Siddharth Dube @ his SAJA-NY meeting, April 7, 1999
PHOTOS: Sreenath Sreenivasan/SAJA
(feel free to reproduce with credit)
Rediff interview | Times of India article
SIDDHARTH DUBE, author of "In The Land of Poverty: Memoirs of an Indian Family, 1947-1997" (see press release below, including comments from Amartya Sen), was born in Calcutta in 1961. He studied at the University of Minnesota's journalism program and Harvard's School of Public Health.
His latest book "Sex, Lies and AIDS," about the AIDS explosion in India, has been an Indian bestseller since its July 2000 release. (see press release below).
He is both a writer and health policy analyst working on his second book, about India's AIDS epidemic. He has also worked for the health divisions of UNICEF in New York and the World Bank in Washington, D.C.
As a writer, he's been published in The Washington Post, The Financial Times and the Economic & Political Weekly.
According
to Siddharth, statistics prove the failure of India's battle against poverty.
For instance, the 350 million Indians estimated to live in absolute poverty
today are equal in number to India's entire population in 1947.
You may contact him at sdube@prodigy.net
About
Sex Lies and AIDS | About In the Land Land of Poverty
Rediff interview | Times of India
article
SEX, LIES and AIDS
A runaway bestseller since
its release, this July 2000 title from HarperCollins on AIDS -- the greatest
catastrophe to threaten India in recent years -- is by Siddharth Dube,
author of the internationally acclaimed Words
Like Freedom: Memoirs of An Impoverished Indian Family.
India — with South Africa —
has the world's largest number of people infected with HIV, with close
to 5 million Indians currently infected. Demolishing the stock stereotypes
about Indians being asexual and government claims that the epidemic is
being controlled, Dube shows why the World Bank fears that in another
5 years more than 15 million Indians may be infected with HIV, the AIDS
virus.
Already, Mumbai, Pune and several
other places are in the thick of full-fledged epidemics. And 2 million
or more Indians have died of AIDS, twice the number of Indians killed
in the bloodshed of Partition. Why is our government failing to prevent
this mammoth tragedy? Why is the average Indian — whether poor or middle-class
or rich — so vulnerable to contracting HIV/AIDS? Will AIDS devastate India
as it has Africa?
These and other burning questions
are the subject of this riveting mix of journalism and analysis, now in its second paperback edition and in
several Indian languages. Simply written and with cartoons by the irrepressible
Mario, Sex, Lies and AIDS can be read by anyone, whether college
student, parent or politician. It is essential reading for anyone who
wants to understand the truths about Indian society, sexuality, government
and the disease that imperils India’s future.
To place orders in the US,
contact the Asia Society bookstore in New York at 1.212.327.9310 (phone),
laurens@asiasoc.org or www.asiasociety.orgstore.
For orders from elsewhere outside India, contact Renuka Chatterjee, Editor-in-Chief,
HarperCollins Publishers India, at 91.11.3268185/3278586 (phone), 3277294
(fax), or by email marked to her attention at harper@del6.vsnl.net.in
"A lucid,
compelling and indefatigably researched attempt to stem the tide of denial,
prejudice, ineptitude and bigotry that characterize Indian attitudes and
policies on AIDS. Perhaps most remarkable is the book’s annexe, 'A Kama
Sutra for the Age of AIDS: How to have Safer Sex,' an unsqeamish and delightfully
polysexual guide."
"Impassioned
and lucid analysis. This slim and clearly written volume should be mandatory
reading for government officials, health workers and teachers throughout
India."
"The real story of AIDS
in India and why you should care. In chillingly simple terms portrays
the horrors that will befall us if we don’t act soon."
"One of the two sexiest
books on India. Goes in search of the sexual double standard that has
made it possible for India to harvest the highest number of AIDS patients
in the world in less than ten years. [The] reports of the sexual biographies
of a variety of ordinary citizens -- a businessman, a pavement dweller,
a college coed, a truck driver, a prostitute -- invest this book with
greater value than any dozen treatises on AIDS."
"Want to know about AIDS
but didn't know whom to ask? The answer: Sex, Lies and AIDS."
"Congratulations for writing
this magnificent book. I thank you on behalf of INP+ and all people living
with HIV in India for presenting the correct scenario on AIDS in India."
