past perfect

Ha Jin's latest novel is a solid read, but won't meet readers' high expectations of this writer's work

By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in October 2004).

War Trash by Ha Jin. Pantheon $25

A NOVEL LIKE Ha Jin's Waiting, which won the National Book Award in the United States and elicited comparisons with Russian masters Anton Chekhov and Isaac Babel, can become a heavy burden on a writer's subsequent work. Though impressive, Ha Jin's fourth book, War Trash, does not meet the same lofty standard.

Set in 1951-53 and written in the form of a memoir by Yu Yuan, a Chinese soldier captured and imprisoned by American troops during the Korean War, the book offers an intriguing view of that conflict. But perhaps because it reads so much like a memoir--the book hinges on Yu Yuan's political development--War Trash lacks the drama needed to make it a successful novel.

Apart from the setting, the story of political disillusionment is well-trodden territory for Chinese authors writing in English. Though Yu Yuan does not begin as a communist, he realizes quickly that he must ally himself with the communist leaders in the prison camp if he is to have any hope of returning to the mainland, rather than emigrating to rival Taiwan. Because he has an elderly mother and a young fiancée waiting for him at home in China, he fights off the overtures of the Nationalists and cooperates with the communist-led agitations at the prison, which include not only hunger strikes and other nonviolent resistance but also the clever capture of the American general in charge of the prison camp.

Yu edges closer and closer to joining the party himself. But his class background as an educated graduate of the formerly Nationalist-run Huangpu Military Academy holds him back. The more he observes the decisions of the camp's party leaders--symbolic struggles to fly the Chinese flag, for example--the more he comes to believe that their faith leaves no room for humanity. "I was ambivalent about the attempt to reseize the flag," Yu reflects. "On the one hand, I admired the courage our men had displayed, and in a way I'd been awestruck by their passion and bravery, which I have to admit I didn't share. On the other, I doubted whether it was worth losing a man's life for the sake of a flag, which, symbolic as it might be, was just a piece of nylon cloth." Making explicit the striking parallel between fervent communism and religious fanaticism, Yu concludes: "I had noted there was a kind of religious fervour in some of these men, who were capable of laying down their lives for an idea."

By the end of the novel, of course, Yu has become a cynic, ready to mouth the party's platitudes if that will get him home--but fully aware that every political machine grinds on without a care for the people who fuel it and even thrives on their destruction. "Without such obliteration of human particularities, how could one fight mercilessly? When a general evaluates the outcome of a battle, he thinks in numbers--how many casualties the enemy has suffered in comparison with the losses of his own army. The larger a victory is, the more people have been turned into numerals. This is the crime of war: It reduces real human beings to abstract numbers."

This passage has resonance today, as the world's collective thinking about political issues again falls victim to the foolish polarity of a theory of a clash of civilizations. But these are not new ideas, nor are they expressed well. All of Ha Jin's books have dealt with modern China's baffling combination of idealism and brutality. But Waiting, and to a lesser extent his other fiction, was remarkable foremost for its understanding of human relationships, not political ones. He captured the sweet tragedy of our frail loves and petty hates with sensitivity and wisdom.

And though he himself once served in the People's Liberation Army and sometimes writes of soldiers, Ha Jin's best stories have, like Chekhov's, always been about love. The chief interest of War Trash, in contrast, is in its value as history. The Chinese prisoners' perspective on the war in Korea and their American captors is not one with which many foreign readers will be familiar, and though the novel's thematic conclusions are thin gruel, the prisoners' machinations make good reading. But these are not the usual pleasures we expect from fiction.

yet another cross to bear

A new state law that seeks to extend the reservation of jobs for low-caste Indians from the public sector to private companies has business worried that the government is turning back the clock.

By Jason Overdorf
(This article appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in September 2004).

THIS SUMMER the Congress Party-led government of the Indian state of Maharashtra--home to Mumbai and many of India's largest companies--vowed to enact sweeping affirmative-action legislation that would force private corporations to reserve 52% of all jobs for low-caste Indians.

The move came in the run-up to state elections. But many business leaders nevertheless interpreted it as a sign that the Congress Party meant to make good on its promises to temper reforms designed to unfetter Indian industry with measures to ensure that business doesn't leave the poor behind. Notably, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance federal government elected in May listed a call for a national dialogue on the expansion of affirmative action to the private sector in its mission statement.

Maharashtra's new law--the first of its kind--was passed in January, but the state government has yet to frame the rules for implementing it. The furore that resulted when the government promised to begin enforcing the law by July 30 (a deadline it failed to meet) arose partly because of the all-encompassing nature of the legislation. The law mandates quotas in "any government-aided institution: those that are recognized, licensed, supervised or controlled by government," which can be interpreted to mean that it applies to virtually all companies operating in the state. The first major companies to see the sword looming over them could be those whose government-land leases are about to expire.

"We've already been suffering under many constraints, like socialist economic planning and labour restrictions," says Rahul Bajaj, chairman of Bajaj Auto, the world's largest manufacturer of scooters and motorcycles and one of India's largest companies. "If we implement reservations, we'll have no way to become internationally competitive."

"An employment-quota system is only perpetuating the caste system in India," says Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries, one of India's largest corporations. "It is also perpetuating benefits for a 'creamy layer' amongst the backward and scheduled castes and tribes."

India first implemented an affirmative-action programme for members of what the constitution calls "the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes" in the 1950s. Essentially, the scheme reserved a percentage of jobs in government departments and government-owned companies for tribal peoples and castes once thought of as "untouchable," who'd long been victims of discrimination under the Hindu caste system.

Many say the constitution intended reservations as a temporary measure. But the rising political clout of low-caste Indians (who make up some 50% of the population) prevented the programme from being discontinued. Instead, it was expanded to include Indians from lower-middle positions in the caste hierarchy, now known as other backward castes, or OBCs. Now, as India dismantles its socialist-style economy and sells off more and more of its public-sector units--drastically shrinking the number of reserved jobs--calls to expand the scheme to include private-sector companies have become more strident.

Bajaj and other business leaders--though sympathetic--believe that discrimination is fading away and it is time for a relaxation of labour restrictions, not further constraints. "There are poor people," says Bajaj. "The scheduled castes and scheduled tribes are suffering. Nobody says nothing should be done about it. We must do something. But we can't correct one wrong with another wrong . . . Most of us do not have that prejudice [against low-caste Indians]." He adds, "Of Bajaj Auto's 10,500 employees today, 28% [are from scheduled castes and scheduled tribes]. Where is the discrimination?"

Likewise, Nandan Nilekani, chief executive of Infosys Technologies, India's billion-dollar software-services giant, said in a statement, "We compete with the best in the world and recruit people who are the best, without any consideration for age, gender or caste. We believe that to retain its competitive edge, the country has to invest in training and developing our talent for the global market place."

In a more candid television interview, Nilekani sympathized with plans to help create a more equal society. "There is no substitute for economic growth and globalization to remove people out of poverty," he said. "The point is, how do you make sure that the wealth creation is funnelled into social causes? Clearly we need to have affirmative action. We really need to give people an opportunity. But I think the focus has to be on education and making sure that we create high-quality education opportunities for everyone and then provide, obviously, the jobs that can absorb them. Reservation in a company, per se, may not be a great idea." Ambani agrees. "A more equal society in India can be created by an intense investment in education for empowerment and employability, combined with creating employment on an unprecedented scale," he says.

If India's employers are so committed to social reform, why is the opposition to affirmative action so strong? Just as in other countries with such policies, like the United States or Northern Ireland, there is a huge gap in opinions about how much discrimination exists, especially between the privileged and the disadvantaged. Many of the elite, like Bajaj, believe much of the prejudice has been eradicated.

But even successful "untouchables"--who now call themselves Dalits, or the oppressed--believe discrimination is still so prevalent that it defines every social interaction. While industrialists think the government should focus on uplifting the poor regardless of caste, low-caste leaders believe such a shift in emphasis would mean only that the lion's share of the benefits poor, low-caste Indians now enjoy would be transferred to poor members of the higher castes.

Anand Teltumbde, a Dalit who moved from state-run Bharat Petroleum to become managing director of Petronet India, a private-sector company, says this debate reveals a fundamental misconception about the reservation policy. Most people believe the policy is intended to uplift the poor, rather than to offer redress for 2,000 years of discrimination. "There is never an iota of reference to the intrinsic disability of Indian society to treat all people equally and justly," he says. "It is not the disability of the Dalits but the disability of Indian society that necessitates reservation."

When industry suggests that requiring companies to fill positions with Dalit personnel will erode efficiency, it implies that Dalits are by nature incompetent, he argues. "I would say the very tone and tenor of these reactions against reservations from the corporate leaders constitutes reason enough for reservation in the private sector."

POTENTIAL FOR VIOLENCE

Opinions differ as strongly about how effective reservations in the public sector have been in uplifting the targeted groups and what the costs have been to performance. Dalits, especially, believe that reservations are the only useful step India has taken to undo the damage done by the caste system. "It is the only effective action that the government has taken," says Udit Raj, president of the Indian Justice Party, a political organization that represents Dalits and minority groups. "Otherwise, I don't see anything, any progress."

Other high-caste Indians think government-sector reservations have been too effective in enriching low-caste Indians and disastrous to the performance of the government. "There are so many so-called backward castes. Take the Nadars [a South Indian caste]. They're filthy rich and yet they get preference over [higher-caste] Brahmins everywhere in Tamil Nadu. For all the things Brahmins did [to the lower castes] 100 years ago, you can't keep penalizing them," says K. Mahesh, chairman and managing director of Sundaram Brake Linings.

