India Read Free Page B

themselves – to abandon Hinduism, which had enslaved them, and to turn to Buddhism. Before his thought could change or develop, he died, in 1956.
    No leader of comparable authority or esteem had risen among the castes for whom Dr Ambedkar spoke. He had remained their leader, the man they honoured above all others; he was almost their deity. In every Dalit house, I had been told, there was a photograph of Dr Ambedkar. It was a photograph I had seen many times, and it was strange that a better photograph hadn’t been used. The Ambedkar icon was like a grey passport photograph reproduced in an old-fashioned newspaper process: the leader reduced to a composition of black and white dots, frozen in an image of the 1940s or 1950s, a plumpish man of unmemorable features, with the glasses of a student, and in the semi-colonial respectability of jacket and tie. Jacket and tie made for an unlikely holy image in India. But it was fitting, because it went against the homespun and loincloth of the mahatma.
    The Dr Ambedkar idea semed better than the idea about the telephone directories. There had, indeed, been a religious stillnessabout the people in the line. They had been like people gaining merit through doing the right thing. The Dr Ambedkar idea made sense of the flags and the emblems of which I had had a memory. The people I had seen were honouring their leader, their saint, their deity; and by this they were honouring themselves as well.
    Later that day I talked to an official of the hotel. He asked for my impressions of Bombay. When I told him about the Ambedkar crowd, he was for a moment like a man taken aback. He was at a loss for words. Then, irritation and unhappiness breaking through his well-bred hotel manner, he said, The country’s going from bad to worse.’
    It was a version of what I had heard many times about India. India had changed; it was not the good and stable country it had once been. In the days of the freedom movement, political workers, honouring Gandhi, had worn homespun as an emblem of sacrifice and service, their oneness with the poor. Now the politician’s homespun stood for power. With industrialization and economic growth people had forgotten old reverences. Men honoured only money now. The great investment in development over three or four decades had led only to this: to ‘corruption’, to the ‘criminalization of polities’. In seeking to rise, India had undone itself. No one could be sure of anything now; all was fluid. Policeman, thief, politician: the roles had become interchangeable. And with money – the money of which the crowded, ugly skyscraper towers of Bombay spoke – many long-buried particularities had been released. These disruptive, lesser loyalties – of region, caste, and clan – now played on the surface of Indian life.
    The Dalits, for instance. If they had still been only the mahatma’s harijans, children of God, people for whom good things might be done, objects of sentiment and a passing piety, an occasion like the morning’s Ambedkar anniversary wouldn’t have given anyone thoughts of a world about to undo itself. But a certain amount of money had come to the people once known as harijans, a certain amount of education, and with that there had also come the group sense and political consciousness. They had ceased to be abstractions. They had begun to do things for themselves. They had become people stressing their own particularity, just as better-off groups in India stressed their particularities.
    And the Dalit particularity was perhaps not the most important one in the city of Bombay. Just outside the hotel was the Gateway of India. This was a British monument: a high, magnificent arch, commemorating the arrival in India in 1911 of the King-Emperor, George V. The imperial associations of the arch were now absorbed into the poetic idea of the gateway; and the paved open area around it was a popular afternoon promenade. On either side of that imperial monument