India, My India; 3; Since My Time

The new generation had emerged since last I had seen India. A generation for whom this struggle for freedom and independence is but a story in a history book. In ancient Lucknow, playground of my childhood, I watched her new industrial masses marching against hunger and the rising costs of food. I had not seen Lucknow or India since independence in 1947. 17 years later, I thought that in her protest marches, I had found the features of a new land. But they did not march for the old causes I had marched for. I had marched for ideals.

They marched for bread. India had won her independence, but to provide the good life for 450 million people is the work of more than one generation. The Lucknow marches, like myself ones, were part of the history of a people moving on into its own future. A nation not of any post war or emergent period, but a nation of a thousand years of history. It did not matter why they marched, or under what banners, I cared and India cared that they marched. The same spirit that moved through this new generation had guided me, Mahatma Gandhi, whose own story is a history book and at whose feet they will gather for generations to come. The inspiration was still there,

but after 17 years, the details had changed. In the hills, surrounding my hometown of Tarkhari, they had begun to harness the natural resources of this vast land. You can take a wide panoramic view of this nation and you have glimpsed only the edges of its progress. But you can take a deep, searching look and find that the view in the valley remains the same. The dam and power station at Matatila, the hill of the goddess, for centuries my people had brought their problems to this goddess, to this legendary mother. Now it seems she was answering them in her own way, raising up her modern beacons to shed light and strength

over this ancient land. The economic surveys and the government pamphlets will tell you the details of India's industrial revolution. But they cannot show the new found dignity on the faces of young India, men from my own region of Bundelkhand. The world of new India is never the less the modern world. At the Indian military academy at Dehradun, the army had become entirely Indian and was trained to the rhythms of clipped military Hindi. Map reading was still taught in English,

but they extended the far cry from the concise cockney of the British Encios of my town. Faces of new India in a modern world. A world in which India too has had to face the realities. And since by time precision and dignity of another kind, the greatest fact and deepest impression of new India, the emancipation of her women. Everywhere it seemed the styles were changing, in architecture as well as social attitudes. The blending of eastern and western lines, the fusion of Hindu and Muslim styles, but to me, the India of another world. Even the old government buildings lit up for a public-day celebrations

had taken on a new look. Here were the grounds and courtyards, which had once echoed to the processions of long since forgotten by throes. And almost inevitably, the Taj Mahal. Almost because only in England had I learned that it was a symbol of India. Now I could look upon this dream and marble with a new esteem. And the tourists. At first, I had resented their intrusion, their enjoyment of the decadent romantic concept of the glory that was India. But now the spectacle of an India of bejeweled Maharajas

and bedecked elephants was just as much a source of delight to me. The glory that was India, or another front-top facade. The president of an Indian Republic on his way to the state-opening of an Indian parliament. This might suffice for a symbol of new India. But this was the face of the new India for me. The features of Mr. Manulal Devari, member of parliament, Fitchal Kari, my native town. Master Saheb, as I had always called him, I had known wrong before politics and independence movements. He was my first school teacher. At Ganga Singh High School in Jakari,

he had taught me the three hours. And in more ways than one had given me a something good start in the world. After 25 years, I was seeing him again in his new role. In India, unlike in England, the teacher has a place of honour and dignity in a boy's life. Now it seemed altogether fitting to me that this most venerable of teachers should be helping to guide their affairs of the nation in parliament. Master Saheb, sometimes Jarkari teacher. Now in his kurta and baggy trousers, Mr. Devari, member of parliament, Fitchal Kari, House of Commons, free India. The other great teacher might have taught this kind of parable

and the new generations at his feet listen to this kind of tale. Gandhi, of course, would have searched for the face of New India first in the craters in the schools. At Ganga Singh High School in Jakari, I was welcomed back at morning assembly like an illustrious form of pupil. Standing self-consciously to attention, I felt very might the old boy as the children sang India's national anthem. In my day, it had been God save the king. But this wasn't the school of Master Saheb and Mingi. In our day, it had been a high school which depended for its income upon the old Maharaja. Now it was financed permanently by the state. In our day, they were only boys.

Girls who received any education at all were taught at home. In our day, they never dreamed of teaching signs. An ordinary classroom in some emerging country. A blackboard, a teacher. A line of new desks. A row of clean faces. A scene filmed a thousand times. But to my old teacher and me, endowed this to the Mahatma, only a vision in our time. The basic objective of India's development is to provide the masses of the people with the opportunity to lead a good life. Thus, the philosophy of India's third, five-year plan.

