This is the P&R part of my thoughts on Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, which is the best book I've read in the past few years. Here is a link to the book review in the Entertaining Diversions subforum. I'm posting this in two forums because I think there are two different discussions to be had about this book. The book has a very strong political theme, concerning the (almost inevitably) disastrous results of implementing unfettered capitalism. The India that Boo writes about is an anarcho-capitalist's wet dream; as I mentioned in the book review literally everything is for sale. This includes justice; characters accused of a crime are extorted by police investigators, forensics experts and prosecutors. On the other hand, murders without an obvious suspect are classified as deaths due to disease, because without a suspect to shake down investigating them wouldn't be profitable. Charities take in-kind donations from oversees donors and then sell them to the highest bidder. Corruption infects every level of the society; and everyone in society is looking for a way to make money. Especially from those below them; a vast amount of the paltry income earned by Annawadi's residents is skimmed off by various officials looking for bribes. Amy Chua wrote a book on this subject, from which the essay A World on the Edge is excerpted. Her particular focus was on the implementation of laizzes faire capitalism in a society with deep ethnic tensions, and the disastrous (and murderous) results that often flow from such decisions. Behind the Beautiful Horizons is a work in the same genre; offering up a look at capitalism unfettered by social mores and cultural norms. Westerners like to believe that some things ought to be beyond the market's reach, though we differ on where the line ought to be drawn. Yet, when we take a step back, it becomes obvious that the debate over whether or not basic health ought to be a basic right or a market applies equally to concepts like criminal and civil justice. Other than the fact that it's pretty squicky, who says that a wealthy person shouldn't be able to pay their way out of a crime? Annawadi is a cautionary tale of capitalism run rampant; it can properly be placed alongside William Gibson's various novels and the Cyberpunk role-playing game. In Annawadi, everything has a price and everyone is looking to make a profit. Now that I've done the typing, I'm actually not sure that there's much to discuss here; except for various extreme libertarians and the various anarcho-capitalist nuts nobody will find the idea of truly unfettered capitalism uncontroversial. Any economist worthy of the profession will tell you that capitalism needs to be accompanied by strong social mores and institutions in order to reign in its excesses. At the very least, the next time you're arguing with an anarcho-capitalist, you've got another example of why we shouldn't totally eliminate all public institutions!
I loved that book, thanks for posting about it. Having spent a lot of time in India, it was even more fascinating due to having seen a lot of it first hand (and I've been to that area near Mumbai - shudder.) The complex part of it is that the culture in India is so conducive to victimization and victims who feel that it is simply their karma to be in a bad situation. I was appalled at having dinner in a luxurious restaurant in Chennai, then coming out and seeing people sitting almost naked in trash 10 meters from the front door. Leaving a production plant that was filled with amazing, cutting edge technology and within a minute of leaving the gates, driving past people sitting in a concrete square with no front wall, with an open fire in the middle of the floor. When I asked my friend who is the CTO of a big company over there (and he is African) how the people can sit in trash and squalor and see the wealth within hands reach and not have some kind of revolution, he said he has come to find it is part of the whole karma attitude, the "this is where I am meant to be in this life, and if I simply accept it I have a chance at a better life when I come back next time." I have been a lot of places, a lot of countries in my life. India is the one country where I don't think I could move, even if it was only a short (e.g. 2 or 3 year) assignment.
Perhaps your friend is right--I know nothing about the culture of the Indian underclasses. This sounds like exactly the sort of thing I'd expect to hear the wealthy tell themselves anywhere in the world, however. There's always a narrative about how the slaves in the field picking cotton are content with and/or deserving of their lot in life.
No, that was my first thought also. I was very disturbed by the class gap all around me - beggars next to a movie studio, etc. I ended up talking to a Hindu priest in a temple (long story) and he said the same thing, essentially.
I semi-grew up in India (lived there from age of 4-17, but when I was 8 my parents sent me to boarding school in England, as the Indian school I was attending was too harsh discipline wise, though it did instill lifetime love of cricket) At the age of 15 I was the most ardent Mao-ist that ever was. The Indian caste system is beautiful in its control. It isn't so much that the poor feel that they deserve it, and hey, could be worse, you could be a locust, it is that the rich think that they deserve it, because they were super cool in a previous life. So the usual incubator for revolution & change (privileged students appalled by their privilege) doesn't/ didn't exist. Those revolutionaries (by Indian standards) Gandhi & Nehru were both very foreign influenced/ educated. But god, I love/d that country. It was hard to explain to people in England, the harshness & vibrancy of the colours, how stepping over dead bodies in the street became normal, the absolute sense of otherness of being the only white boy in a town of millons (this was 70's/ 80's India, before it opened up) As a little boy, I could pretty much go anywhere and do anything, playing with street kids in the gutter one day, attending a hi-so wedding the next, watching a juggarnaut parade the next. Probably another reason for my parents to send me to UK - I had a tendancy to go walkabout, that drove them frantic!
You mean the British Raj's caste system. Pinning down the origins of the modern myth of caste in India is very difficult, but the hybridization of Indian elite and British colonial interests makes for a much more plausible explanation than "welp it's India, hope they get civilized some day and put aside all of this petty cultural stuff that's self-imposed across class".
Dunno about that, but you are probably right. The entire concept of India is from the British Raj - the Congress Party were almost exclusively "foreign" elite Indians with a liberal western outlook. An ex girlfriend wrote her thesis on the regional nationalist movements, that had little truck with Congress, especially the Bengalis, and were much more radical. I wrote a high school paper on S C Bose, an interesting character to say the least (he broke with Gandhi, met Hitler, and raised the INA from captured Indian Army soldiers in Burma, finally died in Taiwan) One of those odd coincidences, one of his followers who was in the sub taking him from Germany to Japan ran a local carpet factory, interviewing him was special.
For what it's worth, Boo's narrative doesn't seem to lay any blame directly on the class system. Her focus is almost entirely on economic exploitation. Certainly class exists and exerts a pernicious influence, but it doesn't seem to be the proximate cause of the awfulness she portrays.
