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

by Pankaj Mishra

  The landlord was a much-hated figure among his tenants, despised for the mistresses he kept in semiservitude as well as his financial crookedness. When he had falsified the records of Rahmat’s family’s ownership of a piece of fertile land, Rahmat’s father and brothers had been too powerless to argue. But then he had tried to manipulate the mortgage on Rahmat’s father’s auto repair shop. This had enraged Rahmat’s brother.

  Rahmat said, “Zamindar bada powerful banda tha; the landlord was a powerful man.” The many relatives of the dead man arrived in a Pajero and flogged Rahmat’s father in front of the family, before destroying the auto repair shop. The police ransacked his house a few times, even locked Rahmat up for a few days, although he himself had been in the fields with a friend at the time of the murder.

  The revolving discolike lights on the ceiling glistened on Rahmat’s perspiring face as he spoke. The shop was busy. It seemed, rather incongruously, part of the celebration of wealth and leisure I had seen elsewhere in the city. The solemn-faced skull-capped visitors to the mosque inside the madrassa were easily outnumbered by the paunchy men in tight jeans and T-shirts who staggered out from badly parked Mercedes cars, strode fast to the shops, and then returned holding minimountains of shiny cellophane-wrapped sweet boxes.

  Shoe polish urchins, their thin arms slinging wooden boxes, lapped at their knees. It was them Rahmat watched, turning his head away from me. His heavy-lidded eyes were even more unreadable when he turned back, and then, as if out of habit, he wiped his mouth and then his forehead with the sleeves of his kurta, already damp from his prenamaz ablutions.

  Only the men at the mosque in the nearby town, Rahmat said, had been able to help his family. They had employed his teenage younger brother at their own madrassa; they had worked through their contacts in the police to ease the pressure on Rahmat’s family. Rahmat knew vaguely that they were members of the SSP and opposed to the Shias, but he hadn’t given it much thought. Then one warm evening in 1995 one of the SSP men, someone not much older than Rahmat, who often led the namaz on Fridays, called for him.

  When Rahmat got to the mosque on his bicycle, he found a small crowd of young men already there, including a couple of men from his village, people who had been tormented by the now-dead landlord. None of them them knew why they had been summoned. Then the man who had called them arrived, accompanied by an Afghan wearing a black turban, and addressed them briefly.

  He said that the guest with him had come all the way from Afghanistan, where a new jihad had commenced. There were many corrupt men like the landlords of Punjab in Afghanistan. They called themselves mujahideen the man said, as though they were engaged in jihad, but they were no worse than bandits and rapists, and now a new force had arisen to vanquish them and establish the law of the Prophet. The soldiers fighting the jihad were young Talibs, students, but Allah was with them.

  It was the first time Rahmat had heard about the students, or the Taliban. There had been several Afghans at his madrassa, but he had kept away from them. The Afghan refugees had had a bad reputation in his part of Pakistan; they were seen as liars and thieves. His father dealt with them all the time in his auto repair shop. Their heavy trucks that they had brought from Afghanistan damaged the roads, and the drivers were often high on opium.

  And so when the Afghan man began to speak, Rahmat was skeptical. He spoke Urdu with a heavy Pashtu accent that, Rahmat remembered, made some of the men smile. But the Afghan remained serious, and he didn’t waste much time. He said he had come to ask for volunteers for the jihad in Afghanistan. He couldn’t promise much in return, except food and shelter; the way of jihad was not strewn with roses; it was a holy duty for Muslims, and shahadat martyrdom, was all they could expect from it.

  Most of the young men weren’t interested. But Rahmat with a brother in jail and the auto repair shop, the sole source of his family’s income, now gone, couldn’t so easily disregard what the Afghan had offered. His father and his brothers wondered what he was getting into but didn’t try to stop him. Rahmat remembered riding with other young men in a chartered bus to Quetta in Baluchistan and then crossing the border illegally one night. On the other side there were, along with Pashtun Afghans, many more Pakistanis. There were even Pakistani Army officers at the training camp where Rahmat learned to fire an automatic rifle and also men from Chechnya Kashmir, and Uzbekistan. It was in this training camp, in a rocky valley near the border, that he had grown his beard, not under any pressure—although men in Afghanistan were required to wear four-inch-long beards—but because of his desire to be a good Muslim.

  Rahmat and other people in his group had been at the camp for less than two weeks when they were summoned to the western provinces, where the Taliban were fighting to capture the city of Herat. By the time Rahmat reached Herat, it was already under the control of the Taliban. He and his fellow mujahideen were like conquerors in the city. But it was a strange place. It was very cold; the locals spoke Persian, not Urdu or Pashtu; they even looked like Iranians. Even more alien were the young Pashtun men of the Taliban who went around shutting down schools, smashing TVs and VCRs, and tearing up photos. One of them discovered a seminude photo of an Indian film actress in the tent Rahmat shared with eleven, twelve other Pakistanis, and there was some awkwardness between the Afghans and the Pakistani volunteers for some time after that.

