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

by Pankaj Mishra

  I accompanied the commissioner and the district police chief on their inspection tour of rural police stations two days before the elections in Allahabad. We traveled in two white Ambassadors with blue sirens and official flags on the bonnet. Villagers turned to look at us warily as we raced through a series of traffic jams on narrow country roads. At the first sign of an approaching bottleneck, the driver put on the siren, and bodyguards cradling AK-47 guns leaned out of the windows, forcing big, overweight trucks off the roads and onto muddy ledges where they stood leaning dangerously.

  Policemen everywhere stood to attention and saluted the cars as they went past. At official bungalows with little flower beds and manicured lawns, junior officials vied with each other to open the car doors and escort us to dining tables overloaded with warm snacks. More members of the Civil Service would invariably join us at this point. These were election observers sent to the region from other states, men in their thirties and forties, eager and fluent. A brisk bonhomie would ensue around the dining table as people compared notes on who was posted where and who was about to be promoted. There would be little talk of the election or the police stations we had visited (some of them in total disarray—small dark rooms full of dusty files and broken furniture, smells of urine and alcohol emanating from lockups—easily imagined as local centers of tyranny, settings for the third-degree torture and custodial deaths and rapes you read about in the papers).

  At the beginning of the inspection tour, the police chief, who had the reputation, rare in Allahabad, of not soliciting bribes, looked concerned. His English marked him as a man who had entered the Civil Service from a modest small-town background; he couldn’t have been unaware of what occurred in the police stations. Yet after the first, where he scolded the paunchy official in charge who had been clumsily making up the number of men arrested and guns seized, he hurried through the rest, with a look of distaste on his face. The commissioner looked restless throughout the tour and found his voice only with the other Civil Service men. He had earlier spoken to me with feeling about the inconveniences of living in the English town of Hull, where he had been sent by the Indian government to undergo some training. He now spoke mournfully—others around the dining table shaking their head sideways in approval—of criminals with hundreds of police cases against them, who had not only joined politics but also become “honorable ministers” and to whom he was required to show proper deference.

  Dignity, and how to hold on to it: That was what preoccupied these men, most of whom the Civil Service had rescued from a lower-middle-class shabbiness—the dignity whose emblems included the bungalows, the white cars with sirens, the red-sashed attendants, and the attentive lower officials; the dignity that came out of asserting one’s distance from everything tainted by the ordinary misery and degradation of India: the widow outside the commissioner’s office, the criminals working as ministers, the corrupted men in the rural police stations.

  In the assertion of that distance lay the self-image of the colonial administrators, and over time this has changed as little as the actual hierarchies and structure of the administration itself, Only the gap between rhetoric—more intense in an India with democratic aspirations—and reality has widened. For people in small towns and villages—the majority of India’s population—the sources of power and justice are still somewhere in the larger unknown world, and you can spend all your life waiting for them to work in your favor.

  Consider this village thirty miles out of Allahabad: a huddle of huts, unpainted brick houses, and narrow mud lanes on a stony slope. My car was the only motorized vehicle on the rutted country road that dusty late afternoon. Its appearance from behind an abrupt bend startled the bullock cart drivers and shepherds and excited fear among the people at this village, standing by the side of the road, holding the little green plastic flags of the Samajwadi (Socialist) Party, waiting for the local candidate, Mr. Reoti Raman Singh, to arrive. They stood stiffly, not daring to come closer, until summoned by the driver, when they moved awkwardly and surrounded the car. Anxious, thin, sun-hardened faces with roughly cut hair, young and old, pressed against the windows; frankly curious eyes quickly took in my camera, diary, pen—glamorous items in this context—and suddenly clouded over with uncertainty. When I asked them about the local issues they wished their member of Parliament to resolve, they shook their heads. One of the best-dressed persons among them, an old man in white kurta and dhoti and thick white mustache, said that there were no problems at all and resumed his scrutiny of my personal effects. It was only when my exasperated driver, a recent migrant to Allahabad from a nearby village, introduced me as a journalist and urged them to tell me the truth that the old man began to speak.

