Pankaj Mishra

South Asia and its collision with the West
Reviewed by Ben Macintyre The New York Times

Temptations of the West. How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond. By Pankaj Mishra.

During the Soviet Union's long, doomed attempt to subdue Afghanistan, Soviet helicopters dropped countless butterfly bombs, brightly colored devices looking much like toys that Afghan children picked up when they fluttered to earth. Then they exploded.

That grim image might be a leitmotif for Pankaj Mishra's fascinating, angry book about the impact of modernity on India, Pakistan, Nepal, Afghanistan and Tibet. "Temptations of the West" tells of the complex, often violent struggle of ancient societies to define themselves in the face of cultural, political and religious intrusions from outside - the gaudy butterflies that seem so pretty and then blow up.

The book's title is somewhat misleading, and its subtitle even more so. This is no mere attack on the vacuities of Western pop culture transplanted to the East, nor yet another condemnation of the legacy of colonialism. Instead, Mishra painstakingly picks apart the complex, contradictory relationship between South Asia and the West. He lives in both India and England, so he cannot claim to be personally immune to the temptations of Western life.

Certainly his book offers none of the prescriptions and bromides of a "how- to" manual. Part autobiography, part travelogue, part journalism, it is written not from a political or polemical position but from that of a small-town, upper-caste, lower-middle-class Indian with a taste for Western literature.

Mishra's journey begins in the dusty reading room of a university in Benares, the ancient city on the Ganges, holy to both Hindu and Muslim. There he finds the works of Edmund Wilson and Gustave Flaubert, and briefly befriends an intelligent, frustrated young man named Rajesh, trying to make his way in a society riddled by bribery and nepotism. One day, Mishra gives Rajesh a copy of Wilson's essay on Flaubert's "Sentimental Education." Later, Rajesh reveals that he has read the novel. "It is the story of my world," he remarks.

Mishra makes Flaubert's tale of "the small, unnoticed tragedies of thwarted hopes and ideals" the subtext of an India that promises so much to so many but delivers on those promises to so few. (Much later, the author discovers that Rajesh has become a contract killer.) Mishra has a talent for discovering such extraordinary, even lurid characters to illuminate his account of dashed dreams, clashing religions, huge wealth, crushing poverty, corruption, oppression and, almost unbelievably, hope. He wields a poignant vignette: the Bollywood starlet, stripping off her clothes in search of fame over the objections of her horrified father, while outside the studios of the powerful film moguls, would-be actors wait like supplicants at the gates; the politician claiming to represent lower-caste Dalits against the "Brahmanical forces," who turns out not be a Dalit at all, and is the owner of a large agricultural estate; the Afghan writer who composed her verses while living under the stringent rules of the Taliban's Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, a body at once Orwellian and medieval.

In Peshawar, near Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, Mishra comes across a former soldier from Bangladesh, on the run for his part in the 1975 assassination of that country's president. The refugee spends his days as a heroin- addled copy editor on a doomed newspaper, claiming the killing was "an accident" and insisting he has a great book in him. Mishra reports on a world in which the cultural definitions are constantly evolving, eliding and colliding.

His travels are interwoven with pungent commentary on modern politics in South Asia. Few politicians escape unburned; some are roasted. Indira Gandhi is held up as a triumph of mediocrity: "a not particularly sensitive or intelligent woman ... exalted by accident of birth and a callow political culture into the chieftancy of a continent-size nation."

While there is fury in Mishra's account of his homeland and its neighbors, there is also a fierce love. He is particularly moved by the sight of ordinary Indians trudging off to vote for politicians who often do not deserve it. The political culture of India may be callow at the top, but at the roots it is a remarkable tribute to the resilience of democracy.

A vein of optimism runs alongside his rage. There is growth and opportunity in Kashmir after more than a decade of devastation, and even in Tibet, where more than a million people have died through execution, torture and starvation since 1950, he finds small glimmers of hope.

The Tibetan high plains and mountains move Mishra to lyricism, but his prose is untainted by the romantic Orientalism that skews so much writing about the Indian subcontinent. Indeed, he has nothing but righteous scorn for visitors prepared to see and accept suffering and cruelty as part of the general quaintness of the East.

