Incendiary Circumstances

by Amitav Ghosh

  Thus the story of the real consequences of the sort of political restiveness that Munif describes in Cities of Salt is not likely to warm the heart quite as cozily as the ending he gives his novel. But if Munif can be accused of naiveté on this score, he must still be given credit for seeing that the workplace, where democracy is said to begin, is the site where the foundations of contemporary authoritarianism in the oil sheikdoms were laid.

  Today it is a commonplace in the Western media that aspirations toward democracy in the Arabian peninsula are a part of the fallout of changes ushered in by oil and the consequent breakdown of "traditional" society. In fact, in several instances exactly the opposite is true: oil and the developments it has brought in its wake have been directly responsible for the suppression of whatever democratic aspirations and tendencies there were within the region.

  Certain parts of the Gulf, such as Bahrain, whose commercial importance far predates the discovery of oil, have long possessed sizable groups of businessmen, professionals, and skilled workers—a stratum not unlike a middle class. On the whole, that class shared the ideology of the nationalist movements of various nearby countries such as India, Egypt, and Iran. It was their liberal aspirations that became the victims of oil's most bizarre, most murderous creation: the petro-despot, dressed in a snowy dish-dasha and armed with state-of-the-art weaponry—the creature whose gestation and birth Munif sets out to chronicle in the second volume of the Cities of Salt cycle, The Trench.

  Unfortunately, The Trench comes as a great disappointment. The narrative now moves away from Harran to a city in the interior called Mooran ("the Changeable"), which serves as the seat of the country's ruling dynasty. With the move to the capital, the focus of the narrative now shifts to the country's rulers.

  The story of The Trench is common enough in the oil sheikdoms of the Arabian peninsula; it begins with the accession to power of a sultan by the name of Khazael, and it ends with his deposition, when he is removed from the throne by rival factions within the royal family. Munif describes the transformations that occur during Sultan Khazael's reign by following the career of one of his chief advisers, a doctor called Subhi al-Mahmilji (who earlier played an important part in the creation of the new Harran). The story has great potential, but Munif's voice does not prove equal to the demands of the narrative. It loses the note of wonder, of detached and reverential curiosity, that lent such magic to parts of Cities of Salt, while gaining neither the volume nor the richness of coloring that its material demands.

  Instead Munif shifts to satire, and the change proves disastrous. He makes a valiant attempt—not for nothing are his books banned in various countries on the Arabian peninsula—but satire has no hope of success when directed against figures like Sultan Khazael and his family. No one, certainly no mere writer of fiction, could hope to satirize the royal families of the Arabian peninsula with a greater breadth of imagination than they do themselves. As countless newspaper reports can prove, factual accounts of their doings are well able to beggar the fictional imagination. Indeed, in the eyes of the world at large, Arab and non-Arab, the oil sheik scarcely exists except as a caricature; he is the late twentieth century's most potent symbol of decadence, hypocrisy, and corruption. He preempts the very possibility of satire. Of course, it isn't always so. The compulsions and the absurdities of an earlier generation of oil sheiks had their roots in a genuinely tragic history of predicament. But those very real dilemmas are reduced to caricature in Munif's Sultan Khazael.

  Even where it is successful, moreover, Munif's satire is founded ultimately upon a kind of nostalgia, a romantic hearkening back to a pristine, unspoiled past. It is not merely Americans from the oil companies who are the intruders here: every "foreigner" is to some degree an interloper in Harran and Mooran. As a result, Munif is led to ignore those very elements of the history of the oil kingdoms that ought to inspire his curiosity, the extraordinary admixtures of cultures, peoples, and languages that have resulted from the Oil Encounter.

