1913

by Charles Emmerson

  At the end of June 1913, as existing tenancies came to an end, black farmers attempted to renew their contracts, unaware of the new law. Some white farmers, equally unaware, accepted. ‘It was only when they went to register the new tenancies’, wrote Plaatje, ‘that the law officers of the Crown laid bare the cruel fact that to provide a landless Native with accommodation was forbidden’.70 ‘Then only was the situation realised’ by black South Africans, he continued – South Africa had inched further away from being their country, perhaps it would never truly be their country again. Unlike British-ruled Bombay, where sections of local Indian population had secured themselves a leading position in the life of their city and substantial influence in the future direction of their country, the native population of white-ruled South Africa had been unceremoniously reduced to the status of third-class subjects in a land they had once called their own.

  TEHRAN

  Under Foreign Eyes

  In the distant past, over 2,000 years previously, Persia – as the country we now call Iran was generally known in 1913 – had been a great and feared nation, with an empire which included Turkey, the coastal zone of Egypt, and most of the rest of the Middle East. By 1913, its empire had been pared back. Where once the country’s geography – jammed between the Persian Gulf, the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Caucasus, Afghanistan, and the Indian Ocean – had provided a springboard for Persia’s conquest of its neighbours, the country’s geographic position now made it an object of unwelcome interest by newer and more dynamic powers, Britain and Russia in particular, who saw it as a buffer between their respective empires, and as a prospective market for their goods.

  Persia’s domestic economic development had stalled long ago. Its internal political situation was lamentable. In July 1913, former Viceroy of India Lord Curzon relayed a contemporary description of the country as:

  a country minus a King – true, because he is only a boy; minus a Regent, because the Regent has been travelling about for some time in Europe; minus a Parliament, because the Parliament has been abolished; minus a Government, because no Government can be said to exist; with no army but the robber bands … and with no money except that which she can extract from Great Britain and Russia.1

  In the last few years the country had been convulsed by a constitutional revolution in 1906 as well as by civil war, international intrigue and foreign military intervention. As Curzon described it in 1913, the country was now in an advanced state of dismemberment, the fig leaf of sovereignty barely hiding the role of foreigners in determining its future: a Russian sphere of influence in the north, a British sphere of influence in the south, and a weak government in the middle, with a divided cabinet, a fifteen-year-old boy-Shah and, for much of the year, an absentee Regent. What remained, then, was Persia as an idea – a memory of ancient greatness, catapulted into the twentieth century. But was that enough?

  In Tehran, the Persian capital, uncertainty reigned as to the future course of government, with the ship of state leaky and rudderless. Since the Regent’s departure for Europe the previous year, noted a British diplomatic dispatch in May 1913, ‘His Majesty [the Shah] has done absolutely nothing but waste his time dawdling around eating sweets’, contributing to the boy’s adolescent chubbiness, and to the sense of the country’s political drift.2 Rather than being encouraged to govern, the Shah’s courtiers preferred to ‘encourage him in his idleness’, the note reported, ‘and instil into his mind that women and futile pleasures are much more desirable than intelligence and learning’. Two months later, with the Regent still absent, things had not improved. ‘There is a lot of “if” and no small share of “but” in the present political situation in Persia’, the British minister in Tehran wrote sternly back to London.3 ‘It seems almost inconceivable under the circumstances that the Government coach goes on at all’, he continued. And yet it rumbled on, ‘for all the world like one of the Noah’s Ark vehicles that convey the unfortunate traveller over the stony, bumpy road between Resht and Tehran’.

  Ahmad Shah Qajar. Since the departure of the Persian Regent to Europe, wrote a British diplomat in 1913, ‘His Majesty [the Shah] has done absolutely nothing but waste his time dawdling around eating sweets’.

