John Elliott
What really happened between Edwina Mountbatten and Jawaharlal Nehru?
The Jaipur Literary Festival is becoming a major event not just for literary folk but also for India’s prestige-conscious society. Here in the grounds of the city’s Diggi Palace hotel, a charmingly faded pile built in the 1860s as a grand town house for a rural Rajasthan ruler, Delhi’s self-appointed social elite have all mingled with the crowds (around 27,000 people have attended in total), along with famous writers and ambassadors from the US, UK and other countries, without demanding (as they usually do) exclusivity and front row seats.
In a country where prestige and patronage count for so much and do so much damage, it is striking how the festival straddles India’s vast social divides, with sessions on the Dalits (untouchables) at the bottom of India’s social strata, as well as to the lives and loves of the Indian dynasties and the British royal family.
It was fitting that one of these sessions focused on Queen Victoria’s fascination for two particular Indian men, explored in very different ways by two Indian authors. The Exile, by Navtej Sarna, an author and Indian diplomat is a historical novel about the life of Maharaja Duleep Singh who became prominent in Victoria’s court when the queen was in her 30s. More revealing was Victoria and Abdul, Shrabani Basu’s biography of a servant, Abdul Karim, who became an influential and often disruptive adviser to Victoria on India, “a good looking, extravagantly dressed servant…hated by the Queen’s household both for his race and class”.
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John Elliott
Over 12,000 attending Jaipur festival last year
The Jaipur Literary Festival is only in its fifth year but it’s already billed as Asia’s biggest such event, and with more than 12,000 attending last year, it’s now the biggest free literary festival world-wide—you only pay for the food (and the books).
I came yesterday from my home in Delhi, to this famous old pink Moghul city—the capital of the Indian desert state of Rajasthan—where you sense the magic of India’s history and see all the modern fun and chaos as well.
The festival started this morning but last night the organisers were learning a tough lesson: if you hold a festival in a country which is a terrorism target and has thick fog in winter, prepare for the worst.
Over the past few days more than a dozen speakers have been marooned abroad due to problems with obtaining Indian visas, which are becoming more difficult to obtain as anti-terrorism measures are put in place. And yesterday more than 100 people, both speakers and delegates, were stranded in fog at Delhi airport for several hours, unable to take off for the 250km flight here.
As darkness fell, two of the key first-day speakers were still yet to arrive: Her Majesty Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck, the queen mother of the remote Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, and Girish Karnad, a famous Indian playwright, film-maker and actor, who was due to deliver the opening address on “Entertaining India”.
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Meghnad Desai
Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
When the first female head of India’s largest state celebrates a birthday, you wouldn’t expect an intimate private event. But when Kumari Mayawati celebrated her 53rd birthday in January the party became what Indians call a big political tamasha. Admirers brought presents, most often bundles of cash, because the birthday girl had announced a gift target of 120m rupees (£1.6m). In theory this was for party coffers, not herself, with each of 400 local branches aiming at 300,000 rupees (£4,000) each. Her followers were happy to oblige. Mayawati is not just leader of India’s poorest caste, the untouchables, in Uttar Pradesh, one of the country’s poorest states. She is also a behenji, or respected sister.
Yet even these lavish celebrations seemed subdued compared to previous years. There was no giant birthday cake laden with orchids. Mayawati dropped her favourite fuchsia dress in favour of a muted silver and pink suit, topped with a simple overcoat. Such reserve was a response to the allegation that one of her party’s legislators had bludgeoned a prospective guest to death for refusing to contribute to the birthday gift target. Her political rivals were also on the streets. One group held a “contempt day,” in which caricatures of Mayawati were ceremoniously spat upon and her effigy was set on fire. Another held a khooni divas, or “murderous day,” highlighting the murder allegation. Not to be outdone, her supporters in the Bahujan Samaj party (BSP) held an “opposition party contempt day” of their own, recounting similar misdemeanours by their opponents. For corruption or thuggery there is little to choose among the parties; politics in Uttar Pradesh (UP) is never dull.
