We in the West have always had a fascination with all things Eastern to the extent that we have created various stereotypes and clichés to ensure that countries like India are what we want them to be. At one time she was the Mecca for all things spiritual; everybody from pop stars to bored, middle class housewives looked to India for enlightenment and sought out the services of any guru willing to take them on as a student. They reveled in the exotic and the mysterious until they discovered that spiritual advancement wasn't something that happened overnight and was a continual work in progress, at which point they dropped it like a hot potato.
Forty years later our fascination is now centred on the economic miracle that is modern India - The Economic Tiger of The East! Instead of ashrams and gurus, the West now comes to India in search of cheap labour for their manufactured products and call centre employees to explain how to use them and trouble shoot their problems. Where it used to be that the sons and daughters of the affluent West would seek India's shores for enlightenment, we now welcome the children of their rich to enlighten them with free market capitalism, business and science degrees, and the great myth of the global economy.
One thing hasn't changed, though: our unwillingness to look behind the facade of the image we have created. We continue to ignore the poverty; the way politicians exploit the mistrust between Muslims and Hindu out of one side of their mouths and condemn the violence that occurs afterwards out of the other; the caste system that continues to be rigidly enforced by society no matter what it says on the law books; and the continual degradation of women who are still often considered no more than chattel to be bought on sold on the marriage market.
Indian apologists on both sides of the world will tell you it's all different now — and by this they mean it's better hidden — but talk to those who care to see and they will tell you that nothing has changed.
Indu Sundaresan is one of the new generation of Indian novelists who not only sees, but is willing to write about those things going on behind closed doors, in the back streets, and far beyond the glare of bright city lights. In her newest collection of short fiction, In The Convent Of Little Flowers, published by Simon & Schuster Canada, she covers everything from elder abuse and the consequences of the caste system, to the hardships that are still common place for women in India. In case we think some of the more extreme things she describes are invention, she has included a postscript with the collection where she explains that each story was inspired by actual events occurring in India that she either read about or had been told about.
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