Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond
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Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond
336eBookFirst Edition (First Edition)
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Overview
A vivid, often surprising account of South Asia today by the author of An End to Suffering
In his new book, Pankaj Mishra brings literary authority and political insight to bear on travels that are at once epic and personal. Traveling in the changing cultures of South Asia, Mishra sees the pressures—the temptations—of Western-style modernity and prosperity, and teases out the paradoxes of globalization. A
visit to Allahabad, birthplace of Jawaharlal Nehru, occasions a brief history of the tumultuous post-independence politics Nehru set in motion. In Kashmir, just after the brutal killing of thirtyfive Sikhs, Mishra sees Muslim guerrillas playing with Sikh village children while the media ponder a (largely irrelevant) visit by President Clinton. And in Tibet Mishra exquisitely parses the situation whereby the Chinese government—officially atheist and strongly opposed to a free Tibet—has discovered that Tibetan Buddhism can "be packaged and sold to tourists."
Temptations of the West is a book concerned with history still in the making—essential reading about a conflicted and rapidly changing region.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429954648 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 06/12/2007 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 398 KB |
About the Author
PANKAJ MISHRA was born in north India in 1969. He is the author of An End to Suffering and The Romantics (which won the Los Angeles Times's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction) and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.
Pankaj Mishra is the author of From the Ruins of Empire, Age of Anger, and several other books. He is a columnist at Bloomberg View and writes regularly for The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and The New Yorker. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in London.
Read an Excerpt
Temptations of the West
How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond
By Pankaj Mishra
Picador
Copyright © 2006 Pankaj MishraAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-5464-8
CHAPTER 1
ALLAHABAD
The Nehrus, the Gandhis, and Democracy
1. The Colonial City and the Countryside
In September 2000 India held its third general election in as many years after the coalition government dominated by the Hindu nationalist BJP (Indian People's Party) collapsed in New Delhi. The Hindu nationalists, who had conducted nuclear tests and challenged Pakistan to a final war over Kashmir soon after joining the coalition government in 1998, were expected to strengthen their position and resume their work of turning India into a militant Hindu state. I thought then of returning to Allahabad, the North Indian city where I had lived as an undergraduate student from 1985 to 1988, a time when Hindu nationalism still seemed as marginal in India as it had been for the previous four decades.
Allahabad lies in the heart of the vast North Indian plains, at the confluence of the two sacred rivers of Hinduism, the Ganges and the Yamuna. Flying across the plains on a clear day, you can follow the rivers as they descend from the Himalayas and then meander through great expanses of flat cultivated land, past clusters of ancient cities and towns. Three millennia ago their waters provided the basis for the civilization of the original Aryan settlers of North India. Each winter hundreds of thousands of pilgrims still travel to Allahabad from all across India for a religious fair near the confluence, and every twelve years the Kumbh Mela, the largest human gathering in the world, attracts millions of Hindus to the site.
Yet the place isn't easy to get to. Commercial flights have been discontinued, and during the election period the overnight train from Delhi was overbooked. To get to Allahabad. in time for the early campaigning, I had to take the multi-stop flight from Delhi to Benares, along with a tour group of Italians traveling to see the erotic temple sculpture at Khajuraho, and then drive eighty miles east to Allahabad.
The flight is operated by one of India's private airlines. The breakfast was freshly cooked and warm, the toilets were clean and generously supplied with cologne, and the courtesy and efficiency of the staff were like marvels compared with the resolute badness of the state-owned Indian Airlines. Miles out of Delhi, moving deeper into a part of India still untouched by the entrepreneurial energy and foreign investments of recent years, the flight could seem part of the good things contact with the global economy had brought to India: higher standards of health and hygiene; a greater alertness to individual needs.
But an older India of caste and poverty is never far away even on a plane with its Western-style amenities, its atmosphere of international ease and luxury. In Khajuraho, after the package tourists had departed, another kind of people came on board: dark-complexioned, barefoot cleaners with little brushes and rags. They filled the cabin with the smell of sweat and chewed tobacco, and as they went scuttling through the narrow aisles on hands and knees — as if their degradation were required by their low caste — the expression on the face of the pretty short skirted stewardess, who could have been the glamorous poster girl of a European or an American airline, was one of pure distaste.