  Workers from other parts of Asia hardly figure at all in Munif's story. When they do, it is either as stereotypes (a Pakistani doctor in Cities of Salt bears the name Muhammad Jinnah) or as faceless crowds, a massed symbol of chaos: "Once Harran had been a city of fishermen and travelers coming home, but now it belonged to no one; its people were featureless, of all varieties and yet strangely unvaried. They were all of humanity and yet no one at all, an assemblage of languages, accents, colours and religions." The irony of The Trench is that in the end it leaves its writer a prisoner of his intended victim. Once Munif moves away from the earliest stages of the Oil Encounter, where each side's roles and attributes and identities are clearly assigned, to a more complicated reality—to the crowded, multilingual, culturally polyphonic present of the Arabian peninsula—he is unable to free himself from the prison house of xenophobia, bigotry, and racism that was created by precisely such figures as his Sultan Khazael. In its failure, The Trench provides still one more lesson in the difficulties that the experience of oil presents for the novelistic imagination.

  AT LARGE IN BURMA 1996

  What Went Wrong?

  Like many Indians, I grew up on stories of other countries: places my parents and relatives had lived in or visited before the birth of the Republic of India, in 1947. To me, the most intriguing of these stories were those that my family carried out of Burma. I suspect that this was partly because Burma had become a kind of lost world in the early sixties, when I was old enough to listen to my relatives' stories. It was in 1962 that General Ne Win, the man who would be Burma's longtime dictator, seized power in a coup. Almost immediately he slammed the shutters and switched off the lights: Burma became the dark house of the neighborhood, huddled behind an impenetrable, overgrown fence. It was to remain shuttered for almost three decades.

  In retrospect, I am astonished by the degree to which the Ne Win regime succeeded in cutting the country off, even from the attention of its immediate neighbors. Burma is one of the larger countries in Southeast Asia, with a land area considerably greater than that of Thailand and a population of an estimated 46 million. It hangs like a mango between India, China, and Thailand, with the province of Tenasserim trailing like a tendril down into the Andaman Sea. Its border with India is hundreds of miles long. Calcutta, where I was born, is closer to Burma's principal urban centers, Rangoon and Mandalay, than it is to New Delhi. Yet while other neighboring countries—Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka—figured in our newspapers to the point of obsession, Burma was scarcely mentioned. In defiance of the laws of proximity, General Ne Win was able to render his country invisible to both its neighbors and the world at large.

  In my family, memories of Burma were kept alive by an old connection, and last December, on traveling to Rangoon, I found a trace of that connection in a small, nondescript temple in the commercial center of the city. The temple stands on a broad, straight road that was once known as Spark Street; it is now called Bo Aung Kyaw Street. This part of Rangoon was planned and built by British engineers in the late nineteenth century, and Spark Street still has a dark, gas-lit Victorian feel to it.

  The temple on Spark Street is merely a hall on the ground floor of an old apartment building. It was built in 1887 and has served ever since as a community center for Hindu immigrants from Bengal. I had heard about the temple as a child, from an aunt who had married into a wealthy Bengali family that had settled in Burma. My aunt's husband ran a prosperous timber business. He was nicknamed "the Prince" because of his extravagant tastes. My aunt and the Prince left Burma in 1942, in the last, panic-stricken weeks before the Japanese Army marched into Rangoon. They managed to bribe their way onto a ship that was sailing for Calcutta.

  The couple settled in Calcutta, and the Prince went back into the timber business. He was a distinguished-looking man, aquiline and ruddy-cheeked, always dressed in a starched cotton kurta and dhoti. In my earliest memories, he is a figure of truly princely munificence, driving up in his chauffeured Studebaker to swe
ep his relatives off to the most expensive shops in the city. This was not the way people did things in Calcutta; it was the Burmese side of him, and in the semisocialist India of that time, it couldn't last. He began to slide down the economic scale, slowly at first and then with gathering speed. By the time I was old enough to talk to him, his cars were gone and he was living in a small fourth-floor flat in a part of Calcutta where almost everyone was a refugee from somewhere or other; he just happened to be from farther away than most.

  The flat was crammed with books, from Mickey Spillane to Knut Hamsun. The Prince read voraciously and eclectically, mainly in English, a language I never heard him speak. When I went to visit him, he would lay aside his books and talk of Burma.

  "It was a golden land," he would say. "The richest country in Asia, except for Japan. There are no people on earth to compare with the Burmese—so generous, so hospitable, so kind to strangers. No one goes hungry in Burma—you just have to ask and someone will feed you."