  At the end of that road, in Tehran itself, lay a city of a few hundred thousand, the dilapidated capital of a dilapidated country. ‘If you desire comfort, do not travel to Tehran!’ advised European resident Dorothy de Warzée.4 The condition of the city in 1913 compared unfavourably with that of more up-to-date Bombay or Algiers where the crowded compactness of those cities’ geography, and the adoption of Western technologies, made even the poorest parts of town appear to be bustling, on-the-make places. Tehran, in contrast, exuded a sense of irretrievably faded magnificence. It straggled haphazardly across miles of open ground. Wide and unpaved roads ran between beautiful and overgrown gardens, hidden from public view by tumbledown walls. The city, to put it mildly, had seen better days.

  Around Tehran’s old perimeter ran defensive walls, punctured by fourteen colourfully tiled gates, and a moat. But by 1913, the moat had become the city’s rubbish dump. ‘Into this moat’, wrote de Warzée, ‘the carcases of all the animals that die are thrown; it is the usual thing to see a gorged circle of pariah dogs sitting in happy repletion after a mid-day meal off these remains.’ Although electric lights had been strung up in a few parts of town, Tehran by night was a dark and dangerous city, lit mostly by the ‘mitigated darkness of a few petroleum lamps’ – and ‘woe to the uninitiated who walk or drive unwarily by their faint flicker’.

  By day, the city took on a somewhat brighter hue, the streets filling with pedlars and merchants, tea houses opening up, mud bricks being laid out to dry, women washing their linen in the street, men having their hair cut by street barbers and, as was the custom, dyed red, black or brown, to cover up the signs of age. ‘There are no old men in Teheran’, noted de Warzée, ‘for it is not polite to be wiser than the Shah’.5 Jugglers and masked figures with tame bears and monkeys jostled for attention with beggars – ‘worse than those in Italy’ – bearing their misshapen limbs, injuries and skin diseases as proof of their poverty, misfortune and worthiness of alms, which it was the responsibility of all Muslims to provide. And at the centre of it all lay the bazaar:

  The Bazaar is a little world; it is roofed in like an immense tunnel, and is always cool, with scarcely any light. It is the centre of all conspiracies and plots, and a sort of gigantic club-house the members of which have different political interests; all the mischief that can be planned comes from the Bazaar, and all the rumours, fantastic and otherwise … All criminals, if they can but reach the Bazaar, are safe, because there it is very difficult to discover their whereabouts. It is like a great beehive, with endless cellars and dark little alleys leading by yet darker, cavern-like openings to courtyard or house, with always an outlet hidden somewhere behind, a maze only to be threaded by the native; the foreigner usually finds himself in a cul-de-sac, from which he will have to retrace his steps if he is without a guide.6

  One might get lost in the bazaar, but for the patient European traveller in 1913 there were bargains to be had. Families were selling off their heirlooms – a piece of intricate jewellery here, a French watch there – to cover the rising price of life in a country where trade was interrupted, and the surrounding countryside beset with difficulties. In the north, where the Russians had imposed themselves, the situation, was, in general, grimly stable. In the south, insecurity reigned. There, brigandage was such, Curzon suggested before the House of Lords, that a case of tea from Bombay bound for the central Persian city of Isfahan would now, rather than being ferried up the Persian Gulf and then overland to Isfahan, more probably be sent around Arabia, through the Suez Canal, through the Dardanelles to the Black Sea, entering Russia at Batumi, and then down to Isfahan via Baku: a detour of several thousand miles. In such ways, by adding time and cost to every exchange with the outside world, rural instability exacted its price in
the everyday lives of the peaceful residents of the capital.

