India, a Universe Between Past and Future

It’s easy to say “India,” or rather Bharat, according to the Sanskrit diction that Prime Minister Modi has revived. There are many of them stacked next to each other, each from a different historical era. They live in the same place but not at the same time, all true. India disappoints with both mild enthusiasm and generalizations. It is useless to try to find the real India, to sew Western value systems onto it, to try to interpret its slow flow by looking back at our short time: 22 languages, 22,000 dialects, six major religions, half a million villages, 800 million semi-poor people receiving five kilograms of free rice per month, 350 million middle class representatives (more than in Europe), six-week elections (this year from April 16 to June 1), with 2400 parties competing for one billion voters who will cast their ballots at a million polling stations…

Incredible!ndia: this is not only the apt slogan of the Indian Tourist Bureau, but also the comment of every foreigner who has set foot in India, amazed by its colors, smells, tastes, enthusiasm, Jugaad, the ancient art of getting by… Pierpaolo Pasolini in 1960 published The Smell of India, a diary of a journey he made to India with Morante and Moravia. He described a country that he thought would remain unchanged – poor and dirty – for future generations, humbled, populated by good people, a sweet hell without any kind of future. Instead, in less than two generations, India has changed its skin countless times: it’s still home to 400 million poor people (twice the population of Nigeria), but its diaspora is revitalizing Silicon Valley’s first investor-entrepreneur community; the Dalits – casteless – continue to scavenge through the slums of Calcutta and Mumbai, but the pre-wedding ceremony of hyper-billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s son, Anant, featured Rihanna, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Ivanka Trump, as well as hundreds of Indians from around the world (global Indians), the Bollygarchs; buffaloes continue to plow at the foot of the skyscrapers of high-tech companies in Bangalore and Hyderabad, but Indian high-tech institutes now have little to envy the MIT in Boston and CalTech in Pasadena.

In India, the future is fertilized by the past, and the poorest shoeshine boy retains in his eyes, without realizing it, the glimmer of light that comes from being the last link in a chain, which began with the Vedas a thousand years before Homer wrote The Odyssey and which has never been broken… In India, destiny is accepted, there is no Western desire to imagine the future, to dominate and control it, no determination to impose on the world an order, a scale of values, a logic, a morality as a lockpick. While the West has made great strides in working with the world around “self” and has become materialistic, the East and above all India have delved deeper into the “self” and elevated its spirituality. In our latitudes, increasingly restless and dissatisfied, where ideologies and religions have exhausted their vital charge and became tired liturgies, people no longer wonder about the dimension of life and death, but about how to stay young. Hence there is a fever of consumerism, dangerous revolts against reason, and a refuge into irrationality. In contrast, India, chaotic, disorderly, a repository of values, and a magnet of ideas, reconciling tradition and innovation, counts on its wisdom to always make it stay the same. India does not need the world because it contains a world within itself, as its intellectuals claim, without arrogance because they take it for granted.

India is an endless continent and can be loved or hated at first sight. A stranger? Yes, a world where the concept of time is circular, whereas our world is linear, it is dedicated to introspection, while ours to externalization, they have millions of deities, doctrines of rebirths and reincarnations, where there is no creed because there is no founder, a galaxy of spirituality not governed by central ecclesiastical hierarchies, where life is understood as a continuous sequence of sacred moments, based on a cosmic order that permeates and sustains all reality, divine and human: the essence of existence is identified with an inexpressible universal principle called Brahman, which in a human corresponds to Atman. A human is chained to his actions by Karman in the cycle of existences, Samsara, liberation from which only higher knowledge allows. This is the mystery that India offers to its visitors, a mystery that cannot be solved or understood, but only observed and respected.