  The others prompted him, in shy whispers at first, and then everyone spoke at once. This village was different from those I had already visited that day only in the quality of its deprivation. It was privileged in having a tube well for drinking water, but the nearest hospital was nine miles away, and though the government had installed an electric pole, there had never been any “current.” The biggest problem related to the government’s primary school; it had been around for several years, but the teacher came only once a week from Allahabad and even then only for a couple of hours or so. There was no way of predicting when he would come, and so the students dressed each morning for school and spent the day waiting for the teacher outside locked doors. That wasn’t all. The teacher took all the rice which the government sent for the pupils every year. He had also carved out personal profits from the building of the new one-room school for girls; the foundation was nine inches instead of the usual twenty inches, and the building could collapse any moment.

  Earlier that day I had been traveling with Reoti Raman Singh, the candidate for Allahabad’s parliamentary constituency from the Samajwadi Party. Fierce monsoon rains had accompanied us en route from Mr. Singh’s rambling old mansion in the old quarter of Allahabad to the rural districts. The windshield wipers flailed uselessly; the road was reduced to frothy mud. When the rain stopped, soft parkland rolled out on both sides, the green of the grass, trees, and bushes brilliantly vivid and separate in the gray light of the still-turbulent sky; water gurgled through roadside ditches; and for a moment at least it was possible to take pleasure in the poverty-ravaged landscape, to see pastoral beauty in the young boys and girls herding sheep and buffaloes on grassy slopes.

  Mr. Singh was a tall, stooping man; he walked with a slight limp and gave an impression of some deep debility, along with a great kindness. He sat impassive in the front of the Jeep and hardly moved whenever his personal attendant, a thickset man in a safari suit, reached out from the back seat to adjust the silk scarf around his employer’s neck. The scarf, stiff with starch, was important. Mr. Singh belonged to an old distinguished feudal family of the region, one that had made its name and wealth in precolonial times, and the external symbols of his prestige had to be maintained. At a railway level crossing, a blind man in wet rags came up to the Jeep and, hopping a bit on his bare, calloused feet, sang a devotional song. Mr. Singh obliged with a generous gift of one hundred rupees, three times the daily wages of a laborer. There was both approval and envy on the faces of the small crowd of onlookers as they watched the rupee note passing from Mr. Singh’s attendant to the blind man; Mr. Singh, or “Kunwar Sahib,” Prince, as he was called, had done the thing expected of him.

  Early that morning at his house in Allahabad, men from nearby villages had sat silently in small dark rooms, tense with the urgency of those matters they waited to lay before Mr. Singh: power and water connections, a clerical job, a property dispute. Their blank faces cracked and betrayed disappointment when Mr. Singh, already running late that morning, was rushed out to the Jeep waiting in the front yard. There were many more supplicants at the villages where he stopped, mostly men from the low Nishad (fishermen) caste, small-limbed and dark and half naked, who ran up to the Jeep, hands folded, heads bowed. Mr. Singh addressed them in the local dialect; his
manner was easy yet authoritative. He asked them directly about their problems and was quick to respond. He promised to fire the policeman who had been extorting money from one village; he promised to build a culvert linking another two villages across a canal within a month of his election; at villages requiring water, he promised to have tube wells dug. He reminded them of the electricity and water he had brought to villages in his region. He didn’t say that he had done the good work in his official capacity as a member of the state legislature; it was an earlier contract, and not the obligations of elected office, that he was invoking, the contract between the upper-caste wealthy feudal lord and his destitute but loyal subjects. The faces in the crowds looked satisfied; they nodded, childlike, as he spoke, and as he prepared to leave, people lunged forward and tried to reach through the open window to touch his feet. It was as if after the unmet expectations from the flawed institutions of democratic India, after the many disappointments, an uncared-for people had found some security in the still-persisting ideals of noblesse oblige.

