In March 1899 Kawakuchi passed through this valley and wrote: ‘Pokhara looked like a town of villas at home, the site being chosen because of the beauty of its natural scenery. Bamboo-covered ravines, flower-roofed heights, rich in green foliage, picturesque because of a rushing and winding stream, itself set in the midst of high mountains – such were the characteristic features of Pokhara. The stream’s waters are milky white, probably on account of their carrying in them particles of mountain clay. In all my travels in the Himalayas I saw no scenery as enchanting as that which enraptured me at Pokhara. Another thing notable about that place was that it was the cheapest spot in Nepal for all kinds of commodities.’
With all of which, apart from the last sentence, I heartily agree. And as the rise in prices and addition of an airstrip have been the only major changes in Pokhara since 1899 one is comfortably aware that were Kawakuchi to return here in his present incarnation he would at once recognise his ‘enrapturing’ valley.
Further on in the same chapter he reaches Tsarang, the home of many of our camp Tibetans, and then he writes:
‘In point of uncleanliness, Tibetans stand very high among the inhabitants of the earth, but I think the inhabitants of Tsarang go still higher in this respect. In Tibet people wash themselves occasionally, but they almost never do in Tsarang. In the course of the year that I lived there, I only twice saw a person wash himself, the washing being confined even then to the face and neck. The skin all over the body has on it a peculiarly repulsive shine of polished dirt, so to say; but what can they do when it is a custom to laugh at persons who wash their faces nice and clean, and to deride them as being very dirty in their habits? Not only in their appearance, but in all they do, the natives seem to have absolutely no idea of cleanliness. To say that they think nothing of making a cup of tea for you with the same fingers with which they have just blown their noses, is to give only a very mild instance of their filthiness; and I have no courage to dwell here on their many other doings, which are altogether beyond imagination for those who have not seen them done and are too loathsome even unto sickening to recall to mind. The natives hereabouts are merely creatures of animal instincts; they think of nothing but eating, drinking and sleeping, their minds being otherwise filled with thoughts pertaining to sensual love. They occasionally spend their evening in listening to a lama preaching, but only occasionally. They change their clothing but once a year, and if any of them is brave enough to wear the same suit for two years, that person is made an object of high praise. And as they never wash their wearing apparel it is always shiny with grease and dirt. Indifferent as they are to their appearance, they are very painstaking in preparing food, as also in making their sleep comfortable. And their ruling passion is that of carnal love, and that applies to all ages from the very young to the very old. Like all uncivilised people they are intensely superstitious; to them a lama is omnipotent, for they believe he can cure diseases and divine all future events.’
With most of this, too, I agree – though one doesn’t notice our Tsarangs being inordinately disposed to ‘carnal love’.
Anyway our Japanese friend has a ‘thing’ about sex, and consequently about Tibetan Buddhism in general. Towards the end of this same chapter he writes very scathingly on Padma Sambhama and the Nyingmapas: ‘His teaching is a sort of parody on Buddhism proper, and an attempt to sanctify the sexual relations of human-kind, explaining and interpreting all the important passages and tenets in the Sacred text from a sensual standpoint, and in the Tibetan rhetoric in which I took lessons I found this lewd and detestable teaching largely incorporated.’ At which point one begins to wonder if the Japanese monk – alias Tibetan lama – was not in fact a disguised Presbyterian clergyman!
This morning the sky was cloudless when I cycled up to the bazaar at six o’clock – and what a sight the mountains were in that clear, early sunshine! One appreciated them all the more, not having seen them for so many weeks; even Roget – if he were among those present – would be unequal to those Himayan snowpeaks. They are majestic, and I can’t help it if everyone else has said so already. This really is the only adjective that begins to convey the impression received as one cycles up from Pardi, going straight towards Machhapuchhare itself – a king of snow and ice soaring far above the rest, high and mighty, into the blueness.