The long, bone-rattling drive afterward to Allahabad on potholed roads, through calf-deep floods, past the tin-roofed shacks and rain battered villages of mud and thatch — the cowering huts, so picturesque from the plane, now appearing frail, in danger of collapsing onto the sodden earth from which they had been so arduously raised, the low-caste women paving tiny courtyards with cow dung, the men spinning rope for the string cots, the sky low and gray over the flat fields and tiny huts and the buffaloes placid in muddy poots — the long drive through a world that belonged to itself as fixedly as it would have two centuries ago was a reminder of how far even the superficially good things of a globalized economy were from this heavily populated and impoverished part of India.
India, with its severe disparities of income, caste, and religion, is split into so many separate worlds. You can live in one without knowing anything about the others, and no world has an obvious past until you make the effort of dredging it up. I didn't find out until later that the region between Allahabad and Benares, familiar to me from my time as an undergraduate student at Allahabad University, hadn't always been so impoverished. In the early years of the nineteenth century, when the British were still more interested in business than empire, the area had been an important trade center for North India, and its merchants and moneylenders had been known for their initiative and energy.
But as always in India, the prosperity so created had been shared out among a very small group of people; it had led to little except the creation of zealously guarded hoards or, occasionally, an opulent mansion in the midst of a teeming bazaar. When trading routes changed and the region lost its importance, the private fortunes quickly dwindled, the mansions fell into ruin and were taken over by squatters. The region was restored to the wretchedness and cruelties that were probably always there under the gloss of temporary affluence.
Affluence is still a rare achievement, but the gloss has got shinier and deeper. At the time of the elections, my hotel in Allahabad was a new white eight-storied building of egregious luxury, built by a local manufacturer of bidis (cheap Indian cigarettes), who had recently begun to dabble in politics. Every effort had been made to make it conform to international specifications. The menu at the coffee shop offered Mexican and Italian food. A Muzak version of "The Sounds of Silence" played in the elevators. When the power supply broke down, as it frequently did in the city, a massive basement generator groaned into life. The corridors were thickly carpeted; the double-glazed windows kept out the loud film music from the small slum just outside the hotel, where a rain-fed gutter overflowed into the tin-roofed shacks and left green stains of slime on the pale earth around them.
The hotel was fated to remain empty — and so it was — most of the time. Its luxury couldn't but seem pointless. It met no local needs; it required no local expertise. In fact, people from as far as South India had to be imported to fill in managerial positions. Its purpose, if you could call it that, seemed to lie in its being an assertion of wealth and power in the midst of general deprivation, quite like the newly built houses with Doric columns and Palladian façades in the area around the hotel.
The solidity of the building, its quiet interiors, the monumental presence of its white façade in the middle of the city — in all its deliberate order and calm, the hotel underlined its separateness from its setting. Its effect was felt most keenly by the menial staff, who traveled each day from their homes in the flood-threatened outskirts of Allahabad and approached their place of work with something like awe. They looked very ill at ease in their green uniforms and were obsequiously polite with guests, calling to mind the Indians who had come to serve in the new city of Allahabad built by the British after the rude shock of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the city whose simple colonial geography was plain from my sixth-floor hotel room, the railway tracks partitioning the congested "black town," with its minarets and temple domes, from the tree-lined grid of "white town," where for a long period no Indians, apart from servants, could appear in native dress.
Allahabad was Prayag, a small pilgrim center, before the British, in the early nineteenth century, began to use it as a military base, guarding the up-country trade on the river Ganges. When, in 1857, Indian soldiers in British-led armies mutinied, the British struggled to retain their power across most of North India, except in Allahabad, where they were not challenged greatly. They quickly put down the few soldiers who did rebel; they razed to the ground those houses in the old quarter that belonged to rich supporters of the insurrectionists. No stories of unspeakable atrocities against British women and children emerged from Allahabad as they did from Kanpur, just 150 miles away to the north on the Ganges.
