02 Gunnar Myrdal and ‘An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations’…

Our quest has to start with that iconic text of the turbulent ’60s, Gunnar Myrdal’s “Asian Drama”. What do you say of a work spanning all of 2284 pages, with separate Author and Subject indexes, footnotes in tiny print on every page which probably constitute more than half the text, and, when you finally come to end of the main chapters by page 1828 (in Vol.III), you are then faced with a ‘Postscript’ followed by 16 Appendices, in small type, over another 400 pages? One doffs the hat, and crawls away in shamefaced awe and chagrin at this marvellous performance, this tour-de-force of Teutonic thoroughness and literary architectonics.

How does one approach, let alone read, this work? My contemporaries (those who came of age in the ‘60s, that is) will recall that this was one those seminal works that most of us swore by, and cited as an authority, but few of us actually studied (Karl Marx, Lenin, Mao, Paulo Frero, Sartre, are some of the others). Published in 1968, never available in the college library (assorted intellectual types would wander with it under their arms for the permitted two weeks and end up paying fines but not getting past the contents page and acknowledgements), it’s only now, after four decades, that I accidentally stumbled upon it in the Sapna book depot in Bangalore (I was lusting after the Dewey Decimal Classification, being let go at 12,000 rupees), reprinted by Kalyani Publishers, New Delhi, in a green hard binding, for… hold your breath, a cool 650 rupees! Since we all remember, in various degrees of vagueness, the initial parts, I decided to start with the lesser-leafed third volume. I’ve just finished the main text, which talks about education and health, and am working through the Appendices now.  

The man is thorough, and also authoritarian. He knows exactly what is wrong with the world, and he has a ready prescription to every ill. All through his discourse runs the theme of ‘soft’ states and their opposite, which I suppose would be the ‘hard’ states, but this doesn’t appear to be the term the good Professor uses. It is this imagery that has stuck in my mind, if nothing else of his actual ideology has. Often I have expressed my thanks to providence that India has been historically a soft state, and will continue to be a soft state, despite the earnest exhortations of Myrdal and others. The civilised West finds the Indian mentality irritating, and our favourite image wheen we want to get back at them, is that of the gallon-hatted, spur-shod, cowboy trying to harangue the wretched third-world farmer resting in the shade of his gum tree (Acacia species) into a more strenuous mode of life. My favourite irony (it can’t be true, but somehow it has stuck) is of an expert who wanted to know why all the peasants were still sleeping at 11 in the morning…. little realising that they had risen with the dawn, and finished a half day’s work before breakfast (this may no longer be true in India today, since even the rural people have adapted to the western 9 to 5 workday, and moreover are conditioned by the demands of television).

We have a good example of a ‘not-soft’ state in our great neighbour to the north, the Middle Kingdom (India was the Western Kingdom to them). The Professor should have been proud of them… they took decisions, they brooked no opposition, they knew exactly what to do. They went through massive convulsions, they made a disastrous Great Leap Forward into an abyss, they engineered a major Cultural Revolution which destroyed much of their culture and history. The final epitaph of the Great Helmsman’s philosophy was probably this concise pronouncement: it doesn’t matter what colour the cat is, as long as it catches mice. What will we do with all those heavy tomes we used to buy with our small change from the Indo-Soviet book centres, but never actually read all these years?  If that is what a not-soft state is like, thank god we are a soft state, is what I say…