Eideard

Accounts of India’s changes focus on its economic growth, its surging migration, its skyward construction: changes in outward trappings. Less apparent, but no less momentous, is the decline and fall of the Anglicized ancien régime.

Some in the old elite saw change coming. They sold inherited businesses, learned new professions, reined in maharajah-like spending. But many did not, and now a wave of aspirations is rising from dank slums and hopeless towns, crashing at last into the delicate structures of unearned privilege.

Quietly but unmistakably, a whole country is changing hands.

In cities, middle-aged graduates of India’s leading colleges struggle to get their children into the same schools. With children of humbler backgrounds aiming higher than ever, even a 90 percent score on the entrance exam is no longer enough. This is the secret reason why, in a new age of Indian opportunity, many rich Indians still send their children abroad for college: not to escape India, but because their children are unable or unwilling to compete in an increasingly fair society.

The newspapers print photographs of those who “top” the exams. They are routinely scrawny and dark-skinned, drawn from the distant suburbs and villages, Indians whose ancestors might have cooked and cleaned for the ancestors of the students they now displace.

Visit the companies staffed by this new meritocracy, and you encounter a new elite. In the Indian offices of, say, Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, the paychecks are fat and the intellects razor-sharp. But they seldom speak English in the old, affected British way. They are coarser and yet more confident. They feel the world is theirs, but are less obsessed than the earlier elites with emulating the West. They are proudly indigenous, often preferring Indian food, music and movies to the alternatives.

They are changing the language. On television, on college campuses, in businesses, you hear new-economy elites who sound much more Indian than their predecessors, their English unapologetically peppered with Hindi: “Let’s go have some khana. I’m hungry, yaar…”

The rot is palpable in the last strongholds of the Anglicized: the Bombay Gymkhana, the Willingdon Club and other such colonial-era hangouts. They are pretty places, steeped in (imperial) history, just splendid for tennis and a gin and tonic.

But to spend time in one of these clubs and then among, say, the employees of Google in Hyderabad is to visit two different countries, one withering, the other roaring.

Bravo! I’ve lived in a few places like this – though not on the same scale. In some ways, where I live in rural, northern New Mexico, there are similarities – even to someone who isn’t a True Local.

The brash, young, climbing to succeed, new generations of the newly-educated deserve an extra round of applause. Surely they will make mistakes; but, they will be their own – not crap leftover from three or eight previous generations.