  Rahmat hadn’t liked the rough ways of the Taliban; they were backward people, he thought. They were cruel to their women and religious minorities and military opponents; someone in his village had been forced to participate in the massacre of civilians belonging to the Shia Hazara community in central Afghanistan. Rahmat was a bit frightened of them. But he couldn’t deny that they had brought peace to Afghanistan, and when the Pakistanis he was with spoke of imposing a similar peace in Pakistan, where there was so much injustice and banditry, it seemed like an attractive idea.

  Rahmat hadn’t stayed long in Afghanistan as he was wanted as a witness at the trial of his brother. He hadn’t returned to Afghanistan after that, although other young men he knew in his village had gone and were still going to fight with the Taliban.

  Back in his village Rahmat met up again with the men at the mosque. It was with one of them that he had come to the Binori Town madrassa three years ago and then stayed on. There was some money to be made doing small menial jobs for the students and teachers; Rahmat could eat cheaply, and he could always find a place to sleep. Things were better here than in the Punjab, where his brother was still in jail and his father close to death.

  Rahmat had shaken his head when I first asked him if he wanted to eat anything. But when I ordered another plate of halwa he was quick to reach out and place his hand on the arm of the waiter, startling him slightly. After the food came an oily plateful of what looked to my furtive eyes like mutton, Rahmat became more expansive, his Urdu, replete so far with Punjabi slang, became more formal, full of difficult Arabic and Persian words. He began to speak with his mouth full, of the greatness and necessity of jihad of how Muslims were being oppressed everywhere, in Kashmir Afghanistan. Chechnya, Egypt, Palestine, how the Jews in Israel could get away with anything because they were supported by Western powers.

  I had heard, and was to hear, a lot of this talk from both the leaders and the foot soldiers of the jihad. It wasn’t without its quota of truth, and you had to be careful neither to dismiss nor to swallow it whole. It was easier to see through the self-aggrandizement and deceptions of people like Hamid Gul. But the idea of oppression and injustice that Rahmat spoke of was more than just rhetoric he had picked up from the teachers at his madrassa and the ISI officers at the training camp in Afghanistan; it had a basis in his own experience of the world.

  Rahmat was like the young men of my own class in the Indian small towns of the 1980s and early 1990s people for whom the world didn’t seem to have much place. The idea of religion as redemption, the unquestioning submission to one creed or philosophy—this was what my background had required of me, and i
t had taken some effort, and much luck, to be able to move away from it, to redefine myself as an individual, and to enter new, more complicated affiliations with the larger world.

  Others weren’t as lucky; these were people whose frustration and rage over their many deprivations could easily be appropriated into ideological crusades, for whom hallucinations of great power allayed their crushing sense of a very real powerlessness. It was among the young unemployed men in small towns that the Hindu nationalist movement, also funded primarily, like the jihad, from abroad, from rich Hindus in the United States and U.K. had found its foot soldiers, the men who formed the faceless mobs, who were in charge of the dirty stuff, of the necessary lynchings and destruction.

  The Hindu disaffection, however, was of a different order. The young Hindus I knew were frustrated by their exclusion from the middle class; they did not, despite their rhetoric of an Indian golden age, seek to radically change the ways of the world or hold up alternative visions, as Mahatma Gandhi once had, of what a good and true life was and could be. Even the most extreme Hindu ideologues did not, in the end, wish, like the jihadis, to challenge or reject the knowledge and power of the West. They were content to take the world as they found it, dominated by the West, and then find a niche for themselves in it; they were, above all, sly materialists. This pragmatic collaboration with the West is what has produced the new Hindu renaissance of the last 150 years, a regeneration of which the software tycoons of Silicon Valley and the Indian writers in English are related aspects. Gandhi’s ambition—to form a society as different as possible from the one in the West—has few takers left in India. Ironically his distrust and fear of Western modernity are now amplified best by the radical Islamists of Pakistan, where a Westernized postcolonial elite—those men from the posh colleges that Hamid Gul despised, who now spoke helplessly in their farmhouses of the Talibanization of Pakistan—had discredited itself.

  It is why, while India daily moves closer to the West, Pakistan seems much further away. It is also why Rahmat although he imagined me to be a Muslim, saw me essentially as an alien, someone very removed from him—the resident of London, the city of Sodom and Gomorrah—and why I was startled when looking up from his hectically ravaged plate of mutton and rice, Rahmat asked me if the women in London went around with their legs exposed.

  This was a question that came from my own past, the kind of thing I would turn around in my mind, when I was still a boy in isolated towns, with no TV or cinema around to inhibit my imagination. It was strange and unsettling to think how quickly that past, along with all its peculiar material and sensory privations, had vanished, how dramatically my circumstances had changed. No one before me in my family had ever left India, while I spent much of the year in London and traveled to many different parts of the world. I published in American and British newspapers and journals; depended upon them, in fact, for a living.

  Globalization had also opened up the West; there was more space there for people like me, people who would have had to struggle harder for a similar space in their native countries. I still felt myself on the margins, writing about subjects that appeared remote from the preoccupations around me, the obsessions with food, sex, money, movies, celebrities that I saw reflected in the weekend papers in Britain. But the first cultural shock had worn off. As a colonial I was a child, however distinctly, of the West. England was, after all, the place where I as an adult had chosen to be, and I had, in time, come to see something brittle and self-righteous in my exasperation over the articles about boyfriends and hemlines.

