IF YOU were to take the one dominant image in any society and use it to deduce that country’s state of mind, then you would judge that India’s greatest current problem is dandruff.
From hundreds of billboards and in a thousand television advertisements, the same young film star, long-haired and stubbly — and now able to overcome his one flaky disability — grins out. All Clear Ice Cool, a menthol-based anti-dandruff shampoo, is the answer.
Back on Earth in Bombay, where you land, skirting just over the corrugated iron roofs of the shanty towns that creep to the runway’s edge, and then taxi to the terminal, scattering the airport dogs, the right counter-scurf medicament seems, to say the least, unimportant. And you wonder, as the taxi drives you through town, what the half-naked pavement-dwellers make of the exhortations hanging 9m (30ft) above their heads to fly Lufthansa to the World Cup.
There are 14 million people inhabiting India’s largest city, selling, making, travelling by every conceivable form of locomotion, living and working in almost every conceivable form of building — save, perhaps, the igloo. The one thing that all these structures seem to have in common is the strange yearning of the Indian building to be a ruin.
The port was the gateway to India and Bombay is still the country’s commercial centre, home to its stock exchange and the first stop in trying to answer one of the great questions of the moment, which is, is all this stuff about the rise of India really true, or a vast media puff and a story for politicians to scare British workers with?
For years after independence in 1947 Indian growth rates were almost ruinously slow. They picked up first in 1980 and then, spectacularly, after 1991, when the Congress Government of Narasimha Rao undertook a sweeping liberalisation of heavily regulated and nationalised industries and services. Much of the dusty, bureaucratic, Fabian-inspired planning system was dismantled, and the private sector, suppressed for years, leapt out of its constraints. The unlikely sherpa for this bit of political mountaineering was the diminutive Finance Minister, now Prime Minister, economist Manmohan Singh. Since 1991 foreign investors have crowded into India, and — even more encouragingly — Indian investors have reciprocated, taking over European and American companies. Surviving the Asian financial crisis of 1998, growth rates have continued to rise. More recently, however, it has become modish (not to mention sensible) to question the nature of the Indian Miracle. Isn’t IT India a little like Bollywood India — lots of glitz but as substantial a representation of reality as the Ice Cool man and his fleck-free hair? This week the subcontinent was admonished with typical grandness by The Economist. “India,” it concluded, “needs to grow much faster. Otherwise, poverty will persist for decades and social tensions will mount.”
You can’t grow much faster than the Bombay suburb of Bandra Kurla, which simply did not exist a decade ago. Built on mangrove swamps that linked the Bombay peninsula to the mainland, Bandra Kurla is Canary Wharf at 36C (97F). From the central plot where the Reliance Company plans to build a giant office block, an amphitheatre of banks rises above and around you: Baroda, ICICI, Wockhardt and many, many more. It’s extraordinary.
“If you had been here just two years ago you would see what a transformation there already is. It’s something we see in our daily lives,” says Sucheta Dalal, columnist for The Indian Express and editor of the magazine Money Life. But in Gujarat state, just to the north, she tells me, growth is even higher, running at 18 per cent per annum. “When I go there every six months I can’t believe how things are changing — infrastructure, roads, water and electricity supplies.”
And it isn’t all in services or IT. The Indian enterprise Bharat Forge will soon become the largest forging company in the world, operating in Scandinavia, Germany and China. Ms Dalal says that Indians who used to emigrate and stay abroad are now coming back to build something in their home towns. It is the Return of the Patels. The confidence is there, evidenced in the property ads, the profusion of new cars, the near-ubiquity of mobile phones. The Indian middle class is rising, and consuming as it rises.
Some of its local representatives would probably like to have consumed the suburb of Dharavi, also known as Asia’s largest slum. Lying to the south of Bandra and just across the River Mithi it, too, was once a swamp. But this area was claimed for Man, not by the great municipality of Bombay, but by a million individual actions on the part of the poor, who found themselves a place to live by gradually raising the land above the water.
Kalpana Sharma, a journalist and author of a book on Dharavi, once interviewed a woman who brought earth in sacks to a place where, eventually, she could build a shelter. Thirty years later the woman was still there, now surrounded by shacks.
Ironically, when Bandra Kurla was planned, says Ms Sharma, the value of neighbouring Dharavi “went up enormously. It’s now pukka land.” The Dharavites have no security of tenure, the area being owned by various state authorities, but, even so, there is no way that the people can be moved out. There are between half a million and a million of them and, over the years, their status has been what is called “regularised”.