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David Goldblatt
The second season of the Indian Premier League (IPL), the world’s biggest and richest cricket competition, is now in full swing. It is not, however, being played in India. Instead, the opening day featured the Rajasthan Royals, the Mumbai Indians and the Chennai Super Kings in Cape Town, South Africa—an expression, perhaps, of the precocity of India’s globalisation? It took Major League Baseball (MLB) over 100 years before it opened a season with a match outside the US. Similarly, the National Football League needed half a century to stage a game of American football at Wembley. Named like a Bollywood sequel, IPL-2 is abroad after just a single year in operation.
Of course, the IPL has been forced to take its show on the road. In March, gunmen attacked the Sri Lankan cricket team bus in Lahore, massively raising the security stakes of any high-profile cricket event in the region. And IPL-2 had been blithely scheduled to coincide with India’s parliamentary elections. It was all too much for India’s strained security forces to cope with.
Undaunted, the management of the IPL played the English Cricket Board off against the South Africans as potential hosts, got a fantastic deal from the latter and moved the entire 56-game, eight-team show south. Sponsors have remained committed and the IPL found the time to renegotiate its television rights for even greater sums. The Indian public would naturally have preferred the league to stay at home but give every indication that they will watch on television and in multiplex cinemas.
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James Crabtree
Elegant apartment blocks stand tall above the gardens of Malabar Hill, the most exclusive district in south Mumbai. The area juts out on the far side of a bay, like the thumb of a hand stretching for the sea, as if trying to keep at arm’s length from the body behind. Property prices here rival downtown Manhattan. When the smog isn’t too thick, residents can gaze east across Back Bay, to see the city’s seething downtown fingertip. Few places would have given a better view of the smoke rising from the Trident Oberoi and the Taj hotels.
The attacks that began on 26th November, in which 188 died, shocked India. But unlike the events of 11th September 2001—to which they have been too readily compared—this was not shock springing from the unexpected. India is used to violence. The same group behind this devastation, Lashkar-e-Toiba, bombed Delhi in 2005. The next year, 209 Mumbaikers died when seven explosions ripped through their commuter rail system.
True, the latest attacks were more public and prolonged. The sieges, shoot-outs and hostages shinning down drainpipes had a cinematic quality suited to the home of Bollywood. But the novelty came in the choice of victims. Tragedy in India usually hits the poor, whether bombings, riots or the simple brutality of everyday life. This time, the gunmen attacked India’s prosperous new elite, many of whom died on the floors of the Taj hotel.
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Salil Tripathi
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When the Doha global trade negotiations collapsed in July, many countries shared the blame. But one of the more surprising culprits was India. Indian consumers have suffered during the recent food crisis, with inflation over 12 per cent for some commodities. Removing agricultural trade barriers would surely have helped get cheaper food to India’s many millions of poor citizens.
Yet Indian trade minister Kamal Nath declined to open India further to farm imports, claiming he had to protect the “livelihood of millions of farmers” in India. What was behind this decision? Double-digit inflation often sounds the death knell for Indian governments. Elections are due by next May, and the governing coalition barely survived a recent confidence vote.
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Charles Grant
The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East
by Kishore Mahbubani (PublicAffairs, £15.99)
Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan will Shape our Next Decade
by Bill Emmott (Allen Lane, £20)
Power is shifting from the west to Asia. But is Asia anything more than a geographical term? Arguably the only century in which a significant number of Asians shared a single political identity was the 13th, when Genghis Khan conquered much of the continent. About 100 years ago, writers such as Kakuzo Okakura in Japan and Rabindranath Tagore in India, and politicians such as Sun Yat-Sen in China, developed pan-Asianist ideas. They thought the Asians had much in common, as victims of colonialism, and as people who, compared with westerners, were less materialistic and more spiritual. But such ideas never spread far.