  Curzon knew well the country whereof he spoke. Having travelled through Persia in his early thirties he had published in 1892 a two-volume book – Persia and the Persian Question – which he had intended to be, and no doubt believed still was twenty years later, the definitive account of the country.7 In it, he described a lonely, dramatic country of extremes. ‘It is difficult to bring home to English readers, whose ideas of nature are drawn exclusively from the West, the extremity of the contrast that meets the eye’, Curzon had written:

  Mountains in Europe are for the most part blue or purple in colour; in Persia they are flame-red, or umber, or funereal drab. Fields in Europe, when not decked with the green of grass or crops, are crimson with upturned mould. In Persia they are only distinguishable from the brown desert by the dry beds of the irrigation ditches. A typical English village consists of detached and often picturesque cottages, half hidden amid venerable trees. A typical Persian village is a cluster of filthy mud huts, whose outline is a crude combination of the perpendicular and the horizontal, huddled within the protection of a decayed mud wall … Rivers do not roll between trim banks, nor do brooks babble over stones. Either you are stopped by a foaming torrent, or you barely moisten your horse’s fetlocks in fording a pitiful thread.

  Across this vast land – some of it mountainous, some of it virtual desert, some of it fertile, some of it not – there was not a single railway line outside Tehran, even in 1913. There were a few roads deemed suitable for wheeled traffic, mostly in the north of Persia, leading from Tehran up to the province of Azerbaijan in the north, to Mashhad in the east and to Qom and Isfahan in central Persia. ‘The remaining roads are either caravan or mule tracks which have existed from time immemorial’, concluded a British military intelligence report of the time, ‘long stretches of sand, rough mountain tracks covered with boulders and loose jagged stones, slippery rocks, narrow defiles, and steep gradients are the characteristics of most Persian roads’.8 This was a landscape which reinforced local tribal allegiances, which conspired against strong central government and which provided perfect cover for marauding bands of armed men – troublemakers, brigands or heroes, depending on one’s interests; insurgents, outlaws or mujaheds depending on one’s affiliations. Justice in such parts of the world as these was summary: religious authorities took it upon themselves to mete out punishments for religious offences; civil authorities were responsible for judgement on everything else – drawing their inspiration from past edicts, local custom, Sharia law, or from a simple sense of pragmatism.9 More often than not, order was maintained by force – and by force of character. In the distant corners of Persia, the Shah in Tehran might seem as distant as the sun; Europe, as distant as the stars beyond. Epidemics, droughts and famines were common.

  Above all, this was a man’s world, where women played a traditional family-oriented role, even if some women in Tehran, exposed to the literature and political currents of Europe and America, now chafed more keenly at the injustices of their position. ‘Alas!’ wrote Taj al-Saltana, a harem-born daughter of a former Shah, ‘Persian women have been placed together with cattle and beasts’:

  They live their entire lives of desperation in prison, crushed under the weight of bitter ordeals. At the same time, they see and hear from afar and reading the newspapers about the way in which suffragettes in Europe arise with determination to demand their rights: universal franchise, the right to vote in parliament, the right to include the affairs of government. They are winning successes. In America their rights are fully established and they are striving with serious determination. The same is true in London and Paris. My teacher! How I wish I could travel to Europe and meet these freedom-seeking ladies! I would say to them ‘… cast a look at the continent of Asia. Look into the houses, where the walls are three or five metres high and the only entryway is a door guarded by a doorman’.10

  Unable to attend the Budapest meeting of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance in 1913, representatives of the women of Persia sent a telegram instead. They were nonetheless mentioned in the conference proceedings. ‘Do not forget’, urged Mrs Carrie Chapman Catt, the American woman presiding, ‘that this [Persia] is a Mohammedan nation and that a modern liberal element within that religion was slowly but surely lifting people to enlightenment and self-respect’.11 Chapman Catt blamed recent foreign intervention – Russian and British – for undercutting a wider process of national political reform and, therefore, women’s hopes of an improvement in their own situation.

