Lost tribes of America

Gullah Culture in America by Wilbur Cross; Price: Rs.2,500; Praeger Publishers; 270 pp

The popular global perception of the United States is of a multicultural, prosperous and hardworking society, with little time for history, environment or preservation of its cultural heritage. This impression is not entirely accurate, as there are numerous government and private organisations and foundations involved in conserving the cultural heritage of the rainbow coalition of people from around the world, who constitute the population of Planet Earth’s most vibrant democracy. For instance the Penn Center, based in the island of St. Helena off the coast of South Carolina, is actively engaged in documenting the history, heritage, cuisine, and prayer and shaman practices of the Gullah-Geeche people. Custodians and practitioners of this ancient African-American culture trace their origins to Sierra Leone and contiguous regions of West Africa.

In an attempt to publicise the laudable efforts of The Penn Center, veteran journalist Wilbur Cross has written this enlightening book narrating the hitherto hidden and unrecorded history of Gullah culture, and how it has impacted itself upon the American nation, particularly, the southern seaboard states. The Gullah people are the descendants of African ethnic groups who arrived in America in the late 17th century, and were forced to work (as slaves) on plantations in South Carolina and later Georgia. They were from many tribes including the Mandingo, Bamana, Wolog, Fula, Temne, Mende, Vai, Akan, Ewe, Bakongo and Kimbundu.

A former editor of Life magazine, Cross, who has authored or co-authored over 50 books in his career, has taken pains to study and unmask the intricacies of a lost tribe in Gullah Culture in America (GCA). Spread over 12 chapters, GCA starts with a foreword by Emory Shaw Campbell, executive director emeritus of the Penn Center. “Although thousands of articles and hundreds of books have been written on discoveries of Native American cultures and Indian lore, the Gullah-Geeche culture has been almost totally overlooked,” says Campbell, citing GCA as an inspiring story of “how the Gullah people rose from the ashes to revive and relive their culture in the most positive ways”.

GCA explores the Gullahs’ direct link to Africa, via the sea islands of the American south-east from the days when they came into contact with the western world after the American Civil War through missionaries who travelled to St. Helena Island, South Carolina, to establish a small institution called Penn School to help freed slaves learn to read and write. According to Cross, this was the first interaction between Gullahs and White Americans who observed that most of the islanders spoke a language that was only part English, combined with expressions and idioms often spoken in a melodious, euphonic manner, accompanied by distinctive practices in religion, work, dancing, and the arts.

Cross reckons that even today, there are more than 300,000 Gullah people, many of whom speak little or no English, living in the remoter areas of the sea islands of St. Helena, Edisto, Coosay, Ossabaw, Sapelo, Daufuskie, and Cumberland. The author sees himself as a standard-bearer for these unique and colourful people by showcasing their culture, and taking the reader behind the scenes, to portray what it’s like to grow up, live, and celebrate in this remarkably unique Afro-American community. The Gullah and other waves of slaves from Africa came to a country with barely any music or dance traditions. It was they who created it, endowing America with Jazz and Blues folk music which influenced the development of modern rock and rap music.

Cut to the Indian scenario, where several such minority cultures are dying a slow death due to the pressures of rapid modernisation and urbanisation. We need people like Wilbur Cross to research, and document these cultures. There are numerous tribes and groups such as the chenchus of Andhra Pradesh, and Ilagas of Karnataka, who need to be discovered, studied and systematically classified.

Srinidhi Raghavendra

Love’s Labour lost

Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani; Penguin Allen Lane; Price: Rs.699; 531 pp

This much awaited book whose big bang release in the major metros was stymied by the 26/11 terrorist attack on Mumbai, is an impressive and extensive work of research and application. To write this labour of love, Nandan Nilekani, a full-time director and co-founder of the Bangalore-based, globally respected software systems and solutions company Infosys Technologies Ltd (annual revenue: Rs.19,200 crore; no. of employees 103,000), took time off to interview over 100 notables in numerous walks of life, and examined the country’s political, economic, social and other sectors. Quite obviously a lot of high-value man hours were invested in this detailed prescription, written to help 21st century India get its act together and reclaim the global respect it enjoyed right up to the dawn of the British imperialist era in the 18th century.