These differences of opinion can translate into vitriol--even violence. The last time India increased the scope of its reservation policies, when former Prime Minister V.P. Singh decided to extend job quotas to include not only the scheduled castes and tribes but also Indians from "other backward castes," fanatics burned themselves to death in protest and riots broke out across the nation, eventually leading to the collapse of Singh's government in 1990. To some, Singh's reforms made a mockery of the affirmative-action policy, entitling over 90% of the population in some states to reserved jobs.

"A lot of people feel there is this class of people that are being pampered . . .," says Narendra Jadhav, a Dalit who is principal adviser in the department of economic analysis and policy at the Reserve Bank of India, speaking for himself. "Most people do not recognize that in every single walk of life the extent of implementation of reservations has been extremely poor."

Dalit leaders allege that high-caste officials responsible for recruitment and promotions leave positions vacant rather than hire or promote those they view as inferior, then justify themselves to superiors by claiming they couldn't find suitable low-caste candidates.

Regardless of the merits of those claims, the numbers hardly suggest that reservations have turned the scheduled castes and tribes into a pampered new elite. Although they make up about a quarter of the population, the scheduled castes and tribes hold only 10% of the top group A positions, 13% of group B positions, 16% of group C positions and 21% of group D positions in central-government services. Meanwhile, 44% of the sweepers come from scheduled castes.

Perhaps the haphazard and incomplete enforcement of reservations in the public sector offers a clue to the likely fate of the Maharashtra law. In the end, it might only apply to companies in which the government holds a stake.

failing the grade

Who says cheaters don't win? In India, criminals are making millions by stealing exam papers. That's casting a shadow over the education system's ability to function as a meritocracy.

By Jason Overdorf
(This article appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Wall Street Journal in June 2004).

WHEN POLICE STORMED a building in a middle-class New Delhi neighbourhood late one night this spring, they found the men they were looking for in the midst of an unusual crime. The alleged perpetrators of one of the biggest scams to rock Indian higher education were chaperoning a midnight crammers' session for some 39 students--with a healthy sampling of parents looking on--as they studied for the entrance examination for India's prestigious medical colleges. When officials verified that their handwritten study sheets perfectly matched the top-secret question paper, not due to be released until the beginning of the exam the next morning, the test was cancelled and the tutors were taken into custody.

That was bad news for the 240,000 or so would-be doctors who had sweated over textbooks for months in preparation for the Central Board of Secondary Education's All India Pre-Medical Test, which determines who will gain admission into 15% of medical degree programmes here. Far from a reprieve, the cancellation meant more waiting, more studying and more stress. For students from rural areas, who had to travel long distances to reach testing centres, it meant they would have to spend even more money for their chance at a lucrative career.

Worse still, this wasn't the first case of its kind. Over the past several years, as many as 10 important question papers have been leaked. They include the Common Admission Test that governs admittance to the ultra-prestigious Indian Institutes of Management, or IIM, a degree from which virtually guarantees a bright future in business. The leaks have left Indian education officials scrambling for solutions--and excuses. More seriously, they have raised serious questions about the Indian educational system's ability to function as a meritocracy.

"A couple of my friends who had studied very hard for the exam were devastated" by the leak, says 17-year-old Nitya Asavari of New Delhi. "Mentally it was really a setback to them. I think it makes the whole system lose credibility. There is no guarantee. This leak got published in the newspaper, but there must be thousands of others," she adds.

Another student, 17-year-old Chitwan Mittal, was one of those due to take the cancelled pre-medical test. "People who pay the money can easily get through," she says. "It's happening every year." The corruption in the system also makes it even harder for poor students--whose parents cannot afford to buy placements--to get a good education. "It's absolutely not fair," says Mittal. "People just throw money and they get seats. Seats are literally sold to students."

Cheating is big business in India. For the latest leaked paper, the Central Bureau of Investigation--the federal investigative agency--says the accused sold exam questions to students and their parents for 700,000-800,000 rupees ($15,400-17,600), and may have had up to 400 customers. Even by the most conservative estimate, the alleged theft would have brought in 50 million rupees--more than $1 million--for a single exam. "The money involved is enormous," says Dependra Pathak, of the Delhi Police Crime Branch. "That generates temptation." The temptation to cheat is just as strong on the side of the buyers--the students and their parents--in a country where college places, particularly in areas like medicine and engineering, are like gold dust.

This spring's late-night raid ahead of the pre-medical test was a major coup for Delhi's police. But the fact that the leak happened in the first place discouraged many officials--and outraged many ordinary Indians. Among the main reasons for the dismay: The authorities thought they had solved the problem with the arrest of Ranjit Kumar Singh, or "Ranjit Don," a Bihar doctor who allegedly masterminded last year's leaking of the admission test for the IIM.

Singh, who has not been convicted of any crime, is in jail awaiting trial in his home state. To some there he's become something of a Robin Hood figure, despite news reports claiming he has a personal fortune of 2 billion rupees. But the latest exam leak shows that the methods attributed to him, at least, live on, as Pathak of Delhi's crime branch explains: "They called the students to a central location, they gave them handwritten question papers, they didn't let them go out until the morning," he says.

At the time of Singh's arrest, police said as many as 70 similar gangs might be operating around the country, though G. Mohanti, spokesman for the Central Bureau of Investigation, or CBI, now calls that figure an exaggeration. The investigative agency also said it suspected that the school board's pre-medical exam had likely been compromised for at least five years.

Among those calling for an explanation is advocate Raj Kumar Gupta: Earlier this year, he filed a public-interest suit with India's Supreme Court, requesting that the country's major educational authorities, as well as the CBI, make public their findings on the reasons why the testing system is vulnerable to leaks and what they have done to correct the problem. In May, the Supreme Court issued a notice in support of Gupta's demand.

"The leakage of question papers is affecting the psychology of students and their parents," Gupta argues. "Students who are real hard workers are getting demoralized and depressed. Above all, it has a great negative impact on the whole education system." The despair of students is understandable: After the leaking of the 2003 pre-medical exam, allegedly by Ranjit Singh, around half of the 1,200-or-so medical school placements awarded went to students from his home state. Another "natural inference" from the rash of exam leaks over the past year, according to Gupta, is that the authorities haven't learned any lessons from previous failures.

That may be only partly true. The Central Board of Secondary Education, or CBSE, said its chairman was too busy to grant an interview. But the CBI and police say the source from which the alleged perpetrators of the leak obtained the pre-medical exam paper suggests that most of the usual gaps in security have been filled. In 2004, the alleged source of the leak was a computer operator working inside the CBSE's "confidential" exam section. Police say that means that the traditional weak link of the chain--the printers who are entrusted with producing the exam papers several days before the test--has been strengthened.

So far, the authorities have arrested a dozen people allegedly involved in leaking and selling the 2004 exam paper. But to some, suspicion concerning N.K. Thaploo, a professor, and Suchdir Sachdeva, owner of Sachdeva New P.T. College--a coaching institute with a history of producing exam "toppers"--is greater cause for concern. Police say the two agreed to buy the leaked exam for 5 million rupees. The authorities have arrested Thaploo, who maintains he is innocent. Sachdeva, currently on bail, says he will cooperate with the investigation but has made no comment on his guilt or innocence.

"What is their [the coaching institutions'] role?" asks S.C. Tripathi, secretary of higher education at the Ministry of Human Resource Development. "Why is it that students are tempted to go to coaching institutions, and some coaching institutions are able to model their coaching programmes in such a way that over a period of time they are able to claim that children or students who come to their coaching programmes have a better rate of success?"

COACHING CENTRES

India has thousands of coaching institutes, three or four to every mid-sized town, Tripathi says, and many charge high fees. The question becomes: Do students cheat because they don't believe the system is a meritocracy, or have they lost their faith in meritocracy because of cheating? Student Asavari, though just 17, already talks like a cynic. "In every leak," she says, "the coaching centres are majorly involved."

Until a better answer arises, the IIM selection boards--shocked by the first-ever leak of their admissions test last year, but also concerned that coaching institutes skew exam results--have resorted to an old-fashioned solution. They use the test only to select the students for the second round of the admission process, a combination of one-on-one and group interviews designed to test the candidate's subject knowledge, as well as evaluate his or her personality. "Suppose someone has managed to get a high score in the written test that does not reflect the true abilities of the individual," says Bakul Dholakia, director and a professor of IIM Ahmedabad. "This is something that gets spotted in the interview process." Perhaps for that reason, so far nobody has raised doubts about the quality of IIM graduates.

But can the same be said for India's medical schools? Quite a few exam cheats "muddle through medical school," says S.K. Vohra, a respected New Delhi doctor with 50 years' experience. While he says the established medical colleges are up to standard, at some less reputable institutions, poor systems and inferior teachers are reflected in the quality of the graduates. One of the question papers leaked in 2000 was for the gynaecology and obstetrics exam for final-year medical students at the University of Bombay. That's a graduating class you don't want to meet--at least not in a professional capacity.

picture perfect

India: The Definitive Images, 1858 to the Present Photo editor Prashant Panjiar. Penguin Books India and Dorling Kindersley. $28.16

By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in May 2004).

WHEN PENGUIN INDIA asked photojournalist Prashant Panjiar to edit India: The Definitive Images, 1858 to the Present, a coffee-table book he came to see as a "visual history" of the country, Panjiar did not simply pull out his collection or pick the brains of other shutterbugs for inspiration. Instead, he talked to a cross-section of photographers, writers, journalists, friends and acquaintances, coaxing them to recall images and explain the meaning they held for them.