"Your book totally changed
my earlier attitude to AIDS: sad that it happens to others, really doesn't
mean anything for me."
o o o o o
Press Release
IN THE LAND OF POVERTY: Memoirs of an Indian Family, 1947-1997
By SIDDHARTH DUBE
This critically acclaimed and best-selling study of modern India records history from the perspective of India's poor
"A deeply illuminating study of poverty in India seen in concrete detail [and] made vividly real by remarkable descriptive skill." -- AMARTYA SEN, Nobel Laureate in Economics
"An extraordinary study of the human dimensions of poverty anddevelopment that is destined to become a classic." -- SHASHI THAROOR, UN diplomat and author of The Great Indian Novel and India: Midnight to the Millennium
"This is a book about how India works. Siddharth Dube's argument is relentless, like the poverty he describes." -- ARUNDHATI ROY, author of the Booker Prizewinning novel The God of Small Things
"A sensitive, ideology-free analysis of the poor and their history...[that] stands out for its boldness and narrative accuracy." -- OUTLOOK (India)
"A fine biography...[that will] leave an indelible mark on a reader's conscience." -- INDIA TODAY (India)
"An excellent book [that] stands distinctly apart from other suchwritings not only because of its simplicity of style, but also because of the enormous empathy and compassion it evokes." -- THE PIONEER (India)
"A carefully crafted journey...far more powerful than any other pure socio-political or economic analysis." -- BUSINESS STANDARD (India)
What have fifty years of freedom meant for the poor of India? Is India destined to remain the land of poverty? A vivid and unforgettable oral history of an impoverished Indian family, In the Land of Poverty draws readers into a powerful understanding of the experience of living in desperate poverty. Ram Dass and his family of "Untouchables," lowest of the low in a rigid caste system, serve as a microcosm of the Indian poor and their experiences reflect the dismalfortunes of poor families on the Indian subcontinent. Told through the voices of several generations, In the Land of Poverty takes the reader on a journey into the reality of South Asian poverty the powerlessness, the sickness, and the illiteracy and offers a critical look at the history of post-Independence India. Published as Words Like Freedom (HarperCollins) in India, In the Land of Poverty illuminates the central paradox of modern India: a half century of democracy and economic growth has not tempered the plight of the 350 million Indians living in abject poverty. By sheer numbers, the history of India's poor is the history of the Indian subcontinent and this history is compellingly recorded in In the Land of Poverty.
Siddharth Dube is a scholar and journalist based in New York and New Delhi.His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Financial Times and India's Economic and Political Weekly. Mr. Dube has worked for the World Bank and UNICEF and is a long-term visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi.
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Rediff
on the Net
May 19, 1999
INTERVIEW:
SIDDHARTH DUBE
'How can anyone escape the realization that mass poverty is the dominant fact in India'
Siddharth Dube should be an unpopular man among those who anticipate a prosperous market-driven future for India, and especially with non-resident Indians who think he presents a negative image of India here in the United States.
In his book In the Land of Poverty: Memoirs of an Indian Family 1947-1997, published recently in America by Zed Books, Dube chronicles the saga of Ram Dass Pasi, landless "untouchable" laborer, and his family from Independence through to the present. Through Ram Dass and his family's eyes, Dube discovers that few benefits of development have actually filtered down to the poor and that their existence remains as oppressive and unjust as ever. He suggests that without comprehensive land reforms "in the future, as in the half-century past and in centuries earlier, India is destined to remain the land of hunger, want and suffering."
In addition to the nationalist brigade, this bleak conclusion has also upset skeptics who consider Dube's dismissal of growing political decentralization and lower-caste mobilization in India too casual. After Dube recently spoke at a South Asian Journalists Association meeting, an irate SAJA-lister posted a message asking why the organization had invited Dube. Wasn't he running down Mother India the way The New York Times does, asked the reader.
Dube is not surprised by the criticism. But he wonders at times how many of his critics have actually read his book.
Amitabh Dubey, a Ph D student in Political Science at Columbia University, who is not related to Dube, met him recently in New York to find out why the book has created such a fuss. Dube has also presented his arguments at Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas and is scheduled to participate at an Asia Society discussion in New York on June 29, as well as in Chicago and Washington DC. His next book, Sex, India and AIDS will be published in January.
When the entire world appears convinced that the reforms of the 1990s have unleashed a new era of growth for India, why are you striking such a discordant note? Many Indians would argue that economic growth will eliminate poverty, that socialism is what has failed India, and that the land reforms you advocate are impossible to implement. Even Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze have focused more on health and education than on the land reforms that you advocate.
The testimony in my book of this family, and of the poor, is the most compelling evidence of the need to get rid of poverty, inequality and oppression, and how important owning land is in the fight against rural oppression and poverty. This is routinely overlooked because we treat poverty as simply an economic issue which can be fought with programs. There is a lot of evidence that small farms are very productive and that land reforms are a key to increasing rural productivity and wage rates. Very few policy people would disagree with this.
