June 11, 2012

Real India: a land soon without tigers, and maybe orchids

Suprabha Seshan -- a gardener and guardian of the land, living for the last 17 years in the wild rain forest of Kerala, near the southwest tip of India -- is taking a fierce run here at the glad gab in Bangalore about the software boom, jobs, sudden wealth, the "New India," which she believes has delivered itself into a deadly trap of consumerism, pollution, ruined forests and rivers, a "virtual" prosperity but a profoundly un-natural India. It is a New India, in short, without tigers or, soon, even orchids. But Ms. Seshan is scathing in a light, laughing, maybe specially Indian way.

BANGALORE — Suprabha Seshan — a gardener and guardian of the land, living for the last 17 years in the wild rain forest of Kerala, near the southwest tip of India — is taking a fierce run here at the glad gab in Bangalore about the software boom, jobs, sudden wealth, the “New India,” which she believes has delivered itself into a deadly trap of consumerism, pollution, ruined forests and rivers, a “virtual” prosperity but a profoundly un-natural India. It is a New India, in short, without tigers or, soon, even orchids. But Ms. Seshan is scathing in a light, laughing, maybe specially Indian way. It’s an underlying premise among Indian chatterers, as they keep telling us, that often the best point in an argument is one whose direct opposite may sound equally plausible, even true. So let the conversation continue, through many paradoxes. “Is it possible,” she asks herself in conversation, “to live a life without contradiction?” — i.e. without petroleum, chemical fertilizers, technology? “In today’s society,” she answers, “it’s not possible.” There’s a cutting Indian edge here on the global contradictions of growth in a collapsing biosphere. Tea and eucalyptus plantations under the British Raj upset the balance and beauty of the green range of India’s Western Ghats in the 19th Century, and destroyed vast natural forest lands — but not so much that the state of Kerala doesn’t still market its mountains as “God’s own country.” For 20 years now there’s been an eco-tourism boom in Suprabha’s jungle — with roads, hotels, breaking-up of farms and new construction to serve high-end and mass visitors. The “eco” industry gets its name from the jungle, Suprabha says, but the jungle is withering. Ayurvedic medicine, the rage in New Delhi as well as Los Angeles, draws heavily on plants from Kerala wilds, “but where will we get them in a few years?” Better eco-tourism, I wonder, than the coal and bauxite mining that is churning a tribal rebellion in Eastern India? “Mining is rape,” Suprabha responds. “Eco-tourism is prostitution.” The good news from her own two decades on 60-plus acres in the wild is that forests and all their complexity do grow back. “The forest will return if given the chance. We call it ‘gardening back the biosphere.’ It can be done.” The bad news is that no one in or out of power will say “no” to eco-tourism and the promise of jobs. How, I asked her, will all this be remembered in the emerging story of the new India?

SS: I cannot relate with the new India at all. We have nothing in common in terms of what we seek as a possible future. The new India is appalling to me, if the new India means the exclusion of the forests. The new India means the end of nature to me. The two cannot go together: this is an apocalypse in the making. Because what is new “Shining” India going to shine with if it doesn’t have its rivers and its plants and its forests? What will it go forth with? CL: What piece of the old India are you invoking? And what is it in the old India that might ring an alarm? SS: The old India, what little I’ve known, is the diversity of things, the beauty and the sacredness and the diversity of things. In people, in the land, in trees and plants. Everything was sacred, and this was commonly felt. But modern industrial civilization, colonialism, all the powers that be have made it their special mission to destroy that relationship. The sacred doesn’t mean worship necessarily. The sacred means seeing each thing for what it is, and that it has its own right to be. And unfortunately it seems that a lot of mainstream religion has ritualized the sacred and has made an idol out of the sacred. So the sacred is now a plastic idol ringed by lights in someone’s concrete home. And so you worship your elephant that way. And meanwhile, the actual elephant is dying of tuberculosis, and herpes virus.  So my question has always been with regard to the so-called famous Indian tradition which is spiritual and so on: it’s become so symbolized and so ritualized and so separated from the actual earth that it has lost its meaning. It is virtual. It’s a virtual religion. CL: You sound like high Hindu priests I’ve read about, who teach this reverence for the single wasp, for every form of life… Is that a foothold for India to catch, against environmental disaster? This reverence for the planet, for life. SS: Reverence of any kind, of course, would be a very very powerful foothold. But I just don’t see it. Except in textbooks and stories. I do feel the modern media are crowding them out. Because you can have this experience of nature, of the wild, of the sacred, of anything, and you can almost believe that it’s true. And that’s the danger of the new technology to me: you can track a tiger in the forest through your computer and feel all that adrenaline rush, but you don’t have a relationship with a tiger. Because when you are with a tiger in the forest and your adrenaline rushes you’re a life and death situation… One gym instructor told me in the city, when I told him I live in the forest. He said “Oh, the jungle is a deadly place to booze!” That’s a crude version of what a lot of people do. They go to the jungle and they’re shut away from the jungle. The new technologies and this kind of removal that we see: it’s a severing that’s happened. They’re blind when they go to the forest. They have no means to look at the forest, to see it in a simple way. Just the beauty of it, let alone sacredness. Sacredness is so much more, it’s part of a life and a relationship, a recognition that we all have our spaces and relations with each other.