"It struck me that it was important to investigate which photographic images the average Indian knew best," he writes in an explanatory note. "Could we, by studying these images, arrive at some understanding of our nation?"

The answer to that question, at least in the form of this collection, must be yes and no. India is a schizophrenic country--one of "too many people living too close to each other," as Khushwant Singh writes in the accompanying text--so it is no surprise that The Definitive Images is a schizophrenic collage.

Divided into three sections--"Timeless India," "The Road to Freedom" and "The Years of Freedom"--the book ranges from the hackneyed exoticism of Steve McCurry's "Dust Storm," a shot you feel certain you have seen in postcard form; to Henri Cartier-Bresson's powerful image of Jawaharlal Nehru announcing Mohandas Gandhi's assassination; to an uncredited journalist's picture of three young sisters, hanging by the neck, who killed themselves because their family was too poor to arrange their dowries.

The book's creators decided to locate the beginning of modern India in 1858, after the event that Indian patriots call the First War of Independence and the British know as the Sepoy Mutiny. But it contains few photographs from the period preceding the Freedom Movement of Gandhi and Nehru, which began in the 1920s. Only a handful of photographs, most portraits, represent the final days of the British Raj--a shortcoming that the exceptions, like Felice Beato's staged photo of Secundra Bagh after the British slaughter of 2,000 rebels there in 1858, make one regret. Alongside its newsy shots of political events, the book includes an embarrassingly sentimental shot of cricketer Sachin Tendulkar wielding a bat (and looking remarkably like he does today) at age five, as well as publicity stills from various Bollywood films.

For all its flaws, however, The Definitive Images is a stirring collection, evoking what many have called India's "contradictions." More importantly, perhaps, it reveals Panjiar to be the best sort of patriot, one who sees his country, spots and all, and can love it and hate it at the same time. It took no small courage to include, in a book of this sort, Raghu Rai's photograph of one of the 31 men blinded with bicycle spokes and acid by police in Bhagalpur, Bihar, in 1980; the notorious photograph of the Roop Kanwar sati, which ultraconservatives used to glorify a widow who in 1987 burned herself to death on her husband's funeral pyre, an outlawed practice; and D. Ravinder Reddy's picture of Hindu fanatics storming the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya in 1992. This unflinching gaze undermines the myth of India favoured by the country's Hindu nationalists. Instead, juxtaposed here with Gandhi seated next to his spinning wheel and Nehru delivering his "Tryst with destiny" speech, these photographs stake a claim for an India with an unwavering commitment to a progressive, enlightened social justice.

a reluctant heir

Sonia: A biography, by Rasheed Kidwai, Penguin India (December 2003). Hardcover. ISBN: 0670049557. Price US$8.8, 256 pages.

By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared in the Asia Times in March 2004).

When journalist Rasheed Kidwai set out to write an unauthorized biography of Sonia Gandhi, many were not optimistic about his chances. The Italian-born widow of assassinated prime minister Rajiv Gandhi is notoriously tightlipped with the media, and she is hardly likely to be any more friendly to a biographer - always seen here as hagiographer or character assassin. But Kidwai was not dissuaded. If anything, the difficulties he would face in gathering material for his book gave him new inspiration to write it. Though the president of India's illustrious Congress Party had scores of sycophants and legions of critics, nobody had managed "an objective evaluation of her life".

Without a doubt, Sonia is one of the most intriguing figures in Indian political life. Like many of the more appealing public personalities, she became part of Indian history accidentally, and with some reluctance, as a victim of circumstance. When she married Rajiv Gandhi - no relation to Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi - in 1968, the scion of the Congress party's hereditary dynasty claimed to have no interest in following in the footsteps of his mother Indira Gandhi and his grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru (both premiers). Rajiv was a commercial pilot, and more than happy to leave the political wrangling to his brother, Sanjay. Nevertheless, Sonia's entrance into the political family required her to remake herself as an Indian bahu, or daughter-in-law, deferent and traditional. And when her husband entered politics in 1984, winning the prime minister's post by a landslide after the assassination of his mother, Indira, Sonia was forced fully into the limelight. She tried to keep away from politics and lead a normal life during her husband's term as premier, but this was a decision that would come back to haunt her, as it founded her image as "an inscrutable person, constantly tense, aloof and cold".

Kidwai's biography deals primarily with the period of Sonia's life leading up to her selection as the Congress party president, several years after Rajiv was assassinated in 1991. As a cub reporter with a Congress-allied paper, Kidwai was one of the few journalists who stuck by the then-lackluster widow for the months following her husband's death. During that period, Kidwai said in a telephone interview, Sonia never discouraged Congress leaders from coming and meeting her, so "although she didn't join politics, she became a sort of listening post". Knowing the leader from these days, Kidwai offers an interesting insight into her personality and motivations - which are still mostly unknown, even as she mounts her second run for prime minister against incumbent Atal Bihari Vajpayee of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which forms the lead party in the ruling coalition.

"One needs to look at it in a very human way," Kidwai says. "She came from a far away place - she didn't come from Rome, she was in a very small place in Italy. Indians know a lot about the UK and English people know a fair amount about India, but Italy is very far from us. Her family knew very little about India. Her father was very opposed to this marriage. Her father died in 1988 without ever visiting India, even when Indira died or the birth of Priyanka and Rahul [Sonia's children]." With all this distance in the background, Kidwai says, when the Congress offered her the mantle of leadership, it came as a shock. She was still grieving for her husband, and suddenly she was thrust into a world of Machiavellian intrigues, with everyone seeking to use her to further their own ambitions.

While it does get bogged down in the details of the petty rivalries and backroom deals of the Congress party, this section of Kidwai's biography, which comprises the bulk of the book, also provides an excellent history of the woes that have brought the once unassailable political party into its present disarray. Kidwai traces how, without a Nehru or Gandhi to lead them, rival factions nearly split the Congress on several occasions, until finally the cabal of leaders prevailed on Sonia to take charge as leader. Not surprisingly, it was a compromise destined for trouble, as many saw Sonia as a neophyte they could turn to their advantage, but it did prevent a schism. Today, though, many blame Rajiv's widow for the Congress' failure to defeat the BJP, forgetting to credit her with arresting its precipitous decline.

Kidwai's recapitulation of Sonia's achievements is useful. Along with holding together her fractious supporters, he also credits the Congress party president for the elimination of "black" or untraceable money from the party's finances, the steadfast support of a bill that would allot a quota of seats in the parliament to women and a new, more democratic operating style. The latter move - a change in demeanor from the autocratic methods of Indira and Rajiv, who ushered in and shunted out state chief ministers as a matter of course - has helped her to marshal her troops and makes it very unlikely that a leader will emerge to oppose her within the party, despite some grousing that the Congress should not be led by a foreigner.

But for all Kidwai's skill as political analyst, the biography suffers from an impersonal feel, perhaps because he was denied regular access to his subject. The portrait that emerges is that of a political leader, as Kidwai concerns himself chiefly with Sonia's political choices as he attempts to sketch out her ideology. And while that may prove useful to Indian voters (and journalists) as the Congress president ramps up her campaign for national elections in April and May, it gives the book a dry, academic tone. Just as Sonia's stern face hasn't endeared her to the public as India's Jackie Kennedy - whose trials are in many respects paralleled by her own - this serious biography is likely to hold the interest only of scholars and committed policy wonks.

sonia on the ropes

Politics has never been easy for Sonia Gandhi, yet she's grown ever more adept at remaking both herself and her once-dominant party. Now, as elections loom, is it all too little, too late?

By Jason Overdorf
(This article appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in March 2004).

SONIA GANDHI didn't come to Kaudiram, a crowded and dusty town in Uttar Pradesh, to pull her punches. Over a booming public-address system set up at the city bus station, the Italian-born president of India's Congress Party kicked off her national election campaign with a strident assault on the ruling coalition led by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. Calling Vajpayee's government incompetent and corrupt, the custodian of the dynasty begun by Jawaharlal Nehru unveiled a new willingness to go for the throat.

With polls approaching in April, the Congress Party--credited with gaining India's independence from Britain--is fighting for survival. It was defeated in the country's last two national elections and suffered disastrous losses in December's state assembly polls. If Vajpayee wins a third term as prime minister, it will be the first time anyone from outside the Congress has managed the feat. A second victory over Sonia would also signal an end to the politics of hereditary dynasties that have shaped India's history since 1947.

"The last person from the Gandhi family who won elections for Congress was Mrs. Gandhi's dead body in 1984," says Pramod Mahajan, chief campaign strategist for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the dominant partner in India's governing coalition. Since that election, when Congress won 400-plus parliamentary seats after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the party's performance has steadily waned.

The BJP, meanwhile, has gone from two seats in 1984 to 180 today, and is tipped to do even better this time out. Vajpayee, a 50-year election veteran and brilliant orator, leads India at a time of political détente with Pakistan and with the economy booming. By contrast, Gandhi is facing probably her toughest challenge yet in what has always been a reluctant political career--one that only began when, first, her mother-in-law, Indira, and later her husband, Rajiv, were killed by assassins.

Faced with this crisis, Sonia has begun to reinvent herself and the party. She has finally become a politician--seeking friends and embracing the media. Few doubt she has made a genuine attempt to turn Congress--and herself--around, but the question remains, is it all too little, too late?

