Society
India - Introduction
Published 30 January 2006
When I moved back to India three years ago, I took a lease on a farmhouse five kilometres from the boom town of Gurgaon on the western edge of Delhi. From the end of my road you could just see the rings of new housing estates springing up, full of call-centres, software companies and fancy apartment blocks, all rapidly rising on land that only two years earlier was still billowing winter wheat. These new neighbourhoods, most of them still half-built, were invariably given unrealistically enticing names - Beverly Hills, Windsor Court - an indication, perhaps, of where their increasingly wealthy Punjabi middle-class owners would prefer to be, and where, in time, they may eventually migrate. Now, three years later, Gurgaon abuts the edge of our estate, and the largest mall in Asia is coming up a quarter of a mile from my house. The speed of the development is breathtaking. As Edward Luce points out in his brilliant and thought-provoking piece on the Indian economy in this issue, India is already on the verge of overtaking Japan to become the third-largest economy in the world.
So extraordinary is all this that it is easy to overlook the fragility and unevenness of the boom. As you leave Gurgaon, it is like heading back in time to a slower, premodern world. Within 20 minutes cars and trucks are beginning to give way to camel and bullock carts, denim and baseball caps to dusty cotton dhotis and turbans. The colour begins to drain away from the landscape but for the odd flash of a red sari: a woman winding her way to the village well. The truth is that much of India remains completely untouched by this astonishing boom. The grandchildren of Brahmin temple priests may be designing space rockets, but the grandchildren of untouchables are still untouchables, and the grandchildren of the two-thirds of Indians who derive their income from agriculture remain, by and large, farmers. Because of the caste system, the hyperdevelopment of India is being driven by a tiny elite section of the population. The tensions that this growing inequality will produce can only be guessed at. At the same time as Hyderabad geeks have seized great chunks of the US software writing market, farmers 50 miles to the north have been poisoning themselves in waves of debt-related mass suicides. The militantly Maoist Naxalite movement is spreading out from Bengal and Bihar into the Gangetic heartland of India. India is changing with a speed that is astonishing; but, as this special issue makes clear, much still remains uncertain, and the country remains as fascinatingly unpredictable as ever.
William Dalrymple is the New Statesman's south Asia correspondent. His NS piece on madrasas won Print Article of the Year at the 2005 Foreign Press Association awards
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