Hindol Sengupta’s Recasting India advances the proposition that what holds India together and what has been slowly but steadily transforming the country in recent decades is a rise of entrepreneurship among the common people of the country. This sure yet imperceptible growth of free enterprise among ordinary Indians, Sengupta implies, has been the outcome of the economic liberalisation that took root in the country during the 1990s and which constitutes the key trait of the political culture of the Indian right. Indeed, the book reads in parts like a manifesto promoting the politico-economic agenda of the BJP, complete even with a defence of Narendra Modi’s (in)actions in curbing the Godhra riots. Perhaps, this is only to be expected from a book that is endorsed by none other than Arvind Panagariya, who has emerged in recent years as the academic voice of market capitalism as against the idea of the socialist welfare state.
Despite his rather obvious political conviction, Sengupta delivers a volume that is enriched with research-led anecdotes of real life entrepreneurs — success stories of enterprising and innovative Indians whose efforts seem to have made a difference personally to them and collectively to their communities. One ends the book with a feeling that, perhaps, there indeed is a steady spirit of change — a growth of ‘Per Capita Hope’, as Sengupta puts it — that is set to take the country on to the high road leading to pervasive economic development and societal well-being. But how much of this positive change of mindsets and industry among the people, especially the youth, is due to any particular brand of politics and how much of it is simply a generational change influenced by a growing homogenisation of youth-culture globally is anybody’s guess.
The introduction sets out Sengupta’s basic premise that, unlike in the West — which is awakening to the in-built defect of capitalism, namely the propensity to generate inequality — India has only recently started to reap the benefits of capitalism. While acknowledging that even in India the gap between the rich and the poor is widening, leading to what he calls the ‘Antilia Syndrome’, Sengupta underlines his perception that “India is brimming with the aspiration of a billion entrepreneurial minds” who constitute the “‘animal spirits’ of the economy” and who are keen to benefit by the liberating drives generated by a state that not only doles out ‘welfare’ but enables enterprise. Sengupta opines that theorists and commentators like Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze, or Arundhati Roy, whose prism of analysis is Marxist theory, see only despair in India’s poverty, totally missing the Indian people’s ‘yearning for one chance, one opportunity to break free’ and failing to appreciate the role the state needs to play to give the people their chances in life.
The rest of the book provides concrete examples of the actions of the ‘entrepreneurial minds’ Sengupta celebrates. Thus, the first chapter summarises the phenomenal business success of ‘Prince’ Dwarakanath Tagore, the grandfather of India’s first Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore. Chapter two focusses on the rise of entrepreneurship in Kashmir — a development that has been slowly changing the valley, making it both more prosperous and more ‘normal’. Chapter four is a pivotal one wherein Sengupta puts forward his perception that Muslims in Gujarat have emerged in recent years not as opponents and enemies of Narendra Modi but as the beneficiaries of his economic policies and hence as his staunch supporters, who believe that ‘there is more to Modi than the riots’.
Chapter five describes the rather innovative business of Gauri Singh of Gurgaon whose ‘The Maids’ Company’ not only generates good money for herself but also serves as an employment generator and a support system for its members, namely, women who work in people’s homes. Chapter seven dwells on Kalpana Saroj, the Dalit woman who survived a brutal marriage to emerge as a successful entrepreneur dabbling in everything from a women’s cooperative, to Bombay politics, and ultimately to real estate.
Another illustration that Sengupta provides is the unorthodox business of Arunachalam Muruganantham, ‘the pervert pad-maker’ who has made his money through his efforts to provide affordable sanitary care to poor women, inventing and patenting a machine that sells all over Asia and Africa.
The ‘Conclusion’ makes certain valid points about the ‘jugaad’ (‘frugal engineering’) mentality that Sengupta identifies as one of the chief causes why India fails to achieve or even to aim at the highest standards in anything. The chapter then moves on to a rather desperate attempt to claim M. K. Gandhi as a potential supporter of entrepreneurship of the capitalistic mould — and to stack him against ‘socialism’ — and then on to a statistics-based discussion of how, despite ‘crony capitalism’, there has been a considerable ‘churning’ in the top of Indian business since even before the liberalisation. The discussion drives at Sengupta’s thesis that the ‘benevolent state’ and ‘mercenary private enterprise’ are both ‘enduring myths’ that are being busted by the spurt of entrepreneurship in the country in much the same way that Gandhi brought Independence to India — through steady, quiet enterprise and effort, rather than through any precipitous revolution.
What saves the book from being an unabashed apology for market capitalism is Sengupta’s oft-repeated admission that capitalism does have an innate proclivity to generate inequality, and that the ‘social contract’ that Gandhi envisioned, whereby everyone would have the right to make money honestly but the money which the rich would not strictly ‘need’ would be spent on collective good, has been miserably breached in our country.
There are a few things in the book that this reader found unexpected in a quasi-academic Palgrave volume, namely, some amount of padding — for example, where Sengupta goes on and on about India’s caste system or where he talks about the lives of manual scavengers — some rather obvious showing-off of knowledge, as in the ‘Introduction’ itself, and, above all, the gimmicky, sensational chapter-headings. In all, however, Sengupta gives us a book that provokes fresh thinking and inspires hope. The language is simple, and the style — somewhat pedestrian — favours ease over elegance.
Recasting India: How Entrepreneurship is Revolutionizing the World’s Largest Democracy: Hindol Sengupta; Pan Macmillan India, 707, 7th Floor, Kailash Building, 26, K.G. Marg, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 499.
