How The West Will Be Won

Writer NIRPAL SINGH DHALIWAL counters fears that globalised India will lose its essential identity. Indians, he says, have a special emotional DNA that conquers all



AS INDIA INCREASINGLY engages with the global economy, opening itself to the ideas, technologies, culture and consumer goods of other societies, the fear has arisen that India will somehow “lose her identity”. National chauvinists and leftists alike are disturbed by the inflow, believing that India will be absorbed into an homogenized worldwide consumer culture that flattens cultural differences, that its history and values will dissolve into a sea of shopping malls, multinational brands and subscription television channels.

But as an Indian, born and raised in London, I am amazed by the lack of confidence Indians have in their civilisation, whose essence has endured for thousands of years longer than that of the West. Europe has been completely flattened twice in its history: firstly by Christianity, that effaced the myriad religious traditions that preceded it, and then by modernity, which evaporated its national boundaries with the creation of the European Union. Europe has always been goaded towards standardised homogeneity: by imperial Rome, Napoleon, Nazi Germany and now modern-day Brussels. It is Europe that has lacked the ability to maintain its identity and resist the power of transnational ideas and influences, not India.

I’ve partied with the twenty-something young urbanites of India’s first truly globalised generation at nightclubs such as Athena and Insomnia in Mumbai. I’ve seen how they dress in international labels and recognise contemporary western music and consider it their own. But I’ve also seen how the dance floor shakes most fervently when they hear a Hindi hit — albeit in a house remix. I’ve seen how they want a samosa chaat — not pizza, not French fries — when they’re hung over and craving junk. And I’ve heard them banter and haggle with rickshaw drivers with an ease and informality that suggests they are, ultimately, part of the same billion-strong gang.

On a personal level, there is no better example of how impervious India essentially is to Westernisation than my mother.Surinder Kaur Dhaliwal, born and raised in a village thirty miles outside Amritsar, has spent the last thirty-five years in London, briefly returning twice to India during that time. Despite having lived and worked in the UK and raised four children there, Punjabi is her first tongue while English is a foreign, rather than a second, language. Her commitment to Sikhism and early-morning pujas has only increased with time, rather than be diluted by Western secularism. You could dismiss her resistance to change as simple peasant wilfulness. But you would be patronising, offensive and wrong. She has cleaved to her Indianness by choice not ignorance.

“Did I mind when you married an English woman?” she asks me, when I quiz her about her identity. “Do I mind how you and your brothers and sisters choose to live your own lives? I have changed a lot. I have changed my mind about many things. I have learnt to enjoy my freedom here and to respect yours. I am independent here, more than I ever could have been if I’d stayed in Punjab. But I am Punjabi. I am Sikh. That will never change.Her resolute Indianness has underwritten my life and empowered me. It’s easy to consider immigrants such as her as being disadvantaged. She may have been uneducated, poor and unable to speak English, but her Indian values nonetheless gave me a platform on which to build my life. Her stoicism, faith, hard work and perseverance — the elemental values of an Indian village woman — provided a model and a structure for me.

By comparison, the working-class white kids I grew up with, natives in their own land, were the disadvantaged — living in chaotic households disrupted by divorce and parental neglect. As a child, I envied their freedom to stay out late, smoking, drinking and getting high, while I was pressured to stay at home and study and make good on my parents’ sacrifices. Inevitably, I went to university while they left school as adolescents, unqualified and sinking into manual jobs. Their ‘freedom’ was merely a life of floundering without direction. Sometimes, when I’m in the west London neighbourhood I grew up in, visiting my family, I bump into those old schoolmates and feel guilty — as if I’d been born into affluent privilege — for simply having a structure to my childhood, while they were left to drift.

MY GRANDMOTHER never learned enough English to string a sentence together after fifty years in Britain, earning her living mopping floors. Yet she could boast four accountants, a television producer, a writer and a social worker among her ten grandchildren. That outcome is unheard of among the white lower classes in Britain, but commonplace for immigrant Indians. The story is a vindication of Britain and the opportunities it provides to those who migrate there, but it is also a testament to India. Britain may have provided us with chances that were unavailable in rural Punjab, but India gave us the spirit to capitalise on them — a spirit that is conspicuously absent among many Britons.

All of her grandchildren, not least myself, are fascinated by India and deeply loyal to it, visiting the country more often and — equipped with a British education — taking an interest in India’s history, culture and politics that our parents never did. India has a pull on our hearts and minds in a way that Britain never will. The most interesting aspect of all this is that we’ve never really knew what being Indian actually is. What it is to be Indian — the ideas and worldview that underpin it — has always been a mystery. In childhood, it only seemed to consist of unexplained rituals and a series of prejudices and anxieties — about marriage, diet, miscegenation, religion, caste and communalism — that made us feel wholly different from British society, while never really knowing why.