Mishra's book will enrage many Indian readers. Indeed, he has already come under attack in Indian newspapers for suggesting that the Muslim insurgency in Kashmir has been fueled by the brutality of the Indian military. He will win even fewer friends at home for his contempt toward India's growing middle class, at once nationalistic and craving Western approval.

As for the more strident Hindu nationalists, he declares that "Hinduism in the hands of these Indians has never looked more like the Christianity and Islam of popes and mullahs and less like the multiplicity of unselfconsciously tolerant faiths it still is for most Indians."

This is not a gentle book, but it is a brave one - and, for anyone in the West able to look beyond clichés and rhetoric, an essential one.

Ben Macintyre is a columnist for The Times of London. His most recent book is "The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan."

Just read...

The New York Times Book Review

June 11, 2006
'The Places in Between,' by Rory Stewart

A Walk Across Afghanistan
Review by TOM BISSELL

PITY the contemporary travel writer: routinely viewed as a kind of overstuffed guidebook author, struggling to explain exactly what he or she does. Specialists pounce on the tiniest "mistakes," and ideologues condemn the whole enterprise as colonialism with a thesaurus. Meanwhile, there's no single go-to word for what this most curious and searching of writers seeks to produce. Travel narrative? Peripatetic memoir? Adventure yarn? Not that this even matters, since — or so the prevailing wisdom goes — the best journeys have already been made. All that's left is a specious sort of experiential plagiarism.

Not quite. Rory Stewart's first book, "The Places in Between," recounts his journey across Afghanistan in January 2002. Even in mild weather in an Abrams tank, such a trip would be mane-whitening. But Stewart goes in the middle of winter, crossing through some territory still shakily held by the Taliban — and entirely on foot. There are some Medusa-slayingly gutsy travel writers out there — Redmond O'Hanlon, Jeffrey Tayler, Robert Young Pelton — but Stewart makes them look like Hilton sisters.

Paul Theroux once described a certain kind of travel book as having mainly "human sacrifice" allure, and how close Stewart comes to being killed on his journey won't be disclosed here. He is, however, sternly warned before he begins his walk. "You are the first tourist in Afghanistan," observes an Afghan from the country's recently resurrected Security Service. "It is mid-winter," he adds. "There are three meters of snow on the high passes, there are wolves, and this is a war. You will die, I can guarantee." For perhaps the first time in the history of travel writing, a secret-police goon emerges as the voice of sobriety and reason.

Recalling an American journalist who wondered if Stewart thought what he was doing was dangerous, he writes, "I had never found a way to answer that question without sounding awkward, insincere or ridiculous." He's then asked if he has read "Into the Wild," Jon Krakauer's account of a well-meaning young man's doomed trek into the Alaskan wilderness. It is, Stewart is told, more than a little pointedly, "a great piece of journalism."

So is "The Places in Between" — a pipsqueak title for what is otherwise a striding, glorious book. But it's more than great journalism. It's a great travel narrative. Learned but gentle, tough but humane, Stewart — a Scottish journalist who has served in both the British Army and the Foreign Office — seems hewn from 19th-century DNA, yet he's also blessed with a 21st-century motherboard. He writes with a mystic's appreciation of the natural world, a novelist's sense of character and a comedian's sense of timing.

Stewart's travels in Afghanistan were part of a much longer journey, a walk across Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal. The author and book to which he's doomed to suffer comparison is Robert Byron, whose "Road to Oxiana" details a journey across Persia and Afghanistan in the 1930's. (No doubt mindful of this, Stewart name-checks Byron twice.) But Stewart has little to worry about. In literary terms, he's Byron's equal, and in matters of temperament and compassion, he's arguably Byron's better. While Stewart's chapters are typically short and episodic, every one has a haiku-like intensity.

Stewart is a rarity among travel writers: he's not much interested in telling us about himself. He says he promised his mother this would be his last journey and he'd come home if he didn't get killed, and that's about as confessional as he gets. (You have to suspect that he wasn't entirely straight with his mother: his second book, "The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq" will be published in August.)

Stewart clearly loves the people of Afghanistan, to whom he has partly dedicated this book. Despite sometimes being "greedy, idle, stupid, hypocritical, insensitive, mendacious, ignorant and cruel," he explains, these people never attempted "to kidnap or kill me" — even though Stewart "represented a culture that many of them hated." Thanking people for not killing you: this is defining deviancy down.

