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

by Pankaj Mishra

  Their connection to the Islamic world outside India was often exaggerated by leaders of Indian Muslims in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it was one way of holding on to an idea of personal and collective worth amid the general degradation of the Muslim community under colonialism. What struck me, however, was that Abbas, whose work as a correspondent for a major Indian newspaper gave him status, even prestige in Kashmir, still needed to make the claim. But it was really an idea of dignity and selfhood that he was affirming, an idea that could take on a special urgency among such thoroughly trampled-upon people as the Kashmiris.

  The troubles began, Kashmiris say, with foreign rule. After the Moghuls, Afghans, and Sikhs, the valley fell in the mid-nineteenth century to a petty Hindu feudal chief who had helped the British defeat the Sikhs. The British ceded the entire state—the valley together with Hindu-majority Jammu and Buddhist-dominated Ladakh and the northwestern parts that later were to come under Pakistani rule—to the chief for a meager sum of seven and one-half million rupees. The sale is still a source of rage and shame for Kashmiris.

  Things didn’t improve much under the new Hindu rulers. In 1877 a famine killed two-thirds of the population. Thousands of underfed, underclothed Muslims died while carrying rations on their backs for troops in remote Himalayan outposts. Muslims were rarely given jobs; the administration was staffed overwhelmingly by the small minority of Hindus (about 4 percent of the population in the valley). The maharaja and his Hindu courtiers built up fabulous private fortunes. Even prostitutes paid one hundred rupees as tax to the maharaja; Muslims who were found slaughtering cows were banished to the remote Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean.

  The son of the last Hindu maharaja of the state, Karan Singh, records a Buddha-like epiphany in his autobiography. Born at the Hôtel Martinez in Cannes, an entire floor of which had been taken over by his father, he spent his childhood in Kashmir more or less free of contact with Muslims and poverty. His father, Hari Singh, was fond of shooting and hunting and racing, also, it is said, of London prostitutes. Life in his palace was an endless search for entertainment. As Karan Singh writes, “We spent hours working up lists for lunch and dinner parties, seating plans and menus.” Once his father asked a friend to take Singh around the city and show him the kingdom he would one day inherit. The friend drove him to the Muslim-majority areas and pointed at the dilapidated buildings and shabbily dressed men on the streets, and said, “These are your people.” Karan Singh was astonished.

  The more astonishing thing about this event is its date, in the 1930s. Barely ten years later India was free of both colonial rule and the maharajas. The Muslim elite of India were to demand and receive a separate homeland in the form of Pakistan, and the maharaja of Kashmir, faced with a choice between joining India or Pakistan, would reluctantly accede to India, which had adopted a secular, democratic, and egalitarian constitution, giving Indians a new idea of themselves, of their past and potential.

  But such was the course of Indian history until then that it was mostly Hindus who took up these opportunities, who saw in modern education and the modern world the possibilities of personal and communal development. The Muslims of India, whose political power had been comprehensively destroyed by the British and many of whose leaders remained trapped by fantasies of recapturing their old glory in India, took some time before even attempting to catch up with the Hindus.

  In all this time, the Muslims of Kashmir, cut off from larger events and trends in British-ruled India, and held down by the tiny Hindu minority of rulers and administrators, were barely able to move at all. Illiteracy and poverty were widespread; political opposition to the Hindu maharaja was met with brutality. As in India, a few educated Muslims were left to carry the burden of their country’s humiliation and backwardness.

  2. The Politics of Secularism

  It is no coincidence that the person who articulated best the fears and frustrations of all Indian Muslims was a Kashmiri, Mohammad Iqbal, one of the most important Muslim philosophical thinkers of modern times. Iqbal was born in 1877 in what is now Pakistan to an illiterate family of shawl peddlers and tailors. His parents managed to send him to school and college, where he did very well. He was already famous for his poetry when he went to Cambridge in the early years of the twentieth century to study philosophy.