The deeper messages of entering the forest, and the silence, and the sensitivity, opening up and so on. That is a very quiet thing. That can’t happen in the way outdoor education is being sold to people: you work in an IT company and then you go for a weekend to the forest and then you have this outward bound experience. I don’t think it can happen like that. A relationship with nature is built over generations for the human species — the human species has come out of this million-year evolution, eye-to-eye contact with snakes, and elephants, and plants. You can’t really do it instantly. But a lot can be done: awareness is a pretty instant thing. People can be suddenly opened up in a pretty instant way. But, for that to build into a living relationship of sensitivity and mutual care, I don’t think that is so simple.

Suprabha Seshan in conversation with Chris Lydon in Bangalore, India. July, 2010

Podcast • August 20, 2010

Real India: M. A. Baby and "Kerala Communism"

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with M. A. Baby (29 minutes, 14 mb mp3) TRIVANDRUM, Kerala — M. A. Baby is giving us an introductory dose of Indian leftism in power. A Communist and ...

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with M. A. Baby (29 minutes, 14 mb mp3)

TRIVANDRUM, Kerala — M. A. Baby is giving us an introductory dose of Indian leftism in power.

A Communist and a Catholic, too, he is the Minister of Education and Culture in a coalition government that runs the state of Kerala — often described as the most (perhaps the only) successful Communist regime (and one of the best-educated states) in human experience.

M. A. Baby embodies Communism in the Indian style, sitting before a portrait of Gandhi, quoting Marx and Engels as Gospel. Non-aligned between Soviet Russia and China in the old days, Indian Reds are an articulate fringe in national politics, with real voting bases in only three states: West Bengal, Tripura and Kerala.

Here in Kerala, Communists have been a key stone in solid progressive alliance over most of century, and they share the credit for India’s best scores in literacy, public health, anti-caste reforms and relative equality of fortunes. Yet in many conversations (including ours with Paul Zacharia) the Communists have a share in the general disrepute of government for cronyism, if not corruption.

The deeper discouragement, as Minister Baby himself acknowledges, is that the many left-wing governments of Kerala in 63 years since Independence have all been stymied by economic stagnation and unemployment. Kerala is in the habit of giving young people first-rate educations for jobs that don’t exist. The best and brightest from Kerala work in the Europe, the Gulf and the States. By Minister Baby’s estimate, which staggers me, a quarter of Kerala’s gross annual income comes in remittances from out-of-state.

CL: A lot of students in Kerala, when we asked about their politics, called it “left.” But none could say what the agenda was. How would you describe the content of your “left”?

MAB: The left, according to me, is those who are fighting to reduce the inequities in society — if possible to eradicate the man-made differences in society. There are natural differences. But the natural resources in this beautiful planet should not be monopolized by some. According to me, we don’t say: ‘this part of the air and atmosphere and oxygen belongs to me; this much of the sunshine belongs to me.’ The entire humanity should have an almost equal say and share. I’m not against private property, but private property should be to a minimum. And human beings are not the center of all activity, as they used to be in all progressive thinking. Now all the other creatures — they, too, have an equal right to this beautiful planet.

CL: What’s the connection with Mahatma Gandhi, whose portrait is over your desk, as it is over so many desks?

