Close your eyes and think of India. What do you see? Elephants and swamis? Half-clothed worshippers bathing in the Ganges? Swaying lovers in a Bollywood dance number?
The image of the world's second-most-populous country has changed little since Mark Twain rhapsodized about "the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty - of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps."
But India is changing. With its economy growing at a gallop, with its new caste of homegrown billionaires snapping up companies around the world, with its thrusting middle class buying 10 million new cars a year, India is dashing into the future in a frenzy of unleashed materialism and naked ambition.
How are we to understand this revolution? How can we reconcile the old India of Western imagination - exotic, spiritual, eternal - with the fast-changing, worldly, money-mad India of today?
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Simple, says Pavan K. Varma in Being Indian: The Truth About Why the 21st Century Will Be India's (Penguin, 2004). Just understand that there is no contradiction. "The image is a myth."
Indians, he writes, have never been otherworldly. They lust for material things as much as any other people, maybe more. They admire the wealthy. They are sharp traders and resourceful entrepreneurs. In the United States, they form the most successful community of recent immigrants.
Hinduism, India's dominant religion, isn't sniffy in the least about making money. Hindus unashamedly worship Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. "Indeed, Hinduism must be the only religion that expressly includes the fulfilment of physical desires, and the pursuit of prosperity, among the supreme aims of life," writes Varma, an Indian diplomat. Instead of living like Gandhi, most Indians would rather get rich.
The trouble is that, for decades, their masters wouldn't let them. No, not their British masters; their Indian ones. After independence in 1947, 60 years ago this month, prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru embraced the socialism that was the intellectual fashion of the day, putting much of industry in government hands and regulating the rest almost to death in a mass of red tape that came to be known as the "Licence Raj."
Only after that Raj was finally overthrown in 1991, when a cash-strapped government opened up the economy in a fit of desperation, could Indians give full rein to their natural inclinations. The socialist era, Varma says, was "antithetical to the genius of the Indian people." They took to the new market economy "like ducks to water."
The foremost chronicler of that great plunge is Gurcharan Das, another smart, eloquent, courtly Indian. Educated at Harvard, he became a leading international executive for Procter & Gamble before retiring to write novels, plays and newspaper columns. I met him in Delhi this spring, and we chatted about his book India Unbound (Viking, 2000) as he walked his dog in the historic Lodhi Garden.
Like every Indian businessman of his generation, he spent countless hours cooling his heels in the waiting rooms of the petty tyrants who ruled (and, in many places, still rule) India's bureaucracy, pleading for the right to sell this product or import that one. He is still angry about it - not for himself, a privileged executive, but for the Indian masses who were left in squalid poverty while their cousins in other parts of Asia climbed the ladder to prosperity.
"By suppressing economic liberty for 40 years, we destroyed growth and the futures of two generations," he writes. "For the average citizen, it was a great betrayal."
When I met him, though, he was filled with hope. Unbound, India is doing even better than he predicted seven years ago. Its economy is growing at 9 per cent a year, nearly as fast as miraculous China's. Its software and outsourcing firms are world- famous. It has more billionaires (36) than any other Asian country. Its middle class is predicted to grow to half a billion people by 2025. More than 100 million people have risen out of poverty in the space of a single generation.
Mira Kamdar is equally upbeat in her Planet India: How the Fastest-Growing Democracy is Transforming America and the World (Scribner, 2007). An American born of an Indian father, and a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, Kamdar travels up and down the subcontinent to witness "the churning of Indian's incredible metamorphosis." She visits tycoons and software whiz kids, slum dwellers and cotton farmers. Everywhere she goes, she is awed "by the pride, the bullishness, the sense that this moment belongs to India."
Of course there are problems, immense problems. Nearly half of Indian children under 3 are undernourished. HIV/AIDS is spreading. A third of Indians still cannot read or write.
Yet all three writers are optimistic - as are Indians themselves. Varma says that "the real Indian rope trick is the persistence of hope in the most hopeless of circumstances."
Kamdar goes even further. She argues that India can give the world a lesson. If India - a multiethnic state of many religions and languages, a functioning parliamentary democracy - can rise to riches, it will put the lie to the argument made by other regimes (hello, Beijing) that you can't have freedom if you want economic growth.
For all India's problems, it's hard not to be moved by the sight of one-sixth of humanity moving together into the future. In his famous speech to the nation at India's birth on Aug. 14, 1947, Nehru said, "The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity?"
After decades of stagnation and frustration, Indians are at last saying, "Yes."
Marcus Gee is The Globe and Mail's Asia-Pacific reporter.
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