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On 15 August 2024, India celebrated 77 years of independence. The following is a feature piece which appeared in the International Herald Tribune attached to Xinhua News Agency in 2007 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. The author of the article, Tang Lu, shows the dramatic changes in India in the past 60 years by interviewing Jayanthi Iyengar, a lady journalist in India. Although this interview was conducted 17 years ago, it is still very relevant.
By Tang Lu
Mumbai, August 20, 2007:Jayanthi Iyengar 47,is a distinguished Indian woman journalist and columnist for the Hindustan Times. Her husband works as an engineer for Tata and is often sent by the company to work in Asian countries. Her two daughters are currently in college in the U.S. I stayed at Jayanthi’s home in 2005. I stayed at Jayanthi’s house in 2005, in an upmarket residential area of Pune, a large city in southern India. The family has three cars. When I first came to Jayanthi’s house, I thought her living room was very special. I had the impression that even for very rich Indians, home decoration is relatively simple, and there are always a few pictures of Hindu gods on the walls. But Jayanthi’s home decoration is in the retention of Indian cultural characteristics at the same time full of strong modern atmosphere, Western-style furniture, large root carvings, full of exotic flavour of all kinds of face …… all the furnishings show the owner’s economic strength as well as aesthetics of the difference.
I once asked Jayanthi, ‘Is the Indian middle class all rich like you? Do they all spend like you?’ . Jayanthi said, ‘Our annual income as a couple is around 250,000 rupees, which is pretty much the upper middle class in India, and we are in the save, spend, work category because we want life to be as good as it can be.’
As per the official Indian calibre, the number of people like Jayanthi who belong to the middle class is around 300 million (the annual income may vary a lot). Though their lives can be described as carefree now, their fathers and mothers were far less fortunate than they were. Moreover, going back 20 years, the Iyengars were not as rich as they are now.
In an interview on the occasion of India’s 60th year of independence, Jayanthi told me about the struggles of three generations of her family.
Street Lamps for Studying
Although child marriages have been illegal in India since 1929, the fact is that even today, in the 20th century, they are still commonplace. Jayanthi’s mother was the last child bride in her family. According to the family’s rules, women are not allowed to study. However, her grandfather, a Sanskrit scholar with a master’s degree in both history and economics, was kind enough to allow Jayanthi’s mother to pursue a primary education. After graduating from junior high school, she married Jayanthi’s father, a 21-year-old village schoolteacher, as arranged by her maternal grandfather, even though she was only 13 years old. However, at the age of 40, she went on to attend college and earn a college degree as she had hoped.
Jayanthi’s father was the only son of a poor family. He used to read under the street lamps in order to study. Although rural India is now electrified, meaning that every village has access to electricity, those that don’t have access to electricity do so because of a lack of ability to pay. However, in the days when Jayanthi’s dad went to school there was no electricity at all in the village, and no one even knew what it was. With no money in the family, it was his aunt who eventually sponsored him to finish his university degree in Physics and get a Bachelor of Science degree. After graduation, through his own hard work, Jayanthi’s father passed the civil service exams and joined the Indian Telecom Department, where he later qualified as a Telecom Engineer. He retired as the General Manager of the Telephone Department in Madurai, Tamil Nadu.
Although it is no longer worth bragging about having a landline phone in the home, with the rapid growth of India’s telecoms industry, the country’s telephone penetration rate had almost caught up with the global average of 15 per cent by 2006, reaching 130 million subscribers. But go back a few decades and there were very few telephones in Indian homes. Because Jayanthi’s father worked for the Department of Telecommunications, he had a telephone installed in his home. This was a special deal given by the Indian government to employees of the Department of Telecommunications, under which her father was entitled to a fixed number of free calls every month. This was the envy of many Indians at the time. Jayanthi’s siblings loved to talk on the phone, but her parents got angry when the children talked for long periods of time, and they would scream, ‘The phone bill is going to go up!’
