Late last week came the announcement from the intimidatingly named National Intelligence Council that the end of American hegemony is imminent; that the unipolar world will, before long, cease to exist; that new locations of power are emerging.
The shift has been heralded for some time, if not by the US authority that provides ‘unvarnished’ intelligence to US policy-makers; so we already have an idea of what those new locations are. Nevertheless, I found myself scouring the report in the paper to see if my country of birth had been mentioned. In the third paragraph, like characters in a frequently perused novel, I found the emerging economies of India, Brazil and China, which, predictably, seem to be a source of a great deal of the anxiety. Two things, however, gave this fairly unsurprising assessment a new meaning and urgency. The first was that the pronouncement came from the National Intelligence Council and not from a liberal columnist or a developing-world economist. The second was that the familiar names of China, India and Brazil were being mentioned, in this instance, in the wake of calamitous damage to the market earlier this year. Not long ago, the emergence of the Chinese and Indian economies was a confirmation of the transformative powers of the free market and fitted in perfectly with its triumphalism. Now, with America and Europe set to borrow money from India and China, this reassuringly optimistic, self-congratulatory, but one-dimensional narrative may have to be reconfigured.
Yet, despite this subtle but decisive shift in the balance of power, it feels stupid to gloat, which is why I felt embarrassed to catch myself reading the news with a personal frisson and excitement, a lack of reflection and seriousness. It was as if there was, for a moment, a characteristic member of the India diaspora in me, waiting to get out; a diaspora which, in my waking moments, I am deeply wary of for its conservatism and its arriviste ambitions on the world stage. Yet reading about the National Intelligence Council’s report, I was surprised to find in myself a haunting of the contemporary Indian’s romance with power. But that excitement has a history.
Many things have been happening, some of them in the last three months, that would have seemed implausible 15 years ago. The great, unprecedented phase of calm and plenty we entered after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, marred, here and there, by some irrational and unpersuadable terrorists, appeared to be here to stay. No one expected it to be struck so hard at its heart — not by aircraft flying out of nowhere, but by the workings of its own institutions. Then there was the American election and Barack Obama.
Six years ago I’d spent about four months in New York, and discovered that it was far less multicultural than London. It had educated neighborhoods, posh neighborhoods, black and Hispanic neighborhoods, but having spent some months in America’s most liberal city, I wouldn’t have dreamed of the emergence of a figure like Obama.
Similarly, six years ago, despite the already growing economies of India and China, I could not have thought, as Afghanistan was being bombed and America and Britain co-authored justifications for entering Iraq, that a time may come when a greater parity between the so-called “developed” and “developing” nations would look increasingly like a basic, unignorable reality rather than a desire or a pleasant idea. Ten years ago, indeed, dispirited by constant traveling and its deeply discriminatory nature, I remember resigning myself to the fact that no such parity would emerge in my lifetime, that it was the lot of people who belonged to countries such as India to be second-class citizens in the world.
What was it to be a second-class citizen? It was, crudely, to be constantly judged and assessed by people less skilled and less competent than oneself. There was no innate marginality to being Indian; marginality was conferred upon you by nationalities that clearly had a proprietorial relationship to the world. The assessment of the more skilled by the less began long before you were employed; it began at the airport, the immigration desk. “So you’re a creative arts fellow,” said one of the more friendly immigration officials at Heathrow 15 years ago, as I was returning to Oxford. “What are you creative at?”
Ten years ago, economist Amartya Sen, still an obdurate Indian passport holder, returned to England after collecting his Nobel Prize in Sweden, to resume his duties as master at Trinity College, Cambridge. Seeing that the landing card said that Sen’s address was the Master’s Lodge at Trinity, the immigration official asked: “Are you the Master’s friend, then?”
And what will happen to the old power centers when the new ones emerge? Will the English suburbs be overrun, for instance, by Bollywood and A.R. Rahman? Cultural infiltration has been happening for a long time, well before the idea of an altered world order became a feasible one: chicken tikka masala is not only a canonical fact of British life; it is a cliche of Britishness. And there has been relatively little resentment, partly because, one suspects, no national or racial group — not even the white bourgeoisie — is entirely at one or at peace with itself and that some part of it necessarily rejoices when its own identity or integrity is undermined.