Nevertheless, the British wished to make a point. The pacifier of Allahabad was a devout Christian colonel called James Neill, who believed "the word of God gives no authority to the modern tenderness for human life." Under his direction, some six thousand Indians were hanged, shot, or tortured to death, in just a few days.
It was in the months following the pacification that eight villages were confiscated, as a senior official stated, from "dirty Indian niggers" and were turned into the exclusively British enclave of Civil Lines. The great buildings of the city — the Romanesque cathedral, the university tower and dome, the Gothic public library, the Baroque High Court — came up in the decades that followed the suppression of the mutiny, a time of serenity for the British in India, when India officially became part of the empire and the natives remained quiet for the most part.
In Allahabad, the civil and military administration, the hospitals, schools, and the high court produced a small Anglo-Indian society. For these exiled people, the compensations for the city's great heat and isolation were to be had in untroubled leisure, in the clubs, polo grounds, and large bungalows with wide verandas and sprawling lawns where it was common for a family to have fifty to sixty servants. When, in 1887, the young Rudyard Kipling came to work in Allahabad after some exciting years as a journalist in Lahore, he found himself alienated; the "large, well-appointed club, where Poker had just driven out Whist and men gambled seriously, was full of large-bore officials, and of a respectability all new."
When you look now at the buildings of the period after 1857, their playfully diverse architectural styles seem to confirm Kipling's vision of a people savoring their privilege. In their rhetorical magnificence — quite like that of my hotel — they stand apart from, and indeed loom over, everything around them; they suggest a people made absolutely secure by wealth and unchallenged power. At the public library — built as a memorial to the official who dispossessed the "dirty Indian niggers" of Civil Lines — there are relief figures of Indian peasants and potters and silk weavers on carved capitals. The peasants are wiry, obviously well-fed men with turbans; the physical aspects and setting of the potters and silk weavers have been similarly improved. They are unsettling, not least because severe British methods of revenue collection had ravaged the countryside, forcing generations of the rural poor into vicious circles of endless debt and bondage to local landlords and moneylenders. It is hard to imagine that the architect was aware of the crude irony of his representations; more likely that he was indulging a fantasy about the Indian countryside, a romantic idea about peasants created at a safe distance from their actual condition.
The romance had gone, but this distance hadn't really diminished with independence; the administrators and the masses still lived in separate worlds. At the commissioner's office, an old sprucely painted bungalow with trimmed hedges in Civil Lines, a middle-aged woman in a torn white sari held a creased piece of paper and pleaded with attendants wearing red-sashed livery. The widow of one of the laborers killed in a mining accident, she had traveled a long way from her villagethat morning to beg the commissioner to expedite relief money sanctioned more than two years ago by the government. The audience wasn't granted; the woman was told to take her application to a lower official and not bother the commissioner's office with petty requests.
I accompanied the commissioner and the district police chief on their inspection tour of rural police stations two days before the elections in Allahabad. We traveled in two white Ambassadors with blue sirens and official flags on the bonnet. Villagers turned to look at us warily as we raced through a series of traffic jams on narrow country roads. At the first sign of an approaching bottleneck, the driver put on the siren, and bodyguards cradling AK-47 guns leaned out of the windows, forcing big, overweight trucks off the roads and onto muddy ledges where they stood leaning dangerously.
Policemen everywhere stood to attention and saluted the cars as they went past. At official bungalows with little flower beds and manicured lawns, junior officials vied with each other to open the car doors and escort us to dining tables overloaded with warm snacks. More members of the Civil Service would invariably join us at this point. These were election observers sent to the region from other states, men in their thirties and forties, eager and fluent. A brisk bonhomie would ensue around the dining table as people compared notes on who was posted where and who was about to be promoted. There would be little talk of the election or the police stations we had visited (some of them in total disarray — small dark rooms full of dusty files and broken furniture, smells of urine and alcohol emanating from lockups — easily imagined as local centers of tyranny, settings for the third-degree torture and custodial deaths and rapes you read about in the papers).