First they were recognised, then some basic services were provided — paved roads, standpipes, electrical connections and public toilets — and finally the slum-dwellers were permitted to upgrade their own homes, if they were able.
Now, Ms Sharma tells me, 50 per cent of Bombay’s population lives in slums. But what she calls the “la-la brigade of the ‘resurgent India’ ” fails to deal with the realities of the poor. There is, for example, no comprehensive housing policy in Bombay. Worse, “just about 60km [37 miles] outside Bombay we have had reports of children under the age of 1 dying from malnutrition. We delude ourselves into believing that we are getting ahead, but if the progress isn’t extending even 60km outside the city, there must be something very wrong in the way in which things are developing!”
Ms Sharma admits, however, that kids have always died in India. Sometimes, in fact, it takes a hard second look to work out how so many survive. Alongside a Stygian canal in Dharavi you can see structures built with a Mad Max, post-apocalyptic ingenuity. Nothing is wasted. Like the nests of the faecal and coal-coloured house crows, people will collect and use anything that can be incorporated into four storeys of corrugated iron — a car radiator grille, large plastic containers, bottles, carpets.
In Britain it would walk off with the Turner Prize. Round the back are tanneries, laundries, all manner of businesses. In this one place you could experience both the sense that all was possible as well as the feeling that everything was intractable. Stand on one spot on Mutton Street in the Thief Market area and a hundred people will pass you in a minute. On Falkland Road dozens of beautiful young prostitutes hang out of the doorways. “F***land Road, we call it, sir!” laughs the cab driver, though the sign “Specialist — VD — Sex — Skin — Dr Shah” suggests that there may not be much to laugh about. A Hindu temple abuts a “stress-management clinic”, a private hospital faces a sign reading, “People who dirty public places are social criminals”.
Just beyond the Happy Home for Blind Children (which overlooks the crematorium) is Bombay’s latest whizzo shopping mall, Atria. Flunkies open the car doors of well-to-do customers, though the mall is hardly open yet. By the entrance two men on stilts in scarlet-and-gold matador outfits welcome visitors, and just inside a 3m (10ft) padded dinosaur is being taunted by a group of delighted, well-scrubbed Indian boys.
Guarded by exceptionally beautiful young women in grey uniforms with the word “Vigilante” on their belt buckles are the emporiums of Swarovski and Aldo. The shopfitters are in at Giordano, but at Identiti you can buy that elegant wooden plaque to put your house name on in brass letters. “Woodlands” seems to be a popular choice. The sulky young manager doesn’t want to talk to me, and it turns out that the place has a history. Half of it is owned by a local right-wing politician, whose nationalist party controls the municipal corporation. For months the local residents had their roads blocked while builders’ lorries parked beside the site. But then an activist filed a series of questions under the country’s new Right to Information Act. Within two days the road was open again.
To Sucheta Dalal this small history suggests a larger truth — that, given the chance, Indians are capable and enterprising. “The biggest single thing in India is our adaptation to technology, whether it’s mobile phones or bank ATMs. Every time I use the ATM I find one person giving a lesson to somebody else.”
For her it is the Nehruvian state that creates the roadblocks, and the people who surmount them. “More and more Indians are so desperate to get out of these 40 years of control, quotas and restrictions,” she said. “They want to use the technology to link up. They want their children to go to good schools and to learn English.”
What’s more, India’s growth is durable. “The population is so huge that you don’t need the kind of consumption that you have in the West to survive or thrive.
“If every family decides to treat itself once a month to a good movie or a Baskin-Robbins ice cream or a meal at McDonald’s, then companies do very well. How little it costs in India to transform a life. For a few hundred extra rupees a seller can get a pushcart, hire a little boy.” Kalpana Sharma is a pessimist. Sure, people have benefited, “the people on the periphery of the middle classes, the people who support the middle classes. It has led to the creation of a certain type of job”.
But, overall, the gaps have widened. “Take this state of Maharashtra, the most urbanised, most industrialised, but here, in just the past six months, 700 farmers have committed suicide because of the agricultural crisis. It will be the undoing of whatever progress we are seeing if, ultimately, these problems are not addressed. It’s a bubble of illusions and it will burst in a terrible way at some point.”
On Sunday evening at Nariman Point — possibly unaware of all this — the families sit on the sea wall looking over the bay to the Malabar Hill. Behind them trip the silver horse carriages, decked in fairy lights, and in between the horses zip a thousand scooters and motorbikes carrying the boys and girls with the Ice Cool haircuts.
