Delhi (24 page)

No culture is timeless or impermeable, for all the claims. Hinduism has evolved in conversation (and conflict) with the West, Christianity and Islam. It continues to adapt to new technologies and audiences, often with great fleetness of foot. Swapan Dasgupta, a prominent advocate, speaks proudly of ‘evangelical Hinduism' and compares it to the showy mega-churches and preachers of American evangelical Christianity.

Strikingly unusual, though, is twenty-first-century Hinduism's primary audience. In most of the world the poor are more religious than the rich. In India, and in an interesting selection of other countries (China, Brazil, Turkey, some of the Arab world: all aspirant powers), the reverse is true. As Akshardham shows, the emerging world's middle classes are not necessarily becoming disenchanted with science and the market. Instead, science is absorbed by religion, à la the boat ride and its many inventions; the market tapped for snazzy new temples; and the socially mobile realize that they ought to get in on conspicuous religion too.

The real coup for Hinduism comes with the internationally popular idea that it is fundamentally peaceful and benign, a lifestyle choice rather than an expansionary religion. As one of the bureaucrats I interviewed claimed: ‘Hinduism is not a religion. It is a way of life.' (Yes, regardless of my questions, somehow the interview breadcrumbs always led back into the forest.) He continued, ‘All paths eventually lead to the same God, though Hinduism is the oldest and purest.'

This is the subtle genius of contemporary neo-Hinduism, and a claim I would hear repeatedly from Indians and tourists alike. Across the West, Hindus have become a model minority, the antithesis of Muslims. They work hard, they integrate, they get rich, and they don't bomb anyone. Of course, this picture focuses on the middle-class migrant, not the poor Indian in Saudi Arabia or the illegal worker in London. It is a cleansed and narrow ideal, which conveniently ignores the fact that Hinduism too has chauvinistic and intolerant strands (though, like other religions, it is not reducible to these). The modern atrocities committed in its name—in Ayodhya and Mumbai in 1992, Gujarat in 2002, even Delhi in 1984—deservedly received huge amounts of attention in the 1990s.

The worst excesses of the 1990s recede into memory. Perhaps equally concerning today, as Meera Nanda's plain-speaking book
The God Market
(2009) argues, is a creeping Hinduization of public space in India—and a Hinduization that is less tolerant than Western myths suppose. As I interviewed the bureaucrat, a red thread upon his wrist, his Hinduism was discreet but insistent. The idea it might be inappropriate in his profession was seen as a Western anachronism. Nanda describes a ‘state-temple-corporate complex', in which politicians, businessmen and Sathya Sai Baba-style mega-gurus increasingly collaborate. Gandhi has been accused of bringing the Hindu idiom into popular politics, but today the place of religion in public life is conspicuous and unashamed to a degree never seen previously in independent India.

Perhaps the only surprise is that it took the majority religion in a religious country so long to assert itself conspicuously. In the post-1991 new India, tradition and national identity become key resources in the fight against the crushing force of Westernization. The equation of Hindu = India is almost too tempting to resist.

I mulled over several theories as to why shiny new Akshardham is so enthusiastically visited, while far older Delhi sites stand virtually empty, like the tombs of enigmatic slave-kings in Mehrauli. Appreciating ruins is a fairly recent invention: given they smack of decay's inevitability, perhaps it takes an especially confident or especially philosophical generation to start the habit. Perhaps Delhi the prospective world city wants—
needs
—a big, glossy, self-congratulatory monument like Akshardham to position itself in the world. Domestic tourists flock to other relics, though, from Hyderabad's Golconda Fort to the Ajanta and Ellora Caves, so maybe Delhi simply has too many ruins already. Perhaps, like me, everyone was just searching for answers that seemed elusive in the money-grubbing city, and found them in Akshardham's shine.

Or perhaps Dilliwallas just really, really like indoor boat rides.

11

T
ONGUES

Hindi? Hindi?! It's not even a real language! Why would you want to learn that redneck tongue, when you could learn beautiful, glorious, poetical Bengali?

