Mark Tully’s India: The Road Ahead
Henna Butt reviews Tully’s account of his journey around India reconciling extreme views in a quest for the truth. What can India do to get where it ought to be?
The story of India’s economic development has been optimistic and enthusiastic – a tale that views the shedding of Socialist policies in 1991 as the birth of a burgeoning market economy. Ubiquitously depicted alongside China as one of the future’s great economic powers, whilst maintaining a ‘good child’ image as the world’s largest democracy, the sanguine prognosis for India is in stark contrast to subaltern literatures that lament continuing poverty and widening fissures of inequality.
Mark Tully’s latest offering treads the middle road between these extreme views. India: The Road Ahead is a hybrid of travelogue and social, economic and political analysis. The reader is taken on a thematic and geographic journey that airs some of India’s lesser-known dirty laundry, neatly accented with Tully’s prescriptions for the roads that would deliver the country to a better future.
Travelling with his wife, Gilly, Tully visits Jharkand, a territory of ‘Red India’. This is a corridor running through Central and Eastern India, from the Nepal border to Andhra Pradesh, where Naxalites – as members of India’s Maoist movement are known – challenge the government’s authority.
Another stop sees Tully examining the state of India’s Dalits, the formerly ‘untouchable’ castes. Visiting Dalit-only villages that stand apart from higher caste settlements he finds confident and optimistic individuals. Conversely, in the Mirchpur village of Haryana, where Dalits still rely on work as labourers for Jat landowners, little has been done to lift them from their serf-like servitude. Atrocities committed by high caste villagers against Dalit labourers illuminate extant institutional prejudice as the justice system fails to award punishment with an impartial hand. Speaking to the Dalits, Tully finds that many of them consider continuing social strife between higher castes and themselves to be born of their growing self-esteem, because they now feel able to “look other people in the eye”.
The Dalits are not the only downtrodden group recognised by Tully as he goes on to look at the problems faced and raised by India’s huge Muslim population. In Uttar Pradesh, Tully follows the progress of a new Muslim party in the elections, the Ulema Council, which seeks to bring an end to the targeting of Muslims by the police as well as gaining the representation that mainstream parties have failed to provide. However, perversely, their efforts result in the Muslim vote being split and the gaining of the majority by the BJP (Bharat Janatiya Party) candidate.
Indian politics has long been characterised by the ongoing struggle between the Congress Party’s aggressive secularism against the BJP’s equally aggressive, Hindutva. Whilst much of the more jagged rhetoric has been eroded from both sides over recent years, the issue of religion looms large in Indian politics. When discussing the tensions between Hindutva and secularism, Tully extols the middle way. He explains that many analysts have attributed the attacks on the Ayodhya mosque in 1990 and 1992 to the national Hindu identity forged by the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in the late Eighties. However, to criticise these TV serials, he writes, is to take secularism too far.
Visiting South India, Tully is confronted with the issue of language. The two ends of a violently opposed spectrum are showcased as he meets Ramakrishnan and Chandrabhan Prasad. Ramakrishnan has produced a modern Tamil dictionary in an effort to keep his mother tongue alive, capable of “producing new knowledge” whilst Chandrabhan feels that the relics of native languages must be done away with and replaced with English in order to extinguish the culture of caste.
Tully seeks many of his solutions for the ‘road ahead’ from India’s state apparatus, however many of the issues that he describes stem from its adolescence as a nation. His writing shows an impatience for India to achieve its potential, to streamline its lumbering institutions and circumvent the jugaar culture that favours a winding road where a straight one would suffice.
One cannot read the book without feeling that Tully assumes India’s relationship with Europe and North America is one of dependence and emulation. He writes, “to me the one thing India needs to avoid is imitating practices first adopted in Western countries without adapting them to Indian circumstances.” Where others may see modernisation, Tully sees isomorphism, pointing out the prevalence of English words in Hindi, or the development of supermarkets superseding specialised local producers.
Tully marks his course as the middle road between the optimistic William Bissell and the pessimistic Bal Mundkur and this is what he delivers. Fondness and warmth characterise his considered writing; part nostalgic and part frustrated it epitomises his life which straddles India and the UK, each acting as a haven for the failings of the other.
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