The recent events in India finally got me around to reading William Dalrymple for the first time - an omission that I sorely needed to correct. I cannot count the number of times people I respect have recommended reading Dalrymple. The book I started with is The Age of Kali. His opening chapter is about his time in the bowels of Bihar - a state where I have spent a lot of years of my life. The PTSD inducing qualities for his prose for one such as myself cannot be overstated.
I was fortunate enough not to live in places like Gomoh during my time there, but the level of fear and anxiety that formed the background noise of my life back then is incomparable to anything I have experienced since then. Having spent my formative years in Bihar created a baseline for what I was able and willing to tolerate in life - a level not everyone can measure up to. I have friends from my childhood scattered around the world now, who like me are the product of their time in Bihar. We are fundamentally different and reading Dalrymple helps explains why.
A lot of the background and context Dalrymple provides throughout the book is meant for readers unfamiliar with India. He does a great job of summarizing the information in a way that helps the reader understand the experiences he goes on to describe. However, there are some oversimplifications:
The lower castes are no longer content to remain at the bottom of the pile and be shoved around by the Brahmins. Laloo has given them a stake in power and made them politically conscious: exactly as the Civil Rights Movement did for American blacks in the 1960s.
There are some parallels certainly to the civil rights movement on the surface. However, political leaders like Laloo driving the charge of lower caste "empowerment" cannot be compared even remotely to those of the Civil Rights Movement and that makes all the difference in the outcomes for those that are being purportedly "liberated" in India. They have gone from being exploited by one set of overlords to another.
His insight into Bihar and its place in the fate of India is undeniable when he says:
In a very real sense, Bihar may be a kind of Heart of Darkness, pumping violence and corruption, pulse after pulse, out in to the rest of the subcontinent. The first ballot-rigging recorded in India took place in Bihar in the 1962 general election. Thirty years later, it is common across the country. The first example of major criminals winning parliamentary seats took place in Bihar in the 1980 election. Again, it is now quite normal all over India.
He moves on to other parts of India, some of which are more familiar to me than others. The Rajasthan section was particularly hard to read - the Roop Kanwar reference brought back memories of reading about this tragedy in the news. The blur of reading about the custom of Sati in history and this event in the news had us confused as kids. I don't recall anyone making an effort to clarify any of this to us. The news cycle moved on to other topics and no one talked about it anymore.
Having also spent several years in Bangalore at different points in my life, I struggled with this observation, Dalrymple makes:
In conversations about India’s future, just as Bihar is sometimes presented as a vision of where India could be heading if everything went wrong, so Karnataka, and particularly the area around Bangalore, is held up as what the country could be like in twenty years’ time if everything went right.
Bangalore is no longer that icon of perfection and has not been for a long time. But context, perspective, and scale do matter here. In Bangalore, a person may struggle with very long commutes and limited access to running water. Juxtaposed against Bihar, these are silly problems to complain about and so his statement is true; a sad acknowledgment of how dire things are.
In summary, I am very glad I finally got around to reading Dalrymple. There is almost a therapeutic quality in this book for me. An outsider to India and Bihar was able to diagnose the pain much like a doctor treating a patient who struggles even to describe the symptoms of their terrible malady.
I was fortunate enough not to live in places like Gomoh during my time there, but the level of fear and anxiety that formed the background noise of my life back then is incomparable to anything I have experienced since then. Having spent my formative years in Bihar created a baseline for what I was able and willing to tolerate in life - a level not everyone can measure up to. I have friends from my childhood scattered around the world now, who like me are the product of their time in Bihar. We are fundamentally different and reading Dalrymple helps explains why.
A lot of the background and context Dalrymple provides throughout the book is meant for readers unfamiliar with India. He does a great job of summarizing the information in a way that helps the reader understand the experiences he goes on to describe. However, there are some oversimplifications:
The lower castes are no longer content to remain at the bottom of the pile and be shoved around by the Brahmins. Laloo has given them a stake in power and made them politically conscious: exactly as the Civil Rights Movement did for American blacks in the 1960s.
There are some parallels certainly to the civil rights movement on the surface. However, political leaders like Laloo driving the charge of lower caste "empowerment" cannot be compared even remotely to those of the Civil Rights Movement and that makes all the difference in the outcomes for those that are being purportedly "liberated" in India. They have gone from being exploited by one set of overlords to another.
His insight into Bihar and its place in the fate of India is undeniable when he says:
In a very real sense, Bihar may be a kind of Heart of Darkness, pumping violence and corruption, pulse after pulse, out in to the rest of the subcontinent. The first ballot-rigging recorded in India took place in Bihar in the 1962 general election. Thirty years later, it is common across the country. The first example of major criminals winning parliamentary seats took place in Bihar in the 1980 election. Again, it is now quite normal all over India.
He moves on to other parts of India, some of which are more familiar to me than others. The Rajasthan section was particularly hard to read - the Roop Kanwar reference brought back memories of reading about this tragedy in the news. The blur of reading about the custom of Sati in history and this event in the news had us confused as kids. I don't recall anyone making an effort to clarify any of this to us. The news cycle moved on to other topics and no one talked about it anymore.
Having also spent several years in Bangalore at different points in my life, I struggled with this observation, Dalrymple makes:
In conversations about India’s future, just as Bihar is sometimes presented as a vision of where India could be heading if everything went wrong, so Karnataka, and particularly the area around Bangalore, is held up as what the country could be like in twenty years’ time if everything went right.
Bangalore is no longer that icon of perfection and has not been for a long time. But context, perspective, and scale do matter here. In Bangalore, a person may struggle with very long commutes and limited access to running water. Juxtaposed against Bihar, these are silly problems to complain about and so his statement is true; a sad acknowledgment of how dire things are.
In summary, I am very glad I finally got around to reading Dalrymple. There is almost a therapeutic quality in this book for me. An outsider to India and Bihar was able to diagnose the pain much like a doctor treating a patient who struggles even to describe the symptoms of their terrible malady.
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