Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond Read online

  for Barbara Epstein

  Table of 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

  Preface

  Over the last five years I have traveled to places as far apart as Buddhist Tibet, Bollywood, and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Temptations of the West describes these journeys in South and Central Asia, through countries that differ radically from each other in many ways but that seem to face the same dilemma: How do peoples with traditions extending back several millennia modernize themselves?

  Recent events have ensured that this is no longer an academic question. Western ideologies, whether of colonialism, communism, or globalization, have confronted the countries I visited—India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Tibet—with the same challenge: modernize or perish. But the wrenching process of remaking life and society in all their aspects (social, economic, existential) frequently collapses in violence, which affects not just South Asia but also, as the horrific events of 9/11 showed, the apparently remote and self-contained worlds of the West.

  Needless to say, the societies I traveled through are too internally diverse to be summed up by broad generalizations of the kind preferred by policymakers and op-ed columnists. These interconnected narratives do not presume to offer solutions to their great problems, nor dwell abstractly on democracy, religion, and terrorism. Rather, they seek to make the reader enter actual experiences: of individuals—Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists trying to find a way in the modern world—and of the traveler, as, confronted with a bewildering complexity, he moves from ignorance and prejudice to a measure of self-awareness and knowledge.

  PROLOGUE

  BENARES

  Learning to Read

  I spent four months in Benares in the winter of 1988. I was twenty years old, with no clear idea of my future, or indeed much of anything else. After three idle, bookish years at a provincial university in a decaying old provincial town, I had developed an aversion to the world of careers and jobs which, having no money, I was destined to join. In Benares, the holiest city of the Hindus, where people come either to ritually dissolve their accumulated “sins” in the Ganges or simply to die and achieve liberation from the cycle of rebirths—in Benares, with a tiny allowance, I sought nothing more than a continuation of the life I had led as an undergraduate.

  I lived in the old quarter, in a half-derelict house owned by a Brahmin musician, a tiny, frail, courteous old man. Panditji had long ago cut himself off from the larger world and lay sunk all day long in an opium-induced daze, from which he roused himself punctually at six in the evening to give sitar lessons to German and American students. It was how he maintained his expensive habit and also staved off penury. His estranged, asthmatic wife lived on the floor above his—she claimed to have not gone downstairs for fifteen years—and spent most of her time in a windowless kitchen full of smoke from the dung-paved hearth, conversing in a low voice with her faithful family retainer of over fifty years. The retainer, a small, reticent man in pleated khaki shorts, hinted, in that gloomy setting, at better days in the past, even a kind of feudal grandeur.

  The house I lived in, the melancholy presence of Panditji and his wife, were part of the world of old Benares that was still intact in the late eighties and of which the chess games in the alleys, the all-night concerts in temples, the dancing girls at elaborately formal weddings, the gently decadent pleasures of betel leaves and opium formed an essential component. In less than two years most of this solid-seeming world was to vanish into thin air. The old city was to be scarred by a rash of fast-food outlets, video game parlors, and boutiques, the most garish symbols of the entrepreneurial energies unleashed by the liberalization of the Indian economy, which would transform Benares in the way they had already transformed other sleepy small towns across India.

  But I didn’t know this then, and I did not listen too closely when Panditji’s wife reminisced about the Benares she had known as a young woman, when she told me about the time her husband came to her family home as a starving student, when she described the honors bestowed on her father by the maharaja of Benares. I was even less attentive when she complained about her son and his wife, more particularly the latter, who, though Brahmin, had, in her opinion, the greedy, grasping ways of the merchant castes.

  I didn’t pay much attention to the lives around me. I was especially indifferent to the wide-eyed Europeans drifting about on the old ghats, each attached to an ash-smeared guru. I was deep into my own world, and though I squirmed at the word and the kinds of abject dependence it suggested, I had found my own guru, long dead but, to me, more real than anyone I actually knew that winter I spent slowly making my way through his books.

  On an earlier visit to the library at Benares Hindu University, idly browsing through the stacks, I had noticed a book called The American Earthquake. I read a few pages at random, standing in a dark corridor between overloaded, dusty shelves. It seemed interesting; I made a metal note to look it up on my next trip to the library. Months passed. By then I had moved to Benares, and one day, while looking for something else in the same section of the stacks, I came across the book again. This time I took it to the reading room. An hour into it, I began to look at the long list under the heading “Other books by Edmund Wilson.” Later that afternoon I went back to the shelves, where they all were, dust-laden, termite-infested, but beautifully, miraculously, present: The Shores of Light, Classics and Commercials, The Bit Between My Teeth, The Wound and the Bow, Europe Without Baedeker, A Window on Russia, A Piece of My Mind …

  It was miraculous because this was no ordinary library. Wilson’s books weren’t easily accessible. I had always lived in small towns where libraries and bookshops were few and far between and did not stock anything except a few standard texts of English literature: Austen, Dickens, Kipling, Thackeray. My semicolonial education had made me spend much of my time on minor Victorian and Edwardian writers. Some diversity was provided by writers in Hindi and the Russians, whom you could buy cheaply at Communist bookstores. As for the rest, I read randomly, whatever I could find, and with the furious intensity of a small-town boy to whom books are the sole means of communicating with, and understanding, the larger world.

