Z is for Zenana

India has never been a woman's world. Muslims have routinely locked them away, Buddhists regarded them as one of the snares which bind us again to our fleshy, suffering body, and Hindus seem to have ignored them completely. Hindu goddesses tend to be either beautiful pieces of furniture like Lakshmi, or cruel vamps like Kali. The female pantheon comes across like nothing so much as a bunch of fractious film stars. It is probably no coincidence that it is on the screen - large and small - that Indian women have made their greatest impact.

Wherever you go in India there are cinema hoardings, crude and garish posters which almost invariably depict buxom women in slight undress, either looking helpless - like Lakshmi - or wielding guns and whips as Kali might. And where the women, who are young and lissom, tend to look fraught and hysterical, the heroes - who are at least forty-five and probably wearing a corset - always look calm and suave.

One advantage female film-stars have is that they tend to sing more songs than the men. For this reason they are necessarily indispensable. Often it is the music which makes, indeed, justifies a film, and the power and fame of the unseen singers - who are rarely if ever the screen actresses - is gratifyingly great.

The singing is just as popular on the small screen. But at least on television women have managed to make a more positive contribution. Much of the news, together with many of the programme links, is presented by women. Partly this is due to television's obsessive desire to offer visually attractive images; but it is also an indication of the medium's greater liberalism. The women who appear are clearly very westernised, and speak the perfect English of the Indian intelligentsia.

For women of the lower classes and castes, the prospects are not so good. In the country and smaller towns, a woman's destiny is simply to become married and produce children, and to work. Passing them in the road it is hard to tell whether they are fourteen or forty-four. It is very noticeable that you never see young courting couples; any couple is married: courting as the west knows it seems either non-existent or coyly invisible. Yet being married is a totally public activity, as neutral as any other business. Judging by the advertisements in the daily papers for brides and bridegrooms, which detail the required characteristics of body and background, this is almost what it is.

Indian women seem good for only one thing: dying. The greatest building in India is a monument to a dead wife. While the Rajput warriors donned their saffron wedding robes of martyrdom and rode out of doomed fortresses like Chittorgarh to certain but glorious death, the women inside built huge funeral pyres and committed the mass suicide known as jauhar. And even Mrs Gandhi, perhaps the dominant formative influence on modern India, may one day be best remembered for her murder at the hands of Sikh extremists. Whether in life or through death, Indian women are conspicuous by their absence. For them, Indian history is the history of the zenana, the area in a Muslim household where they were hidden from the world.

A Partial India A to Z

G is for Gandhi

Everywhere in India the presence of Gandhi is felt. But it is of Mrs Gandhi rather than of the Mahatma. The succession of her son Rajiv as Prime Minister has helped. He stands as a constant reminder by his name and bearing alone, quite apart from his active promotion of her memory. With his tenure of what is effectively a presidential post, the third of his family after his mother and grandfather to do so, the Gandhi dynasty is in danger of become synonymous with post-Independence India,

But the country could do a lot worse. Confounding his critics Rajiv has proved himself an able and astute politician. For many, he has come to stand for a new, dynamic. India. Looking like some Indian film star, his serious and handsome features are the perfect symbol for the growing aspirational classes in India which form the core of his support.

These new middle classes - the equivalent to the west's yuppies - are increasingly evident in India, and are testimony to the changes which Rajiv and his mother have helped promote. The wide range of weekly magazines of the news- and views-paper type, which cater specifically for this market, are the bellwethers of this generation. In keeping readers up-to-date with the latest lifestyle trends at home and abroad, they serve the same function as western magazines like The Face and Elle. One magazine recently carried a cover story on the self-same rising middle classes, and their possibly destabilising effect on Indian society.  It's a perfect example of the narcissism common to all these groups, whether among the Indian middle classes, or the self-regarding yuppies.

It is this same class of managers and entrepreneurs that is fuelling the boom in computers. As might be expected, Rajiv too has been a keen exponent of high technology, and in certain areas the country has made great strides in modernisation. For example, the national airline now boasts a fully computerised booking system. But the old India has asserted itself; ticket reservations are never definite, but must be confirmed once or even several times nearer the departure date. The result is a nullification of any hoped-for advantages.

The railways have also benefited from computers. Sleeping cars now come with neat printouts of names and berths stuck to their side. However, once again much of the benefit is lost through the inefficient manual ticket booking system and its labyrinthine quota schemes.

Other problems remain for this brave new India. Power cuts are common in some areas, and, even worse for an economy striving to modernise itself, the telephone system is practically unusable. But there are more serious difficulties than those of infrastructure. Perhaps the biggest challenge faced by Rajiv is the new wave of separatist terrorism. Westerners tend to forget that India is a recent and unnatural creation; many Indians do not. As well as in the Punjab, there is unrest around Darjeeling, and continuing border tensions with Pakistan exacerbate the situation. As the centrifugal movements gather momentum, Prime Minister Gandhi will need to draw on all the inherited power and resonance of his name to stop the New India that he is forging from falling apart in his hands.

A Partial India A to Z