Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

by Pankaj Mishra

  I never did hear what happened to Rajesh. Such stories were in the newspapers every day. But if took me awhile to sort out my confused feelings. I kept seeing Rajesh at that busy crossing, trapped in the dense swarm of scooters, cycle rickshaws, bullock carts, cars, buses, trucks, and bicycles, the four men converging upon him, producing crude pistols from their pockets …

  Rajesh had bewildered me: his self-consciousness about his Brahmin identity, the pistols in his room, his constant talk of the void. I could now see that he had been struggling to make sense of his life, to connect the disparate elements that existed in it; but so, in a different way, was I.

  In 1996 I thought of writing something on Edmund Wilson. I had tried before, in 1995, the year of Wilson’s centenary, but what I wrote then seemed to me too much like a reprise of what a lot of other people had already said. I realized, though, that I had been trying to write about him in the way an American or European writer would have. What I had in mind was a straightforward exposition of Wilson’s key books; it hadn’t occurred to me that a separate narrative probably existed in my private discovery of Wilson’s writings in a dusty old library in the ancient town of Benares.

  Browsing through old papers in preparation for another attempt, I came across a photocopy of his essay on Flaubert’s politics. It looked familiar. Idly flipping through the essay, I reached the pages on Sentimental Education, where I saw some passages underlined in red. As I’m not in the habit of marking up i printed text, I wondered who had done this. I read the underlined sentences:

  Frédéric is only the more refined as well as the more incompetent side of the middle-c lass mediocrity of which the dubious promoter represents the more flashy and active aspect. And so in the case of the other characters, the journalists and the artists, the members of the various political factions, the remnants of the old nobility, Frédéric finds the same shoddiness and lack of principle which are gradually revealed in himself …

  On another page the underlined passage read:

  Flaubert’s novel plants deep in our mind an idea which we never quite get rid of: the suspicion that our middle-class society of manufacturers, businessmen, and bankers, of people who live on or deal in investments, so far from being redeemed by its culture, has ended by cheapening and invalidating all the departments of culture, political, scientific, artistic, and religious, as well as corrupting and weakening the ordinary human relations: love, friendship, and loyalty to cause—till the whole civilization seems to dwindle.

  The passage offered a small glimpse of Wilson’s way of finding the sources and effects of literature in the overlap between individual states of mind and specific historical realities. But I hadn’t noticed this when I discovered the piece. I read it again and thought about the red underlinings. And then, after almost seven years, Rajesh strode back into my consciousness. I remembered the afternoon I had given Sentimental Education and Wilson’s essay to him; I remembered his words to me on the train, words I dismissed as exaggeration, the determined look on his face as he said, “It is the story of my world. I know these people well. Your hero, Edmund Wilson, he also knows them.”

  What had he meant by that?

  The question did not leave me. And there came a time when I began to think I had understood very little, and misunderstood much, during those months in Benares. I recalled the day I went to visit Rajesh’s village, and I at last saw that there had been a purpose behind Rajesh’s invitation to his home, his decision to reveal so frankly his life to me. Even the cryptic remarks about Sentimental Education and Wilson on the train: He wanted me to know that not only had he read the novel, but he had also drawn, with Wilson’s help, his own conclusions from it.

  In the hard and mean world he had lived in, first as a child laborer and then as a hired criminal for politicians and businessmen, Rajesh would have come to know well the grimy underside of middle-class society. What became clearer to me now was how quick he had been to recognize that the society Flaubert and Wilson wrote about wasn’t much different from the one he inhabited in Benares. “It’s the story of my world,” he had said. I couldn’t see it then, but in Benares I had been among people who, like Frédéric Moreau and his friends, had either disowned or, in many cases, moved away from their provincial origins in order to realize their dreams of success in the bourgeois world. Only a handful of them were able to get anywhere near to realizing their dreams while the rest saw their ambitions dwindle away in successive disappointments over the years. The degradation of bribery, sycophancy, and nepotism that people were forced into in their hunt for jobs was undermining in itself; so pervasive was the corruption around them that neither those who succeeded nor those who failed were able to escape its taint.

  The small, unnoticed tragedies of thwarted hopes and ideals Flaubert wrote about in Sentimental Education were all around us. And this awareness, which was also mine but which I tried to evade through, ironically, the kind of obsessive reading that had led me to the novel in the first place, had been Rajesh’s private key to the book. Thus, where I saw only the reflection of a personal neurosis—the character of Frédéric in particular embodying my sense of inadequacy, my harsh seff-image—he had discovered a social and psychological environment that was similar to the one he lived in.

