Different Modernities in India

The tomb of Muhammad bin Tughluq in Delhi

Before the pandemic forced me to return to the United States in March of this year, I spent seven months living in India. Though I am currently a PhD student in modern South Asian history, I haven’t always been interested in India, and I came to this field by happenstance. Before starting my PhD, I received my MA in modern European history, with an emphasis on Irish and British history through the lens of capitalism and empire. I wanted to go abroad between graduate degrees, so my advisors helped me apply for a Fulbright grant that would send me to India. We picked India because we thought I could pitch a believable comparative project on my work with Ireland, but I was completely ignorant of the country, not knowing any of its history or languages. I split my time between Calcutta and Delhi, studying Bangla and Hindi, and traveling widely to try to get a sense of the country.

Living in India upended my notions of modernity by presenting me with a variegated living experience, some elements of which far surpassed my experiences of living in other “developed” nations (USA, Ireland, S. Korea, Italy). I encountered India for the first time when I arrived last summer, my impressions fresh and unfiltered by any special knowledge I had about the place, save for the preconceived assumptions I had as an American, such as the spiciness of Indian food and the predominance of the Indian diaspora among my father’s tech coworkers. Before I left for India, I was bombarded with questions from friends and family: Would I be able to survive the heat? How would I adjust to living in a “developing” country? How would I deal with being surrounded by poor people? Most of these notions, and the ones I harbored in my own head, were informed by a cloying orientalism that purports that places like India are not truly modern yet. As Edward Said famously noted, many westerners conceive of places like India as stuck in a primordial past. They need to “catch up” to their western counterparts to truly join the modern world.

The Fortress Tughlakabad in Delhi

I found that the Indian people I interacted with were acutely aware of such stereotypes. Calcuttans are very disappointed that, because of Mother Teresa’s fame, most foreigners think of Calcutta primarily as a city famous for poverty. The city’s rich literary history, its proud defense of the Bangla language, and its thriving cultural scene (driven by the ubiquitous adda, or intellectual chat), are much less well known. My favorite part of the city, College Street, hosts the world’s largest secondhand book market and is dotted with cafes devoted to conversation and cold coffee. Not to mention the fact that the city is also home to fabulously wealthy neighborhoods. For instance, every mall I visited in Calcutta was far more upscale than any I have been to in the United States. Calcutta’s metro also far surpassed any American transit system I have used. Experiencing such places caused me to think constantly of what it means to be modern today.

For many, the most important hallmark of modernity is a certain level of economic prosperity which has trickled down to the masses. Using mostly economic indicators, multiple international organizations still classify India as a developing country because GDP per capita still lags behind many European and North American nations. In February a headline about the US marking India as a developed nation made waves, but this was merely a shrewd move to try to penalize Indian industries subsidized by the state. Yet the economy is not the only indicator of modernity. Change in familial organization, rising secularism, and new theories of the state have also been used to describe what constitutes modernity. As the world’s largest democracy, India is unique in its commitment to modern political ideals despite its relative lack of homogeneity. Indeed, if diversity is an indicator of modernity, then surely India vaults to the top, for its sheer number of languages, ethnicities, cultures, cuisines, and biozones make the US’s claim as a melting pot seem a bit presumptuous.

Conventional development theory still labels the US and other colonizing nations as “developed” and many former colonies such as India as “developing.” Yet these labels, couched in outdated macroeconomic statistics, obscure the many other ways of evaluating the health or progression of a nation. Is modernity a hegemony that must be assimilated to, or are their competing visions of modernity? If India indeed needs to “catch up” to places like the UK or the US, what would “catching up” look like? Is catching up merely a matter of economic calculation? Or would India need to be culturally and financially dominated by our favorite multinational corporations? Would a parallel skyrocketing of rates of suicide, depression, and opioid abuse be in order? Surely there is room for multiple or alternative modernities, as India’s subaltern theorists have advocated for so strenuously in the last forty years.

