initiative I see in street vendors and family stores, but corruption at every level has prevented this entrepreneurial spirit from translating into a prosperous national economy that benefits all Indians.  Federal subsidies for India's poor rarely get to them without bribes taken at every turn.  Recently eleven members of Parliament, some from the ruling Congress but others from the opposition BJP, were caught taking bribes for their votes.

There is also the wonder of India's booming economy, one that unfortunately has exacerbated the divide between the rich and the poor.  When I arrived for the first time in 1992, Prime Minister Narasima Rao had just begun liberalizing the economy, one that had been locked into disastrous Soviet-style five-year plans that limited foreign investment.  Since 1991 the Indian economy has doubled and by 2040 it is predicted that it will stand third after the U.S. and China.  India's 300-million-strong middle class, larger than the entire U.S. population, is buying goods and services at a frenetic pace.

In 1992 I sat in awe as a seven-year boy from Chandigarh recited all the American states and their capitals from memory. I was also embarrassed by the realization that most Americans could not get through half the list, or fewer still could locate my state, let alone India, on a map. 

This ignorance extends to the American president himself, who once called the Greeks "Greecians" and the Hindus "Hindis."  On his first trip to India Bush did not endear himself to his audience when he claimed that Pakistan "was a force for freedom and moderation in the Arab world." As it is forced to on a regular basis, the White House had to correct that as "Muslim world."  Far too many Americans believe that all Muslims are Arabs, when in fact most of them are not.

There is the wonder of the Indian schoolteacher in Tamil Nadu has memorized the square roots of the first 10,000 numbers and he has inspired his students to learn his memorization techniques.  There are Muslim Indians who know the Quran by heart, but even more amazing are the Hindu bards that can recite the entire Mahabharata, the longest scripture, by a factor of ten, among the world's holy books.  The ragas have been passed from music teacher to student without error for over 2,000 years.

There should be no surprise at the wonder of India's elite graduate schools, which recently have been ranked just behind Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. These graduates have made their presence felt in Silicon Valley, where 35 percent of the companies are Indian led; in NASA, where 36 percent of the scientists are Indian; and at the top of American medical practice and research.

There is still the disgrace of the Indian caste system, which divides Indians into four categories of priests, rulers/landlords, merchants/artisans (with over 1,000 sub castes), and farmers.  Even after years of governmental directives, 99 percent of the city workers in Hyderabad who pick up the garbage and clean the streets and sewers are Dalits, while a large majority of the higher positions go to those of high caste.

When I was at Panjab University in 1992, there were student protests on campus, but I was surprised to learn that it was high caste students who were objecting to new quotas for Dalit enrollment in medicine and law.  I was devastated to learn that even some Indian Christians divide their churches down the middle with a curtain so that the ministers can preach to their Dalits without offending high caste Christians. This is supremely ironic, because over the centuries Dalits have converted to Christianity in order avoid this discrimination.

Still, there is the wonder of India's religious diversity and tolerance. In the country that is more than 80 percent Hindu, the current president, a famous scientist, is Muslim, the prime minister is Sikh, and the Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi, Rajhiv Gandhi's widow, is Roman Catholic.  Dalits celebrated the fact that one their own, K. R. Narayanan, actually became president, and all of India mourned his death on November 9, 2005.

There are more Muslims in India (150 million) than there are in Pakistan.  There are also 4 million Jains, 7 million Buddhist, 21 million Christians, and 40 million Sikhs. Nearly all the world's Zoroastrians (115,000, called Parses in India) live in India, being welcomed with open arms after being forced out of their Persian homes by invading Muslim armies.  Tens of thousands of Jews once flourished and lived in peace with their Hindu neighbors on the Southwest coast, but only 4,000 survive after the Dutch and Portuguese destroyed their thriving port cities.

It is even a greater wonder that Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians visit each other's altars and shrines. Until the rise of Hindu fundamentalism, all Indian children were taught to respect any sage, seer, prophet, savior, or saint. In November 1999, some Hindus friends in Chandigarh invited me to attend the birthday celebration of the Sikh's first guru.  I was amazed at the great number of Hindus mixed in amongst the thousands of Sikhs.