  That discovery did honor to both Flaubert and Wilson. The worlds we knew in Benares were many years away from those of the French novelist and the American critic. Yet—and this was a measure of their greatness—they seemed to have had an accurate, if bitter, knowledge of its peculiar human ordeals and futility. It was a knowledge Rajesh himself arrived at by a somewhat different route. “To fully appreciate the book,” Wilson had written of Sentimental Education, “one must have had time to see something of life.” It sounds like a general sort of adage, but Rajesh exemplified its truth even as he moved into another world, taking what in retrospect look like all the wrong turns. Rajesh had known how to connect whatever little he read to the world around himself, much in the same way Wilson had done in his essay and in his other writings, a way that revealed a symbiotic relationship between life and literature that I, despite all my reading, was not fully to grasp until long after I had left Benares and thought again of that time of hopeful, confused striving when I first read Edmund Wilson.

  PART ONE

  ALLAHABAD

  The Nehrus, the Gandhis, and Democracy

  1. The Colonial City and the Countryside

  In September 2000 India held its third general election in as many years after the coalition government dominated by the Hindu nationalist BJP (Indian People’s Party) collapsed in New Delhi. The Hindu nationalists, who had conducted nuclear tests and challenged Pakistan to a final war over Kashmir soon after joining the coalition government in 1998, were expected to strengthen their position and resume their work of turning India into a militant Hindu state. I thought then of returning to Allahabad, the North Indian city where I had lived as an undergraduate student from 1985 to 1988, a time when Hindu nationalism still seemed as marginal in India as it had been for the previous four decades.

  Allahabad lies in the heart of the vast North Indian plains, at the confluence of the two sacred rivers of Hinduism, the Ganges and the Yamuna. Flying across the plains on a clear day, you can follow the rivers as they descend from the Himalayas and then meander through great expanses of flat cultivated land, past clusters of ancient cities and towns. Three millennia ago their waters provided the basis for the civilization of the original Aryan settlers of North India. Each winter hundreds of thousands of pilgrims still travel to Allahabad from all across India for a religious fair near the confluence, and every twelve years the Kumbh Mela, the largest human gathering in the world, attracts millions of Hindus to the site.

  Yet the place isn’t easy to get to. Commercial flights have been discontinued, and during the election period the overnight train from Delhi was overbooked. To get to Allahabad. in time for the early campaigning, I had to take the multi-stop flight from Delhi to Benares
, along with a tour group of Italians traveling to see the erotic temple sculpture at Khajuraho, and then drive eighty miles east to Allahabad.

  The flight is operated by one of India’s private airlines. The breakfast was freshly cooked and warm, the toilets were clean and generously supplied with cologne, and the courtesy and efficiency of the staff were like marvels compared with the resolute badness of the state-owned Indian Airlines. Miles out of Delhi, moving deeper into a part of India still untouched by the entrepreneurial energy and foreign investments of recent years, the flight could seem part of the good things contact with the global economy had brought to India: higher standards of health and hygiene; a greater alertness to individual needs.

  But an older India of caste and poverty is never far away even on a plane with its Western-style amenities, its atmosphere of international ease and luxury. In Khajuraho, after the package tourists had departed, another kind of people came on board: dark-complexioned, barefoot cleaners with little brushes and rags. They filled the cabin with the smell of sweat and chewed tobacco, and as they went scuttling through the narrow aisles on hands and knees—as if their degradation were required by their low caste—the expression on the face of the pretty short skirted stewardess, who could have been the glamorous poster girl of a European or an American airline, was one of pure distaste.

  The long, bone-rattling drive afterward to Allahabad on potholed roads, through calf-deep floods, past the tin-roofed shacks and rain battered villages of mud and thatch—the cowering huts, so picturesque from the plane, now appearing frail, in danger of collapsing onto the sodden earth from which they had been so arduously raised, the low-caste women paving tiny courtyards with cow dung, the men spinning rope for the string cots, the sky low and gray over the flat fields and tiny huts and the buffaloes placid in muddy poots—the long drive through a world that belonged to itself as fixedly as it would have two centuries ago was a reminder of how far even the superficially good things of a globalized economy were from this heavily populated and impoverished part of India.

  India, with its severe disparities of income, caste, and religion, is split into so many separate worlds. You can live in one without knowing anything about the others, and no world has an obvious past until you make the effort of dredging it up. I didn’t find out until later that the region between Allahabad and Benares, familiar to me from my time as an undergraduate student at Allahabad University, hadn’t always been so impoverished. In the early years of the nineteenth century, when the British were still more interested in business than empire, the area had been an important trade center for North India, and its merchants and moneylenders had been known for their initiative and energy.

  But as always in India, the prosperity so created had been shared out among a very small group of people; it had led to little except the creation of zealously guarded hoards or, occasionally, an opulent mansion in the midst of a teeming bazaar. When trading routes changed and the region lost its importance, the private fortunes quickly dwindled, the mansions fell into ruin and were taken over by squatters. The region was restored to the wretchedness and cruelties that were probably always there under the gloss of temporary affluence.

