I don’t think of myself as living in India, and neither should you.
Here’s why: I live in Gurgaon, in the state of Haryana, not in “India.” Yes, Gurgaon is in India, and Haryana is in India, and technically I do live in India (smartass), but lots of people will tell you that Gurgaon is “not the real India,” and they’re not wrong.
They’re not wrong for a variety of reasons which are specific to Gurgaon and which I will discuss in future blog posts, but for now what I’d like to call attention to is the stunning fact that you could replace the word “Gurgaon” with the name of literally any other city or village in India, and the sentence “_____ is not the real India” would still in some sense be true.
It would be true because India is a country of about 1,250,000,000 people — that is one billion people, i.e. a thousand millions, plus two hundred and fifty more millions, or about four America’s, more than both the U.S. and all of Europe combined — and these twelve-hundred-million-plus Indians are spread out across twenty-eight states which, unlike the U.S.’s 50 states, are in a certain sense like different countries. They are more like European countries than American states — they have different languages (24 officially recognized ones, including Hindi and English, plus a gazillion dialects), different cuisines, different architectures, different appearances, feels, topographies, cultures, customs, crime statistics, social norms, wildlife, tourist destinations, political realities, ethnic compositions, religious makeups, styles of dress, mannerisms, dancing styles, and so on.
Just to give one example: Uttar Pradesh (“UP”) is a state in Northern India. It’s often called the Heart of India for its size and importance. It has about 200 million people living on about 90 thousand square miles (for reference, the continental U.S. is about 300 million people living on about 3 million square miles). People tend to speak either Hindi or Urdu (but generally not Bengali, which is common in West Bengal, for example), and there are like 70 other languages, which vary in frequency depending on where you are in Uttar Pradesh. The state is the home of the Kathak style of dance, and boasts several major dancing schools. The Hindu religious festival Kumbh Mela, reputedly the single largest peaceful gathering in the world, attracts some 100 million (!) pilgrims to the Ganges River, once every 3 years. There is a whole Wikipedia page on the UP economy, and another about its cuisine. Etc. etc.
…and then there are 27 other states. Plus the several different ‘states’ effectively within Uttar Pradesh, each with its own idiosyncrasies.
Not so long ago, these 28 states weren’t even part of a single “India.” As recently as the 1940s, India didn’t have its own national government, there were over 500 princely states, and of those 500 princely states not even two dozen had their own governments. Mass migration between states only really picked up in the early 20th century — if you were born in one state, you probably stayed there, for most of India’s history. Only a few hundred years ago, huge swaths of what is now “India” were the domain of some Persian empire, or Afghan empire, or Islamic empire, or British empire, and “India” was not much more than an idea. Delhi is a perfect example of this — you can stand in the Red Fort and literally be standing on the graveyard of multiple empires. (It gives you a sense that nothing lasts forever, least of all civilizations, even apparently dominant civilizations like that of the West). Nothing has always been what it is today — not the religion, nor the architecture, nor the infrastructure, nor the people, nor the language, nor anything.
(Not even death and taxes are immutable here. A few decades ago, Gurgaon was basically a tiny hamlet with approximately zero inhabitants and huge tracts of empty, rocky, undeveloped land — hence no death, and no taxes. And today it is a booming city of 1.5 million people which, along with nearby Faridabad, generates half of Haryana state’s income taxes.)
So there are really many different Indias, and even most Indians haven’t seen them all.
If you live in the U.S., and you still haven’t seen even half of the 50 States, imagine living in a country four times the size of yours, and the States are really different countries… now how well do you think you’d know your own country?
Here is a related story: A coworker of mine recently said that I was very inquisitive about India. I told him yes, that’s true, in part because I am constantly confused here, and surprised, and entertained, and put in awkward or uncomfortable or new or strange or unfamiliar situations — and not always because India is different from the U.S., oftentimes something will be familiar or American-looking, which is just as much a reason to ask a question (it is a strange experience, for example, to see a woman in booty shorts on an Indian street, or to see a corporate training happen very much the same way it might happen anywhere else in the West, and forget for a moment that you are in India, then remember where you are and say “hm, this feels kinda weird!”). And so, because I am not 100% in my own element, I have a lot of questions about what’s going on. I want to know why something is the way it is, or whether it’s the way I think it is (often I find that I’d been wrong about some notion, so often that I’ve learned to heavily discount my own beliefs about everything here, and indeed everything else, which is something else I’ll blog about soon). I want to know what to expect when X happens (I am rarely fully prepared). I want to find my bearings, or to at least move in that direction, even if I’ll never totally get there. So yes, I’m inquisitive.
Being inquisitive, I asked this coworker, “Have you ever had this experience? Have you ever felt out of place and had to ask a lot of questions?” And he said that yes, he had — but only while travelling to different parts of India. He told me that going to another state has been, for him, at times like going to a different country. ”You travel for five hours and it looks like a completely different place. The people are different, the buildings are different, people speak a different language, and say things I don’t understand,” he said.
And this is a middle class, well-educated, and more professionally experienced guy than a lot of others. He is the sort of person who would probably know more about India than the median Indian. Yet even he still feels like a stranger in a strange land in parts of his own country.
Point being, there really isn’t just “one real India.” To the extent that there is “one India,” it takes the form of a) a national identity that many Indians hold in their hearts, and b) a legal regime called the Republic of India. It’s not like there’s this one single place you can go to for a while and say “Aha! Now I’ve seen the real India.” You can literally spend a lifetime here (as many Indians have) and still parts of your own country will seem mysterious.
Some people say that the villages, especially the remote, rural villages, are “the real India.” And in a certain sense that’s true — they’re not polished, or corrupted, or influenced as much, by the forces of globalization. They are less Western; more “authentic.” Their poverty and remoteness has kept them relatively insulated — mobile phones and migrant workers notwithstanding.
But even among the villages there is a huge cultural/linguistic/other variety. A village in Bihar might be just as different from “the big city” as it is from a “similar” village in Kerala.
And even within villages there is a lot of variety. Two families living just up the road from one another can both be very poor, and yet one can still be much richer than the other. The head of the “rich” poor family might be educated, make $3,000 per year (PPP), and provide for his family in a thatched-roof hut filled with various types of “capital” (musical instruments, decorations, clothing and so on), and supplemented by remittance income from a migrant relative, whereas the head of the “poor” poor family might only be semi-literate, earn $1,000 per year (PPP), pimp out his own own wife or daughters, and live in a porous tent with not much more than a few cooking implements. That is an enormous difference in both wealth and income, in the same village, and yet they are both very poor by global standards! And so I, as a Westerner, or even an Indian like the coworker I mentioned above, could very easily visit one of these families, stay with them for a while, and say, “Aha! Now I’ve seen the real India!” and still (in a certain sense) be wrong about that.
“_____ is not the real India” is just about always partly true.
Point being, don’t think of me as living in India. I don’t live in India so much as I live in Gurgaon, in Haryana state.
Gurgaon is a very interesting place, and I’ll write more about it later, but for now just be aware that sometimes you’ll see me say “In India, they…” or “In India, I saw…” when really what I should have said was “In Gurgaon they,” or “In Haryana they,” or “In Northern India they…” and you as the reader will have to correct me in your head as you read what I’m writing about “India.”
I’ll be sharing more on my local/regional/Indian experiences later. This is all just a cautionary note.
PS — Tyler Cowen’s new favorite lunch question is related to the point I’m trying to make in this post, and it would be a lot of fun to see discussed seriously among my coworkers. (Though Tyler’s commenters seem not to like it very much…)