February 27, 2023
By Annavajhula J.C. Bose*

Former Indian diplomat Madhu Bhaduri’s memoir, Lived Stories, incisively covers a range of issues: India’s foreign relations; the country’s democracy being distorted into an autocracy; the way senior Indian civil servants operate; and comparisons of what she saw abroad to what she sees in India.

Bhaduri, 77-years-old, served as a diplomat in Hanoi, Mexico City, Vienna, and Hamburg and was India’s ambassador to Belarus, Lithuania, and Portugal. 

“One of my most memorable experiences in Hanoi was the celebration of victory in the Vietnam War in September 1975,” Bhaduri writes. “The entire population of the town and the villages surrounding it came to the central lake of Hanoi on their bicycles and watched a magnificent display of fireworks…a befitting celebration to mark the end of a long and devastating war. There were no speeches, no patriotic songs…At the end of it, people gradually moved away and rode back home on their bicycles. There were no police in uniform.”

Bhaduri continues that at the railway station in Hanoi she found that “No one was in a hurry. People were confident that they would get their turn to carry their bicycles into the empty train carriages. It struck me that a nation which had fought an unequal war was less violent than Indians committed to ‘nonviolence’. Perhaps we needed a lesson in nonviolence more than other societies”

Hanoi is a city of many large and small lakes, similar to Bangalore, Bhaduri writes. “But unlike Bangalore, Hanoi’s lakes are clean and clear. In the race towards development, they have not been used for sewage disposal like the lakes and rivers of India. The markets of downtown Hanoi are no less crowded and bustling with activity than our markets. But they are clean, again unlike our markets.”

Bhaduri returns to the issue of cleanliness while discussing her posting in Vienna in 1970 for 2 years; and again in 1986. Her superiors asked her not to screen two films at the Indian embassy in the city: The Flute and the Arrow by Arne Suckdorff and Calcutta by Louis Malle.

Suckdorff, a Swedish film-maker, portrays the life of tribals in Bastar, in Chhattisgarh state. The tribals, known as Adivasis, are the original inhabitants of the forests in the region.

The film showed how they live in harmony with nature. Bhaduri writes, “What I wanted to know then was why the government was in denial; why it refused to admit the existence of this part of India and its people who live close to and in harmony with nature.”

In addition to Chhattisgarh, Adivasis inhabit parts of Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Maharashtra state. Today, the struggle of the Adivasi communities to retain their own ways of life, writes Bhaduri, is seen as “anti-development” and labelled as “internal terrorism”. This view is driven by business interests: the forest region, where the Adivasis live, has vast deposits of coal, iron ore and other natural resources. 

Bhaduri notes that, contrary to the claims of Hindu nationalists, the Adivasis are not Hindu. The Adivasis, she continues, “do not have caste divisions. Perhaps that is also why their hamlets and villages are clean…Santhal Adivasi villages in Bengal are in fact aesthetically very appealing…Perhaps the cleanliness of Adivasi life could be attributed to the fact that there are no ‘higher’ castes among them who have the privilege of creating filth which the ’lower’ castes alone are obliged to clean up.”

Malle is a renowned French film-maker. His Calcutta, Bhaduri writes, was “a powerful depiction of a city burdened by poverty and inequality, by filth and the remains of a colonial legacy. The camera showed mountains of garbage on the streets and wide avenues where children and pigs together searched for something they could eat, even if it was mango seeds already sucked clean…Unlike normal documentary films which have background music, Malle’s camera captured the actual sounds and noises of the overflowing city.”

In 1968, Madhu Bhaduri joined the Indian Foreign Service, after finishing near the top from among hundreds of thousands who took the intensely competitive national civil service exams. She was one of India’s early women diplomats. She is a graduate of the Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. 

Three years later, she married Amit Bhaduri, who then taught economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. They have two daughters.

Since retiring from the diplomatic service in 2003, Madhu Bhaduri is based in New Delhi. She has been volunteering for social justice causes in India, including Parivartan which is fighting corruption, including by using Right to Information laws. In 2012 she was a founding member of the Aam Aadmi (Ordinary Citizens) Party, but left within a year.

She has published four novels and several short stories in Hindi, one of which was translated into Russian.

As a fellow social activist Aruna Roy notes in a foreword to Lived Stories, “Madhu writes as Madhu is: straightforward, honest, and committed to the values she promised to protect…The message is straightforward. Power and privilege bring responsibility with them…(and adherence) to these principles—of ethics and of the Constitution.”

*By Annavajhula J.C. Bose is a Professor of Economics at the Shri Ram College of Commerce, Delhi.

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