Oh, how I’ve longed for my very own literary feud. Rushdie-Greer, Naipaul-Theroux, Amis-Eagleton sniping from highfalutin’ British papers and lit mags. And now I have one! A bloodthirsty throwdown between British author Nirpal Dhaliwal, Bombay UB contributor AnonAndOn and me. It takes place not in the London Review of Books, but rather in Tehelka and, uh, our own blogs. And it’s rather genteel. So, like my lovers, just close your eyes and pretend.

First, Nirpal in Tehelka:

Westernisation is a myth… Globalisation should not be feared as the engine by which India is subsumed into the west, but heralded as the process by which India will Indianise the globe…

My friend, Manish Vij, a thirty-year-old American citizen and native of Boston, similarly can’t pin down what exactly it is that makes him and others like him feel essentially Indian… “India swaggers culturally but is also intimidated because it’s poorer… That’s silly. With the population it has, it’ll never be swallowed. It’s a soft power exporter… It was also fascinating meeting people who’d grown up as a majority in India their entire lives. They’re both confident and oblivious to the world…” [Link]

So apparently Indians are oblivious to the world. Oh man. That dude sounds like a total tool. Actually, the full quote was about young, spoiled elites who’d never known the feeling of being a minority:

it was also fascinating meeting people who’d grown up a majority in india their entire lives. they’re both confident and oblivious. both role models - aristocrats, jocks, beauty queens who never emigrated - and cautionary tales. your range of role models is much broader once you see it yourself rather than through your parents’ prism.

Also, I’m a Bay Area native. And a bit older than that (shabash, buddy ).

Then AnonAndOn went in all gangsta with her sideways Tec-9s of rhetorical terror:

I was with Manish when he bought [Nirpal's book] Tourism (for the aesthetic quality of having a barely-sheathed breast and nipple on the cover, naturally)… it’s incredibly infuriating to find him not just mentioned in an essay that had me chewing on the edge of my table, but agreeing with the flawed central thesis. Now I’m livid because a) the essay makes no sense, and b) I can’t believe Manish would agree with such ridiculous (absence of) logic…

Contrary to what Dhaliwal would have us believe, the West is not one homogenous identity… Tell someone from Los Angeles that their identity is a photocopy of someone from Alabama and see how they react… Before we get pigeon-chested with the pride of not having a Holocaust in India, let’s keep in mind Partition, Kashmir, the North East, the Naxals, communal riots, the diversity that is ignored with the label “South India” and continued caste-based violence…

We felt vaguely embarrassed about being Indian because that was how the West perceived us and we worked damn hard to rid ourselves of the signifiers that were considered “native”. India became Neo about 10 years ago when America and Britain started considering India cool… India became less intimidating to the developed world when it became home to Mercs, malls and monogrammed bags…

Madonna isn’t cool because she wore mehendi. Mehendi is cool because Madonna wore it… Without awards from Venice Film Festival and the Golden Globes, how many Indians would have watched Monsoon Wedding… Indians “lack … confidence in their civilization” because most of our notions of India have been formulated on the basis of how someone else viewed the “native” culture and that remains true to this day…

Dhaliwal plays Morpheus, India is Neo and Vij and Thayil are … Trinity?… There isn’t one Indian identity that is going to stride a la Neo and scramble the zeroes and ones of Occidental thought. It is particularly impossible by the India being celebrated by Dhaliwal… of socialites wearing Prada and tweenies dressing like hip hop stars… [Link]

Now I think Nirpal’s views of India are a bit idealized and amber-tinted. And Indian culture is hardly monolithic (though some things, like closeness of family, are shared across regions). But I also think Anon underplays India’s strengths. Mehndi was always cool, if you grew up in Amrika without. India’s laissez-faire multiculturalism has been widely noted, not just what Nirpal wrote here:

Multiculturalism and the accommodation of Islam in a secular democracy is a basic part of Indian life, while in Britain it’s a hot potato that no one seems capable of grasping. Britain’s affluent welfare society has spawned hundreds of international jihadists, while India, despite its poverty and vast Muslim population has created almost none… 20th century Europe imploded twice into catastrophic fratricidal warfare. Contemporary India has far deeper reasons for unrest than Europe ever did, yet there is no Indian equivalent of the Somme or Auschwitz. [Link]

Aside from opening night, it was far easier to get a ticket to the new James Bond flick than to any Hindi blockbuster in Bombay. The Bollywood sphere of cultural influence is vast. Fundamental cultural differences insulate much of India from turning into Orange County East.

Arise, awake. My guess is India will end up more like an overpopulated Italy: wealthier, more modern, but with deep fondness for its own traditions.