—Uncle

‘O
h, ah, India.' A typical British conversation.The woman, I remembered, had said it in the same way you might say ‘newt collecting' or ‘sebaceous cyst', nodding a little too heartily, fingers whitening around her wineglass. ‘It must be warm out there.' English weather-speak, the anthropologist Kate Fox reminds us, is the human equivalent of chimpanzee grooming. I swear introductions back home were easier when I could say I studied toilets.

And then the classic question: ‘So, do you speak The Language?' Or, as one old and dinner-encrusted Oxford don once wince-inducingly put it: ‘Do you speak Hindoo?'

The answer would be complicated even if I had a crumb of linguistic facility. Stand on the streets of any global city and you will hear a host of different tongues. In this, as in everything else, Delhi boasts a mixture of the familiar, the foreign, and the unsettling new twist on the known.

It stands at the head of a gigantic Tower of Babel. India has no national language. The constitution lists a host of languages for government development: 22 at present (English does not make the list), though that number is likely to rise again. The country boasts perhaps four hundred more outside this official list, plus thousands of dialects. Many of India's states have their own official languages, though at the federal level the main official language is Hindi (
not
, I stress, ‘Hindoo'). It's now a true world tongue, with perhaps half a billion native or second-language speakers in India and several hundreds of millions more around the world. Stage #27 (approximately) of my journey to Dilliwallihood meant attempting to join this vast group.

Bollywood has done much to bolster Hindi's expansion. One such international movie hit, the internationally acclaimed historical cricket film
Lagaan
(2002), contains much to send the eyebrows twitching. Aamir Khan casually whittles a perfect cricket bat; the fielders practise by chasing chickens; the bastardy British display worse muttonchops than a battery sheep farm; a man with a withered arm unwittingly invents spin bowling; et cetera. But for the expat monoglot, by far the most ludicrous and irritating scene of the entire four-hour experience is linguistic.

‘Madam! You have learned Hindi!' exclaim Aamir's muscled pecs.

‘Oh,' the British heroine says airily, twirling a parasol, ‘my faithful manservant taught me over the weekend.'

She's also called Elizabeth, to rub salt in the wounds. Theoretically Hindi should indeed be an easy language to learn, as it stems from the same delicious-sounding mother language (Proto-Indo-European or PIE) as Latin and its progeny, including English. But when I tried to learn Hindi, I rapidly discovered that
Lagaan
wasn't the piece of hard-nosed documentary realism I'd thought.

My faltering studies took me to Mussoorie, self-proclaimed ‘Queen of the Hills', and now a faintly demoralizing honeymoon spot above the celebrated military town and schools of Dehra Dun. It's a little north of Delhi and freezing in the winter—even in the early autumn I wore pink camouflage earmuffs against the morning chill—but close enough that on summer weekends it can feel like an outer suburb.

I stayed in the bungalow of another self-proclaimed Queen, the hawkish and gracefully ageing ‘Rani Ji'. She looked rather like Indira Gandhi—the same cruel eyebrows and aggressively starched saris—and indeed claimed to have been a close friend of the twice prime minister/sometime dictator. (She also claimed that Mahatma Gandhi had dandled her on his knee, and that poppet-sized cricketing legend Sachin Tendulkar had slept on her floor: ‘Such a polite, grateful little man'. I hope she's writing an autobiography.)

The bungalow was damp, and at night spiders the size of ferrets shimmered onto the curtains. During the day Rani Ji ruled. She sat on the porch to survey the town below, and dispensed her wisdom. ‘India has gone dreadfully to seed,' she assured me. Mussoorie was being ruined by swarms of Dilliwallas, who scattered chatter and piles of plastic over the hills, throwing rubbish from their cars and cigarette ends into the forests. These intruders she lampooned as ‘the
paratha
crowd', because they brought their own greasy flatbread lunches up from the city.

Rani Ji herself knew the correct hill station etiquette because she was the estranged wife of an Indian prince. Her father had been so rich that he buried Rolls Royce cars in the Rajasthan desert. High in the clouds, she advised us of the best animals to keep in a royal menagerie: ‘Tigers are infinitely superior to lions; their coats are more manageable. Elephants are prone to the most grievous flatulence, sometimes fatal. Anacondas are disloyal.'

