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OpinionComment
Kamala Thiagarajan
Kamala Thiagarajan

Opinion | Moon landing a triumph for young India but not a panacea

  • The successful landing of the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft has inspired a sense of deep pride among Indians but also complex feelings about priorities
  • India has many pressing problems, but the landing can also be inspirational, particularly for the country’s young women and girls

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A girl holds aloft the Indian national flag as she watches a live telecast of the moon landing of Chandrayaan-3, in Mumbai, on August 23. Photo: AP
Kamala Thiagarajan
On August 23, the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft launched by the Indian Space Research Organisation didn’t just make a soft landing on the little-explored south side of the moon, it also moonwalked its way into a billion hearts.
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As with all things Indian, however, the sense of deep pride in this victory is also complex. As I found out during these past few days, it can have wildly different implications for different people based on their age, where they live and their outlook on life.

But first, one indisputable fact that unites us all, diverse bunch that we are. Launched with a budget of about US$90 million – small change when compared to the deep pockets of other countries’ space programmes – the moon mission appealed to the Indian sense of thriftiness.

For the Indian diaspora, roughly 18 million Indians who have migrated overseas, the successful landing was not just a moment that indicated their birth country’s rising status in the new world order. It was also a refreshing change from the image of “poverty porn”, a label they have been forced to confront, especially after a spate of Hollywood movies such as the multi-Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire put the spotlight on India’s cramped living conditions in its teeming urban cities.
This stereotyping and the bias that comes with it is also the reason many Indians took to social media to resurrect an old outrage – a cartoon from The New York Times in 2014, soon after India’s second Mars mission. The cartoon showed a poor Indian farmer, clad in a dhoti with a cow’s lead in one hand, knocking on the door of an “elite space club”.

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India makes historic landing on the lunar south pole, becoming the 4th country to land on the moon

India makes historic landing on the lunar south pole, becoming the 4th country to land on the moon

Even though the intent was to show how much of an outlier India’s space programme was, it was a caricature that some Indians felt reeked of racism and stereotyping. After all, the average Indian – and, more so, an Indian scientist – can’t be represented by a rural farmer, and our average rural farmer isn’t always poor or lacking in knowledge.

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