Mysterious India
Leave some room for surprises when you travel to India.
(dis was ritten by a tourist some 15 years ago)
One of the oddest customs turned out to be an impromptu tea ceremony at train stations. He saw people disposing of their clay teacups by smashing them onto the railroad tracks.
"It looked like littering, but it wasn't," Hoem said.
A cup of tea in India costs about a nickel, including the cup, Hoem said. Crowds waiting for trains buy hot drinks, then toss the empty cups onto the tracks. That type of disposal makes sense because the clay shards simply go back into the soil, and making new cups provides work for people.
"It's better than using plastic," he said. "They're recycled."
India is a nation of close to 1 billion people -- roughly three times the population of the United States -- living on a land mass one-third the size of the U.S.
Traditional religions and languages pulse at the heart of a modern nation, Hoem said, and the cultural complexity defied understanding.
"It was always a bit outside my reach no matter how many streets I walked," Hoem said.
On the one hand, India's electronics industry is poised to become a world leader in software production. On the other, draft animals still plod in village streets, supplying the energy to transport goods to market in a country without oil of its own.
Attractions of the modern marketplace (Pepsi recently debuted in India) compete with traditional family businesses like coconut stands on street corners. And there's an active black market for duty-free Western goods, Hoem said.
Food was plentiful in most places Hoem visited. Because of its climate and arable land, India can feed itself, although millions of people survive on limited incomes.
"The food is inexpensive," Hoem said. "People doing small jobs like washing clothes can earn enough for basic sustenance -- rice and legumes."
However, as the Indian economy surges, fueled by successes on the international front, inflation will surely follow. Progress in one sector may spell danger in another, he said.
"Prices will go up," Hoem said. "The poor people will have trouble feeding themselves."
He attributed vast changes in India to the end of the Cold War.
"India now is in the fourth year of a liberalization program," he said. "This means they are opening their economy up to investment from overseas. They are allowing their business people to make strategic alliances in the form of cooperative manufacturing or joint ventures."
Hoem ran into another surprise in Madras: a cathedral dedicated to the apostle Thomas, the "doubting Thomas" of the New Testament. According to some historians, Thomas carried the Gospel to India and was martyred on a mountain near Madras.
In a nation where 80 percent of the population is Hindu and the civilization dates back 3,000 years, Hoem wasn't expecting to find Western religion ensconced in such a prominent spot.
However, he soon discovered Christians, who represent 5 percent of the population in India, exert economic power far beyond their numbers.
"Missionaries brought schools," he said. "The Christian population has a higher percentage of wealth because of the educational advantage Christianity has brought."
Travel: Exotic India
EDITOR'S NOTE -- India is a confounding mix for tourists: so much beauty, so much poverty. For every plus -- ancient temples, lovely villages, savory food -- there's a minus -- searing heat, open sewers, crippled beggars. An AP reporter and his family found these contrasts on a four-day weekend not far from New Delhi.
------ By THOMAS WAGNER Associated Press Writer
MANDAWA, India (AP) -- One of the best ways to put a finger on the pulse of India is to drive through the exotic state of Rajasthan along the country's harrowing highways.
Many of them are two-lane roads with no line down the middle, few street lights, and free-for-all traffic of trucks, buses, cars, rickshaws, bicycles, pedestrians, tractors and carts drawn by bullocks or camels.
There are no police patrols, and the only rule everyone follows is trucks and buses have the right of way because they're big and their drivers are reckless.
of flies under the tables. But dinner is often tasty and costs less than $1.
Some dhabas still use deep clay ovens to bake tandoori breads. On the road, devoted Hindus can be seen making the more than 100-mile walk to the Ganges River in Uttar Pradesh state and carrying its sacred water back to their homes and temples.
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HOTEL: Room at Neemrana, 15th century fort-castle in Aravalli mountains converted to hotel, $25 a night; deluxe suite with two bathrooms, study, verandah, $160.
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FOOD: Buffet dinner at hotels, $10-$12 a person. Meals at tiny roadside restaurants known as dhabas, $1.
India as Disaster Land
10,000 flee floods in eastern India
NEW DELHI, Aug. 22 (UPI) -- The flooding Ganges River forced more than 10,000 people in eastern India to abandon their homes following three days of heavy monsoon rains, the Press Trust of India reported Tuesday.
In addition to the Ganges River, the Padma, Kalindi, Bhairab and Bhagirathi Rivers in India's eastern state of West Bengal have overflowed their banks, flooding vast areas of the eastern district of Murshidabad.
In neighboring Malda district, the rising Ganges river damaged houses and buildings, the report said.
Senior officials in charge of flood relief operations said more than 6,000 people were evacuated to safety as the swirling waters of the Padma River swept away a number of villages.
The state government was sending relief material to the area, senior official Chaya Ghosh said.
The northern districts of Coochbehar and Darjeeling also experienced heavy rains in the last two days but there was no loss of life or damage to property reported, Ghosh said.
The rising waters in West Bengal are part of a general flooding in eastern and northern India. Since the seasonal monsoon rains began two months ago, more than 100 people have lost their lives in floods and nearly one million have been displaced.
Army rescues 25,000 in Delhi as floods wreak havoc
NEW DELHI, Sept 8 (Reuter) - Soldiers rescued more than 25,000 homeless people in Delhi on Friday as the monsoon-swollen Yamuna river flooded the Indian capital, officials said. The Press T._t of India (PTI) reported 32 deaths as a result of flooding in the north of the country. The floods were the worst in Delhi since 1978, but officials said the waters had receded after coming close to a 17-year-old record two metres above the danger mark. More than 600 people have been killed by flash floods and landslides triggered by torrential rain since monsoon rains began battering coastal India in June. Delhi's chief minister, Madan Lal Khurana, said the waters would drop below the danger level by Saturday night. Passengers were stranded as the huge Inter-State Bus Terminus, near the river, closed operations. Soldiers and firemen carried out rescue and relief work in motor boats as government aid agencies handed out food and medicine to the homeless. Authorites geared for medical relief to prevent an outbreak of waterborne diseases, officials said. They said they feared an outbreak of diseases like cholera and gastro-enteritis as sewage from drains flowed into homes. "We have moved at least 25,000 people to safer places and given them food and medicines," a flood control spokesman said. Air Force helicopters were also called into action to rescue hundreds of marooned people and drop food and medicines to villages and towns across northern India. Flood and rain related damages and deaths were reported from the states of Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. The spokesman said he could not confirm news reports which said two people -- an 85 year-old woman and a two-year-old child -- had drowned in the Delhi floods. Homeless people squatted on waterlogged roads leading to northern and eastern Delhi along the banks of the Yamuna, blocking traffic with makeshift tents, and suburban trains were cancelled as floodwaters swamped railway tracks. The spokesman said it had stopped raining in the neighbouring state of Haryana, which had caused flooding in Delhi by releasing water downstream to prevent local floods. Soldiers were also on standby for relief work in Uttar Pradesh, where the Ganges river has swept away scores of villages, the Press Trust of India said.
Delhi gears up to confront the aftermath of floods
New Delhi, Sept 10 (PTI) As the water level in Yamuna river receded further, the Delhi government today accelerated its efforts to confront the aftermath of floods, including the possibility of an outbreak of diseases like cholera, gastroenteritis and malaria. The Delhi Chief Minister, Mr Madan Lal Khurana, held a high level meeting with his Cabinet colleagues and senior officials of the State and considered various measures for controlling the after-effects of the floods, like water- logging, spread of diseases, removal of garbage and silt etc. All the aspects of the situation were reviewed in the meeting and the flood-affected areas were divided in six sectors to be looked after by six task groups comprising government officials and representatives of various organisations and headed by a Delhi Minister each, a Press release said. All the MinisWM were asked to go to problem places and take all the necessary steps in removing it, Mr Khurana said. The Chief Minister said nearly 1,000 additional safai workers are being engaged, besides 68 mobile/static dispensaries and 13 malaria clinics. Blood samples of 978 persons were tested for malaria, he said. The government was distributing thousands of handbills to caution the people against the spread of diseases, the Chief Minister said adding that people have been asked not to use handpump water and only drink chlorinated water.
Poor India:
Village India
By THOMAS WAGNER Associated Press Writer
DHORDO, India (AP) -- As the sun sets in the desert and scrubland of the Kutch region, ending the daily inferno, storyteller Bapu Miya sometimes sits outside his mud hut and recounts legends and parables.
On a recent night, 25 children waited patiently while Bapu, who is illiterate and nearly blind, lighted a lantern and then began telling stories about Moryo, the one-legged outcast who becomes a hero.
But just as Bapu was shifting into the part about Moryo rescuing his six half-brothers, the village's electricity came back on after a power outage.
Within moments, the children ran off to watch Dhordo's only television -- where they see Indian movies and soap operas, CNN and the BBC, American cartoons, and commercials for everything from Pepsi Cola to Japanese refrigerators to British Airways.
"That's all right," said Bapu, 65. "Television tells them about the whole world. I can't do that. But I am sad when the children leave my stories to watch movies and serials."
In many areas of India, even remote ones like Kutch near the Pakistani border, traditions in villages are dying out.
Folklore, customs and craftsmanship are being threatened by economic development, commercial TV, challenges to inherited patterns of authority, and cross-cultural migration.
The changes could one day undermine the main sources of rural harmony: the extended family, the farm and religion, says Richard Critchfield, who has written nine books about village life around the world, including India.
Many of India's villages, which are home to about 70 percent of the country's 900 million people, are poor and illiteracy is widespread. People die from curable diseases. Some still are segregated by ancient prejudices of caste and religion.
But most villages defy the stereotype of being hopelessly retrograde or despairing. The faith and interdependence of the people provide a unity and sense of purpose often missing in the West.
Many villagers live in peaceful, homogeneous communities, their poverty offset by a wealth of customs, rituals and crafts that define who they are and what they do.
But that could be changing.
"There has been a great surge of Westernization in rural India," says Stephen Huyler, who has studied Indian folk art for 20 years. "Modernization is essential, but its most healthy _expression would be a blending of traditional forms with innovative technologies."
How modern Indian villages have become often depends on how close they are to a city or a town.
Like many other villages, Dhordo -- in a remote corner of western Gujarat state -- is now within reach of a town by public buses, and its 230 residents have access to the postal system.
Electricity came to the village seven years ago, and the following year the dirt road that connects it to the nearest town, Bhuj, was paved. It also has gasoline-powered irrigation pumps.
But many residents cannot afford these services, and the ones who can often see their small refrigerators or light bulbs turned off by power failures that last for days.
Dhordo still does not have telephones, but it has a TV set that the village headman received as a gift two years ago. It now sits in the community room, rarely turned off and keeping people up late.
In other villages, people who have TVs often invite in neighbors who don't.
Cars are rare in rural India, so many people in villages still travel by foot, bullock cart or bicycle.
Like Dhordo, most rural areas now have access to mass-produced goods, everything from saris made out of synthetic material to toothbrushes that replaced the twigs people once brushed with.
But these products often force craftsmen like shoemakers and potters to abandon their professions. Many men end up becoming migrant workers in distant cities so they can send money home.
Dhordo has a varied economy. Its men raise cattle, grow millet or work at a nearby pesticide plant. Women produce intricate handmade embroidery.
Each village in the Kutch region has a unique style for embroidering vests, wedding dresses, blankets, wall hangings, and hats and knee pads for its camels.
But buyers from India and other countries, catering to a middle-class market, are asking the women for simpler patterns.
