[Reader-list] review of Suketu Mehta and Pavan Varma from Economist

[Rana Dasgupta]

India

Not losing hope
Apr 7th 2005
 From The Economist print edition



Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
By Suketu Mehta

Being Indian: Inside the Real India
By Pavan K. Varma



AT TIMES of great change, nations inevitably become introspective. In 
India's case, one recent consequence of a rapidly growing and 
globalising economy has been an outpouring of books with titles like 
“Remaking India”, “Shaping India of our Dreams”, “The Great Indian 
Dream”, “Rising Elephant” and “Rethinking India”. Having escaped the 
blind alley of economic autarky, goes one common theme, a newly 
self-confident but widely misunderstood India is ready to take its 
rightful place as a leading world power.

In very different ways, these two books are the best of the recent crop. 
Both are elegantly written, in English, yet transcend the interests of 
the English-speaking elite. “Maximum City”, which at the end of March 
won the Kiriyama prize for non-fiction, is a remarkable documentary of 
life in India's largest city, now known as Mumbai. This is not the city 
of bankers, stockbrokers and call-centre workers that many business 
visitors encounter. Rather the book delves into the interlocking worlds 
of communal violence, politics, gangsterism, commercial sex, film-making 
and even religious renunciation.

Suketu Mehta must be an extraordinarily winning man. One surprising 
feature of his book is the trust he has inspired in his subjects, a 
range of people grappling with the grim business of surviving Mumbai. 
They have helped him create an account of the city—and of India—which is 
as intimate and gripping as a novel.

What made them do it? There is an incorruptible cop who boasts of his 
expertise in torture. There is a breathtakingly beautiful bar-girl, who 
brings Mr Mehta along for a reunion with the father she has not seen for 
ten years. There is the gangster who puts a pink towel on his head and 
says his prayers in Sanskrit as a break from describing how it feels to 
shoot somebody. There is a man making a living as a female dancer, who 
decides to abandon tweezers and asks Mr Mehta to teach him to shave. 
There is the struggling would-be entrepreneur, who confides his pleasure 
in returning to his home village because he likes to feel the grass 
tickling his buttocks as he defecates. There is the underworld don, who 
takes to the author so much that, like an indulgent shopkeeper, he 
offers him an assassination of his choice.

Through much of this drama, Mr Mehta, it seems, is just sitting there, 
tapping it all straight on to the keyboard of his laptop. Many of those 
he writes about obviously no longer see him as reporter or writer, but 
as confessor and friend. He vindicates their trust by bringing their 
stories vividly to life.

In doing so, Mr Mehta paints a picture of an India that is so vast, 
complex and confusing as to defy generalisation, and facing such a 
terrifying array of problems that it forbids optimism. Yet most of his 
characters show what Pavan Varma in “Being Indian” calls the intrinsic 
Indian propensity for not losing hope. That dauntless optimism is in 
evidence on a national scale at present. To many foreigners it seems 
almost unseemly: how can a country talk so proudly when so many of its 
people—260m at the government's count—live below the poverty line? Mr 
Varma's answer is brutal: the rich in India have always lived a life 
quite uncaring of the ocean of poverty around them.

“Being Indian” is one of the most subtle recent attempts to analyse the 
continent-sized mosaic of India and simplify it for the general reader. 
It also fully realises the ambitions of its subtitle. The book describes 
the emergence of a “new supranational Indian culture” which has “the 
arrogance of the upstart and the self-absorption of the new”, and which 
in writers such as Mr Varma and Mr Mehta, is blessed with two quite 
gifted chroniclers.