Revenge from the Land of the Naked Fakir

Writing in The Hindu, southern India’s preeminent newspaper, historian Ramachandra Guha points out some interesting tidbits about the year that Winston Churchill spent in Bangalore in the late 1890s. The teeming IT metropolis was then a sleepy little cantonment town. As a young officer, Churchill was at first pleased with the quiet charm of this agreeable, green town. Churchill found that “the sun even at midday is temperate and the mornings and evenings are fresh and cool”. He described his house as “a magnificent pink and white stucco palace in the middle of a large and beautiful garden.” And there were all manners of servants to cater to the needs of a British imperial military officer.

But there was no military action in that part of British India, and Churchill was bored. He made good use of his time reading widely and deeply, but Bangalore to him was no longer a pleasant little outpost – it had become “a garrison town which resembles a 3rd rate watering place, out of season and without the sea, with lots of routine work and... without society or good sport…”

Churchill was also broke. In his memoirs he talks of the clever money lenders of Bangalore who were only too obliging in extending cash loans to the British officers, only to recover the money with substantial interest when the pay packets were disbursed. In the lobby of Bangalore Club, in the heart of today’s bustling city, one can see a record book with penned entries. It is open on the page with the list of Bangalore Club members who had outstanding dues. Against the name of “Lieutenant W.S. Churchill” is mentioned the sum he owed the Bangalore Club: 13 rupees. The Club Officers basically had passed a resolution waiving off these bad debts.

Fast forward to the early 1940s. The screaming bombers of the Luftwaffe were relentlessly pounding London practically every night. Half way across the world in India, Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi – the British-trained barrister turned ascetic freedom movement leader – had committed Indian troops to fight and die alongside the British because Gandhi believed that Nazism had to be defeated. But that did not mean Gandhi had given up the freedom struggle, and his quest to drive the British out of India. He launched the “Quit India” movement and even took his message to the factory towns and streets of England. As we all know, war-weary Churchill was incensed by this and characterized Gandhi as “that Naked Fakir.”

In the 2000s, bright young IT workers from the land of the Naked Fakir are extracting a kind of economic revenge out of the West, including the United Kingdom. It is now not the Indian workers under the colonial imperial yoke who are bristling. Rather, it is the government and company workers in Britain who are bristling at the jobs that are flowing to Bangalore and other Indian IT centers on an almost daily basis. Even the telephone inquiries to British Rail about train schedules and fares are sometimes answered from India.

History has a nasty habit of biting back, sometimes after decades or even centuries. In Bangalore, as the winds of protectionism pick up in the United States – the major client country for most of the IT work being done in India – the corporate strategists of India’s IT firms are readjusting their priorities. They find that the share of Europe in all the IT services being exported from Bangalore is less than 30 percent. This has to be boosted, the Indian IT managers reason, in order to lessen the dependence on the United States. So, where in Europe should Indian IT firms focus? With 200 years of British colonial history having established a good base of English language, where else but the United Kingdom!

Those mild-mannered money sharks of Bangalore are as clever as they were in the 1890s. The interest meter keeps on running on that 13-rupee bad debt!

Nik Dholakia