And that is threatening their skills, says Judy Frater, an American who set up a cooperative that is helping some of the women embroiderers of Kutch preserve their traditions.
"There is nothing equal to embroidery passed down from generation to generation. It takes the women a lifetime to learn, and it is invaluable," Ms. Frater said in an interview.
"I just hope these women can hold onto this tradition as their villages step into the modern world."
Middle Class Indian as Hope for the West
Venture Capital Fund will focus on fueling India
The San Francisco Chronicle (SFC) By Peter Sinton, Chronicle Senior Writer 03/14/95 The window sill of William Draper's San Francisco office is cluttered with photos -- shots of Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, even Fidel Castro, who still owes him $20 from a bet on who would be elected president of Nicaragua. But now Draper is using his connections and venture capital experience to create a $40 million fund targeting India. A veteran Silicon Valley financier who has spent most of the past 12 years in high-profile international trade positions, Draper says the Draper International India Fund is the first venture capital fund with a dual presence in the United States and India. It plans to provide Indian entrepreneurs with capital and access to Silicon Valley technology and management -- much of it from Indian nationals who have built successful companies in the United States. According to Draper, who founded and ran Sutter Hill Ventures in Palo Alto for 20 years, India "represents the most attractive of the Asian emerging markets. "It is entrepreneurial, it has a burgeoning middle class of over 200 million people, a democratic tradition, friendly capital markets, and western business practices in law, accounting and the widespread use of English." Draper, past president of the U.S. Export-Import Bank, was head of the United Nations Development Program fom 1986 to mid-1993. Returning to the private sector, Draper began to assemble the fund in 1994, with a roster of advisers and investors who put up at least $250,000 each. In the Bay Area, funds rolled in from general partners of venture capital firms such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mayfield Fund and Sutter Hill Ventures as well as investment bankers Sandy Robertson and Paul Stephens and several Indian executives. Draper eschewed funds for China, Indonesia and Vietnam, choosing India for itsgrowth instead. "India's has switched to a more market-oriented economy so there is opportunity for explosive growth," said Umang Gupta, chief executive of the Menlo Park software company Gupta Corp. Another reason for becoming an adviser/investor, he added, is that "Bill Draper is one of the deans of the venture capital business and his work with the government gives him all the credentials needed to create a fund in a developing country like India." Besides attracting cash and counsel in the United States, Draper has lined up some of the biggest business names in India as advisers. Heading the list is Ratan Tata, chief executive of Tata Industries Ltd., the country's leading industrial power. It is basically a holding company that controls more than 90 companies. Next month Draper International will open an office in Bangalore, which has become the hub of India's information technology industry. The Bangalore office 550 miles southeast of Bombay will be run by Kiran Nadkarni, who for the past eight years headed India's first venture capital company with annual returns topping 20 percent. India's break with socialism four years ago "offers great opportunities for the businessman," Draper said. The country also has good technical schools and engineers get paid about a tenth of what their American counterparts receive. India is now the largest exporter of software after the United States. Draper will be going to India next week to explore investments in telecommunications, software and even food-processing. One prospect is adapting interactive voice response telephone systems for the Indian market. Another is developing voice mailbox systems which can be accessed from pay telephones. Draper said such "virtual telephoning" is useful in a country where it can take two or three years to get your own phone. Besides investing in start-up companies, the new India fund will finance later-stage companies that are likely to go public within two or three years. Unlike some developing countries, India has well-developed stock markets. The Bombay Stock Exchange has been running for more than a century and some 7,000 issues trade over the counter. "I would love to see the same kind of venture capital financing that happened in the United States happen in India," said Mayfield Fund general partner Yogen Dalal who came to the United States 22 years ago. Most of the software work in Bangalore is now contract work for other countries. But with more capital, he said, "they will be able to develop more products for use in the subcontinent."
Urban Indian Aspirations.
India: The sari makes way for legs and Levi's AMIT ROY (DTEL)
INDIAN models are no longer shy of revealing a bit of cleavage and thigh on the catwalk. In the wake of the rapid expansion in the Indian fashion industry, young women turn increasingly to modelling, now seen as a perfectly respectable career, Amit Roy writes. Victory for two Indian girls last year - Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai - in the Miss Universe and Miss World contests respectively has accelerated the process of social change.
Vidisha Pavate, India's 19-year-old entry for this year's Ford Supermodel contest, says: "Everyone is talking of a hat-trick."
The appetite of the middle classes for designer labels from the West has been whetted by fashions shows on satellite TV. The market is ready to be exploited by well known Western brands - from Levi's and Lee to Benetton and Armani.
Fashion writer Meher Castelino, herself a former Miss India, says: "The Indian market is very large and the Indian consumer label-conscious. Indian women who would not spend more than 1,000 rupees ($33) on a garment three years ago now think nothing of spending 40,000 rupees ($1,333.33)."
The best models are in heavy demand. Madhu Sapre, who does three fashion shows a week, says: "Top models charge 25,000 rupees ($833.33) a show, compared with 3,000 rupees ($60) three years ago."
Levi's launched their jeans in India with a huge bash in Bombay last month; they see the country as potentially one of its biggest markets.
India's best known male model, Milind Soman, who also participated in the launch and who estimates his tally of shows over the past year at 120, adds: "Indians are very glamour-struck."
According to Sanjay Chowdhury, Levi's managing director in India, the jeans will be made in Bangalore with locally manufactured denim and the cut carefully adapted to account for the Indian female's more rounded figure.
The one Indian designer familiar to some people in Britain is Tarun Tahliani - one of his clients is Imran Khan's bride, Jemima Goldsmith. Asha Sarabhai, who has a shop called Egg in Knightsbridge, also has a following in the West.
Many others - Shahab Durazi, Suneet Verma, Rohit Baal, Abu Jani, Sandeep Khosla, Monisha Jaising - have celebrity status in India.
Most design both Indian and Western clothes, and it might not be long before Delhi and Bombay rank alongside Paris, Milan and London as fashion centres of the world.
The Realities of Westernization
CORPORATE AGENDA NOT ALL THAT INNOCENT
By Batuk Vora, Freelance Writer in Virginia
Western media is flooding their pages these days with stories about India's economic potential, its open and virgin markets, its consumerist new middle class...and all that. In a way this could be a thing of pride for importance- hungry Indo-Americans. But it is time they learn to take all this with a pinch of salt. There are many now who ask: what all those multinationals really want from India and what are they taking there? A little closer watch could enlighten us. Together with 'virgin' market craze, there are also stories about corporate loot and plunder, corporate destruction of environment and exploiting the Indian labor, etc. Bhopal tragedy could repeat any time somewhere- according to a warning issued by several non-government organizations of Goa, Bangalore, Kandla, and other industrial centers in India. A news from Panjim, Goa, reported in Indian newspapers informed about American chemical giant DuPont's Nylon factory, being built in partnership with India's Thapar Group at a village in Goa, facing violent demonstrations from local villagers. The local people fear it could destroy their water resource, their grazing land, their holy deity and entire green environment. DuPont perhaps foresaw this possibility and they had incorporated a "Bhopal clause" in the agreement that imposed all the liability of such environmental or human destruction on their partner Thapars ! Sometime back, in the city of Bangalore, half a million farmers joined a "seed satyagraha" to protest proposed provisions of GATT that they believed could allow global corporations to destroy their livelihood. An item recently published as an advertisement in Indian media flashed "Camay fragrance reaches Indian homes !" as if Indian homes were just waiting for Procter and Gamble's statement that " We have made sure we put everything in the Camay soap that would appeal an Indian woman - the size, shape, the color...the international know-how." Procter & Gamble wants to dominate the key consumer areas in India, declared another news item. They were "tailoring" their products to "Indian conditions !" Western logos and names frequently mask an article that consumers in the West would not recognize: a debased, altered or down-market imitation. Take for instance a product called Savlon from Johnson & Johnson. It has a lurid, deep orange color that stains everything it touches. The same item sold in the West looks quite different. A Bombay paper, Blitz reported that Savlon contained both Quinoline Yellow WS and Sunset Yellow FCF. The same thing is true about Dettol; Colgate red toothpaste seems to consist largely of cloves, which can be bought more cheaply in their natural form. A critic calls it "consumer apartheid" for the Third World people. A discerning consumer in the West knows more or less what he or she is getting, while those inexperienced people in India - novices in the holy mysteries of consumption have to be contented with a mere snob value of the Western logo, unaware that they are being fobbed off with something inferior. Common people do not know how the pressures of market competition force the multinationals to act as they do. Hindustan Level started to reduce the total fatty matter (TFM) in its soaps from 76 % to around 50 %, keeping their weight the same ! This enabled them to maintain the price of both Lux and Rexona at a lower cost to itself, while lowering the quality. This was called "improved technology." Others soon followed suit. A report reveals that as far as Camay soap is concerned, animal fat content is concealed because of the allergy of Indian women. What is seen in today's opened up Indian markets is essentially a territorial war waged by the multinationals when the local people are caught in the crossfire. A recent advertisement in The Times of India for Pierre Cardin Fashions invited readers " to associate yourself with an empire stretching across 110 countries worldwide !" No surprise, the "middle class" teachers introduced white chocolates in schools in India at the behest of Nestle. A whole new generation of Western brand loyalty is being cultivated in India. Traditional, cheap ways to answer local needs is replaced with more expensive, sometimes spurious substitutes from distant places. Neem and Babul were excellent ways to clean the teeth and now they are replaced with tooth- pastes that are mainly full of chalk, is seen as "modernization." Glaxo markets its infant foods, Fairex and Complan, as if no growing child can reach maturity without them. What was wrong with traditional Porridge or ragi ? A new voice of sanity is now heard in India side by side with this kind of corporate invasion.
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Consumerism fuels dowry-death wave; Bride burnings on the increase
By Molly Moore Washington Post Foreign Service NEW DELHI -- For 20-year-old Asha, marriage was hell. Her in-laws, she wrote in impassioned letters to her father, berated and beat her and once spiked her milk with pesticide in an attempt to poison her. Finally, according to her father, just after her third wedding anniversary, her husband's family gagged her, beat her unconscious and electrocuted her with a live wire. They bundled her bloodied body in a quilt, tossed it in the front yard and called her father to say she was unwell because of an accident.
"I knew instantly she had been killed," said the father, Gyan Chand, 54, a government employee. "It was a case of dowry death."
In an era when India is enjoying unprecedented economic advances and boasts the world's fastest-growing middle class, the country also is experiencing a dramatic escalation in reported dowry deaths and bride burnings. The rise of this ancient practice has been fueled by the intersection of the new age consumerism and Hindu tradition dating from medieval times. Indian officials say families of every religious, social and economic background are turning increasingly to dowry demands as a means to escape poverty, augment wealth or acquire the modern conveniences they once never heard of but now see advertised daily on television.
Police say reported dowry deaths have increased 170 percent nationwide in the last decade, with 6,200 recorded last year -- an average of 17 married women burned, poisoned, strangled or otherwise killed each day because of their family's failure to meet the dowry demands of the husband's family.
"We are becoming a very materialistic and consumer-driven society," said Sundari Nanda, who heads the New Delhi police department's Crime Against Women Cell. "For such a society, dowry becomes a way of betterment for those in the process of climbing up."
In the nation's rush to embrace modernity, the demand for dowry -- the money and gifts a woman's family provides the married couple and the groom's family at the time of marriage -- has become a lever for extorting money and goods from a bride's family for years after the wedding. If her family does not comply, she frequently is subjected to cruelty, physical abuse and often death.
