Bookless in Baghdad

by Shashi Tharoor

  This is no small challenge. When the United Nations helped reconstruct East Timor after the devastation that accompanied the Indonesian withdrawal, we had to rebuild an entire society, and that meant, in some cases, creating institutions that had never existed before. One of them was a judicial system of international standards, which in practice meant Western standards, complete with the adversarial system of justice in which a prosecutor and a defense attorney attempt to demolish each other's arguments in the pursuit of truth. The UN experts had to train the Timorese in this system. But they discovered that there was one flaw. In Timorese culture, the expected practice is for the accused to confess his crimes, and justice to be meted out compassionately. In order to promote the culture of the “not guilty” plea required by Western court systems, the UN experts had to train the Timorese to lie. Their mental processes — their imaginations — had now truly been globalized.

  This brings me to the second half of my argument today. In one sense, the terrorists of 9/11 were attacking the globalization of the human imagination — the godless, materialist, promiscuous culture of the dominant West, embodied in a globalization from which people like them felt excluded. Certainly those who celebrated their act did so from a sense of exclusion. If we speak of the human imagination today, we need to ask what leads surprisingly large numbers of young people to follow the desperate course set for them by fanatics and ideologues. A sense of oppression, of exclusion, of marginalization, can give rise to extremism. Forty years ago, in 1962, the now all-but-forgotten UN secretary general U Thant warned that an explosion of violence could occur as a result of the sense of injustice felt by those living in poverty and despair in a world of plenty. Some 2,600 people died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. But some 26,000 people also died on 9/11, around the world — from starvation, unclean water, and preventable disease. We cannot afford to exclude them from our global imagination.

  But that is, of course, not all. If a state cannot even offer its people hope for a better life for their children — by providing access to basic education — then how can we expect those people or those children to resist the blandishments of terror? It should come as no surprise that the Taliban recruited its foot soldiers from the religious schools or madras-sas that were the only source of nurture and “education” for many children who had no other source of knowledge available to them; who learned not science or mathematics or computer programming at these schools, but rather only the creed of the Koran and the Kalashnikov — the Koran crudely interpreted, the Kalashnikov crudely made. Their imaginations were, as a result, anything but global.

  Which brings me back to the question I raised at the beginning: Have we fallen into the dangerous illusion that the human imagination can be globalized? In considering an answer, we have to look at the global mass media. The mass media reflects principally the interests of its producers. What passes for international culture is usually the culture of the economically developed world. It's your imagination that is being globalized. American movies and television shows, in particular, can be found on the screens of most countries.

  Who else makes the cut to enter the global imagination in our brave new world? Yes, there is the occasional Third World voice, but it speaks a First World language. As far back as the first Congo civil war of 1962, the journalist Edward Behr saw a TV newsman in a camp of violated Belgian nuns calling out, “Anyone here been raped and speak English?” In other words, it was not enough to have suffered: one must have suffered and be able to express one's suffering in the language of the journalist. Which leads to the obvious corollary question: Are those speaking for their cultures in the globalized media the most authentic representatives of them?

  Can the Internet compensate? Is it a democratizing tool? In the West, perhaps it has become one, since information is now far more widely accessible to anyone anywhere. But that is not yet true in the developing world. The stark reality of the Internet today is the digital divide: you can tell the rich from the poor by their Internet connections. The gap between the technological haves and have-nots is widening, both between countries and within them. The information revolution, unlike the French Revolution, is a revolution with a lot of liberté, some fraternité, and no egalité. So the poverty line is not the only line about which we have to think; there is also the high-speed digital line, the fiber optic line — all the lines that exclude those who are literally not plugged in to the possibilities of our brave new world. The key to the Internet divide is the computer keyboard. Those who do not have one risk marginalization; their imagination does not cross borders.

  These concerns are real. If they are addressed, if the case for overcoming them is absorbed and applied, the twenty-first century could yet become a time of mutual understanding such as we have never seen before. A world in which it is easier than ever before to meet strangers must also become a world in which it is easier than ever before to see strangers as no different from ourselves.

  Ignorance and prejudice are the handmaidens of propaganda, and in most modern conflicts, the men of war prey on the ignorance of the populace to instill fears and arouse hatreds. That was the case in Bosnia and in Rwanda, where murderous, even genocidal ideologies took root in the absence of truthful information and honest education. If only half the effort had gone into teaching those peoples what unites them, and not what divides them, unspeakable crimes could have been prevented.

  Freedom of speech also guarantees diversity. As an Indian writer, I have argued that my country's recent experience with the global reach of Western consumer products demonstrates that we can drink Coca-Cola without becoming coca-colonized. India's own popular culture is also part of globalization — the products of Bollywood are exported to expatriate Indian communities abroad. The success of Indian films and music in England and the United States proves that the Empire can strike back.

