The new India: Bangalore
The making of a miracleIn 1947 it was a provincial outpost. Today it's the most globalised city in India. Ian Jack reports from the boom town of Bangalore
Tuesday August 14, 2007
The Guardian
One early morning in Bangalore - at about six, before the traffic thickened and made the timing of any cross-town journey the subject of doubting speculation - an enterprising young man called Arun Pai took me in his car to the edge of the Karnataka Golf Association course, where he asked his driver to stop. On one side, greens and bunkers. On the other, big new buildings coated in glass and occupied by IBM, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs. "I always take my foreign clients here," Pai said, "and ask them to tell me which famous author stood almost in the same position."
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Many people have no difficulty. The answer is Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist and author of The World is Flat, and this is the setting of his book's first sentence, when Friedman is about to swing from the first tee and his partner tells him: "Aim at either Microsoft or IBM." As a first sentence it hardly ranks with "The past is a foreign country ...", but Friedman's book, the world's most popular gospel of globalisation, has sold 3m copies. It takes its several heroes from the IT business; one of them is Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of the Indian software company Infosys, who gets the credit for inspiring the title by insisting to Friedman in 2004: "Tom, the playing field is being levelled." But you might say that its real hero is Bangalore, or Bangalore as Friedman sees it: the leading example of how a city populated by clever, ambitious, English-speaking technicians in what is still known as the developing world can use the tools of the new information age to abolish geography - to undercut European and American costs so much, with no (or better) effect on quality, that it destroys the historic advantages of adjacency, when the counting house was best placed next to the warehouse and the warehouse next to the factory.
The 600 pages of Friedman's book radiate a gung-ho optimism, and perhaps for that reason it is more widely read in India, a country that for most of the 20th century suffered the pessimistic prognoses of the outside world, than in Britain. To look for a British equivalent you might have to go back to Samuel Smiles and his Victorian testaments to hard work and self-help and his glorification of the great engineers. As I went around Bangalore this month I often thought of Smiles and the first industrial revolution - of its ruthlessness and chaos, its model factories and choked sewers, its slums and philanthropists, yet running through its new kind of people, freshly urbanised and adapting to the factory clock, the thread of a belief that they were at the centre of a new kind of world.
Arun Pai, my guide that morning, is an example of this new kind of person, or new at least in India. Inspired by the walking tours of London, he created a small company, bangalorewalks.com, and every Sunday he leads groups of people through the history of the city as manifested in its monuments, churches, parks and barracks. At this, he is quite brilliant; from plain and obscure objects he can draw stories that take you to Napoleon and the conquest of Everest. To listen to him, Bangalore has been affecting the course of global history ever since Lord Cornwallis took it from Tipu Sultan in 1791.
But walking tours aren't how Pai makes his real money. That comes when a software company, usually American, asks him to introduce one of its newly arrived executives to India: the bewildering totality of it. Pai has a one-day course. He takes them in his car to the famous Friedman site, to the ancient Hindu temple behind the new Marks & Spencer's, to the new suburbs and shopping malls. He may recall a few recent cultural references, such as the American passive verb, to be "Bangalored", meaning to lose one's job to cheaper competition overseas. He can do Hinduism in five minutes. Most of the questions are about cows, but beggars and caste are also popular topics. He has persuasive answers for the innocent from Kansas, and to demonstrate and sharpen his skills he asked me to ask him any question at all about noticeable aspects of India. I asked why it was that Indian advertising never depicted any human being with a skin shade darker than olive, when so many of the population, especially in the south, were by no means so light. Pai said that it was just a local edition of a universal fact: the enduring appeal of whiteness. But he agreed that this answer might not satisfy an American executive who happened to be black, or indeed anyone from a society that has adjusted to multiculturalism in way that India, for all its divisions of religion, language and caste, has not.
Later that Sunday morning, Pai took a group of us along the city's main thoroughfare, MG (Mahatma Gandhi) Road, in search of bungalows. The Victorian bungalow and its shady garden were once the trademarks of Bangalore - "India's garden city". Only a few survive. Land is too valuable and its price increases every week. "Take pictures, take pictures," Pai said when we stood in front of one. "It may not be here when you next come." In 10 years, people say (and perhaps hope), the city will look like Dubai or Singapore. Some of it already does.