"Dowry is a form of theft legitimized by marriage," said M.J. Akbar, a prominent Indian newspaper editor. "It's economic bondage. And when the woman stops being frightened by torture, the only option is to burn her." While law enforcement authorities said the increase partly reflects a greater willingness by women's families to report the deaths, they also said the statistics represent only a fraction of the actual cases believed to have been committed. They also do not include the tens of thousands of incidents of non-fatal dowry harassment and physical and mental abuse inflicted on wives by husbands and in-laws.
Dowry is perhaps the greatest force contributing to the oppression of women in India and elsewhere on the subcontinent. Originally intended as a way to provide for daughters in a culture where women are not entitled to family inheritances, the tradition has evolved into an insidious practice of bankrupting families and abusing women.
"In these times when dowry demands should become less and less, instead everybody wants more," said Somvati Singh Alewata, 33, wife of an Indian soldier and mother of a recently married daughter. "We just ruin our lives because of dowry. You have to pay dowry, or nobody will agree to marry your daughter." From the time of a daughter's birth, parents know their family will face years -- sometimes generations -- of debt to pay for her wedding and dowry, prompting the widespread practice of killing baby girls and aborting female fetuses. If the daughter is allowed to live, the parents -- believing they are only caretakers for the girl, who will eventually be given to her husband's family -- consider her a burden and often give her less food, medical care and attention than her brothers. Then bridegrooms' families believe they are entitled to hefty payments for accepting the burden of a woman. In the United States, the average wedding costs $7,500, according to the Association of Bridal Consultants, a trade group; that is about one-third of the average annual per capita income in the United States. In contrast, even the poorest Indian families often spend more than $3,000 on a wedding -- the equivalent of nearly 10 years' wages for the average worker. Often, the cost of the ceremony and gifts leaves families deep in debt into the next generation. Many dowry harassment cases follow the pattern of Phoolvati and Bhim Singh's experiences with their daughter, Santara, 19. As in most Indian marriages today, the family selected a groom recommended by friends. The boy was unemployed, but his parents were farmers and he was the sole heir to their property.
"Nobody asked for dowry in the beginning," said Phoolvati, 65, her face wrinkled as a walnut. "They said, `We don't want anything. We just want your daughter and whatever is in her heart.' "
Phoolvati, a farmer and mother of six children, was touched. She and her husband gave their daughter the gifts any family would give a young bride: jewelry, silver, a bed, a black-and-white television, an electric fan, a sewing machine. "I gave all this with my own heart's happiness," the mother said in an interview.
Following tradition practiced at all India's social levels, the newlyweds moved into the home of the groom's parents in a village about 20 miles from New Delhi. Within six months, Santara's in-laws began harassing the young bride to ask her family for money to buy a car. "Why don't you go home and get 50,000 rupees" -- about $1,600 -- Santara said her mother-in-law told her. "Otherwise we'll throw kerosene on you."
A few months later she carried out the threat, Santara's mother said, and poured kerosene on the bride. Before she could strike the match, Santara ran from the house, hid in a neighbor's home and sent word to New Delhi for her mother to come rescue her.
But Santara then faced another problem common to young brides who flee troubled marriages: In a culture obsessed with social appearances and family honor, her own mother began pressuring her to return to her husband and filed a case of desertion against Santara's husband in hopes the court would force the groom's family to take her back.
"I could not keep a married daughter with me," Phoolvati said. "There would be a stain on her honor because she has been deserted. It would mean more and more dishonor for me." Six months ago, a judge ordered the groom's family to take Santara back with a stern warning: "Don't kill the girl or you all will be hanged." Santara is now back with the family in her husband's village and her mother said, "I'll wait one year and see if they behave badly."
In recent years a growing number of women's organizations have begun working to educate women and help abused wives escape dangerous family situations. In New Delhi, an estimated 150 shelters and homes for tortured and abused women have opened in recent years. Some organizations, such as the Women's Vigilance Society, specialize in helping families negotiate the corrupt and often inept police and judicial systems.
Under a 1961 Dowry Prohibition Act, giving and taking dowry is illegal, punishable by jail and fines. Even so, few cases make it to court and fewer result in prosecutions. Often the husband's family bribes police to cover up dowry-related murders. By the time Gyan Chand, who works in downtown New Delhi, arrived in the village 20 miles outside the capital where his daughter Asha had been killed, police had already declared the death accidental.
Neighbors told him about the Women's Vigilance Society, and he enlisted its help in forcing police to bring charges against his daughter's in-laws and arrest her husband and mother-in-law. Although Asha was said to be the fourth case of dowry death in the village in as many years, it was the first in which police filed charges.
"Even when charges are filed, the law is not much help for women," said Rajana Kumari, who heads the Vigilance Society and has authored a book titled, "Brides Are Not for Burning." She added, "It can take eight to 10 years for a case to go to court." Increasingly, some organizations, local governments and families are fighting the dowry system. In the southeastern state of Orissa, where police say reports of dowry deaths have jumped 11-fold in the last decade, the government has proposed legislation sharply limiting the amount a family could spend on a wedding and gifts. In some of the country's more prosperous rural villages, where every modern convenience -- washing machines, refrigerators, other appliances -- can be traced to dowry gifts, families with several daughters have begun marrying all of their girls to sons in a single family to help reduce wedding costs and dowry payments. This winter, Santosh Aelawati, a farmer's wife who lives in a village in the northern state of Haryana, married three daughters -- Naresh, 18, Suman, 15, and Pramilla, 13 -- to three sons from another village family.
"There is nothing wrong getting my daughters married in the same family," Aelawati said. "Getting three daughters married is a big expense. This way, we didn't have to give dowry to three families, and I saved money on the ceremony." Even so, the family borrowed heavily and spent $2,580 on the wedding and gifts of a television, dining room set, sewing machine and other household goods. Although dowry continues to be pervasive even in urban, middle-class families, a small but growing number of young, educated career men and women are refusing to accept or give dowry in their marriages.
In an unusually bold move that made headlines in New Delhi newspapers last fall, Minoo Duggal, 25, a teacher, and her father called off her wedding to an army captain three hours before the ceremony was to begin because the groom's family allegedly began making last-minute demands for more dowry.
Although Duggal's family said they agreed during marriage negotiations to pay $7,260 for the wedding along with gifts to the couple and the groom's family, Duggal's father said the intended in-laws asked for an additional $3,225 the day before the wedding.
With the groom's party ready to begin its parade to the wedding hall, Duggal's family posted a notice on the doors announcing: "Today's marriage canceled due to heavy dowry demand. Inconvenience regretted."
"Had I given in to the pressure and quietly got married, later they would have burned me or harassed me to death with their demands for more dowry," Duggal told reporters.
But in Indian society, even this story does not have a happy ending. Despite an initial flood of marriage proposals from men insisting they would demand no dowry, Duggal has been unable to find a husband and family members said her actions have sullied the family's name and jeopardized future marriage prospects.
"We got back everything we had paid the boy's family except our reputation," said a relative who asked not to be identified. "Even now, when we go out for social dinners or to the club to play cards we hear the gossip: `Why did they have to do such a dramatic thing like calling it off? What did they get out of it. Now the boy is married and she is still unmarried.' "
Special correspondent Rama Lakshmi in New Delhi contributed to this article.
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Factories of Children: Youth labor force growing in Asia to meet export demand, help families
By Molly Moore Washington Post Foreign Service
DEWARI, India Eleven-year-old Dinesh Devran crouched before a loom in a dim, oven-hot mud hut, where he knots carpets 10 hours a day -- his sweat the interes t payment o n loans take n by his fami ly. Dines h, whose empl oyer's rugs s ometimes end up in Washington's high-priced carpet shops, said his day begins at 7 a.m. and does not end until sunset, when he is allowed to eat. Son of a poor farmer in the heart of northern India's carpet-making belt, he started working the carpet looms when he was 9 years old and has never been to school.
"I was sent here to work off the loans my parents took from him," Dinesh whispered, nodding toward the loom owner, who stood just out of earshot. "Every time a carpet is finished -- after about 2 1/2 months -- I get paid 300 rupees," about 12 cents a day.
Dinesh, clad in a tattered T-shirt and grimy underpants, is one of about 55 million child laborers working for employers other than their parents in India, according to Operations Research Group, an Indian organization that has conducted a study for the Labor Ministry. That number will leap to more than 70 million by the turn of the century, Indian demographers estimate, as the country's rapidly growing population pushes more rural families into poverty while economic liberalization fuels demand for many products made with child labor.
Worldwide, as many as 200 million children between 10 and 14 are working in jobs that are dangerous, unhealthy and often inhumane, according to the International Labor Organization. In the poorest developing countries, nearly one of every five children holds a job, among them children as young as 5 and 6, the organization's surveys show. While children's rights advocates and protests from Western countries have increased awareness of the problem and resulted in new laws restricting child labor, the governments of most South Asian nations have done little to enforce their laws or curb the burgeoning practice.
"We have laws [prohibiting child labor], but the government has found it's not always possible to enforce them in a country as large as India," Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, chief architect of the economic liberalization program, told reporters at an annual budget briefing.
The world's largest concentration of child laborers is on the populous Indian subcontinent. During the past two years, Washington Post reporters have visited dozens of sites across the region where child labor is used and interviewed more than 150 child workers, parents, factory owners, government officials and children's rights activists.
In India, Pakistan and Nepal, youngsters weave the carpets sold in some of America's most expensive home decorating stores, according to extensive interviews with loom owners and exporters. In Pakistan, where about 50 percent of all soccer balls sold in America are made, child laborers make up about 25 percent of the work force that makes those balls, according to an investigation by the Washington-based Children's Literacy Program. Many of the factories are in the Sailkot district near Lahore. In the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka, a Post reporter observed young girls toiling in the Fortuna Apparel Ltd. factory. According to the factory supervisor and the labels on packing boxes stacked in various rooms, the factory was making blue jeans sold at K mart and casual clothes stitched for Wal-Mart. When the reporter pulled out a camera, the factory manager ordered all of the children to duck out of sight under the sewing tables. Mary Lorencz, manager of public communications at K mart in Troy, Mich., said a clause in the company's vendor contracts "guarantees that no child, forced or prison labor has been used. . . . We do have inspections." She said K mart had no suppliers in Bangladesh. "From what our import people can tell, we have no current business with Fortuna Apparel Ltd.," she added, noting that K mart is trying to do a secondary search to see if any of its suppliers are working with the factory. Jane Arend, director of public relations for Wal-Mart, said the company "has never condoned and won't allow" use of child labor and has canceled orders in the past when the issue of child labor arose. "We did find that we had previously done business with Fortuna but stopped in early 1993 when they did not pass Wal-MarWR factory certification," she said. In a new setback to children's rights efforts in Bangladesh, garment manufacturers last week refused to sign an accord with international agencies to end child labor in their factories, calling the plan unnecessary and intrusive.
Companies in India, the world's second-most-populous country with 900 million people, sell one-third of their $500 million annual carpet exports to American firms, according to the Indian Carpet Export Promotion Council. A children's rights advocate group, the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude, said that about 300,000 children between the ages of 6 and 14 work in India's carpet industry. "As India expands its exports, those industries will increase their use of children," said Myron Weiner, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has written a book on child labor in India. "It is one of the consequences of economic liberalization."