Not Wasting Electricity on Storybooks
Jayanthi’s parents were very frugal. Perhaps because they suffered from a lack of electricity in the past, they are very particular about how they use it. In Jayanthi’s words, ‘One of the things my father always says is that you can’t waste electricity to read storybooks, you should use it to study.’ Influenced by her father, Jayanthi studied especially hard, and in her 12 years of school life, she only saw three films. She says, ‘I remember my father having only 2 pairs of trousers and shirts, which he took turns to change at work, and I knew that we didn’t have much money in our family, and even then my father still told me this, “If you need money to buy a book, don’t hesitate, I’ll buy it for you right away.”
Today India’s middle class, which has become the engine of the country’s economic prosperity, has a completely different consumer philosophy from that of their parents. Because of this, when Jayanthi’s children were born, her standard response to her two daughters was, ‘Don’t worry about the price of anything you want to buy, just tell me what you need and I will buy it for you.’
In fact, when Jayanthi got married in 1983, she and her husband were still traveling by bicycle. ‘Twenty years later when my daughters went to college, we already had three small cars, one for me, one for my husband and one belonging to my two daughters. They all had mobile phones, iPOTS and a TV in each of their rooms. I remember I got my own TV only when I came to Delhi in 1983.’
Jayanthi used to have more than enough holidays when she started working in Delhi more than 20 years ago, however her limited income allows her to go back to Madras (now renamed Chennai) only once in 1-2 years to visit her family. Although train tickets in India were not expensive, visiting her family was a heavy burden for her anyway. With India’s rapid economic growth, Jayanthi’s life has been radically transformed. Now, whenever she has free time, she not only flies to visit her parents, but also spends her holidays in a variety of ways: floating in the Ganges, walking on the beaches of Goa, trekking in the Himalayas …… and, from time to time over the years, traveling abroad.
First Generation of Married Women Journalists
While in India, it sometimes feels like women are well taken care of – there are seats reserved for women in buses, women’s compartments in trains and women-only counters at station ticket offices. However, discrimination against women is actually pervasive in Indian society. Traditionally, the educated and observant middle and upper classes do not allow their wives to work outside the home. So, no matter how well a girl does in college, she usually gives up her job and becomes a housewife when she gets married. Jayanthi is a woman who dared to challenge the traditional society, she became the first generation of female journalists with outstanding results, but behind her success she suffered a lot of unimaginable humiliations.
When I joined the profession in 1987, there were very few women in the journalism profession and it was unheard of for a woman journalist to be a mother,’ says Jayanthi. When I was posted as deputy editor of the Times of India’s sub-paper, The Saturday Times, I was immediately protested by the paper’s editor-in-chief, ‘My department cannot be a dumping ground for married women!’ Four years later I wanted to try my hand at journalism and was again met with the cynical comment from the editor-in-chief of The Times of India, ‘I can’t afford to have a lot of married women on my team’.When I tried to join The Herald as a legal reporter in 1991, the comment from the paper’s city editor-in-chief was, ‘I don’t want feature writers, I need journalists for important stories’.When I was appointed deputy editor-in-chief of The Economic Times of India in 1999, another comment was made, “I don’t know what kind of magic she is casting on the executive editor” …… ’
‘ I know that despite the fact that there is no gender discrimination allowed in India, the fact is that it is very difficult for women to rise to higher positions. For example, as a woman journalist, one must first forget one’s gender; at that time, I was crammed in a big room with more than 40 male journalists, who liked to smoke when they were writing and couldn’t write without smoking, so I could never protest against their smoking. Apart from sniffing cigarettes, I had to learn to listen to their profanity and sometimes sit in the press club like a man and drink with the editor-in-chief till late ……
Today, India has changed. About 50 per cent of the workforce in various sectors in the cities are women, with a larger proportion of women in the media or electronics sectors. But in some small towns and villages, families still do not usually allow women to work outside the home.