As the young and exotic wife of Rajiv Gandhi, the scion of India's first family, and then as his grieving widow, Sonia might well have become India's Jackie O. But because of her own reluctance to sacrifice her private life, and her advisers' desire to "protect" and thereby control her, she instead became India's Al Gore--seen to be clumsily acting out the instructions of a coterie of handlers. "She's still uncomfortable being a politician," explains Rajesh Tripathi, a Congress leader. "With people she's not at ease. She doesn't have the quality that her mother-in-law had, and Rajiv was a natural also."

Sonia Gandhi only entered active politics in 1998, seven years after Rajiv's assassination, when she finally yielded to Congress leaders' pleas and took over the helm of the party her husband once led. Although still relatively inexperienced, her confidence has appeared to grow in the role. "In the last seven years, she has matured," says Digvijay Singh, former Congress chief minister of Madhya Pradesh and one of Sonia's closest advisers. "She's understanding the issues, she's taking stands."

Singh, along with other pundits, saw the emergence of this new avatar when Sonia, as leader of the opposition, delivered a withering motion of no confidence in the Vajpayee government in August. "The very fact that her charge sheet was never replied to [by Vajpayee]" illustrates how much better she's become at the game, says Singh.

Singh credits Sonia for her democratic style, which has brought "consensus politics" to the Congress. In party meetings, she prefers to listen to all sides before weighing in with her opinion. She takes copious notes, which discourages party members from flip-flopping on their stands. Unlike Indira and Rajiv, she doesn't try to micromanage the states under Congress' control, and that has won her respect, if not the awe her predecessors inspired.

But that consultative approach has its limitations, Singh admits: "The leader has to lead, rather than be led." Today, he says, the Gandhi widow has begun to do precisely that.

To start, Gandhi worked to convince Congress that unless it worked with other parties it had no chance of regaining power. Realizing that the once-dominant Congress would have to show humility, she opted to leave the party's choice for prime minister open for now, and has emphasized repeatedly that the party and its partners will select their leader--together--only after the polls. That's a clear change of tactics from 1999, when the election was seen as a presidential-style race between Vajpayee and Gandhi. That move, coupled with personal approaches by Gandhi, has won Congress some potentially important allies in the electorally significant states of Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu.

More importantly, perhaps, Rajiv Gandhi's Italian-born widow--who did not become an Indian citizen until 1983--has also realized that her surname won't be enough to win her the election. She hit the campaign trail with a new political personality, endeavouring to overcome her natural reserve and, if such a thing can be accomplished by an act of will, to make herself lovable. Her first target: Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state.

When Sonia embarked on a gruelling, three-day pilgrimage through the eastern part of the state in February, thousands of villagers lined the road along her convoy's route. In some places they were crowded on rooftops and gathered four rows deep on the roadside. "This is how you have to reach these people," says Congress's Rajesh Tripathi, who travelled with the convoy.

And yet, he adds, "she has to do it more intensely. She has to have more exposure, and it has to be an audience like this." Those comments reflect a common perception of Gandhi's relationship with the voters. "Her basic problem remains the same," says Rasheed Kidwai, veteran reporter and author of Sonia, an unauthorized biography of the Congress president. "She's not very open. That's her nature."

So why does she do it--why did she decide to leave the privacy of domestic life and plunge into Indian politics? Tripathi recalls once asking her a similar question. "Do you really think I have a choice?" she replied.

"Over a period of time," comments Kidwai, "she slowly got into believing that the party needed her, the country needed her, and the legacy of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty demanded that she keep the communal forces at bay." A turning point came in 1992, when the Babri mosque in Ayodhya was destroyed by Hindu fanatics stirred to passion by BJP stalwarts L.K. Advani and Uma Bharti, now deputy prime minister and chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, respectively. According to Singh, it was this "absolute" commitment to the fight against the various chauvinist groups threatening Nehru's idea of India that brought Sonia into the fray--after much pressure from the party.

"She's the only person who has a global vision . . . that goes beyond a parochial, local, regional view," echoes Salman Khurshid, former Congress president in Uttar Pradesh. "Then she is extremely secular and extremely liberal, again, in the mould in which we had leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and so on. Maybe we're not being able to sell it properly, but that should be a strength."

Indeed, Congress's "selling" of Sonia has at times been lamentable. Incomprehensibly for a major politician, Sonia, who speaks fluent, if heavily accented, Hindi, waited until late in the campaign before giving her first-ever extensive interview, in two appearances on the television programme Walk the Talk with Indian Express editor Shekhar Gupta. That reticence contrasts sharply with the openness of the avuncular Vajpayee. "She's absolutely an unknown entity," says Kidwai. "People are prepared to accept shortcomings. . . . The issue of foreign origins--the Indian people are prepared to accept that--but they want to know who she is, and what she is all about."

In a signal that her opponents smell blood in the water, early on the BJP took to calling this campaign a contest between Vajpayee and "the Question Mark." Sonia's appearances on Walk the Talk seemed an effort at rebuttal. The results were mixed. While Gandhi shed some of her reserve and occasionally seemed to speak from the heart, her suspicions about her interviewer's motives were transparent, and at one point she allowed herself to be trapped into parrying a question with a damning, "I wouldn't want to discuss it now."

For the time being, at least, the party's answer appears to be more Gandhi, rather than less. Congress workers are pushing Sonia Gandhi's son, Rahul, and daughter, Priyanka, to join the campaign. That hints at another reason why the party's president soldiers on: She knows this is a relay race and she's carrying the torch.

Will she falter? Is this the end of the dynasty? The BJP is bullish: "I'm afraid this time they may not even get the three-figure mark" in seats, says Mahajan, the campaign strategist. While there is some speculation that Gandhi may step down if Congress does as badly as predicted, Mahajan--like many others--believes that for now she's all Congress has. "Sonia is their biggest liability, and still she is their biggest asset because there is no [other] unifying force," he adds. "It's a Catch-22 situation for them."

Sonia herself has said she'll take losing in stride, if she has to. Asked on television if a loss would spell the end of her political career, she responded: "I have certain duties which I have to fulfil, about which I have spoken earlier. And there's no turning back."

moving for a living

Delhi attracts some 200,000 migrant labourers every year. It's a life of toil and hardship. But those with drive and hope--and more than a little luck--can create a better future for their children.

By Jason Overdorf
(This article appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in December 2003).

"THE DAY THAT WE ARRIVED, it was pouring rain," recalls 32-year-old Guddi, a migrant labourer who came to New Delhi with her husband and two children last year. "The train only stopped at the station for a moment, and by the time we realized that we had to get down, we hardly had time to jump off and grab the children. We had brought everything with us--flour, dal, pots and pans--but we left it all in the train. We got down with nothing but the clothes on our backs."

Like many new migrants, Guddi and her husband went directly to a cluster of hovels, next to a construction site, where other labourers had set up camp. With no food, the family went hungry until they found work the next day.

"What did I think about Delhi?" says Guddi. "I guess I noticed some big buildings, but I didn't look around much. All I saw was that there were many, many buildings coming up." And all that construction meant that what they had heard was true: Jobs would be easy to find in the city.

That promise of a better life--even if it means endless days of back-breaking labour--brings more than 200,000 migrant workers to Delhi each year to work on the city's many construction sites. Between 1991 and 2001, the population of Delhi increased by more than 4 million people. About half of that rise was the result of migration. Delhi's not alone. According to the Census of India, the country's urban population stood at around 285 million, or just under 28% of the total, in 2001, compared with 218 million, or just under 26% of the total, 10 years earlier.

The mobile population creates a host of problems, according to Neera Chandhoke, a professor of political science at Delhi University who has studied rural-urban migration. "The growth of shanty towns puts tremendous pressure on services, whether it is medical care or transport, water or power," says Chandhoke. At the same time, the close quarters and poor conditions of the shanty towns, combined with fierce competition for jobs, often results in tensions between the various regional communities brought together in the city. In addition, says Chandhoke, "competition over jobs leads politics in all kinds of unpleasant directions" including strident, and even violent, opposition to those viewed as outsiders.

Delhi has escaped the worst side of anti-migrant violence, the professor says, though it's no stranger to riots. "Overall in our survey of Delhi shanty towns we didn't find much direct conflict," she says. "But we did find a lot of resentment."

Chandhoke's team also discovered that government bodies seemed to have no idea just how many migrants it was dealing with in the shanty towns, most of which are built illegally on public land. "We were told that a particular shanty town had 1,000 people in it. When the team went there we found that 10,000 people were living there."

While jobs attached to public infrastructure projects attracted migrants to Delhi in the 1980s and early 1990s, today a private building boom is absorbing most of the capital's migrant labour force. In Delhi and two suburban areas, Gurgaon and Noida, close to 3 million square feet of commercial and residential space is planned or due to be built over the next 18 months, says Sanjay Verma, an executive director at real-estate consultants Cushman & Wakefield.

As Indian builders use very little mechanical equipment or prefabricated materials, building is done almost entirely by hand. Every 100,000-square-foot project employs around a hundred labourers who must dig out foundations with picks and shovels, mix tonnes of concrete, and tote and lay in place thousands of bricks with nothing but muscle power. "It's very labour-intensive," says Verma.

And relentless: Men strain over picks and shovels for hour after hour of the day, or graze their shoulders lifting and placing bricks. The women seem to have it even harder: Every morning they wind cloth around their heads to make a flat carrying surface, and all day long they carry load after load of bricks--12 at a time--up to their partners working in the building above. "There's not a minute to rest," says Guddi. "It's back-breaking labour. But at least I can work. I miss the village a lot, and every now and then I want to go back, but there's no point. All my family is there, and I miss them, but there is no work. What choice do I have?"