3 SEPTEMBER
Today I had my first quarrel with local officialdom; however successful I may be in social contacts with Asians I seem doomed to repeated failures in professional contacts, where resounding ethical clashes so often occur. This is an enormous problem, to which one can rarely find a solution both honourable and practical. Common sense and tolerance dictate some degree of flexibility and on minor points I do accept the irritating necessity to jog along in a haze of compromise. But then comes some major point that compels me to act according to my own principles, and it must be bewildering for the Nepalese when I suddenly revolt and begin rigidly to oppose them. Perhaps it is a mistake ever to compromise, even on minor points; yet one’s work here would come to a standstill if one didn’t. I can’t claim that any reasoned decision is taken at the moment when I stop jogging along; I merely rebel instinctively against an utterly repugnant course of action, and from that point on the certainty that one is right by one’s own standards makes further compromise impossible.
This whole problem centres on the difficulty of determining the extent to which we are entitled to impose our standards on an Eastern people. My own feeling is that normally we are not entitled to do this to any extent, and I would be the first to protest if others were bullying the unfortunate Nepalese. Yet when Eastern nations misguidedly insist on importing Western institutions that are wholly unsuited to their society, and expect us to provide the essential funds and personnel, then surely we are entitled to demand a minimum of conformity to our standards. However, in most cases this is an unrealistic demand, and therefore many Western field-workers, with a far wider experience of the problem than mine, have by now concluded that the whole elaborate structure of Aid to the Developing Nations should be dismantled and either forgotten or reconstituted.
It was obvious this afternoon that our ‘frankness’ appears to the Nepalese as simply the most atrocious form of bad manners. They feel shocked, hurt and saddened when a spade is called a spade, and today they were clearly writing me off as an unspeakable barbarian from some caveman civilisation – which indeed I am, in many ways, compared with them. Yet my natural aggressiveness was being rigorously curbed in their honour and I referred to that spade very gently – though I couldn’t quite bring myself to call it an agricultural implement. However, this offensive frankness at least gives Asians the opportunity to understand our reasoning, whereas we are forever groping in twilight towards some faint understanding of theirs.
Only once has a Hindu sincerely tried to explain to me his thinking on honesty, and that explanation was not very illuminating. I was staying with an English couple in Uttar Pradesh when this young Brahmin came to dinner. He was a most delightful person – warmhearted, courteous, witty and well-informed – and during the past two years he had been virtually adopted by my elderly friends. Soon we all began to discuss the hoary topic of Indian dishonesty and in an effort to enlighten us the young man said: ‘Look at it this way – I’m an educated Brahmin and a very good friend of this family, yet if I came into the house when it was empty and saw Rs. 100/- on top of that bureau, I’d almost certainly steal it, but if I only knew that the Rs. 100/- was locked inside the bureau I would never steal it, even if I could easily break the lock and was sure of not being caught.’
Naturally enough this concrete example was received with some rather half-hearted laughter, whereupon the young man frowned impatiently and went on: ‘You don’t like to believe me, but this is true. The theft would have been the fault of whoever left the money lying around. I’d feel I’d done wrong but I’d think I couldn’t be expected to resist such a temptation. And then the carelessness of the owner would counterbal
ance my own guilt and I’d be happy.’
By this stage my host and hostess were plainly feeling upset so I hastily changed the subject, much as I longed to pursue it. The only perceptible vestige of decency in this exposition was the admission that some guilt would be felt, though it could be suppressed so expeditiously. Possibly the uneasiness revealed by so many Hindus in their relations with Europeans is partly based on envy of the values upheld by our more obstreperous consciences. Individual Hindus cannot be blamed for following their traditional code; yet when that code is so out of harmony not merely with Christian morality, but with a universally applicable natural law, they are bound to suffer from the repercussions of their too easily quieted consciences.
