The End of Karma Read online

  He came from the Yadav community; their traditional occupation had been to herd cattle, but by now they had accumulated land, guns, and a large constituency of voters across the state. On the caste order, they were somewhere near the bottom, though not considered “untouchable.” In the finely graded categories that delineated the caste order (Americans might recall our own absurd racial categories, like “octoroon”), they were officially classified as one of the so-called Other Backward Classes, meaning that they were socially and economically disadvantaged compared with those who were considered “forward.”

  Also on the list of “backward” castes was Srikrishna Jaiswal’s Kalwar community.

  Yadav leveraged the caste stereotypes brilliantly. Portraying himself as a champion of the downtrodden, he dressed in the countryman’s white cotton wraparound dhotis rather than the city man’s pleated trousers. He gave speeches in colloquial Bhojpuri and Hindi. And he stitched together a winning patchwork of voters who felt dispossessed by the big political parties that were, by and large, led by upper-caste men.

  Yadav was elected chief minister of Bihar in 1990. His ascent marked a crucial shift in the postemergency political order. Never before had a man from the “backward” castes taken power like this. Bihar was one of India’s most populous and therefore most politically influential states, and so his new Bihar-based political party became a force to contend with in national politics. Never again—at least not during Anupam’s coming-of-age—would small parties like his allow either of the two major national parties, Indian National Congress and its rival Bharatiya Janata Party, to enjoy a monopoly on power. Indeed, for the next thirty years, both national parties would have to rely on these third parties, based on region and caste, in order to rule India. Power had to be shared.

  Upper-caste Biharis called Yadav uncouth. His own people saw it differently. A man who was then a student at Patna University recalled of that time that, finally, he and others known to have come from “backward” communities no longer had shoes thrown at them in class. They were now in charge.

  In December 1987, when Yadav was beginning to make his mark in politics and the cold mist rose so late in the morning that mothers swaddled their babies in blankets and mufflers until close to lunchtime, Sudha bore her first child: a boy, thanks to God’s grace, whom she called Anupam. She can’t say exactly how old she was. She thinks she was around seventeen. It had become customary at the time to not burden your child with a caste name. So she didn’t bother to write Jaiswal on his birth certificate. Sudha wrote his name simply as Anupam Kumar, introducing him to the world as simply Anupam-the-young.

  In quick succession came another boy and a girl. Enough. Sudha had her tubes tied and set her mind to building a home. She saved, prayed, borrowed, until finally, there was enough to buy a plot of land, in a working-class mohalla near Gaighat, where the British had once built their opium factory. Sudha bought a few bricks at a time, then sheets of corrugated tin for a roof. From a sister, she picked up hand-me-down window frames. She installed iron bars to keep out thieves.

  The house slowly came into being.

  If she could have put an electric fence around it, she would have, so fiercely did she want to make it a sanctuary from the disorder outside. She barred her children from playing cricket, tossing marbles in the lane, going to the movies, loping through the bazaar—or in any other way loitering on the street. When she went to the market, she padlocked the front door from outside, keeping the kids inside. She was terrified of the street. She was terrified that it would suck the marrow out of her children’s bones, that it would fill them with chaos and vice.

  She had reason to be nervous. During Anupam’s childhood, Bihar was a dangerous place. The state accounted for one in five murders committed with an unlicensed gun in all of India. Anyone who was seen as wealthy risked having a child kidnapped. Educated professionals left in droves. Sudha had no such escape route. She knew only she had to keep an owl’s eye on her young.

  In Gaighat, gang fights broke out often. Thugs who enjoyed Yadav’s patronage were rarely prosecuted, which explained the success of a gangster who lived nearby and ran a lucrative hooch business from the back of his house. His portly wife, back-fat spilling out of her blouse, often sat on the front porch as though on neighborhood watch. Sudha taught her children to bow each time they crossed her path.

  Sudha’s tin-roofed house trapped the heat of summer. The power supply was unreliable, so it didn’t make much difference that they had no ceiling fans when Anupam was a child. The water pipes were dry more often than not. Across the lane, an enterprising family produced bags of noodles from a noisy makeshift ground-floor factory. Pigs foraged in an empty lot next door, which served as a neighborhood trash dump.

  Anupam’s destiny was most certainly scripted in Sudha’s womb. She willed Anupam into being. She believed in him. She guarded him. She prayed each morning that he would outfox fate.

  “It was a mutual collaboration between me and my mom that brought the magic” is how Anupam once put it.

  Anupam studied all the time. It rubbed off on his younger brother and sister, Anuj and Chandni. Mummy made it clear that they were to emulate his ideal.

  That Sudha had a Class 6 education was no doubt crucial to Anupam’s success. She could read, which meant she could hustle for school forms, caste certificates, tutors—whatever her children needed. She could manage the family’s finances on her auto-rickshaw-driving husband’s perennially erratic income.

  Sudha was typical in this respect. The children of educated moms, regardless of their economic circumstances, are less likely to be malnourished, more likely to be immunized against childhood diseases, and they are more likely to succeed in school.4

  * * *

  Anupam’s childhood coincided with Yadav’s reign. Yadav became chief minister of Bihar in 1990 and with the exception of a brief period when criminal charges forced his resignation in 1997, he remained in power until 2005.