At the beginning of the inspection tour, the police chief, who had the reputation, rare in Allahabad, of not soliciting bribes, looked concerned. His English marked him as a man who had entered the Civil Service from a modest small-town background; he couldn't have been unaware of what occurred in the police stations. Yet after the first, where he scolded the paunchy official in charge who had been clumsily making up the number of men arrested and guns seized, he hurried through the rest, with a look of distaste on his face. The commissioner looked restless throughout the tour and found his voice only with the other Civil Service men. He had earlier spoken to me with feeling about the inconveniences of living in the English town of Hull, where he had been sent by the Indian government to undergo some training. He now spoke mournfully — others around the dining table shaking their head sideways in approval — of criminals with hundreds of police cases against them, who had not only joined politics but also become "honorable ministers" and to whom he was required to show proper deference.
Dignity, and how to hold on to it: That was what preoccupied these men, most of whom the Civil Service had rescued from a lower-middle-class shabbiness — the dignity whose emblems included the bungalows, the white cars with sirens, the red-sashed attendants, and the attentive lower officials; the dignity that came out of asserting one's distance from everything tainted by the ordinary misery and degradation of India: the widow outside the commissioner's office, the criminals working as ministers, the corrupted men in the rural police stations.
In the assertion of that distance lay the self-image of the colonial administrators, and over time this has changed as little as the actual hierarchies and structure of the administration itself, Only the gap between rhetoric — more intense in an India with democratic aspirations — and reality has widened. For people in small towns and villages — the majority of India's population — the sources of power and justice are still somewhere in the larger unknown world, and you can spend all your life waiting for them to work in your favor.
Consider this village thirty miles out of Allahabad: a huddle of huts, unpainted brick houses, and narrow mud lanes on a stony slope. My car was the only motorized vehicle on the rutted country road that dusty late afternoon. Its appearance from behind an abrupt bend startled the bullock cart drivers and shepherds and excited fear among the people at this village, standing by the side of the road, holding the little green plastic flags of the Samajwadi (Socialist) Party, waiting for the local candidate, Mr. Reoti Raman Singh, to arrive. They stood stiffly, not daring to come closer, until summoned by the driver, when they moved awkwardly and surrounded the car. Anxious, thin, sun-hardened faces with roughly cut hair, young and old, pressed against the windows; franklycurious eyes quickly took in my camera, diary, pen — glamorous items in this context — and suddenly clouded over with uncertainty. When I asked them about the local issues they wished their member of Parliament to resolve, they shook their heads. One of the best-dressed persons among them, an old man in white kurta and dhoti and thick white mustache, said that there were no problems at all and resumed his scrutiny of my personal effects. It was only when my exasperated driver, a recent migrant to Allahabad from a nearby village, introduced me as a journalist and urged them to tell me the truth that the old man began to speak.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Temptations of the West by Pankaj Mishra. Copyright © 2006 Pankaj Mishra. Excerpted by permission of Picador.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Preface,
PROLOGUE,
PART ONE,
ALLAHABAD - The Nehrus, the Gandhis, and Democracy,
1. The Colonial City and the Countryside,
2. The Dynasty,
3. Bourgeois Anxieties,
4. The Reclaiming of India,
AYODHYA - The Modernity of Hinduism,
1. History as Myth,
2. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh: Indian-Style Fascism,
3. Engineering Souls,
BOLLYWOOD - Indian Shining,
PART TWO,
KASHMIR - The Cost of Nationalism,
1. The Killings in Chitisinghpura,
2. The Politics of Secularism,
3. The Unending War,
PAKISTAN - Jihad Globalized,
AFGHANISTAN - Communists, Mullahs, and Warlords,
PART THREE,
NEPAL - The "People's War",
TIBET - A Backward Country,
Also by Pankaj Mishra,
About the Author,
Copyright Page,