  In any case, I spent most of my time in London at my desk, had only a shallow relationship with the world around me. In the beginning I was unsettled by the devout Muslims I would often see on Brick Lane, quite near my flat. However, as often happens, the more money you have, the more liberal you become, more in tune with the cosmopolitan city and its bland middle-class tolerance. In London, where I knew security and stability for the first time in my life, I became someone without a past, and as the months passed, the Muslims faded into the promiscuous bustle of the gay discos, leather retailers, Balti restaurants, music halls, coffee and bagel shops.

  But this kind of Westernization can also be superficial; you can quickly lapse into an older cultural conservatism. Your political loyalties can be more mixed up than what you and other people assume. It explains my unease at the American Embassy in Islamabad a few days after meeting Rahmat. There stern experts on the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalists kept using the words “us” and “them” impressing upon me the urgency of forcing “those guys,” the Taliban, to give up their special guest, Osama bin Laden. Although I, with my beard and Afghan cap, looked like one of “them”—the desperate men just outside the embassy’s fortlike walls—the Americans had no doubt where I belonged. I was one of “us,” part of a powerful imperial civilization that, in this remote, vulnerable outpost, was denoted by bowling alleys, cocktail bars, and the framed photos of suburban barbecues on office walls.

  No ambiguities existed for the diplomats. They defended the government they worked for with as much passion and vigor as the jihadis—the “them” of their vocabulary—spoke of jihad, and they could make you feel that the war they were fighting was also your war and the side we were all on had both truth and power behind it.

  It was hard to demur when you considered the opposition. Far from offering a blueprint for a new civilization or society, the Taliban seemed perversely intent on annihilating the few bits and pieces of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage that had survived the long war. I was in India when I heard about the news about the Taliban’s intention to destroy all Buddhist statues in Afghanistan. At that point I’d still not visited the country, and I wasn’t sure what was going on. I rang a Pakistani journalist in Peshawar. He confirmed some of the theories I had seen in the Pakistani papers on the Internet. The Taliban were frustrated by the sanctions imposed on them by the UN and wanted to draw international attention to the plight of Afghans facing drought and starvation; there was a struggle between the hard-liners and moderates with the Taliban and the former had won this time.

  The journalist wasn’t sure about the statues, however. The tall, exposed Buddhas in Bamiyan had been around for centuries; they could not be removed. And the museum in Kabul, which held the best representatives of Indo-Greek sculpture, had been looted long ago, first by the mujahideen who took over the city after the fall of the Communist regime in 1992 and then by the Taliban in 1996. There was not much left; foreign journalists who toured the museum were only shown some rubble, although that could have come from anywhere. For years now, statues had been smuggled out of Afghanistan and transported as far as New York and Tokyo; you could still find a few with the antiques dealers in the bazaars of Peshawar.

  I had already seen some of these statues, almost by chance, in the somewhat banal setting of a house in an upper-middle-class suburb of Peshawar, where they stood in glass cases before a large fake fireplace. They belonged to General Naseerullah Babur, another of Pakistan’s powerful military men and Benazir Bhutto’s “favorite uncle.” He wouldn’t say how he had got hold of the statues, most of which I recognized from photos I had seen, and only mumbled something about finding them during excavations. It wasn’t hard to guess, however, and subsequently I discovered that the manner in which he had acquired the statues was as much of an open secret as his original sponsorship of the Taliban.

  He was also responsible for suppressing a particularly savage civil war in Karachi between local Sindhis and Muslim migrants from India. In fact, Babur told me many such stories himself, his broad face often cracking into childlike smiles; he appeared every bit the retired man, who had made his little pile, albeit rather dubiously, and was eager to establish his role in great events, the brave Pashtun of legend, as an admiring taxi driver described him to me, who would patrol Karachi during the worst violence in an open, unescorted Jeep.

  Babur’s connection with Afghanistan had begun when he was the governor of the N
orth-West Frontier Province in the 1970s. It was then he first met the Afghan Islamists who became famous names in the jihad, and introduced them to American diplomats in Islamabad.

  In 1993 Benazir Bhutto returned to power three years after being overthrown by the ISI and Hamid Gul and Babur became interior minister. By then Afghanistan was in chaos. The roads, bridges, schools, orchards, and irrigation systems lay in ruins. But even more disastrous was the moral breakdown that occurred in the years after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. The modern state with its law enforcement policies had barely existed outside the cities while civil war and the consequent displacement of millions of people further undermined the tribal and religious codes that had previously governed the lives of ordinary Afghans. Warlords and gangsters flourished in the vacuum. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahid favored by the ISI had already branched off into heroin manufacturing and smuggling; many other mujahideen commanders took to smuggling and highway robbery. Men with guns stood at improvised checkposts on all major roads. The situation was particularly bad in the Pashtun-majority provinces of southern Afghanistan, where several commanders raped young boys and women and plundered at will.