Guddi's 12-year-old son, Anil, misses the village, too. "People are always fighting here, and there I could play in the river. There's no river for me to swim in here in the city." That's an understatement. The 500 or so rural labourers who are building the luxury Sun City apartment complex in Gurgaon live in a sprawl of squat, brick huts, without running water or even windows. The ground is littered with trash and discarded construction materials. A few houses have televisions. No one has a toilet. The air (like much of Delhi) smells of burning dung. Despite all, though, nobody wants to leave.

"Most migrants come to earn money or because they have problems in their villages," explains Bhagya Lakshmi, a programme coordinator at Delhi Mobile Creches, a non-governmental organization that provides food and schooling to labourers' children. "Sometimes drought, floods, or debt forces them out, or their land is too small to support the family." Because most villages still work on the barter system, moving to the city offers their only chance to earn much-needed cash. Still, even after they arrive and find work, migrant workers face many challenges.

"The biggest problem they face is that they don't have regular work," Lakshmi says. "They may get only 15 or 20 days of work in a month, and they get paid only after 15 days of work. Sometimes they have difficulty getting their money if the contractor shuts down the project for some reason."

Migants' children also face difficulties. Unlike in the village, where relatives can look after the children, on the building sites the adults all work from dawn to dusk. Mobile Creches works to shore up the gaps and give the children enough education to get them into government-run schools, but the NGO can't cover every site. And even if a child does get into school, chances are that its parents will move to another site after only a few months. With each move, the child has to qualify and gain admittance all over again. All those interruptions mean it's easy to fall behind.

Though the obstacles are great, the experiences of migrants who came to Delhi earlier suggests that some--those with the right combination of hope and drive--can manage to give their children the opportunities they never had themselves.

When 36-year-old Naramdas came to Delhi in 1986, he had nothing. No land. No work. "The day I left home, everyone was in tears. Five or six of us went to the train together. I kept looking back over my shoulder at my family until I passed out of sight. At first I couldn't decide whether I should stay or go back home." Today, Naramdas is a skilled mason, and all his children are in school--a rare accomplishment for any of Delhi's poor. "I know I cannot move back to the village now," he says, "because that would spoil things for my children. I have to stay here and work so that my children can study. I am working so my children can become something. One day, I would like my son to be a doctor, or maybe a teacher."

poetry or pretension?

My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey. Knopf. $24

By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in November 2003).

THERE ARE NO MORE interesting characters than the genius and the fraud. Of the two, the fraud--who abhors messy perspiration, preferring instead a single, bold, elegant stroke of inspiration--is of course the more compelling. Just such a trickster is the central figure of My Life as a Fake, the latest novel from Man Booker Prize winner Peter Carey, a tale based on a literary hoax that occurred in Australia in 1944.

In the real story, two clever writers opposed to the abstruse direction taken by modernist poetry set out to prove the ignorance of its proponents. To this end, they cobbled together a fake poem from the flotsam and jetsam of some famous poets, titling it The Darkening Ecliptic. They submitted their work to an avant-garde Australian literary magazine called Angry Penguins under the pseudonym Ern Malley. The magazine's editor, who accepted and published the poem, was not only humiliated when the trick was revealed, but in a bizarre twist of events, he was taken to court for violating Australia's obscenity laws.

In Carey's fictional version, a lone poet named Christopher Chubb had perpetrated his hoax long before the novel begins. Chubb conjured up a rustic autodidact called Bob McCorkle and submitted his poem to an imaginary Australian magazine named Personae, hoping to show once and for all that the editor couldn't tell poetry from pretension. But Chubb's spiteful hoax proved more disastrous than he intended. Disgraced in print and in court, the editor of Personae killed himself. After the suicide of his pilloried victim, Chubb drops off the map for decades.

Enter London poetry magazine editor Sarah Wode-Douglass, the book's narrator, who discovers Chubb while she is on holiday in Kuala Lumpur. He now works as a bicycle mechanic--the career he facetiously devised for McCorkle. Chubb is covered in scabs and possesses a single, threadbare suit. But he still has something to hook Wode-Douglass with. He tempts her with a page of poetry that promises it might just be the real thing: literary genius.

"It was a poem, or part of a poem, composed in those thick rhythmic downstrokes which would later become, if only briefly, so familiar," Wode-Douglass explains. "I read with a full consciousness of the old man's history. I approached those twenty lines with both suspicion and hostility, and for a moment I thought I had him. It was a sort of Oriental Tristan Tzara, but that was too glib a response to something with very complicated internal rhymes . . . It slashed and stabbed its way across the page, at once familiar and alien. I wondered if the patois--Malay, Urdu--was disguising something other than cod Eliot. But that did not fit either, for you really cannot counterfeit a voice. All I knew now, in my moment of greatest confusion and suspicion, was that my heart was beating very fast indeed."

As coy as any poet's mistress (and certainly more so than any poet), Chubb refuses to show Wode-Douglass the entire poem until she listens to the story of its origin. He insists that it was not he who wrote it, but the real Bob McCorkle--a Frankenstein's monster who literally stepped into the world fully grown from the hoaxer's imagination. Wode-Douglass is wary of becoming the victim of a second, more astonishing, scam, but no matter who the author is, the brilliance of the page of poetry she has seen is undeniable. Perhaps Chubb is a madman, but she must know if he is a genius. She must read the entire work. And for that reason, she must listen to the trickster's tale, the heart of My Life as a Fake.

Like the monsters of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Bob McCorkle seems at once his creator's true self and his worst nightmare.

Though Chubb ostensibly fashioned the pseudonym to expose the stupidity of Australia's search for its "authentic" poet, in doing so he discovered and set free from the rigid confines of his Anglophile's body the very Australian voice he'd denied existed. In Wode-Douglass's words, Chubb's own poems are "priggish, self-serving, snobbish," while McCorkle's have "wildness," "nasal passion" and "the sense that nothing on earth can matter but a poem."

Imagine Chubb's horror. A literary snob, an exposer of fake artists, and he brings to life an alter ego more talented than himself, a genuine prodigy! Writers--notorious for their envy--shudder at the idea. They know the difficulty of the struggle for a real, honest, new voice, as well as the mixture of torture and joy in discovering that another has triumphed in it. But Chubb's trial is not limited to burning jealousy. His nemesis, hating his creator as monsters will, kidnaps Chubb's daughter and leads him into exile in the jungle, eventually forcing him to take on the working class penury he mocked with his hoax.

Carey, who won Booker prizes for Oscar and Lucinda and The True History of the Kelly Gang, is one of those rare writers whose works are greeted with nervous anticipation, for fear he might one day falter. But My Life as a Fake does not disappoint and Carey once again proves his formidable talent. Though the novel's pace bogs down a bit in the last third, this intelligent and playful work combines a witty reflection on the nature of art and a compulsively readable colonial adventure story with look-Mom-no-hands virtuosity.

One can hardly escape the impression that the author has staked his claim to being his country's Bob McCorkle and its Christopher Chubb: An unpretentious, genuine Australian voice and a clever, deceitful magician. This is very fine work--truth at its most feigning--and Carey performs without a net.

faltering footsteps

The Long Strider by Dom Moraes and Sarayu Srivatsa. Penguin-Viking, 2003. ISBN: 0670049751. Price: US$9, 359 pages.

By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared in the Asia Times in November 2003).

In the early stages of researching The Long Strider with co-author Sarayu Srivatsa, Dom Moraes discovered from doctors that he suffered from cancer. The prognosis was not good. The old poet was dying. Perhaps inspired by the eccentric subject of the book, Thomas Coryate, a dwarf and writer and sometime buffoon who walked from England to India in the year 1613, Moraes decided not to undergo radiation treatment to prolong his life, but to spend his final days completing a last project.

As he told Srivatsa: "I don't have a lot to do. I want to go to London for one last time. I want to be able to finish writing the Coryate book. And if there is some time left after that, I want to work on my collected poems." When the two collaborators were left alone by his doctor, the grand old man added, "What I need immediately is to get as pissed as is humanly possible." Moraes brings that irrepressible pluck and humor to this, likely his last book, and his wry, sometimes baudy wit finds the perfect foil in the earnest, sometimes priggish Srivatsa.

The Long Strider tells the story of the remarkable, foolhardy walk of Thomas Coryate, a would-be Marco Polo whose writings were mostly lost in transit from East to West. Coryate, whose thirst for fame bordered on madness, enjoys a no-more curious reputation today than in his own time (though his 15 minutes were up centuries ago). Though he is credited with popularizing the use of the fork in England and inventing the word "umbrella", Coryate is best known as the first Englishman to make the "Grand Tour of Europe", which eventually became an essential part of the gentleman's education.

But he made that journey less as a gentleman than as the butt of a gentleman's jokes, say scholars. After the death of his father, a country parson, Coryate managed to secure a place in the retinue of the young Prince of Wales, where he was both wit and buffoon, a wise fool not unlike the jesters of Shakespeare. He made a name for himself with comical orations, full of pseudo-scholarly words and ludicrous circumlocution, that parodied the posturing, courtly repartee popular at the time.

No doubt unsatisfied with making and rebutting insults, however, Coryate set out to make a name for himself by walking across Europe in 1608 and writing a first-person account of his adventures, called The Crudities. In what Charles Nicholl calls a triumph of self-promotion in a compelling piece in the London Review of Books, Coryate's book became something of a sensation in 1611, a year in which Ben Johnson's Alchemist and William Shakespeare's Tempest were on the stage and John Donne was writing the Holy Sonnets.