  Drinking water, police harassment, electricity, schools, and hospitals: These weren’t the themes being discussed when I left Delhi, although the media had been as obsessed with the elections as it was with Kashmir, where the Indian Army had fought several bloody battles with Pakistan-backed armed intruders over the summer.

  The media grew each year, with new newspapers, magazines, and TV channels appearing almost every week. But only a very small part of what they produced could be called journalism. During the battles in Kashmir, they had assumed the role of cheerleaders and worked up a lot of hysteria among the metropolitan middle classes for whom war and jingoism appeared to clarify, if only momentarily, a self-image that had been blurred by eight years of rapid social and economic liberalization. False stories, disseminated by the Indian Army about the torture of its soldiers by the Pakistanis, were retold endlessly even after it was revealed that they were false. Correspondents in battle fatigues shouted breathless reports into microphones as shells screamed overhead. Stylish young army officers boasted at length about their plans for the Pakistanis. There was little embarrassment when on national TV one of the officers echoed the Pepsi-Cola slogan, Yeh Dil Maange More (“This Heart Wants More”) and was then killed in battle soon afterward or when in its haste to convert the skirmishes into a splendid little war for itself the government announced on Independence Day that its highest military honor was to go posthumously to a soldier who turned out to be alive in a Delhi army hospital.

  And then, as abruptly as it had started, the war was over and forgotten. No one seemed to know how much money had been collected for the families of the 266 dead soldiers; the countless relief funds and benefit concerts and fashion shows became part of yet another Indian scam. Political pundits and analysts replaced military strategists and experts on television and seemed to shuttle endlessly between recording studios, chatting about “swings” and “anti-incumbency factors” and “index of opposition unity.” The English-language press was full of opinion polls and analyses, and the suave spokesmen for the two main political parties, the Congress and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), exchanged creative insults in daily debates about the foreign origins of Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the Congress, and the alleged failure of the BJP government to act on early intelligence reports about the intruders in Kashmir.

  The television experts and newspaper columnists called it an election without issues. But the separation of issues from elections had occurred long before. Elections, held almost yearly, had become a national drama, preceded and followed by even greater dramas of betrayals, defections, buying and selling legislators, no-confidence motions, coalition collapses, new ministries, speculations about who was in and who was out, etc. The drama, created this time by questions like “Is Sonia an agent of the Vatican?” and “Did our soldiers die in vain in Kashmir?,” helped suppress the real issues and also brought about a temporary cohesion and passion among a fragmented, apathetic population.

  Yet in Allahabad, once known as the most politically minded city in India, even the drama was missing. As late as the 1980s, politicians and lawyers, dressed in contrasting white and black, gathered at the old coffeehouse in the heart of the “white town” every morning and evening to gossip about various political figures and the size of their wealth. But I found the coffeehouse empty. Waiters in scruffy white livery and turbans stood around vacantly under fans hung high from cobwebbed wooden beams on the ceiling, and lizards made drowsy by the moist heat clung unmovingly to the faded painting of Gandhi on the walls, where the bright-blue paint had peeled off, exposing the solid masonry underneath.

  One morning I went to Anand Bhavan, the family mansion of the Nehrus. It is only a five-minute walk from the campus of Allahabad University, where I had lived as an undergraduate; strange to think that I hardly ever went there.

  Not that there was much to see. On the morning I went, gaudily dressed peasant women and children sat cross-legged in the long arcades, cautiously running their hands over the cool marble floors. Outside, the posters at pavement stalls were all of fleshy-lipped Indian films heroes. The usual election party banners, the tempos with loudspeakers, and the motorcycled boys with party flags and bandannas were hardly visible on the streets. I walked through the wide verandas and balconies and peered into rooms where French meals were once served on Dresden china with Czech glasses and where, in a more political time, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru and other great men of the Congress Party discussed ways of liberating India from colonial rule. In a newer building on the large walled compound, I could see yet more peasant women, also in gaudy nylon saris, shuffling shyly through an ill-lit gallery of photographs from hopeful times: Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, inaugurating dams and factories, what he called “the new temples of India”; Nehru with other celebrities of the postcolonial world, Nasser, Sukarno, Nkrumah; and Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, in an elegant silk sari, hugging Fidel Castro at a summit meeting of nonaligned nations.