Go back 60 years. Does the story of Bangalore's rise symbolise the larger history of independent India? Yes and no. In 1947, Bangalore contained about 500,000 people and has about six million now; the fifth largest city in India. In the same period, India's population, now 1.12 billion, has multiplied by a factor of three rather than Bangalore's 12, but urban growth rates that are much higher than the national average aren't unusual. When I first came to Bangalore in 1976, I didn't feel I'd left India behind. The same restrictions on consumption, the same brakes to aspiration, applied as much here as anywhere else in the country. Under the regime of Indira Gandhi (and of her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, before her), the Indian middle class grew to a kind of noble austerity in the cause of national self-reliance. On the other hand, even then, Bangalore was clearly exceptional. It was tidier, neater, greener, English was more readily spoken, a striking number of church towers poked above the trees in a country where, outside the far south, Christianity had made very little impact. Above all, there was (and is) the climate. Bangalore is 3,000ft above sea level, protected by its height from the enervating heat; the British called it a "no-fan station". When I asked Nandan Nilekani of Infosys how he explained the IT industry's attraction to Bangalore he made all these points - "It's the most middle-class, Anglicised, cosmopolitan city in India, with a better quality of life" - and added another: that a scientific and technical tradition already existed in the city, thanks to the aircraft and electrical instruments businesses that the government of India located there in the 1950s and 60s, militarily strategic factories that were as far away as possible from the borders of Pakistan and China, India's potential enemies. During the 1980s, even before economic liberalisation, it became known as the fastest-growing city in Asia.
It is also, as the historian Ramachandra Guha says, a mongrel kind of town: the only place in India where you can watch films in six Indian languages. Partly, this is British doing. After Cornwallis dethroned Tipu Sultan and restored the kingdom of Mysore to its former Hindu rulers, the British built an army cantonment on the high ground outside the gates of Bengaluru, which in the local language, Kannada, was the name of the town they had captured. The cantonment grew in size to become a "civil and military station" which drew thousands of Tamil craftsmen, tradesmen and servants, as well as Persian horse traders and British civil servants and brewers. A large Anglo-Indian population became established. Missionaries opened schools, a great park was laid out, exotic trees imported, courts and administrative offices built. The lingua franca of this new town, Bangalore, was English; just down the road in the narrow lanes of Bengaluru they continued to speak in Kannada.
The two towns became one municipality in 1949, but the differences between them persist. In Bangalore, I met men in their early middle-age, raised in the old city, who said that until their late teens they had never travelled the mile to the cantonment; and who had been warned by their parents that, when they did, they had better avoid the temptations of bars and hotels.
Bangalore became the capital of the new state of Mysore (since 1973, Karnataka) when the Indian state boundaries were redrawn in 1956. The official language of Karnataka is Kannada. But thanks to the successive flows of migrants from other Indian states, only about 30% of Bangalore's inhabitants claim it as their first language. That means the city has no dominant majority, a welcoming absence as far as new migrants and businesses are concerned but a fretful one for the native Kannada speaker, who, if he lacks English, may feel excluded from the new consumer culture of his own capital city.
Consequently, in what some Bangaloreans consider a political sop to the natives, Bangalore will be renamed Bengaluru within the next year or two. When it appears in airline timetables and on departure boards, a stranger might imagine that the new, more Indian name reflects a new, more Indian reality on the ground. But the opposite will be the case.
A good way to understand what has happened to Bangalore is to look at a street map. In the old city, the Kannada names, many centuries old, come from castes and occupations and bazaars. In the cantonment, the source of the names is obvious enough: Brigade Road, Infantry Road, Church Street. Then, to judge from the parentheses, a burst of patriotic renaming took place - Sir Mirza Ismail Nagar (Richmond Town), Field Marshall Cariappa Road (Residency Road) - though to no effect on how people think and speak of these places. In the suburban spread of the 1960s and 70s, the streets renounce any claim to history or romance, as though Stalin was in charge of the naming department. In Indiranagar, named after Indira Gandhi, the main street is One Hundred Feet Road: that is its width. Many streets are simply numbered, as are localities: a visitor can spend many hours in an auto-rickshaw looking for 597, 15th Cross Road, JPNagar Phase Two. But now that anonymity, these plain square houses in their numbered streets, no longer satisfies new money. The names and architecture of the most recent settlements, high-rises and gated communities could be described as postmodern or pre-post-colonial: Buckingham Court, Windsor Residency, Palm Meadows, 10 Downing Street. Some quite small houses have castellated battlements. The word "Residency", the title the British gave to the homes of senior imperial administrators, is very popular.
"People here speak of 'get-up'," an architect told me as we had dinner in a hotel. "They say to each other, 'What kind of get-up is your new house going to have? Mediterranean? English Castle?' They think they can do anything - anything! - and they want to shove it in your face." In the hotel bar, young Bangalorean men were braying and drinking - the sound carried across the hotel gardens. They weren't poor; this was an expensive hotel. A phrase that the former Sunday Telegraph editor Peregrine Worsthorne coined in the red-braces 1980s came to me: bourgeois triumphalism.
I came to Bangalore a few times in the 1980s and stayed in the homes of my then father-in-law, first in Indiranagar and then in the old Anglo-Indian colony of Whitefield. The sights and sounds I associate with these places were, and in most places still are, common to all India. You would go to sleep to the sound of the chowkidar, the night watchman, tapping his stick and blowing his pea whistle. In the morning there would be the cawing of crows and the cries of an early street pedlar, selling vegetables from a stall on wheels. Sometimes an occasional car would honk. The Whitefield house is now a restaurant, the Eurochine, and in Indiranagar they are tearing down 30-year-old houses all the way down the Hundred Feet Road to make way for the stores of the global brands: Benetton, Nike, Levis. Cars queue impatiently down every street and turning.
