Introduction
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Notes Introduction 1. In October 1998, for example, the state was battered by a 'supercyclone' that killed approximately 10 thousand people. 2. Gurcharan Das, India Unbound (New Delhi, New York: Viking, 2000), p. ix. 3. Ibid., p. 346. 4. 'DotKarma' in Cheryl Bentsen and Tom Field, 'India Unbound: CIO Field Report', CIO: The Magazine for Information Executives, 1 December 2000, p. 104. S. 'The Software Industry in India: A Strategic Review' (New Delhi: Nasscom, 1999), p. 3. 6. Ibid., p. 188. 7. The idea of 'modern capitalism', which is discussed in detail in Chapter 1, presupposes a passive periphery, where marginal populations, maladapted to the tumultuous activity of industrial life, were gradually but inexorably absorbed into the alien system of productive rationality. Today the theory has grown to incorporate a more oppositional model of thought, pitting contem porary capitalism against the deep roots of ethnicity, nationalism, religion, and tribal or territorial bonds. The vision of the periphery has become, if not active, at least reactive. No longer innocently malleable, peripheral popula tions now tend to be seen as clinging to traditions and identities that counter the assimilative forces impinging upon them from outside. In this way they contribute to globalization, but only as its negative - frequently violent - opposition. It is in explicit contrast to these theories that this book proposes a positive conception of the periphery. 8. V.N. Balasubramanyam, Conversations with Indian Economists (London: Palgrave, 2001), p. 11. The outrage that this attitude rightfully provokes is forcefully articulated by Shashi Tharoor in a passage that, as Balasubramanyam writes, is worth quoting in full: [CM Stephen's response was] ignorant (he had no idea of the colossal economic losses caused by poor communications), wrong headed (he saw a practical problem as only an opportunity to score a political point), unconstructive, (responding to complaints by seeking a solution apparently did not occur to him) self righteous (the socialist can't about telephones being a luxury not a right) complacent (taking pride in an eight year waiting list which should have been a sense of shame, since it pointed to the poor performance of his own ministry, unresponsive (feeling no obligation to provide a service in return for the patience and the fees, of the country's telephone subscribers) and insulting (asking long suffering telephone subscribers to return their instruments instead of doing something about their complaints). Ibid. 158 Notes 159 9 . .'l.rvind Singhal and Everett M. Rogers, India's Communication Revolution: From Bullock Carts to Cyber Marts (New Dehi: Sage, 2001), p. 57. 10. 'India Versus China: How to Bridge the Gap', Businesswor/d, 10 june 2002. 11. .'l.rvind Singhal and Everett M. Rogers, India's Communication Revolution: From Bullock Carts tu Cybcr Marts, pp. 107-108. 12. 'The Wiring of India', T!ze Economist, 25 May 2000. 13. 'One more thing happened during liberalization in the center,' Rekhi continued 'the New Delhi government became very weak, the Congress party, which had ruled for 40 years, was crumbling. The local regional parties were developing ... It was at this point that satellite television came in ... Before that TV in India was totally in the control of the government. They gave you one message, it was Doordarshan. So as soon as the TV started to beam into India you had these entrepreneurs setting up cable TV ... What that did was make the government lose control of information. If you go to India now and listen to the television debates they are very impressive, people are debating at a fundamental level. When I started to go to India I was able to speak on the 'IV and be heard by 40 million people live without any censorship. That wasn't possible before.' Personal interview with Kanwal Rekhi (Silicon Valley, 17 June 2002). 14. Allen Hammond and Elizabeth Jenkins 'Bottom-up, Digitally Empowered Development', Information Impacts Magazine, February 2001. 15. Pramod Mahajan, Paper presented at the Hyderabad IT Forum, Hyderabad (22-24 January 2003). 16. Personal interview with Osama Manzar (New Delhi, 2003). 17. C.K. Prahalad, Paper presented at TiEcon, New Delhi (8 January 2003). 18. C.K. Prahalad, India as a Source of Imzuvations: The First Lalbahadur Shastri National A ward fin Excellence in Public Administration and Management Sci ences Lecture, 30 September, 2000, New Delhi (Digital Dividend, 2000 fcited 2 February 2004J); available from www .digitaldividend.org/pdf/ 0203ar03.pdf. 19. Tom Field, 'Power Point Prophet', C/0: The Magazine for Information Executives (1 December 2000), pp. 158-164. 20. 'What's Stopping Us? Businessworld Round Table', Businessworld, 17 February 2003. 21. Personal interview Madanmohan Rao (Bangalore, 18 January 2003). 