by Ian Buruma
Israel’s separation wall at the Qaladia checkpoint, near Ramallah, 2010
Count Harry Kessler, 1917
Satyajit Ray during the filming of Ghanashatru (Enemy of the People), 1989
Max Beckmann: Self-Portrait in Tuxedo, 1927
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Berlin Street Scene, 1913–1914
George Grosz: Grosz as Clown and Variety Girl, 1958
A wedding couple at the Window of the World theme park, Shenzhen, China, 2008
Drawing by R. Crumb, 1977
Mishima Yukio posing as Saint Sebastian, 1966
In some countries, most people are religious. A consequence of the constant sneering about religion, of any kind, is that it obscures political analysis. What should we think, for example, of the persecution of religious parties in Middle Eastern police states? Must we stand with secular dictatorships in Egypt and Syria just because they are opposed by the Muslim Brotherhood? Was a military coup in Algeria justified only because Islamists won democratic elections in 1991? There is no simple answer to any of these questions. But atheistic sloganeering does not help.
Hitchens seems to be perfectly well aware of this. He writes in his concluding chapter:
The usual duty of the “intellectual” is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae. But there is another responsibility, to say that some things are simple and ought not to be obfuscated.4
He is right. Standing up to Nazism or Stalinism was the only decent thing to do in the last century. There are turning points in history when there can be no ambiguity: 1939 was such a year, and for Communists perhaps 1956. The question is how Hitchens came to the conviction that 2001 was such a time. The mass murder perpetrated in lower Manhattan, Virginia, and Pennsylvania by Osama bin Laden and his terrorist gang must be strongly condemned. Nor do I have a quarrel with the claim that Saddam Hussein’s “state machine was modeled on the precedents of both National Socialism and Stalinism, to say nothing of Al Capone.” But the idea that September 11 was anything like 1939, when Hitler’s armies were about to sweep across Europe, is fanciful.
For Hitchens, however, it seems to have brought back the specter of the Commander. He quotes Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939,” when “Defenseless under the night / Our world in stupor lies.” He recalls Orwell’s essay, entitled “My Country Right or Left,” written in 1940, when Hitler was at his most menacing. And he thunders: “I don’t know so much about ‘defenseless.’ Some of us will vow to defend it, or help the defenders.” He decides that the US is “My country after all” (his italics). He realizes that “a whole new terrain of struggle had just opened up in front of me.” Acquiring US citizenship at the Jefferson Memorial may not be quite on the same order as sinking the Scharnhorst, but it was one way to contribute to the War on Terror, I guess.
In fact, as Hitchens writes, his break with the old left on the question of US military interventions came earlier, in the Balkans. In Bosnia, he writes, “I was brought to the abrupt admission that, if the majority of my former friends got their way about nonintervention, there would be another genocide on European soil.” I, for one, agreed with that sentiment then and still do. Still, Iraq in 2003 was not Bosnia in the early 1990s. Saddam had certainly been guilty of mass murder in the past, and would have had no scruples to be a killer again, but the Iraq War was not launched to stop genocide. It was sold to the public as a necessary defense against a tyrant’s acquisitions of nuclear weapons and a strike against the men who, as was quite falsely alleged, helped to bring the Twin Towers down. Liberal hawks and neocons, as well as some hopeful (or desperate) Iraqi liberals, were more sold on the idea of liberation and democracy, but officially that was an afterthought. If a democracy cannot make up its mind precisely why it needs to start a war, it is surely better not to start one in the first place.
Weapons of mass destruction did not clinch the argument for Hitchens. For even if it could have been proved that Saddam had none, he writes, “I would have argued—did in fact argue—that this made it the perfect time to hit him ruthlessly and conclusively.” Since 2001, in the mind of Hitchens, was like 1939, he skates over any distinction between Saddam and bin Laden, and talks blithely about “the Saddamist–Al Qaeda alliance.” So keen was he to be among the liberators, and so attracted to the heroic gesture, that both his moral compass and his journalistic instincts began to seriously let him down.