  Bihar’s fortunes tumbled during his tenure. Throughout the 1990s, its economic growth rate slipped to an average of 2.87 percent a year, less than half of the national average of over 6 percent.

  At the same time, its youth population soared. Bihar, one of the most populous states in India, became the youngest state in the union, with a larger share of its population under the age of twenty-five than any other. As such, it became an emblem of the mismatch of labor supply and demand: lots of young people, coming of age in a sluggish economy.

  During Anupam’s childhood, this scenario came to define most of India’s northern and eastern states. The country’s south and west were a stark contrast: there, fertility rates fell steadily, thanks to advances in women’s education and health. In the southern state of Tamil Nadu, for instance, its fertility rate dropped so much that the population growth pretty much stabilized, while its economic growth rate was among the highest in the land.

  Yadav, shrewdly for his time, focused his priorities on social empowerment, promising dignity rather than the nitty-gritty of economic development. He built no new schools in Anupam’s crowded neighborhood. Teacher vacancies were left unfilled. Highways disintegrated from lack of state investment. Vast swaths of the state were not connected to the electrical grid at all, and other places, like Anupam’s Gaighat, lived through hours of power outage every day. It’s what Anupam grew up with—he didn’t know anyone who lived differently.

  Yadav wore his populism on his sleeve. He invited commoners to visit the lawns of the chief minister’s villa in Patna’s onetime British enclave. He installed stables for his buffalos.

  One day, Yadav sat in his office, surrounded by cabinet members from a variety of upper castes. He slipped his foot out of a sandal and regaled those present with a story about how he lost a toenail. “Look at my foot. See, I am missing a toenail. . . . This is democracy.” After a dramatic pause to let this bewildering statement sink in, he continued:

  I lost this toenail when I was a poor boy living in my
village. We barely had enough to eat and I used to herd buffalos all day, sometimes so late that I would fall asleep on the back of a buffalo on my way home. One day, a buffalo that I was herding stepped on my foot and I lost the toenail. . . . Now look at what a tall chair I am sitting in [the chief minister’s chair]! I have proven that ballot boxes are more powerful than machine guns. Votes can decide whether a man will be in the dust or riding in an airplane.5

  As far as Sudha was concerned, there was no question of putting her children in public school.

  In Gaighat, the government schools were falling apart. Indeed, at the school where Anupam was nominally enrolled, bricks tumbled off the façade. Anupam remembers that it was painted red, “like a police station.” Teachers rarely showed up, or when they did, they didn’t do much more than take attendance. Kids played hooky or marbles—or they made themselves useful, snatching gold earrings or serving tea to the rickshaw drivers under the Mahatma Gandhi Bridge.

  Sudha pounded the pavement for a private school she could afford—which wasn’t much with what her husband brought home from his rickshaw route. Anupam went to school dutifully, until one day in Class 4 when he came home, put down his book bag, and told Mummy: My teacher can’t read properly. What good is a teacher like that?

  She did not doubt his word. She did not tell him to keep quiet and go back to school. She let him drop out. Then she pounded the pavement some more.

  In the next mohalla, she found a “coaching center,” which was another name for a private, unregulated non-school school. Some coaching centers are afterschool tutoring centers. Others, like the one Sudha found, offer full-day programs. This one established itself in a ground-floor flat, shielded from the street by a high wall of bougainvillea. Rows of children sat on the floor, rocking gently back and forth while memorizing math.

  Every morning, at quarter to eight, Sudha packed Anupam a roti-sabji lunch and whispered prayers over his head. The boy left home, bowed to the hooch dealer’s wife, walked past the shuttered snack shops and under the Mahatma Gandhi Bridge, where the auto-rickshaw drivers assembled. He studied at the coaching center from eight in the morning until eight at night, six days a week. The subjects offered were math, logical reasoning, and general knowledge, enough to crack the state-run matriculation exam in Class 8.

  That exam was the only reason Anupam enrolled in the nearest government-run school, which was across the street from the coaching center. He showed up once a month, so his name could remain on the attendance rolls.

  On Sundays, he did homework.

  It was a typical Indian work-around. By 2011, one-fourth of all Indian parents shelled out money for tutors outside school, according to the Annual Status of Education Report, an independent survey of education trends carried out by a national nonprofit called Pratham. It was one telling measure of how little kids learned in school.

  This survey, conducted every year across rural India since 2005, also pulled the veil off of one of India’s best-kept secrets. It found that while the vast majority of children were enrolled in school—India was boasting of near universal school enrollment—they were getting very little out of it. The latest survey results, from 2014, showed that most Indian children in Class 5 are functionally illiterate. More than half cannot subtract.

  That is to say, even though education is now democratic, its quality is abysmal. Vast numbers of children are going to school, and coming home with little to show for it. It is a perfect snapshot of what aspiration has wrought, and how aspiration is defeated, one child at a time.