  Persia’s population was divided by more than sex – indeed, as a linguistic and ethnic group, Persians themselves actually only made up half the country’s population, out of a total of around twelve million.12 Another two and half million were Azeri-speaking. Two hundred thousand were Mazanderanis, living on the fertile shores of the Caspian. Additionally, amongst the scattered non-Persian tribes in the country there were Kurds in the west, Arabs in the south at the head of the Persian Gulf, Baluchis in the south-east, Qashqa’is in the south-west and Bakhtiaris, key political players, between the Persian Gulf and Tehran. After these came a dizzying array of smaller groups, including Afghans, Turcomans, Hazaras, Basseris, Tajiks – and the Turkic-speaking Qajars, from which group the Shah himself was drawn. Shi’a Islam predominated throughout the country, providing some of the unifying glue of an otherwise disparate enterprise and making Shi’a religious leaders the custodians of Persian national identity as much as any national political magnate. But there were also 100,000 or more clandestine Baha’is (considered foreign-inspired conspiratorial heretics by Shi’a clergy and dangerous social reformers by the Shah). In Yazd, Shiraz and Tehran and elsewhere there were Jewish communities, and a handful of Zoroastrians, forerunners of the Parsis who dominated the economy and trade of the city of Bombay. There were pockets of Assyrian Christians and Armenian Christians. Franz Joseph, the Austro-Hungarian Emperor in Vienna, would surely have sympathised with the dilemmas facing any ruler of such a country.

  In the old despotic Persia, the political regime which survived into the beginning of the twentieth century, the Shah was nominally the central pivot of the country’s politics, claiming both the religious sanction of Islam and a link back to more ancient Persian glories symbolised by the lion and the sun on the imperial Qajar crest and on the national Persian flag. As Curzon found in the 1890s, the Shah was praised as high as the snow-capped mountains around – but as a symbol of past greatness more than as a real political leader. Even before the disturbances of the twentieth century, it was an open question how far the Shah’s writ ran outside the capital city. Unlimited in theory, in reality his power was circumscribed. Local governors might be linked to him by family ties, by the awards of great titles, and by extravagant and unbreakable oaths of loyalty, but there was no modern bureaucracy to speak of to enforce his will. The foreign ministry, while keeping legations in all the major European capitals, also posted officials in the provincial capitals of Persia itself – to keep tabs on local governors, it was said. This was hardly a sign of great central authority.

  And these were problems of governance which, whether the Shah was bound by a constitution or not, could not be changed overnight, by the stroke of a pen. Dealing with them would require long-term administrative reforms, a change in political culture and a period of security in which reforms could take root. Recent Persian history, however, had provided only spasmodic reform, and precious little security. European countries offered little real help other than lending money to the regime – which left it drowning in debt. On occasion, Russia actively conspired against Persian renewal, preferring a weak neighbour to a strong one. The overall result for Persia was drift, punctured by protest – or, as American William Morgan Shuster preferred to describe it, slow strangulation. Briefly employed as a reforming Treasurer-General of Persia in 1911 – before he was forced out under Russian pressure – Shuster found the odds stacked against him, and against Persia’s r
enaissance. Back in the United States in 1912, he introduced his written account of his time in Persia with a melancholy couplet of his own devising, a prophecy and a lament: ‘Time with whose passage certain pains abate, but sharpens those of Persia’s unjust fate’.13

  There had been stirrings of modernisation, or at least the awareness of its necessity, when Curzon was in Persia in the 1890s. Nasser al-Din Shah, who reigned for nearly fifty years up until his assassination in 1896, had travelled to Europe and been fascinated by the march of progress he observed there. But, once back in Tehran, this fascination had not been translated into sustained Persian modernisation, but rather dissipated in the Shah’s intense but short-lived passions for the latest novelties. ‘He is continually taking up and pushing some new scheme or invention which, when the caprice has been gratified, is neglected or allowed to expire’, Curzon had written:

  One week it is gas; another it is electric light. Now it is a staff college; anon, a military hospital. To-day it is a Russian uniform; yesterday it was a German man-of-war for the Persian Gulf. A new army warrant is issued this year; a new code of law is promised for the next. Nothing comes of any of these brilliant schemes, and the lumber-rooms of the palace are not more full of broken mechanism and discarded bric-a-brac than are the pigeon holes of government bureaux of abortive reforms and dead fiascos.14

  But time, like geography, was not on Persia’s side.