There are no precise figures on the numbers of child laborers, and estimates vary depending upon the way child labor is defined. However, numerous governmental and private organizations, such as the Bonded Labor Liberation Front, have surveyed many of India's labor sectors and estimate that of the 55 million children believed to be working in the country, 25 million youngsters work at agricultural jobs; 20 million in service jobs in shops or hotels, or as domestic servants; 5 million in various hand-loom industries including carpet making; and the remainder in such labor-intensive industries as cutting gems or making matches.
Children often work in abysmal conditions. Hundreds of youngsters labor in dingy hosiery factories from dawn to nearly midnight to meet the needs of T-shirt and underwear companies in America. Although India's constitution forbids children to work in hazardous jobs, children routinely lose fingers in south Indian firecracker factories. Young boys and girls walk barefoot across broken glass shards carrying molten glass on the tips of long rods they thrust into furnaces for molding brightly colored bangles in northern India. Other children have fingertips bloodied by polishing discs in the Jaipur gem-cutting industry, which exports jewels to the United States, Europe and the Middle East.
Child labor is hardly a new phenomenon. It was common practice in the West during the Industrial Revolution and continued to be used on a wide scale in the United States as late as the 1930s. Children in the developing world have long labored beside their families on farms, in local cottage craft industries and as servants for the wealthy landowners for whom their parents worked. In poor nations such as India and Pakistan, where so many people live on the edge of despair, child labor arguably is a major factor in the survival of millions of families.
In India, 75 percent of the population lives in rural areas. The land holdings of each successive generation are shrinking, forcing massive numbers of people to work as day laborers for pay that is sometimes nothing more than a handful of rice and beans at the end of the day. At the same time, thousands of new industries are opening to supply both export demands and India's growing middle class. Large numbers of Western countries are farming out labor to factories in Third World countries where it is far cheaper. Meanwhile, local factory owners attempting to dodge India's powerful labor unions and cut production costs are turning to the ever-growing pool of destitute families eager to put their children to work.
One of the most controversial industries that thrives on child labor is carpet manufacturing. Loom owners prefer to employ children because their thin, nimble fingers can work taut looms much more efficiently than those of an adult. By the time the youngsters reach their mid-teens, their fingers and hands often are badly damaged from the cuts and nicks of the knives and strings used in knotting, their eyesight has grown weak from long hours of tedious work in dark rooms, and their growth often is stunted by years of sitting in uncomfortable, hunched positions at the looms. Bhagirathi, a rail-thin 10-year-old, said his father sold him to a loom owner for $20 when he was 8 years old. In 1 1/2 years working on the looms, Bhagirathi said, he was never paid any wages.
"I start work at 7 a.m. every day," said the youngster, who was interviewed shortly after the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude took him from the loom owner in the Mirzapur district in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where the majority of India's carpets are produced. "I have skin infections and feel itchy all the time, but they give me no medicines."
The Katmandu-based activist group Child Workers of Nepal says half of that country's estimated 300,000 carpet workers are children. It surveyed 365 factories and found that 50 percent of the child workers were frequently ill, almost half of the female children were sexually abused, 90 percent of the youngsters worked in buildings with poor ventilation, lighting and work spaces, and 75 percent of all the child workers were 14 or younger.
Although they are now more sensitive to criticism for employing child labor, loom owners do not apologize for using the youngsters to make their carpets.
"No one will say child labor is good," said Ram Chandra Maunya of the Mirzapur-based Prasad Carpet Emporium, which ships carpets to the United States. "But what is the alternative for these poor children? There's a lot of pressure to remove them from the looms. But if we remove them totally, they'll starve and die, and it will be on our conscience. You have to look at it from the humanitarian point of view."
India's largest pool of child labor for carpets is in the Palamu and Garhwa districts of the country's poorest state, Bihar, in the drought-prone northern plains. The land there is so dry and infertile that families cannot live off their own crops, and more than 1 in every 10 people migrate out of the region several months each year to work as day laborers in stone quarries or brick kilns. Many families live on incomes of less than $60 a year. In normal times, 30 percent of the residents don't have enough to eat; in times of drought the figure increases to 53 percent, according to a recent study by the New Delhi-based independent research group, The Action Research Unit.
In such environments, carpetmakers find a willing labor force. Children usually are recruited by middlemen who comb villages for the most destitute families.
In the sun-scorched village of Jamua in the Garhwa district, the tactics of a villager known as Kishno are typical of the carpet agents. Two years ago he approached Gibasia, a farm woman whose husband is too feeble to work the land.
"Kishno said, `You are poor,' " recounted Gibasia, the mother of five children. " `At least in Mizapur your boy will earn enough to make a living for himself.' "
Gibasia said Kishno paid $16 for her eldest son, 9-year-old Santosh. She decided to disregard the vague stories she had heard about the poor treatment of the children working on the looms.
"If I had enough grains from the land, enough water and food -- would I not gather all my children and keep them close to me?" she said, sitting on the stoop of her mud house, which had been freshly coated with a layer of cow dung. "Why would I send them away? It is my helplessness, my poverty."
"People think this is easy and convenient work," said the Rev. Mathew Cheryath, a Catholic priest who works with families in the Garhwa district. "I ask them, `Why do you send your son so far away?' They say even though he's working hard, he is working hard in the shade. It's better than crushing stones in the sun."
Said Amravati Devi, mother of three children who work carpet looms: "We would not eat if the children didn't work on looms."
In the last several years, the increasing use of child labor has prompted growing outcry from the United States, Germany and other Western nations, as well as greater social consciousness in India. U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin (R-Iowa) has attempted to pass legislation that would ban the import of products made with child labor. German officials have threatened to impose similar sanctions. The Indian government has tried to strengthen laws prohibiting child labor, and private organizations fighting the problem are proliferating throughout the country.
In India, 4,000 people have been convicted of violating child labor laws, but 3,500 of the accused were fined the equivalent of only $5, according to a new report by an Indian chamber of commerce and the International Labor Organization. Rather than reducing child labor, the laws and the negative publicity have prompted factory owners to find new ways of circumventing legal restrictions -- and of dodging activists who conduct surprise raids to "rescue" child workers.
Instead of producing carpets in large factories with dozens of looms, factory owners parcel the work out to smaller loom owners, subcontractors in distant villages where it is more difficult for government workers, journalists and anti-child-labor groups to inspect the premises. The practice also allows owners to exploit the fact that Indian law does not prohibit the use of child labor in small shops and workplaces.
Two years ago India launched a new carpet certification program called Rugmark, primarily because of pressure from Germany, its biggest carpet importer, and from Indian organizations such as the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude. Under the program, government monitors are supposed to inspect exporters' looms to certify that children are not employed, then tag carpets with a certification seal.
"It is impossible to enforce," said Maunya, the carpet exporter, who is chairman of the Rugmark program in Mizapur. "It is impossible for a person like me to inspect all 1,000 of my looms. How are they going to make sure there is no child labor? All you have to do is understand this is India. In India, things work on paper." Maunya has not certified his own company as free of child labor under the Rugmark program he heads.
According to Maunya, 90 percent of the looms in his district are located in rural villages accessible only by foot or bullock cart. He said the government has provided only three inspectors to cover looms spread across 2,000 villages. Even if an inspector makes it to the loom site, Maunya said, "Fake certification is easy. Inspectors will take bribes and certify your carpets." Other industries also have circumvented national and local laws. In the southern state of Tamil Nadu, where children's rights organizations estimate 80,000 children make matchsticks and matchboxes, factory owners moved production from huge warehouses to small village sweatshops after the state government tried to crack down on children working in hazardous industries, according to interviews with factory owners and government officials and visits to a dozen work sites. Now, at the end of each day, long lines of tiny children balancing large trays of matchsticks on their heads walk through the streets of towns such as Sivakasi to deposit their day's work. For 40 percent of those Sivakasi families, according to a UNICEF survey, the children brought home more than one-third of the family's income. Government officials and childrens' rights organizations frequently debate the solution to the growing child labor problem in India and elsewhere. Some argue that compulsary education would force many children out of factories and into schools, while othersay families can't live without child labor.
"It might take another century to change," said the Rev. Cyriac Joseph, a Catholic priest who has done mission work in a poor district in Bihar for the last 16 years. "These people have nothing. They have so many worries at the present, they can't worry about the future."
Special correspondent Rama Lakshmi contributed to this article.
Rejecting the West
India turns its back on Western ways
The Independent - London (INDT) Tim McGirk in New Delhi 09/29/95
For many people here, Pepsi, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Lifebuoy soap are dirty words. Indians are recoiling from the shock of a fast-paced liberali>tion which, after decades of protectionism, is buffeting the nation with Western consumerism and permissiveness.
A climate of xenophobia has been created by nationalist politicians in which multi-national companies are no longer regarded as the bearers of hi-tech goodies and cash but as invaders, the new Mogul hordes. With general elections six months away, this anger against all things foreign is likely to intensify.
These nationalists - an unlikely combination of leftists and Hindu revivalists - are trying to shut down the country's first Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, in Bangalore. The reason given is that its food is supposedly unhealthy, even though, a few streets away, hawkers sell cucumber slices doused in water scooped from open sewers. In a land where the cow is held sacred, McDonald's has yet to begin grilling its Big Macs.
This xenophobia has even brought out Indian defensiveness towards its trees. Thousands of farmers routinely demonstrate against a US firm, WR Grace, for "genetic colonialism". The firm's sin was to patent a method of preserving extract from the neem tree, which Indians have used for thousands of years for everything from a pesticide to toothbrushes. One left-wing MP, George Fernandes, who had Coca-Cola banned from India in the 1970s because it would not divulge its secret formula, fulminated: "Patenting neem is like patenting cow dung".
Many foreign firms which looked hungrily at India's colossal potential market are peeved by this turn of events. Foreign investment this year has doubled to $2bn (pounds 1.4bn). But after a new right-wing Hindu government in Maharashtra state cancelled a $3.5bn power plant with Enron, a US multi- national, foreign firms are reluctant to invest in the country's worn- out roads and electricity grids. Five European banks reportedly pulled out of big projects after Enron's ills.
Maharashtra's capital, Bombay, is stricken by power black-outs, yet the right-wing Hindus' popularity zoomed when they tore up Enron's contract. It showed they were standing up to the multi-nationals, even though millions are now doomed to nights in the dark.
India is being convulsed by changes that are probably more far-reaching than anything seen for the past 300 years, and that encompasses Britain's conquest of the sub-continent. A prominent psychoanalyst, Sudhir Kakkar, said: "Traditional Indian society was untouched by British colonialism. The British didn't have the capability nor the wish to interfere that deeply. But now the elite who runs business and government want to change society's values."
The new economic opportunities created by reforms have also upset Hinduism's social hierarchy. The caste strata are being reshuffled like a stack of cards. Lowly Kerala labourers who went off to the Gulf came back to live in bigger houses than the upper-caste Brahmins and land-owners who were once their masters. Leather work, because of its associations with dead animals, until recently was only done by the despised Untouchables. But as the shoe export market grows, a tanner now earns more than someone belonging to a higher caste.
"The ferment in Indian society isn't just economic," said Dr Kakkar. "Many people feel the Western world is encroaching, that all traditional values are under siege - the family and relations between the sexes."