These clashes of standards are a normal hazard in the East and what most disheartened me today was the full realisation of how ill-equipped the Nepalese are to tackle organisational problems. Only when one has had a close up view, over a considerable period, of how their minds work can one appreciate the crucial difference between a race with a tradition of logical thinking and a race with no such tradition. And this is the chief obstacle to successful co-operation on any project. Ordinarily we completely take for granted our heritage of logic, since any moderately intelligent Westerner will think coherently, if not profoundly, about a given problem; but even the best educated and most intelligent of the Nepalese seem to lack this method of approach. Their various theories may be sound, and their various practical schemes constructive, but any co-ordination of either theories or schemes is non-existent and would require a major miracle rather than a Western adviser. Instead of looking at all of a problem first, and then dealing with its component parts in relation to its entirety, the average Nepalese deals with each aspect as a separate issue and makes various decisions which, if they were acted upon, would promptly cancel each other out – so perhaps it is fortunate that in Nepal decisions are rarely or never acted upon. But coping with this sort of thing day after day is enough to depress the most ebullient and I don’t wonder that so many Western workers simply give up trying.
These disillusioned experts often dismiss the Nepalese as being colossally and irredeemably stupid; yet this is a most unjust over-simplification. Here we are not up against inferior brain-power, but brain-power that operates on a different fuel, travels on a different gauge line and is going in a different direction; and it may be that the illogical Nepalese will have the laugh on us at some not-too-distant date, when they are as happy as ever and our civilisation has tripped itself up and broken its neck in the progress race.
5 SEPTEMBER
It is interesting that many of Pokhara’s leading citizens profess to be Communists; this morning one of them openly discussed with me his sympathy for China, and he is the fifth to do so. None of these men is poor and three of them are among the richest in the valley, and are continuing to do very well under the present regime, so their new allegiance cannot be attributed to discontent. But – significantly – all five have received that fatal half-education, clumsily modelled on a Western pattern, which cuts the mind adrift from its traditional moorings without beginning to equip it to steer safely through alien waters. And now their support of Chinese Communism is being rather self-consciously flaunted as proof of both an avant-garde outlook and of ability to withstand Western pressures. This last point seems to be of major importance, and one finds an obsessional defiance of the United States in their attitude. Invariably they argue – more or less coherently – ‘America hates China and we resent American efforts to dominate us, so let’s show these dollar-splashers that it’s not as easy as they might think to buy us.’ Clearly this childish yet forgivable reaction against America is the Nepalese Communist’s most powerful incentive, and it is surprising that the inevitability of such a development was not foreseen years ago. On the one hand are the Americans, full of pity and dollars and naïve enthusiasm, supplemented by a pathological hatred of the Chinese and a total incomprehension of the Nepalese; to these ‘do-gooders’ the spending of money on a country is the obvious way to ‘rescue’ it, but as yet the Nepalese seem quite unprepared to follow where the dollar leads. Then, on the other hand, one has the Chinese talking across, instead of down, to their Nepalese ‘brothers’, sharing with them a state of undevelopment which they can justly claim to be improving through their own efforts, preaching opposition to a capitalism of which the Nepalese know nothing except that Americans are capitalists, and smoothly gearing their propaganda to Asian thought processes and emotional reactions. It would be strange if those Nepalese who sincerely believe that their country needs reform did not look north-east for support.