22. Jagdish Bhagwati, 'Why Your Job isn't Moving to Bangalore', New York Times, 15 February 2004. 1 The idea of Westernization 1. Personal interview with Ash ish Sen (Bangalore, 20 January 2003). 2. Khushwant Singh quoted in Mehrotra Raja Ram, Indian English Texts and Interpretatiom (Amsterdam, Philadelphia: john Benjamins Publishing Company, 1998), p. 2. 3. R.S. Gupta, 'English in Post-Colonial India', in Who's Centric Now? The Present State of Post-Colonial Englishes, ed. Bruce Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 20tH), p. 150. 160 Notes 4. Ibid. 5. Braj B. Kachru, The Alchemy of English: The Spread, Functions, and Models of Non-Native Englishes, 1st edn, English in the International Context (Oxford [Oxfordshire); New York: Pergamon Institute of English, 1986), p. 1. 6. Ibid., p. 14. 7. Barbara Wallraff, 'What Global Language', Atlantic Monthly 2000, p. 53. 8. Robert MacNeil, Robert McCrum and William Crun, The Story of English (London: Faber & Faber and BBC Books, 1992), p. 10. 9. Ibid. 10. There are those who argue that the dominance of English -like the so-called universal languages that preceded it (Latin and Greek) - will eventually recede. English's supremacy, these theorists contend, is the result of the cultural and geopolitical power of its native speakers. 'Throughout history,' writes Samuel Huntington, in his immensely influential book The Clash of Civilizations, 'the distribution of languages in the world has reflected the distribution of power in the world.' Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, 1st Touchstone edn (New York: Touchstone, 1997), p. 62. English, according to this vision, will lose its prominence at some point in the future when the power of America is inevitably overshadowed by some other state or civilization. 'If at some point in the distant future China displaces the West as the dominant civilization in the world, English', Huntington predicts, 'will give way to Mandarin as the world's lingua franca.' Ibid., p. 63. There are various reasons to be suspicious of this claim. Many of them have to do with inherent properties of English that will be discussed in later chapters. Also worth considering, however, is the extreme enthusiasm for English inside China (with both the government and the private sector putting immense resources into teaching English to vast sections of the population) and the fact that many second-generation Chinese living abroad prefer English to their mother tongue, which they find too difficult to learn. 11. Braj B. Kachru, The Other Tongue: English across Cultures (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), p. 3. 12. Thomas de Quincy quoted in Arjya Sircar, 'Indianization of English Language and Literature', in The Struggle with an Alien Tongue: The Glory and the Grief; Indianisation of English Language and Literature, ed. R.S. Pathak (New Delhi: Babri Publications), p. 73. 13. Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs Mcworld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Re-Shaping the World(]. Ballantine Books, 1996), p. 84. 14. Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989), p. 105. 15. Max Weber, 'The Social Psychology of World Religions', in From Max Weber, ed. H.H. Gerth and C.W. Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 269. 16. It would be a mistake to assume that Weber's argument is that the Protestant religion is the cause of capitalism, or the capitalist way of life. 'No economic ethic', he writes, 'has ever been determined solely by religion. In the face of man's attitudes towards the world - as determined by religious or other (in our sense) "inner" factors - an economic ethic has, of course, a high Notes 161 measure of autonomy. Given factors of economic geography and history determine this measure of autonomy in the highest degree. The religious determination of life-conduct, however, is also one- note this- only one, of the determinants of the economic ethic.' Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), p. 268. 17. Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 290. 18. Ibid., p. 148. 19. Ibid., p. 289. 20. Weber, Tile Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, pp. 113-114. 21. Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, p. 290. 22. To quote Weber: 'In inner-wordly asceticism, the grace and the chosen state of the religiously qualified man prove themselves in everyday life. To be sure, they do so not in the everyday life as it is given, but in methodical and rationalized routine-activities of workaday life in the service of the Lord. Rationally raised into a vocation, everyday conduct becomes the locus for proving one's state of grace.' Ibid., p. 291. 23. The three laws of dialectics, the law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa, the law of the interpenetration of opposites and the law of the negation of the negation give, for Marxists, a scientific basis to this succession.