Bytes, Bombs, and Bombshells.

India's Search for Identity

In many respects, the India that emerged in the 1990s stands in stark contrast to its former self. Sustained economic growth, multiparty coalition governments, and a greater openness to the West reveal an India in metamorphosis. Indeed, the prominent features

of Indian life in the late 1990s--nuclear-power status, dazzling success in the information technology (IT) sector, and even dominance in the beauty pageant circuit--exemplify this change. What is perceived as the new India, however, is in reality closely linked to its old self. The popular response to India's new prominence in these fields shows that the deep psychological issues that have troubled the country for the last half-century continue to color the Indian experience today. These successes are helping the nation mediate questions of its identity and of its perceived inferiority--twin crises that have dogged India since its inception. But a closer examination of the Indian response reveals that this newfound identity is in fact not independent of externally generated Western standards. By orienting India westward for its sense of self, these recent successes threaten to lead India further away from finding itself in its own rich history, thus preventing India from addressing the very real problems that face the country.

Twin Crises

Before advancing, it is useful to clarify both dimensions of the twin crises. Anxiety surrounding India's identity--one face of the twin crises--centers on questions such as, "What is Indian?" and "What is India?" Though the struggle against imperial domination united people across the subcontinent, articulating an identity once the British departed proved more difficult.

India's teeming diversity has long thwarted the successful articulation of such a common identity. Indeed, secessionist attempts in Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Kashmir, and Nagaland have challenged the very notion of a unified state. The numerous languages, customs, and castes have also highlighted the citizens' differences instead of their commonalties. The reservation system to aid the downtrodden dalit and shudra castes, for example, has only widened the gulf between members of various castes and sub-castes. The absence of a unifying native language, meanwhile, has forced the country to look Westward--to English--for a language that transcends the cultural and political baggage accompanying most native Indian languages. It is clear at this point that the Indian identity is still in flux.

Adding to the burdens of identity formation is India's protracted struggle to position itself in the international community--the second face of India's twin crises. This struggle for a sense of place reveals a deep feeling of inferiority. Indian novelist Shobha De sums up the problem: "For so long we've considered ourselves to be losers and second-raters." While the roots of this complex surely lie in the humiliating experience of imperial domination, equally important is the post-independence experience. Governments from Nehru down to the current Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) administration have entertained notions of India being, as Howard Schaffer writes, "a great nation whose size, population, resources, and status as a major civilization entitle it, or even oblig[e] it, to play an influential role on the global stage."

But this rhetoric stands next to a very different reality. India is relatively poor and divided, and the perception that it is a socioeconomic failure remains a common view of many Westerners and Indians alike. This attitude has only marginalized the country in the global arena. Scholar Therese Delpech describes the results: "For the past 50 years, a rather patronizing view towards India has prevailed."

This brief look at the twin crises hardly captures the many subtleties underlying the questions of identity and inferiority. It does, however, demonstrate that the twin crises have a long history in Indian self-perception. More importantly, it helps provide a more nuanced reading of India's fascination with and reaction to nuclear tests, beauty pageants, and IT commerce in the late 1990s.

Nuclear-Power Status

Though India's testing of five nuclear weapons in May of 1998 was met with swift condemnation worldwide, the view within India was vastly different. Festivity and nationalism marked the domestic scene. The tests enjoyed a 91 percent approval rating--making them perhaps only second to independence itself in popular support. The Delhi-based Pioneer remarked that the tests would force the West to abandon its view of India as a "wounded civilization incapable of dealing with itself, leave [sic] alone others." The Indian Express argued that the tests demonstrated India's "remarkable scientific capability built during a quarter-century" of technology-transfer restrictions. Likewise, The Hindu, Hindustan Times, Business Standard, Telegraph, and Financial Express all showered the tests with praise. Although public support declined somewhat in the months following the tests, most Indians remained supportive. Writing one year after the tests, India Today expressed the prevailing sentiment in much of India: "No one is t alking about turning back the clock."

What is truly remarkable about the popular response is how clearly it addresses the concerns of identity and inferiority. Most obviously, the tests are imagined as a ticket to the high table of global power. More subtly, the contours of a new identity emerged in the blasts' wake. It is useful to remember that the initial testing of nuclear weapons in most other nations (perhaps with the exception of Pakistan) met with little to no fanfare. The situation differed in India because the tests suggested a new sense of self--one of power, scientific progress, and resourcefulness. After all, the bomb was developed without the aid of any other nation. It was a product of India, for India. In one fell swoop, India managed to reinvigorate its self-identity and enhance its standing in the ranks of global power brokers.

Beauty Pageant Victories

The appropriation of nuclear tests to mediate the twin crises parallels how Indians have approached their success in beauty pageants. India's dominance in the beauty circuit is evident in the four Miss World titles and two Miss Universe crowns that its women have captured in the last six years. Twice--in 1994 and 2000--Indian women held both the Miss World and Miss Universe tides simultaneously. The victories elicited an outburst of national pride and self-congratulation throughout the country. In a fit of excitement, the usually reserved Times of India dubbed the country a "beauty superpower." Member of Parliament Pramod Mahajan, meanwhile, waxed blissfully on the floor of the Lok Sabha that India's recent victories confirmed its lead in world beauty. Ordinary citizens also framed the victories in terms of India's international standing. The British newspaper The Independent quotes one software designer who remarked that "by winning, Yukta [Mookhey, Miss World 1999] has played a vital role in furthering Indi a's presence in the world."