Dreze and Sen have also spoken of land reform. It's just that they’ve focused more closely on improving health and education, probably because it's more feasible. I also have no problem with the overall direction of the economic reforms, although I do have reservations about intellectual property rights, biodiversity, etc. If you say land reform is unfeasible, let us then accept the consequences and search for a feasible alternative.
One proposal in Bihar is to have the state buy land at the full market price and to redistribute it. International donors like the World Bank could easily loan money for this. Existing tenancy reforms have yet to be implemented. You can enforce existing laws on benami land. Break up visibly large holdings held by politically powerful zamindars and industrialists. If you really want political emancipation, it can be done with existing laws.
One reason for this widespread conservatism is that international institutions are dominated by the United States which prefers conservative policies. What's more, all those involved in "development" are also elite from different countries who are comfortable with doling out money and uncomfortable with the idea of redistribution. These jet-set interests drown out other voices. I'm just trying to make these other voices heard.
The book is really trying to show what the poor themselves think about the causes and solutions to poverty. To them, the lack of land is the single most important cause of rural oppression and inequality, and the most important avenue to social and economic emancipation.
In your book you say that Panchayati Raj hasn't worked, and that lower caste mobilization is exaggerated because the lower caste parties like the Bahujan Samaj Party are led by the middle classes and not by the poor. But even in Ram Dass' family his son Shrinath tells us that upper caste oppression has eased. Ram Dass himself says that the scheduled castes now refuse to tolerate Thakur insults, unlike in the past.
His grandson Hansraj says that ever since the scheduled castes in UP won reservations to the panchayat, and many of them became pradhans, the upper castes have begun to treat them with greater respect. So hasn't rural oppression eased because of political changes in the absence of land reform?
Part of the point of the story was to take a particular family and to place it in the context of the country's development. Even if these people are sanguine about their own village they will point to the next village and show that the factors that have enabled them to progress, viz the ownership of some land, are entirely absent in the next village. They will themselves point to the lack of redistribution in the rest of Uttar Pradesh and the continuing oppression.
More importantly, is even this incremental change and the resulting diminution of oppressive poverty sufficient? I would argue that the book shows that even though there has been change, its pace has been so slow that its effect on mass poverty has been insignificant, given the numbers and proportion of people under poverty. We really need to ask ourselves what kind of change we need to take huge number of the poor out of poverty.
It seems a bit of a stretch to conclude that India is doomed to man years of widespread poverty from the experience of a single scheduled caste community in Uttar Pradesh. After all not only are the scheduled castes particularly badly off compared with other poor groups, but Uttar Pradesh has been a poor performer even within India. Haven't other groups and regions done much better?
I think the generalization is quite valid. In terms of income, Uttar Pradesh is quite close to the national average and in fact helps define the national average because of its size. The poorer northern states represent a huge percentage of the poor in India. In health and in education, Uttar Pradesh is a bigger failure that many other states, but other states aren't great successes either.
The only real successes have been a few states like Kerala, Himachal and Punjab, and these are definitely outliers. Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra, for example, have performed better than Uttar Pradesh but not much better.
But what makes you so pessimistic? At the end of the book you say that India is doomed to many more decades of poverty.
It sounds logical to me to be pessimistic. If decade after decade, election after election, and speech after speech we've been told that poverty is going to disappear when in fact it has not, and has even become worse in some ways, then there is reason to be skeptical. What is there to suggest that there will be a real reduction in poverty? You have the same oppression, inequality and lack of public investments as you had earlier.
The only thing we are told is that fast economic growth will take care of poverty. It would be foolish for me to believe this because the record of other countries shows that growth without redistribution makes the poor stay poor, and Brazil is the perfect example of this. Its per capita GNP is ten times that of India yet one-third of its population lives in conditions not very different from the worst poverty in India!
How can anyone who goes to India escape the realization that mass poverty is the dominant fact in India? There is so much deprivation and hunger that one would have to be willfully blind to fail to recognize widespread suffering. It's misplaced jingoism to blame this on Western reporting and vested interests.
Given your pessimism about the prospects for quickly removing poverty in India, what do you hope to achieve by writing this book?
If we believe in democracy and an informed public, it's important to widen the debate beyond academic and policy circles. That is why I have avoided the inaccessibility of the academic literature and written a serious book for the general reader. Rather than swallow what policy elite tell us, we should learn and think about the issue of poverty ourselves, just as the poor seem to do. And we can't keep saying that calling for land reforms is simply an outdated socialist idea.
