An inescapable desire to escape the rest of India

The Bomb, Biography and the Indian Middle Class SANKARAN KRISHNA

Economic and Political Weekly June 10, 2006

This is an essay about the habitus of the Indian middle class, and specifically about its attitudes towards politics, the people and the nation, as indexed in the biography of one of its leading members, the late nuclear scientist Raja Ramanna. It argues that the Indian middle class often sees itself as living amongst, but not living with, the majority of its fellow citizens.

This self-imposed distance between the middle class and the “masses” sometimes partakes of a genocidal impulse, as is indexed in many milieus – everyday expressions of desire for a country with a smaller population; the occasional wild-eyed scheme for secession from the rest of India by momentarily prosperous enclaves such as the IT sector in Bangalore or parts of Mumbai or Gujarat or Punjab; the oft expressed idea that it may not have been a bad thing if Sanjay Gandhi had had a relatively freer hand for a few more years back in the mid-1970s; urban planning schemes that fantasise bypassing slums through freeways, subways, hovercrafts and helicopters – but is more often indicated by a simple wish for the masses to simply, magically, disappear.1

Through a close reading of the autobiography of the “father of India’s atomic bomb” Raja Ramanna, I argue that one of the existential realities of being a middle class Indian is an inescapable desire to escape the rest of India. The historical genealogy of such a desire is a complex matter and includes issues of race, colonialism, caste and a social Darwinist understanding of nations and development. The autobiography of Ramanna offers a fascinating contemporary site for the excavation of such intertwined impulses within the habitus of middle class India. Read on