The teachings of Mahatma Gandhi are used as a rallying- cry. Gandhi's doctrine of swadeshi, or self-reliance, is being manipulated by the nationalists to boycott a list of nearly 100 foreign products, from Nescafe to Adidas trainers. The left backs the swadeshi campaign, arguing that a country with over 400 million people living in poverty cannot afford to fatten the multi-nationals by having Indians buy into the Levis and Pepsi lifestyle.
Their partners, the Hindu revivalists, think that the global culture which is hitting India through Rupert Murdoch's satellite Star TV is corrupting religious beliefs.
In many ways, the phenomenon of the Hindu idols drinking milk last week could be interpreted as a reaction to India's social upheavals. The elephant-headed Ganesh was rumoured to refuse milk offered in a plastic Coke cup, and when the idol snubbed the stockbroker's milk, some thought it was because Ganesh opposed the economic reforms.
Try to imagine the jolt that a poor Indian labourer, leaving his village for the first time, would get when he wanders into a roadside teashop and sees Baywatch on the television. A social activist, Swami Agnivesh, explained: "Somewhere this labourer will sense that this is a threat to his values, and he'll feel helpless about it."
The moneyed classes may have swooned over Western consumerism, but most Indians do not have enough rupees to even dream of buying the things they may glimpse on satellite television's soap operas. The nationalists are cashing in on this sense of helplessness, especially among the kkI5middle classes. The swadeshi campaign is also backed by many Indian companies which enjoyed a monopoly during the years when protective tariffs kept out foreign goods.
An economist, Prem Shankar Jha, said: "What we're seeing isn't xenophobia as much as petit bourgeois fascism. These companies know they can only survive under conditions of extreme protectionism."
Gandhi said it best. India should "keep its doors and windows open to wind from all sides but we should not allow ourselves to be blown off our feet", the sage wrote. Baywatch may well knock the Indian labourer off his feet.
Nation's Restaurant News (NRN) Mark Hamstra 09/18/95
Like a Hindu dipping his toes in the waters of the Ganges before jumping in, U.S. restaurant chains are taking a cautious and deliberate approach to setting up shop in India.
Before the 1991 elections that brought the Congress Party and Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao to power, India equated foreign investment with foreign rule. Now, after almost five years of loosening government restrictions, the Congress Party and the Reserve Bank of India -- the entity that controls the flow of money in and out of the country -- have opened the door a crack.
"The term used in India today is that the [trend] is 'irreversible'," said Har Agadi, vice president of major markets at Domino's Pizza, which recently entered a joint-venture agreement to develop Domino's in that country.
With a population of about 900 million people -- second in number only to that of China; a widespread use of English; and what is called a "growing middle class," India has caught the attention of multinational corporations.
The growing presence of such corporate giants as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Procter & Gamble are helping introduce Western consumerism to this nation of ascetics, and restaurant chains are starting to follow down the road those companies have paved.
Earlier this year McDonald's announced plans to enter India, with the first unit slated to open early next year. Other chains that in recent months declared their intentions to begin operating there include TCBY, T.G.I. Friday's and Pizza Hut.
Shakey's Pizza opened its first Indian restaurant this spring in the city of Goa, and PepsiCo has a KFC in the city of Bangalore and plans to introduce Pizza Hut to India next year.
Despite the government's efforts to lure this type of investment, however, not everyone in India is ready for such a radical departure from tradition. The Bangalore KFC and PepsiCo in general have been the subject of criticism by groups opposed to investment from outsiders and even have been threatened with physical attacks.
Foreign investment in India is so new, in fact, that one of the problems Friday's had when it began looking into the country was that there were few laws in place regulating investment by restaurant companies from outside India, according to Merritt Croker, managing director of international business for the Carlson Cos. chain.
"There simply had not been any kind of government guidelines for this type of operation," he said.
With the local savvy of its development partner, New Delhi-based Bistro Americana Private Ltd., Friday's is eyeing Bombay, the financial capital of India, as a potential site for its first unit. A city of 13 million people, Bombay also is home to several multinational corporations.
Domino's and TCBY also are looking at Bombay as a potential area for future development.
Bangalore, an inland city in south-central India with a population of some 2.6 million, and New Delhi, the nation's political capital, also have been targeted as areas for potential growth by U.S. restaurant chains.
All these cities, according to U.S. restaurate}.>
re developing a yen for Western culture.
"What we want to do in any of the countries we go into is sell America but speak the language of the country we're selling it to," said Hartsell Wingfield, president of TCBY International.
"What we saw in China, where TCBY has built 16 units in its first year there, was pent-up consumerism," he added. "As soon as they see something Western, they want to try it."
Wingfield said that although Indians are already familiar with yogurt and with frozen desserts, frozen yogurt will be a novelty to many consumers.
"They have ice cream there, but it is inferior to what we have in the U.S.," he said. "Most ice cream quality throughout the world is inferior, except in Europe, to what we are used to here."
But, like other operators setting up shop in India, TCBY is going to attempt to offer its traditional Western product without making too many concessions to local tastes.
"Early in our international experience, we toyed with changing the flavor profile to some degree," said Wingfield, whose chain operates in 50 different nations, "but we found that's not what the people want."
Although Friday's Croker agreed that the goal is to provide a Western experience at all 47 of the chain's overseas units, Friday's will make a few small menu adjustments for India.
The chain will tinker with the seasonings in some of its dishes to bring them more in line with the tastes of the locals, and the egetarian section will be expanded to offer Hindis -- who do not eat beef -- more choices. A mutton burger also will be added, Croker said.
Friday's will serve beef in some areas, however. "The idea is not to offend anyone and still satisfy their desire for an American experience," Croker explained.
At Domino's, the company is considering offering fewer meat toppings and more vegetable choices than it does in the United States, according to Michael Curran, vice president of developing markets at Domino's.
"We have localized toppings in other countries," he said. "That's the nice thing about pizza; you can adjust easily once you have the basics."
In England Domino's offers tandoori chicken -- a traditional Indian dish popular among both the British natives and the Indian expatriates there -- on its pizzas, and Agadi said the chain might add that to its menu in India as well.
Indians in the larger cities are already familiar with both pizza and delivery, although Domino's said the quality of the pizza offered there, like the ice cream, is judged inferior by Western standards.
Agadi and Curran said Domino's would probably deliver pizza on motorcycles or scooters, as is done in Mexico, because of the expense of using cars and because in India young people generally do not own cars.
The chains gearing up to operate in India will source most of their product supply locally, the operators said.
"We'll use local supply as much as possible," said Curran. "But where our suppliers there don't have the technology to meet our needs, we will help them with that technology."
At Friday's Croker said most of the products the company buys in India will come from local suppliers, with the exception of a few items, such as beef.
"We're very happy with the local suppliers," he said. "We always try to encourage as much local purchasing as possible."
While TCBY and Domino's both plan to operate from scaled-down units to help offset the high cost of real estate in Indian cities, Friday's is exploring the possibility of building multilevel or in-line units to help keep costs down.
"We're real impressed with potential for India," Croker said. "It's up there with Brazil and China."
Karnataka farmers' body says 'no' to fast food chains
Bangalore, Jul 31 (PTI): Up in arms against the Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), Karnataka's most prominent farmers association, the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha, today warned the American fast food chain to close down its shop here within a week or face 'direct action'. The Sangha President, Prof M D Nanjunda Swamy, told reporters here that the farmers' body would also fight against the 'Pizza Hut' and McDonald fast food chains expected to come up here. Citing a U S Senate investigation report on the state of cancer, he said one American contracted cancer every seven seconds and the culprits were identified as processed meats and chicken in the junk food industry. Prof Nanjunda Swamy alleged that fried chicken served in KFC outlets could pose health problems, including obesity and high cholesterol and pointed out that fried chicken was also considered to be carcinogenic. He said the instant food industry used chicken with leukosis (chicken cancer). Meat and chicken production also involved a large quantity of foodgrains to feed the animals, with estimates showing that the requirement was five times more than was needed for human beings. Prof Nanjunda Swamy said it also meant that water resources had to be diverted to grow foodgrain and fodder for the animals. He said the farmers association had already issued notice to the KFC outlet here to close down, failing which it would resort to 'direct action' in tandem with other organisations. KFC started its outlet in Bangalore in June and Pizza Hut is expected to open its restaurant in December. Prof Nanjunda Swamy criticised the Janata Dal government for allowing these fast food chain outlets to be opened in Bangalore. 'Mr Chandra Sekhar and Mr V P Singh are opposing them, but their followers Mr Deve Gowda and Mr J H Patel are allowing them', he said. He also released a letter written by former Union Environment Minister, Mrs Maneka Gandhi, expressing her opposition to the entry of meat and chicken based junk food chains into India.
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The feathers fly over chicken eatery in India
The Los Angeles Times (Electronic Edition) By JOHN-THOR DAHLBURG and AMITABH SHARMA SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
SEPTEMBER 22, 1995
NEW DELHI - In the south Indian city of Bangalore, a high-stakes game of chicken is being played--and Col. Sanders could be the loser.
At issue is the first of what Kentucky Fried Chicken hopes will soon be 30 of its restaurants in India. Its foes, who are trying to shut down the pioneering eatery, claim American fast food is a baneful influence on India's economy and environment, counter to the country's best interests and dangerous and unhealthy for those who eat it.
"Look at the children" of overseas Indixo, said M. D. Nanjundaswamy, leader of the farmers organization spearheading the anti-KFC campaign. "These overgrown kids look like broiler chickens themselves."
Nanjundaswamy has called for "people's action" in India's fast-growing computer capital to drive out an intruder he claims is serving poultry stuffed with hormones and chemicals.
To counter the threat posed by Nanjundaswamy's Karnataka State Farmers Assn., the government of Karnataka state has dispatched armed police to mount a 24-hour vigil at the restaurant's door.
The uproar and a simultaneous court battle have made KFC, a fast-food subsidiary of PepsiCo Inc., the latest U.S. firm to become embroiled in controversy as India opens up long-closed markets to foreign capital and businesses.
"What the campaign ultimately boils down to is a deep-seated hatred" of multinational corporations in the view of Indian journalist Sandhya Mendonca, who has followed the controversy for a Calcutta weekly. "Its opponents say that the liberalization of the economy has amounted to very little--barring the setting up of fast-food outlets that we don't really need."
KFC's troubles came to a boil Sept. 13, when the Bangalore Municipal Corp. ordered the restaurant shut, allegedly because Col. Sanders' "hot & spicy" seasoning contains nearly three times as much monosodium glutamate as allowed by India's Prevention of Food Adulteration Act.
KFC won a temporary reprieve from a Bangalore High Court judge the same day. The judge ruled that the restaurant could operate through today, when full court hearings are scheduled.
"All we are saying is to let the customer decide," Sandeep Kohli, managing director for India of PepsiCo Restaurants International, told reporters. "If they don't like our product, then we will have to close anyway."
Kohli claimed that the amount of MSG used is well within legal limits and that health standards at the two-story restaurant on Bangalore's fashionable Brigade Road are unequaled locally.
In recent years, some other large U.S. companies, including Cargill, DuPont, Enron and Coca-Cola, have been on the receiving end of protests or opposition in India from hostile politicians, activists and government authorities.
But so far, U.S. investors, the source of almost $6 billion of the $11.3 billion in foreign investment cleared by India through June, have not gotten cold feet, said one business spokesman.
"There's no sign of anybody backing out{the projects," Jordan Misra, an executive at the U.S. desk of the Confederation of Indian Industries, said Wednesday. "All the long-term projects are proceeding on course."