  And it's not just India. A recent study has established that local television programming has begun to overtake made-in-America shows in more and more countries. And as the globalizing world changes, it does not do so only in one direction. In England today, Indian curry houses employ more people than the iron and steel, coal and shipbuilding, industries combined.

  In my first novel, The Great Indian Novel, I reinvented a two-thousand-year-old epic, the Mahabharata, as a satirical retelling of the story of twentieth-century India, from the British days to the present. My motivation was a conscious one. Most developing countries are also formerly colonized countries, and one of the realities of colonialism is that it appropriates the cultural definition of its subject peoples. Writing about India in English, I cannot but be aware of those who have done the same before me, others with a greater claim to the language but a lesser claim to the land. Think of India in the English-speaking world even today, and you think in images conditioned by Rudyard Kipling and E. M. Forster, by the Bengal Lancers and The Jewel in the Crown. But their stories are not my stories, their heroes are not mine; and my fiction seeks to reclaim my country's heritage for itself, to tell, in an Indian voice, a story of India. Let me stress, a story of India; for there are always other stories, and other Indians to tell them.

  How important is such a literary reassertion in the face of the enormous challenges confronting a country like India? Can literature matter in a land of poverty, suffering, and underdevelopment? I believe it does.

  My novel begins with the proposition that India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay. Such sentiments are the privilege of the satirist; but as a novelist, I believe, with Molière, that you have to entertain in order to edify. But edify to what end? What is the responsibility of the creative artist, the writer, in a developing country in our globalizing world? In my own writing I have pointed to one responsibility — to contribute toward, and to help articulate and give expression to, the cultural identity (shifting, variegated, and multiple, in
the Indian case) of the postcolonial society, caught up in the throes of globalization. The vast majority of developing countries have emerged recently from the incubus of colonialism; both colonialism and globalization have in many ways fractured and distorted their cultural self-perceptions. Development will not occur without a reassertion of identity: that this is who we are, this is what we are proud of, this is what we want to be. In this process, culture and development are fundamentally linked and interdependent. The task of the writer is to find new ways (and revive old ones) of expressing his culture, just as his society strives, in the midst of globalization, to find new ways of being and becoming.

  As a writer committed to Indian pluralism, I see cultural reassertion as a vital part of the enormous challenges confronting a country like India — as vital as economic development. We are all familiar with the notion that “man does not live by bread alone.” In India, I would argue that music, dance, art, and the telling of stories are indispensable to our ability to cope with that vital construct we call the human condition. After all, why does man need bread? To survive. But why survive, if it is only to eat more bread? To live is more than just to sustain life — it is to enrich, and be enriched by, life. Our poorest men and women in the developing world feel the throb of imagination on their pulse, for they tell stories to their children under the starlit skies — stories of their land and its heroes, stories of the earth and its mysteries, stories that have gone into making them what they are. And (since my second novel was about Bollywood) they see and hear stories, too, in the flickering lights of the thousands of cinemas in our land, where myth and escapist fantasy intertwine and moral righteousness almost invariably triumphs with the closing credits.

  Globalization, its advocates say, is about growth and development. But it cannot just be a set of figures on GNP tables, a subject for economists and businessmen rather than a matter of people. And if people are to develop, it is unthinkable that they would develop without literature, without song, and dance, and music, and myth, without stories about themselves, and in turn, without expressing their views on their present lot and their future hopes. Development implies dynamism; dynamism requires freedom, the freedom to create; creativity requires, quite simply, imagination.

  But in speaking of a cultural reassertion of imagination, I do not want to defend a closed construct. I believe Indians will not become any less Indian if, in Mahatma Gandhi's metaphor, we open the doors and windows of our country and let foreign winds blow through our house. For me the winds of globalization must blow both ways. The UNESCO charter memorably tells us that “as war begins in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the foundations of peace must be constructed.” This is true not just of war and peace but of the entire fabric of human life and society — which must be constructed in the mind. As the acolytes of Osama bin Laden or the young foot soldiers of the Taliban have taught us, the globe will always have more than a single mind. And that is why cultural diversity is so essential in our shrinking globe. For without a multiplicity of cultures, we cannot realize how peoples of other races, religions, or languages share the same dreams, the same hopes. Without a heterogeneous human imagination, we cannot understand the myriad manifestations of the human condition, nor fully appreciate the universality of human aims and aspirations. This is why, as a writer, I would argue that the specificities of literature are the best antidote to the globalization of the imagination.

