Review

Enthusiasm unbound

The untrammelled gusto of globalisation’s adherents

By : C K Lal

Bound Together: How traders, preachers, adventurers, and warriors shaped globalization by Nayan Chanda Penguin Books, 2007

For millennia, Aryabarta encompassed the world for the elite of India. The area was big enough to accommodate the ambitions of the Maurya rulers. Its astounding diversity kept the best of Brahmin brains perpetually engaged with the mystery of the before- and afterlife. Farmers ploughed, and hunters or herders went about their daily tasks, without bothering much about the world beyond the Arabian Sea or the Bay of Bengal. Some contact with the rest of the world was maintained through land routes. But frontiers were dangerous places to live: marauders from abroad frequently plundered these regions.

For a very long time, only merchants or fisherfolk dared sail across the seas. The rest feared the pollution of the black waters. As late as the mid-19th century, Jang Bahadur Kunwar Rana, Maharaja of Lamjung and Kaski from Nepal, was still able to become the first ‘Eastern potentate’ to set foot inside Birmingham Palace. That, of course, suddenly changed with the departure of the British from Southasia. With the colonialists gone and Brown Sahibs in power, there was no risk of being ridiculed as ‘imperial agents’ after coming back home from the land of the firangis.

Go West has become the anthem of the middle class in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, especially for the offspring of those professionals who have benefited so immensely from their association with the colonial establishment. These are the illustrious Macaulay’s Children, who have shone in every profession in each of their adopted countries. Bongs, Gujjus, Punjus, K’digas, Mallus and Tam-Brams, having slogged throughout their coursework at various IITs just to get the chance to slog even more in Europe and the United States, now form a veritable universe of English-speaking global elite. Add to that the ever-burgeoning number of ABDs (American Born Desis), DVDs (Diversity Visa Dependents) and NRIs, and it becomes clear that the size of the global Southasian community is now large enough to deserve its own icons.

There are cosmopolitan Indians in trade and industry, with Laxmi Niwas Mittal and Swaraj Paul among the better known for their wealth and chutzpah, respectively. But more than the rich and famous, it is the knowledgeable who are the favourites of the fawning middle class back home in Southasia. Jagdish N Bhagwati of Columbia University, Lord Meghnad Desai of England and Amartya Kumar Sen of Harvard University may not be household names in Dharavi, but their works are hotly debated at university campuses in Colombo, Dhaka, Islamabad and New Delhi. Now Nayan Chanda wishes to join their rank with Bound Together, his new book about globalisation.

Like Sen, Chanda too went to school in Bengal. But unlike the lifelong academic Sen, Chanda chose to focus on journalism. It is too early to say whether this decision was a loss for academia or not, but Chanda’s career choice has definitely been a gain for journalism. Although he had a relatively uneventful stint at the Far Eastern Economic Review, he still manages to write with the felicity of a magazine reporter. Every chapter of Bound Together abounds with intriguing snippets, gripping tales and delightful turns of phrases. The book is such an engrossing read that its main theory – that there is no escaping the globalisation process; that it has been going on for 60,000 years and will continue to do so into the infinite future – tends to disappear in the maze of anecdotes, asides and stories.

Every book has a beginning, middle and end; but a magazine can be flipped open and read from almost everywhere. Somehow, it makes more sense to read the last chapter of Chanda’s book, “The Road Ahead”, and then come back to the beginning. Indeed, the epilogue provides a better context for Chanda’s work than what the author says in the introduction. “The big differences that mark the globalisation of the early years with the present are in the velocity with which products and ideas are transferred, the very growing volume of consumers and products and their variety, and the resultant increase in the visibility of the process,” gushes Chanda in a single breath, italicising all the v-words – the allusion to victory unmistakable – for effect rather than emphasis. At the same time, he seems to have intentionally ignored the arguably more important corollary: the vulnerability of the marginalised in the globalisation process.