  In college I discovered that the picture was not quite so simple. Indians had settled in Burma in large numbers in the late nineteenth century, after the British completed their conquest of the country. Indians had occupied a disproportionate number of government posts, and Indian merchants and moneylenders had come to dominate crucial sectors of the country's economy. I argued with the Prince. "But Indians were bitterly resented in Burma, weren't they?" I'd say. "Burmese nationalism practically started with anti-Indian riots."

  He acknowledged this with a nod and a shrug. "But that's just one part of the story," he'd say. "There was a lot of friendship too." Then his eyes would light up again. "Ah, but it was a golden land..." It is impossible, I suspect, to imagine oneself being resented by a place to which one has given such unreserved love.

  Neither the Prince nor my aunt ever returned to Burma, but my father, who had visited them there, went back once. The year was 1945, and he was an officer serving in the Allied Fourteenth Army. As the Allied forces advanced on Rangoon from the north, my father found himself both amazed and appalled by the scale of the destruction around him. The British had adopted a scorched-earth policy when they withdrew from Burma in 1942, demolishing bridges, setting fire to oil fields, and blocking the Irrawaddy's navigation channels with scuttled ships. Three years later, the retreating Japanese had reciprocated, destroying all that was left of Burma's infrastructure. "When buffaloes fight," goes a Burmese proverb, "the grass gets trampled." By the end of the war, after two bitterly fought campaigns, Burma was a devastated country.

  My father found Rangoon virtually unrecognizable, but on making his way to Spark Street he discovered that the temple had survived, and he was able to trace a few distant relatives who had remained in the neighborhood. They would have starved, they told him later, but for the army rations he steered their way.

  On the evening of my visit, the temple was all but empty: a handful of elderly men were seated around a table in the neon-lit hall. I went up to them and earned a warm welcome by mentioning the Prince's family name. Soon, as I sat with them at the table, the conversation turned to prewar Burma, and I found myself listening to echoes of the Prince's voice, intoning the very same words: "A golden land, the richest country in Asia, the envy of its neighbors, the kindest, most hospitable people on earth—even now, when everything is so scarce..."

  How did it all go wrong? I asked. Fifty years earlier, Burma had been the most developed country in the region, with an impressive agricultural surplus and a superabundance of natural resources—oil, timber, minerals. It had had an important petroleum industry, a highly educated population, almost universal adult literacy, a lively independent press, a rich literary culture, and a framework of democratic institutions. Now it was one of the most impoverished countries in the world's fastest-developing region, one of the United Nations' ten least developed nations on earth, and a byword for repression, xenophobia, and civil abuse. How could any country travel so far back so fast?

  The man seated next to me tapped my arm. He was well over seventy, a thin, upright man with a thatch of white hair. I shall call him Mr. Bose. Mr. Bose led me to the temple's entrance and pointed across the street to the dark, unlit compound of the Secretariat Building, a sprawling complex of decaying red brick offices built by the British at the turn of the century. "Do you see that veranda there?" he said, pointing to one on a second-floor walkway. "That was where Burma's future ended. Do you see that door? It leads to the room where General Aung San was assassinated, on July 19, 1947. I was just down the corridor—I saw his body lying there."

  I had often heard my father speak of General Aung San; he had met him once at an army barracks in Rangoon during the war. General Aung San had said very little—he was famously a man of few words—but he had made a powerful impression on everyone present. He was twenty-nine years old at the time, a strikingly good-looking young man, with high cheekbones, a receding hairline, and a good-humored twinkle in his eye.

  Despite his youth, Aung San was the country's acknowledged leader, the hero of its independence movement. A few years before, as a young student-politician, he had fled from British-ruled Burma and received military training from the Japanese. He was instrumental in organizing a militia of Burmese nationals in Thailand. In 1942 he marched back across the border at the head of the Burma Independence Army, accompanying the invading Japanese forces. Later, increasingly distrustful of the Japanese, he and his soldiers switched loyalties and joined the Allies. At the end of the war, it was widely believed that General Aung San would assume Burma's leadership once the British granted the country its independence, in 1948.