Returning to the negative, we wonder why it has to be that 40 percent of the world's poor people live in India, and why 25 percent of the world's women who die in childbirth are Indian.  Indian women also give birth to low weight infants at an alarming rate, and because of traditional preference for males (men and boys usually eat first), Indian girls between the ages of 1-5 are 50 percent more likely to die than boys. It is estimated that with the aid of prenatal sex selection 10 million Indian female fetuses have been aborted over the last 20 years.

Even though the British banned sati soon after they took control, there are still Hindu wives who burn themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres.  For poor women who have led miserable lives and who will be shunned as widows, the promise that they will be goddesses by their sacrifice is sometimes irresistible.  Villages also gain if the funeral pyre is made into a sati shrine that will attract many pilgrims. In November 1999 local officials in Uttar Pradesh arrested the brothers of a woman on suspicion that they intended to make a business out of their sister's sati shrine.

Returning to the positive, there is the great wonder of that state of Kerala, which leads India in all social and health statistics.  Nearly all Keralites are literate and have access to health care, while the rest of India has a 60 percent literacy rate and little or no health care. Kerala's life expectancy is 74 years while the all of India's is 64 years, and its infant mortality rate of 10 per thousand is comparable to Western countries. While the number of women per 1,000 men continues to fall below 800 in some Indian states, primarily because of female infanticide, Kerala's number was 1058 in 2001. 

Some people attribute this success to the large number of Christians who live there (the first ones coming in AD 300), but most of the credit has to be given to the first freely elected (in 1957) Communist government in the world. Indian Communists have ruled far less successfully in the state of Bengal where some of the worst corruption can be found.

There is the puzzling why of HIV in India, which has the second largest number of AIDS cases in the world.  Most tourists perceive the Indians as the most puritanical of all Asians. In October, 2005, an Israeli couple was fined 1,000 rupees for kissing during a Hindu wedding ceremony they had arranged for themselves at the holy city of Pushkar. I was surprised that I could not take my daughter to a men's dormitory at Panjab University to meet a student friend.  Hindu fathers swear before their priests that the daughters they are giving in marriage are virgins.

The lack of AIDS awareness in India struck me quite directly one morning in 1992 when I was reading The Deccan Herald.  Under the heading "Prospective Grooms," I found the following entry: "Fair brahmin boy, 26 years-old, BS in engineering, HIV Positive."  I later read that the many families with comparable daughters eagerly fell for this spoof assuming that "HIV Positive" was a new prestigious degree.

India produces its own anti-retroviral drugs, but even at $28 per month the cost is beyond most of the patients.  Long distance truck drivers pay for sex at truck stops and return home to infect their wives. There are also the millions of men who leave their villages for work in the big cities and visit prostitutes while there, an estimated 40,000 in Bombay alone.

India's conservative views on sex, primarily the result of European influence, are also changing.  (The Kama Sutra is after all an Indian creation.) One night in my New Delhi hostel I was listening to a new talk radio program, and a young woman called in to talk openly about her fears of being pregnant. Divorces are still rare compared to American rates, but in Bombay one in three marriages now break up because of infidelity, dramatically up from one in seven in 1995.

There is the wonder of New Delhi's city government. It has found the political will to remove hundreds of roaming cows from its streets and also to force motorized rickshaw drivers to convert to compressed natural gas.  For the first time it was a delight to cruise this great capital city laid out beautifully by the British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens.

The other Delhi success story is the dramatic reduction in fireworks at Diwali, India's festival of lights.  On October 23, 1995, I gladly fled the deafening noise and sulfurous fumes of Diwali in Delhi so that I could witness the solar eclipse at Fatipur Sikri the next day.  By far my most terrifying experience in India was boarding the train to Agra as kids threw 3-inch firecrackers into the bogies.  Gratefully, more and more school children are now taking their Diwali money and donating it to charity.