In an earlier phase of his career, Hitchens tells us, “I resolved to try and resist in my own life the jaded reaction that makes one coarsened to the ugly habits of power.” Quite right too. He was also commendably staunch about the use of torture by the British in Northern Ireland. A Labour minister who defended torture as a necessary measure is called “a bullying dwarf.” Hitchens writes: “Everybody knows the creepy excuses that are always involved here: ‘terrorism’ must be stopped, lives are at stake, the ‘ticking bomb’ must be intercepted.” What on earth was this same Hitchens thinking, then, when he adopted Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, as his new good friend?
Hitchens was so smitten with George W. Bush’s Pentagon, despite its connivance at torture, that he appears to have believed everything he was told: “In all my discussions with Wolfowitz and his people at the Pentagon, I never heard anything alarmist on the WMD issue.” To be sure, Wolfowitz has since admitted that oil was a major reason for going to war, and the threat of WMDs was just a convenient “bureaucratic” excuse. But his Pentagon boss certainly was alarmist about the nuclear threat, as were the president and the vice-president.
In claiming that there was no alarmism at the Pentagon, Hitchens is either disingenuous or a lousy reporter.
He appears to want it both ways, however. On the one hand, WMDs didn’t matter, and on the other he wants us to believe that they were indeed a threat, and what is more, that he, Hitchens, found proof of this. UN inspectors under Hans Blix looked at five hundred sites in Iraq without coming up with any evidence of WMDs before they were recalled. But Hitchens dismisses these as “very feeble ‘inspections.’ ” Blix must have been very feeble indeed, for Hitchens, on one trip to Baghdad, in the company of Wolfowitz, was shown components of a gas centrifuge dug up from the back garden of Saddam’s chief physicist. And he was told by the US Defense Department that “some of the ingredients of a chemical weapon” had been found under a mosque.
That is not all. Before the war a band of comrades, including Ahmed Chalabi—a slippery political operator with strong links to Iran—was taken up by Hitchens, this time with the rather grandiose name the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. It was “the combination of influences” of this group “by which political Washington was eventually persuaded that Iraq should be helped into a post-Saddam era, if necessary by force.” And this group of heroes, according to Hitchens, was subjected to a “near-unbelievable deluge of abusive and calumnious dreck.” This unbelievable deluge was dropped, no doubt, by the kind of “Western liberals” whose “sick relativism … permitted them to regard ‘honor’ killings and genital mutilation as expressions of cultural diversity.”5 Not to mention liberals like “Norman Mailer, John Updike, and even Susan Sontag,” who all “appeared to be petrified of being caught on the same side as a Republican president.”
Again, the narcissism, the narrow scale of characters, and the parochial perspective are startling: “We were the only ones to see 1968 coming.” It is as if the central focus of the Iraq War was about scores to be settled between Hitchens and Noam Chomsky or Edward Said. It is odd that in all his lengthy accounts of the war, the name of Dick Cheney is mentioned only once (because he happened to share the same dentist with Hitchens). What is utterly missing is a sense of perspective, and of the two qualities Hitchens claims to prize above all: skepticism and irony. A skeptic would not answer the question whether he blamed his former leftist friends for criticizing the war with: “Yes, absolutely. I was right, and they were wrong, that’s pretty mu
ch it in a nutshell.” Asked about his literary influences, Hitchens mentioned Arthur Koestler. He was right on the mark. Koestler, too, lurched from cause to cause, always with the same unshakable conviction.6
How, then, does Hitchens think? Several times in the book he expresses his loathing of fanaticism, especially religious fanaticism, which in his account is a tautology. As a typical example he cites the Japanese suicide pilots at the end of World War II. In fact, many were not so much fanatical as in despair about a corrupt society going under in a catastrophic war. But if modern Japanese history must serve as a guide to our own times, Hitchens might have mentioned a different category of misguided figures: the often Marxist or formerly Marxist intellectuals who sincerely believed that Japan was duty-bound to go to war to liberate Asia from wicked Western capitalism and imperialism. They saw 1941 as their finest hour, the moment when men were separated from boys, when principle had to be defended, when those who didn’t share their militancy were disloyal weaklings. These journalists, academics, politicians, and writers were not all emperor-worshipers or Shintoists, but they were believers nonetheless. The man who emerges from this memoir is a bit like them: clearly intelligent, often principled, and often deeply wrongheaded, but above all, a man of faith.