  I had realized early on that being passionate about literature wasn’t enough. You had to be resourceful; you had to be perpetually on the hunt for books. And so I was, at libraries and bookshops, at other people’s houses, in letters to relatives in the West, and, most fruitfully, at the local paper recycler, where I once bought a tattered old paperback of
Heinrich Mann’s Man of Straw, which I—such were the gaps in my knowledge—dutifully read, and made notes about, without knowing anything about his more famous and distinguished brother. Among this disconnected reading, I had certain preferences, a few strong likes and dislikes, but they did not add up to coherent standards of judgment. I knew little of the social and historical underpinnings to the books I read; I had only a fleeting sense of the artistry and skill to which certain novels owed their greatness.

  I had problems too with those books of Edmund Wilson I had found at the library, some of which I read in part that winter, others from cover to cover. Many of them were collections of reviews of books I could not possibly read at the time, or else they referred to other books I hadn’t heard of. Proust, Joyce, Hemingway, Waugh, yes; Malraux and Silone, probably; but where in India could one find John Dos Passos? Wilson’s books also assumed a basic knowledge of politics and history I did not have. They were a struggle for me, and the ignorance I felt before them was a secret source of shame, but it was also a better stimulus to the effort his books demanded than mere intellectual curiosity.

  I was never to cease feeling this ignorance, but I also had a sense as I groped my way through Wilson’s work that my awareness of all these unread books and unknown writers was being filtered through an extraordinarily cohesive sensibility. Over the next few months it became clear to me that his powers of summary and explication were often worth more attention than the books and writers that were his subjects. There was also a certain idea that his lucid prose and confident judgments suggested and that I, at first, found so attractive, the image of a man wholly devoted to reading and thinking and writing. I thought of him at work in his various residences—Provincetown, Talcottville, Cambridge, Wellfeet—and in my imagination these resonant names became attached to a promise of wisdom and serenity.

  The library where I found Wilson’s books had, along with the university, come out of an old, and now vanished, impulse: the desire among Hindu reformists in the freedom movement to create indigenous centers of education and culture. The fundamental idea was to train young Hindu men for the modern world, and like many other idealisms of the freedom movement, it hadn’t survived long in the chaos of independent India, where even the right to education came to be fiercely fought over under the banner of specific castes, religions, regions, and communities.

  Sectarian tensions were particularly intense in North India, especially in Uttar Pradesh, the province with the greatest population and second-highest poverty rate in the country, where caste and political rivalries spread to the local universities. The main political parties, eager to enlist the large student vote in their favor, had begun to put money into student union elections. Politically ambitious students would organize themselves by caste: the Brahmin, the Thakur (the so-called warrior caste), the Backward. and the Scheduled (the government’s euphemism for former untouchables). The tensions were so great that academic sessions were frequently interrupted by student strikes; arson, kidnapping, and murder among students became common features of campus life.

  Miraculously, the library at Benares had remained well stocked. Subscriptions to foreign magazines had been renewed on time; you could find complete volumes of the TLS, Partisan Review, and The New York Review of Books from the 1960s in the stacks. Catalogs of university presses had been dutifully scrutinized by the library staff; the books, as though through some secluded channel untouched by the surrounding disorder, had kept flowing in.

  The library was housed in an impressively large building in the style known as Hindu-Saracenic, whose attractive pastiche of Indian and Victorian Gothic architecture had been prompted by the same Indian modernist aspirations that had created the university. But by the late eighties chaos reigned in almost every department. Few books were to be found in their right places; the card catalog was in complete disarray. In the reading room, students of a distinctly criminal appearance smoked foul-smelling cigarettes and noisily played cards. Some of them chose to take their siestas on long desks; bored young women spent hours scratching their initials into tabletops.

  It was hardly a congenial place for long hours of reading, but since I wasn’t enrolled as a student at the University, I could not take books out of the library. I was, however, allowed to sit in the reading room, and I was there almost every day from the time it opened in the morning. Since I had little money, I walked the four miles to the library from my house. For lunch I had an omelet at a fly-infested stall outside the library and then a glass of sticky-sweet tea which effectively killed all hunger for the next few hours. In the evening I would walk home along the river and sit until after dark on the ghats, among a mixed company of touts and drug pushers; washermen gathering clothes that had rested on the stone steps all afternoon, white and sparkling in the sun; groups of children playing hopscotch on the chalk-marked stone floor; a few late bathers, dressing and undressing under tattered beach umbrellas; and groups of old men, silently gazing at the darkening river.

