A brief introduction to Boo-lean algebra

Let me say this upfront: Katharine Boo’s Behind The Beautiful Forevers is an excellent work of reportage (narrowly conceived); the language is beautiful (it’s beauty all the more striking given the ugliness of the language’s referents); and it’s heart is in the right place – Boo’s sincerity and concern for the people she writes about are not in question. Having said that, Behind The… is also a seriously flawed book. On at least three counts.

Number one: Boo’s ideological baggage, and her seeming obliviousness to it, restricts her to a symptomatic understanding of poverty. It is this superficial understanding that informs her approach to her subject – the human beings who live in Annawadi, a Mumbai slum.

What do I mean by ‘ideological baggage’? In sociological terms, it refers to one’s beliefs about the nature of the world which we take to be the truth, forgetting (or not realising) that it is merely one narrative about the nature of the world, but a narrative that has been elevated to the status of truth by powerful institutions. It also means that there can be no ‘reportage’, no ‘facts’ and no writing as such, that is ‘outside of ideology’ or ‘ideologically neutral’. This is a basic given that informs most academic writing.

But ‘ideological neutrality’ is a myth that continues to survive in the minds of journalists and editors and even Pulitzer Prize winners, and they often speak about ‘journalistic objectivity’ with the same touching faith that a three-year-old talks about Santa Claus.

I don’t have access to Boo’s mind beyond the evidence of her writing. But such evidence as exists points to complete ignorance (or is it indifference?) about the nature of her book considered as an ideological project. In her Author’s Note, Boo states that she wrote the book to answer the following questions: “What is the infrastructure of opportunity in this society? Whose capabilities are given wing by the market and a government’s economic and social policy? Whose capabilities are squandered? By what means might that ribby child grow up to be less poor?”

The book’s foundational questions reveal, in stark terms, the intellectual bad faith of Boo’s endeavour. For example: how did she arrive at the conclusion that lack of opportunity causes poverty, as opposed to being the effect of poverty? She didn’t: it is merely an assumption that allows her to hold on to the ideological fiction that creating an “infrastructure of opportunity” is the best way to combat poverty.

And this logical inversion in her thinking is the ideological filter which ensures that her narrative will never interrogate either the western, scientific, modern values and the contractual relations that they legitimize, or the global institutions and practices they gave rise to, and at whose mercy every Annawadian lives and dies.

As a result, Boo takes the poverty of the Annawadians as a given. In her book, poverty is an effect of nature, like sunlight or gravity. She notes that all the families in Annawadi are migrants. But does she ask what forces drove them to become migrants? Surely that’s a fundamental question you need to ask if you’re planning a “deeply reported account” of the people you’re studying?

But no, Boo doesn’t name the forces that made Karam Husain leave Siddharthnagar, “the impoverished Uttar Pradesh district where Karam had been raised”, and choose a miserable existence in Mumbai. Was it even a choice? How did people in Siddharthnagar live before it became “impoverished”? Or was it always already an “impoverished Uttar Pradesh district”?

The closest Boo comes to asking such questions is in the case of Asha, a wannabe slum lord. Boo follows Asha to her village in Vidharbha where, faced with the reality of farmer suicides, she gets a big opportunity to connect the dots – between rural distress and urban migration and destitution. But all she has to offer is this: “Ashamed and in debt, some farmers (italics mine) killed themselves – an old story, one of the Marathi-movie staples.”

It is an accepted sociological fact (not necessarily acknowledged by economics) proven by innumerable studies and research projects, that poverty is caused by disempowerment. The less control a people or a community have over their lives and resources, the more they are likely to slip into deeper and deeper poverty.

Economic development in independent India, and especially the accelerated phase of development that has generated the new-found ‘prosperity’ that Boo is so dazzled by, has been predicated on a systematic dispossession and disempowerment of large masses of people who, though they may never have been wealthy in monetary terms, were by no means living in want.

Vidarbha’s farmers before the advent of multinational seed companies and an export-focussed agricultural policy, Chhattisgarh’s adivasis before the state government signed MOUs with mining companies, residents of Tamil Nadu’s Illuppur town, a thriving centre of artificial diamond polishing before India opened its markets to cheap Chinese gemstones -- to take just three examples, were doing okay in their modest, low-efficiency, low productivity, low consumption, low carbon economies.

But the hunger of global economic capital for their land, resources and new markets – a hunger which moved the Indian state more than the hunger of its own people – kick-started the processes that became liberalisation (for the overcity) and pauperization for the vast majority, which then had no option but to embark upon the long march to various ‘undercities’ in megacities like Mumbai.

Urban poor don’t drop from the skies. They come from somewhere, and they are actively produced when India’s predatory urban class preys upon the resources of the rural poor (most commonly, their land) in order to sustain its own unsustainable economies.

The aluminium that Abdul collects as scrap as well as Abdul himself, are products of the same process of plunder unleashed by the forces of global capital whose servant the Indian state has become, and corruption is merely the lubricant that facilitates the relentless sodomising of the 99% by the 1%.

Reading Boo, it is possible to imagine that you and I, and our lives in gated communities, have no direct bearing on the sewage-enriched lives of the Annawadians. This can be such a liberating thing to know, it is hardly surprising that IMF-ers and copybook neoliberals have fallen in love with the book despite its excoriating account of poverty in shining India. It is after all nice to be freed of the moral responsibility for the misery of fellow citizens.

For all her claims to a “vagrant-sociology approach”, Boo is in no mood to acknowledge, let alone report on, the screaming fact that the creation of poverty is an integral part of the very processes that have brought mind-boggling prosperity to those perched at the top of the economic food chain.

