Books by Indophiles make for tedious reading. They are usually unreadable and insufferable. Much as they try not to, they are invariably condescending and take the reader on a journey of cultural tourism that Indian readers are never interested in. Such books need to be read only to ascertain what perception outsiders hold of India. Mark Tully is an exception.
Tully is no Indophile, as we know them. He was born in India and has lived and worked here for 40 years. He is probably as Indian as any of us are. Tully is also a journalist, one of the old school which believed that journalism ought to be about people.
Mark Tully’s Non Stop India, which comes 20 years after No Full Stops in India, is a classic tome of narrative non-fiction. It is not a sequel, this collection of essays takes the narrative further.
Tully takes the reader across India as much as he can (he limits himself to the north, east, and northeast) with his anecdotal storytelling. The vignettes that he paints of India are those from his travels. Non Stop India can be be seen as a classic textbook for old school journalism – he apparently does not take sides, he lends voices to the people he meets, and provides just the optimal background that is necessary to understand the context.
The last, of course, is a tad problematic. This book has been ostensibly written for both an Indian as well as an international audience. This makes room for considerable superfluous detail than an Indian reader would find exasperating. Since Tully does not delve too deep, he can get away with the redundacies. The book, after all, makes for a lyrical reading.
Tully doesn’t ramble as he effortlessly moved from one subject to another – from Maoism and poverty to tigers and the saffron upsurge. You don’t realise whether you are reading a book or a long feature in a magazine. He proves that journalism is about stories, it is about people. Tully tells stories, he doesn’t analyse. This is one of the drawbacks of the book. There is so much of narration in Non Stop India that you wonder whether Tully is making a point somewhere.
He tries a dialectical approach towards the end by propping up William Bissell against Bal Mundkur, and concludes, “Short-sighted optimism tends to produce blindness, blindness to faults. Hopeless pessimism tends to produce fatalism, a fatalism which undermines the efforts to put things right.” Our journalist is perhaps looking for a middle path here.
Tully is humble as he acknowledges those who helped him stitched together the essays, “They helped me overcome the difficulties a broadcasting journalist, used to writing snappy reports, faces when he has to write a coherent book.”Tully does not waste words.
The reading done, you will wonder whether Tully has a political agenda. The conclusion, in fact, raises doubts. He talks of having rules and clear policies, and asserts the need to make the system work. In doing so, he argues, “The policies must be adhered to, and the rules obeyed. this means that the dreaded discretionary powers which enable bureaucrats and politicians to diverge from policies and disobey rules must be removed. Then businessmen and women will not be able to offer inducements to get politicians and civil servants to use their discretionary powers.” Tully contends that it is the politicians and bureaucrats who plague the system.
Read this in the backdrop of the corporate gurus whose thoughts he often invokes and the fact that there is no direct reference to the ongoing corporate plunder of natural resources in the country, you realise that Tully very subtly drives a corporate agenda.
The system, that Tully says is workable, has been subverted by politicians and bureaucrats. He wants us to believe that the corporate world is virtually innocent and is drawn into the morass that has been created by those who run the system. In doing so, Tully turns a blind eye to the malaise that has been seen at the root of every other scam that has been unearthed in recent times – crony capitalism. This is where Tully fails, abysmally so.
Non Stop India has been described in many quarters as an exercise in objectivity. But what is objectivity, except being a subjective description? A reviewer even described Mark Tully as a “camera”. Of course, the anthology in question is a collection of snapshots. Yet, a photographer is not only a person who clicks photographs, s/he also decides what you will see in the frames. Tully, therefore, makes us see what he wants us to see. He deftly blocks out all else.
This flaw apart, the book does make for a good read. Eminently readable.
