Whose "development"?

Readers well-versed in development issues may have to forgive (if they can) some economic naiveties in the following, where this blog goes determinedly "off-topic"...

Kathmandu's Thamel district, a rooftop restaurant in the tourist ghetto. The third lassi of the afternoon, staving off the waiters circling questioningly with the bill. As dusk draws on, the crazy medley of sounds that crowd in from outside sums up the distracted confusion of the place, and my situation, trapped in visa limbo now for two weeks, and still too preoccupied to plunge into the "real" Nepal. Rickshaw drivers emit bird-like peeps, quack their home-made shampoo-bottle hooters; the tourist-protecting policewomen give intermittent blasts on their whistles; the sarangi (Nepali fiddle) sellers wander up and down all playing the same desultory scale, competing perhaps with a flute salesman or one of the melancholy, note-perfect imitations of American rock that begin to echo down from the bar across the narrow, rainy street. Everything meant to alert or attract the foreign traveller, everything instead merging together into a repetitive, overlayered backdrop, like the jungle of signs and banners that jut and unfurl across the claustrophobic gully separating one pizza parlour from its rival opposite - they read: Laundry, Internet, ATM, Massage, Treks and Tours, Continental/Indian/Tibetan/Chinese Food...

I become lulled into a familiar urban-American doze - a mall-terrace, airport-lounge, TV ad-break state of mind. It even seems to have penetrated the book I have just abandoned, bought out of a vague sense of duty to read at least something Nepali, Samrat Upadhyay's Arresting God in Kathmandu - nothing very arresting or divine about it to my mind, a succession of adultery- and alcoholism-filled tales in jaded, detached American short-story prose; Nepal through the eyes of a cosmopolitan Raymond Carver-wannabe. I read other books here too, mostly for "timepass" as Indian English quaintly expresses it. One genuinely attracts my full interest, and begins to connect with what I am learning here and there about the situation of Nepal, and of India. It is Helena Norberg-Hodge's book Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, a brilliant and deeply questioning text, part anthropology, part political-environmental manifesto. (There is also a film of the same title.) Her thesis is as radical as her perspective is unique: as the first Westerner to master Ladakhi, the dialect of Tibetan spoken in the highest region of Himalayan India, she was also the first outsider to penetrate fully one of the most stable, ancient and secluded societies still to be found on the globe in the second half of the twentieth century. And at the same time, arriving just as Ladakh began to be "opened up", she saw the region both prior to and during its ongoing "modernization", its exposure to Western commerce, development and tourism.

Her conclusion was, quite simply, that this process was an unmitigated catastrophe for the Ladakhi people. And that conclusion was the more convincing for being reached gradually, over 16 years, and from an originally non-political vantage point; for Norberg-Hodge had entered Ladakh as a professional linguist, merely with the intention of compiling a dictionary of the Ladakhi language. But the political passion that finally speaks from the book's pages is white-hot, quite as fierce as the more recent investigative journalism of Naomi Klein or Arundhati Roy. It is a brave and fascinatingly argued challenge to our commonplace image of development - that it is something like growing up, an inevitable "mixed blessing", dispelling one's innocence but giving one new capacities to engage with the big wide world.

That makes it sound as if "globalization" is what is at stake here; but in 1991 Helena Norberg-Hodge made little use of the term, and in a way one is rather grateful for it. To talk instead of "progress" and "development", while questioning the values those words have acquired, puts things in a different perspective. One sees Ladakh's changes temporally, rather than spatially; as part of a historical transformation that has happened, is happening, or (in a few far-flung cases) is still about to happen in each individual human culture, rather than a seductively fatal, all-embracing process of interconnection between them. As the author writes, this latter picture falsely implies a "concept of unity [that] has tremendous symbolic appeal... 'One market' implies community and co-operation and the 'Global Village' sounds like a place of tolerance and mutual exchange" (p.155). Not only does this leave on one side the imbalances and injustices that affect individual communities; it also implies that the interconnection and exchange taking place now is something absolutely new, rescuing the "native" societies of the world from their age-old isolation. One of the most telling points this book makes - there is almost one a paragraph - is that such isolation is wrongly imagined. Even such remote societies as Ladakh's reach out and accept foreign goods and influences. Leh, the capital, was an Asian trade hub, and Ladakhis themselves travelled as merchants and pilgrims. The point was that cultural contact with foreigners did not disturb the structures underpinning Ladakhi society - it was sought only as and when the Ladakhis needed it.