But Stewart, who speaks Persian, has no orientalist illusions; he romanticizes nothing and no one. Rather, he has written a kind of tonic to mindless Taliban-hating. He doesn't pardon the Mullah Omars who replicated seventh-century conditions at the end of a weapon the prophet could scarcely have dreamed of, and he's rightfully devastating on the remnants of the hard-core Taliban, describing them as "bullies with a strangled and dangerous view of God and a stupid obsession with death." But the average citizens of Afghanistan, some of whom found themselves working for or aiding the Taliban, he beholds with admirable calm.

When Stewart meets one former Taliban commander, the man is living in comparatively high style, which amounts to owning a water pump, a wood-burning stove and an outhouse. Is this man worth hating? Is he someone who imperils Western freedom? What about his countrymen who have never seen a television or wandered very far from their villages? Can they really be expected to understand why two collapsed buildings in Manhattan have resulted in a sky prowled by American jets?

This is more political than Stewart allows himself to be. Ideologically, he's well behaved. At worst, he's agnostic on the question of the American-led invasion, though a late passage in the book offers a blistering, if mostly forgiving, critique of the foreign workers and diplomats, some of them Stewart's friends, who work "12- or 14-hour days drafting documents for heavily funded initiatives" on "democratization" and "sustainable development." Stewart's most moving achievement is his determination to empathize with men — the book is, unavoidably, a Turkish bath house of masculinity — few have made any effort to understand.

Early in his trip, thanks to a noncommittal blessing from the warlord Ismail Khan ("A big journey," Khan adjudges his mission, "which I would like to support"), Stewart picks up three Afghan traveling partners with predictably tangled loyalties. He grows to like these men, despite their fondness for threatening to shoot children, even as they cause him almost as much trouble as their protective presence otherwise curtails. During a hilarious dinner with a village headman, one of his companions confidently announces that Stewart is from Ukraine, speaks Russian, is a doctor and works for the United Nations. Later, a radio station in Herat announces that "Agha Rory" will be awarded $2 million once he reaches his destination. By this time, Agha Rory has become his mendicant protectors' bipedal A.T.M. Stewart resentfully walks them all into the ground, and they take their exhausted leave of him.

Armed only with a wooden staff tipped with a metal nub scavenged from an old Soviet armored personnel carrier, Stewart meets a new friend who will help him complete his journey — a retired fighting dog "the size of a small pony" whose teeth have been knocked out and whose ears and tail have been snipped off. Stewart names him Babur, in honor of the descendant of Tamerlane who retreated from modern-day Uzbekistan across Afghanistan on his way to found India's Mogul dynasty. Babur's 16th-century autobiography, the "Baburnama," is among the books Stewart packs, and "The Places in Between" details the haunting continuities between Babur's meticulous impressions and what Stewart experiences.

The inclusion of a canine companion threatens to transform Stewart's journey into "Travels With Charley While Dodging Kalashnikov Fire," but Stewart is admirably allergic to sentiment. At one point, about to collapse from cold and exhaustion, "half buried in deep powder," he looks up to see Babur barking at him. "His matter-of-factness made me feel that I was being melodramatic. If he was going to continue, so would I."

The book is replete with fascinating, if fearfully context-dependent, travel tips. If you are forced to lie about being a Muslim, claim you're from Indonesia, a Muslim nation few non-Indonesian Muslims know much about. Open land undefiled by sheep droppings has most likely been mined. If you're taking your donkey to high altitudes, slice open its nostrils to allow greater oxygen flow. Don't carry detailed maps, since they tend to suggest 007 affinities. If, finally, you're determined to do something as recklessly stupid as walk across a war zone, your surest bet to quash all the inevitable criticism is to write a flat-out masterpiece. Stewart did. Stewart has. "The Places in Between" is, in very nearly every sense, too good to be true.

Tom Bissell is the author of "Chasing the Sea" and "God Lives in St. Petersburg." His new book, "The Father of All Things," will be published next year.

Pramoedya

A good page to find info on Pak Pram.