  Iqbal followed many other Indians in being deeply impressed by European progress in the nineteenth century; the idea of individual struggle and fulfillment, and the related idea of the individual’s responsibilities to society and the nation, could not but come as a revelation to people from listless subject communities. Iqbal came to admire Nietzsche. The idea of the Superman, of self-creation and self-assertion, spoke to him in the powerful way it always has to people from colonized countries. But he was also disturbed by racism and hypercompetitiveness, and while in Europe, struggling with the complex mix of admiration, fear, and insecurity the place aroused, he became even more aware of his Muslim identity. The history of Islam acquired new meanings for him; a passing glimpse from a ship of Sicily, the setting of one of Islam’s greatest triumphs in Europe, could make him weep.

  He came back to India convinced, like many Indians before him, that the progress of his community lay not in imitating Europe but in reforming and reviving the religion he had been born into. To this end, he began to exalt masculine vigor and the great Islamic past in his writings. He became a determined critic of Sufism, of the mystical and folk traditions within Islam that, advocating the rejection of the ego and the self, had found such a hospitable home in his ancestral Kashmir. He saw these traditions as emasculating Muslims, rendering them inadequate before the outstanding tasks demanded of the self and of the larger Islamic community.

  Iqbal’s ideas about Islam in India had to have political ramifications. Politics itself at that time of colonial oppression was primarily a quest for dignity, an assertion of identity first and then only secondarily an attempt at creating new institutions. As such, it could not be separated from religion, from the larger sense of a shared culture and past which was the beginning of the political sense for all deprived and subjugated peoples. If, as Iqbal believed, Islam was weakened by incorporating the local traditions of Hinduism, then its original purity under the democracy established by the first four caliphs could never be recovered within an India dominated by Hindus. True Islam, as Iqbal conceived, could be reinstated only if Indian Muslims formed a separate nation. The idea which Iqbal put forward at an important political meeting of Muslims in 1930 was the beginning of the two-nation theory, which, seventeen years later, worked itself out in the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan.

  For most Hindus in India, Iqbal is the misguided instigator of the movement for Pakistan. I hadn’t really thought of him in connection with Kashmir until I met Dr. Mohammad Ishaq Khan in Srinagar, the Kashmiri capital, in March 2000. Dr. Khan teaches medieval history at Kashmir University in Srinagar and has done pioneering work on Islam’s acculturation in the Hindu-Buddhist environment of Kashmir. He is a small, round-faced man, gentle in demeanor; he speaks slowly, as if unaccustomed to talking about his work, but in clear qualified sentences that indicate a quietly active mind. During the past decade, the years of the insurgency, when the university ceased to function, he has produced his best work, a book on the spiritual dimensions of Islam that stresses the contemplative aspects of the faith over the ideological ones.

  In one of the Kashmiri newspapers I read during a recent visit to Kashmir—pages that were full of bad news but always offering something lively in their editorial pages—I read Dr. Khan’s account of his visit to Pakistan. He had met many Kashmiris settled there, but he had stayed away from the awkward subject of politics altogether. When asked why he and other Muslim intellectuals in Kashmir weren’t involved in the anti-India insurgency, he had thought of the Persian Sufi Rumi’s words: “The intellect is destroyed by partial reason.” Nevertheless, he did visit Iqbal’s tomb in Lahore, and in a striking passage he describ
es how overwhelmed he was with emotion as he approached the tomb: “I couldn’t control myself. Tears started pouring from my eyes.”

  Dr. Khan’s allegiance was to the Sufi tradition of Kashmir, which Iqbal had rejected. His suspicion of Islam as ideology had only grown after the violence and suffering caused by the insurgency, which one of his own students had joined, someone whom Dr. Khan remembered as denouncing, in the way Iqbal once had, Sufi Islam for turning the Kashmiris into apathetic slaves of Hindu India. The student had gone to Pakistan for training in the military camps and risen high within the leading pro-Pakistan guerrilla group, Hizbul Mujahideen, before being killed in Srinagar in 1999.

  Iqbal’s personal response to Europe and Islam and the melancholy beauty of his poetry had been reduced in the end to simple ideologies that had sent thousands of other young men to an early death. Nevertheless, the idea of Iqbal as the man who had brought a hope of redemption to the Muslims of the subcontinent survived and—this is what struck me—still had the power, many decades later, of moving even someone like Dr. Khan, committed to the intellectual life, to tears.

  it was somewhat easier after that to imagine the impact Iqbal had on millions of Muslins across India with his poetry and philosophy, something comparable to Gandhi’s influence on the Hindus, and it was somewhat easier to enter the Indian Muslim’s sense of dispossession and understand how much the charisma and persuasive power of men like Iqbal derive from the raw, unformed nature of their community.

