INDIA: The Shade of the Big Banyan

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India is a land where yesterday is more visible than tomorrow, where millions still follow the style of dress, architecture and behavior to be seen in the ruins and sculptures of Mohenjo-daro, a city of the Indus Valley that nourished and died 4,000 years ago. Yet next door to the oxcart and the primitive wooden plow lies an India as modern as Pittsburgh, with belching smoke by day and glaring fire by night.

In this land of paradox, Indian civil airline pilots fly more than 25 million domestic miles a year and jet fighters are being built in Indian factories by Indian workmen. Yet not long ago, when a plane landed for the first time in a district of northern India, peasants tried to feed it hay. The old ways die hard: recently a Westernized and highly educated dean of an Indian law school kept postponing his flight to the U.S. until an auspicious date was selected for him by his astrologer.

On his four-day India visit, Dwight Eisenhower will go to Agra to see the moonlit mirage of the 17th century Taj Mahal; in New Delhi, he will sleep in another reminder of India's past—the gigantic pink sandstone President's House, which used to be the palace of the British Viceroy. Today's India prefers different monuments: bustling factories that turn out locomotives and toothbrushes, diesel engines and radio sets. For all its look of the past, the ambitious young republic is forging ahead in atomic energy, quadrupling its steel capacity in a few years' time, rushing to completion a vast network of irrigation canals and hydroelectric plants.

India's future hopes and fears both center on the immensity of its population—415 million people. India's population, second only to Red China's, is greater than all of South America, Africa and Australia put together. Indians speak more than 700 languages or dialects and belong to at least seven distinct racial types, from the tall, leathery, light-eyed Punjabi of the north to the frail, black-skinned Tamil of the south. Most of India's millions are underfed, badly housed and racked by disease. The average life expectancy of an Indian at birth is 32 years and five months. Hundreds of thousands are homeless, and live, make love, sleep and die on city sidewalks, or in and around railway stations. Food that might sustain them is casually devoured by more than 50 million monkeys and some 50 million cattle roaming unchecked through the land. In the midst of poverty, there are polo-playing maharajahs who are among the world's richest men. And there are Indian millionaires who religiously feed ants to show their reverence for life, and lavish their charity not on hospitals or schools but on retirement farms for aging sacred cows. An estimated 7,000,000 Indians are unemployed; many millions more get work only sporadically. India's food production is at last gaining, but it has a hard time keeping up with the Indian birth rate, which is also increasing. Every day 28,400 new Indians are born.