TINA
Bound Together begins with “The African Beginning”, which attempts to confirm the ‘Out of Africa’ theory of human origin on the basis of results of the author’s own DNA. “The very widely dispersed M168 marker can be traced to an African man, who lived some 31,000 to 79,000 years ago, and is the common ancestor of every non-African person living today. His descendents migrated out of Africa and became the only lineage to survive away from humanity’s home continent.” So, does that make George W Bush and Osama bin Laden distant cousins? But, more to the point, how does this knowledge help to reduce the hegemony of the West over the Rest?

The author tells his readers that traders opened land and sea routes that were later used by preachers, adventurers and warriors to weave financiers, producers, transporters, distributors and consumers into a unified garland of globalisation. In a way, transformation of the wide-world web into the World Wide Web was a natural phenomenon, and one that is now largely unstoppable. There is nothing new in this TINA (There Is No Alternative) worldview. Ever since Margaret Thatcher propounded this viewpoint for political objectives back in the 1980s, it has become the default position of neoliberals and neoconservatives alike.

At the same time, there has to be an alternative to a system that makes this world so unequal. India has the largest number of absolute poor in the world, but it is also home to the largest number of (dollar) billionaires outside the US and Russia. Clearly, the values of the idea of vasudhaiva kutumbkam (The whole world is a family) are very different from the bourgeois belief of the world as your oyster. Globalisation is a fundamentally flawed world order of winners and losers – and, hence, inherently instable. A dose of universalism – of human rights, democracy and governance – is necessary to make it slightly less tyrannical.

Globalisation has succeeded in establishing its primacy through a complex mix of legends, laws, language and literature. For the globalisers of the world, laws are what the rich decide. That is how the Bretton Woods Sisters and their development associates work: International Monetary Fund conditionalities and World Bank consultants at times supersede the constitutional provisions of recipient countries. The language of globalisation is also invariably English: the lingua franca of an empire established by British merchants, micro-managed by Afro-Asian agents, institutionalised by Orientalists, protected by imperial gunships, and made acceptable by the words and actions of what have been referred to as WOGs – Westernised oriental gentlemen who willingly shoulder the white man’s burden for him.

Edward Said has said more about the role and function of literature in ensuring colonial hegemony than was perhaps necessary. The late professor failed to fully appreciate the fact that the new Orientalists were often escapees from the Third World, who propagated the values of their masters with a vengeance. For all its scholarship, Bound Together is essentially a polemical tract that seeks to promote the agenda of globalisation by manufacturing legends – the final tool of hegemony.

Self-destruction mode
Despite the ritual opposition of tattooed protestors at Davos and World Trade Organisation jamborees, the grip of globalisation continues to tighten. Nonetheless, slowly, but unmistakably, a parallel movement for the promotion of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the covenants on economic and social rights, and democratic governance has begun to take shape. That is where hope lies for the destitute, the marginalised and the weak of the world. Globalisation and universalism are twins of a process that began millennia ago in Africa. The Bad Guy (the choice of the masculine is intentional) has maintained his primacy, but ultimately it is the Good that will prevail. The real TINA is, in fact, universalism, not globalisation.

Ironically, after marshalling the flow of facts retrieved from selective amnesia to establish the inevitability of globalisation, Chanda is constrained to recognise, in his concluding chapter, “As we move further into the twenty-first century, global connections forged by history’s warriors have emerged as globalization’s most problematic legacy. The world’s sole superpower, the United States, which many view as the new Rome, has enormous, near imperial power without an obvious empire.” This empire seems to have gone into self-destruction mode – aiding global conflicts, abetting mindless exploitation of the earth’s resources, and augmenting greenhouse gases.

If the world is currently under a level of stress never before seen in human history, the credit for creating such a situation must go to the unrestrained forces of globalisation. The elite has tremendously benefited from its ability to access the Internet freely and from the pressurised comfort of executive-class seats in long-haul aircrafts, while sipping complementary champagne. But all of the planes in the world are not enough to give a single joyride to the poor of Africa, the continent where our collective history began.