It does no good to be wistful. A bright young science graduate can expect a starting salary of at least 270,000 rupees (about £3,400) a year as a software engineer, and within a year or two will be earning far more than the professor who taught him. Between 200,000 and 300,000 people work in Bangalore's IT industry and not all of them will be so prosperous; call-centres, now referred to dismissively as IT's "low-hanging fruit", pay far less. The great majority, however, will earn far more than their parents. Rent and property are expensive - at the top end, a Bangalore flat can cost £1m - but credit is cheap. This new middle class has cars and takes holidays abroad (eight days in Singapore for £150). The very rich have servants and a manager to manage them. A servant - a driver, a cook - can double his salary by learning English. If the new recruit joins Infosys, which has become India's most applauded company, he or she will travel each day to a "campus" at Electronic City, which has a putting green, an orchard, a swimming pool, free bikes to get around, and a canteen that serves 14 different cuisines (one of them Jain, which omits garlic and onions). In recent years, more foreign chief executives and heads of state have visited this campus than the Taj Mahal, or so it is said, and "the Infosys tour" has become a cliche of books and TV documentaries. And of course, after getting out of your golf buggy and ascending one of the taller buildings, you can look out through the plate glass and see the slums beyond the fence, where a small boy is defecating next to a stray dog and the ditch runs black. India: land of contrasts. But supposing this replica of Silicon Valley were to disappear? The slum, the stray dog, the black ditch, the defecating child - all these would still be there.
Philanthropy is popular. Infosys has a foundation devoted to good works. Quite separately, Nandan Nilekani's wife, Rohini, estimates she has spent about $40m (£20m) of their money on children's educational and water projects, mainly in village India, over the past few years. This is a lot. Then again, her husband is one of Infosys's seven founders. When the company went public in 1993, 100 shares cost 9,500 rupees. The same shares today would be worth 24,440,000 rupees, 3,000 times their flotation value. (Many more people have benefited than the founders; stock options were once given to all employees, who now number about 80,000.) "It's just no use being an island of prosperity in this country, it isn't going to work," Rohini Nilekani said when I went to see her in her charity's office, and in that statement hover two large black clouds.
The first is inadequate, sometimes collapsing, infrastructure: roads, railways, sewers, drinking water, schools, electricity. The second is the growing divide between urban and rural India. Despite increasing urbanisation, about 70% of the population still live in agricultural villages. The reverse side of the economic liberalisation that made India's software industry possible is the crisis of Indian agriculture. Poor crop prices, exhausted soil, expensive fertiliser, falling water tables, and land that needs to sustain too many livelihoods: so far this year 1,000 Karnataka farmers are said to have killed themselves. And yet the odd thing, the thing that a more curious American executive might ask their guide, Arun Pai, is: given that the price (80 rupees, about £1) of a six-minute local call from my grand hotel surpasses the daily wage of the sugar-cane cutter in a field a few miles away, how come there is so little anger and unrest in Bangalore? The best answer to this question came from another software entrepreneur, Subroto Bagchi, who runs MindTree Consulting (its clients include Avis and Royal Mail). I went to see him at his house. He offered tea and when I said yes, went away to make it and brought it on a tray himself - striking behaviour; never before, in 30 years' experience of India, have I ever seen any Indian man of above average wealth do anything so humbly domestic.
Bagchi, like many other Indian IT success stories, likes to stress his middle-class origins, a term that has a more egalitarian implication in India than in Britain. Indian businesses in the past tended to be run by caste-based dynasties, with money and trading (as well as political) know-how inherited by succeeding generations. Bagchi's father, on the other hand, worked as a government officer in a remote, un-electrified district of Orissa State; Nilekani's father managed a textile mill; village postmen, teachers and railway ticket-collectors appear proudly in the biographies of others. According to Bagchi, it demonstrates the truth of the saying that the Indian IT business succeeded "not because who we knew but because what we knew" and having to compete in a global market without political protection.
I asked about the prospects of discontent, given the disparities of wealth in Bangalore. Bagchi said: "Tell me, where is the angst, where is the senseless killing? They're not even restless. They're not just content, they're quite grateful. Most people, labourers, maidservants, are making a better living. It doesn't occur to my driver that he has every right to be as well-dressed as I am. Just doesn't occur to him. You have to understand, we don't have a sense of urgency, our civilisation is 3,600 years old. For most Indians, it's been an upgrade from coach to business class. They're grateful to be where they are".
· Ian Jack began writing about India as a foreign correspondent in 1977 and lived for a time in Delhi and Calcutta. He edited the Independent on Sunday and then Granta magazine and now writes a Saturday column for the Guardian.