Immigrant population in U.S. at post-war high
T V Parasuram Washington, Aug 30 (PTI) After a surge in immigration over the past 20 years, the foreign-born population in the U.S. reached 22.6 million people in 1994, making up 8.7 percent of the total population, according to a Census Bureau survey of legal and illegal immigrants. This is the highest proportion since World War II but much less than in 1910, when the foreign-born immigrants accounted for 14.7 percent of the population. However, because a good proportion of immigrants is non-white the actual proportion of non-whites is difficult to determine because 45 percent of the foreign-born are Hispanics -- mainly of Latin American origin -- and they can be of any race. A large proportion in Latin America is of mixed race. Including the Latin American origin immigrants among non-white races, populist politicians are whipping up anti- immigrant sentiment, citing statistics which show that while whites constitute over 70 percent now, they will be about 52 percent in a few years at the current rate of immigration. Populist politicians and some writers and columnists are cashing in on the latent anti-immigrant sentiment. Even the mainstream Republican and Democratic Party representatives in Congress are responding to it and trying to reduce immigration with the unstated purpose of preventing much dilution of the white population. Two presidential hopefuls, Governor Pete Wilson of California and Columnist Pat Buchanan have made reducing immigration one of the main planks of their platform. A California referendum which passed but which is currently blocked by the courts -- the last refuge of the immigrants -- seeks to deny foreign-born illegal immigrants access to all welfare benefits except emergency medical treatment, denying even education to their children. President Clinton, more liberal than most, has endorsed proposals to greatly reduce the level of legal immigration. Congress has before it proposals to cut off major federal welfare benefits even to legal immigrants who are not citizens. There is, as a result, a surge in applications for citizenship, which can be made five years after obtaining the green card or three years if one marries a U.S. citizen. Marrying a citizen has always been a passport to the greencard and later citizenship. In 1994, when the Census Bureau took the survey, only 31 percent of the 22.6 million foreign born had become naturalized citizens. Of the 22.6 million foreign-born, including 494,000 born in India, which ranks eleventh in the list of countries which send the largest number of immigrants though it is the second most populous nation on earth, the largest group is Mexican. The census survey calculated that there are 8.3 million legal and illegal immigrants living in the U.S. who entered in the 1980's, which makes the decade as having the highest levels of immigration since the turn of the century. The flow increased during the 1990's, with 4.5 million people entering the country during the first four years of the decade. The popular image in developing countries of everyone coming to America striking it rich and becoming a millionaire is belied by facts. Long-term poverty plagues a small but significant fraction of the immigrants of the 1980's, according to the Census Bureau survey. About the quarter of the immigrants of the 1980's live below the poverty level. The problem is particularly acute among those from Mexico. Forty percent of the Mexicans who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1980's live in poverty. Unemployment among the foreign born is 9.1 percent compared with 6.8 percent for native Americans, according to the report.
"Masala in the Melting Pot: History, Identity, and the Indian Diaspora"
by Savita Nair
This paper integrates an analysis of Mississippi Masala (Mira Nair, 1991) with the personal narrative of an Indian East African student at the University of Pennsylvania. The film and quoted speech offer overlapping contexts for understanding one another. This multi-layered text that interpretes the film through the lenses of a lived life allows the experiences of the speaker to help dramatize and critique the film's representations. In doing so, the paper raises issues about writing history through the use of film and oral sources, negotiating selfhood, and creating identities in expanding diasporic spaces.
The research for this paper was initiated in order to fulfill an assignment for a course on oral historical theories and methods offered by the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania in Fall 1993. During the semester, I interviewed Neena Valji about her family's migration history from India to Kenya to America. I found out about Neena from a Hindi professor who knew that I was interested in locating Indian students who grew up in East Africa. Neena was enrolled in his course. Upon meeting Neena, I explained that my dissertation examines the history of Indian voluntary migration to East Africa during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and that I am using my oral history course as a means to begin compiling family histories. I explained that I am also interested in exploring issues of ethnicity and identity (trans)formation in the Indian diaspora more generally, and that I find her experience particularly appealing because of her family's multiple migrations. While much of our initial discussions revolved around her memories of life in Kenya and her account of her parents' and grandparents' migration experiences, my query about the film, Mississippi Masala (Mira Nair, 1991), opened the floodgate to a multitude of lively and impassioned comments and criticisms. It became apparent that Mississippi Masala was pivotal.
For Neena, the film provides a vehicle in and through which she could express inconsistencies, misconceptions, and nostalgia about her background. A stylized compilation of director's, screenwriters', and cinematographers' representations of Indian/East African/American experiences, Mississippi Masala encroached on worlds intimate to Neena. For this reason, the film became emblematic of a world in which Neena both was and was not a part; it linked her personal, private past to a big-screen, public present. For me, as researcher, the film does more than serve as a practical and accessible reference for comparing experiences, it allows for the possibility of raising issues beyond the confines of a oral historical source. The film enables me to delve into Neena's utterances and non-utterances, the gaps and inconsistencies in her told narrative, as it creates a theoretical link from her life to the world around.
Neena's articulations also provide a way of understanding a construction of a particular kind of self. The narrative which she lays out reflects her intentions, her comprehensions, her imaginings, and her positionings. Further complicated by the ambiguities of memory and meaning that are integral to oral accounts, the lens of lived experience must rely on alternative contextualizing nodes of analysis. In this case, the film provides such a node. Neena's expressions about life in East Africa, her family's migrations, and Mississippi Masala all work to formulate Neena's own subject position, a diasporic subject. What she tells us is important; what she doesn't, critical. Her narrative, the temporal, thematic, and not always fluid way in which she tells her story, provides the basis for how she conceives of herself in relation to the world around her. The lens into her self signals an identity which, although overlapping in its makeup and texture, is explicitly and vigorously constituted; whereas, given the nature of filmmaking, the lens of the camera must generalize experience on film.
The themes that arise out of the ways in which Neena talks about her life and talks about the film structure this paper. Neena's identification with, and consequent dismissive distancing from, the young female protagonist in Mississippi Masala begins to shed light on the predicaments of history writing. Based on the premise that there are boundless ways of creating and writing histories, this paper seeks to integrate oral history and film analysis by providing a multi-tiered text which shifts back-and-forth between lived and film sources. Both lived narrative and film narrative may be held to the demands of historicity, while each genre simultaneously participates in the work and play of constructing histories. In this paper, I attempt to open the discursive terrain around the diasporic subject and, in this case, her historical creation. In doing so, I explore issues of heterogeneity and identity, movement and hybridity, and I raise questions about generationality and diasporic space.
The paper begins by providing a brief background of the film and a historical context for Indian migration to East Africa. It then explores Neena's memories of East Africa as compared to her lifestyle in the United States, and continues with an extended discussion of self-formulations of identity in relation to and in the face of representations of "otherness." In this regard, the paper alternates between Neena and the film, and how difference is either glorified or disregarded. This is followed by Neena's explications and the film's expressions about degrees of cultural assimilation, and representations of America. Finally, I raise questions, more generally, about future generations of diasporic subjects and the study of diasporas.
In Mississippi Masala, a Gujarati Indian family undergoes the 1972 expulsion from Uganda of Asian Indians. They resettle in rural Mississippi, joining a group of Gujarati motel business families. The film explores the family's experiences, especially those of the young daughter, in order to comment on issues of identity, racism, marginality and displacement. Perhaps because it is one of the few films to enter mainstream film-viewership that focuses on the Indian diaspora, or because it includes several well- known Indian film stars, Mississippi Masala continues to spark discussions and debates within South Asian American everyday lives and related news media. Indian Ocean Networks
With formal British colonization of Africa in the late nineteenth century, existing trading contacts between western India and eastern India increased markedly. The British imperial system managed the movement of people, money and goods by recruiting indentured labor and by encouraging voluntary migration from British India to develop newly acquired East African territories. The British employed over 30,000 Indian indentured laborers to build the Uganda Railway. A diverse group of voluntary migrants from western India, mostly from present-day Gujarat, accompanied the Indian indentured laborers in order to fulfill various services necessary for the workers and for the British administrators. In total, over 100,000 shop owners, artisans, and craftsmen, as well as a professional class of doctors, lawyers, accountants and engineers followed the labor movement to East Africa hoping for financial gain. India's overseas migrants created a modern history of migration that built upon preexisting connections between these two Indian Ocean coastal communities.
The migration story that placed British India and British East Africa into the same historical geography continued well after the completion of the Uganda Railway. Only 20% of the laborers who built the railway stayed on. Contrary to popular notions, most Indians in East Africa trace their ancestry to independent, voluntary migrants who saw East Africa as an arena for economic opportunity. Most members of the various Indian communities in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zanzibar became intermediaries between the British administrators and settlers, and the largely agricultural African population. In general, the Indian population quickly became, and remained after decolonization, a commercially successful group. They continue to occupy a visible and powerful economic place within East Africa society, and continue to rely on India as a market for goods as well as a supplier of socio-cultural commodities.
The negotiations and contestations between race and class in East Africa remain products of an imperial legacy---a legacy which has divided Indian and African populations along ethnic, occupational, and geographic lines, creating a volatile and violent ethno-political climate in many East African cities. The 1972 expulsion of Indians from Uganda by Idi Amin well illustrates the repercussions of such a climate. Following Ugandan Indian refugees, other Indians who had settled in areas of Kenya and Tanzania later fled East Africa in fear of violence or similar expulsion. Some returned to India---to an India which was both unknown and familiar. Other migrants sought new opportunities in Great Britain or in the United States. These so-called twice migrants, from India to East Africa to western metropoles, carried with them the remnants of an imperial past, the burden of both a postcolonial global economy and a racially stratified society, and a twofold nostalgia for imaginary homelands. Remembering Kenya
Neena's grandfathers were among the voluntary migrants who left India for East Africa in the early 20th century, following the pattern established by earlier indentured laborers from western India. During the early 1920s, Neena's grandfathers came to Kenya from towns in what is now Gujarat. Both men were in their late teens. Her father's father, who was a teacher in India and in Kenya, left Gujarat during a period of drought in his village in hopes of economic success in Kenya. Her mother's father had been a farmer in India but, in Mombasa, he was involved in exporting goods and running an Indian food store. Although both men were married, they came to Kenya alone and were later joined by their wives.
Within the last several years, most of the members of the two large families have moved to England or to India. Neena's family alone moved to the United States. Neena knows that her relatives, and other Kenyan Indians, have been in a state of readiness to leave Kenya because they anticipate that at some point they will have to leave. According to Neena it seems that, although her extended family enjoys the quality of life in Kenya, they realize that economic necessity and/or political pressures will demand their eventual departure. Memories of injustice, discrimination, and violence in Uganda loom precariously close.
Like other relatives, Neena's parents decided to leave Kenya voluntarily before they were forced to leave. Both born and raised in Kenya, they met during their college years. Theirs was a "love" marriage. Her parents had to wait ten years before getting married because they were struggling with their families over their inter-caste relationship. After marriage and two children, the Valji family migrated from Mombasa to the United States. Sponsored by a relative in West Virginia, they first lived in a suburb of Charleston, and then after one month, they moved to their current home, Frederick, Maryland.