By not identifying these pauperising processes for what they are, Boo presents a misleading picture of what she calls “the infrastructure of opportunity”. Of course, there will always be some space for a few individuals to come and take a bigger bite of the crumbs that drop off the high table. It is these crumbs that Abdul and Asha fight for, and accumulate, and hope will lead them to middle-class respectability. But Boo doesn’t ask why they are only ever in a position to seek crumbs and not sit at the high table themselves.

Instead, her exclusive focus on the immediate reality of poverty leads her to magnify how the poor screw the happiness of other poor. As you read again and again how the poor fuck the poor, the fact that the rich have already fucked the poor by rigging things in such a way that the only way the poor can survive is by fucking other poor doesn’t seem so noteworthy anymore.

In other words, the question to ask in a book like this is not about “the infrastructure of opportunity” but the “infrastructure of empowerment/disempowerment”. Sadly, Boo doesn’t want to go there, and her book stands diminished by this refusal.

In fact, the best work of nonfiction about poverty in contemporary India is a rather less lushly written volume, titled Listening To People Living In Poverty, a publication brought out by the NGO ActionAid, in December 2003. Unlike Behind The…, not only does it document lives, it also provides an explanatory framework for understanding the life stories it documents.

It is less about journalistic flair, more about articulating a truthful answer to the real question that is the burden of a book like Boo’s: why do the Annawadians continue to remain poor? Is it possible that the majority of them remain poor not despite India’s growth story but because of it? Such a possibility does not come within a thousand miles of Boo’s mind, let alone cross it.

In her review (the sanest one I’ve read so far), academic Mitu Sengupta fears that “that the neoliberal establishment will find substance, in Boo’s book, for their wider narrative of why the government can only ever fail, and why retracting the already-thin cover of publicly funded programs remains the best bet for getting India back on track.”

It is easy to see why her fears are fully justified: there is nothing in the book that indicates Boo’s understanding of poverty and its alleviation is radically different from that of the neoliberals. Boo believes that a better “distribution of opportunity” is the way out. The neoliberal gang has no problem with that. The problem comes when you start talking about distribution of power, and sharing control over resources and decision-making – then things get ‘political’. And Boo’s book, of course, is pure reportage, a polished gem of facticity itself, and totally ‘apolitical’ – which is precisely how ideology operates.

While there is nothing in her book to discourage its co-option into the neoliberal agenda, there’s plenty -- especially about how government welfare schemes suck – to actively encourage it. It’s hard to imagine that Boo is innocent of these possibilities.

Number two: Boo’s strategy of novelising her narrative and yet keeping herself out of this novelised account clashes with the moral responsibility that an author of nonfiction has towards her subjects.

Throughout her narrative, Boo remains the invisible, all-seeing subject, while the poor Annawadians are objects of her authorial gaze. While we get to know what she thinks of each of them, we never get to know what they think of her and her project. She makes a cursory attempt to redress this imbalance in her Author’s Note at the end, but that’s not the same as putting yourself at the same level, and sharing the same space, as your interlocutors – both in the life situations in the slum, and in the text.

An effect of this segregation is that, by the end of the book, the slum-dwellers remain ‘them’ and the readers remain ‘we’. Boo writes, without any self-consciousness, “The poor blame one another for the choices of governments and markets, and we who have means are ready to blame the poor just as harshly.” Now, who is this “we” here? And who are “we” to pass judgement on the poor? Ironically, this is also the closest Boo comes to acknowledging that the poor are so completely disempowered that they have no say in the choices of governments and markets. Yet she does not see this as having anything to do with why they are poor. Nice.

Finally, Boo’s portrait of the poor, instead of rendering their selves as real to the readers as their own (reader’s) selves, ends up other-ing the poor. Of course, an otherness conceived as a separate self that is ultimately mysterious and hence unknowable and worthy of respect is what good novels are about.

But Boo’s novelistic narrative stops the poor-as-the-other at a comfortable distance – they are the ‘other’ defined at the level of people-not-like-us, people we can understand through, and meet in, Boo’s book, but not people with whom “we” can discuss national economic policy.

Boo does not portray even one poor person as someone who can empathise with or understand the life of someone from the overcity, except in broad aspirational brushstrokes.

More than anything else, it is this authorial snobbery that caricatures their humanity – they are human, no doubt, but not so human that they can occupy the same space as our own intimate selves in our world, or Boo’s self in her book. It would have been interesting, and only fair, to see their understanding of her life, of her values, of her childhood, of her ambitions, articulated in these pages. But we don’t get it.

Boo, however, gets full access to all their innermost secrets, and shares them with millions of strangers. If she had an ethical issue with this one-sided relationship, we don’t hear about it.

That is why, having read the book, we, like Boo on the last page of her book, can still think of Annawadians as ‘they’ and ourselves as ‘we’. We can congratulate ourselves on our resources of empathy, our ability to be moved by the suffering – and then go back to cursing those hawkers who have encroached on our footpaths.

We acknowledge another’s humanity not merely by empathising with them, or getting to know them intimately, but by letting them empathise with us – which is the real test of class barriers. This is where Boo’s book fails most spectacularly – not one resident of Annawadi is shown to be capable of understanding Boo in the same way she is allowed to apprehend their lives’ meaning. This water tight segregation of the self and the other is both the charm (for the non-Annawadian reader) and the harm in Boo’s beautiful narrative.

G Sampath is an independent writer based in Delhi. He’s reachable at sampath4office@gmail.com