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Global Photographs
Photo by Richard Strauss
The evil Thyagu stands over Shenbagam holding the wedding Thali round her neck as she sits submissive and dazed. To secure her inheritance, all he has to do is tie the knot. Uma is being restrained in the crowd, helpless. A reincarnation of Shenbagam’s mother Jeeva, she remembers the pain of having her husband corrupted by drugs, being falsely accused of adultery before being pushed off a cliff by Thyagu. He has ruled tyrannically over the village ever since, keeping the labourers poor whilst soaking up its wealth.
Stalls outside the stations of Tamil Nadu are lined with 10 Rupee short stories, which clamour to seduce the reader with displays of crime, horror and suspense. A victim under the blooded fangs of a giant tabby cat sits above a sari-clad woman armed with a machine gun.
Suddenly a shot. Five more rattle in quick succession. Thyagu’s ex-wife stands with a smoking gun: “May this story be a lesson to the world that justice will always prevail”.
And so The Rebirth of Jeeva ends, balanced in a karma that has taken two generations to achieve. This is symptomatic of a powerful world view in the Indian popular imagination, which the author, Indra Sundar Rajan, summarizes by saying “if we make a mess, then it’s our responsibility to clean it up. We must pay the debts of our karma ourselves”. It’s an idea that returns again and again in Tamil Pulp Fiction.
Working for The Climate Project – India over the summer, an independent chapter of Al Gore’s NGO, my boss, a fervent atheist, said to me wryly, ‘you see in climate negotiations the West adopting a Christian view where if you mess up, you say sorry and get absolved. The thing is, if you mess up as a Hindu you have to make amends, else you’re a cockroach’.
There is a lot of frustration in India about the way the West are trying to deal with global warming. Equity is at the heart of it. China and India are consistently getting classed as the first and fifth largest polluters in the world, with an implied burden of responsibility that’s proportional to these positions. But per capita, the average Indian emits roughly ten times less than the average American, and four times less the average European. It’s even below the developing world average. In fact, 400 million people live in non-electrified dwellings in India and this poverty is the most ignored ‘carbon sink’ in the climate change debate.
The graph that gets pulled out even less is the one showing historical emissions over the last 250 years. The UK stands awkwardly at the top closely followed by the US, whilst India and China are only specks on the horizontal. If you’re thinking in karma it’s a large debt to pay.
What is more, the countries least responsible for climate change stand to suffer the most because of their geographic locations and limited resources to adapt. For instance, the UN estimates that if the global temperature rises by 2 degrees, India stands to loose between a fifth and a half of its agricultural output. This is so dangerous because 60 per cent of the population is involved in agricultural production.
But there’s something upside-down about the way climate change tends to get reported.
When I was in Mumbai in late August 2009, the festival of Ganesh Chaturthi was in full swing. Large statues of Ganesh, up to five stories high, were paraded through the streets by families and neighbourhoods to the accompaniment of symbols, drums, even stacks of speakers. Dancing and covered in red paint, Mumbaikers took their idols down to the sea to be ceremoniously drowned. As the mover of obstacles, people pray to the elephant god for success and wealth in the coming year, with heads of households waving bank notes over relatives as a sign of good fortune.
I think many in the West are intimidated by this vision of India: a rapidly growing economy full of people desperately wanting to make money, get more things, and earn a more comfortable existence for themselves. No-one would deny India the right to do this, but the ‘oriental consumer monster’ is often used by us as an excuse to do nothing about lowering greenhouse gas emissions; at least, nothing about changing lifestyles. Instead the emphasis is on technology. We want to make new stuff that emits less, rather than using less in the first place.
Compare this to the climate change message in India. One of the services that The Climate Project- India provides is a training session for teachers and businesses where there is a heavy emphasis, not only on saving energy, but on reducing waste and water consumption as well. What seemed strange to me was that many of the audiences consisted of fairly poor people who would in any case consume relatively little. Asking why this information was included, I got told simply that it got a very popular response. In fact, for millions of Indians, the idea of conservation gives a dignity to their way of life.
What this means is that whilst the British public are busy stock-piling halogen lights and pointing out the reluctance of India and China to accept binding emissions targets, school teachers on £100 a month are consciously continuing to take bucket showers rather than wasting water through a mains system.
Photo by Richard Strauss
Of course, India will have a huge role to play in helping to prevent global warming. Certainly, if its eighty-odd years of coal reserves are all burnt, then the world will get very toasty. But the Indian Prime-Minister, Manmohan Singh, has said that India’s per capita emissions will not exceed the developed world average. If people in the West consume sustainable amounts of carbon, so will Indians. Leading up to Copenhagen in December, this puts the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of those who have caused the problem. Karma.
