Rich India, poor India

how we live — By Bob Riel on August 15, 2008 at 6:13 pm

Every country has to deal with contrasts between its rich and poor citizens. But in few countries is this disparity as stark as it is in India. A new film there (“Barah Aana”) looks at the life of migrant workers who are employed as waiters and chauffeurs, and it explores the contrasts between their existence and the lives of those who employ them. It has apparently stirred a good deal of conversation in India, as described in this NY Times article.

India may be changing at a disorienting pace, but one thing remains stubbornly the same: a tendency to treat the hired help like chattel, to behave as though some humans were born to serve and others to be served.

“Indians are perhaps the world’s most undemocratic people, living in the world’s largest and most plural democracy,” Sudhir Kakar and Katharina Kakar, two well-known scholars of Indian culture, wrote in a recent book, “The Indians: Portrait of a People.”

The subject, usually overlooked, has been raised by a provocative new film depicting India from a servant’s-eye view. The movie, “Barah Aana,” by Raja Menon, tells the story of three migrants to Mumbai from the ailing villages of northern India. They work as a chauffeur, a waiter and a security guard, sending most of their earnings home. They are heroes in their villages, but in Mumbai they are invisible men, enduring the callousness that comes with being an accessory to other people’s lives…

The director’s answer is that India has something deeper than a poverty problem. It has, in his view, a “dehumanization” problem. In an interview, he described India’s employers and servants as living as “two different species.”