  I will never forget what a social worker who worked for Pratham told me after we spent the day in a typical Bihar village, where his colleagues were conducting the survey. We had watched dozens of children stream into school early in the morning. We had watched them trying to read by themselves. We had listened to the headmaster complain bitterly about having to handle so many kids, and with so few teachers, that it was impossible for him to do anything. The social worker looked utterly dejected by the end of that morning.

  “When they get older, they’ll curse their teachers,” he said of the children. “They’ll say, ‘We came every day and we learned nothing.’ ”6

  Anupam displayed an unusual acumen for numbers. Word spread in his mohalla. Another tutor stepped in during high school. He armed Anupam with more hat tricks to ace math tests.

  Srikrishna once suggested that Anupam become an Indian Administrative Service officer, a bureaucrat with a government-issued Ambassador car with flashing red lights on top. That would be sweet revenge against all those cops who had pushed him around all those years on the streets of Patna. Anupam confessed to having no interest in becoming a bureaucrat.

  Anupam told Mummy that he wished to study at one of the Indian Institutes of Technology, the IITs, an intensely competitive chain of colleges established by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to train engineers for a new nation. By Anupam’s time the IITs had exported armies of engineers to build the global technology industry in California’s Silicon Valley.

  Sudha broached the idea with her husband. Neither of them knew anyone who had attended the IITs. They hadn’t even heard of the IITs. It didn’t matter. It was enough to know there was a world beyond their world—and that Anupam would take them there.

  In one respect, the education of Anupam is a portrait of Indian neglect. It is equally a portrait of how to hack a way around it—how to adjust.

  As Anupam was coming of age, caste was fast losing its original currency. That is to say, it defined less and less what you did for a living. More and more, caste did not dictate which water tap you could use or whom you ate with; those distinctions didn’t vanish, they just mattered less in many parts of India, especially cities. Caste remained central in marriage (“Take water, not daughter,” it was said). And it became entrenched in politics. (“You don’t cast your vote,” it was also said; “you vote your caste.”)

  In the years after the lifting of the emergency, caste carried more and more weight in who you backed at the polls, and for good reason. If your man (or woman) got elected, it could mean jobs for your people, or a road through your part of the village, or a government contract for a cement dealer in your community. People voted along caste lines not out of an antiquated sense of tribal loyalties, but often for the prospect of real material gains.

  The Constitution guaranteed set-asides for those on the very bottom of the social order. Those who were considered untouchables, or Dalits, and tbose who were regarded as outcastes, because they were India’s indigenous people, or adivasis, were entitled to a fixed share of elected seats in parliament. They were also entitled to a fixed share of government jobs and seats in college.

  By the 1980s, as the “backward” classes rose in political power, they too sought quotas in jobs and university admissions—but gauging who was “backward” and how many they were became enormously tricky. To determine backwardness, the government sometimes relied on the peculiar observations of nineteenth-century British ethnographers.

  One H. H. Risley, a Briton writing in the late 1800s, described Anupam’s community of Kalwars as a “liquor-selling, distilling, and trading caste of Behar.” He averred, “The social rank of Kalwars is low. Brahmans and members of the higher castes will on no account take water from their hands.”

  And in 1896, a treatise placed Kalwars under the heading “Manufacturing or Artisan Castes that are Regarded as Unclean Sudras.”

  John C. Nesfield, a British census officer serving in the North-West Provinces and Oudh in 1881, observed that Kalwars were higher in status than oil pressers, because liquor distilling required “more skill and less dirt.”7

  In 1990, when Anupam was a baby, a government panel, relying in part on these writings, concluded that indeed, his community was deserving of “backward” status. They too would be eligible for quotas in university admissions and government jobs.

  That immediately unleashed protests across the country by “forward” caste s
tudents. More set-asides meant fewer seats for upper-caste students. Competition was fierce for government jobs too, which were about the only jobs that were available around that time, before economic liberalization. In the anti-affirmative-action protests, some upper-caste youths went as far as to set themselves on fire. The first among them died in 1990. It was a turning point in the story of how much caste would continue to matter for Anupam’s generation.

  Anupam eschews caste distinctions. He believes it shouldn’t matter, either in how you treat people or in who does what for a living. He is wary of affirmative action, which is understandable, given how “backward” kids like him are ridiculed by “forward” kids for getting into university on reservations. In his view, admissions should be based solely on test scores, he says, especially at elite institutions like the IITs.

  This is not always so straightforward, as a pair of American scholars discovered when they set out to measure how children’s self-awareness of caste differences affected their educational performance.

  Karla Hoff and Priyanka Pandey, both economists, conducted an experiment with Indian schoolchildren modeled after experiments on racial self-awareness in the United States. They tested two sets of boys in middle school on a set of mazes. One set of boys took the test without knowing who belonged to which caste. Another set of boys took the test after being told who was high-caste and who was low. When caste was not revealed, there were no differences in the performance of the two sets of boys, the researchers found. But when caste was publicly announced, the lower-caste subjects performed measurably worse. Their ability to solve the mazes dropped by 23 percent. That is to say, the lower-caste students performed measurably worse when they knew that others knew that they were lower-caste.8

  I asked Anupam what he thought about this experiment. He was unusually introspective, but he didn’t refer to himself at first. He wrote in the third person about “people” who belong to this caste or that: