As an Indian who has spent more than two decades living outside her country of birth, I have always struggled to explain my homeland to foreigners. For India is like playdough in the hands of any would-be educator: a civilization, a nation, a philosophy, a palimpsest. It is ancient, with a history stretching back millennia to the Indus civilization. But it is also new, having celebrated only its 76th birthday as a republic last August. 

Broadly sketched, the country’s contemporary politics is a face-off between two camps: midnight’s children and Modi’s offspring. The former, under a label borrowed from Salman Rushdie’s Booker Prize-winning novel, are the inheritors of the vision of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru: secular, liberal and — as critics would claim — rather English and elite. This was the country that Nehru imagined was born at “the stroke of the midnight hour” on August 15, 1947, the end of British colonial rule. 

Their power is waning. Midnight’s children guided the Nehruvian Congress Party, which for decades bestrode the country’s political landscape like a colossus — albeit a corrupt and inefficient one. It was unceremoniously booted out by the current prime minister, Narendra Modi, and his offspring: a hyper-patriotic, atavistic, majoritarian-oriented and — as critics would claim — bigoted and bullying brood of Hindu nationalists.  

All nations are ideas as much as territory. They are, therefore, fungible: molded by wars and revolutions as well as dreams and texts. The geographic outline of India is more-or-less clear, although its precise contours are drawn differently in Pakistan and China. But what is the idea of India? 

In the first few decades after independence, that idea was plurality. It was an idea that stood as the antithesis of the concept of the 19th-century European nation-state, where a single religion, a single language and a common enemy supposedly formed the “natural” basis for the only sustainable kind of political unit. For decades, India defied the exclusions of the nation-state so defined. By resisting the Balkanization that many Western commentators had thought to be its inevitable destiny, this idea of India stood as testament to the fact that it was possible to create a strong, common identity out of fractured multiplicity.

Post-independence India, like many other former colonies, was forged at the intersection of an ancient civilization’s often traumatizing encounter with Western “modernity.” It was, therefore, a new kind of nation-building project. An amalgamation of what Bruno Maçães has identified as civilizational and national states. The Republic of India’s metaphysics blended civilizational acceptance of pluralism and absence of an insistence on singular truths, gods and loyalties, with a liberal constitution that treated the population as free and equal citizens governed by an abstract, secular law.

For midnight’s children, India defied the linear, European narrative of progress, which entailed a steady march “forward” from the feudal religious practices of the Middle Ages to the homogenizing modernity of the present.

This idea of India provided a third way between so-called civilizational and national states by acculturating Western ideas to Indian civilizational values. Indian secularism, for example, is neither defined nor practiced in the Western sense of a separation between church and state. It does not promote public spaces bleached of religion. It is instead about acknowledging the legitimacy of people’s deeply religious sentiments by stressing equal respect for different beliefs as the bedrock of societal cohesion. Many beliefs flourish in public spaces without prejudice. 

In the school I attended in New Delhi in the 1980s, for instance, celebrations for the religious festivals of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians were all part of the annual activities curriculum, although the academic one did not include anything of a religious mien.

In practice, this high-wire act of balancing the civilizational with the modern-liberal-national by being both and neither has often resulted in incongruous outcomes. Indian citizens, for example, while supposedly equal under the law, are left to the vagaries of their religious traditions when it comes to “personal” matters like marriage, divorce and inheritance. 

A uniform civil code that would expel religion from the legal sphere altogether has eluded India, although a “directive principle” enshrined in the constitution strongly suggests that the state strive toward implementing it as soon as possible. 

The reason? Democratic politics in India, regardless of the party in power, operates along narrow lines of identity, with votes being conceptually divvied up along caste and religious lines. Politicians then appeal to these so-called “vote banks” by promising various sops and boons, including non-interference in their private community-based laws.

Muslims in India can, therefore, divorce and marry women according to religious norms that are different for Hindus or Christians. And Hindu succession laws are different to those of citizens who belong to other religions. 

But the Republic of India cannot claim credit for having thought of this way of dividing and ruling its citizens. That credit goes to the British Raj, which, in a self-serving manner, encouraged and institutionalized the concept of India as a number of identity silos with little in common except a “neutral” state that was essential for providing arbitrage between them.

What midnight’s children failed to do was to move away from the legacies of the Raj. They not only adopted a constitution with borrowed liberal and “Western” values, but also failed to apply those values uniformly. Doing so maintained the hypocrisies and biases of their erstwhile colonizers, resulting in an inconsistent political worldview that stressed individual freedoms and equality on the one hand while paying obeisance to community-based “civilizational” values — often cynically for the purpose of winning elections. 

The cumulative result of their failure has been the rise of Modi’s offspring. For the latter, the project of a modern Indian pluralism failed to achieve little more than the appeasement of minorities to the detriment of Indian unity and “civilization.” 

If the Nehruvian idea of India was premised on plurality, for Modi that idea has been replaced by purity. Under the current political dispensation, Project Hindutva has replaced Project Secular. The underpinnings of the country are thought to lie in a nativist metaphysics that are undiluted by centuries of invasions — first Islamic and then European — that India suffered. Hindutva would erase the layers of the palimpsest that Nehru championed and return it to so-called civilizational-first principles, which are Hindu.

In its softer iterations, the Hindutva concept includes all the diverse peoples of the Indian subcontinent as de-facto culturally Hindu regardless of the religion they might practice and profess. Hinduism, in this conception, is conflated with being civilizationally Indian, rather than related to any particular practice of devotion. 

In fact, given its cacophony of beliefs and practices, Hinduism has been compared to open-source code, where apostasy becomes almost impossible and atheists (the Charvakas being a case in point) can exist within the fold. Consequently, and much to the bewilderment of people grounded in monolithic, Abrahamic worldviews, there were peoples in the Indian subcontinent that could be described as Hindu-Muslims. Examples include Khoja Muslims and Kutchi Memons from western India, who are self-professed Muslims but long retained elements of Hindu worship from their pre-Islamic conversion.

It was, in fact, the modern, colonial encounter with the British that ended such syncretic identities. Taking the census, a core activity of the British administration, was centered on categorizing the “native” population according to their religion. The Raj was unable to comprehend or consider more pluralistic conceptions of self that did not adhere to binaries.

The creation, with British assistance, of a religion-based state like Pakistan, in the mirror of European conceptions of what a nation-state should look like, has made it that much harder for India to truly exist as the syncretic civilizational state it once was. The civilizational state that Modi’s offspring are attempting to “return to” is in fact a modern construct, closer to a Hindu Pakistan or a Germany cleansed of Poles and Jews than any historic state of cultural purity. Hindutva — the political project of creating a Hindu India — is far closer to the Western ideal of identity-based nationhood than it is to a Hinduism-infused civilizational state where heterogeneity rather than orthodoxy is the norm.

In the past, I have argued that India could be a role model of sorts for the European Union, were the EU to care to learn from a “less-developed” country. For modern India was in some respects a proto-EU: a large region of immense diversity wrought into a strong political and economic unit. Like the EU, India has more than 20 official languages, and the two share the motto of “unity in diversity.” Indeed, by its very existence against the norms of political convention, India had something to teach Europe about the possibility of what Maçães calls “a third way between nationalism and liberalism.”

Midnight’s children essentially undertook an Indian version similar to what would evolve as the European project: rejecting the homogenizing tyranny of the nation-state and choosing instead to celebrate aggregation. Modi’s offspring, while ostensibly rooting for a return of the civilizational state, are in fact merely envisioning a narrowly defined, pre-EU, European-style nation-state.  

It’s an increasingly complex world that simple binaries cannot adequately capture. Cleavages between the liberal and the civilizational have never been fully overcome anywhere, and these continue to play out — not only between states, but within them as well.

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Historically, the experiences of many women in Asia’s two major civilizations, India and China, have been nasty. In China, young girls had their feet broken and bound to give them a shape presumed to be attractive to men. In parts of India, they were burned on the funeral pyres of their husbands in a practice called sati. In both countries, proverbs comparing women unfavorably to various animals, mocking their intelligence and even mourning their existence, remain common.

“The most poisonous thing in the world is a woman’s heart,” goes one Chinese saying. In Sanskrit, the root of many modern Indian languages, an idiom warns against trusting “rivers, animals with paws, animals with horns and women.” A married daughter is described in Chinese as “spilled water” — useless. In Malayalam, the language of the southern Indian state of Kerala, ostensibly one of India’s most progressive regions, a disappointing state of affairs is compared to “a home where a baby girl has just been born.”

The bulk of the over 100 million “missing girls” in the world, identified by Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen in a widely cited 1990 essay for the New York Review of Books, were in India (37 million) and China (44 million). At birth, boys naturally outnumber girls so that, all things being equal, about 105 male children are born for every 100 females. But all things are not equal, and gender-selective abortions in countries where males are preferred mean that millions of girls are never born, while a disproportionate number of those who are die young of malnutrition or poor medical care compared to boys.

I lived in China for seven years, between 2002 and 2009, reporting on the country’s rise for an Indian broadsheet. During that time, among the most common of the questions posed to me on both sides of the border was the crude yet clarifying, “Which is better?” Which did I prefer? Was one better off as an Indian or Chinese?

The question was almost impossible to answer in the abstract without taking the lived realities of different individuals into account. It was just as wrongheaded to conflate a Muslim dissident in Xinjiang with a business tycoon in Guangzhou as it was a Dalit (“untouchable”) night soil worker in the Indo-Gangetic plain with a software engineer in Bangalore. But even as I resisted being forced into a definitive answer, given the multiplicity of unavoidable caveats, I increasingly, and unexpectedly, found myself plumping for China over India when it came to gender. Women in China certainly did not have it easy, but “easy” is relative.

Growing up, my literary imagination had been fattened on a steady diet of narratives of oppressed Chinese women, from O-Lan, the long-suffering protagonist of Pearl S. Buck’s classic “The Good Earth,” to the grandmother of writer Jung Chang, whose feet were bound at the age of two, as detailed in her bestselling family history, “Wild Swans.”

As a result, I was unprepared, imaginatively, for the sheer physicality of women in China that I immediately noticed upon arriving in Beijing in the summer of 2002. Chinese women inhabited public spaces in a way that was impossible in most parts of India. They didn’t walk as though folding themselves inward to be invisible to passing men. They didn’t avoid eye contact. They rang their bicycle bells loudly. Sometimes they loitered. They were often brash, elbowing their way to the front of queues.

It was more likely for me to spot a woman taxi or bus driver in Beijing than it had been in London or Los Angeles, for example. The residential committee of the neighborhood I lived in was staffed by daunting dames with Chairman Mao coiffures who could bring errant residents in line with a glance. At the airport, men were often frisked, with businesslike indifference, by female security guards.

The female airport security guards leaped out at me as a particularly compelling comparison with India, where airports featured women-only queues that led to curtained-off boxes where they were patted down by female officers. What irked me was that this whole procedure was compulsory for women, yet there was only one “ladies line” for several open to men. I had a showdown at the New Delhi airport once when the women’s line snaked long with ladies bearing multiple unhappy children, while the men’s queues were relatively empty. I asked to be patted down by a male security officer to hasten the process, since I was running late. It was as though I’d asked to strip down and dance naked for the waiting passengers. “This is not Indian culture, madam,” a security official admonished me. I was eventually silenced and pushed to the back of the ladies’ queue. How I longed for China on days like that.

The numbers backed up my impressions of the relative empowerment of women in China. According to 2020 data from the International Labor Organization, the labor force participation of adult females (between 15-64 years of age) is nearly 60% in China, higher than the United States (56%) and triple the abysmal figure of 20% in India.

According to the latest World Bank data, female literacy in India in 2018 was at 66%, 16 percentage points behind the literacy rate of men. India still has around 186 million women who are unable to read and write a simple sentence in any language. The contrast with China, where more than 95% of women are literate, is sharp and revealing.

On the maternal mortality ratio, another parameter of female welfare, India lags China by a large margin. About 113 women in 100,000 died due to childbirth-related complications in India for the period 2016-18, compared to 18 per 100,000 in China.

The cumulative impact of deep-seated gender biases results in the denial of education and self-realization opportunities for women and, over time, robs them of their self-worth as human beings. There is a huge economic cost to this that compounds the emotional one. A United Nations Global Compact study concluded that if Indian women participated in the labor force at an equal ratio to men, it would boost the country’s GDP by 27%.

If women are valued, they have better odds of being born in the first place, rather than aborted. Then, they are more likely to be better educated and healthier. This in turn boosts the health of their families and eventually the wellbeing of the economy. Investing in and improving outcomes for women is therefore arguably more important for a country’s prospects than building shiny infrastructure or reducing tariff barriers.

Which is a significant part of the reason why, despite India’s considerable achievements both politically and economically, the country lags and will continue to lag behind China. Until it can improve the lot of Indian women — a change that requires considerable social engineering (for which there is underwhelming appetite), high-speed trains, giant statues and the other showy weapons in the current government’s arsenal that are meant to signal India’s arrival on the global stage will remain damp squibs, doomed to sputter and die before the abysmal reality of the systematic denial of agency to women.

In the Western world, where communism has long been a dirty word, the achievements of China’s Communist Revolution are usually buried under the horrifying excesses of former leader Mao Zedong’s mass mobilization campaigns, like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. But Mao also challenged gender norms by radically breaking with the past. That “women hold up half the sky” is a well-known adage of his. Legislation in 1950 gave women the right to divorce for the first time. Mao encouraged women to work outside the home, and age-old practices like foot-binding and concubinage were eradicated. Most significantly, people were educated into a formal belief regarding gender equality for the first time.

Mao was hardly a feminist by modern standards. At the root of the efforts to increase female labor force participation was the utilitarian agenda of boosting national productivity rather than a desire to expand women’s choices. The individual interests of women were made subordinate to collective goals. They were often prevented from caring for their children, who were taken away and placed in state-sponsored nurseries. Moreover, the expansion of the female role in the public sphere was not matched by an equivalent expansion of the male role in the private sphere, with the result that women became doubly burdened.  

But despite these qualifications, communism did accelerate the collapse of feudal hierarchies and sharply circumscribed the power of religiously sanctioned misogyny. Mao’s revolution was accompanied by large-scale misery and social dislocation, but it wrenched China into the kind of modernity that escapes India, even today.

Arguing the benefits to women of China’s Communist Revolution is certainly open to debate, but what’s even more controversial is this: In the post-Mao era, for more than three decades (1979-2015), China experimented with the world’s largest demographic engineering effort, the one-child policy, under which a large percentage of the country’s population was restricted to having a single child. The impact on China’s sex ratio was devastating. Many families secretly aborted female fetuses; at the time I lived there, around 117 boys were born for every 100 girls — one of the most skewed gender ratios in the world.

But in India, without any equivalent demographic restrictions, that gender ratio was almost as bad: 110 boys for every 100 girls. And there were districts in states like Punjab and Haryana where it spiked to a horrifying 130 boys for every 100 girls.

There was, moreover, another side to the one-child policy coin that benefited female children in China. Preeti Choudhary, a village council representative from Faridabad, in the Indian state of Haryana, was visiting Beijing as part of a youth delegation when she asked me: “If, in Haryana, we also made it compulsory to have only one child, what couldn’t the women achieve?” She argued that being freed from the burden of raising several children was empowering. Moreover, if a family could only have one child, all resources would be made available to feeding and educating that child, regardless of gender.

Still, notwithstanding the Communist Revolution, male preference remains strong in China. Moreover, some of the misogynistic practices stamped out, or at least sublimated, during the revolutionary years have re-emerged under the country’s new brand of red capitalism.  

Concubines, in the traditional sense, may have ceased to exist, but the practice of keeping mistresses is back. And female employment rates have been steadily decreasing over the last two decades. This is partly a result of a concerted effort to encourage women to focus on marriage and family instead of careers through the state-assisted dissemination of the idea of “leftover women,” who are unable to find husbands because of their high levels of education and “unrealistic” demands. In her book on leftover women, Leta Hong Fincher demonstrates the myriad ways in which the continuing patriarchal norms underlying inheritance have effectively kept women from benefitting from the trillions of dollars generated by China’s real estate boom.

And yet, were I somehow given a choice in the matter, I would choose to be born a woman in China rather than in India. My chances of being healthy and educated would be higher and the likelihood of my having active agency over my life choices would be greater.

Despite what fashion magazines might have us believe, a woman’s greatest dream is not to walk down the aisle in designer bridal wear, but merely to be able to go out for a walk without fear. Even if it is late at night. Even if it is unaccompanied. And this is a dream more likely realized in China.

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