Homes were like small theaters as television was not widely available
When I stayed at Jayanthi’s house, I had the impression that she had a very regular routine, going to bed on time every night and going out for exercise very early in the morning. Jayanthi proudly told me that her good habits were formed because she went to school at a time when there was no television. Although Indian television has now grown to be one of the largest networks in the world, it was only introduced in 1959, and due to its limited transmission signal, it could not cover all parts of the country. So until she went to college, Jayanthi had never watched television.
Recalling the first time she saw a television, Jayanthi laughed out loud. ‘My cousin’s family was the first in our family to have a TV. I remember when about 50 people would crowd into the living room of his house every Sunday to watch TV if a film was shown on TV. Among these regulars were his neighbours, children, servants and even people he never knew! I remember that feeling especially like being in a small theater where family members couldn’t have any privacy, haha, that’s impossible!’
Now no longer considered a rarity in India even in the villages, television has not only changed the habits of city dwellers, but has especially drastically changed the rural society of India. In rural India, television sets have become an essential part of the village wedding dowry.
Daughter’s Habits No Longer Adapted to God Worship
Indians love to worship gods. According to their tradition, one should usually get up and bathe at dawn and try to pray to God in the morning. Because of this, Jayanthi’s parents taught her from a young age to go to bed by 10 pm. To this day, she adheres to her parents’ requirements, ’However, my daughter, who goes to school in the United States, is the complete opposite of us. She usually goes to bed at 7 a.m., although she has also expressed a desire to change her bedtime to 1 p.m. Because she goes to bed late and wakes up late, she sometimes misses her meetings with her professors.’
My daughter once told me that her greatest wish in life was to stay awake for six days and spend her evenings doing crossword puzzles like the one in the Times of India or sitting outside the road all night drinking coffee at one of those Starbucks-like Barista …… We are against all this. But there is no way around it. That’s the contrast. Today our fathers and mothers still adhere to the old-school methods of dressing, eating, sleeping and worshiping the gods, but today young people in India’s IT industry and other sectors work at night and sleep during the day. This is true in many families. So, for them, there is no time to worship God in the morning anyway.’
As she was about to conclude the interview, Jayanthi said, ‘All of us in our family have actually been empowered through education. Because we believe that education is a means of gaining power, we save, we spend, we work with our children and fit in with their trends so that we are able to help them get paid more for their work and live a better quality of life.’
Afterword: Jayanthi’s family story is just a microcosm of India’s 1.1 billion people, which reflects the changing times in India: traditional and modern, conservative and open, reflecting the struggle and hard work of Indians and the different ideas and consumption concepts of people in different times, and also reflects the rapid pace of development of India in these 60 years.
India’s famous Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen recently published an article ‘60 years young India’, the article quoted Picasso said a sentence ‘people from 60 years old began to become young.’ Amartya Sen points out that ‘a similar situation seems to be happening in India now, at least in the economic sphere. India is much more rejuvenated today than it was when this ancient land achieved political independence in 1947.’
Yes, while India’s economy grew at what has been jokingly described as an Indian-style growth rate of 3-4 per cent for the first three decades of its independence, it increased to 6-7 per cent throughout the 1990s following the introduction of economic reforms, and averaged 7.5 per cent per annum from 2002-2006, while at the same time India’s poverty rate, which was 55 per cent in the mid-1970s At the same time, India’s poverty rate fell from 55 per cent in the mid-1970s to 26 per cent today. While many, many economists are not as confident about India’s economic rise as they are about China’s, this does not prevent the Indian economy from entering a period of sustained high growth. With a revitalised economy and a growing middle class population, India is emerging as a major economic force on the world stage. Today, millions of people living in Indian cities are growing up in an environment where they are becoming familiar with mobile phones, MP3s, and luxury cars, and where their lifestyles reflect their values and life goals in a way that is comparable to those of any metropolitan city in the world. Indians are growing up in an environment with goods, services and economic dynamism that once could only be dreamt of.
Jayanthi’s quote says it all, ‘People living in our century are so lucky. They have the opportunity to see all kinds of changes in their lifetime.’
END
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