The language school sat above the honeymooning town. The other students included several unsettlingly smiley American missionaries and a woman exploring polyandry in hill tribes. The trees speared the fog to give occasional flickers of the Himalayas. Gangs of langurs hissed at us, all black faces and black homicidal eyes in a froth of grey fur and tentacular limbs. The monkeys especially hated Sukrit-slash-Sukriti, the black-brown puppy who followed loyally behind, a little nippy creature of never-determined gender who was later kidnapped.

Unfortunately, my Hindi could not keep pace with my new menagerie-based knowledge. The textbook appeared untouched since the nineteenth century. I learned how to hail a tonga (a small two-wheeled cart, apparently), and how to bark commands like German offizieren in old war films: ‘Sit down! Speak! Faster!' An entire chapter focused on a class of verbs for feudal overlords: to cause a third party to do
X
for you, e.g. ‘I'll have the carriage brought round, old fruity', ‘Philomena had the man shot'.

I mastered just enough to sound like an imperialist, but still not enough to be remotely interesting—nor, critically, enough to understand the responses. Back down in Delhi, my yearning for practice was frequently thwarted by the fact that 50 percent of speakers became instantly dispirited by my ineptitude and switched to speaking English. To borrow from Mark Twain, I ‘never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.' The other half were chewing paan and their speech was unintelligibly mangled by a mouthful of drugged red spittle. It's like trying to talk to a bunch of drunken vampires.

Each morning I attempted to ‘chat' with Kamala. We reached a working equilibrium. I bellowed incoherently, she did a mocking impression of my bellow, and then we waggled heads at each other until her phone rang. This was punctuated only by the occasional clash of civilizations. The worst of these involved a sanitary towel. Unfortunately, she pronounced it so that it sounded exactly like the Hindi word for ‘tree'. I was bemused until she did a Michael Jackson-style crotch grab.

For all the power of Bollywood, Hindi's dominance is far from unchallenged. India is living proof that languages probably did not evolve to spread Miss World-style messages of peace and love across all humanity, but to pass around scurrilous rumours and attack plans against other groups. Its many dictionaries are bloodstained.

Since independence, the subcontinent's new countries all struggled to manage linguistic diversity. India's neighbours showed how high the cost could be. Pakistan's selection of Urdu, mother tongue of only a tiny elite refugee minority, as its national language eventually led to civil war and the loss of half of its population, as East Pakistan broke away to become Bengali-speaking Bangladesh. Discrimination in Sri Lanka (as Ceylon was nationalistically renamed) against the successful Tamil-speaking minority helped fuel a vicious terrorist insurgency—the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, true pioneers of suicide bombing—and a 26-year-long civil war, put to a brutal end only in 2009.

India, which had a finger in both of these pies, has also seen blood spilled over languages. The early years of independence witnessed mass protests and suicides, demanding new states on linguistic lines. But it has generally accommodated its immense linguistic diversity better than its neighbours, redrawing state boundaries on linguistic lines in the 1950s.

Delhi itself now has three official languages, with Punjabi and Urdu alongside Hindi. To a European the linguistic picture looks curious. European languages, at least in the west of the continent, largely share the Latin alphabet: it's easy to pretend you can read French or German or Romanian.

But visually India is a graffiti wall. Across the country different languages have different alphabets. Gujarati is crimped and hatless, Bengali has gnarled runes, while the east coast's Oriya (Odia) appears to made up of cartoon Cubist faces. The South, with its own distinct Dravidian family of languages, has particularly resisted Hindi's imposition, arguing it amounted to a thinly veiled attempt to secure Northern dominance. Southern scripts have more curves than Aishwarya Rai: Tamil is all jalebi whorls, Kannada whorls with eyebrows, Malayalam McDonalds logos. The speakers of some of these may be able to chat together awkwardly, like Portuguese and Spanish speakers, but they probably wouldn't exchange postcards.