  In Allahabad, a decaying city whose brief moment of glory belonged to the anticolonial struggle, you couldn’t but feel distant from these celebrations of postcolonial nationalism and third world solidarity. It was also hard not to wonder what, if anything, the peasant visitors made of the photographs. Most of them came on day trips from the vast rural region around Allahabad where the young Jawaharlal Nehru had, after his seven years at Harrow and Cambridge, first been exposed to “the degradation and overwhelming poverty of India.” Their parents and grandparents were probably among the enthusiastic voters who, after independence, repeatedly elected Nehru to the Indian Parliament from a rural constituency near Allahabad. But they themselves had remained close to destitution.

  Things hadn’t changed much even for those with privileged access to the owners of Anand Bhavan. In the late 1970s, Dom Moraes, the Indian writer and poet, met an old couple, Becchu and his wife, Sonia, who had worked there for much of the century. Moraes was then researching a semiauthorized biography of Indira Gandhi; the officials in charge of the mansion let him remove the leatherbound books from the shelves and discover Nehru’s interest in Balzac, Dickens, Maugham, and Koestler. The same officials, one rainy day at Anand Bhavan, brought Becchu and Sonia to see Moraes and told him that “Becchu was beating Sonia too much. Now he is not beating. Since she is becoming blind, he is taking care.”

  The two of them sat before Moraes, “dripping and shivering after coming in from the cold.” The interview wasn’t a success. Moraes got only a blurred picture of the “splendour, hedonism, and ostentation” that had marked life at Anand Bhavan until the early 1920s (when Gandhi, the charismatic new leader of the freedom movement, partly converted the Nehrus to his ascetic and defiantly Indian lifestyle); Becchu, a “skinny old man,” kept shouting at his wife in between fits of crying. His “convulsive sobs turned into positive roars of sorrow” when Moraes mentioned Indira Gandhi’s defeat in the national elections she had held in 19
77, two years after imposing a “state of emergency” on India and suspending civil rights.

  Becchu’s grief, however, was more personal. During her nine years as prime minister of India, Mrs. Gandhi had promised him a pension; it hadn’t been paid, and after her defeat it now looked very unlikely indeed. An unsettled Moraes tried to console the servant with a big tip. Becchu stretched out a “wizened hand” for the rupee notes, but his wife, “blind or not,” was quicker. “She whipped the money away and stuffed it in her blouse,” and Becchu started to wail.

  2. The Dynasty

  Nehru was often perceived by foreign visitors as a “lonely Indian aristocrat … presiding over his deficient but devoted peasantry.” But the description “aristocrat,” which Nehru himself encouraged, is too easily achieved in India; you only need to be placed slightly above the general wretchedness.

  The Nehrus were Brahmins from Kashmir who in the early eighteenth century became minor courtiers to Mughal emperors in Delhi. After the British destroyed Muslim power in India in the nineteenth century, the Nehrus found roles in the new imperial dispensation. Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal’s father, was trained as a lawyer, and he moved to Allahabad in 1886 to practice in the High Court that the British had established. He first lived in Allahabad’s old “native” quarter; a brothel filled with very young Nepalese women now stands on the site of his house. But he outgrew these modest beginnings very quickly, at the same pace, in fact, as Allahabad’s importance as an administrative and educational center. There was much money to be made from representing in court the decadent and exuberantly litigious landed gentry of North India, the upstart men rewarded with grants of land by the British for their loyalty during the mutiny of 1857, and soon after buying Anand Bhavan, Motilal acquired liveried servants, horses, an English chauffeur for his imported car, and an Irish tutor for his son and started to order his clothes from Savile Row.