In Mombasa, Neena's mother was a middle-school teacher and her father was a high-school teacher as well as school principal. Since his Kenyan training and work experience were not accepted as suitable qualifications in the United States, her father first worked in West Virginia as a manager of a local convenience store. Like many new immigrants, her father acquired his first job through a relative's contacts. He is now employed in a clerical function with the United States State Department. He continues to train and take courses in order to apply for higher-level positions within the federal government. After gaining some education and training in the United States, her mother now works as a nursery school teacher. According to Neena, although her family was doing well in Mombasa, they believed that their future in Kenya was not good---especially future employment prospects for Neena and for her brother. They thought that it was best to leave and they did. Neena's parents maintain, however, that Kenya is still the best place to live.
Neena also looks back fondly on her life, and the overall quality of life, in Mombasa. She remembers, "It's easier, stress- free. It's not a 9-to-5 workday. You go to work at 8, come home for lunch at 12, take a nap, go back to work and return home by 4. Then you have a proper dinner, and visit with family and friends." Notably, she does not compare the quality of life in Mombasa to the quality of life in Frederick on the exclusive basis of the material comforts that were given up. In fact, she argues that such things cannot be compared. Although her Mombasa home did not have the luxuries and comforts of her Maryland home, such as a washer and dryer, dishwasher, and other household appliances, her family had Kenyan servants, including a maid and a watchman, to help with household care. Unmindful of her privileged position, she claims that in Mombasa everything was not money-oriented. She explains, "Opportunity means a comfortable life. They don't care about status symbols. Parents care [about] kid's needs. So, they do things for their kids." Neena says that her parents enjoyed a better quality of life in Mombasa not because of their economic status, but because of their better sense of community. Neena's memories of a more carefree, non- materialistic life in Mombasa belie the great class fissure between East African Indians and East Africans. Her nostalgic account of Mombasa as euphoric home signals her entry into an American environment wrought with multiple class fissures and her family's location in a new capitalist structure. Generating India
Neena characterizes her life in Kenya as an Indian life. She explains, Growing up was all Indian. Gujarati [was] spoken in the home. Everything . . . every occasion was very Indian...family, friends, whatever. But coming [to America], most of my friends are white Americans. When I came to Penn I met Indians, but I noticed that they are different. They are not Indians. . . . They are just like every other American. . . . More festivals are celebrated in Kenya. Here, Diwali is the only thing. . . . A big part of what [my family] misses is the Indian cultural experience or life that they had there. Here, there is isolation. People don't come to visit. Everyone is just too busy here. . . . The lifestyle is so drastically different. It is not compatible to a life that has lots of interaction with people.
Interestingly, Neena lived in a Mombasa neighborhood that was "primarily African." She was raised in an area where her father had been provided housing by the government school for which he worked. Her grandparents also lived in the area. According to her, this community used to be "more Indian" when her father was growing up. However the racial balance shifted as Indians got out of teaching professions and into business ventures. As each generation of Indian teachers retired, they were replaced by African teachers. Neena recalls that when she was young, there were still three or four other Indian families in the area. As time went by, her family was the only Indian family in the neighborhood. "We were surrounded by Africans," she emphasizes.
From where, then, did Neena develop ideas about what is or what is not Indian, and what constitutes an Indian community? Although her immediate surroundings were not filled with enough Indian cultural stimuli to warrant her profound self-identification with being Indian, she feels that her parents were successful in instilling an Indian identity in her. As she looks back at her life in Mombasa from the United States, she is dissatisfied and disappointed with the way Indians in America attempt to maintain their Indian identity. This nostalgia for an East African past alongside an essentialized India is the basis for her need to gauge the authenticity of any, especially others', identity markers, a need especially apparent in her later explication of Mississippi Masala. In a deeply candid moment, she reflected that she never worried in Mombasa about maintaining her Indian identity. She never questioned her identity because "it was simply there." She concluded that Indian cultural domiance in Kenya supported her Indian identity: In Kenya, [Indians] are the dominant people. Compared to the native, we are dominant culture in our minds. So, nothing can influence us. But now, when you enter the western world, you [find] changes happening.
The convergence which arises by coupling Neena's theory about Indian hegemony in East Africa with her earlier emphatic statement about being "surrounded by Africans" in her Mombasa neighborhood is, however, oxymoronic. This dissonance draws dangerous implications about the nature of minority/majority relations in a heterogeneous postcolonial space. An economically- powerful minority, Indians in East Africa struggle against an East African nationalism that emphasizes African cultural initiatives. Conversely, Indians' insular business networks and non- assimilative marital/social practices are the grounds for African resentment and claims of Indian isolationism. It is precisely the conjuncture of "surrounding" and of "being surrounded" that allows for identity formation. Within this racially and economically polarized society, Neena's Indian-ness is more about who she is not rather than who she is.
Neena's "being Indian" in Mombasa also comes from more common cultural markers such as specific foods, language, and daily ritual practices within the home that are vestiges of a remembered homeland. Significant institutional influences solidified her identification with the Indian community. Her parents sent her and her brother to what she called an "Indian Sunday School". It was a day of rigorous and disciplined activities for Indian youth at the local Hindu temple. She describes it as military---required uniforms, standing in straight lines, exercises, marching drills, and a written excuse by parents for a missed session. She greatly disliked the military-like aspects of the group. Her more enjoyable activities included: one hour of prayers, Gujarati language class, Indian music and dance classes, and competitive games and sports. Although she admits that these weekend activities seemed normal at the time, she is now astonished that her parents made her attend the sessions. Nevertheless, she is a testament to the success of institutional mechanisms of acculturation when she proudly states, "Going to that place made [my brother and me] strong. That's a big reason why we are very Indian . . .why we are very disciplined. We are good kids. We have a good foothold because of that . . . . It was a cultural school."
Neena's first statements about Mississippi Masala juxtaposed the proper (authentic) and improper (inauthentic) way for an Indian to behave. For her, if a character's action does not fit with her notions of authentic Indian behavior, then the character is marked as American. I thought [Mina] was American. I don't think she thought about the Indian part . . . like the dating. It was the falling in love thing which you don't think about in India. It was not the Indian way of adapting to a marriage situation . . . .The running away part was totally unacceptable. She didn't think about the reaction of the Indian community. If I was ever going to do anything like that, I would have to think about the ramifications. It was because of her American upbringing that she didn't think about these things.
When asked to comment on the parents, Neena is more sympathetic. Her words, however, nationalize, naturalize, and polarize categories for conduct: It was not her parents' fault. Living here makes you think of freedom and makes you challenge all else you have been brought up with. [Mina] thought she could do it. Here, you can do that sort of thing, and it's fine. So, [Mina] figured it was too. Her parents seemed pretty Indian. They dealt quite well with the whole situation. They seemed like good parents. I don't think it was their fault.
Regarding India's culture, Neena states that her sense of being Indian is not derived from India---the place, the nation. According to her, her sense of being Indian comes from "the feeling of India". Although she has visited Gujarat twice, the process of identity formation took place in Mombasa, not in India. She has little to say about her two visits to India. While she is two generations removed from daily life in India, she has fully accepted and eagerly maintains her Indian identity. Her identity as an Indian was strengthened rather than weakened by living in a majority African neighborhood in Mombasa. She is able to define herself, her family, and other Indians in relation to what they were not---African. She had an available and accessible community to define herself against. Nevertheless, she relates more to being Kenyan than to being American. Her self-ordering of identities is as follows: "I am Indian first, then Kenyan, then British, then American."
While Neena may argue that her identification with India is not an identification with the country/the nation, her conclusions about her own personhood and its relationship to various nations are, nonetheless, implicated in the politics of nationalism and territorialism. It has been argued that nationalism is one of the most recent forms of discourse which in fact produces social identity. Social identity produced by nationalist discourse powerfully transfers over space to diasporic communities. I suggest that Neena's story provides further evidence for the power of nationalist and religious rhetoric to form a diasporic minority community. Moreover, the focus shifts from a national subject to a diasporic subject. This diasporic subject is able to order and to structure hierarchically national identities, to negotiate between citizenship, ethnicity, and lifestyle, and monopolize on the allure of hybridity. For a diasporic subject, a process of identity formation is possible, however, precisely because of the notion of a homeland. However distant Gujarat may be from Mombasa, India is produced and reproduced (for and by children of migrants) as a known cultural entity through temples, language, endogamy, festivals, foods, and "Indian Sunday School". Perhaps only outside of India, in this case in Mombasa or in Maryland, can Neena be Indian. Institutions and organizations which are funded through international components of India's nationalist and religious groups exist throughout areas of Indian settlement. They promote a specific and essentialized form of Indian, in this case, Gujarati, identity in diasporic spaces. In Neena's case, her parents support the Vishva Hindu Parishad's organized socio-religious and cultural activities. The Vishva Hindu Parishad's mission is anything but devoid of nationalist objectives; it is embroiled in an Indo-Hindu-ist discourse which includes its transnational contributors. Neena, as a diasporic subject, must rely on India as a nation. Forming Ghettos
Like Neena's bounded characterizations of American and Indian societies, Mississippi Masala itself presents and maintains ghettoized identities. The film creates a blend of familiar and exotic ethno-imagery---the masala of Mississippi, a mixing of social types; the masala of migration, from India to Uganda to England to Mississippi; and the masala of identity, sexualized, ethnicized, gendered, and positioned by class.
The significance of masala, as implied in the film's title and dialogue, grows by pushing the masala metaphor a bit further ---to the making of masala. There is homemade masala, a concoction of hand-ground spices prepared without a strict recipe. Then there is store-bought masala, measured, uniform, marketed and packaged for general consumption. And what is the test for a good masala?: the taste of an individual spice should still come through when tasting the blend of these various spices. In other words, interaction should not obscure or flatten difference. By using masala in the title, the filmmaker opens up the debate of assimilation vs. pluralism in America.
Referring to another set of overused metaphors, the film begs the question: should America be a melting pot or a salad bowl? The masala imagery implies that while perceived cultural and racial differences may be the ingredients of discrimination, difference will be the ultimate emancipator. Indeed, the film's reception highlights that a celluloid portrayal of difference can be commercially liberating. I suggest that
Mississippi Masala works to portray a blend of familiar images collected for easy identification. In a pioneering effort to deal with racism, marginality, displacement, and oppression, the film ultimately reifies the dichotomies it seeks to complicate and sidesteps the political and historical realities it uses as context.
The film begins in Uganda, in 1972, at the time of the expulsion of Asians by Idi Amin's government. Jay, a well-to-do Indian lawyer, his wife Kinnu and young daughter Mina are among those who must flee with little more than the clothes on the backs, leaving behind their Ugandan friend Okelo, in order to find a new home. From Uganda via London, they reappear eighteen years later in Greenwood, Mississippi. Now, Jay and Kinnu run a local liquor store. They also work at a Gujarati-owned motel, an icon of Gujarati entrepreneurship in the American landscape. Welcome to working-class America! The main story line begins with an illicit affair between the now grown Mina and Demetrius, an African-American carpet cleaner, and continues with their love- driven defiance of perceived familial, racial, and cultural constraints. Note that the depiction of these perceived constraints parallels Neena's own suggestions about conservative Indian communities. Throughout the film, the audience suffers Jay's intense longing for what he considers his homeland: Uganda. Concerned with receiving compensation from the Ugandan government for his lost property, Jay displays a profound and direct emotional displacement which the central love story seems to symbolize. By the film's end, Jay's feelings of displacement and reconciliation are secondary to the sexual relationship, romanticized poverty, and adolescent pain of the two young lovers.