Many Indians have taken to theorizing about the meaning of India's success. The Times of India quotes a Mumbai resident: "Indian beauty symbolizes a return to the mystical, mysterious feminine mystique, which the West today has to rescue from old books and archives." An Indian designer, interviewed by The Washington Post, suggests that Indians "don't look totally Asian, and not totally Caucasian. It's very exotic." These notions of Indian beauty have impacted the lives of ordinary citizens in a number of ways. The modeling and cosmetics business have boomed in recent years, and talent shows in universities and high schools, which previously ended with debates or essay competitions, now conclude with fashion shows. As Barry Bearak of The New York Times observes, beauty contests have mushroomed throughout India with "monsoon queens, summer queens, married queens, and junior queens" being named in many cities. In fact, Mrs. World 2000, is Aditi Govitrikar, a married mother of one from Mumbai.

The public reaction to the beauty pageants reveals that the victories have become the springboard to assert India's superiority to the West. For all their artificiality, pageants are still portrayed as a marker of international success. More importandy, the pageants serve as a focus for Indian identity itself. For many, there is now a distinctive meaning to being Indian--it implies being neither fully Eastern nor fully Western. That such beauty is celebrated even in school talent shows suggests how deeply this new sense of self reverberates with the population. Pageants, in short, have provided the Indian public with a new means to approach its identity.

Information Technology

The picture of contemporary India as both brawny and beautiful would be incomplete without one final epitaph--brainy. This final designation refers to India's phenomenal success in IT, India's fastest growing sector. Foreign companies are aggressively recruiting Indian talent from the world's second largest pool of software professionals. What concerns us here is not the factors accounting for India's success, but rather how this success is perceived and understood among Indians themselves.

Instead of viewing IT as a tiny sector in a predominantly slow-growing agrarian economy, IT has been portrayed as the engine driving the country's renaissance. As one New Delhi economist remarks, "The '80s were the Asian Tigers' decade; the '90s, China's. The IT revolution will make this decade India's." The term "IT superpower"--bandied about frequently by Indians when describing their country--captures not only the notion that India is competitive in a fast-growing niche of the global economy, but also the notion that this competitiveness carries a normative worth. As Indian venture capitalist Kanwal Rekhi suggests, "The IT industry as a whole has given renewed hope to Indians that we can fight with the best and brightest in the world and win. The success of these Indians sends out the message that we are not losers." From being a narrow dimension of the country's economic life, IT has been reconfigured as an integral thread in the tapestry of national identity. As with beauty pageants and nuclear weapons, the ripples of this success are not simply internal. They are transformed into proof of the nation's worth on the global stage. Indian software professionals are not characterized as individuals who are simply adept at their craft. They are conceived of as the "brains" behind a modern, dominant, and more powerful India.

Troubling Issues

The discourse surrounding nuclear weapons, beauty pageants, and the IT sector is thus instructive because it reveals how Indians are appropriating contemporary events to understand their identity and place in the global community. But this discussion is important not simply as a means of seeing how India imagines itself. It provides an entry point into two issues of even wider importance.

First, there is reason to fear that a fixation on India's recent successes will overshadow its more fundamental problems. Critics within India, for example, are blasting the government's excessive focus on strengthening the IT sector, which employs only 1 percent of the population, at the expense of the agriculture sector, which employs 60 percent. Indian journalist Lionel Messias points to Andhra Pradesh as an example of this: "Government officials do not hesitate to point out that with IT gaining precedence over all other sectors in [Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu] Naidu's scheme of things, little attention is being paid to agriculture, the main and proven base of [Andhra Pradesh's] economy." The obsession with fashion shows, cosmetics, and pageant rankings, meanwhile, glosses over the poverty, inequality, and illiteracy that are the harsh realities for most women. In embracing the newfound sense of self and superiority that bytes, bombs, and bombshells offer, the country can too easily ignore th e fundamental problems that continue to haunt the majority of its citizens.

More importantly, the use of new media--weapons, pageants, and the software industry--to overcome the twin crises uncovers a fundamental paradox facing India. Relying on the West--being brawnier, brainier, and more beautiful than Western countries--to formulate its identity, India is left in a precarious position. Using external validation makes the country's self-esteem vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the global economy, to the whims of pageant judges, and to the threat that another nation will develop a bigger and better bomb. In other words, this externally generated self dodges a fundamental rethinking of identity. Granted, it has never been easy for India to generate an internally inspired identity. It has long identified itself via the outside world, as the selection of English as a national language demonstrates, and it must do so because of its enormous internal diversities. That said, continuing to use phenomena like IT, nuclear bombs, and beauty queens to mediate the twin crises does little to bri ng the country closer to a better understanding of itself and its place in the world. At worst, it reinforces a sense of inferiority by tying the country's self-perception to standards of judgment set by the West.

What began as a portrait of India's show of strength in the political, economic, and cultural realms in the 1990s ends on a different note. The popular appropriation of nuclear tests, pageant victories, and IT dominance uncovers the crises of identity and inferiority that India faces. The discourse of IT, nuclear weapons, and beauty pageants, while helping India mediate the twin crises, threatens to divert attention from the real problems facing the country and leaves it vulnerable to the whims and judgments of Western nations. Only by moving beyond the recent headlines and into its rich history can India begin the process of introspection--a process that can generate a more sustainable and secure sense of self.

PAVEN MALHOTRA, Editor-in-Chief, Harvard International Review