1 Hitch-22: A Memoir (Twelve, 2010).
2 These flirtations elicit the odd remark that he has a special sympathy for women, because he knows “what it’s like to be the recipient of unwanted or even coercive approaches.” This, I feel, underrates the seductive appeal of the habitual charmer.
3 Not that the Argentine junta leader was not guilty of horrendous crimes, but even criminals, alas, are human.
4 This dilemma explains the title of the book, Hitch-22.
5 If you look for them carefully, especially in universities, you might still find some people who think like that, but I would hesitate to call them liberals.
6 Perhaps “liberating Iraq,” the caption to a photograph of Hitchens smoking a cigarette with delighted Iraqis, is meant to be ironical. Somehow, I doubt it.
16
THE LAST BENGALI RENAISSANCE MAN
ON A VISIT to Calcutta I was told a story about Louis Malle. The French director had spent some time in the city to film part of his famous—and in India notorious—documentary on India. One day he was shooting a riot scene, quite common in Calcutta. This infuriated a Bengali policeman who ran up to Malle threatening to smash the camera. Malle objected. “Who do you think you are?” shouted the Bengali. “Louis Malle,” replied the director. “Ah,” said the Bengali with a sweet smile, “Zazie dans le métro.”
It is no doubt an apocryphal tale, but one hears many such stories in Calcutta. It tells you something about the atmosphere of the place, an extraordinary combination of squalor and high culture, violence and civility.
I was told this anecdote by an urbane newspaper editor called Aveek Sarkar. We met in his office, housed in an old building in the center of a commercial district where beggars and rickshaw wallahs dodged in and out of the hopeless traffic jams, while entire families, the children naked, the adults in flimsy clothes, washed themselves by burst waterpipes. Aveek was dressed in a dhoti and smoked Montecristo cigars. He offered me a fine Scotch whiskey and talked about Bengali poetry. Every Bengali is a poet, he said. There are at least five hundred poetry magazines in the state of West Bengal and when Calcutta celebrates the birthday of its greatest poet, Rabindranath Tagore, poetry bulletins are published by the day, sometimes even by the hour. “We don’t look to the rest of India, which is intellectually inferior,” he mused. “Our literature is related to French literature, not Hindi. I don’t even read Hindi. Calcutta is like Paris.”
Aveek kindly introduced me to Satyajit Ray, the film director, graphic designer, composer of music, and author of children’s stories. He lives in a grand old apartment building in an elegantly crumbling area known as South of Park Street. His working room is stacked with books—anything from Bengali literature to fifteenth-century Italian art to modern British theater design. There are inkstands, pens and paintbrushes, and an old-fashioned gramophone. And in the midst of this sits Ray, a tall, handsome man, dressed in a dhoti, drinking tea. He speaks English with a refined baritone drawl, rather like a donnish Oxford aesthete. Without having seen Calcutta—or, indeed, his films—one might mistake him for a brown sahib, a genteel colonial relic. He is something far more complex than that, however, for he represents a style historically and socially rooted where most of his films take place, in the decaying grandeur of his native city.
Ray had been very ill. He still appeared weary. “It’s a frightful bore making films in India these days,” he said. The Bengali film industry was in a sad state. Cut off from a large potential audience in Bangladesh by a government ban there on Indian films, there are not enough Bengalis to sustain the industry anymore. Compared to the average movie produced in Calcutta today, Ray said he would rather see a splashy Bombay musical: “At least there’s plenty of action and pretty girls.”
His last film was completed from his hospital bed, by issuing instructions to his son. It is possible that some of Ray’s genius will be carried on to the next generation, but not likely. Genius, of course, cannot be taught. Besides that, India has changed too much. It is almost impossible now to make the kind of understated, humanist movies that Ray did. The style is not fashionable, but then it never really was. One of the most remarkable things about Ray’s films is that they ever got made at all.
In an essay about the Japanese cinema, Ray commented on Kurosawa’s masterpiece, Rashomon: “It was the kind of film that immediately suggests a culmination, a fruition, rather than a beginning. You could not—as a film making nation, have a Rashomon and nothing to show before it.”1 It is hard to disagree, but this makes Ray’s achievement all the more baffling. For what, in the Indian cinema, laid a foundation for Pather Panchali, Ray’s first film, made in 1955? It had the maturity of a culmination of something, while in fact it was only the beginning. As early influences Ray cites the humanism of Jean Renoir, the technical economy and realism of Rossellini and De Sica, but he had no Indian masters to follow or challenge. Yet unlike so many “arty” Asian films, Ray’s work was never a reflection of half-understood Western styles. From the very beginning, his films were unmistakably Indian. How did he do it? What, if not Indian cinema, was his artistic source?