The story of the father's longing is used solely as a framing device for a romantic plot. What was the filmmaker's investment in focusing on the romance? Was this decision made only to capitalize on the potential entertainment value for the audience, according to Hollywood standards, or to juxtapose Jay's feelings of deep nostalgia and romanticization of the past with Mina's light-heartedness and de-romanticization of the past? Meaning, origin, and history are sacrificed for Hollywood romance.
In a February 1992 interview, director Mira Nair discussed the common thread in her work, "I would have to admit that I have always been drawn to stories of people who live on the margins of society, learning the language of being in between, dealing with the question, What is home?" To produce and exhibit these marginal, displaced "others" she uses mythic notions of home, parodies of African-American and Indian-American cultural phenomena and classic Hollywood film strategies. The politics of identity appear absolute. In a film that glorifies heterogeneity and eroticizes hybridity, where is a nuanced presentation of "being in between" that includes fluidity, simultaneity, and temporality of identities? Separated from other American working-class struggles, easily accessible features of color and nationality are privileged. In other words, the story of Mina and Demetrius is portrayed as one where race and imagined origin are paramount--the carriers of all identifying traits. Although some members of film audiences may be searching for fresh portrayals of African Americans or some portrayal of the Indian diaspora in American theaters, their cinematic materialization cannot alone legitimate dimensionless, uncritical, "Third World" protagonists.
What are the implications of Mina's attraction to Demetrius? Why did the filmmaker use that specific diasporic character as a vehicle for interracial union? How is Mina's relationship to blackness and race in America different from her relationship with Uganda? I speculate that, while this relationship is not an oppositional one for Mina, it is for her father. For Jay, Uganda is not equated with blackness; for Mina, Uganda and the idea of blackness are indistinguishable. Her social interactions over space and time provide this evidence. The movements from her childhood friendship with a Ugandan boy, whom she kisses before leaving her Kampala home, to her close friendship with Okelo, and to her sexual affair with Demetrius are depicted as natural for her and her alone. During these sections of the overall narrative, it seems that the individual spices of Mina's masala begin to taste the same. For all the filmic allusions (at times not so subtle) to "mixing", "blending" and "difference", categories of color and race do not change.
To return to the discussion of easily accessible features of identity, I would argue that Jay's relationship with his friend Okelo, and both Mina's and Demetrius's attenuated relationship with their respective origins serve to undermine class dynamics in favor of racial difference. Important interactions between class and race, both in Uganda and the American South, remain unexplored. As argued by bell hooks and Anuradha Dingwaney agree in their commentary on this film: ". . . both Jay and Okelo represent countries colonized by the West. Yet in Uganda, where Indians mediate between the oppressed blacks and the oppressing imperialist class, their relationship would necessarily be informed by hierarchy and domination. It is precisely this relationship that the film erases."
It seems that Neena would agree with hooks and Dingwaney. During her interview with me, Neena commented on the film's depiction of Indian/African interactions:
"The East African part was cheesy . . . not realistic at all, especially the part about the relationship between the African and the Indian father. To tell you the truth, I grew up in Kenya and we were not that interactive with the Africans. It's not realistic. We had [African] friends in school and next-door neighbors, but no real closeness . . . The Indian community just stays within itself and it interacts with the Africans just on a need basis. There's the question of superiority. America is so dominant, we integrate ourselves, and in two or three generations most Indians will not even speak their natural languages. Whereas in Africa, it's very Indian and it's going to stay that way for a while. It's probably because there, we think we're superior to them, and here, in this culture we think [Americans] are superior. It's true. [In Africa] Indians think they're better. And they are the middle to upper middle class . . . I think Indians have made a point of not interacting with Africans."
Unlike the film's representations, Neena's articulations about Indians and Africans in Kenya is necessarily in hierarchical terms, more true to the nature of race/class dynamics in East Africa. All About Race
Neena's battle between assimilation and maintenance takes place on the terrain of social interactions. Interracial unions become her litmus test for authenticity. Neena estimated that fifty percent of Indian Americans would "marry an outsider." She was dumbfounded when I asked her to estimate the percentage of Gujarati youth in Mombasa who would marry Africans. She responded and reiterated, "I don't know of any. That would be looked down upon completely. That would be so much worse than an Indian guy marrying a British girl . . . It's not even talked about . . . that would just never happen. It's not even a possibility." Racist attitudes from the Indian diaspora in East Africa mirror racist sentiments in the United States. Africans cannot be subjects, cannot be objects, and cannot occupy/enter the discursive space. Her comments about interracial unions in East Africa and in the United States do not include a place for Africans, but barely provides a space for white western partners (i.e., British) who are themselves "outsiders." She is so committed to her notion of an Indian community that her story about her life in East Africa erases blackness; whereas for the film's Mina, East Africa necessarily means blackness. While a commitment to Indian-ness is mimicked in Mississippi Masala, the film subverts Neena's gesture by promoting a brand of blackness which includes Indians and by glorifying a hybridity which, instead, forsakes and silences whiteness.
While Neena's notion of Indian-ness is a racially constituted one---one where "Indian" is a racial category---it does not allow for blackness, whiteness, and just barely concedes to western-ness. When questioned about what being Indian means to her, Neena exclaims, "Identity just is!" She continues with an example: "How can a guy who is Indian, born and raised in Canada, not say that he considers himself Indian?" [Being Indian] is ingrained in me . . . that's what I am. When people ask, it's the first answer. Even in Kenya, we weren't Kenyan, we were Indian. To me, being Indian is what I am. It's my identity . . . my beliefs, my religion, my morals, my principles. It affects so much of my life. Everything is because of an Indian upbringing. It's not because I lived in Kenya that I'm more conservative---it is because of my Indian upbringing. And that makes me identify with being Indian first.
Part of the maintenance of Neena's Indian identity leads to her desire to marry an Indian. Her parents are strict that she and her brother marry Gujarati Brahmans. Although Neena's mother is not Brahman, both parents consider their children Brahmans and want them to marry subcaste Brahmans of the same. She jokes that her parents gladly, though somewhat hypocritically, embrace her father's higher caste status for their children. She sees her own desire for endogamy as an indication of her parents' success. She proclaimed, "They have brought me up well. I would prefer to marry within caste, if possible. Generally, I want someone who is Indian, Hindu, and speaks the same language. If not all that, then definitely Indian." She admits that although she has rebelled against caste restrictions, she understands her parents' concern. Apparently, her parents' warnings against marrying outside one's own community are tantamount to marrying interracially. "I don't know how other people can do it. It's like Hinduism, like rebirth. It's such a basic part of life...the religious ritual . . . . I can't imagine that not part of my life. I would want my husband to have that too. You can't have one without the other."
Clearly, Neena and her parents are proud of the Kenyan Indians' maintenance of Indian tradition and identity---a tradition and identity seemingly more authentic than those of Indian Americans. "[My parents and I] have feelings of disappointment with Indians here. They're definitely different from Indians we've known [in Mombasa]. There's a whole set of Indians that are here, the money kind of people who want Mercedes . . . that part is disappointing for my parents. We had never known Indians like that. Even if we did know any really rich Indians in Kenya . . . those people did not flaunt it. It was something you did not do. You were still part of the community; you still act like everyone else. [In America], a lot of people are not like that. We don't associate with them."
Neena's membership in Penn's South Asia Society reifies her disappointment: "The South Asia Society does things for a show, more superficial than cultural-ethnic. It is good that [the members] go through the motions . . . it's just that they're not that Indian, on the whole." I suppose that her opinions about the activities of the South Asia Society stem from her experiences at the Indian Sunday School in Mombasa. Indian Sunday School was touted as a real and direct link to things Indian, whereas the South Asia Society fails to uphold the standards and ideals of Indian culture to which she subscribed.
Neena suggests that such differences (between herself and Indian American members of the South Asia Society) are caused by "assimilation, Americanization and westernization." She acknowledges that change is inevitable in America because America is a "dominant society." This notion of change includes changes for herself. She feels that she is able to adjust to her life in America by remaining conscious of her "Americanization." Neena relies heavily on the notion of consciousness and she implies that undergraduates in the Society are not conscious of the changes that they have undergone. She has made a determined effort to maintain her Indian identity, characterized by a "conservative outlook in views and traditions," despite her ability to pass as an American. "To everyone, I seem very American. I talk and look American. I look like I've lived here forever," she remarks. Although she opts out of fully accepting an American identity which she characterizes as less conservative and dynamic, she recognizes that her Indian-ness exists vis-`-vis an influential, powerful American cultural landscape. In contrast to her depictions about East African life, she includes a more hybridized picture of America. Nevertheless, her focus is a racially hybrid society devoid of class complexities. The Okelo Question
The ambiguity surrounding Okelo, the one African Ugandan character in the film, illustrates the simplified race/class dynamics in what is a highly fissured postcolonial African environment. It is not until the end of the film's alternative narrative of Mina and Demetrius that the audience finds out that the African friend Okelo is a schoolteacher. Until this point, Okelo's class status is left ambiguous. Is he Jay's driver, his servant? This is nostalgia on the part of the filmmaker. The deliberate reversal of established hierarchies forces the audience to question its own racial and class-based biases. The ambiguities in Jay's and Okelo's relationship are problematic because their relationship itself seems intended to spark comment on racial jingoism both in Uganda and Mississippi, and to create the backdrop for the lovers' strife. However, the relationship is not explored adequately nor historicized, and instead relies on the audience's awareness of what appears to be the filmmaker's play on the audience's biases. Such "play" is subtle and risky. Instead of disrupting audience assumptions, the film may reify them.
A subnarrative which is alluded to is the relationship between Okelo and Jay's wife Kinnu. It may raise questions about the possibilities and indiscretions of hybridity. There are a few signs, however open to debate, to suggest that Okelo (and not Jay) is Mina's father, for instance, a photo of Okelo and Mina to which her mother clings; a farewell to Okelo at a Ugandan bus station where Kinnu and Okelo embrace, interrupted (as if caught) by Jay's somewhat antagonistic glare; mentions of Mina's dark complexion (visibly darker than either Kinnu or Jay); and Kinnu's secrecy and evasion when questioned by Mina about her father's relationship with Okelo. More than offer commentary about racism and, to use the director's own words, "hierarchy of color," this hypothesis provides a whole host of readings, if not evidence, into the essentialized, stereotypical suggestions already present in the film. They are: Indian male impotency, Indian female sexual prowess and eroticism (and in this case, a penchant for black men passed on from mother to daughter), and finally the sexual potency of the African male (first by Okelo, then by Demetrius's randy companion Tyrone, and finally by Demetrius). With such a reading, the film also complicates sexuality with generational politics, where the daughter, in a beachside motel, literalizes what is only hinted at for the mother. Missing in Mississippi
The film's representation of the characters' lives in Mississippi is incomplete and lacks context, specifically regarding Americanization, notions of home, and the apparent divide between tradition and modernity. In such a move, Mira Nair abandons genuine bonding across different colored minorities, or possible apathy (having little to nothing in common), between Indian Americans and African Americans. The seriousness of racial discrimination and violence, and powerful influences of classism are also minimized. She chooses in favor of an American modernity which celebrates sexual freedom and independence in contrast to the perceived constraints of tradition, family, and community.
Reviewers have been sympathetic to the ideas driving this movie: "fresh images of people previously ignored, denigrated, or stereotyped by Hollywood," "a story of survival," "a piquant film," "a movie for the multiculture." Themes of pain, along with the particular theme of miscegenation, are nothing new to Hollywood. The idea of love's power to overcome all obstacles is as old as Romeo and Juliet, and in today's world is often