But the book's success was due not only to its merits. Having received a copy of the travelogue to review (and edit), the Prince of Wales called for the addition of a compendium of fulsome, mock praise from Coryate's ostensible friends - Johnson and Donne among them. While other writers, such as Tim Moore, the author of The Grand Tour: The European Adventure of a Continental Drifter, view this facetious preface as detracting from - and even obscuring - the literary and anthropological merits of the Crudities, in The Long Strider, Moraes credits Coryate himself for this development, suggesting that the tenacious self-promoter used the scorn of his literary betters to create buzz for his offbeat tract.

But whether or not Coryate was satisfied with the reception that his Crudities received, one thing is certain: He was not content to let his notoriety end there. In what Moore interprets as a desperate reaction to the reception of Coryate's first book and what Moraes and Srivatsa spin as a bold quest for ever greater fame, Coryate set off on his long, eventually fatal, walk to India. That he made it to the Moghul court alive is remarkable enough. Without maps or the writings of other travelers to work with, he set out with little money and nothing more than a copy of the Christian Bible as his guide.

Coryate left England in 1612, first sailing to the Holy Land and then leaving from Jerusalem for India in 1614 on foot. He made the first part of his walk with a caravan, crossing the Euphrates and Tigris and finally the Indus rivers with a motley horde of traders and their numberless, groaning camels. He made Agra, then the capital of the Mughal Empire under Emperor Jahangir, and then Ajmer, now a pilgrimage site for Indian Muslims, in 1615.

In India, usually clad in filthy rags and without a penny in his purse, Coryate met Britain's earliest trade representatives, including the East India Company's agent at the Mughal court, William Edwards, and the ambassador of England's first official embassy to India, Thomas Roe. With characteristic audacity, he also insisted on delivering one of his pompous orations to the Emperor Jahangir, whom he fantasized would finance a further tromp to China and beyond.

How his faulty Persian was received is a mystery, but like his mad street tirades against Islam, it was amusing enough or insane enough or incomprehensible enough that it did not get him killed. On the other hand, it lost Coryate the sympathy of ambassador Roe, who found the man's appearance disgraceful. Unlike his European tour, Coryate's walk to India did not become a publishing success. A handful of letters he sent home via other travelers eventually went to press as Thomas Coriate, Traveller for the English Witts: Greeting in 1616, and some were reprinted in Sir William Foster's Early Travels in India in 1921. But he failed to deliver the enduring masterpiece he had set out to write.

Moraes and Srivatsa tell Coryate's story in alternating chapters. Moraes writes the more imaginative, novelized sections that recreate Coryate's thoughts and adventures on his journey, while Srivatsa supplies diary entries cataloguing the pair's efforts to retrace the dwarf's steps (by jet plane, mostly).

The idea of the dual narrative is to show the contrast - interesting in its continuities - between ancient and modern India. The authors rely on their readers to see the parallels, however, and the juxtaposition of chapters is not often illuminating enough. Part of the problem is that while Moraes' novelization of Coryate's journey is entertaining, particularly for the humorous appearances made by Ben Johnson and other literary and historical figures, Srivatsa's diary entries are too concrete, too pedestrian, to measure up.

As in their previous collaboration, Out of God's Oven: Travels in a Fractured Land, (See Asia Times review of March 22, A cynical, idealistic melange) the urbane and poetic writing of Moraes, a veteran poet and journalist, makes the workmanlike contributions of Srivatsa seem all the more clunky.

"People here, Hindu or Muslim, are still religious and they believe what their ancestors did. People here were terrifyingly poor then and they still are. What's interesting is that their attitudes toward religion and poverty are slightly different now," Moraes tells Srivatsa as they follow Coryate through India. He must be right, but simply telling readers to be on the lookout for these similarities is no substitute for a thoughtful reflection on them, and that neither author provides.

There is another parallel here, however: that of two men coming to the end of a journey. Perhaps because of his own outsider's status in both India and England, perhaps because of his own failing health, Moraes displays a remarkable sympathy for his fascinating subject that carries the book, flaws and all. Maybe there's another reason. Though in life he was mostly a teetotaler, in his dying moments, the author of the Crudities made a final request for his liquor of choice, white wine, with last words that Moraes must envy: "Sack! Sack! I have not tasted sack these many months. Give me some sack."

water, water....

Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia, by Tom Bissell. Pantheon Books. $25.95

By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in October 2003).

A COLOURFUL WORLD ATLAS, produced in association with Britain's Royal Geographical Society in 2000, still shows the Aral Sea as a pale blue teardrop, perhaps a hundred miles across, between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in what was once the far-flung hinterland of the Soviet Union. As writer Tom Bissell shows, it is a misleading colour. Once a vast inland sea, today the Aral Sea represents one of the modern world's worst ecological disasters. Poisoned and destroyed in less than a generation, it has shrunk by 75% of its volume and half of its surface area since 1960. Soon it will have dried up and disappeared.

Bissell first went to Uzbekistan in the mid-1990s with the American Peace Corps, but a mix of culture shock and home-sickness led to his "early termination of service." In April 2001, he returned, hoping to catalogue the disaster and come to grips with his failure to stick it out the first time. In Moynaq, once the seaside home of fishermen who contributed a tenth of the Soviet Union's total catch, he discovered the title for his book. "For years after the sea abandoned Moynaq's shoreline," he writes, "some of the town's more desperate fishermen dug canals out to meet it . . . 'Chasing the sea,' they called it."

The dust storms, and the poisoning of the land can be traced directly to the Soviets' forced march toward modernization, though Bissell suggests the groundwork for the destruction was put in place by Tsarist Russia. The weapon was cotton. Soviet planners in the 1950s decided to drain the Aral Sea to increase the country's cotton yield, ushering in five decades of abuse that pumped pesticides into the water table at the same time that its diluting volume was reduced, and replaced soil-saving vegetation with ever-growing cotton fields. The results were nothing short of disastrous.

Bissell's descriptions of the region surrounding the sea are harrowing. In Nukus, a town that is home to a few hundred thousand, he experiences what is called a "small" dust storm, now too commonplace to be monitored. "Dust gathered in the gutters of my leaky eyes. I could barely see the sun, though through the dusty brown-out I could discern a weak, urine-coloured glow." This is nothing. At least five times a year Nukus is struck by a "cloud of howling sand" that carries off the area's "poisonous dust" to as far away west as Georgia and the Black Sea.

Residents of the Aral Sea region suffer from one of the world's highest rates of tuberculosis. Anaemia rates are among the highest in the world. The infant mortality rate is startling, and respiratory infections are the main cause of death among children. Kidney disease linked to the high salinity of the water is widespread.

Though Bissell's avowed purpose is to investigate the Aral Sea disaster and his visit to the region makes for a powerful and informed portrait of this ecological nightmare, he aspires to a greater canvas. Chasing the Sea is a travel narrative that, like its inevitable model, Robert Byron's 1937 classic Road to Oxiana, seeks to capture the historical grandeur of Samarkand and Tashkent, as well as what life is like in Uzbekistan today. In this effort Bissell is less successful, sometimes losing the thread as he tries to bring together ancient history, modern politics, his exorcism of his personal demon of "failure" and a kind of rogue's journey across the country. He pins long historical digressions onto visits to famous monuments with clumsy and sometimes hackneyed devices. A visit to the site of the execution of two British spies by the tyrant Nasrullah Khan in the 19th century, for example, prompts him to express a corny "kinship": "They were travellers. They had toiled in these vicinities of suffering, bled upon this soil . . . This was hallowed ground."

A first-time author must be excused a fit of enthusiasm now and again. But banal summations also mar some of Bissell's more analytical passages. When his "breath was nearly taken away" by the sight of a woman and her daughter dressed in purdah, he indulges in some, one supposes, admirable cultural relativism, concluding: "I also knew that body-conscious American girls were gagging themselves and barfing over toilets from sea to shining sea. Muslim culture was not alone in having its dark edges." This simple-minded observation is a mere substitute for the more complex conclusion needed to complete a train of thought.

These flaws, like off-key notes in a well-played piece of music, are frustrating because the book holds such promise. Overall, Bissell offers a sensitive and erudite picture of this fascinating country, ambitiously engaging a broad sweep of history that encompasses Genghis Khan in the 13th century, Timur in the 14th century, and the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. If his authorial voice sometimes seems callow, his earnestness nevertheless achieves an engaging honesty. And this absence of posturing and performance is, in the end, enough to excuse him.

The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad (translated by Ingrid Christopherson), Little, Brown, Agust 2003. ISBN: 0316726052. Price US$19.95, pages 256.

By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared in the Asia Times in October 2003).

When Norwegian war correspondent Asne Seierstad (pronounced Ossna Sairshta) landed in Afghanistan, the country was full of journalists there to writ e about the return of music, the rehabilitation of the Kabul soccer stadium - used by the Taliban as an execution ground - and of course the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The veteran reporter soon concluded that those stories were dead horses. And then, in a chance encounter in a bookshop, she found her subject: Sultan Khan, a bookseller who defied the edicts of the Russians and the Taliban for 20 years, risking his life and spending time in jail, to save Afghanistan's literature.

Seierstad convinced Khan to let her move in with his large family, where the 33-year-old Norwegian lived for the spring after the fall of the Taliban. This close association gave Seierstad an incredible opportunity to learn about the inner life of Afghanistan. As a foreign woman, she enjoyed a liminal status that allowed her to befriend not only the aging patriarch Sultan and his son Mansur, but also Sultan's daughter Leila, his wives Sharifa and Sonya and his ancient mother Bibi Gul. The result of her labors is a remarkably intelligent and sensitive portrait that goes beyond the simple narratives of repression and liberation and the alarmist tales of bearded, hair-trigger fanatics that filled bookshelves last year. Before picking up the Bookseller of Kabul, I would have been quite happy never to read another sentence about Afghanistan. After reading it, I feel there's much more to learn.