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David Goldblatt
The Dominican takeover of baseball
Imagine a world in which Jamaicans make up 10 per cent of Premiership players and 40 per cent of squads in the rest of British professional football. Meanwhile, Tottenham Hotspur have just opened a £5m training academy on Montego Bay, leaving Wigan as the only top-flight side without a permanent presence on the island. Unbelievable? This is precisely analogous to the state of American baseball and its relationship to the Dominican Republic, a Caribbean nation of only 9m people.
Over the last 40 years, college athletes in the US have increasingly opted for basketball and American football over baseball, while at the same time the number of Major League Baseball (MLB) clubs has doubled. The signing price of domestic baseball talent has risen with its scarcity. Foreign players, who are signed for a fraction of the cost of US prospects, have stepped into the gap and now make up a quarter of MLB squads. There are Venezuelans, Puerto Ricans, Panamanians and Japanese, but above all there are Dominicans. And they are not just bit-part players or journeymen; Dominicans are also the stars—Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz are the iconic batters of last year’s World Series winners, the Boston Red Sox. With many Dominicans in the minor league system too, their presence in the majors is set to rise yet more.
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Trevor Mostyn
After having the world’s attention drawn to its shortcomings during the miserable odyssey of the Olympic torch, China bent over backwards to show its compassionate side in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake. Yet the ghost of Tibet is unlikely to fade away before the August Olympics. The Dalai Lama’s 11-day visit to Britain has kept the plight of the Tibetans in the public eye, even if he is speaking here only on the art of happiness and has met the prime minister only in his capacity as a “religious leader.”
Yet back in India, where the Dalai Lama has been in exile since 1959, not everyone shares the west’s warmth towards the Dalai Lama. The Delhi intelligentsia who weekend in the Himalayan hill station of Dehradun can be quite savage about Tibet’s spiritual leader. I thought it was a one-off when the wife of a successful entrepreneur told me that the Dalai Lama should “go home” to Tibet and that India could not afford to host roughly a hundred thousand indolent Tibetan refugees. But I heard this view expressed again and again by Indian journalists—and even by a retired general—along with praise, at India’s expense, for China’s economic success.
I suggested that India, unlike China, enjoyed democracy and a political system of checks and balances. Is it not significant, I asked, that the leader of India’s ruling Congress party is a Roman Catholic (Sonia Gandhi) and its prime minister a Sikh (Manmohan Singh)? And that until recently, its president was a Muslim (Abdul Kalam)? China, by contrast, is governed by a group of about nine anonymous men within the National People’s Congress. But my arguments fell on deaf ears.
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Kishwer Falkner
Why have the political trajectories of India and Pakistan been so different, given that each was cut from the nearly identical cloth of empire? If the characteristics of a resilient democracy include pluralism, control over defined territory, a sense of being one nation and, for poor countries, the ability to develop—then it seems to have taken India about 30-35 years to become one, from the early 1940s to the late 1970s. Pakistan, by contrast, remains far from the democratic goal.
But from the outset in 1947, there were several factors which favoured India over Pakistan. The basis for founding Pakistan was the protection of a religious group, while for India it was national self-determination. Given the extent of ethnic, linguistic and religious difference, India was pluralistic from the start. Pakistan, however, was premised on the idea that Islam would be in danger in an independent Hindu majority state, particularly if it was to be a democracy. The numbers could not favour Muslims—who made up only about 10 per cent of India’s pre-partition population. The result of the campaign for a separate Muslim homeland was that as partition drew closer, large numbers of Muslims who had lived across India moved to the provinces of northwest India, to settle amid different ethnic and linguistic communities.
These communities, in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Punjab, had historically been among the least exposed to democracy and pluralism under British rule, as they had comprised the security perimeter of British India. They were heavily militarised, as the “steel frame” had to be maintained against the Russian empire. The third of what came to be Pakistan’s four provinces was Balochistan. It was created late in the 1880s, and was made up of mainly princely states, with entrenched authoritarian aristocratic rulers. Sindh, the fourth province, which hosted the port city of Karachi, had a rural interior with large tracts of land owned by “waderas” or feudal lords—the Bhutto family alone was estimated to own 40-60,000 acres of prime land, worked by serfs.
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