Book review: 'India Calling' is about American desi trying to make sense of India

India Calling: An Intimate Portrait Of A Nation’s Remaking
Anand Giridharadas
306 pages
Rs499

Anand Giridharadas returned to India in 2003 for the same reasons his parents left it for the US in the 1970s: to build a life and career. He worked as a management consultant in Mumbai, then as a columnist, and now, in India Calling, has written a book that tries to capture the tumult of a changing India against the backdrop of a family history.

Giridharadas has a keen ear for stories — he profiles Mukesh Ambani as representing an Indian business ethos, spends time with a ‘semi-joint’ family in Ludhiana, obtains fascinating accounts of marital dysfunction by sitting in on the proceedings of a divorce court — but these don’t always blend easily with the tenderly-written family memoir.

 It often seems as if Giridharadas sees exactly what he wants to see. In a section titled Ambition, he goes to Umred, near Nagpur, to write about a riot sparked by frequent power outages, and concludes that the riot happened because the town “had begun to dream”. His main source in the town is Ravindra Misal, who runs a school that teaches spoken English.

According to Misal, people require electricity “to listen to tapes of great speakers, to surf the Internet,” and power outages are “becoming a hurdle on their path”. Giridharadas seems to find this explanation adequate. (A media report of the riot mentions agricultural pumps, but that would be Old India.) Misal’s personal story of ambition is a compelling one, but its telling is marred by Giridharadas’ commentary, which turns out to be bizarrely Orientalist. Misal wants to make money, and so, “for Ravindra, the world was not illusion, maya”.

Then, Giridharadas wonders, “What did he think of the idea, so prevalent in India, of kismet, of fate?” A little later, leaving nothing to kismet, “He also rejected the idea of karma . . . .”

Giridharadas’ writing excels at descriptions and he is particularly good at reproducing Indian English in dialogue. His narratives are slickly structured to yield ironies. He is also a lightning-rod for epiphanies and sudden realisations. A servant mistakes Giridharadas for a delivery boy and the transformation in the servant’s attitude on realising his mistake shows Giridharadas “the truth of what it means to be Indian” which is “the calculus that governed life: Am I his sahib or is he mine?”

Such simplistic insights contribute to what is a cynically essentialist view of Indians. Giridharadas calls the vision of a Maoist ideologue improbable because, “At bottom, he sought to turn Indians into a people other than themselves. He sought to make them egalitarian in spirit, sought to make them forget who was a master and who was a servant, sought to beat back the karmic, pain-absorbing mentality . . . .”

At the same time Giridharadas is excited by the change he sees. The feudal, fatalistic, caste-ridden, other-driven, family-burdened, bureaucratic, nepotistic old India that his parents fled from now aspires to individualism and personhood. It wants money, things, love, travel, and all the other things Giridharadas had growing up in the US. But given what India is “in its bones” this leads to dissonance, in a way the underlying theme of the book.

The critic James Wood has written of Naipaul — author of the ur-book of the booming New India genre, A Million Mutinies Now (1990) — that he is likely to uncover twenty truths on the path to error. The converse is true of India Calling. Its insights, even when they appear perceptive, are often arrived at through simplistic reasoning or careless generalisation, and feel unearned. Near the beginning of the book Giridharadas speaks of how, growing up in the US, he created an image of India from stories he’d heard and a few Indians he’d met: “As I conjured up the country, I squeezed these things for all the juice that they possessed, searched for meaning where it may not have been, deduced from personal history the history of a people.” Those words would be only slightly less true at the end of the book.