‘Much of India’s China envy is misplaced’

But one gets a sense that you are not too interested in the Chinese economic miracle, which from the Indian experience of an inefficient state, seems remarkable.
The Chinese invested early in public health and education. When they did not have the resources, they innovated, for example, spreading public health through “barefoot doctors”. Because it was not a democracy, they sought legitimacy through these efforts. They also decentralised, giving powers to mayors of cities like Chongqing and Shanghai, which grew prosperous quickly. But outside of these cities, there remains great inequality. The project of urbanisation has run into serious obstacles. There are these ghost cities where no one wants to live because there are no jobs. I think much of India’s China envy is misplaced. It has little to do with its achievements in health and education. It’s basically an envy of people who get things done, and it is a longing for strong technocrats who can dispense with democracy.

In India, though, poverty rates have come down remarkably in the last decade.
That is true. Urban incomes, and even in parts, rural incomes have gone up. But this is only a small and narrow way of measuring progress, let alone happiness and contentment. With incomes, expectations also rise. And the great promise of global capitalism — that all of this, the housing of the kind that the billboards in this city offer, the private swimming pools, the life of a gated community, all of which is now a democratic fantasy — will be available to each of us. When that doesn’t happen, when people find themselves frustrated, then great disaffection follows.

Could you tell us about what you found in Tibet?
The Asia I travelled through was united by its experience of an aggressive form of capitalism, which throws up similar challenges and dilemmas. In Tibet, for instance, you have people resisting capitalist modernisation despite its obvious material benefits, because it undermines so much of what they hold sacred. You find a similar scenario in pre-modern societies in India and elsewhere. The people of Niyamgiri (Orissa), for instance, would definitely benefit financially if they accept large sums of compensation, move away from their lands and allow Vedanta to set up mines. But they have refused that. That should make us ask whether there is something in life that is not quantifiable in terms of money, or GDP statistics, and how this project of capitalism — that we have all accepted — should deal with communities that clearly do not want this kind of development.

If you could take us back to 1992, when you decided to live in Mashobra to spend time to read and write. Was it a particularly radical thing to do?
It wasn’t actually. It was a very different India then. There was no great pressure to make yourself employable or lucrative in the job market. I grew up in small towns in UP, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. It was a childhood where I had the time to daydream, I did not face any peer pressure, I did not even know what other people my age were doing. Perhaps being in small places helped. And it was possible then to retire to a village to read and write, to live a modest life. That’s not a life available to writers now, who get professionalised much too quickly. It’s no longer possible to be a writer who is living in genteel poverty and is happy to do so.

What set you off on your first book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana?
I was curious about what liberalisation had unleashed in towns across the country. We date the opening up of the economy to 1991, but changes had begun earlier, in the 1980s, with a pro-business shift in the country. The technocrats had already arrived on the scene with Rajiv Gandhi and Sam Pitroda and others. Cable TV had arrived, which was a big change. The visual culture had changed with these images from the West being streamed in. Travelling between 1993 and 1994, I found small towns with more money, a greater sense of entrepreneurship, and an aggressive new politics. I was curious about how the people saw the world, what they consumed, the music they heard, the books they read.

In a world where everything seems so familiar, what does the travel writer write about?
It will be a mistake for the travel writer to believe that. Beyond that superficial impression of familiarity, there are different structures for him to discover. Lhasa now resembles a Chinese city, with international style hotels and spas and video game parlours. But if you step beyond that, to the Tibetan part of the city, to any house, you will find different systems of reverence, a place where other things are valued. Where someone will show you an image of the Dalai Lama brought from Dharamsala, which is not like someone showing you the new iPhone. But it is true that travel writing is in crisis. A travel writer goes in search for strangeness and otherness, which is hard to find. Travel writing then has to deepen itself, spend more time trying to unlock the codes of life that are hidden from most people.

Do you keep up with new writing in English by Indians?
More than Indian writing in English, the most exciting thing now about the Indian literary scene is the translations of literature in Indian languages, making them available to readers in India and abroad. Unlike Indian writing in English, which comes from a very narrow base — they are all by upper-caste, upper-class writers, who even went to the same college — we read works by people from different regional backgrounds and castes and in diverse styles and genres.