  Not that literature implies a retreat from the globe: rather, it is the mind shaped by literature that understands the world and responds to its needs. Literature teaches us to empathize, to look beyond the obvious and beneath the surface, to bear in mind the smaller picture — of the ordinary human beings who are ultimately the objects of all public policy. And above all, to remember always that there is more than one side to a story, and more than one answer to a question. Those are fairly useful prescriptions for public policy makers in the era of globalization.

  In many ways, the fundamental conflict of our times is the clash between, no, not civilizations, but doctrines — religious and ethnic fundamentalism on the one hand, secular consumerist capitalism on the other. Thanks to globalization, the world is coming together into a single international market just as it is simultaneously being torn apart by civil war and the breakup of nations. The author Benjamin Barber has written of the twin prospects facing humanity as “Jihad versus McWorld” — “Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence… against technology, against pop culture, against integrated markets; against modernity itself” versus a “McWorld” of globalization run rampant, a world of “fast music, fast computers and fast food — with MTV, Macintosh and McDonald's pressing nations into one commercially homogenous theme park.” Both Jihad and McWorld, of course, end up by obliterating our most precious possession — our identity.

  Every one of us has many identities. Sometimes religion obliges us to deny the truth about our own complexity by obliterating the multiplicity inherent in our identities. Islamic fundamentalism, in particular, does so because it embodies a passion for pure belonging, a yearning intensified by the threatening tidal wave of globalization as well as by the nature of Middle Eastern politics. Of course there is something precious and valuable in a faith that allows a human being to see himself at one with others stretching their hands out toward God around the world. But can we separate religion from identity? Can we dream of a world in which religion has an honored place but where the need for spirituality will be a personal one, no longer associated with the need to belong? If identity can relate principally to citizenship rather than faith, to a land rather than a doctrine, and if that identity is one that can live in harmony with other identities, then we might resist both Jihad and McWorld.

  And for that we must promote pluralism. To strike a personal note, my own faith in religious pluralism is a legacy of my upbringing in secular India. Secularism in India did not mean irreligiousness, which even avowedly atheist parties like the Communists or the southern DMK found unpopular among their voters; indeed, in Calcutta's annual Durga Puja, the Communist parties compete with each other to put up the most lavish Puja pandals. Rather, secularism meant, in the Indian tradition, a profusion of religions, none of which was privileged by the state. I remember how, in the Calcutta neighborhood where I lived during my high school years, the wail of the muezzin calling the Islamic faithful to prayer blended with the tinkling bells and the chant of the mantras at the Hindu Shiva temple and the crackling loudspeakers outside the Sikh gurudwara reciting verses from the Granth Sahib. And just two minutes down the road stood St. Paul's Cathedral. Students, office workers, government officials, were all free to wear turbans, veils, caps, whatever their religion demanded of them. That is Indian secularism: accept everyone, privilege no one; nothing is exceptional, no one is humiliated. This secularism is under threat from some in India today, but it remains a precious heritage of all Indians.

  Pluralism can only be protected by supporting the development of democracy at a local, national, and international level to provide a context for cultural pluralism to thrive. We must encourage a liberal, free-thinking education that opens minds everywhere rather than closes them. We must take a stance of respect and humility in our approaches to others, strive for inclusiveness rather than marginalization.

  When the terrorists of today and tomorrow have been defeated, our world will still be facing, to use Kofi Annan's phrase, innumerable “problems without passports” — problems of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, of the degradation of our common environment, of contagious disease and chronic starvation, of human rights and human wrongs, of mass illiteracy and massive displacement. These are problems that no one country, however powerful, can solve alone, and which are unavoidably the shared responsibility of humankind. They cry out for solutions that, like the problems themselves, also cross frontiers.

  Today, whether one is from Tübingen or Tallahassee, it is si
mply not realistic to think only in terms of one's own country. Global forces press in from every conceivable direction; people, goods, and ideas cross borders and cover vast distances with ever greater frequency, speed, and ease. The Internet is emblematic of an era in which what happens in Southeast Asia or Southern Africa — from democratic advances to deforestation to the fight against AIDS — can affect lives in Germany. As has been observed about water pollution, we all live downstream.

  Robert Kagan's famous, if fatuous, proposition that Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus has gained wide currency lately. If that is so, where are Africans from — Pluto? They might as well inhabit the most remote planet, for all the attention they are paid by either Americans or Europeans. Yet their problems are an affront to our consciences. The tragic confluence of AIDS, poverty, drought, and famine threatens more human lives in Africa than Iraq ever did. Individual countries may prefer not to deal with such problems directly or alone, but they are impossible to ignore. So handling them together internationally is the obvious way of ensuring they are tackled; it is also the only way. Everyone — Americans, Germans, Indians — will be safer in a world improved by the efforts of the United Nations, efforts in which all the world's peoples have a stake and all enjoy the opportunity to participate. And these efforts will be needed long after Iraq has passed from the headlines.