MAB: Albert Einstein said that future generations would find it difficult to believe that a person of flesh and blood like Mahatma Gandhi walked this earth. It’s a very true description. I have the greatest respect for the contribution of Mahatma Gandhi, and I have all the works of Mahatma Gandhi with me. Whenever I get tired I read him almost at random. It’s very interesting in the formulations of Mahatma Gandhi that he claimed: ‘I am a Hindu. I am a Muslim. I am a Buddhist. And I am a poor Communist.’ And to a great extent he is serious. I could see the influence of Communism in him.

CL: I keep seeing 95 percent as the measure of literacy in the state of Kerala. Everybody says that for 50 years in India, Kerala has led the way toward literacy, and now computer literacy, but also social equality, health care and health itself. Why so different from the rest of India?

MAB: Historically even the monarchy, the royalty we had, used to take an interest in education and cultural matters. Even during royal times, and British times, in the field of education, progressive things were happening — with a lot of limitations. So after Independence, the gap we had to cover in literacy and education was less than what existed in other provinces. It’s like Sir Isaac Newton saying: ‘If I am able to see further… it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants.”

M. A. Baby in conversation with Chris Lydon in Trivandrum, India. July, 2010

Podcast • August 17, 2010

Real India: Novelist Paul Zacharia Shares His "Confusion"

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Paul Zacharia. (33 minutes, 15 mb mp3) Paul Zacharia is a novelist and story writer eminent in the Malayalam language and in Trivandrum, the southernmost big city in ...

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Paul Zacharia. (33 minutes, 15 mb mp3)

Paul Zacharia is a novelist and story writer eminent in the Malayalam language and in Trivandrum, the southernmost big city in India and the capital of the famously progressive state of Kerala. In our conversations, Paul Zacharia stands for the many beloved Indian sages who for one reason or another have escaped universal celebrity. At home he is acknowledged as “non-conformist and unorthodox to the core;” his fiction marked by “a deep sense of humor, experiments in craft and narrative techniques, and an unsentimental prose.” When I called to ask if we could talk some “about the new India,” he readily agreed to “share my confusion,” as he said, about what his country is going through.

In his downtown apartment, under a monsoon downpour, Paul Zacharia is a cheerful spirit with a dissident turn of mind and a variety of opinions he shares freely. The New India is more poor than rich, he noted at the outset, but the growth is real and the cultural shifts will endure. Though left of center of himself, he does not mourn the collapse of “Nehru Socialism” — “just a slogan,” he argues, long useful to a ruling clique, as in many Communist countries. The “Maoist” label on the tribal rebellion in the eastern states of India “doesn’t mean a thing — they could call themselves Christians, or Jesus men or whatever, but the cause is just.”

He turns both sweet and sour on his egalitarian, persistently Communist home state Kerala. It was blessed 50 years ago with a perfect storm of reform movements that ended “feudalism” in the region. But the Communists who took power became corrupt, inefficient, heartless — “like any other political party.” A certain stagnation in education as well as politics in Kerala is driving the best of the younger generations to work and grow in Europe, the Gulf and the U.S. Their remittances are what keeps Kerala afloat.

About Americans he is affectionate one moment, astringent another. Hemingway, T. S. Eliot and James Thurber are writers he keeps rereading, in his pantheon with Victor Hugo, Dostoevsky and Lewis Carroll. Barack Obama seems “just a puppet of all the people who pull the strings in the US.” The war on terror? A ruling-class “industry.”

Zacharia takes up my suggestion that India will never see a social revolution:

I think the last revolution we saw was Mahatma Gandhi mobilizing the people against the British. After that, there is no cause out there: a single point of belief, a single ideal, and a great man who can hold up that ideal and say ‘Look at me, I am truthful, I am honest, I am transparent, I have nothing to hide and this is the ideal we shall follow.’ There is no such person after Gandhi. I doubt such a person can come up in the present kind of politics — I’m sure there are individuals, hundreds, maybe thousands, lakhs of individuals in India who have that mind. But they will never be able to come to the top and lead the people in the political system that we right now have here. So the revolution is impossible. The Communist party attempted it and failed miserably, in fact shamefully.

I will say the only revolution that keeps occurring is the revolution the voter creates every five years. That keeps democracy intact. Every five years there is a revolution in India, and that is very close to half a billion people going to the polling booth and putting his vote in. That is a silent revolution and that keeps this whole place going.

The people we elect are indifferent, inefficient and useless. But they keep democracy in place.

Paul Zacharia in conversation with Chris Lydon in Trivandrum, India. July, 2010