One of the reasons for the book's success is Seierstad's decision to write in what she calls in her foreword the "literary form". By that, she means simply that she turned her voluminous research into a novel, opting not to include herself as a character in a glorified travelogue and restricting her pronouncements on Afghan history and culture to a minimum. That choice allows her to focus on the interior lives of her subjects - their thoughts and feelings - in a way that would elude a journalist focused only on "observations".

Though it is (fortunately) no geopolitical treatise, the Bookseller of Kabul is hardly a book of small incidents. Rather, Seierstad captures the family dilemmas that any novelist would seize on - conflicts fraught with repressed emotion. The book begins with Sultan Khan's decision to take a second wife, a heartbreaking humiliation for the woman who supported him for so many years. Seierstad evokes the fear and excitement of Sultan's young bride, the resignation of Sultan's old wife and Sultan's own pride and determination with an equally deft grace.

She describes not only the pain of the second wedding, but also the first wife's gradual acceptance of the new bride. And when Sharifa and Sultan tell baudy jokes and gossip about the sex lives of their relatives, we see that a second marriage does not mark the end of love and the burka (veil)and daily prayer do not mean the end of sex.

In the context of the postwar press coverage, replete with images of faceless, voiceless women, the Norwegian author's description of life behind the veil is particularly valuable. Drawing on personal experience (she reveals in her introduction), Seierstad shows how the concealing garment can be restricting and disorienting - like the blinders worn by a horse - but yet how it remains possible to look beautiful and even to flirt while hidden beneath it. Then again, she also reveals how in a town where the sun shines nearly every day of the year, a young woman, her skin pale and gray, may be weak and dizzy, suffering from lack of vitamin D.

Seierstad's method - so unlike the self-important riffing of Mailer and Wolfe's "new journalism" - might be called anti-journalism. And though in her introduction she confesses that she chased the Northern Alliance around herself for six weeks, Seierstad has little patience for the oversimplifications of her chosen profession. It's not surprisingly, therefore, that the funniest character in the Bookseller of Kabul is a reporter named Bob who works for "an American magazine" (Time). Given to eloquent Americanisms like "wow!" and "yeah", Bob drags his interpreter Tajmir on what he doubtless described as a thrilling chase after bin Laden.

"Tajmir and Bob disagree fundamentally about what constitutes a successful trip," Seierstad writes. "Tajmir wants to return home as quickly as possible ... Bob wants violent action in print; like a few weeks ago when he and Tajmir were nearly killed by a grenade." With the same deadpan delivery the author hilariously skewers the journo's characteristic nonchalance about the culture he's observing.

As Tajmir tries to find somebody who has seen bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, or someone who "thinks they have seen someone who resembles them", he reads and hopes against hope that he and his journalist buddies find nothing at all and return home safely. Bob interrupts with typical simplicity: "What are you reading, Tajmir?" "The holy Koran," answers the interpreter. "Yes, so I see, but anything special? I mean, like a travel section or something like that?" pursues Bob, perhaps looking for "color" for his story.

That's parachute journalism in a nutshell. And in the Bookseller of Kabul, Seierstad has found the antidote.

an oppressed voice heard

Outcaste: A Memoir by Narendra Jadhav, Penguin India, August 2003, ISBN: 0670049727, price Rs395 (US$8.60), 296 pages.

By Jason Overdorf
(This book review appeared in the Asia Times in September 2003).

In the 1960s, when author Narendra Jadhav's father Damu retired from his job with Indian Railway, the old man had trouble adjusting to life without schedules to meet and work to do. The "virtually illiterate" pensioner turned his hand to repairing all the gadgets in the Jadhav house - even those that were, until he got hold of them, in perfect working order.

It was only to keep his father from becoming a nuisance that Narendra, his youngest son, pushed him to write his memoirs. That the old man persevered, wrestling with language, testifies to the unforgettable character he was: stubborn, perhaps irrationally confident, and, above all, unwilling to accept his supposed limitations.

More than 20 years later, his recollections became the framework for Outcaste - a tribute to an inspiring father by a son who rose to become an adviser to the executive director (India) at the International Monetary Fund and head of economic research at the Reserve Bank of India. That such a remarkable story of success began, literally, as what the Indians would call "timepass", somehow makes the book more enjoyable, like a $20 bill found unexpectedly in the pocket of a crumpled pair of pants.

Indian family sagas are as commonplace as they are charming, but nearly all of them are tales of one kind of elite or another. Outcaste - a family memoir not of high-caste, scholarly Brahmins, so well represented on the bookshelves, but of three generations of untouchables - is different.

Twice as likely to live in poverty than other Indians and still bound to face powerful discrimination at every turn, India's untouchables - now known as Dalits - remain (except in politics) virtually silent and invisible. No major Indian newspaper or magazine employs a Dalit editor, and reporters are few and far between. Bollywood, where many Muslims have found fame, has no Dalit directors and no Dalit stars. And Dalit authors - already few in number - rarely find publishers eager to translate their books into English.

If Outcaste may be used as a measure of those stories waiting to be told, that is a terrible shame. Written in a simple, artless style, Outcaste traces the journey of Damu, the author's father, from a small village in Maharashtra to Mumbai. In the city he uplifts himself and his family, overcoming great odds, with a clever wit, good humor and an amazing force of will.

Inspired by the movement of Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar - the Dalit leader who struggled against caste discrimination and untouchability during India's battle for independence and eventually became the chief architect of the new country's constitution - Damu refused to allow his children to grow up uneducated.

His eldest son became a district collector with the Indian Administrative Service - one of the country's most powerful and coveted positions. His youngest son, Narendra, with a PhD in economics from Indiana University, became an adviser to the executive director (India) at the International Monetary Fund and, later, head of economic research at the Reserve Bank of India - and, of course, an author.

Damu's life alone would provide material for half a dozen movies. In just one chapter, Damu wins a job selling newspapers by hanging around the train station. Before long, a gora saheb (white gentleman) picks him out and pays him extra to save a copy of the Chronicle for him. One day, the gora saheb takes him home to play with his little blond daughter. Damu, who thinks he is there to perform some errand, sits on the floor at first, but the gora saheb pulls him up and makes him sit on the couch next to him. "I was very uncomfortable and felt totally out of place," Damu recalls. "My lowly place was so deeply etched in my mind that when I was treated well, I could not believe it. I thought there was something wrong. After much thought, I reasoned that perhaps saheb did not know that I was an untouchable."

For months, Damu and blond Missybaba play together, until one day the saheb tells him he will have to accompany the little girl to school. There is, of course, something patronizing about the relationship between Damu and the saheb, for whom the little boy places bets on the horses and continues to run errands. But the way Damu tells the story is as disarming as a famous actor recalling his big break - and as free of rancor. A gambler and a drunk, the saheb does not last long with the railways before he is dismissed, given one month's notice to return to England. Jadhav dispenses with the farewell party in a handful of paragraphs. The saheb buys Damu a new suit and hires a photographer to take a picture of Damu and Missybaba. Memsaheb gives him his first glass of wine. And then, in a deadpan sentence fraught with emotion, the episode concludes: "About a month later, Saheb and Missybaba returned to England, but he was not able to take Memsaheb with him because she was half Indian."

Like Angela's Ashes, Outcaste manages powerful sentiment without the maudlin embarrassment of sentimentality. Outcaste lacks the literary flair of Frank McCourt's memoir, however, possessing neither its forceful, lyrical rhythm nor its artful cohesiveness. Jadhav's unaffected prose serves him well, but certain editorial decisions - concluding with an essay by the author's 16-year-old daughter, for example - give the book an amateur's earnestness. Yet despite that artlessness - indeed, perhaps because of it - Outcaste captures the life of India's villages and Bombay's slums with an anthropologist's precision and a novelist's humanity.

criminal conversions

For 2000 years, the Hindu caste system treated India's 'untouchables' as less than human. Millions chose new religions to escape or at least protest. But today, ultra-nationalist Hindus are seeking to block off even that avenue.

By Jason Overdorf
(This article appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in September 2003).

ON A SWELTERING Independence Day in Gujarat, a group of 50 or so Dalits--the outcastes once known as "untouchables"--listened as community leaders railed against the caste system. "For 55 years India has been independent," the speakers declared, "but still we have not gained our independence." "Jai Bhim!" the small crowd shouted in response.

For many Dalits, that phrase--"Jai Bhim!"--has become a greeting, an expression of solidarity and a kind of war cry. It means "Long live Bhim!" and honours Bhim Rao Ambedkar, a political leader from the independence era who introduced an affirmative-action programme for Dalits in the Indian constitution, where they are referred to as "scheduled castes."

Ambedkar argued that there was no hope for the untouchables within Hinduism. The only way they could escape from their caste was to renounce their religion. "I was bo

Orn a Hindu," he once said, "but I will not die a Hindu." In 1956, he led more than a million Dalits to convert to Buddhism.

"Dr. B.R. Ambedkar fought like a warrior for human rights," Manoj Gohel, a Dalit who converted to Buddhism in 2001, told me the evening before the Gujarat event. "He is our messiah. We consider him our god. His dreams are very well known: To make India free of this casteism; to make India free from this untouchability; to bring equality for all people and prosperity to all people. And to free Dalits from the grip of Hinduism."