“The raw material of the cinema is life itself. It is incredible that a country which has inspired so much painting and music and poetry should fail to move the film maker. He has only to keep his eyes open, and his ears. Let him do so.”2 Ray wrote this in 1948, seven years before his first film was shown. It offers at least a vague and general answer to the question above. There is more to Ray, though, than a sensitive pair of eyes and ears. To find clues to his particular vision one must, I think, go back much further than Renoir or Rossellini, back to the Bengali renaissance of the 1820s and 1830s.
The Bengali renaissance was the product of a small number of families, often divided among themselves in cliques. These families—the Tagores, the Debs, the Rays, the Ghoses, the Mallicks—were mostly high-caste Hindus and were collectively known as the bhadralok, literally, gentlemen of substance. The British called them the “educated natives.” While the Bengali elite had consisted of large landowners, the bhadralok attained social prominence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by acting as middlemen for the East India Company and private British traders. They were the clerks, the fixers, the contractors, the translators, the minor civil servants, and the tax collectors who made fortunes by fleecing the old landlords, who often ended up in penury (the theme of one of Ray’s best films, The Music Room, 1958). Their main enthusiasm was modern education, for which they had an almost unquenchable thirst: science, English literature, European philosophy, and politics. They organized reading societies, established English-language schools, stocked libraries, started printing presses, and published newspapers. The bhadralok, in other words, were th
e first modern Indian bourgeoisie: men who sought a spiritual answer to modernization in a fusion of European liberalism and enlightened Hinduism. Anxious to be cosmopolitan, they were still steeped in their own past.
This was the source of some ambivalence. Since they were colonial middlemen their interests lay with the British Empire, which their political ideals would ultimately lead them to oppose. Their sons and grandsons, frustrated by the lack of political power on the one hand and the inertia of Indian traditions on the other, often turned to Marxist radicalism. The reformist zeal of the bhadralok left a legacy in Bengal of Marxist government and occasional terrorism. The cultural sophistication, the fruit of the Bengali renaissance, gave us thousands of garrulous coffee-shop philosophers, millions of poets, and the occasional genius, such as Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray.
Tagore’s grandfather, Dwarkanath, was a typical example of the pioneering bhadralok. He started off as the chief native officer of the East India Company’s opium and salt department, but in true bhadralok style later owned several English-language newspapers. A British friend described him as “a Hindoo with an enlarged mind and a truly British spirit.” He might have said the same about Satyajit Ray’s grandfather, Upendrakisore Ray, an accomplished musician of Western classical music, graphic artist, composer of songs, and writer of children’s stories. Upendrakisore launched a children’s monthly magazine called Gandesh, which Satyajit revived in 1961 and in which most of the short stories in The Unicorn Expedition first appeared.3 Few renaissance men maintain the same level of excellence in everything they put their hands to. Although Ray’s stories, written for teenagers, never quite scale the heights of his films, they are suffused with the same spirit.
His characters reflect the gentle patrician humanism, so typically bhadralok and so typical of Ray’s work. There is Shonku, the scientist-inventor, whom Ray calls “a mild-mannered version of Professor Challenger,” one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s creations. Professor Shonku travels around the world showing off his strange inventions—a computer the size of a football that knows the answers to a million questions, or Corvus, the crow genius. Like Ray, Shonku is cosmopolitan, at home in most capital cities, thirsty for new knowledge, but at the same time very Indian in his fascination with the metaphysical. His adventures take him to Zen gardens in Kyoto and Tibetan monasteries where he learns how to fly off to an imaginary land filled with unicorns. The Shonku stories, in the manner of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, humanize science. The author’s attitude, his humanism, and his faith in science remind one of a more self-confident age in the West, when people still believed in progress, an age before Auschwitz and the invention of the atom bomb. Indians (and most Asians, for that matter) often like to make the neat distinction between scientific Western civilization and spiritual Eastern civilization. Professor Shonku, again a bit like his creator, quite successfully manages to straddle both.