And it must be said, that was relatively seldom: for the Ladakhi way of life seems to have been so internally well-adjusted as to rely little on outside resources. The society was small and tightly-knit, using a few natural assets - a short barley-growing season, carefully channeled mountain streams, sturdy yaks providing labour, milk and fuel - to maximum effect. By harvesting and storing food and fodder when it was available in summer, the Ladakhis could spend the winter months celebrating, drinking and telling stories. "Economic" relations were centred on the household (the meaning, it pays to remember, of the Greek root of our word "economics": oikos); and particularly on the sustaining knowledge and industry of the women at its core. Work thus solidified familial relationships, diffusing a spirit of co-operation throughout the community which is neatly summed up in a traditional proverb: "Even a man with a hundred horses may need to ask another for a whip". Such co-operation largely replaced any need for a money economy, as well as ensuring a crime rate of virtually nil and an absence even of the concept of "unemployment". As the expressive English phrase goes about the "good old days" (sometimes even taken to include the Second World War) - back then people "pulled together". And having done so in traditional fashion for hundreds of years, the Ladakhis continued still in 1975 to live their lives with grace, consideration, humour and an extraordinary level of contentment.

The picture seems exaggerated, too rosy perhaps - some reviewers of the book and film suggest as much. But it may equally be, as Norberg Hodge reports of her own initial distrust at the Ladakhis' joie de vivre, that we would rather not believe a society so different from our own could take such good care of its members. We would prefer to think of it as "poor" and "backward", in urgent need of development on the Western pattern. And the tragedy, which in this book stands revealed as one of the main motors of such development, is the success we have had in convincing the Ladakhis and others like them of our way of seeing things. A sadly revealing chapter epigraph sets two quotes from the same Ladakhi source alongside each other, one from 1975 when Norberg-Hodge arrived, the other from 1983. The first time of asking, Tsewang Paljor opined, "We don't have any poverty here [in Ladakh]"; eight years later, he was complaining, "If only you could help us Ladakhis, we're so poor".

What is poverty, according to these two definitions? On the first, it seems to indicate a poorer quality of life, the lack of an enjoyable modicum of the things one needs - "enough to drink, enough to eat" as a Ladakhi phrase went. On the second, it has been reduced to lack of money, and the things - of Western origin - that money can buy. The innumerable economic paradoxes this sets up in practice, some of them familiar from the free trade and globalization debate, are well explained here, in more detail than I have space to reproduce: how villagers begin selling traditional brass and wooden jars for a pittance and replacing them with tins or plastic buckets; how construction work with imported concrete becomes "cheaper" than building traditional houses from local mud bricks; how the Ladakhis' environment becomes urbanised and aesthetically degraded at the same time that individuals count themselves richer. But of equally great importance, for the psychological or rhetorical reason just mentioned, is the paradox in theory. In Ladakh and the similarly placed independent kingdom of Bhutan, the standard of living is "actually quite high... People provide their own basic needs, and still have beautiful art and music, and significantly more time for leisure activities than people in the West" (p. 143). Yet going by GNP, Bhutan's subsistence economy ranks it as one of the poorest countries in the world. In effect no distinction is made "between the homeless on the streets of New York and Bhutanese or Ladakhi farmers". Equally absurdly, because work performed in one's own home or on one's own land is not "productive", only 10% of Ladakhis were, at the time of writing, officially classified as being "in work" at all.

I'm not competent to start a debate about statistics here, but this really made me stop and think. What does a slogan like "Make Poverty History" - which is the kind of sentiment that no-one would normally dream of questioning - actually mean in practice? Perhaps the agitatory tactics and short-term objectives selected by the 2005 campaign were in fact less problematic than its long-term aim - removing "absolute poverty". For when one looks with Norberg-Hodge's caveats in mind at the ways in which this state, or its upper limit, the "poverty threshold", are defined, one starts to wonder whether it really always equates to the classic cliche of destitution - as real as that undoubtedly is for those living in a Mumbai bustee. The World Bank sets the poverty line at $1 a day. First of all, that figure must be adjusted according to national economic conditions. Many students here at Santiniketan, for instance, spend less than that in a day, and are by no means absolutely poor: it is simply that, going by current exchange rates, a vegetarian lunch in a restaurant here will cost only 30 cents (and home cooking is of course cheaper). Secondly, even when adjusted, this measurement will always rest on the assumption that purchasing power or the lack of it must be the defining factor in quality of life - something that may not hold true in traditional economies. And some of the conventional lifestyle-based alternatives, such as the UN paper quoted on the above Wikipedia link, are so loaded with cultural bias they would astonish anyone who had spent any length of time in a Third World country: if you live in a house with a mud floor and do not get your information from the media then you are already defined as living in absolute poverty. (That would have categorized Tagore in his later years as poverty-stricken, living isolated in his mud house "Syamali" here in Santiniketan!)

Although that was not a happy example, alternatives to financial measures of poverty are needed - as Bengal's most famous Nobel laureate since Tagore, Amartya Sen (also a denizen of Santiniketan) has pointed out. The now-deposed King of Bhutan famously stated the objective of his deliberately isolationist policies as the maintenance of "Gross National Happiness". Maybe that sounds whimsical, but in fact economists have recently been taking happiness seriously as a factor in their theories. And as the Bhutanese meditations on this concept reveal, this is surely one way in which such wider topics as morality and religion must enter economics, upsetting the modern dogma that "development" and progress should be defined in purely material terms.

Tagore was of a similar mind. In a few paragraphs on the idea of "civilization" in his book The Religion of Man, he tells a story about travelling down by car with friends to Calcutta. Since there was a problem with the engine, the party had to stop numerous times in order to ask for water to help service it. In village after village people were happy to help, without thinking of charging any money for their often considerable trouble in finding water for the visitors. "The only place where a price was expected for the water given to us", he reports, "was a suburb of Calcutta, where life was richer, the water supply easier and more abundant and where progress flowed in numerous channels in all directions." It is a rather ambiguous anecdote, one must admit: as indeed much in Tagore's effort to engage with rural society was. The party of motoring urbanites already embody to the full the transformation in lifestyle that Tagore regretfully witnesses occurring in the countryside; and it is easier for the aristocrat to operate with assumptions of mutual generosity than it perhaps was for those whose lives were being swallowed by the growing metropolis. But for all that, he has a point when he contrasts the moral culture needed to offer a simple gift of water with the material civilization which has lost such an instinct: "In a few years time it might be possible for me to learn how to make holes in thousands of needles simultaneously by turning a wheel, but to be absolutely simple in one's hospitality...requires generations of training."

It is easy to forget the role that human virtues have had to play even in establishing what "material" civilization we do enjoy. We are too prone to forget that money itself is not a material but an ideal entity, its power resting entirely on trust and confidence. Businesses too need to choose morally reliable associates and employees, hence the provision of job references; where corruption rules and everyone has their hand in the till, even the maximization of profit will prove difficult. And once we are prepared to acknowledge how important the virtues of human character are within our present economic system, perhaps then we may see what virtues also lie outside it. When money does not change hands, then other concepts than trust come to the fore. Doing things for oneself builds independence and self-reliance, as Thoreau discovered in his cabin in Walden; conversely, the gift can stand at the centre of a whole network of social bonds and associated values, as sociologists from Marcel Mauss to Pierre Bourdieu have observed. To give a local example: for one of the prominent Brahmin families in rural Bengal, feeding the other villagers at festival time is a way to maintain one's social position; not to do so would be considered both mean and dishonourable. Analysing similar practices in Algeria, Bourdieu terms this "social capital": by distributing one's wealth one cultivates good social relations, which are always considered more basic and valuable. All across the Middle East and India, such attitudes permeate even what might appear to be normal market economies. When market traders assiduously cultivate your friendship, they are, perhaps, not just being "slimy" (as Western travellers are prone to think); they are attempting to convert a brief and empty monetary transaction into a more continuous social relationship. We may not think it worth the time; but is that not in the end our loss? For if we persistently refuse such overtures - and I admit, out of my lack of social adeptness I tend to do so, most of the time - then we ourselves will gradually transform a large part of our public world into what must be a worse alternative: into Thamel, a pure consumer zone, where the isolated, rootless individual wanders through a mall of luxury goods and impersonally administered services, gazing constantly, but from ever-varying angles, at the mirror of his own impatient desires.

I am, then, still persuaded by the argument of Ancient Futures: Ladakh may be an exaggerated case of postponed development, but its situation is far from unique. The tragedies of the Native American and Australian aborigine populations were not the result of "colonial" attitudes: they are another, more radical outcome of much the same process - the insistence that only Western definitions of land ownership, money, education, wealth and leisure are binding. Is it worse to have to travel miles on foot to fetch water, when this is an expected part of one's way of life - or to have that way of life and its skills laid waste, and to sit alone and unemployed at home with plentiful clean water on tap? I put that not just as a rhetorical question: it is genuinely difficult to answer, because we in the West have in fact got used to the latter kind of alternative and the values it creates. And when others want access to that sort of living, it seems like condescension, or jealousy, to suddenly begin questioning it.

In the end, I think the best thing one can do is to acquaint oneself as well as one can with the alternatives to our "developed" state, and with the dilemmas of those still "developing". Those dilemmas are real, but in their complexities they can also be very local. A subsistence economy, after all, means farming: and what one can farm and how easy it is (with or without some use of machinery) vary massively from place to place. It thus seems right to me that the most popular practical approach to "development issues" is currently not through central government, but small-scale charitable enterprise, better known as the NGO. In this part of the world one comes across NGOs everywhere. A Swiss woman I met at the Indian embassy in Kathmandu, acquainted for some 25 years with Nepal and its affairs, explained to me how - with the government still in transition and the constitution suspended - the country was virtually being run by NGOs. In the mountainous area of Jharkhand, roughly between West Bengal and the Nepalese border, numerous local initiatives were being run for the adivasis (tribal people) and poor local peasants. Here NGOs are the peaceful alternative to a more revolutionary approach: Maoist guerilla fighters, establishing enclaves independent of central government, and in the last few months constantly in the news for their attacks on local police stations. I met one NGO worker from there on the train between Santiniketan and Kolkata; in Nepal I made friends with an American girl volunteering on a project in Hazaribagh, the Nav Bharat Jagriti Kendra. And in Kathmandu itself I was given a tour of the Kumbeshwar Technical School, a completely self-sustaining, 25-year old project integrating traditional handicraft production, an orphanage and a primary school, all for the local low-caste population. In Hindu India and Nepal, these organisations are not only battling economic imbalances but also the ingrained social prejudice of the caste system. Not everything in traditional societies is organised for the "greatest happiness of the greatest number", and not everything there deserves to be endorsed just because it has perpetuated itself for generations. (I want to put on record that I do not agree with social conservatism a la Edmund Burke!) But in some cases, and Ladakh may have been one, stability corresponds to slowly-evolved contentment, not oppressive conservatism; and here we must have something to learn in building a sustainable future for our own society.