Today, however, many fear that Hindu extremists will turn that form of liberation into a crime. Last year, two Indian states--Tamil Nadu and Gujarat--passed legislation granting the state governments sweeping powers to prevent proselytizing and stop religious conversions. The president of the national ruling Bhartiya Janata Party, or BJP, commended the move and called for a national anti-conversion law. "A lot of money is coming into the country from Islamic organizations to aid conversions," claimed BJP President Venkaiah Naidu.

Such statements go to the heart of the Hindu-nationalist vision of India and its objection to Dalit conversion. The BJP is the political wing of the Sangh Parivar, a loose grouping of offshoots of a high-caste paramilitary organization called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Espousing the ideology of "Hindutva," the group conceives of India as a Hindu country waging a battle against foreign invaders. With incendiary propaganda, it has managed to unite Hindus of high and low caste, despite their many reasons for division, against the spectre of a demonized Islamic world. But any mobilization of the downtrodden threatens to smash the Hindu alliance to pieces. For that reason, Hindu ultra-nationalists have long viewed religious conversions as a dangerous threat to their ultimate goal: transforming India from a secular to a Hindu state.

"The moment you change your religious identity," explains Martin Macwan, the head of Navsarjan, a Gujarat-based organization that works for Dalit rights, "your political affiliations change."

For 2,000 years, Hindu belief has divided humanity into four Varnas, or groups: Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras. Once, the caste you were born into determined your social status and the job you could do. Brahmins and Kshatriyas, at the top, were the scholars, priests, rulers and warriors of the society. Vaishyas were traders and the Shudras were menial servants. Beneath them all were those forced to perform tasks deemed by the Hindu religion to be polluting--making shoes, treating leather and scraping human excrement from primitive toilets, among myriad other jobs. Held to be "untouchable," these people could not enter the temples, drink from the wells or bathe in the waters used by other Hindus. Viewed as subhuman by their own religion, millions converted to Islam and Christianity over the centuries.

"Although India has laws prohibiting discrimination and there has been some positive change in access to public services, still the practice of untouchability and caste-based discrimination persists, mainly in rural areas," says Sukhadeo Thorat, an economist at Jawaharlal Nehru University. "Between 1981 and 1997, there were 200,000 atrocity cases filed with the police, while the most recent economic data shows untouchables are twice as likely to work as poorly paid wage-labourers than other castes, twice as likely to be unemployed and nearly twice as likely to be living below the poverty line. The scheduled castes are at least 25 years behind the rest of the population in terms of poverty." One has to look no further than the Sunday newspaper to see the evidence that discrimination continues, with matrimonial advertisements that specify the desired caste, and even rental properties offered "for vegetarians," code for "Brahmins only."

In two well-publicized cases last year, Dalits in Tamil Nadu were beaten for bathing in an upper-caste well in Rajasthan and forced to eat human excrement as punishment. In Haryana, not far from New Delhi, a mob of caste Hindus lynched five Dalits employed to dispose of cow carcasses after accusing them of skinning a live cow, an animal sacred to Hindus. The last incident reawakened the Indian media to the persistence of caste discrimination and provided a platform for leaders seeking to emulate Ambedkar's mass conversion of the 1950s. Udit Raj, founder of the Lord Buddha Club and president of a national employee organization called the All-India Confederation of Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe Organizations, seized the opportunity to hold mass conversion rallies in several states and later founded the Justice Party, a political body that seeks to unite Dalits and India's religious minorities.

"What we are looking for is to liberate all people from mental slavery," Raj told me. "Caste and Hinduism are the same thing, so if my people want respect and dignity, they must come out of the caste system . . . We are trying to spark a fire."

Opponents of conversion have been working just as hard to extinguish that fire. While Gujarat, the state torn apart by Hindu-Muslim riots last year, is considered to be in the vanguard of the march towards Hindutva, Tamil Nadu passed its anti-conversion law first, raising the alarm that the Hindu-nationalist ideology was gaining ground in the traditionally more tolerant south.

Although three other states (Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh) have had similar laws since as long ago as 1968, the Gujarat and Tamil Nadu legislation affords the state more sweeping powers. Almost identical in their wording, the laws in both states vaguely prohibit "conversion from one religion to another by use of force or allurement or by fraudulent means." And they impose harsh punishments. Those found guilty may be imprisoned for up to three years and fined up to 50,000 rupees ($1,090); but if the convert is a Dalit or aboriginal--a member of what the law calls the scheduled castes and tribes--the prison term may be extended to four years and the fine doubled to 100,000 rupees. Both laws also require participants in conversion ceremonies to notify the district magistrate. Violators may be jailed for up to a year and fined up to 1,000 rupees. Dalit leaders point to the latter clause and the double punishments specified for the conversion of members of the scheduled castes and tribes as evidence that the laws are directed against them.

In both states, supporters argue that anti-conversion laws are necessary to control the activities of unscrupulous missionaries. "We require this freedom-of-religion bill because in some cases there was forced conversion," the BJP law minister in Gujarat, Ashok Bhatt, told me. "We want only three things: That there should not be any conversions made forcefully or by bribe or through misguiding people. That should be prohibited by law."

Opponents of the laws believe they have a more nefarious purpose: To set up Christians, and even religious converts, as enemies of the people. Not only would this discourage conversion, but it would also help unite Hindus against a perceived common enemy--just as the demonization of Muslims has done--and prevent a split between high- and low-caste parties.

"The intention of these lawmakers is perhaps to create a rift between religious communities and to give a false impression that there is a phenomenal growth in a particular community and they must be controlled," says Moses P. Manohar of Tamil Nadu's Interchurch Service Association (a Christian group).

In the Gujarati city of Ahmedabad, where attacks on the Muslim community in 2002 left nearly 1,000 dead, some Christian leaders fear officials are taking even more direct action to stoke intercommunal tensions. "When the carnage took place here, people had computer printouts with the location of Muslim homes and shops," says Victor Moses, a Roman Catholic priest and director of St. Xavier's Social Service Society in the city. Earlier this year, he adds, police came "in the middle of the night to ask Christian workers about their work, to survey how many Christians they had working in the organization. Later they denied the survey's existence. They are updating and upgrading that list [of minorities] to strike as and when it is possible." Though another Christian leader showed me a list of questions he claimed to have obtained from a police officer conducting this survey, the Gujarat law minister angrily denied its existence.

"What they want to do is to harass us," concludes the Justice Party's Udit Raj. "Their philosophy is weak, their religion is weak; they want to herd the Dalits and the poor into their religion with blind force. Hinduism is under attack because its foundation is based on discrimination."

QUITTING HINDUTVA

In two villages near Kanchipuram, a Hindu religious centre in southern India, the conflicting motives that inspire Dalits to convert are evident.

The Dalits of Koothirampakkam live in a ghetto separate from the caste Hindus, and claim they aren't allowed into the main village. Nor are they allowed to buy items from the same store. The village council forces them to help pay for an annual religious festival, but the procession of the icon doesn't come to their ghetto. The Dalits must worship it from the other side of the street.

Last year they threatened to convert to Islam. "Even if we are Hindu we can't pray to God. So why should we be Hindu?" said Chandra Khantan, a 47-year-old resident of the Dalit village. "At least the Muslims will allow us into the mosque." Other residents told stories of violent clashes with the caste village. Pangurangal, a youth in his 20s, claimed that in one fight he was assaulted with an iron pipe.

In the neighbouring caste-Hindu village, many people were reluctant to speak to a journalist. Those who did made no apologies for the segregation of the village, though they denied there was any violence. "They have a separate temple," said 67-year-old Narseeman. "They have a separate water tank. They have a separate ration shop. Why are they complaining?"

There's a similar story in the nearby village of Thirupedu. Following a violent clash with the caste Hindus of their village, 300 Dalits last year gathered up their belongings and moved to an unoccupied area along the roadside. Last December, at the urging of Ranganathan and a group called the All-India Christian Council, they converted to Christianity.

Critics of conversion, such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the most vocal wing of the Sangh Parivar, argue that casteism remains prevalent in India's Christian communities, which continue to use terms like "Brahmin Christians" and "Dalit Christians." Leaders of a loose grouping of movements rallying around the slogan "Quit Hindutva" admit that casteism can occur among Christians. But when it does, they argue, it represents a perversion of the Christian doctrine; in contrast, Hinduism explicitly endorses discrimination. And for most Dalits, what they are rejecting is more important than the belief they're embracing.

"Every Dalit must quit Hindutva," says G. Ranganathan, Tamil Nadu state president of the All-India Confederation of Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe Organizations. "Only then can we get our human rights." For that reason, he organized a mass conversion of Dalits away from Hinduism--to any other religion--last year.

Ranganathan doesn't deny that some Dalits convert for material reasons, as well as psychological or spiritual ones. And nor do the converts in Thirupedu. "They said they would arrange a factory so we would have jobs," said village leader Poonooswami referring to the Christians. "At least they offered to give us cows so that we could start a milk cooperative. They also promised to install electricity connections and water pumps and to build housing for all of us."

The Christian group did help them to build concrete houses, but has not fulfilled any of its other promises. In what might come as a blow to Ranganathan's Quit Hindutva movement, the villagers are now considering filing a complaint against the group under Tamil Nadu's anti-conversion law. "I am a failure in this," Ranganathan admitted with genuine remorse.

Despite their disappointment, the Dalits are determined to remain converts. "Whatever happens, we will not go back to Hinduism," said Poonooswami, standing in a small crowd. "When we converted, we were prepared to die." The others nodded in grim agreement.