I have tried to bring out what the poor think about their situation in modern India. I still get shocked by some of the insights they have. If you realize the poor do in fact understand their lives, you will see that they have the same desires and aspirations as the rest of us. They have a powerful sense of injustice. It was important for me to write a book not just about numbers but about people.
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The
Times of India
Feb. 18, 1999
`Till
you came to our village, no one had cared to know about my life and thoughts'
A new book on three generations of a Dalit family in UP eloquently records
history from the viewpoint of the poor
By Sameera Khan
MUMBAI: Writer Siddharth Dube is not in the business of peddling hope. But then, hope doesn't come easy when one is writing on a subject as stark as poverty, especially when you choose to tell the story of the poor in the voices of the poor.
Those voices are urgent, sombre, stoic and pensive. They haunt you at the dinner table. Hound you in your air-conditioned car. Heckle you as you turn every page of Dube's first book, Words Like Freedom (HarperCollins). Framed around the true experiences and life stories of over three generations of a Dalit family in a village of Uttar Pradesh, the book offers an insight into why millions of families, despite half a century of Independence and democracy, still live in abysmal poverty.
``The idea was to write real, true, living subaltern history for every person who has asked the question, `Why does mass poverty persist in India?''' says Dube, who has worked both as a journalist and a health policy analyst and shuttles between New York and New Delhi.
``And who better to explain the plight of the poor than the poor themselves. Unfortunately, history never gets written from their point of view,'' says Dube, who was afraid that a whole generation of the poor, especially those who had lived through the transition from British India to Independent India, would soon no longer be alive to tell their story.
The story told by Nehru's ``this naked, hungry mass'' is a compelling one that needs to be recounted again and again. ``The zamindars were the slaves of the British but we were the slaves of slaves,'' says Ram Dass Pasi, the patriarch living in Baba ka Gaon, U.P., who shares his experiences of poverty from 1947 to 1997 with Dube.
In 50 years, things have changed only slightly for Pasi's family. While still ranking among the poorest 20 to 30 per cent of Indians, they have moved from a situation of sheer destitution to the poverty-line threshold. ``Most people think that the poor do not understand their life and rely only on fatalism to explain their plight,'' says Dube, a long-term visiting scholar at New Delhi's Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. ``But the poor understand their life only too well and their exploitation at the hands of the rich. And they are immensely articulate if they are spoken to.''
Such as Ram Dass' sister, Puttu, who says, ``If we go to the market, the rich shopkeeper will extract more money from us because we can't calculate. That's how they become rich..'' Or his eldest grandson, Hansraj, who is vocal on why the poor should vote. ``None of the parties want anything but to fill their own stomachs. But it's still important to vote, because some time, something will be of benefit to us poor people.'' Or Ram Dass' own rich voice, ``Education is important. It is the only wealth that cannot be taken away from you.''
Even Dube, more used to hearing rhetoric at international development summits (he has worked for the World Bank, UNDP and UNICEF), was surprised at the eloquence of Pasi and family. ``The sophistication of their thinking is equivalent to that of someone who has been to Harvard or won the Nobel Prize,'' he says. Dube himself has studied at Harvard University's School of Public Health after finishing a degree in journalism at the University of Minnesota.
What surprised Dube even more was Ram Dass' favourite place during his years in Mumbai as a railway coal loader. ``Believe it or not, it was the Prince of Wales Museum and his most treasured pieces were those of Indo-Greek statuary belonging to the Gandhara kingdom,'' says Dube.
Already investigating his next book on the AIDS crisis, Dube is not optimistic about the end of poverty in India. ``Today, the number of people unable to afford a survival-level diet equals the country's total population in 1947 of about 350 million,'' he says disgustedly. ``Our levels of hunger, illiteracy, and excess mortality are today far higher than in China, the Philippines or Indonesia. Mass poverty will endure and live on in India in the next century.''
Dube discards the `trickle down approach' as the most discredited and bankrupt theory and believes that economic growth by itself will bring no miracles. ``What is more important is who will share in the gains of that growth,'' he says. ``The more sure way of getting people out of poverty is redistribution of land and productive assets, so that the poor can participate in economic change.''
Of his own effort to highlight the plight of the poor he is dismissive. ``Actually, I've failed to capture the full horror, scale and depths of poverty in India,'' he says. But his main protagonist, Ram Dass, is more kind.
``It was the rice planting season and after a day's backbreaking work, Ram Dass was answering my questions,'' recalls Dube. ``I apologised for harassing him and he turned to me and said, `Never apologise again about asking me too many questions. Till you came to our village, no one had cared to know about my life and my thoughts. But you did.''
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