CROWDS: An inescapable feature of Indian life. If foreigners stepping onto Indian streets for the first time were asked to name what struck them most about India, it would not be the heat, the dust, or the poverty but simply the crowds — the enormous pressure of people on every available space. Pavements and parks, maidans and markets, buildings and buses are all full to an extent never seen elsewhere. There is no such thing in India as a deserted street, an empty train, or even a secluded spot. Every act that takes place in public, from a farewell kiss to a film shooting, immediately attracts an audience; every inch of open space has at least two claimants; open air offers no release from claustrophobia. The fact that Indians manage to live, function, and order their creative energies in these circumstances is a remarkable feat of social organization.
DACOITS: An Indian peculiarity — the word doesn't exist anywhere else (“bandits” somehow doesn't convey enough). Though they flourish in varying degrees all over the country, the image conjured up by the word is that of the mustachioed bandits of the Chambal ravines, with their blood feuds, their codes of honor, their glamorous “bandit queens.” In their tyranny over innocent villagers, their rapacious plunder (Veerappan despoiled the natural resources of his jungle as ruthlessly as any contractor), and the toll they have taken in human lives, the dacoits have exceeded the worst excesses of the Wild West, but it is typically Indian that the main method of bringing them to justice has not been the gunfight at the O.K. Corral but the extraordinary “mass surrenders” masterminded by assorted Gandhians.
DANCE: Curiously schizoid in status in India. The revival of classical dance since independence has helped Indians rediscover a precious heritage of great beauty and skill, and the encouragement of folk dancing has brought respectability and public attention to such expressions of rural exuberance as the bhangra or the ottamthullal. But for the mass of the urban public, dance is still something to be viewed on the stage rather than a participatory activity, and social dancing is still widely disapproved of as decadence on legs, confined to discos and nightclubs patronized by a tiny and Westernized elite.
DHABAS: Even if they are called kadais in Tamil Nadu and other things elsewhere, these food stalls are so much more than India's version of McDonald's. Few Indians have not bought tea, cigarettes, soft drinks, or even an impromptu meal at a dhaba. Roughly constructed of thatch or aluminum sheeting with a rudimentary wooden bench (if anything) to sit on, these sheds invariably offer more pleasure, and better food, than most five-star hotels. Which is why fancy hotels are setting up five-star fare in places they disingenuously call “Dhaba.”
DISINVESTMENT: A charming Indian euphemism for getting the government out of businesses it has no business being involved in. (See Privatization.)
DOODHWALAS: These milkmen are still features of Indian life, despite the recent mushrooming of “milk booths” on certain city corners and the availability of packaged milk in supermarkets. They testify to the persistence of India's traditional social relations in the face of the encroachments of urbanization; and more prosaically to the lethargy of the Indian consumer, who would rather put up with watered milk delivered to his doorstep than pick up a quality-controlled bottle of it elsewhere.
DOWRY: The classic Indian social eviclass="underline" the cause of much rural indebtedness, a great deal of human misery, and sometimes the death of an unwanted bride, usually in a “kitchen accident.” There are still those who justify dowry as recompense for the parents of the son, and many who, more “progressively,” argue that it is really intended for the bridal couple to make their start in life. Whatever the arguments, nothing can justify the misery caused by dowry; yet, despite years of campaigning for its abolition, and four decades during which the giving or receiving of dowry has been formally illegal, the iniquitous practice continues. In our country, social pressures are more powerful than legal or moral ones — even when the pressure is to do the wrong thing.
ELECTIONS: A great Indian tamasha, conducted at irregular intervals and various levels amid much fanfare. It takes the felling of a sizable forest to furnish enough paper for 600 million ballots, and every election has at least one story of returning officers battling through snow or jungle to ensure that the democratic wishes of remote constituents are duly recorded. Nor is any election coverage complete without at least one photo of a female voter whose enthusiasm for suffrage is undimmed by the fact that she is old, blind, crippled, toothless, or purdah-clad, or any combination of the above. Ballot boxes are stuffed, booths are “captured,” the occasional election worker/candidate/voter is assaulted/kidnapped/shot, but nothing stops the franchise. At every election someone discovers a new chemical that will remove the indelible stain on your fingernail and permit you to vote twice (as if this convenience made any great difference in constituencies the size of ours); at every election some distinguished voter claims his name is missing from the rolls, or that someone has already cast his vote (but usually not both). At every election some ingenious accountant produces a set of figures to show that only a tenth of what was actually spent was spent; somebody makes a speech urging that the legal limit for expenditure be raised, so that less ingenuity might be required to cook the books, and everyone goes home happy. Elections are an enduring spectacle of free India, and give a number of foreign journalists the opportunity to remind us and the world that we are the world's largest democracy. But they are also an astonishing achievement that we take for granted at our peril.
ELECTION SYMBOLS: Lend both color and clarity to our political landscape. The great Indian achievement of reducing the differences among a bewildering array of parties to the graphic simplicity of bicycles and banyan trees has been deservedly imitated elsewhere. (Although there is somewhat less universal appeal for a dhoti-clad farmer and his plow, and the right to be identified by two yoked bullocks might not be so bitterly contested by political parties abroad, the principle remains worthy of emulation.) Symbols can, however, cause their own confusions, as when a number of electors in the early 1980s cast their votes for the wrong Congress Party, thinking that the woman on its symbol was meant to represent Indira Gandhi. In the mid-1990s the Election Commission forbade parties from choosing small animals or birds as symbols — after one candidate chose a parrot and his rival proceeded to wring a real parrot's neck to show what he would do in the contest. An elephant would have been safer!
EMERGENCY: A period almost everyone would rather forget, during which elections were suspended but jail sentences for politicians were not, and censorship suddenly involved more than osculatory activity on celluloid. For many Indians it was a watershed in their political growth, because the assumptions they had always made about the kind of polity in which they lived were so rudely shaken. For others, it was merely a period of fewer strikes and power cuts, when prices were stable, and yes, the trains ran on time. But those were the side effects of a far more fundamental change of system — and you don't need an Emergency to attain those ends. The phase ended happily, with free elections that defenestrated the government, but it demonstrated the fragility of institutions Indians had begun to take for granted and so strengthened the determination of those who wished to protect them. Ironically, the Emergency's most lasting legacy was the impetus it gave the press upon its withdrawal. Courage, innovation, and investigative journalism, all conspicuously lacking in the pre-Emergency press, became hallmarks of the newly freed media. There's nothing like losing your freedom to make you realize how much you can do with it; Indians are among the very few peoples in the world to have been given the opportunity to act on that realization.