  Many of my days in Benares were spent in this way, and when I think of them, they seem serenely uneventful. But what I remember best now are not so much the clear blue skies and magically still afternoons, glimpsed from my window-side perch at the library, as the factors that constantly threatened to undo that serenity. For a radically different world existed barely a few hundred meters from where I sat reading about Santayana.

  The university in those days was the scene of intense battles between students and the police. Anything could provoke them: a student who was not readmitted after being expelled; an exam that a professor refused to postpone. A peculiar frenzy periodically overtook the two sides, whereupon the students would rampage through the campus, smashing furniture and any windowpanes left unbroken from their last eruption of rage. Challenged by the police, they would retreat to the sanctuary of their hostels and fire pistols at the baton-charging constables. In retaliation, the policemen would often invade the hostels, break into locked rooms, drag out their pleading, wailing occupants, and proceed to beat them.

  I once saw one of their victims, minutes after the police had left, coughing blood and broken teeth, his clothes torn, the baton marks on his exposed arms rapidly turning blue. Another time I saw a policeman with half of the flesh on his back gouged out by a locally made hand grenade. Anxious colleagues watched helplessly from behind their wire mesh shields as he tottered and collapsed on the ground. Terrified bystanders like myself threw themselves to the ground in a defensive reflex we’d seen in action movies. The grenade thrower—a scrawny boy in a big-collared shirt and tight polyester trousers who, I learned later, had targeted the policeman after being tortured by him in custody—stood watching on the cobblestone road, fascinated by his handiwork.

  Such violence, extreme though it seemed, wasn’t new to the university, which had long been witness to bloodier battles between the student wings of Communist and Hindu nationalist organizations. These two groups tended to be allied with different ends of the caste system: The lower castes tended to be Communist; the upper castes tended to be Hindu nationalist. But frequently now the violence came for no ideological reason, with no connections to a cause or movement. It erupted spontaneously, fueled only by the sense of despair and hopelessness that permanently hung over North Indian universities in the 1980s, itself part of a larger crisis caused by the collapse of many Indian institutions, the increasingly close alliance between crime and politics, and the growth of state-organized corruption—processes that had accelerated during Mrs. Gandhi’s “Emergency” in the mid-seventies.

  For students poised to enter this world, the choices were harsh, and it didn’t matter what caste you belonged to; poverty was evenly distributed across this region. Most of the people I knew were deeply cynical in their attitude toward their future. You could work toward becoming a member of either the state or national legislature and siphon off government funds earmarked for literacy and population control projects; if nothing worked out, you could aspire, at the othe
r end of the scale, to be a lowly telephone mechanic and make money by selling illegal telephone connections.

  Most of the students in this traditionally backward area of India came from feudal or semirural families, and aspired to join the Civil Service, a colonial invention that even in independent India continued to offer the easiest and quickest route to political power and affluence. But there were fewer and fewer recruitments made to the Civil Service from North India, where the decline in standards, as well as the cheap availability, of higher education had made it possible for millions to acquire university degrees while they had less and less prospect of employment. Bribery and nepotism had played a major part in the disbursement of the jobs in the minor government services. Students from the lately impoverished upper castes suffered most in this respect; if poverty wasn’t enough, they were further disadvantaged by the large quotas for lower-caste candidates in government jobs.

  The quotas, first created by Nehru’s government in the early 1950s and meant as a temporary measure, were expanded and used by successive governments as an electoral ploy to attract lower-caste votes. The upper-caste students found themselves making the difficult adjustments to urban life only to confront the prospect of being sent back to the oblivion they had emerged from, and their sense of blocked futures, which they acquired early in their time at the university, was to reach a tragic culmination in 1990 in the spate of self-immolations following the central government’s decision to provide even larger quotas in federal jobs for applicants from lower castes.

  My own situation was little different from that of the people around me. I had recently spent three years at the nearby provincial university at Allahabad, where I was in even closer, more unsettling proximity to the desperation I saw in Benares. I was upper-caste myself, without family wealth, and roughly in the same position as my father had been in freshly independent India when the land reform act of 1951—another of Nehru’s attempts at social equality, it was meant to turn exploited tenants into landholders—reduced his once well-to-do Brahmin family to penury. My mother’s family had suffered a similar setback. Like many others in my family who laboriously worked their way into the middle classes, I had to make my own way in the world. Looking back, I can see my compulsive pursuit of books, and the calm and order it suggested, contrasting so jarringly with the rage and desperation around me, as my way of putting off a grimly foreclosed future.