  Aung San was by birth a Burman and thus a member of the country's largest ethnic group. The Burmans are predominantly Buddhist and form two-thirds of the country's population. There are four sizable minorities—the Karen, the Rakhine, the Shan, and the Mon—and many smaller groups. Some are Buddhist and are linked with the people of neighboring Thailand. Others, such as the Kachin, the Karen, and the Karenni, include Christians, mainly from families that were converted by American Baptist missionaries in the nineteenth century. And in the west there is also a substantial Muslim population.

  What these different minorities have had in common, historically, is a fear of being dominated by the Burmans. Aung San, uniquely, was able to transcend this historical mistrust of Burman politicians. It probably helped that he was married to a Christian, Daw Khin Kyi, although he himself was a Buddhist.

  In April 1947, Burma's colonial administration held elections to choose the government that would assume power when the country became independent. Aung San led his party, the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League, to a resounding electoral victory. He was thirty-two; he had been married nearly five years and had fathered three children. The youngest, Suu Kyi, was two years old.

  The events of July 19, 1947, were fresh in Mr. Bose's memory, kept alive by years of telling and retelling. He was then working as a clerical superintendent in the colonial administration. His job required him to sit at a desk in a large hall, overseeing a team of clerks. General Aung San and his kitchen cabinet were meeting in a room down the corridor; Mr. Bose knew that room well, for he often delivered files there.

  Mr. Bose was sitting at his desk at ten-fifteen on the morning of July 19 when he heard an earsplitting noise. He looked up to find himself staring at a roomful of startled clerks. Then he heard feet thudding along the corridor and down the stairs. It took a moment before he realized that the earsplitting noise had been gunfire. By the time Mr. Bose reached the door, a crowd had gathered there. The room was full of smoke. Standing on tiptoe, he counted nine bodies inside, some sprawled on the floor, some slumped over a table. Six members of the cabinet had died with General Aung San. They were among the country's most respected politicians and included some of its most important minority leaders. Mr. Bose looked down and saw a thin trickle of blood winding past his feet.

  Mr. Bose learned that a group of men dressed in battle fatigues had driven into the
Secretariat compound in two jeeps, through the entrance on Dalhousie Street. They had run directly to the cabinet room, carrying guns; they had known exactly where to go. The soldiers ran back the way they had come, jumped into their jeeps, and drove away through the same gate. That was the last that was ever heard of them, although several suspects were rounded up and a right-wing politician was later charged with the assassination and hanged.

  This is the end, Mr. Bose thought as he stood in the corridor, looking into the bloody room. Nothing will ever be the same again.

  "Can you imagine the consequences in India or China if this had happened to Nehru and his cabinet or to Mao and the politburo?" Mr. Bose said to me. "That's something you have to remember when you think of Burma."

  The new Union of Burma attained its independence on schedule, in January 1948. U Nu, a trusted friend of Aung San's who had assumed the leadership of the party after the general's assassination, was sworn in as Burma's first prime minister.

  Three months later civil war broke out, with a vast Communist uprising. Serious ethnic insurgencies started the following year, when a group of Karen soldiers seized an armory on the outskirts of Rangoon and dug themselves in against government troops. Two Karen regiments of the Burma Army then mutinied, and they were soon joined by a regiment of Kachins.

  In colonial times, British recruiting policies had favored minority groups over the ethnic Burmans. The British Burma Army was formed largely of units such as the Karen Rifles and the Kachin Rifles. As a result, the civil war began with the insurgents outnumbering government troops, and they made short work of the government's inexperienced, understaffed official army. They captured Mandalay, Burma's second city, within six weeks and then advanced on Rangoon, the capital, which was already under siege, caught between Communist insurgents and Karen rebels. A year after independence, the authority of the Burmese government extended no farther than the city's outskirts. The administration came to be nicknamed the Rangoon Six-Mile Government. It survived largely because an arms shipment from India arrived just in time to supply the government's troops.