Nilekani believes that a favourable confluence of global factors and “massive changes in our attitudes towards our population, entrepreneurs, the English language, globalisation and democracy” has endowed early 21st century India with a “unique cadence, where all our strengths have come together and matured at the same time”. And in Part I of the book, which comprises eight interesting chapters, Nilekani delights in narrating how by persisting with the messy democratic system of government for the past six decades, during an era when most Afro-Asian countries opted for guided democracy (aka dictatorships) to accelerate socio-economic development, post-independence India has re-shaped itself to prove wrong all the cassandras who had prophesied its collapse into chaos.

Moreover while post-independence India stumbled along, it has been learning through its own mistakes, which is perhaps the best way of learning, suggests the author of this insightful narrative. Thus private industry, which was in bad odour in the first few decades after independence when state-dominated socialism was the ideological prescription for national development, has made a dramatic comeback and entrepreneurs and non-government initiatives are being celebrated as never before. Simultaneously the English language, which was rejected by the political leadership of the country as a foreign tongue with imperialist associations, is now being increasingly acknowledged as a historic endowment, and has made a huge comeback by popular democratic demand.

Other good things are happening deep within the Indian economy, which ex facie is floundering in a sea of troubles — inflation, economic downturn, jihadi terrorism, chronic corruption and decaying political institutions — writes Nilekani. The IT (information technology) and ITES (IT enabled services) industries, once heavily resisted by public sector banks and companies and organised labour, are facilitating unprecedented productivity leaps in industry and government, revolutionising the telecom, transportation and education sectors. Simultaneously the hitherto isolationist Indian economy is rapidly integrating with the emerging new global market and is becoming a force to reckon within it. All these favourable developments, says Nilekani, have strengthened and nourished India’s relatively new democratic system of governance.

Nevertheless despite this favourable confluence of factors which augur well, the author is aware that India remains a deeply unequal country, in which the material gains of the recent past have yet to reach the overwhelming majority of people at the bottom of the social pyramid. Therefore to enable Indian democracy, which is a national necessity rather than luxury as is often contended, it’s necessary to empower the socio-economically disadvantaged by facilitating their access to bank credit, the English language, IT and computers and involve them with the emerging global economy, argues Nilekani.

Commendably, the author acknowledges that the prerequisite of empowering the masses to access new opportunities crystallised by the favourable confluence of global factors and changing mindsets, is reform of the education system, reviving the country’s crumbling cities to ready them for imminent urbanisation, and simultaneously improving rural-urban connectivity which will revive Indian agriculture and catalyse the emergence of a free national market for goods and services.

Unfortunately in opting for a comprehensive diagnosis of contemporary India and writing a prescription for it, Nilekani has sacrificed depth for width. Clearly, the best chapters in this book are those in which he discusses the impact and possibilities of the on-going IT and ITES revolution in India, and the rapid decline of the country’s urban habitats, given the author’s hands-on experience of the IT industry and civic development issues (as chairman of the Bangalore Agenda Task Force). In the rest of this ambitious national development blueprint, Nilekani merely skims the surface of the country’s complex problems, offering hurried and unoriginal solutions. Moreover given the huge ground he has to cover, sectoral omissions in the book — the role of the media and the judiciary in reshaping public opinion — indicate poor understanding of cause and effect.

Regretably, as evidenced by the easy access he has to the high and mighty, Nilekani has been co-opted into the me-first establishment which has made a dreadful mess of national development priorities. His heroes are has-been economists and politicians who were the architects of the licence-permit-quota regime which wiped out the modest standard of living hopes of an entire generation of midnight’s children. But with Lois Lane-like naivete, Nilekani seems unaware that Dr. Manmohan Singh and Montek Singh Ahluwalia (“impeccable credentials as a reformer”) among others, have all slipped into the nearest phone booths for quick personality changes to emerge as the supermen of the new, liberalised Indian economy.

And even though Nilekani mentions the great and truly generous American businessmen-philanthropists Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, he is silent about the social responsibilities of business, particularly about the obligation of the country’s IT tycoons to inspire public confidence in the democratic system by practising American-style philanthropy. One would have to search hard to find a public library, free school, college or hospital endowed by the hard-faced leaders of the tax-exempt IT industry.

After reading this book which alas, is doomed to disappear from the public consciousness as just another prescriptive tome, I believe there is a socially beneficial book which will endure, inside Nilekani. But it has to be about how he and his co-founders built Infosys Technologies step by step, contract by contract into a great institution while confronting and overcoming the socio-economic problems and constraints detailed in Imagining India.

Dilip Thakore