NEW DELHI — Every society has its articles of faith: “This is a free country”; “Islam is a religion of peace.” The strength of a society depends on the extent to which its articles of faith match the reality on the ground. In the India I grew up in, one such article of faith was: “India is a beautiful country.” It was what we said about ourselves; it was what others said about us, too. It seemed unassailable.

But it was not true: The India of the 1980s became every day an uglier country. It was a place where the very elements of life — earth, water, air — had been poisoned. The land was strewn with garbage, the rivers and urban waterways were choked with plastic bags and white chemical foam. The streets were buckled, the footpaths broken, the air thick and unbreathable. To look out at an Indian city or small town was to be greeted by a bleak sprawl of shoddily constructed low-lying buildings, shrouded in a mantle of brown smoke. It was an apocalyptic landscape with no underlying design save for an ever more urgent need to accommodate greater numbers of people.

There were beautiful things, of course, but beauty was in retreat; it was ugliness that was on the march, and very little of what was new was beautiful.

And yet, the article of faith endured: India was a beautiful country, we told ourselves, and others did too, almost from habit. The Indian writers I grew up reading didn’t write about the squalor of our towns and cities; they either edged it out, or they emphasized those aspects of Indian life that would appeal to foreigners. They wrote about fruits and spices, and the idiosyncrasies of their families. The television was state-owned in those days, and gave a very restricted view of life. Bollywood, prone to fantasy at the best of times, was never more fantastical than when it came to dirt: The India of Bollywood was, and is, a clean country.