  Affluence is still a rare achievement, but the gloss has got shinier and deeper. At the time of the elections, my hotel in Allahabad was a new white eight-storied building of egregious luxury, built by a local manufacturer of bidis (cheap Indian cigarettes), who had recently begun to dabble in politics. Every effort had been made to make it conform to international specifications. The menu at the coffee shop offered Mexican and Italian food. A Muzak version of “The Sounds of Silence” played in the elevators. When the power supply broke down, as it frequently did in the city, a massive basement generator groaned into life. The corridors were thickly carpeted; the double-glazed windows kept out the loud film music from the small slum just outside the hotel, where a rain-fed gutter overflowed into the tin-roofed shacks and left green stains of slime on the pale earth around them.

  The hotel was fated to remain empty—and so it was—most of the time. Its luxury couldn’t but seem pointless. It met no local needs; it required no local expertise. In fact, people from as far as South India had to be imported to fill in managerial positions. Its purpose, if you could call it that, seemed to lie in its being an assertion of wealth and power in the midst of general deprivation, quite like the newly built houses with Doric columns and Palladian façades in the area around the hotel.

  The solidity of the building, its quiet interiors, the monumental presence of its white façade in the middle of the city—in all its deliberate order and calm, the hotel underlined its separateness from its setting. Its effect was felt most keenly by the menial staff, who traveled each day from their homes in the flood-threatened outskirts of Allahabad and approached their place of work with something like awe. They looked very ill at ease in their green uniforms and were obsequiously polite with guests, calling to mind the Indians who had come to serve in the new city of Allahabad built by the British after the rude shock of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the city whose simple colonial geography was plain from my sixth-floor hotel room, the railway tracks partitioning the congested “black town,” with its minarets and temple domes, from the tree-lined grid of “white town,” where for a long period no Indians, apart from servants, could appear in native dress.

  Allahabad was Prayag, a small pilgrim center, before the British, in the early nineteenth century, began to use it as a military base, guarding the up-country trade on the river Ganges. When, in 1857, Indian soldiers in British-led armies mutinied, the British struggled to retain their power across most of North India, except in Allahabad, where they were not challenged greatly. They quickly put down the few soldiers who did rebel; they razed to the ground those houses in the old quarter that belonged to rich supporters of the insurrectionists. No stories of unspeakable atrocities against British women and children emerged from Allahabad as they did from Kanpur, just 150 miles away to the north on the Ganges.

  Nevertheless, the British wished to make a point. The pacifier of Allahabad was a devout Christian colonel called James Neill, who believed “the word of God gives no authority to the modern tenderness for human life.” Under his direction, some six thousand Indians were hanged, shot, or tortured to death, in just a few days.

  It was in the months following the pacification that eight villages were confiscated, as a senior official stated, from “dirty Indian niggers” and were turned into the exclusively British enclave of Civil Lines. The great buildings of the city—the Romanesque cathedral, the university tower and dome, the Gothic public library, the Baroque High Court—came up in the decades that followed the suppression of the mutiny, a time of serenity for the British in India, when India officially became part of the empire and the natives remained quiet for the most part.

  In Allahabad, the civil and military administration, the hospitals, schools, and the high court produced a small Anglo-Indian society. For these exiled people, the compensations for the city’s great heat and isolation were to be had in untroubled leisure, in the clubs, polo grounds, and large bungalows with wide verandas and sprawling lawns where it was common for a family to have fifty to sixty servants. When, in 1887, the young Rudyard Kipling came to work in Allahabad after some exciting years as a journalist in Lahore, he found himself alienated; the “large, well-appointed club, where Poker had just driven out Whist and men gambled seriously, was full of large-bore officials, and of a respectability all new.”

  When you look now at the buildings of the period after 1857, their playfully diverse architectural styles seem to confirm Kipling’s vision of a people savoring their privilege. In their rhetorical magnificence—quite like that of my hotel—they stand apart from, and indeed loom over, everything around them; they suggest a people made absolutely secure by wealth and unchallenged power. At the public library—built as a memorial to the official who dispossessed the “dirty Indian niggers” of Civil Lines—there are relief fi
gures of Indian peasants and potters and silk weavers on carved capitals. The peasants are wiry, obviously well-fed men with turbans; the physical aspects and setting of the potters and silk weavers have been similarly improved. They are unsettling, not least because severe British methods of revenue collection had ravaged the countryside, forcing generations of the rural poor into vicious circles of endless debt and bondage to local landlords and moneylenders. It is hard to imagine that the architect was aware of the crude irony of his representations; more likely that he was indulging a fantasy about the Indian countryside, a romantic idea about peasants created at a safe distance from their actual condition.

  The romance had gone, but this distance hadn’t really diminished with independence; the administrators and the masses still lived in separate worlds. At the commissioner’s office, an old sprucely painted bungalow with trimmed hedges in Civil Lines, a middle-aged woman in a torn white sari held a creased piece of paper and pleaded with attendants wearing red-sashed livery. The widow of one of the laborers killed in a mining accident, she had traveled a long way from her village that morning to beg the commissioner to expedite relief money sanctioned more than two years ago by the government. The audience wasn’t granted; the woman was told to take her application to a lower official and not bother the commissioner’s office with petty requests.