In Kathmandu there are several Nepalese-run Chinese Communist bookshops which sell propaganda literature in Nepali, Hindi and English. Many of these publications are incongruously luxurious, yet the prices remain artificially low. Books that would cost twenty or twenty-five rupees if imported from the West are to be had for five or six rupees, and I recently bought for one rupee (eightpence) a well produced, hardback volume of Rewi Alley poems entitled Who is the Enemy? This was published last year by the New World Press, Peking, and the blurb begins – ‘Rewi Alley is a citizen of New Zealand and of the world. He is now coming to the end of his first four decades in China.’ And immediately one wonders if the implication is that Chinese Communism bestows an exclusive longevity which will enable Rewi Alley to enjoy a second four decades in China. The final sentence of the blurb says that these poems ‘are quite frankly political’, and this is so true that at no stage do they come within light-years of being poetry. Some of them are defaced by a jeering, almost obscene blasphemy that makes the Western reader wince; but the majority – especially those on the Vietnamese war – do have that beauty which sparkles from sincerity whatever its setting. Only a fanatically obtuse reader could dismiss them as mere crafty propaganda. On every page the writer conveys his absolute commitment to the peasants of Asia and his unwavering faith in the benefits that Communism can bring them; and one feels the strength and warmth of a real compassion consistently coming through these semi-hysterical phrases. Too often we think of Communism as a cold, systematic, conform-or-die ideology that inhumanly sacrifices the individual to the theory; yet the writings of Rewi Alley and of many of his ‘comrades’ show that it is as essentially human as any other political phenomenon in the history of mankind. Throughout this little book one hears the thumping of its indignant, puzzled, aggressive heart, and one knows that many of these people do care for the poor, however misguidedly, and whatever brutalities may result from their passion of loathing for all ‘Imperialists’.
Last night we citizens of Pardi were treated to some Western-style propaganda when a British Embassy official staged an open-air film show to enlighten the locals on Life in Modern Britain. The films were so ludicrously inappropriate that one marvelled at the responsible authorities ever having fallen into such an abyss of idiocy; but at least the performance afforded me a splendid evening’s entertainment, as I sat there viewing it through the eyes of a Nepalese peasant.
Life in London was represented by the Trooping of the Colour, so the audience must naturally have assumed that city to be a most civilised place, where the majority of the male population wear gorgeous uniforms and ride around on glossy horses – always in military formation for reasons best known to themselves. Next we saw rousing shots from a performance of Macbeth produced on Cornish cliffs in Elizabethan costume, with a bloody dagger much in evidence – which latter detail will no doubt have done a lot to strengthen the links of friendship between the Gurkhas and the Great British Public. This was followed by the Quatro-centenary birthday celebrations at Stratford-on-Avon, showing scores of robed Lord Mayors from all over Britain, and next came the Eisteddfod, showing dancers from many countries in their national costumes, with bevies (or should it be covies?) of druidically-garbed druids in the foreground. Then, as a Grand Finale, we were given the Highland Games, with kilts flying while bagpipes squealed. Such is the image of Britain Today
as the Pokhara Valley is seeing it this week. Doubtless my neighbours now think that the clothes worn here by Westerners are designed for tropical use only, and they must certainly imagine that Britain has at least as many national holidays as Nepal.
8 SEPTEMBER
This evening it was my turn to prepare supper and when Kay arrived at half-past seven, carrying her rarely-used transistor radio, she was breathless with excitement. For an instant after her announcement that a war had started I experienced a sick ‘This-is-it’ feeling, but as she went on I realised that the war is just more bickering than usual between India and Pakistan. Undoubtedly it will cause many sadly unnecessary deaths on the battlefield and some inconvenience here, but it is hardly a war in contemporary terminology.
Already the bazaar price of kerosene has gone up to two pounds per gallon and there is a possibility that all internal RNAC flights may be stopped because Nepal is dependent on India for her petrol supplies. We have just spent two hours listening with great difficulty to snatches of English Language news giving very dissimilar interpretations of the situation from Pakistani, Indian, Nepalese, Chinese, American and British viewpoints. Peking is being even more lurid than usual and describing America as ‘a vicious wolf’ and ‘the most rabid oppressor mankind has ever known’, America is being no less puerile on a slightly more sophisticated level and everyone else is also reacting according to form. The whole thing leaves one sunk in depression. I myself believe in Pakistan’s moral right to Kashmir and, as one of the ‘Fighting Irish’, I would say ‘Good luck to them’ if I thought the Pakistani Army had so much as an even chance of securing that right by force. But this futile skirmishing can only bring further misery to two already destitute countries.
The Waiting Land Page 15