  For Kashmiris the person who came to embody their fate a generation after Iqbal was Sheikh Abdullah, once hailed as the Lion of Kashmir, who for more than half a century since the early 1930s remained the most popular leader of Kashmiri Muslims. His funeral in 1982 was attended by hundreds of thousands of mourners. But eight years later his grave was desecrated, a moment that marks not only the beginning of the insurgency but also the decline of the politics of personality in South Asia.

  Abdullah’s early mentor was Iqbal, whom he had met in 1924 in Lahore, when Iqbal was at the height of his fame. Iqbal had first visited Kashmir, the land of his ancestors, three years before and had come away distressed by the condition of the Muslims. “In the bitter chill of winter shivers his naked body,” he wrote, “whose skill wraps the rich in royal shawls.” He had joined the Muslim-owned newspapers of Lahore in highlighting the fate of the Kashmiri Muslims under Hindu rule: how though they formed 96 percent of the population the rate of literacy among them was only 0.8 percent.

  Iqbal was sympathetic to Abdullah, who, like himself, came from a family of poor shawl sellers and was one of the few Kashmiri Muslims who had managed to educate themselves up to the point where they found their way blocked by discrimination on grounds of religion; under the maharaja, only Hindus, who were a mere 4 percent of the population, were allowed to aspire to higher education and better jobs. Consequently, Abdullah had to leave Kashmir for Aligarh, near Delhi, where the first college providing Western-style education exclusively to Muslims had been set up in 1875. On his return to Kashmir in 1930, he joined a small group of graduate students from Aligarh who called themselves the Reading Room Party.

  Barely a year later, Kashmir witnessed the first major disturbance in response to the autocratic rule of the maharaja. A Muslim called Abdul Qadir, who was working as a butler for a European resident, was arrested for giving a seditious speech. Crowds who came to protest at the prison gates were arrested; more protests followed, and at one point the police fired on the demonstrators. Twenty-one people died. Then the procession carrying the bodies for burial became unruly, and Hindu-owned shops along the route to the graveyard were looted.

  The maharaja’s Hindu army cracked down brutally on Muslim dissenters. Abdullah spent a year in prison with other members of the Reading Room Party. When he was released in 1932, he announced the formation of the Muslim Conference; it was the first organized opposition to the regime of the maharaja in Kashmir. There was a special edge to Abdullah’s relationship with the maharaja. No two men could have been more dissimilar: the horse-racing maharaja, with a weakness for fraudulent Hindu holy men, and the devout Muslim and brilliant nnanipnlator of the masses. In his opposition to the maharaja, Abdullala found himself supported by leaders of the Indian nationalist movement against colonial rule, particularly Pandit Nehru, who under Gandhi’s patronage had become the unchallenged leader of the Congress Party. The friendship between Abdullah and Nehru grew fast.

  There was a special reason for that friendship. Nehru’s Brahmin ancestors came from Kashmir and had moved just a few decades before his birth in 1889 to Delhi and Allahabad, where they became one of the first families of modern India. There was always an air of the solitary visionary about Nehru. He was sent to Harrow and Cambridge by his Anglophilic father. He was much influenced by European ideas of socialism and nationalism. His discovery of India came later and made all the more valuable for him the discovery of his roots in Kashmir, the ancestral connection deepened by the pantheistic feeling he, a man who disdained organized religion, had for the Himalayas.

  Iqbal once said that though his body was confined to India, his soul existed in Kashmir. Nehru came close to making the same claim in his various scattered writings on Kashmir. He’d visited the state as a young trekker and was enraptured. In The Continent of Circe, Nirad Chawdhuri wrote of the Hindu sense of loss associated with the Himalayas: the cold regions the Aryan settlers of North India had come from, the longing expressed by Nehru himself when he wrote in his autobiography, “And I dream of the day when I shall wander about the Himalayas.” In official and personal correspondence, Nehru kept coming back to what he himself described as his “partiality for Kashmir.”