Caught between China and India

China's Peaceful Rise




India's Look East Policy

The Malay Archipelago

Alfred Wallace's 19th century survey of the "Malay archipelago", also one of the best travel books ever written, is available online, I particularly recommend the chapter on Lombok "How the Rajah took the census"

On a slow boat from Ambon to Banda

International Herald Tribune, Friday, November 11, 2005

Michael Vatikiotis

BANDA, Indonesia. The eggshell-blue afternoon sky meets the ocean along a plane so perfectly horizontal it's hard to believe we are on the open sea. In bygone days, the deep blue waters of the Banda Sea were as well known to the navigators of Plymouth and Amsterdam as the English Channel and the North Sea.

In the 17th century, tiny volcanic islands poking precariously above the surface with names like Ay and Run were the epicenter of a lucrative European spice trade. Men fought and died over nutmeg and mace, which were once worth their weight in gold.

The vessels plying these waters today are less adventurous, their cargo not nearly as precious. Yet the islands, for all their vivid natural beauty, still draw more than a fair share of trouble and violence that still arrives by ship.

I boarded the KM Bukit Sikuntang on a hot afternoon toward the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. Her beige flank, flecked with rust and the stains of garbage, rose nearly three storeys off the crumbling quayside in Ambon, the tumbledown capital of the Maluku (or Moluccan) island chain.

Boarding a state-owned Pelni liner is not a pleasant experience for the un-initiated. I was advised to take a first-class cabin, but not informed that to reach the comparative air-conditioned comfort of my windowless and cockroach infested nook, I would first have to run a gauntlet of hot and restless travelers in squalid third-class accommodation.

You have to travel at sea level to grasp the vastness of Indonesia, and the sheer human variety moving along this ragged necklace of islands. It takes a good day's flying and changing planes to make the journey to Ambon by air. But this pales in comparison to the seven-hour sea journey just from Ambon to Banda.

It's another four days sailing back to the capital Jakarta. Or you might opt for the biweekly run a Pelni liner makes from the port of Tanjung Pinang an hour outside of Singapore all the way to the West Papuan port of Fak-Fak. Along the way you meet pearl divers from Aru, policemen from Seram and miners from Timika.

Eastern Indonesia's remarkable natural resources are matched only by the bewildering variety of people, cajoling one another in a regional dialect of the Indonesian language that blends hard Malay consonants with the sing-song lilt of a Latin language - a feature acquired, like faintly aquiline noses and jutting chins, from the Portuguese who first claimed these islands for God and Europe back in the 16th century.

The European legacy left the region, until recently, strongly Christian, overlaying a tenacious Muslim community established earlier on by wandering Indian and Arab merchants. The Chinese also frequented these waters, but were content to just trade.

But the call to Muslim prayer that bursts from the ship's speakers as the sun sinks below the horizon is a reminder that Indonesia's Muslim majority is on the move, fanning out from over-populated areas of Java and Sulawesi.

Migration sowed the seeds of new friction and violence after centuries of decline and langour. Between 1999 and 2001 more than 10,000 people died after ships like the KM Bukit Sikuntang carried Islamic militants across the Banda Sea to islands like Banda, Kei and Seram. They came to wage holy war after a minor incident on a minibus resulted in a Christian killing a Muslim.

That was then, and the islanders are reluctant to recall the violence that has greatly altered the religious topography of the islands.

On Banda the old Dutch church with its stately columns was burned down along with most of the Christian dwellings when a violent mob hitched a ride on the weekly ferry from Ambon.

Inside the ruins of the 17th century church a group of children play on the foot-worn tombstones of early nutmeg plantation owners, or "perkeneers." A passerby says that the Protestant Synod in Ambon has promised to rebuild the church, which has to be one of the oldest in the archipelago. But the work is slow - memories are still fresh and the Christians are not in a hurry to reassert themselves.

The stunning beauty of these islands is hard to reconcile with the violence that percolates through their history, like the old Dutch cannon that still litter the streets of Banda.

The passenger ferries that come and go, landing people the authorities never seem to bother checking on so long as they pay their passage, are a solid reminder that trouble still travels by boat.

Michael Vatikiotis is a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore.

Copyright © 2005 The International Herald Tribune