The first and most serious of the many mistakes the West makes in looking at India is cultural in the broadest sense. The depth of these differences in sensitivity compared to our standards is poorly understood and generally underestimated. We have an outdated and superficial knowledge of India, steeped, as we were and still are to a large extent, in a stereotypical vision that is less and less in tune with the actual reality of what has meanwhile become one of the world’s five largest economies, a nuclear power, which claims a seat on the UN Security Council, which has fought 27 wars since independence, and which, rightly or wrongly, believes it can conduct a dialog on an equal footing with the United States and China, as well as act as a model of attraction to the composite galaxy of the Global South.

Consider, for example, the concept of modernity, which carries a measure of what we think of as its opposite, backwardness. There was no traumatic rupture in India as in the West, with its end of Greco-Roman civilization and a rebirth of society and culture on Judeo-Christian spiritual foundations, nothing like the Enlightenment revolution, French or American. India does not separate, like the West, historical eras that inevitably follow one after the other, without a break. In India, time is still tied to the cyclical concept. There are no turning points; unlike in China, there was no “Long March” or “Cultural Revolution” here, no Deng Xiaoping-like transformation, no repression like that of Tiananmen. Everything is metabolized, digested. India does not have a history as we understand it in our region, consisting of events and persons, but only a continuous gallery of myths. The present is built from the bricks of the past and serves as a foundation for the future. In India, modernity could never be implemented the way it was in China. Eternal India, say the Indian Brahmins, existed before all others and produced everything that matters, from transcendence to the spiritual preconditions of quantum physics. It is argued that the West has yet to deal with the wounds inflicted on it by Copernicus, Darwin, Freud, and the Industrial Revolution. India, they believe, would not need cultural revisionism, as everything had been written and foreseen by Vedanta more than 40 centuries ago.

Are those Indian scientists who perform puja, a ritual prayer, before launching satellites into orbit less modern than ours? Or is Prime Minister Modi backward when he chooses the day and time of his and the government’s oath of office as those dictated to him by his personal astrologer? Moreover, if India is experiencing a kind of eternal historical present, the very notion of modernity loses its efficacy. A Tryst with Destiny was announced by Prime Minister Nehru when he lowered the Union Jack in front of the last British Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, a reward for a millennial and loyal “predisposition to greatness.” In this, Nehru was no less modern in his years than Modi is today. In fact, the Indian soul is incognizable by definition, just as is the so-called breath of life sung in the Vedic hymns. Therefore, this is a country, for which definitions are useless and which does not encourage Western Cartesian reductionism. General de Gaulle’s War Memoirs come to mind: “Vers l’Orient compliqué je volais avec des idées simples” (To the complex East I flew with simple ideas). India, unlike China, is in no hurry.

The priority of face-saving is a common idea throughout Asia, but in India it is carried to paroxysm. Everything is negotiable, except reputation. India’s relationship with its colonial legacy remains extremely delicate: the purchase of Jaguars, Land Rovers, and 470 Tata Group Airbuses for the new Air India from Royal Enfield, Arcelor, figuratively speaking, provided fuel to reaffirm the pride of a nation aware that, at the time of the East India Company’s arrival in the country, it was far richer than the colonizing nation. India is a young state with a strong sense of national identity, living with an intransigence rooted in its past. This must be taken into account in the approach to its ruling class.

It must be noted that despite hints of insecurity, the self-awareness of Indians is very high: India dismantled the British Empire; this is the only reality that can rival the global cultural influence of the United States; one of its probes reached Mars on the first attempt (which the Chinese and Japanese failed to do) and another touched the South Pole of the Moon, a feat never before accomplished by others (giving Modi the opportunity to declare that “the sky has no boundaries”); it is a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization with China and the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue with the United States; it does not hesitate to veto WTO; it became the world’s most populous country in 2023; it set the goal to surpass China’s GDP by 2050; it is the India-born Indians, or Indians’ children, to head some of the major financial and technological giants in America, the so-called Indian Power, from the Alphabet-Google CEO Sundar Pichai to Satya Nadella of Microsoft, from IBM’s Arvind Krishna to Chanel’s head Lena Nadel, and dozens of others; some of the world’s largest business groups are Indian: from Reliance Industries, owned by the aforementioned Ambani, the richest person in Asia, to Bharti Airtel and Infosys. And this is where the widespread arrogance comes in. Is India poor? Today, but not yesterday or tomorrow. Is it still the standard bearer of underdevelopment? But there were 500 kingdoms when the East India Company came in, and Delhi will soon develop like China, even if today its GDP is one-fifth of Beijing’s – that is the reason. Europe is seen as an aging continent in demographic and financial decline, with wealth it can no longer afford and unsure of its role in the world.

