It stands reality on its head to propose seriously that Indian traditions, so powerful, so varied, so ancient and so thoroughly rooted, are vulnerable. Mass American culture will not sweep everything before it, in India or anywhere else. India will not be corrupted. It is clear to me that Indians wish passionately to remain Indian, dress Indian, eat Indian-and watch Indian in the cinema. It may be of some comfort to those who worry about perceived threats that in her recent book The Death of Distance, British writer Frances Cairncross concludes that cheap global communications and the Internet will reinforce and transform democracies. They will shift power downwards and strengthen local cultures. As Cairncross notes, tyrannies fear communications.
In any case, no living culture can be an enclave. In medieval times, people who sheltered behind castle walls and pulled up the drawbridge eventually starved. Rigid and brittle structures break. Supple ones survive and flourish. Languages advance and spread when they are adaptable, creative and find new forms; and traditions at large prosper when they absorb and process new ideas. Strength lies in pluralism and complexity as well as in faith. India’s wonderful cultures are strong enough to take what they want. And I have no doubt they will do so and remain deeply and authentically Indian. The writer Claudio Magris observed that the obsessive defence of one’s origins can sometimes be a form of regressive slavery as in other circumstances is a willing submission to being pushed around.
I have written of the pride people have in their country and its achievements as well as their unhappiness that much has been neglected in the fundamental framework of their civilisation: principally, education and water supply and electricity and transport. They are appalled by the lack of simple services. Perhaps young Mister or Miss Billion will have something to say to his/her forebears.
But I have seen, too, that if there are bad and corrupt men in politics and official life, there are many people, including politicians, who are decent, thoughtful and working to improve their India. Nations are built by such people. A friend asked me once: "What is better in shaping a nation, the optimist or the pessimist?" We debated for hours. I was in the optimist camp but I suppose the answer is that you need both. You need dreamers but you also need hard-headed and practical men and women, and sceptics, too; the flashy batsman as well as the toiling bowler.
India is both very old and relatively new; and, as I have observed myself, a modern Indianness, a modern Indian, have taken shape. Eternal India, yes; but, always, an evolving one. Identity is a quest that continues endlessly and is always open.