Category: Modern India

Two kilometers on Rajpath

On August 24, 2014

Almost without exception, first-time visitors to India from the West can’t help but comment on the unfathomable diversity and complexity of the country. When I first set foot in India five years ago, I claimed that I could have written an entire book on the sights along the road from Guwahati to the Garo Hills. Although this was clearly hyperbole, it is true that Indian society is heterogeneous linguistically, culturally, ethnically, and religiously. India is, after all, a country with close to a hundred literary languages.

Units of measurement in India tend to attract less attention than language and ethnicity, but I think that they are an essential part of India’s mixed cultural heritage, and they are indicative of the country’s modernity. India, like almost every other country in the world, officially uses the metric or SI system of measurement. As part of the country’s modernization, the Government of India introduced metric during the early-independence period. Converting to metric entailed abandoning the British Imperial units previously in use, so the process was also a way to move beyond India’s colonial past. As a result of metrication, Indian highways were re-marked and train route charts reprinted in kilometers, weather reports were issued in degrees Celsius, petrol (gasoline) was sold in liters rather than gallons, and grocers were required to sell their produce by kilogram rather than pounds.

The conversion to metric was slow and even now, more than fifty years after it began, is still incomplete. One does not have to look hard to find remnants of British Imperial units still in use. During my work, study, and travels in India, I have bought a ruler marked in inches at a stationery shop; had my fevers measured in degrees Fahrenheit; and seen carpenters measuring out wood in feet and inches. The result of this incomplete conversion is that Indians—like Americans—will schizophrenically mix English and metric units. An example of this is a cookbook that came with a pressure-cooker I bought in the Garo Hills. The pressure-cooker models are rated by liters of capacity (I bought the three-liter version), but any volumes in the recipes themselves are given in teaspoons, tablespoons, and cups.

(The title of this post is the distance between the India Gate and the central secretariat buildings in New Delhi.)

How many Qutb Minars is this?

By Willy

On February 28, 2014

In Archeology and monuments, Colonial India, Medieval India, Modern India

The tallest pre-modern structure in India is Qutb Minar, a 238-ft (72 m) tower in southern Delhi. Qutb-ud-Din Aybak, the first sultan of Delhi, started building the tower in 1199. Several succeeding generations of rulers added to and modified the tower; it only reached its full height after Qutb-ud-Din’s death. Even the British tried to add their own cupola on the apex of the tower, but it did not match the aesthetic of the rest of the tower, so it came down in 1848. The British cupola now sits by itself on the landscaped lawns of the Qutb Minar complex. Qutb Minar and the surrounding area was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993.

Qutb Minar towers over surrounding ruins in south Delhi.

Publications about Indian construction projects in the early-independence period often compared the new projects with pre-modern Indian monuments; Qutb Minar was a particularly popular item of comparison. Towers or tower-like structures invited comparisons most readily. The ventilation stack of Tarapur Atomic Power Station, India’s first nuclear powerplant, was 366 feet (112 meters) tall—much taller than the Qutb Minar,” as several publications noted.1 Qutb Minar was also used as a standard measuring stick for height for any structure. According to an article in Assam Information, “the height between the bottom of foundation and the top of the piers” of the Saraighat Bridge, the first permanent crossing of the Brahmaputra River, “it almost as much as the height of the Qutb Minar.”2 The winner in any early-independence period height competition was Bhakra Dam. Indian Recorder and Digest stated that the height of the dam, “which is the highest structure in Asia, is about three times that of the Qutab Minar.”3

This rhetoric established continuity with the pre-colonial past, but also attempted to transcend it. The colonial period had been a difficult time for India’s educated elites. Although they believed in their own country’s historic greatness, they also absorbed the western critiques of India as backward, underdeveloped, and imprisoned by tradition.4 Building dams, bridges, and nuclear powerplants was a way to recreate India’s past greatness, which had been lost during centuries of colonial domination. The new India’s greatness, though, would not be based on Indian tradition, but on western ideas and technology. The structures of independent India were bigger, and by implication better, than anything the Sultans of Delhi or the Mughals had been able to make. In the sources that I have read, nobody seemed to care that a concrete ventilation stack was not aesthetically comparable to an intricately-wrought red sandstone and white marble tower.

“Tarapur: Gateway to the Nuclear Age,” Economic Studies 10 (1968), 421. [↩]
“Saraighat Bridge: A Boon to Assam,” Assam Information, November 1963, 20. [↩]
“Dedication of Bhakra Dam,” Indian Recorder and Digest, November 1963, 6. [↩]
Ashis Nandy explained the internalization of western ideas by Indian elites in a lecture I attended in Delhi on June 11, 2012. [↩]

Exercise Shiksha: The Comic

By Willy

On October 20, 2012

In Aviation, Modern India

At the end of a summer Hindi program in Jaipur, I made a Hindi comic book based on my research about Exercise Shiksha, a joint Indo-US-UK air exercise held in 1963. In commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Sino-Indian War on October 20, 1962, I present my comic book, “Yuddaabhyaas Shikshaa,” with both the original Hindi text and a full English translation.