It is not true that Indians are devoid of logic. They have a concept of time that is not the same as the one we use in the West. India is home to a host of thinkers and ascetics who argue that reality is not what it appears to be, given that it is located at levels inaccessible to perception by untrained senses, such as the Western senses. Free will in our culture is predominantly a rational act; however, for Indians it is subject to a karmic view of life. Our center of rationality is located in the mind, they have it in the heart. Indians have no intention of compromising on any possibility: while our country is the land of “or” (this or that), India is the land of “and” (this and that).

Can a country such as India that, like few international players, has come from afar, develop an effective mandate for change? India at the beginning of the 21st century is in a phase of exponential acceleration, experiencing tremendous contradictions in terms of growth rather than, as in the past, subjugation and backwardness. This game-changer mandate handed over to Modi today has only one precedent in the history of a united India: it is again about Nehru, a man who was as different as can be from today’s Modi, so much so that he boasts of his humble origins, speaks poor English, and adheres to a populist agenda, while the other was elitist, cultured, secular, imbued with Western values, an ardent supporter of dirigiste planning, but respectful of Indian traditions and peculiarities. Like Nehru, Modi – a pious Hindu, as he likes to call himself, Vishwaguru, the leader of the world, as his supporters call him – is determined to return India to its rightful place. He undertook a decisive politico-economic course correction through his Make in India program (more on this later), providing strong leadership still dependent on mediation by corporate interests, but attentive to the necessary infrastructural modernization of the country, which requires gigantic flows of international investment. He is a roller, pragmatic, resolutely conservative, a thousand miles away from the now bloodless Indian National Congress of the Gandhi dynasty. He seeks to put New Delhi at the center of the management of the world forums where important decisions are made: in 2022, it hosted the presidency of the G-20 and organized The Voice of the Global South Summit, where more than a hundred countries were invited, but not China. Its aim is to pit Pax Indica against Pax Sinica in an unknown future, hence New Delhi’s difficult balancing of the multi-alliance between Washington and Moscow and positioning itself as the standard-bearer of the world in this development process, with suspensions of the FCCC, climate conferences, in the belief that no one will be able or willing to stand in the way of a power that intends to become a superpower. Much of Modi’s political investment will depend on his ability to combine nationalism and faith aimed at economic and social modernization: an ambitious project that operates on a razor’s edge because institutional India has always been secular, with its ethnic kaleidoscope and its thousand religious affiliations. Essentially, he claims that the only religion in his country is India first, a combination of Indian uniqueness and Hindu identity, but in the meantime, he opens a temple of the god Ram in Ayodhya, as well as preaches and implements Hindu supremacism. The involution of democracy is in plain sight…

These are some of the central elements for understanding India and our relationship with its ruling class. India – to quote Indira Gandhi’s famous expression – is everything and the opposite of everything. Coexistence of the private and the universal, the buffalo house and Infosys, the objective and the subjective, facts and myths, the finite and the infinite, the linear and the circular, the analytical and the intuitive, the mind and the heart. In short, India is a land of paradoxes and complexities. India, above all, just like China, is a place where History has not ended but, like a pendulum, is swinging back…

Not with the hospitable and tolerant India of the collective imagination, as entrenched as it is obsolete, but with this tiresome India, which is associated with superiority complexes and deep insecurity, with its exceptionalism and what it perceives as a manifest destiny, with which the world, sooner than it suspected, is beginning to come to terms.