The biggest problem with India today is the fact that the Indian middle classes — lower to higher — (and of course the Indian upper classes) can only see the U.S.and the U.K. when they look outside India. Their vision is blinkered by colonialism, neo-imperialism and the monopoly of English as the only language that really affords Indians a window to the world. It is also blinkered by their professional backgrounds and/or economic interests. If only their vision was a bit wider, they would realise that the models of ‘development’ and ‘progress’ that they believe in are almost exclusively borrowed from the U.S. — and the increasingly copycat UK — and that they are not among the best models in the world. This also stands for their models of political representation and social equity, but I will leave that alone in this essay.
Actually, the matter is even worse: it is not only that the U.S. and the U.K. models block Indian visions, even what is seen within the U.S. and the U.K. is hugely lop-sided. When Indians ‘envision’ America or England, they see broad swathes of industrialisation and urbanisation; this is partly because of ideological choice, and partly because the Indian middle classes, when they relocate or travel to the West, tend to aggregate in the cities. Hence, administrative and political vision in India pushes towards a similar urbanisation of India: broad highways, industrial cities, malls, etc. If the Indian vision was a bit broader, it would be clear that even much of the U.S. and the UK — let alone countries like Germany, Denmark or Norway — are full of areas of relative greenery and ecological balance.
When I drive through the U.S. or Denmark and then return to drive through Bihar or U.P., what strikes me is the fact that it is the latter spaces that seem almost devoid of greenery, including fertile cultivation at times. The U.S. and other ‘developed’ nations have huge swathes of agricultural land and nature reserves; they have villages that blend into nature, roads lined with trees, towns that are not at all the Indian version of mall-based paved ‘development’ and environmental degradation. I recall Gujarat, Punjab and Bengal as offering something similar in the past but, over the past few years, I have noticed greater denudation in even these ‘green’ Indian states than in most parts of the U.S. This is something that does not seem to worry the Indian middle class, whether liberally Westernised or nationalistically parochial, because they have chosen to see only the heavily urban spaces of the U.S., and their imitations in the UK or China.
Anyone who travelled in Europe two decades ago would have noticed the vast difference between big cities in Europe and big cities in the U.S. European metropolises — Berlin, Paris, Copenhagen etc. — are like expanded small towns, barring some central spaces; they are full of pedestrian streets, cycle lanes, parks, trees, lakes, canals, walks, common spaces, etc. Even London, arguably the ugliest metropolis in Europe, has oases of nature here and there. Two decades ago, such oases were rare in American metropolises, and even today pedestrians can be rarer in the U.S. than drivers. But still, metropolises like New York and Chicago have carefully moved away from the original model of heavy urban development — the one being touted in India — and more towards a balanced, environmentalist spread in the past few years. The best American metropolises have, over the past two decades, come to resemble Copenhagen and Paris more and more. London has cleaned itself up too, as much as it can.
You might ask why do we need to look at these ‘foreign’ spaces for models? The answer is simple: because the developmental and related issues being faced in India today have been encountered by other countries, which industrialised and urbanised earlier. Possible models have already been worked out, consciously or unconsciously, and we need to look at the best. The fact that London is structurally a far dirtier, uglier, more congested metropolis than Copenhagen or Paris has to do with the fact that it was one of the earliest sites of industrialisation: the lack of alternative models then continues to show in many parts of London even today. India, coming a bit later in the race, can avoid these mistakes, but only if it chooses the better models of development.
Tabish Khair is faculty member, Aarhus University, Denmark.
