The Spoils of Indian Democracy (Page 3)

If Luce's book is shaped by the rigid certainties of neoliberalism, Mira Kamdar's account of how India is changing the world is fueled by a breathless enthusiasm that seems to have less to do with economics and more to do with identity.

An Indian-American scholar at the Asia Society, Kamdar is an enthusiast of most things Indian and has clearly done extensive research for this book. As a result, Planet India contains nuggets of information on everything from the animation industry in India to a party at Tavern on the Green for Mira Nair's new film:

At the cocktail party preceding the screening, the Who's Who list of the Indian diaspora cultural elite went on endlessly. I did catch celebrated actress and author Madhur Jaffrey, just out with her memoir Climbing the Mango Trees, and her husband, accomplished violinist Sanford Allen. Filmmaker Jagmohan Mundhra... and his wife, Chandra, and their film producer daughter, Smriti Mundhra, were there. I saw Sarita Choudhury, who starred in Mira Nair's film Mississippi Masala.

I'm sure Kamdar enjoyed herself, even if there were people she missed in the huge crowd.

In India, she covers a wide terrain and a great breadth of subjects, including the obvious divide between the upper classes and the majority, the distress in rural areas and the overwhelming environmental crisis. Kamdar is clearly liberal in her worldview, critical of Wal-Mart, American inequality and the elite Indians who worship at the shrines of Wal-Mart and American-style inequality. But too much of her book is taken up by smooth-toned capitalists who assure her that they will "create purchasing power and turn India's poor into consumers," which sounds more like a threat than a promise, and who say, "Our biggest challenge is the challenge nobody has solved in the world: how to grow equity," which sounds like hokum.

Both books reveal, if in different ways, how significant India's business class has become in shaping perceptions of the country. Ostensibly suffering under the weight of the state, they have nevertheless managed to accumulate great wealth and are in the process of discovering solutions to inequality, social injustice and environmental degradation. In that sense, Indian businessmen--especially those in technology--spout the rhetoric of "frictionless capitalism" that enriches the individual while saving the world. Slavoj Zizek, writing in The London Review of Books about the originators of this idea--Bill Gates and his "court-philosophers" like Friedman--noted how they offer a geeky smartness as the solution to all the world's problems:

Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralised bureaucracy; believing in dialogue and co-operation as against central authority; in flexibility as against routine; culture and knowledge as against industrial production; in spontaneous interaction and autopoeisis as against fixed hierarchy.

Zizek observes that this kind of corporate philanthropy simply involves giving with one hand what has been grabbed with the other. In India, however, there seems to be more grabbing than giving going on, reminding us of what Marx said of the British in India: They had to first get India in order to subject it afterward to their sharp philanthropy.

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