  That partiality took several forms and was to shape Indian attitudes toward Kashmir well after his death. By the time he met and befriended Abdullah in the mid-1930s, Nehru had already begun shape his blueprint for an independent India. In Abdullah, he saw someone who shared his conviction that the old social and economic order of India, represented by the maharajas and big landlords, had to be destroyed through land reforms and centralized economic planning. Abdullah was receptive to Nehru’s advocacy of secularism; it was under the latter’s persuasion that Abdullah changed the name of the Muslim Conference to the National Conference and acquired a greater following among the small minority of Hindus in the Kashmir valley, as well as among the Hindu majority in Jammu, the southern part of the state. Though distrustful of Abdullah, they found reassuring his growing proximity to Indian nationalist leaders.

  As the creation of Pakistan became a certainty, much to the heartbreak of Gandhi and others who had wanted a united India, Nehru was increasingly determined that Kashmir and its Muslim majority should be part of the India he had envisaged and so painstakingly worked toward, an India that was committed to democracy, secularism, and socialism. He was convinced that the idea of a separate nation for the Muslims—the two-nation theory first proposed by Iqbal and embraced by the feudal Muslim elite of North India—was a mistake; he didn’t think it could solve the problem of the Muslim community, the problem he defined as social and economic backwardness. He thought the landlords and mullahs who had kept the Muslim masses away from the benefits of education would merely consolidate their power in a new state.

  Abdullah’s own view of the demand for Pakistan was more qualified and less emotional. He felt, as he confessed in his autobiography, a subconscious sympathy for it; he saw it as a Muslim reaction against Hindu sectarianism, which he believed, despite his personal regard for Gandhi and Nehru, the Congress Party insidiously practiced. Indeed, he thought he could discern strains of Hindu revivalism in Nehru’s sentimental attachment to Kashmir.

  He could also see that Kashmir’s Muslim-majority population and geographical location made for a natural affinity with the new state of Pakistan being carved out from the western, as well as eastern, parts of British India. At the same time, he felt himself out of sympathy with the men leading the agitation for Pakistan, particularly Mohammad
Ali Jinnah, the pork-eating barrister from Bombay, who did not disguise his contempt for the Kashmiris and yet assumed that the state with its Muslim majority had no option but to join the new homeland for Indian Muslims. Abdullah also feared that the poor Muslims of Kashmir would get a bad deal in the feudal setup of Pakistan. So it was that in the years leading up to the partition of India Abdullah came to think of independence and democracy as the best option for Kashmir.

  The same idea, without, of course, the democracy bit, had struck the maharaja, who, as the time of British withdrawal from India came nearer, was faced, as the ruler of the largest of the 562 states under British paramountcy, with a choice between India and Pakistan.

  The maharaja’s autocratic ways continued as local opposition to him intensified. In 1946 he put Abdullah and other members of the National Conference in prison for running a highly popular “Quit Kashmir” campaign against him. Nehru’s support for Abdullah had already alienated the maharaja from the Indian leadership; Gandhi’s questions over the legitimacy of his rule, which had its dubious origin in a sale deed in 1846 between the maharaja’s ancestors and the British, made him more receptive to emissaries from Pakistan, who began to visit him with greater frequency. The partition of India was three months old, and he was still talking with both Indian and Pakistan representatives, hoping to buy time and preserve his regime, when a quick series of events forced him to act.

  Violence and rioting during partition had affected the southern part of the maharaja’s state, where Sikh refugees from Pakistan joined Hindu nationalists and members of the maharaja’s police in attacking Muslims. Tens of thousands of Muslims were killed. Many more Muslims fled to Pakistan, where the news of their suffering provoked the always very volatile Muslim tribesmen of the northwestern provinces on the Pakistan border into declaring jihad against the maharaja. In one of the impetuous and confused actions that inaugurated and forever marked the Pakistani position on Kashmir, a few officers of the Pakistani Army provided a ragtag group of jihad-minded tribals with arms and helped them across the border into Kashmir, at the same time as the Pakistani government was still trying to convince the maharaja to hand over Kashmir to Pakistan.