But one reads with despair about the 46 million Indian kids who do not go to school.  Millions of them are forced to beg in the streets or an estimated 16.5 million work long hours for only a few rupees a day.  Half the children in India don't get enough food to eat, a much higher malnutrition rate than 26 percent of Sub-Saharan children.   Fortunately, fewer Indians are buying the excuse that young nimble fingers make better carpets.

There is wonder that is India's precious gems.  Ninety percent of the world's diamonds pass through Indian hands.  Raichandcharya, Gandhi's Jain guru, was a diamond merchant in Bombay, but was also considered by some to be the 25^th Tirthankara, a long line of god-men going back thousands of years.

India is also the largest gold buyer in the world.  Over 30 percent of the nation's wealth is gold, but most of it is kept and handed down as family treasure.  Some of this gold comes from early trade with Europeans in which Indian merchants insisted on gold for their goods. Rich Indian brides compete with one another in seeing who can wear the most gold at their weddings. (Peasant women carry their dowry gold as jewelry with them wherever they go.)  Indian financial advisers have so far failed to convince people that they could make all of India much more prosperous if they invested that gold rather than hoarded it.

There is the special wonder of an Indian wedding.  In 1992 I attended one in Chandigarh to which 20,000 were invited.  The wedding party arrived on a chartered train from New Delhi and the groom arrived on an elephant. When only 5,000 showed up, thousands of city residents standing outside the fences were ushered in to finish up the food and enjoy the entertainment. The February, 2006 wedding of hotel magnate Vikram Chatwai and model Priya Sachdev went on for seven days in three different locations and cost $100 million.  In addition to Indian celebrities, Bill Clinton, Naomi Campbell, Harrison Ford, and P. Diddy were invited.

There is the wonder of Indian craftspeople who weave beautiful fabrics and carpets, make the world's best bronze statues, and produce the most exquisite inlaid marble.  In Agra 360 families, descendants of the artisans who built the Taj Mahal, still polish and place gems in marble just as their ancestors have done for centuries.  There is also the wonder of Indian marble, which is so fine that that it still shines as brilliantly, witness the dome of the Taj Mahal, as the day it was carved.

Moving on to quite different skills, there are the amazing pilots of the Indian Air Force.  In 2004 India and US air excerises Indian MiGs and Mirages beat American F-15s in some of the mock fights.  More recently Indian pilots did very well in air combat exercises with Americans near Calcutta. Indian pilots were particularly effective when fighting at visual range, that is, with advanced avionics turned off.  Using American AWACS radar planes as neutral target sources, Indian pilots responded faster than the Americans even though this was the first time that the they had used the AWACS system.

My most moving experience in India was one that I had in a poor Muslim village in Harayana state. A Hindu Goddess temple at which my hosts—six Hindus and two Sikh students—paid their respects dominated the village.  After the temple visit the students offered English or Hindi lessons to the village children, whose only good meal of the day, I was told, came from the temple's curry kitchen.

I was also told that this religious harmony is the rule rather than a rare exception.  But as I was experiencing Gandhi's vision of India, on that same day, December 6, 1992, Hindu fundamentalists tore down the Barbri Mosque in the Northern Indian city of Ayodhya. The priests who urged on the mob justified the act because invading Muslims had destroyed a temple to the Hindu god Rama in order to erect the mosque on that site.

One can understand the utter despair that many Hindus feel about the reign of destruction that some Medieval Muslim rulers brought to India, but Hindu nationalists have broken a long tradition of nonviolence and nonretaliation, one that Gandhi tried to continue and strengthen.  It was not a Muslim who killed Gandhi that fateful January day in 1948; rather, it was radical Hindu follower of V. D. Savakar. 

In 1923 Savakar wrote a book entitled Hindutva (literally "Hinduness"), in which he declares cultural war against India's Christians and Muslims, insisting that they, whose families have lived in India for centuries, must leave their homeland.  In 2004 Indian voters turned the BJP out of office and their fundamentalist supporters are now in disarray. It is my hope that the Indians continue the religious harmony I experienced in that Harayana village rather than demean themselves in constant religious strife.