Nowhere does India feel more conventionally modern, or should I say “western,” than in the elite confines of South Delhi. From October until March I lived in Hauz Khas, one of the area’s more conspicuous neighborhoods. My apartment was both smaller and more expensive than my previous place in Philadelphia. New Delhi gets its moniker because the British wanted to distinguish their new capital from the Old Delhi of the Mughal Empire, Shahjahanabad. In 1911 the British moved the capital of the Raj from Calcutta to Delhi, because the former was becoming an unruly nationalist hotbed. The British built a wide and spacious city south of the Mughal capital. As Delhi grew exponentially in the twentieth century, the city expanded further and further south to incorporate neighborhoods such as mine. Yet in Hauz Khas the ultramodern blends with the ancient. Next to the faceless multinational designer boutiques that grace many modern cities lie the ruins of pre-Mughal Islamic empires.

A Lodhi tomb in Hauz Khas

Hauz Khas means “royal/special tank” in Urdu, referring to the reservoir that dominates the medieval complex there, a legacy of the thirteenth-century Delhi Sultanate. The Hauz Khas Complex includes a madrasa (an Islamic seminary/college), tombs, and a mosque. In order to enter the historical site, however, one has to walk through the trendy streets of Hauz Khas Village, past art collectives and tiny cafes. The multi-storied madrasa, with its many alcoves and arches, is now filled with hip young Delhi-walas in designer western clothes, rather than the scholars of yore. Delhi often feels like the modern world’s other megacities, yet it cannot hide its storied past, as ruins quite literally dot the landscape. Once, while taking a walk in a park in the Malviya Nagar neighborhood, a friend and I stumbled across a hole in a wall. Going through the hole we found ourselves in Begumpur Masjid, a massive fourteenth-century mosque that has fallen into disrepair. After wandering around its crumbling walls, we again passed through the hole and re-emerged into the twenty-first century in the midst of a cricket game. Our walk home took us past both ancient and modern grandeurs, displays of extravagant wealth and numbing poverty, and that uniquely modern problem that Delhi is so known for, air pollution.

For scholars of modern India, a central concern remains: the timing and nature of India’s encounter with modernity. Did modernity come with the East India Company and was it subsequently nurtured by the Raj, or did modernity have more “native” roots? Was capitalism brought to India from the outside, or was it already developing from the crumbling land-revenue system of the late Mughal Empire? Given the fact that Mughal India had the world’s largest economy at the dawn of the eighteenth century, how can we properly account for what happened in the last three centuries? Subaltern theorists such as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee posit an alternative modernity theory in which western capitalist models do not map onto India, while Marxists such as Vivek Chibber and Vasant Kaiwar have responded by defending the universality of Marxist developmental theories.

Lotus Temple in New Delhi

I had plenty of time for such musings about development and modernity in my final days in India. In March, as the world began to shut down due to the pandemic, I lay in bed in Delhi with a horrible illness. Whether it was Coronavirus or something else, I do not know, but my fever lingered for weeks and my throat was so swollen I could barely eat or drink. I could hardly leave my bed, and I lost fifteen pounds. I visited a private doctor, a private hospital (receiving IV treatment), a private clinic (for extensive blood work), and government hospitals four times (receiving shots, a ventilator, and myriad prescriptions). Though I had no insurance and was a foreign national, my total bill for my illness was about $250. Most of this was from the blood work and IV, as the government hospital visits were completely free. I shudder to think what this would have cost me in the US, even if I had good insurance. I very easily could have faced financial ruin, a prospect which haunted me as I flew home insurance-less in late March. India’s healthcare system seemed much more humane than America’s, though assuredly of lesser quality in some areas. And yet, if capitalism is the salient feature of modernity, then perhaps America’s free-market healthcare system is a quintessentially modern institution. If this is the case, I hope the subaltern theorists are correct and that alternative modernities, not animated by western capitalism and imperialism, can be nurtured.

Devin Creed is a PhD student in the history department at Duke University. He specializes in modern South Asia, the British empire, and the history of capitalism. He spent the 2019-2020 school year as a Fulbright-Nehru student researcher in New Delhi, India.