‘What We Think of America’
http://www.granta.com/extracts/1633
Amit Chaudhuri
India
When we were children, we played cowboys and Indians sometimes. We rather liked being cowboys; we instructed ourselves that the Indians were ‘Red’ Indians—the term ‘American Indian’ was still not in currency—not remotely like us, who enacted our make-believe in the large basement garages of a building on Malabar Hill in South Bombay. It was while looking for us, we noted, that Columbus had lighted upon America. The enormity of the accident—and the relatively unacknowledged but not inconsiderable part we had played in it!
In many places and ways, Bombay echoed, and still echoes, America. This is not to say it is an imitation; its America is to be found there, in its streets, and nowhere else. But this echo also sets it apart from every other Indian city; gives it its own melancholy destiny to fulfil.
There is, first of all, the allure of tall buildings. They cluster around Nariman Point—what might probably be called Bombay’s ‘financial district’: the Air India building (where a bomb went off in 1993), the Indian Express building, the Oberoi Towers. This is reclaimed land; I remember when Nariman Point was still a ‘point’, a strip of land petering out into rocks and the sea. But tall buildings are everywhere in South Bombay. Some of them are as famous as famous people; a few, like some Bombay celebrities, have less than impeccable reputations. Some time in the late Seventies or early Eighties a building called Kanchenjunga, designed by the architect Charles Correa, came up on the hilly incline of Peddar Road, a giant, off-white rectangular box, with large perforations made in it, coloured violently red on the inside (the perforations were the balconies of duplex flats). For a long time, no one occupied those flats. The building had been erected on a disputed site. No matter; the building became a star—if a slightly shunned one—and a part of the skyline of jostling high and low, young and old structures, the all-night party of the Bombay skyline. Years later, occupants appeared on the balconies; but you are not really meant to see people in the tall Bombay buildings.
There is more than a hint of New York here. The tall buildings are, literally, ‘upstarts’; they are mainly post-Independence social climbers; their altitude suggests the precedence of desire over the genteel evasions of the colonial age.
But, in the perpetual sunshine, in the sea, in the palm trees, is also something of California. The pleasures of the body; the body standing in the sun.
And so, all those beaches; in Chowpatty, Juhu, Marve, not to speak of the Governor’s private beach, which children from the Cathedral School used to visit once a year. The children taken for pony rides; the men, some of them frauds, racketeers or embezzlers, gambolling on the sand; semi-nude, back to a second infancy. The image crystallizes for me Bombay’s mixture of the childlike and the grown-up, of naivety and ruthlessness, a mixture that, as I now know, is also peculiarly American. Childhood fantasy and adult knowingness, innocence and violence, inhabiting the same space, even the same mind and body.
I was introduced to America through the comic book. My Bengali parents had taught me no English before I went to school; settled outside Bengal, in Bombay, they had longed to make me intimate with the Bengali language. I was admitted into the school—on what basis, I don’t know; I knew no English. The headmistress suggested an unusual two-pronged approach to my mother: to familiarize me with the language by giving me both Ladybird and comic books to read. Through the Ladybird books I was brought to a world of English families and landscapes; this education in English continued with Enid Blyton, whose cocooned universe contained strange cruelties and snobberies as well as buttered scones and picnic hampers.
That world, although close to us historically in many ways, felt remote; but American comic books, which taught me to read, somehow entered our lives in Bombay and became indistinguishable from them; we didn’t know where one ended and the other began. The much thumbed and perused copy, in the ‘circulating library’, of the Archie Comics Digest; the thin line separating us from Riverdale. The monthly purchase of Gold Key comics; the ‘friendly’ ghosts and witches; Richie Rich, that Fitzgeraldian cartoon character, who, with swimming pools, butlers, chauffeurs, was still not completely happy. Superheroes who led dull lives as employees in tall buildings, to whom the simple act of putting on spectacles conferred an impenetrable aura of ordinariness and guaranteed a foolproof disguise; or led reclusive lives as tycoons in opulent mansions with vast underground garages in which a single car was kept; or even, like Elastic Man, turned sad, congenital deformities into a prodigious talent for fighting crime. If Gregor Samsa had been born in America, would his ‘metamorphosis’ have made him famous, like Spiderman or the Incredible Hulk?
Our American childhood in Bombay happened during the Cold War, when one part of the world was under the canopy of Brezhnev’s enormous eyebrows. We were in that part of the world. Although India is a democracy, it was certainly a political and strategic ally of Russia; Russia gave us an idea of moral and economic rectitude, while America provided us with a sort of illicit entertainment. As for Soviet entertainment, there were the astonishing films. We went to watch Sovexport films for two reasons. The first was that Russian films emerged from a more consciously artistic tradition of cinema than anything to be found in Hollywood. The other reason was less high-minded: our political friendship led to an odd indulgence on the part of the National Board of Film Censors, and the nudity in bad Sovexport films went largely uncut. The cuts in Hollywood films were clumsily, even insultingly, made—a woman might be unbuttoning her blouse; she seemed to suffer a brief spasm or convulsion; then she was seen to be buttoning her blouse. We, in the Seventies, studied that spasm closely but hopelessly. Nakedness in American movies was kept from us by a wall of propriety harder to penetrate than the Iron Curtain.
Superheroes; but also villains. For a generation, Henry Kissinger was the most hated man in India. In 1975, Sanjay Gandhi would overtake him in loathsomeness; but that bureaucratic suit, those thick glasses and that heavy accent would always make Indians shudder. And Nixon, too, who, with Kissinger, presided over the Bangladesh war; the way the American government always seemed to be on the wrong side of everything. Nevertheless, the young men and women queued up for application forms at the USIS in Marine Lines. The lines were long and exhausting; later, they left for the States. Returning for holidays, the men wore shorts, and T-shirts with the logos of obscure universities. Even their fathers began to wear shorts. On the rear windows of cars in Bombay, they pasted stickers with the names of those unheard-of universities, which others would be obliged to memorize in a traffic jam. What was it that took them there? Was it a desire for success and assimilation that Europe could not offer? And was it the ability, and desire, to merge (but not quite) with those crowds in Manhattan, or settle down in some suburb, or relocate themselves in the vast spaces in between?
The September 11 attacks on the US provoked shock and pity in the rest of the world, but mingled with the sympathy was something harsher: anti-Americanism. It wasn’t confined to the West Bank or Kabul. It could be heard in English country pubs, in the bars of Paris and Rome, the tea stalls of New Delhi. ‘Hubris’ was the general idea: in one opinion poll, two-thirds of the respondents outside the US agreed to the proposition that it was ‘good that Americans now know what it’s like to be vulnerable’.
Is the US really so disliked? If so, why? In this issue twenty-four writers drawn from many countries describe the part America has played in their lives—for better or worse—and deliver their estimate of the good and the bad it has done as the world’s supreme political, military, economic and cultural power.