India
Artifact One
Christianity in India can trace its roots back to the Apostle Thomas, but as the article explains, “most Indians consider Jesus to be a white, Western god” — thanks in large part, I’d imagine, to the British legacy. What does it mean, then, to have an authentically Indian Christianity? The question resonates on multiple levels. There is the question of form — Western-style megachurch, house church, or self-sustaining church that runs a business on the side? And, even more important, the question of theology — does an Indian Christianity mean, in some sense, a Hindu Christianity or a Buddhist Christianity or a Muslim Christianity, as R. B. Lal argues? What is the status of “Christward movements” among tribal peoples who meet to study the Bible but eschew churches and baptism for fear of economic repercussions?
In addition to its strong cultural association with the West, Christianity also is linked to ancient Judaic culture and the culture of early first-century Roman Palestine; Indian Christians are working to translate it into twenty-first century India. It is a process of cultural and theological hybridization — not a seamless one, I imagine, but one that nevertheless seems suffused with hope in a way that Aravind Adiga’s vision of a hybridized India is not. For Adiga, the offspring of India and the West is half-man, half-beast, a monster clawing for life; these Indian Christians, however, see themselves as working in the service of something healthy, vital, and vibrant — or, more accurately, in the service of Someone who does not create monsters.
Artifact Two
It strikes me that the caste system, considered both as jati and as varna, can be read as a striving after the cultural and ethnic purity that colonialism has made impossible. As Akbar puts it, the perseverance of jati is painted as “civilisational strength, modern India’s link with its ancient custom and social practice” — the cord of continuity between pre- and post-colonial societies. Akbar thus notices that Hindu nationalism, of the sort we see so prominently in The Ever After of Ashwin Rao, is largely a Brahmin movement. Venkat, in Viswanathan’s novel, is himself a Tamil Brahmin. And this striving for ethnic purity results in violence — whether the cases of class-based violence noted in Akbar’s article or of violence against Christians referenced in Artifact One, or the bombing of Air India Flight 182, or Hindu-Muslim violence Viswanathan describes.
I wonder if Fanon’s idea that the colonized must violently resist the influence of the colonizer is just another version of this quixotic quest for cultural purity. “Black” and “white” are not such binaries as Fanon would like them to be, and people are not often neatly divisible into community or caste boundaries. If the solution to division is violence, violence will never end.
Artifact Three
Kennard and Provost link the still-being-constructed Lavasa with British imperial “hill stations”: what we have here is a postcolonial incarnation of a colonial institution. The place is owned by Indians and ostensibly for Indians, although the city manager is American, the architectural inspiration is Italian, the name is generic, and, as the authors note, the entire city is “as far as possible from traditional Indian cities, in name, style and architecture.” Jeremy Kahn talks to the city’s owner about Lavasa’s un-Indianness in The Atlantic:
Gulabchand bristles when I bring up this lack of authenticity. “That’s like saying unless you look like a fakir you are not Indian,” he says. “Why should we look to the past? India is a young society.”
Gulabchad rightly recognizes that there is no hard standard of “Indianness” to which he should be expected to conform. Yet his response to this seems to be refusing to consider “Indianness” as a relevant factor at all. He does not seem to recognize that not being bound by the past and not looking to the past at all are two very different things; he also does not seem to recognize that the issue of authentic Indian identity is as much a matter of India’s present as it is of its past. The project would make more sense, I think, had Gulabchad attempted to start from traditionally Indian materials (fraught as the definition of that concept might be) and create something new with them. Instead, Gulabchad seems to seek not an Indian city but a culturally neutered one — as a result, by default, a Western one.
That said, Lavasa will become an Indian city if people live there and make it one. It will be interesting to see if Gulabchad’s project actually attracts this kind of response.
As an addendum, the film Akbar mentions in his article (Artifact Two) looks hilarious.