Being Indian was an “instinctive life” as VS Naipaul termed it, lacking clear definition. My family couldn’t explain it. My grandparents had been illiterates, raised in rural Punjab, and my parents had had only basic educations. They couldn’t explain the philosophical and historical themes that ran through our lives. Being Indian was simply something that we practiced without question. Maybe this lack of definition is precisely what enabled us to maintain our shape. Not being set in stone, it’s an identity that can shift and accommodate change, rather than splinter in the face of it.

My friend, Manish Vij, a thirty-year-old American citizen and native of Boston, similarly can’t pin down what exactly it is that makes him and others like him feel essentially India. It’s an identity that seems to exist entirely in the microscopic fabric of how we relate to others on a personal level. “The fundamental differences between us others,” he says “are the closeness of family, the place of the individual versus the group, sociability, DIY versus paying someone to do the job. And food, of course. It’s easier dating, say, East Asians or Catholics, rather than Protestants, because of a shared conception of family.

Lots of other things, we toss overboard — the attitudes toward women, ritualism, graft culture, provincialism, mistreating waiters and servants...” Manish, like me, can’t understand why Indians feel insecure about their place in the world. “India swaggers culturally but is also intimidated because it’s poorer,” he comments. “That’s silly. With the population it has, it’ll never be swallowed. It’s a soft power exporter. Living in India as an adult actually stripped a lot of superficially Indian things from me, like giving random people lengthy blocks of time solely because they’re Indian. It was also fascinating meeting people who’d grown up as a majority in India their entire lives. They’re both confident and oblivious to the world.”

Another friend, Jeet Thayil, a Kerala-born poet, has spent many years abroad in Hong Kong and New York. Now he writes elegant poems full of Indian classicism but suffused with beatnik insouciance. He also has no fear of Westernisation: “Maybe the question should be: how Indianising is India? India appropriates, assimilates, infiltrates, impregnates, assassinates everyone. You grow up elsewhere considering yourself a global citizen, then you return and you understand you’re as Indian or un- Indian as anyone else. In the new India Westernisation is just another Indianized accessory, like the English language. When I first got here people would ask about my accent and I had standard replies. Now, of course, nobody notices because everybody has a weird accent.”

Jeet’s argument is a powerful one. Living in London, I’m constantly struck by how the West is confronting, often clumsily, issues that have been assimilated into the tapestry of Indian life for centuries. Multiculturalism and the accommodation of Islam in a secular democracy is a basic part of Indian life, while in Britain it’s a hot potato that no one seems capable of grasping. Britain’s affluent welfare society has spawned hundreds of international jihadists, while India, despite its poverty and vast Muslim population has created almost none. Multiculturalism is the defining principle of post-modernity, the inevitable human outcome of capital flows, migration and international trade. And India, despite having millions of people living pre-industrial existences on its streets and in its hinterlands, has handled this most crucial postmodern problem better than the West. India is troubled with ethnic and religious strife, but they should be put in historical context. When we mark Holocaust Memorial Day and Remembrance Sunday in Britain, it is to remind us that despite its hegemony, literacy and wealth, 20th century Europe imploded twice into catastrophic fratricidal warfare. Contemporary India has far deeper reasons for unrest than Europe ever did, yet there is no Indian equivalent of the Somme or Auschwitz. India has dealt with the issue of multiculturalism far better than any other society whilst having far greater pressures to contend with.

BEING WESTERN has become a euphemism for being modern. But the most exciting and attractive element of being modern, which is the cosmopolitan interaction of people sharing their ideas and creativity, is India’s core strength. To be modern, in this sense, is to be Indian. The future of the globalised world will ultimately be determined by its willingness to be Indianised. Indians flourish in the west because of their Indianness. They are hardwired for success in multicultural free-market societies, because of their tenacity and innate capacity to adapt and assimilate new ideas while retaining their sense of self. The only difference between the Indians in the West and those in India is their access to economic opportunity. As more people enjoy those same opportunities in the subcontinent the two sides converge into the same globalised Indian identity.

With such an empowering heritage, it is no surprise that my peers opt for Indian marriage partners, not wanting to dilute the spirit that taken them so far. Westernisation is a myth. Centuries of imperial rule did not extinguish India’s exceptional spirit and nor will globalization. Globalisation should not be feared as the engine by which India is subsumed into the west, but heralded as the process by which India will Indianise the globe.