But to provide the good life for 450 million people is the work of more than one generation. The visions of yesterday are not always the scenes of today. The story of rural India is almost incomprehensible. The story of the haphazard growth of 600,000 villages. And of the hopeless struggle of 85% of the people to take a living from its neglected land. In the village of Adashnagala, a village of only two and a half thousand people, a new approach to rural problems had been made since my time. They call it community development,

a planned attempt to transform the social and economic life of the area. It is essentially a cooperative system between the old traditional village councils and the new government development agencies. Men like these, the office boys and clerks of my time, are full-time social workers, professionally trained in the techniques of village improvement, public health, sanitation, agriculture, irrigation, animal husbandry, social welfare. More than half the villages of India are transforming their lives like Adashnagala. In my day, a caucus like this would have been left to rot

after the vultures had had their turn. The litter and garbage of dead cattle was as common as sight in rural India as the emaciated bodies of the living. But the work of one small incinerator in the village had now transformed the entire scene and was producing at the same time fertilizers vital to the local soil. But the men of Adashnagala, like the contemporaries throughout India, are fighting more than the technical problems of development. The Indian village economy has often been referred to as a cow-dung economy. Cow-dung is collected and used for fuel and for building mudhats. Its vital value to agriculture is manure, to enrich a soil, all but dead for want of fertilizers,

is completely lost. But you cannot substitute gas or electricity overnight, transform mudhats into brick buildings in a day, alter a way of life in a decade. But you can begin at the beginning as Adashnagala's junior high school figures. In my time, the village had no school. Education was a privilege which did not extend to the villages. But the demand for education is high now.

About 80% of all children between the age of 6 and 11 are receiving a regular schooling. Literacy and education will gradually wipe out traditional fallacies and even social differences. The most remarkable example of this social change I met when I dine at the house of the village headman, the local mayor. He is a high caste Hindu of the old school, but he had invited me, a Muslim, to share his meal. My presence would once have defiled the purity of his caste. A traditional tribal dance.

No, just the boys' primary school in the village and a complicated, rhythmic form of physical training. The faces of New India in the classrooms and in the marketplaces. But Gandhi himself would have gone first to the outcasts, to the Harajan colony. There is a vision for the untouchables. The village of Hades Nagla, true to the constitution of New India,

is advancing the conditions of the untouchables. Hence, the Harajan colony, with its neat rows of whitewashed houses like newly painted horseboxes. It seemed to me that despite the betterment and conditions, the isolation itself would only perpetuate apartheid. But the development officer reminded me that you cannot legislate for human attitudes. Gandhi said, it is a matter for deep humiliation that we Hindus regard several million of our kids in kin as too degraded even for our touch. Gandhi called the untouchables Harajans, the children of God. But the kankar eating at the vitals of Hinduism, as he called it, continues.

Someday, we will listen to his teaching. You cannot legislate for human attitudes. But when society does legislate, it is usually to confirm that some of the attitudes are changing. In India, women have always been just another element in the vast complex of Hindu society. Before independence, the Indian woman received little training outside the home. She was sure of one fact, she was destined to be a wife.

Since by time, a new generation has hailed the emancipation of Indian women. I remember during the forties, when about the only women who appeared in public, were at the races or the film studios, at friends houses or parties. A woman who went out to work from the middle and lower classes was a rare phenomenon. The typist, sinister geographers, the telephonists and receptionists, and the few women in executive positions were usually English or Anglo-Indian. But the industrial revolution and the constitution of New India have changed all that.

In Indian society, the woman preserves and passes on its traditions and culture. Today, in her classrooms and universities, India confirms that the intellectual progress of her women is part and parcel of the progress of the nation itself. At Eliga University, I watched my young sister Bibbo, a child of six when last I had seen her, accepting her student days with the ease and naturalness of my own children in England. Had she been of my generation, she would have been married and in Perda instead. Now she studied for her degree and shared her university room with two other girls,

one a Hindu, the other a Muslim like herself. In the grounds of the college, my sister and her friends sang the traditional songs of their university. Even singing would have been frowned upon in my day. By the roadside near Jhansi, I share a simple picnic with my brother's wife Rupaia. My sister, as I called her, was no longer in Perda. And when the last I was in India, she would not have enjoyed even this ordinary freedom.

The Kathakdans, one of the great traditional dances of North India. In my time, an Indian woman performing the Kathakdans, signified social degradation. But the young girl in India today has learned to respect the folk traditions of her ancient society,

and to perform dances like the Kathakdans in all the pride and defiance of her emancipation. A new generation had emerged since last I had seen India. A generation who had learned that to educate a man is to educate an individual. But to educate a woman is to educate a family. And the generations who sat at the feet of Mahatma Gandhi would have learned this truth too. This is NET, the National Educational Television Network.